History and International Relations 0192867474, 9780192867476

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History and International Relations

MARTIN WIGHT was one of the most important twentieth century British scholars of International Relations. He taught at the London School of Economics (1949–1961) and the University of Sussex (1961–1972), where he served as the founding Dean of the School of European Studies. Wight is often associated with the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics and the so-called English School of International Relations. DAVID S. YOST is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. His books have been published by Harvard University Press, the United States Institute of Peace, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He has held fellowships from Fulbright, NATO, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the United States Institute of Peace, and he was a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome in 2004–2007. He earned a Ph.D. in international relations at the University of Southern California.

History and International Relations M A RT I N W I GH T Edited with an introduction by

D AV I D S . Y O ST Foreword by

BE AT R I C E H EUSER

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © The Estate of Martin Wight 2023 David S. Yost is the author of the preface and the introduction. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931415 ISBN 978–0–19–286747–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

This book is dedicated to my beloved wife Catherine, whose discernment, patience, dedication, and encouragement have made it possible.

Foreword Beatrice Heuser University of Glasgow

This volume of Martin Wight’s works includes texts devoted mainly to two subjects: his view of what the then relatively new discipline of International Relations (IR) comprised (and what contribution a historian might make to it), and his analysis of European international relations before and after the Second World War. His comments on the latter focused on the ideas behind European integration that at the time he was writing—the 1950s and 1960s—was very much in its earliest stages. Wight’s lectures “What is International Relations?” and “History and the Study of International Relations” were both given at the London School of Economics, where Wight was appointed a Reader in 1949. In the first of these, he very convincingly debunked the notion that one cannot write about events of the very recent past as a historian. As he noted in his lectures, in his times and to this day, British universities tend to draw a date line between “History” and contemporary affairs as covered by departments of politics and IR, not always the same date line in specific universities. I have heard historians in several countries make the very arguments that one cannot study “recent History” which Wight tackles: that, for the most recent events, the archives are still closed; or that historians are disqualified from writing about their own times. Wight justly points out that we have more material available to us about yesterday’s events than any historian of Antiquity has for the events of a lifetime, and that many great historians we admire, “from Thucydides and Polybius, through Guicciardini and Clarendon down to Trotsky and Churchill” recorded and commented upon the history of their own times. He was not alone: in the 1970s, even our History lecturers used to joke that this was as funny (and absurd) as the spoof on English History, 1066 and All That, whose authors noted that, with the end of the Great War, “history came to a ‘. ’” (a full stop).¹ Indeed, Wight’s generation would not have been taught any post-1919 History in school or in university history departments, as I know from my older British teachers and friends! Nor, Wight contended, should the study of inter-state relations for any reason be confined to the very recent past. Again, in the lecture “What is International Relations?,” Wight stated matter-of-factly that instances for its study are often drawn

¹ W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (Methuen, 1930).

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from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet he himself brings in Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War only five years later, in his lecture on “History and the Study of International Relations,” to set out a wider field of relevance by assuming that “our knowledge comes from Thucydides or this evening’s paper,” thus taking for granted that we know enough about the wars in the fifth century BC between the Greek city states to include them in our analyses. This merits two comments: first, that Wight by inclination is an historian of ideas,² and secondly, that it has always been a great mistake to limit the study of IR or the behaviour of governments—towards their populations, towards insurgents or secessionists, towards other governments, or towards non-governmental actors or organizations such as the Catholic Church—to only two centuries. Looking even just at European recorded history since Ancient Rome—a history that is exceptionally well documented and for that reason alone yields far more insights than that of any other continent—one cannot but be struck by the exceptional quality of the period from the Napoleonic Wars to the end of the First World War:³ other than in the fifth century BC Hellenic world, in no other century have Europeans thought it any sovereign State’s intrinsic right to go to war, simply because it was in the State’s interest (or supposedly, the “nation’s” interest) without at least going to great lengths to plead a just cause. In that respect, the period from the Napoleonic Wars through the Second World War is the epitome of what would be called “Realism” in IR, in which, as the Athenians put it in their dialogue with the Melians, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”⁴ And yes, there are analogies between this attitude of the nineteenth century and that of the fifth century BC Greek city-states, but this has a particular reason: namely, that all the nineteenth century public schoolboys and students of the classics (“Greats”) at Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and other schools and universities that over centuries produced the leaders of States who had been made to read in translation—or even in the original—their Thucydides⁵ saw their own ² See, for example, his essays “The Balance of Power,” chapter 7 in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 149–75; and Martin Wight, “The Balance of Power and International Order,” in Alan James (ed.): The Basis of International Order: Essays in Honour of C. A. W. Manning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 85–115. ³ Wight identified a different beginning point for what he called the Age of Positivism, namely 1763, which is disputable as even the French Revolutionaries still very much excused their own wars with traditional just war criteria. For my claim that that period is an odd-one-out, that’s a key argument in both of these books: Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Beatrice Heuser, Brexit in History: Sovereignty vs European Union (London: Hurst, 2018). Martin van Creveld also argued that the world today begins to look more like the late Middle Ages than anything in between, drawing parallels between the International Organizations and the Catholic Church and the Caliphate, and the European Union and the Holy Roman Empire: The Transformation of War (London: Brasseys, 1991); published in the US as On Future War). ⁴ The Complete Writings of Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Modern Library, 1951), p. 331. ⁵ Herman Finer, The British Civil Service (London: Fabian Society, 1937), pp. 90f. gives figures of the subjects studied by candidates admitted to the British civil service. Until the mid-20th century, a

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world through the spectacles of Thucydides’ writings, and it shaped their actions accordingly. The consequence for IR as a discipline is that in their works, IR theorists might in their studies refer to the “Realist” behaviour of city governments of Thucydides’ Greece but then jump forward almost two thousand years to Machiavelli’s cynical views on how a prince might stay in power in a warring city-states environment that uncannily resembled that of the Peloponnesian War.⁶ As Chris Smith put it, “a genealogy of classical realism usually begins with Thucydides, includes en passant Machiavelli and Hobbes and ends with mid-twentieth century figures such as E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau.”⁷ They skip the Roman ethical thinkers like Cicero⁸ and the entire millennium which we now call the Middle Ages with their perception of a world as one—the Pax Romana, and later Christianitas, even when both were beleaguered by external foes, or when Christendom was divided within itself into many competing and quarrelling principalities. As Wight so nicely illustrates in his lectures on “The Concept of Europe” and “United Europe: The Historical Background” (both in this volume), this notion of belonging to one world in which one general set of rules obtained for millennia, referred to as “natural law” or sometimes as “the law of nations” in Ancient Rome and then again in modern Europe. This notion made Europe—the term that replaced “Christendom” from the times of the Confessional Wars—a “republic” or “commonwealth” (Edmund Burke) to which all Europeans belonged, regardless of their confession or their appurtenance to a particular power, dynastic or popular. Simultaneously, it paved the way for the universalist stipulation of the French Revolution that there was one set of rights for all people everywhere. This notion of belonging to one larger civilization—still often referred to as Europe—with its rules that contained wars and regulated conflict coexisted even in the nineteenth century with the “sovereignism” of States. It coexisted with the bitter competition between the great powers that began the post-Napoleonic peace with the good intention of creating harmony and tranquillity for Europe but that gave the long nineteenth century the legacy of the battlefields of Balaclava, Solferino, Sadowa, Sedan, only to end it with the slaughter of the First World War. As Wight noted, in this period, “every sovereign state” had “an unfettered right of resort to war” (or indeed to third came from the classics, with all other subjects jointly (!) making up the other two-thirds. Even local recruits to the civil service in colonies were made to read Thucydides and other texts dealing with empires. Phiroze Vasumia, “Greek, Latin, and the Indian Civil Service,” Cambridge Classical Journal, vol. 51 (2005), pp. 35–71. ⁶ To give some examples, Joseph Grieco, G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastaduno in their Introduction to International Relations (London: Red Globe Press, 2018) only start with 1500. ⁷ Chris Smith, “International Relations and Political Theory,” in Tim Dunne, Milia Kurki, and Steve Smith (eds), International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (1st edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 37; this book was printed in four subsequent new editions. See also Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater (eds), Theories of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996 and four subsequent new editions); Ken Booth and Toni Erskine (eds): International Relations Theory (2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016 and subsequent editions). ⁸ None of the works in the previous footnote mentions Cicero, Étienne de Tournai (the first proponent of sovereignty) or Dante (with his ideas of empire).

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remain neutral in other parties’ wars).⁹ Wight summed up these “vast pendulum swings” as “systole-diastole movements in Western Civilization.” Wight’s studies took him beyond such a binary interpretation, however: he began to discern three traditions of thinking about international relations in Europe since the Renaissance: one which he called Realist (sometimes called Machiavellian), one he called Rationalist (which he identified with thinking largely going back to Hugo Grotius), and a Revolutionist tradition (which he associated with Immanuel Kant and others).¹⁰ This is reflected in the title of one of his most important books,¹¹ and the theme of several of his shorter works, including “Why Is There No International Theory?”, “An Anatomy of International Thought,” and “Western Values in International Relations.”¹² Not content to have replaced binary interpretations with this trinity of traditions, Wight noted that they overlap. Thus, for example, John Milton’s appeal during the reign of Oliver Cromwell to an obligation for all people arising from an injustice to specific people partakes of both the Rationalist and Revolutionist traditions. It was likewise through historical studies that Wight illuminated and deepened various insights about the balance of power—a subject of such fascination to him that he returned to it repeatedly—and political-military competition in international relations.¹³ Historical studies also led Wight to a certain pessimism with regard to prospects for enduring peace. His most enlightening works in this regard include “The Causes of War: An Historian’s View,” “Gain, Fear and Glory: Reflections on the Nature of International Politics,” “On the Abolition of War: Observations on a Memorandum by Walter Millis,” and the three-cornered dialogue concerning the Axis Powers, the Western Powers, and the Soviet Union in “The Balance of Power” in The World in March 1939. Yet, the way some IR scholars draw on the nineteenth century is to take from it the “Realism,” an application to political thought of Social Darwinism.¹⁴ They are unequipped, therefore, to perceive and understand other forces: ideologies, ideals, and ideas and their influence on international relations. Nor can they imagine

⁹ Martin Wight, “The Idea of Just War,” in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 141. ¹⁰ For a summary, see David S. Yost, “Political Philosophy and the Theory of International Relations,” International Affairs, vol. 70, no 2 (April 1994), pp. 263–90, and David S. Yost, “Introduction,” International Relations and Political Philosophy, pp. 3–21. ¹¹ Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991). ¹² All in Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy. ¹³ His most significant works in this respect include Power Politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1978), and his chapters entitled “Eastern Europe” and “Germany” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). These two chapters are reproduced in the present volume. ¹⁴ Jan Willem Honig discussed the nineteenth century German roots of twentieth century “Realism” in “Totalitarianism and realism: Hans Morgenthau’s German years,” Security Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (1995), pp. 283–313.

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fundamental change. Unfortunately, perception becomes reality: as Wight shows in his essay on “History and the Study of International Relations,” the present is the prism through which historians often see history, but history is also the prism through which key actors interpret the present. The effect is that they are blind to alternative potentialities for the present, and their actions will prevent alternative outcomes. Approaching the present with the scepticism that is inherent in the “Realist” perception of interstate relations forestalls any faith in cooperation, even in a (re-) “United Europe.” It might help our understanding of Wight’s lecture “What is International Relations?” to recall that it was clearly an inaugural lecture, the sort of high-profile lecture in which new incumbents, normally only professors—and Wight was only a Reader—stake out their subject, careful not to tread on any toes and chasses gardées, delimiting it vis-à-vis other departments and disciplines, doffing their mortar boards to colleagues, seeking their support for his approach. Having come from a research institute to join the staff of the LSE,¹⁵ Wight seems to have felt the need to emphasize that he was fully aware of recent scholarly trends and debates in academia, and that his ambition was no longer to give advice to government, but to seek a deeper “understanding” of the relations between States, for its own sake. Perhaps he had already had his fingers burned in some public event in the LSE’s Department of International Relations, or had to defend himself against some accusation of bringing the peace activism that had been the mark of his youth to his work, hoping still to have influence—that is, impact—on government policies. Perhaps we should read this strikingly odd passage in his lecture as pure sarcasm: I had no more pleasant surprise when I joined this Department than in finding that students do not regard International Relations as being of any use. We no longer believe that we are building peace, that we can abolish war, that international problems have solutions, that we can shape events, and that our subject contributes to these illusory ends. . . . For us the occurrence of a Third World War is almost an axiom, and we are studying its causes. We know that our century is running out towards 1984. We no longer want to justify ourselves on utilitarian grounds. All we aim at is understanding. What we pursue is wisdom. I believe this to be a very great gain indeed. It is the tradition of European culture, from Aristotle and Cicero down to Newman, that liberal pursuits are those in which knowledge is pursued as its own end, and that these are superior to useful pursuits as contemplation is superior to action.

The LSE was at the time only one college of the University of London, and although my education at this very university began thirty years later, I can testify to this ¹⁵ Wight hailed from one of the world’s leading think tanks on International Relations, Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

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approach—the dismissal of any utility in studying history, and the mere search for a better “understanding”—still being prevalent then.¹⁶ The other problem Wight must have encountered was the existence at the LSE of two departments dealing with relations between States: the Department of International Relations which Wight had joined, and the Department of International History in which I took my Master’s degree thirty years later. Wight was a historian by background and outlook, the sort of historian who is happy to include everything and anything that can throw light on the issue at hand into his or her interpretation of it, whether it be trade figures, psychological interpretations of the main protagonists, international population movements or the ethnic backgrounds of key actors or which countries they had visited, their favorite novels and films. So how could he hold up the distinction between the two departments that clearly occupied hostile camps? Wight implied that the rival camp, International History, was little more than dressed-up “Diplomatic History.” In different circumstances, he might with greater fairness have admitted that Diplomatic History was one of the tap roots of IR as a discipline. IR was, after all, born in Britain, under that name but also that of Foreign Affairs or Foreign Relations, and as Wight rightly said, out of the traumatic experience of two world wars, very much in the hope that the study of the origins of these (and other) wars in particular would enable following generations to avoid a third. Thus, logically we find that Wight devoted much of his scholarly attention to the study of the origins of the great war of his own youth: the Second World War. His four chapters from The World in March 1939 included in this volume¹⁷ show his fine scholarship in practice: it is here that he provides all the evidence one might wish for to show “What Makes a Good Historian.” He digested information of various sorts, stemming from a vast array of sources which he read in their original languages, to produce an overall analysis illustrating how a multitude of factors interacted to lead to one result rather than another among all the potential developments of the time. It is at once giving back to any moment in the past its manifold potentialities and explaining why only one came to fruition. This volume on Wight’s work on international history strengthens the foundations for historical investigation. Wight set an example of attention to detail and careful analysis of the motivations and constraints affecting state decision-makers, the principal actors in international relations since the sixteenth century in Wight’s view.

¹⁶ I, too, reacted with sarcasm, paraphrasing John Knox’s tract targeting women rulers, with a paper I called “A Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Utilitarianism,” pretend-mocking the notion that lessons could be derived from History. I’m not sure any of my fellow-students to whom I passed my tract even read it, and a month before finals, I didn’t dare show it to my tutors . . . ¹⁷ Chapters 10–13 on, respectively, Germany; Eastern Europe; Spain and Portugal; and Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia.

Preface: Martin Wight’s Scholarly Stature by David S. Yost

Martin Wight (1913–1972) was, as Sir Adam Roberts remarked, “perhaps the most profound thinker on international relations of his generation of British academics.”∗ ¹ Wight’s professional career may be summed up in a few lines: graduation in 1935 from Hertford College, Oxford, with first-class honors in modern history; research staff at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1937–1938; senior history master at Haileybury College, 1938–1941; research staff at Nuffield College, Oxford, 1941–1946; diplomatic and United Nations correspondent for The Observer, London, 1946–1947; research staff at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1947–1949; reader in international relations, London School of Economics, 1949–1961; visiting professor, University of Chicago, 1956–1957; and professor of history and founding dean of the School of European Studies, University of Sussex (1961–1972).² A man of wide-ranging interests and great learning, with a command of Greek and Latin as well as modern European languages, Wight wrote about British colonial history, European studies, international institutions, the history and sociology of states-systems, the philosophy of history, religious faith and history, and the theory and philosophy of international politics (notably with regard to ethics, ∗ This preface borrows from David S. Yost, “Introduction: Martin Wight and Philosophers of War and Peace,” in Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

¹ Adam Roberts, “Foreword,” in Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), p. xxiv. ² The most valuable sources on Martin Wight’s life and professional career include the two studies by Hedley Bull: “Introduction: Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” in Martin Wight, Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), pp. 1–20; and “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” British Journal of International Studies, vol. 2, no. 2 (1976), pp. 101–16; the chapter entitled “Martin Wight (1913–1972): The Values of Western Civilization” in Kenneth W. Thompson, Masters of International Thought: Major Twentieth-Century Theorists and the World Crisis (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pp. 44–61; the chapter entitled “Martin Wight” in Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 47–70; the entry by Harry G. Pitt in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38935; the book by Ian Hall, The International Thought of Martin Wight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and the survey by Ian Hall, “Martin Wight: A Biographical Overview of his Life and Work,” available at the website of the Martin Wight Memorial Trust, https://www.lse.ac.uk/international-relations/assets/documents/pdfs/ wight-martin/wight-martin-biography-and-bibliography.pdf

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ideology, the balance of power, and the causes of war), among other subjects. Much of his influence has stemmed from his lectures on the theory and philosophy of international politics at the London School of Economics in the 1950s. Wight’s continuing prominence has also derived from the attention accorded to the “English School” since the 1980s. He is widely regarded as an intellectual ancestor and path-breaker of the “English School” of international relations, even though he did not employ this term.³ The term “English School” did not arise until nine years after Wight’s death, when it was given currency by Roy Jones in a polemical article in 1981.⁴ There seems to be no generally accepted definition of the English School, however. The term is usually construed as signifying an approach to the study of international politics more rooted in historical and humanistic learning than in the social sciences. Wight’s achievements are consistent with this broad definition. Some observers trace the English School’s origins to the work in the mid-1950s and beyond of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, to which Wight made major contributions, along with Herbert Butterfield, Adam Watson, Hedley Bull, and others. In this regard, the subtitle of Brunello Vigezzi’s comprehensive study is telling: The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics (1954–1985): The Rediscovery of History.⁵ However, Tim Dunne’s informative study of the English School devotes a chapter to E. H. Carr, who was not a member of this committee. As Dunne points out, Carr played a role in fostering the emergence of the English School by “broadening the discipline away from its legal institutionalist origins,” confirming “recognition that International Relations could not be assimilated to the methods of the physical sciences,” bringing “together history, philosophy and legal thinking (albeit in a critical way),” and provoking “writers like Martin Wight into seeking a via media between realism and utopianism.”⁶ Carr’s most prominent contribution to international relations theory has remained his landmark work, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939.⁷ Wight’s critical review of Carr’s book is widely cited, and it is included in this collection.⁸

³ See, among other sources, Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami, The English School of International Relations: A Contemporary Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); William Bain, “Are There Any Lessons of History? The English School and the Activity of Being an Historian,” International Politics, vol. 44 (2007), pp. 513–30; Cornelia Navari, Theorising International Society: English School Methods (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Barry Buzan, An Introduction to English School of International Relations: The Societal Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014). ⁴ See Roy E. Jones, “The English School of International Relations: A Case for Closure,” Review of International Studies, vol. 7 (January 1981), pp.1–13. ⁵ Brunello Vigezzi, The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics (1954–1985): The Rediscovery of History (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2005). ⁶ See Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1998), p. 38. ⁷ E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939). ⁸ Martin Wight, “The Realist’s Utopia,” The Observer, July 21, 1946.

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Hedley Bull listed Wight among scholars pursuing a “classical approach” to theorizing about international politics,⁹ but Wight himself appears to have refrained from categorizing his methodology. The closest he came to doing so, it seems, was in the preface that he and Herbert Butterfield composed for their co-edited volume, Diplomatic Investigations. In that preface Butterfield and Wight described the outlook of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, compared with that of their American counterparts, as “probably . . . more concerned with the historical than the contemporary, with the normative than the scientific, with the philosophical than the methodological, with principles than policy.” The participants in the British Committee, Butterfield and Wight added, “have tended to suppose that the continuities in international relations are more important than the innovations; that statecraft is an historical deposit of practical wisdom growing very slowly; that the political, diplomatic, legal and military writers who might loosely be termed ‘classical’ have not been superseded as a result of recent developments in sociology and psychology, and that it is a useful enterprise to explore the corpus of diplomatic and military experience in order to reformulate its lessons in relation to contemporary needs.”¹⁰ This fell short of a rousing manifesto, but it made clear a preference for empirical history and normative philosophy over social science and immediate policy relevance. The collection of papers in Diplomatic Investigations remains a touchstone for admirers of traditional approaches to the study of international politics, regardless of whether they claim allegiance to the “English School.”¹¹ Wight was more interested in analyzing moral and philosophical questions raised by international politics than in debating immediate policy decisions or assessing current academic schools of thought. He had a talent for bringing insights from history, philosophy, biography, and literature to bear upon political thinking and behavior. During his lifetime Wight’s most extensive publications concerned the history of British colonialism,¹² and his other publications were limited to a pamphlet and some articles and book chapters.¹³ Only one book chapter—his classic essay, ⁹ See Hedley Bull, “International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach,” in Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau (eds), Contending Approaches to International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 20–21. Bull’s famous article was first published in World Politics, vol. 18, no. 3 (April 1966). ¹⁰ Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), preface by Butterfield and Wight, pp. 12–13. ¹¹ For a systematic and illuminating study, see Ian Hall and Tim Dunne, “Introduction to the New Edition,” in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). ¹² Martin Wight, The Development of the Legislative Council, 1606–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 1946); The Gold Coast Legislative Council (London: Faber and Faber, 1947); and British Colonial Constitutions 1947 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). ¹³ See especially: Martin Wight, Power Politics (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1946); “Germany,” “Eastern Europe,” and “The Balance of Power,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press for the

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“Western Values in International Relations”—outlined Wight’s path-breaking organization of the history of Western thinking about international politics into three categories, or traditions (the Realist, or Machiavellian; the Revolutionist, or Kantian, and the Rationalist, or Grotian); and this essay focused on what Wight called the Rationalist, or Grotian, tradition. Wight published relatively little in his lifetime, Hedley Bull observed, because he was “a perfectionist . . . one of those scholars—today, alas, so rare—who (to use a phrase of Albert Wohlstetter’s) believe in a high ratio of thought to publication.”¹⁴ Owing to Wight’s perfectionism, he left many works unfinished when he died at the age of 58. His widow, Gabriele Wight, and his former colleagues and students have prepared four books for posthumous publication: Systems of States in 1977,¹⁵ Power Politics in 1978,¹⁶ International Theory: The Three Traditions in 1991,¹⁷ and Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini in 2005.¹⁸ Wight’s lectures won the enduring admiration of his listeners. As Bull testified in 1976, “These lectures made a profound impression on me, as they did on all who heard them. Ever since that time I have felt in the shadow of Martin Wight’s thought—humbled by it, a constant borrower from it, always hoping to transcend it but never able to escape from it.”¹⁹ Similarly, recalling her studies at the London School of Economics in 1950– 1954, Coral Bell, a distinguished Australian scholar, wrote in 1989 that Martin Wight “still seems to me the finest mind and spirit I ever knew well, looking back over what is now almost a full lifetime of knowing many people of the highest

Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952); “Western Values in International Relations,” “The Balance of Power,” and “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966); and “The Balance of Power and International Order,” in Alan James (ed.), The Bases of International Order: Essays in Honour of C.A.W. Manning (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). ¹⁴ Hedley Bull, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” British Journal of International Studies, vol. 2 (July 1976), p. 101. This essay is reproduced at the beginning of International Theory: The Three Traditions in a slightly abridged form. The citations here refer to the complete original version. ¹⁵ Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press in association with the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1977). For background, see David S. Yost, “New Perspectives on Historical States-Systems,” World Politics, vol. 32, no. 1 (October 1979), pp. 151–68. ¹⁶ Martin Wight, Power Politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1978). This is a revised and expanded version of the 1946 pamphlet with the same title, which was unfinished at the time of Wight's death. ¹⁷ Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991). This book is based on Wight’s notes for the widely discussed lectures given in the 1950s. ¹⁸ Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ¹⁹ Hedley Bull, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” p. 101.

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intellectual caliber.” In Bell’s view, Wight’s most valuable teaching concerned the history of ideas about international politics. He made his students see the history of thought in the subject from Thucydides to Henry Kissinger as a sort of great shimmering tapestry of many figures, a tapestry mostly woven from just three contrasting threads, which he called realist, rationalist, and revolutionist. What made him such a charismatic teacher, and those lectures so fascinating, was the elegance of his analysis, and the breadth and depth of his learning, literary as well as historical.²⁰

Wight’s work remains relevant today because he incisively analyzed perennial questions such as the causes and functions of war, international and regime legitimacy, and fortune and irony in politics. He identified an order in interrelated ideas that clarifies the assumptions, arguments and dilemmas associated with each of the main traditions of thinking about international politics in the West since Machiavelli. As Wight pointed out, such knowledge of the past provides an escape from the Zeitgeist, from the mean, narrow, provincial spirit which is constantly assuring us that we are at the peak of human achievement, that we stand on the edge of unprecedented prosperity or an unparalleled catastrophe . . . It is a liberation of the spirit to acquire perspective, to recognize that every generation is confronted by problems of the utmost subjective urgency, but that an objective grading is probably impossible; to learn that the same moral predicaments and the same ideas have been explored before.²¹

An illustration of the continuing relevance of Wight’s contribution is the steady and even increasing abundance of scholarship inspired by his works. This includes two recent books: Ian Hall’s The International Thought of Martin Wight (2006) and Michele Chiaruzzi’s Martin Wight on Fortune and Irony in Politics (2016).²² Hall and Chiaruzzi have each published significant follow-on studies, including Hall’s “Martin Wight, Western Values, and the Whig Tradition of International Thought,” and Chiaruzzi’s work on Wight’s essay “Interests of States.”²³ Noteworthy recent studies by prominent scholars include Robert Jackson, “From ²⁰ Coral Bell, “Journey with Alternative Maps,” in Joseph Kruzel and James N. Rosenau (eds), Journeys through World Politics: Autobiographical Reflections of Thirty-four Academic Travelers (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books/D.C. Heath and Company, 1989), p. 342. ²¹ Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, p. 6. ²² Ian Hall, The International Thought of Martin Wight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Michele Chiaruzzi, Martin Wight on Fortune and Irony in Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). See also Brian Porter’s review-essay, “The International Political Thought of Martin Wight,” International Affairs, vol. 83, no. 4 (July 2007), pp. 783–9. ²³ See, for example, Ian Hall, “Martin Wight, Western Values, and the Whig Tradition of International Thought,” International History Review vol. 36, no. 5 (2014), pp. 961–81; and Michele Chiaruzzi, “Interests of States: Un inedito di Martin Wight,” Il Pensiero Politico vol. 51, no. 3 (2018), pp. 423–7.

PREFACE: MARTIN WIGHT’S SCHOL ARLY STATURE

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Colonialism to Theology: Encounters with Martin Wight’s International Thought” (2008); Nicholas J. Wheeler, “Investigating Diplomatic Transformations” (2013); William Bain, “Rival Traditions of Natural Law: Martin Wight and the Theory of International Society” (2014); Bruno Mendelski, “The Historiography of International Relations: Martin Wight in Fresh Conversation with Duroselle and Morgenthau,” (2018); and Nicholas Rengger, “Between Transcendence and Necessity: Eric Voegelin, Martin Wight and the Crisis of Modern International Relations” (2019).²⁴ The original purpose of this Oxford University Press project was to present to the public additional unpublished (or obscurely or anonymously published) works by Martin Wight that deserve a wide audience. For example, Wight’s essay “East and West over Five Centuries” was published anonymously in The Economist.²⁵ Wight’s paper “Has Scientific Advance Changed the Nature of International Politics in Kind, Not Merely in Degree?”—presented in 1960 to the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics—had never been published. Wight’s review-essay “Does Peace Take Care of Itself ?”—was published in 1963, but in a little-known periodical named Views. These three essays will appear in future volumes of this Oxford University Press collection of works by Martin Wight. At the suggestion of external reviewers, the editor and publisher extended the project’s scope beyond previously unavailable works by Martin Wight to include some of his “greatest hits” as book chapters that complement the formerly unknown or little-known works. These include his remarkable and path-breaking essays in The World in March 1939—“Germany,” “Eastern Europe,” and “The Balance of Power”—and his canonical essays in Diplomatic Investigations: “The Balance of Power,” “Western Values in International Relations,” and “Why Is There No International Theory?” As Coral Bell observed, “He was a great perfectionist when it came to his own writing, and so refused to publish (because he was not entirely satisfied with it) writing that every other academic I know (including myself ) would have proudly sent off to the publishers.”²⁶ Diffidence and perfectionism discouraged Wight from publishing works even after he had brought them to what other scholars would have considered a high ²⁴ Robert Jackson, “From Colonialism to Theology: Encounters with Martin Wight’s International Thought,” International Affairs vol. 84, no. 2 (2008), pp. 351–64; Nicholas J. Wheeler, “Investigating Diplomatic Transformations,” International Affairs, vol. 89, no. 2 (March 2013), pp. 477–96; William Bain, “Rival Traditions of Natural Law: Martin Wight and the Theory of International Society,” International History Review vol. 36, no. 5 (2014), pp. 943–60; Bruno Mendelski, “The Historiography of International Relations: Martin Wight in Fresh Conversation with Duroselle and Morgenthau,” Contexto Internacional vol. 40, no. 2 (2018), pp. 249–67; and Nicholas Rengger, “Between Transcendence and Necessity: Eric Voegelin, Martin Wight and the Crisis of Modern International Relations,” Journal of International Relations and Development vol. 22, no. 2 (2019), pp. 327–45. ²⁵ “East and West over Five Centuries,” The Economist, May 30, 1953, pp. 580–1. ²⁶ Bell, “Journey with Alternative Maps,” p. 342.

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level of quality. He sometimes borrowed from drafts that he apparently regarded as works in progress, and not quite ready for final publication. He sometimes prepared multiple versions of the same paper, not always indicating the dates of specific drafts. Preparing these drafts for publication has required making comparisons and exercising judgment as to which versions (or sections) of specific papers are more fully developed than others and presumably reflected his most considered judgments. Inconsistencies suggesting the tentative or unfinished character of some drafts were similarly apparent in International Theory: The Three Traditions.²⁷ The origin of each document in this collection—whether it was previously published and, if so, when and where, or whether it was simply a research note or a lecture or radio broadcast, etc.—is indicated in a note with each item. Some of Wight’s notes in draft papers were minimal or telegraphic, and every effort has been made to clarify references while respecting the not-too-much-and-not-toolittle principle as an aid to comprehension and scholarship. The objective has been to collect the most valuable and enduring works concerning what Wight sometimes termed “international theory,” the political philosophy of international relations; history and works by specific historians; foreign policy and security strategy, notably including his works on the United Nations and the impact of scientific change on world politics; and faith and the philosophy of history. In the preface to his widely acclaimed book The Anarchical Society, Bull wrote of Wight, “I owe a profound debt to Martin Wight, who first demonstrated to me that International Relations could be made a subject. . . . His writings, still inadequately published and recognised, are a constant inspiration.”²⁸ In his Martin Wight Memorial Lecture, Bull said, “It has seemed to me a task of great importance to bring more of his work to the light of day. . . . For myself, what has weighed most is not the desire to add lustre to Martin Wight’s name, but my belief in the importance of the material itself and in the need to make it available to others, so that the lines of inquiry he opened up can be taken further. Especially, perhaps, there is a need to make Martin Wight’s ideas more widely available in their original form, rather than through the second hand accounts of others, such as myself, who have been influenced by him.”²⁹ This project has been inspired by a similar judgment as to the profound value of Wight’s contributions and the imperative merit of bringing them to a wider audience.

²⁷ See David S. Yost, “Political Philosophy and the Theory of International Relations,” International Affairs, vol. 70, no. 2 (April 1994), pp. 272–3. ²⁸ Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. xxx. ²⁹ Hedley Bull, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” p. 102.

Acknowledgements I owe my greatest debt in this project to the late Gabriele Wight and the late Brian Porter, who were unfailing sources of sound advice and encouragement. Gabriele Wight graciously authorized the reproduction of many never-before-published items as well as some previously published works to which she held the copyright. Two of her daughters, Susannah Wight and Katharine Beaudry, represent her heirs and retain the copyright to these works. Their continuing support for this project is profoundly appreciated. Great thanks are owed as well to the library staffs of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and the London School of Economics (particularly the archivists at the British Library of Political and Economic Science). At the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Jason Altwies, Irma Fink, and Greta Marlatt have been especially helpful, patient, and resourceful. I would also like to express great appreciation to the supportive and professional experts at Oxford University Press, notably Dominic Byatt, who has vigorously and patiently supported this project since I first proposed it to him in July 2001. I am also sincerely grateful to Phoebe Aldridge-Turner and Shunmugapriyan Gopathy of the OUP team. Several scholars generously made time to advise me on this project and I am most grateful to them, particularly Daniel Moran, Joseph Pilat, Douglas Porch, Michael Ru¨hle, Diego Ruiz Palmer, Paul Schulte, and Karl Walling. Beatrice Heuser responded most graciously and promptly to my request for a Foreword, and I very much appreciate her contribution. Thanks are also owed to several periodicals and organizations for permission to reproduce previously published items: the British Broadcasting Corporation, The Economist, Guardian News and Media, the Immediate Media Company, The Listener, The Manchester Guardian (renamed The Guardian in 1959), The Observer, Oxford University Press, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, SAGE Publications, The Spectator, and the Taylor and Francis Group. Finally, I would like to express the most profound appreciation to my wife Catherine for her constant and unparalleled contributions to this project.

Contents

Introduction: Martin Wight on History and International Relations, by David S. Yost

1

1. What Is International Relations?

20

2. History and the Study of International Relations

41

3. What Makes a Good Historian?

50

4. The Principles of Historiographical Criticism

56

5. The Concept of Europe

68

6. United Europe: The Historical Background

85

7. Europe After 1945

99

8. British Policy in the Middle East

112

9. Brutus in Foreign Policy: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden

125

10. Germany in The World in March 1939

137

11. Eastern Europe in The World in March 1939

209

12. Spain and Portugal in The World in March 1939

295

13. Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia in The World in March 1939

308

14. Note on Partition

323

15. Arnold Toynbee: An Appreciation

324

16. Review of Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgment of Volumes I–VI by D. C. Somervell

327

17. Review of Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilisation on Trial

329

18. Dame Veronica Wedgwood, O. M.

331

19. Review of Charles Petrie, Diplomatic History 1713–1933

333

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20. Review of A. L. Rowse, The Use of History, and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

336

21. Review of Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition

339

22. Review of Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft

342

23. Review of Homer Carey Hockett, The Critical Method in Historical Research and Writing, and Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World

345

24. Review of Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860

348

25. Review of A. J. P. Taylor, Rumours of Wars

351

26. Review of A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918

353

27. Review of A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman

355

28. Review of A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary in International Affairs

357

29. Review of Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations

359

30. Review of Edouard Perroy, The Hundred Years’ War

361

31. Review of L. B. Namier, Avenues of History

363

32. Review of Sir Lewis Namier, In the Nazi Era

365

Selected Bibliography Index

367 375

Introduction: Martin Wight on History and International Relations by David S. Yost

Martin Wight, best known for his works on, as he put it, “the political philosophy of international relations,”¹ relied mainly on historical studies in teaching and conducting research. Indeed, his education and professional achievements were thoroughly grounded in history. He earned first class honors in modern history at Hertford College, Oxford, and taught history at Haileybury College, the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and the University of Sussex. In addition to these teaching appointments, he conducted research at Nuffield College, Oxford, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, as well as reporting as a diplomatic and United Nations correspondent for The Observer, London, 1946– 1947. Wight’s most extensive works of scholarship, written during and after the Second World War, focused on the legislative and constitutional history of British colonialism.² Wight’s collected writings in this volume deal first with the value of historical analyses for the study of international relations, notably with regard to the social sciences. Wight also examined the closely related question of the qualities of firstrate works of history. Wight’s own historical works in this volume concern European unity, British policy in the Middle East, and the interwar period in Europe. In this last category, the present volume features two of Wight’s most illuminating and incisive historical analyses—“Germany” and “Eastern Europe” from The World in March 1939—as well as complementary shorter chapters from the same volume, “Spain and Portugal,” and “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia.”³ ¹ Martin Wight, “An Anatomy of International Thought,” an appendix to Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 143. ² Martin Wight, The Development of the Legislative Council, 1606–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 1946); The Gold Coast Legislative Council (London: Faber and Faber, 1947); and British Colonial Constitutions 1947 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). ³ Wight’s essay in The World in March 1939 entitled “The Balance of Power,” available in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 95–118, was originally published in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952), pp. 508–31. Wight’s other chapters in The World in March 1939 are included in the present volume and discussed below. David S. Yost, Introduction: Martin Wight on History and International Relations. In: History and International Relations. Edited by David S. Yost, Oxford University Press. © David S. Yost (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0001

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INTRODUCTION

The final category of writings in this volume, mostly book reviews, concerns the works of eminent contemporary historians. Wight’s sharp and subtle criticisms illustrate his demanding standards for historical scholarship and his engagement in the intense debates of his times.

History and Understanding International Relations Wight repeatedly underscored the supreme value of historical works for understanding international relations. In one of his best-known essays, “Why Is There No International Theory?” Wight wrote that It may seem puzzling that, while the acknowledged classics of political study are the political philosophers, the only acknowledged counterpart in the study of international relations is Thucydides, a work of history. And that the quality of international politics, the preoccupations of diplomacy, are embodied and communicated less in works of political or international theory than in historical writings. It would be possible to argue that the highest form of statecraft, both in the end pursued and in the moral and intellectual qualities required, is the regulation of the balance of power, as seen in Lorenzo the Magnificent or Queen Elizabeth, Richelieu or William III, Palmerston or Bismarck. But to understand this statecraft one can turn to no work of international theory; in the way, for example, that to understand the Founding Fathers one reads The Federalist. One turns rather to historical writing; to Ranke or Sorel. Works of international history, whether of wide chronological range (for example, Seeley’s Growth of British Policy, Mattingly’s Renaissance Diplomacy, or Hudson’s The Far East in World Politics), or detailed studies (for example, Sumner’s Russia and the Balkans, Wheeler-Bennett’s Brest-Litovsk, or even Sorensen’s account of Kennedy’s handling of the Cuba crisis), convey the nature of foreign policy and the working of the states-system better than much recent theoretical writing based on the new methodologies. It is not simply that historical literature is doing a different job from systems analysis. Historical literature at the same time does the same job—the job of offering a coherent structure of hypotheses that will provide a common explanation of phenomena; but it does the job with more judiciousness and modesty, and with closer attention to the record of international experience. So one might venture tentatively to put forward the equation:⁴ Politics: International Politics = Political Theory: Historical Interpretation. ⁴ Martin Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, first published in International Relations, vol. 2, no. 1 (April 1960), pp. 35–48, 62 and in revised form as a chapter in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 17–34.

HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL REL ATIONS

3

The argument that the study of history can enrich one’s understanding of international relations has a converse: deepening one’s grasp of international relations can furnish a more solid foundation for the analysis of history. Wight quoted Henry Adams in this regard: “By another intellectual route, Henry Adams came to a similar conclusion. ‘For history, international relations are the only sure standards of movement; the only foundation for a map. For this reason, Adams had always insisted that international relations was the only sure base for a chart of history’.”⁵

What Is International Relations? This volume includes Wight’s 1950 paper “What Is International Relations?”—a previously unpublished presentation for a postgraduate seminar at the London School of Economics in June 1950. This paper might have been entitled “To What Extent is the Academic Field of International Relations Inspired by the Social Sciences or by History and other Liberal Arts?” Wight concluded that International Relations are studied at “the point where History and the Social Sciences intersect.” Yet he could not refrain from offering “a statement of faith.” As History is anterior to the Social Sciences, so it is more primitive in the sense of being closer to the fundamental experience of men. In normal men the great experiences of life, falling in love, the thrill of artistic creation, religious experience, intense suffering, carry with them, in proportion to their intensity, and as part of the datum of the experience itself, the conviction that their significance lies in their uniqueness; and the affirmations of social scientists are intellectual constructs floating a little above the ground of experience, as it were, and passing over it. . . . St. Paul on the road to Damascus was not open to reflections upon the incidence of epilepsy. . . . But it is part of the unique significance of these moments that they come, for the individual and the nation alike, trailing an ambiance of purpose and with the echoes of a transcendental meaning.

Wight observed that International Relations was “a new and transient subject” generated by the First World War. It began with a “pragmatic” objective, “almost to be the science of peace,” based on the League of Nations. Since the Second World War and the outbreak of the Cold War, Wight observed, assumptions about the field’s purposes had changed. Owing to the lack of practical objectives in the study of international relations, Wight wrote, the field fell short of being a social science, but it earned the merits of the liberal arts that pursue knowledge for its own sake. In practice the study of international relations involves a tension ⁵ Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1931), p. 422, quoted in Martin Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” Henry Adams wrote about himself in the third person.

4

INTRODUCTION

between sociological and historical poles, with “no human activity” (including domestic politics) excluded. International relations “deals with the lower ultimate of human experience—passion and unreason, violence and deceit”; but its “vision is sometimes extended towards the higher ultimate of human experience; its sky is traversed by a comet like Gandhi.” Wight concluded that “International Relations, more than any other study, is the point at which History and the Social Sciences converge.” However, at critical and unique times in a country’s history— “what Kierkegaard called the ‘hic et nunc,’ the existential moment—History is the proper guardian.” Writing in 1950, Wight offered a restrained assessment of the prospects for learning in international relations, partly in view of the modest ambitions expressed for it by students: I had no more pleasant surprise when I joined this Department than in finding that students do not regard International Relations as being of any use. We no longer believe that we are building peace, that we can abolish war, that international problems have solutions, that we can shape events, and that our subject contributes to these illusory ends. . . . For us the occurrence of a Third World War is almost an axiom, and we are studying its causes. We know that our century is running out towards 1984. We no longer want to justify ourselves on utilitarian grounds. All we aim at is understanding. What we pursue is wisdom.⁶

Wight’s assessment in this respect does not seem to have been vindicated in practice in subsequent decades. Scholars have since the 1950s written books, founded journals, and established academic departments dedicated “on utilitarian grounds” to defense and strategic studies, security studies, war studies, peace research, and arms control, to say nothing of international law, international organizations, global political economy and inequality, development, global civil society, terrorism and political violence, climate and the environment, energy, and natural resources. Wisdom and understanding are obviously supreme and admirable aspirations, and they may support constructive efforts “to shape events” and devise “solutions”—albeit incomplete and temporary—to some problems.

History and the Study of International Relations In the mid-1950s, a few years after he celebrated the rejection of pragmatic utility as a motive for theory-building in international relations, Wight wrote a paper entitled “History and the Study of International Relations” (previously unpublished and included in the present volume) in which he gave a utilitarian spin to the ⁶ Martin Wight, “What Is International Relations?”, June 1950, a previously unpublished paper included in the present volume.

HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL REL ATIONS

5

endeavor.⁷ He endorsed the goal of helping to understand concrete circumstances by comparing international relations to economics: “Even though international relations is trying to evolve a body of theory, the theory is not an end in itself: its raison d’être is to assist in the understanding of concrete situations, just as the raison d’être of economic theory is to assist in the understanding of particular economic situations.”⁸ Wight nonetheless maintained that the knowledge of decisive importance for the study of international relations derives from history rather than from the social sciences. To understand Australian foreign policy, for example, “the history of power relationships in the Pacific” is more illuminating than analyses of the country’s sociology, economics, or internal politics. Compared to the contributions of the social sciences, “historical explanation is always a large part of our total attempt” to comprehend international events. Differences in “the numbers and the non-comparability in size of the units of studies”—states in international relations—show how history-based analyses of international relations stand apart from studies relying on the social sciences. Procrustean historical comparisons, however, raise questions about “devising any sort of generalization from history.” The “process of generalization” may be dangerously “circular”—that is, “we reconstruct past events so that they conform to a pattern derived from other past events: then read off a generalization from this very conformity.” The convictions of Marxists and others who claim to know “where history is going” are “inimical to the study of international relations: there is not much point in constructing a map of the country by painstaking effort, if you believe that you have one already.”

What Makes a Good Historian? and The Principles of Historiographical Criticism In his paper “The Principles of Historiographical Criticism,” Wight underscored the lack of “attention to the principles whereby we judge historical writing.” He raised the “question of the criteria by which we may judge the success of what they [the historians] do. I think it is fair to say that the principles of historiographical criticism are a neglected field of study.”⁹ In this paper Wight noted that there are two “stock answers” in assessing the greatness of historical writing: “literary power” and “accuracy and reliability.” In his article entitled “What Makes a Good Historian?”—based in part on “The Principles of Historiographical Criticism”—Wight pointed out that W. K. Hancock had ⁷ Martin Wight, “History and the Study of International Relations,” written around 1955–1956, a previously unpublished paper included in the present volume. ⁸ [Ed.] Wight expressed ambivalence regarding practical relevance. In an unpublished memo entitled “Study of International Relations” and dated June 14, 1957, he asked about “contemporary history,” is there a “pragmatic taint”? ⁹ Martin Wight, “The Principles of Historiographical Criticism,” a previously unpublished paper included in the present volume.

6

INTRODUCTION

suggested three virtues for the historian: “attachment, justice and span.”¹⁰ Attachment, “the opposite of detachment,” calls for involvement in people and situations, while “justice or fairness is born to redress the balance between varying attachments.” Span shows “an awareness of background: it places the object of immediate and intense study in its proper perspective with the other objects, near or distant, to which it is necessarily related.” In Wight’s view, these three virtues are not “quite comprehensive enough.” Wight proposed that historical works be critically “considered under at least four headings: Mastery of the Sources, Historical Imagination, Historical Architecture, and Philosophical Depth.” The minimum requirement for a historian is mastering the relevant sources. Historical Imagination enables the scholar “to enter into the past, to understand it from the inside, to re-experience it.” Historical Architecture provides for “an apprehension of the passage of time.” Historical Reflection, which Wight also calls Philosophical Depth, concerns “fundamental beliefs about the nature of man and history.” The philosophical import of a work of history may be formulated as “concealed” or “implicit” theory. In Wight’s judgment, “The highest task of historiographical criticism would be to discriminate the kind of historical reflection which is not itself subject to decay”—works of the calibre of Thucydides and Ranke.

Wight’s Historical Scholarship Wight’s own historical writings, as noted above, encompass extensive works on legal and constitutional aspects of British colonial endeavors. His other historical writings comprise shorter studies dealing with aspects of post-1945 European history, British policy in the Middle East, and the interwar period in Europe. These are obviously different types of writings, composed with distinct audiences and purposes in mind. Wight evidently delivered the three previously unpublished papers concerning aspects of post-1945 European history—“The Concept of Europe,” “United Europe: The Historical Background,” and “Europe After 1945”—with a view to contributing to the then-current discussions about the origins and prospects of the European integration movement. There is some overlap and repetition in these three papers because, although prepared for different audiences, they were all presented in 1963 in the wake of de Gaulle’s January 1963 veto of Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community. Wight wrote his previously unpublished paper “British Policy in the Middle East” at the invitation of the International Relations Club at the University of Chicago, and the 1956 Suez crisis furnished the context. The Suez crisis also figured prominently in Wight’s long review-essay “Brutus in Foreign Policy: The Memoirs of Sir ¹⁰ Martin Wight, “What Makes a Good Historian?” The Listener, February 17, 1955, pp. 283–4. This article is also included in the present volume. The quotations in the rest of this paragraph are drawn from this article or “The Principles of Historiographical Criticism.”

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Anthony Eden.” The four chapters from The World in March 1939 included in the present volume—especially “Germany” and “Eastern Europe”—combine terseness and lucidity with thorough scholarship. Wight exploited the most authoritative primary and secondary sources to make clear the foundations of his discerning insights. In these works, Wight concentrated on individual decision-makers: notably de Gaulle, Monnet, Spaak, Eden, Nasser, Hitler, Stalin, Masaryk, and Franco. This focus was consistent with Wight’s long-standing attention to the beliefs and choices of leaders. In 1957 Wight expressed reservations about the shift in attention in historical studies from personalities to abstractions, a trend evident in The New Cambridge Modern History: Savonarola is reduced from a chapter to a paragraph, Machiavelli from a chapter to scattered references. In this kind of historiography there are proportionately more statements about such abstractions as “humanism,” “purchasing power,” “the country gentleman,” and “the administrative System” than about Alexander VI or Frederick II; unavoidable though this intellectual apparatus is, it diminishes the sense of immediate apprehension of the past that the older kind could give.¹¹

By the same token Wight praised F. M. Powicke for his sensitivity to the often obtuse and tiresome quality of economic arguments. “Of economic history which does not see how quickly in real life the economic motive is transcended he says, ‘There is a sort of dullness so intense that it must be false’.”¹²

The Concept of Europe The concept of Europe is elusive, Wight wrote, because it has been regarded as synonymous with Western civilization. After the abatement in the seventeenth century of the European wars of religion, the word “Europe” replaced “Christendom.” Voltaire, Burke, and other European philosophers defined Europe as composed of states that kept the balance of power among themselves while respecting a shared heritage of Christianity and international law. During the period known as the Concert of Europe (1815–1914), Europe constituted “an international society with rights” based on common values. Europeans of various nationalities held that Europe surpassed Asia and Africa in military skills, in “social vitality, initiative and inventiveness,” and in the liberal arts, science, and industry. Ranke, Mazzini, Huizinga, and others agreed in seeing “diversity in unity” in European history and society. From the sixteenth century on, European nations were “conquering ¹¹ Martin Wight, “Study of Histories,” The Economist, October 19, 1957, a review of The New Cambridge Modern History, volumes I and VII. ¹² Martin Wight, “In the Service of Clio,” The Economist, June 25, 1955, p. 1122, a review of F. M. Powicke, Modern Historians and the Study of History.

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and exploiting the rest of the world.” Britain focused on its Empire and Commonwealth, to the neglect of Europe and the League of Nations. European civilization is distinct in “its universalist claims,” originally grounded in Christianity. The “universal mission” convictions survived the Crusades, the Reformation, and the wars of religion, and were followed by the ideologies of the French Revolution and Communism. To describe “the European inheritance” as democracy “is an extraordinarily selective and inaccurate statement,” given the predominance of authoritarian rulers and the scarcity of democratic regimes in European history since ancient Greece. The Common Market has nonetheless been criticized as “too inward looking” and “too little universalist.”

United Europe: The Historical Background The movement toward a united Europe derived, Wight held, from the trials and consequences of the Second World War, the post-war distrust of Germany, and the growing fear of the Soviet Union. Exiles in London in 1940–1944, Jean Monnet and many of the other founders of the European integration movement resolved to learn from the errors that had led to the war and its devastation. Diplomatic precautions against a revived German threat were soon followed by the establishment of the International Ruhr Authority in 1949 and the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. The failure of the European Defense Community deliberations (1950–1954) opened the way to extending the Brussels Treaty to Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany and pursuing the latter’s armament within the NATO framework. The 1956 Spaak Report shifted the emphasis of the integration movement to the supranational principle endorsed in the 1957 Rome Treaty. De Gaulle championed a distinct approach, one of “residual nationalism,” sometimes called the “Europe des patries,” in which “the various fatherlands do not lose their identity, and indeed if truth be told do not lose their sovereignty.” The values of a united Europe are implicitly those of Western civilization, including essential concepts such as social justice and the “inherent dignity” of man. However, such “ideals have only matured fully in the countries of northern Europe” and constitute “a minority report by European history.” Platonic ideals and Christian revelation have been exploited to justify autocratic governments in Europe.

Europe After 1945 Wight observed that the Second World War was “subjectively” the greatest war in history, owing in part to Germany’s conquest of most of Europe. After the war most of the frontiers agreed at Versailles in 1919 were confirmed, despite the Soviet Union’s great territorial gains and the huge population transfers affecting Estonians, Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles. Great powers took important

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decisions at Potsdam in 1945 and Paris in 1946, but there was no comprehensive peace settlement. The stable balance of power compensated for the absence of a treaty-based settlement. The Europe-centered state-system was overtaken by powers peripheral to Europe: the Soviet Union and the U.K.–U.S. partnership. Their division of Europe, explicit in the partition of Germany, upheld the balance of power. “The rival conceptions have been between those who recognize (such as Monnet and Spaak) and those who deny (such as Eden and de Gaulle) that the European state-system is finished.” In Wight’s view, “The European state-system is finished. . . For all that can be said about the technological and economic progress of the European Economic Community, it is, in historical perspective, a mutual benefit society for old folk, powers that have retired from the world stage.”

British Policy in the Middle East After the Second World War, Britain withdrew from many overseas possessions and spheres of influence. Wight complimented British statesmen: “No Great Power in history has ever given up so much, in so short a time, so gracefully.” However, Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 evoked “profound emotion” in Britain. The Suez crisis brought the British back to their foreign policy debate of the 1870s, including the principled protests against Disraeli’s policy. Britain’s greatest material interests in the Middle East were control of the Suez Canal (shares purchased by Disraeli in 1875) and the Anglo Persian Oil Company (shares purchased by Asquith in 1914), both regarded as essential elements of continuing British command of the seas. The settlement in the Middle East after the First World War left London with various responsibilities, including “a general tutelage of the Arab world, and a Jewish National Home.” Both represented a “move out of the field of concrete interests into the more dangerous and uncertain realm of emotions and loyalties.” Britain’s “long balancing act between Arabs and Jews went through three phases”: believing it possible to satisfy both Zionist and Arab aspirations, making concessions to the Arabs, and pursuing incoherent policies regarding Palestine and the establishment of Israel. The pro-Arab biases of the Foreign Office may be attributed to oil interests and anti-Semitic attitudes, among other factors. The Suez crisis is “singularly rich” in irony, including Britain’s undermining its Commonwealth ties and its role as a champion of international law.

Brutus in Foreign Policy: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden Wight found Eden’s Memoirs marred by noteworthy “evasions and omissions” regarding the 1956 Suez crisis.¹³ Wight pointed out “how the consummate ¹³ Martin Wight, “Brutus in Foreign Policy: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden,” review-essay in International Affairs, vol. 36, no. 3 (July 1960), pp. 299–309.

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INTRODUCTION

diplomatic flexibility of the first half of the Eden Memoirs becomes congealed and rigidified, in the second half, into a political principle felt as having compelling force”—that is, in Eden’s words, the obligation to resist the “insidious appeal of appeasement.” As Wight observed, Eden saw the imperative of timely action against aggressors “as the lesson of his lifetime,” beginning with the murder in Sarajevo in 1914; and he compared Nasser to Mussolini and Hitler. In Wight’s judgment, “The most remarkable weakness of the Eden Memoirs is the neglect of Arab nationalism. . . . In dealing with Egypt, there is a deep-rooted assumption of inequality of rights.” The Egyptian seizure of the Suez Canal nonetheless raised basic questions about international order and obligation: “There is a kind of crisis of international society more fundamental than threats to the balance of power; it is when the principle of international obligation itself deliquesces. . . . The difficulty of maintaining the rule of law and civilized international intercourse in a world of dissolving standards is perhaps the deepest theme of Eden’s Memoirs.” Wight concluded that “Eden’s moral dilemma has a lasting significance” and may be compared to that of Brutus and the Roman Republic. “Eden explored the same region of the moral universe of politics, with similar high-mindedness and self-righteousness, blindness and clear-sightedness, misjudgment and courage.”

Germany in The World in March 1939 Wight conjectured that the factors that led to Germany’s conquest of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 included the pursuit of national revival after defeat in the First World War, the widespread belief in betrayal and stab-in-the-back myths, the backing for the National Socialist movement by “demobilized and unemployable soldiers,” and Hitler’s charismatic leadership. Hitler promoted an ideology of racism and built up his Nazi movement’s power by agitating the masses through crude and brutal oratory. Hitler’s perseverance and organizational skills enabled him to exploit multiple methods of manipulation, from harsh violence to slow and subtle infiltration. The goal of Lebensraum (“living space”) was Hitler’s justification for attempting to defeat and dismember the Soviet Union. He followed historic principles of “aggressive statecraft” and devised others, such as articulating “the big lie” as more credible to the masses than small falsehoods and enforcing “exactions on the conquered only by stages, as far as that is possible.” He formulated a principle of building up to a “pinnacle of power” before attacking, but neglected it as he exploited opportunities. He pursued “the political penetration and psychological paralysis of other states, and the promotion of revolutionary unrest.” He sought, in his own words, “the moral break-down of the enemy before the war has started,” and employed to this end propaganda, economic pressures, and political-military intimidation. Rejecting the possibility of

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a capitulation as in 1918, Hitler continued combat “beyond the bounds of purpose, towards self-destruction and universal destruction. Here was the authentic nihilism of the Third Reich.”

Eastern Europe in The World in March 1939 Wight observed that, owing to the collapse of four empires (Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov) in the First World War, Eastern Europe in 1918–1939 included several new states. These successor states faced competition among themselves, internal social and political conflicts, and intervention by France, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. To a greater degree than in Western Europe, Eastern European elites and peasantries retained memories of national grievances, glories, and “historic rights.” The hope that the weak states of Eastern Europe could combine to constitute a great power to block Soviet and German expansion was an illusion. Aside from the rivalries among these small states, one or more of them at a time generally preferred to be aligned with a great power rather than with another small power, partly owing to the influence of national minorities. Germany had economic advantages as the principal market for Eastern Europe’s agricultural surpluses and as the most potent supplier of industrial products. Italy conducted “an active policy of intervention and disruption that was the conditioning factor in Balkan and Danubian politics until she was eclipsed by Nazi Germany.” Britain and France abdicated their responsibilities, notably to Czechoslovakia, at the 1938 Munich conference. Germany and Russia became the most influential determinants of the consequences for Eastern Europe. For example, Ukraine’s brief independence after Germany’s conquests could not be sustained; and Ukraine “was then swallowed up again in the Russian Power as a member of the Soviet Union—tracing a path which was to be followed or approached within a generation by most of the other successor states of Eastern Europe.”

Spain and Portugal in The World in March 1939 The Nationalists led by Franco won the 1936–1939 civil war in Spain. “With the victory of the Nationalist Government, Spain’s will to empire, her imperial and Catholic mission, became the constant theme of propaganda.” However, Wight pointed out, “the foreign ambitions of the Nationalist Government, when its authority was at last established throughout the territory of Spain, were limited by physical exhaustion and political instability.” Franco estimated in 1939 that “at least five years’ peace were necessary” before Spain could be ready to enter a war supporting the Axis. In contrast with Franco’s alignment with the Axis, Portuguese

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policy had been based on alliance with Britain since the fourteenth century. “Even after Spain had ceased to be a Great Power, Britain considered it necessary for her control of the Atlantic that Portuguese independence should be maintained under British protection. . . . Salazar’s policy towards the Spanish Civil War and the NonIntervention Agreement, approximating to that of Germany and Italy, was in some degree a declaration of independence from Britain. Nevertheless Portugal had no common interest with the Axis. If as a Catholic and authoritarian Power she supported Franco, equally as a Catholic and a weak colonial Power she must fear the rise of Nazi Germany. . . . Therefore, while signing the treaty of friendship with the victorious Franco, Portugal was concerned to emphasize discreetly her former ties” with England.

Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia in The World in March 1939 In 1939 the main neutral European states were Switzerland, the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), and the Scandinavian countries (here defined as Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). They were all successful parliamentary democracies; and in their foreign policies, Wight observed, “the elements of prestige and competition for power had perhaps a smaller part than in any other states in the world.” They complemented their traditional reliance on neutrality with efforts to promote collective security and disarmament in the League of Nations. Both approaches failed. For example, Wight remarked, “At the military conference of 23 May 1939 Hitler declared that the Dutch and Belgian air bases must be occupied by force: ‘declarations of neutrality must be ignored’.” Small Powers such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal were incapable of defending their colonial holdings. As Wight noted, “The disproportion between their weight in the world and their possessions marked them down for attack.” Discussions between Hitler and high-level British officials on colonial matters raised concerns among European neutral states. “The Western neutrals had to trust that Britain, being traditionally more sensitive to disturbances of the balance of power in Africa and the Indian Ocean than in Central Europe, would thenceforward recognize in her policy that the great empires overseas were reciprocally dependent upon the security of the smaller.”

History and Historians Wight held that history itself—in the sense of shared interpretations and convictions about events in the past—could function as a motivating factor. For example, he summed up the power of historical memory in his essay “Eastern Europe.” In

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his words, “the accumulated heritage of national strife and injury that had divided [the states of ] Eastern Europe for centuries . . . gave them all alike a sharper and deeper historic consciousness than the nations of Western Europe.” Eastern Europeans nursed grudges and prized victories for centuries. Germans recalled their defeat at Tannenberg in 1410 and achieved vengeance there in 1914. Hungarians remembered their defeat at Mohács in 1526 and savored their revenge on the Turks at the same battlefield in 1687. Serbs repeated ballads commemorating their conquest by the Turks at Kosovo in 1389. Wight concluded that, “Like the Irish, the only Western nation with a comparable experience, these peoples regained their freedom because they lived among their ancient wrongs and glories. History was the stuff of their politics, and all their politics turned back to history.”¹⁴ After World War II, Wight pointed out, British historians had the challenge of explaining their country’s appeasement policy in the 1930s, which many saw as “a curious aberration in the history of British policy.”¹⁵ Sir Charles Webster wrote about this “aberration” point: “The attempt to institute a system of limited liability which only extended to the French and Belgian frontiers was contrary to all her [Britain’s] thinking in the past and was a dismal failure. This failure began a period of British policy which I find it impossible to fit into the pattern of her history. It can only be regarded as an aberration, the causes of which are not yet fully explained.”¹⁶ Wight offered a partial explanation: “insufficient emphasis has been given to the element of positive Commonwealth idealism which helps to explain that period of turning away from the insoluble national conflicts of Europe.”¹⁷ Wight heartily praised certain prominent historians but sometimes qualified such endorsements with harsh criticism. For example, he presented A. J. P. Taylor as almost unsurpassed: “With the exception of Sir Charles Webster, he is our most distinguished international historian, the one who offers the most creative interpretation of the European balance of power and of the tensions and limitations of diplomacy.”¹⁸ Wight nonetheless asked, why is one’s admiration for Mr. Taylor laced with reserves? Is it because of his attitude that energy is more important than time in solving political problems? Because of his failure to analyse his own radical presuppositions as ruthlessly as effete Counter-Reformation dynasticism? Or because, under the hard bright light of his intelligence, the shadows and half-tones of the historical landscape ¹⁴ Wight, “Eastern Europe.” ¹⁵ Martin Wight, “United Europe: The Historical Background,” this volume chapter 6. ¹⁶ Sir Charles Webster, The Art and Practice of Diplomacy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), p. 29. ¹⁷ Wight, “United Europe.” See also Wight’s paper “The Concept of Europe” in the present volume. ¹⁸ Martin Wight, review of A. J. P. Taylor, Rumours of Wars (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953)., published under the title “Contentious But Creative” in The Spectator, May 15, 1953; reprinted in the present volume.

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INTRODUCTION disappear, and his art, like Mr. Evelyn Waugh’s, is vitiated by a corroding contempt for mankind?¹⁹

Wight applauded the outstanding scholarship of Elizabeth Wiskemann in her book The Rome–Berlin Axis: This belongs with Namier, Beloff, and Wheeler-Bennett among the half-dozen definitive secondary works on the diplomatic history of Hitler’s age. Miss Wiskemann compares the writing of recent history to the labour of Sisyphus; but the historian has the added task that his stone is a snowball growing larger as he rolls it upwards, and he is compelled to aid the process, constantly stopping to hold the stone in position with one hand while he gathers all the snow within reach to add to it with the other. Miss Wiskemann’s snowball, securely on the top, will weather very well. As a work of scholarship it is unlikely to be upset by the continuing downpour of documents and memoirs. Moreover it is a work of art, with a shape and a theme.²⁰

Wight nonetheless criticized Wiskemann for spreading the mistaken impression that Hitler and Mussolini were students of Nietzsche. “There is little evidence that Hitler ever read Nietzsche or was influenced by that tortured and aristocratic spirit: Nazism found its soil at lower cultural levels, and the intellectual authorities of Mein Kampf are Wagner, H. S. Chamberlain, and the Protocols of Zion.”²¹ Herbert Butterfield, one of the most highly respected historians of his time, famous as the author of The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), provoked a debate about the feasibility of what he called “technical history,” unblemished by any expression of personal or partisan interpretation. Wight politely dismissed Butterfield’s “technical history” ambition: “There are traces of an unresolved contradiction in Professor Butterfield’s thought. He still suggests the possibility of a technical history, free from interpretation, whose results can be agreed by men of every belief; but he describes how far Ranke was from a colourless objectivity, and how a historical period acquires its shape and coherence in the historian’s imagination. He does not admit that language is an instrument incapable of being used to discuss human affairs without cadences of interpretation and judgment.”²² ¹⁹ Martin Wight, review of A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), published under the title “Fall of an Empire” in The Observer, February 13, 1949; reprinted in the present volume. ²⁰ Martin Wight, review of Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Rome–Berlin Axis: A History of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), in International Affairs, vol. 25, no. 3 (July 1949), pp. 370–1. ²¹ Wight, review of Wiskemann. ²² Wight, “The History of History,” review of Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), in The Economist, November 12, 1955.

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Irony, Determinism, and Forecasting Forecasting has long been an aspiration of scholars interested in practical applications of the study of international relations. Wight was, however, cautious about forecasting. His caution was consistent with his rejection of deterministic interpretations of events, his respect for the autonomous choices of individuals, and his sensitivity to irony—the unexpected and paradoxical situations that often arise in international politics. The irony that Wight underscored in “Fortune’s Banter” was, for example, apparent in the situation immediately following the defeat of the Axis in 1945.²³ “The Russian threat raised the question of German re-armament for the defence of Western Europe, and this of course reinforced the fear of Germany herself. It is one of those paradoxes or ironies which are of the essence of international politics: the need to re-arm a defeated enemy whom you fear and suspect in order to protect yourself against a heroic ally whom you are beginning to admire rather less.”²⁴ Another instance of implicit (or unacknowledged) irony, Wight noted, could be found in the writings of Germans who claimed that, while they served Hitler they opposed him in their hearts, and that the democracies are more to blame than the German people for Hitler’s coming to power and remaining there. Sir Lewis [Namier] analyses their inconsistencies and dishonesties with relentless severity and a rabbinical minuteness, and he shows how neither the civilians nor the army disagreed with the ultimate aims of Hitler’s foreign policy. . . . The doctrine that the historian has no concern with moral judgments, and ought not to feel as intensely as Sir Lewis feels against the Germans and their appeasers, is something of an intellectual counterpart to the abdication of political responsibility which was the democracies’ guilt for the war. The greatest historical writing has often been inspired by anger and disgust, but only when these have been controlled and refined. It is perhaps significant that among Sir Lewis’ glittering intellectual and literary equipment the weapon of irony does not appear.²⁵

Determinism—the view that events derive from inexorable impersonal causes— has the drawback of inviting decision-makers to evade their responsibilities with simplistic interpretations of events. As Wight pointed out with reference to British policy in the Middle East, “It is possible to argue that the whole story was inevitable, and this argument, which when it is advanced by politicians to excuse ²³ Martin Wight, “Fortune’s Banter,” in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, pp. 282–312. ²⁴ Wight, “United Europe.” ²⁵ Martin Wight, review of Sir Lewis Namier, In the Nazi Era (London: Macmillan, 1952), in The Listener, January 29, 1953.

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INTRODUCTION

their actions the historian must always treat with the utmost skepticism, has a peculiar cogency here, because of the intractability of the problems with which Britain has been grappling.”²⁶ Wight provided an illustration of how difficult forecasting is with a comparison of the aims and actions of de Gaulle and Monnet concerning the future of European integration. De Gaulle’s vision could be compared to Bismarck’s “little German” approach, in contrast with broader hypothetical answers to the German question and Europe’s future. The comparison fell short of persuasive power, Wight noted, owing to the contrast between the military autonomy of Bismarck’s Germany and the security dependence of de Gaulle’s France on the United States. Wight accordingly remained cautious about forecasting.²⁷ In his words, “history in its own good time will probably weave together de Gaulle’s conceptions and Monnet’s and make of them some third thing which we cannot now envisage.”²⁸ Given Wight’s view that “determinist assertions disqualify a historian from profound and subtle themes,”²⁹ he was probably gratified to conclude that Toynbee was “no determinist” about the “rise and fall” of civilizations.³⁰ Wight accordingly took critical note of studies that accused Toynbee of attributing reality to the metaphors and abstractions—intended to serve as aids to reflection—in his analytical framework. Ernst F. J. Zahn, for example, wrote—as Wight summarized his argument—that Toynbee “hypostasizes both the élan vital as a collective principle and also the process of challenge-and-response. Against his intention he thus involves himself in a new determinism: man’s freedom is lost if it is made dependent on events of a higher order.” Wight defended Toynbee, writing that “It is the strength of Zahn’s essay that he understands that critical estimate of Toynbee’s work is not exhausted by demolishing its logical structure.”³¹ Wight presented Toynbee’s shortcomings as secondary—even trivial—aspects of a grand achievement: “His logic is sometimes faulty: he does not define his terms, he uses false analogies, he argues in circles. . . . Indeed he never adequately defines the unit of his historical system—a civilization. But civilizations, like nations, are facts of experience. Toynbee’s categories will be knocked about by his successors; their content will be changed; but they have already become part of the historian’s permanent equipment.”³² Wight nevertheless counseled prudence in renovating frameworks of historical analysis. “If we alter our historical framework in accordance with political

²⁶ “British Policy in the Middle East”, reproduced in the current volume. ²⁷ Wight noted grounds for circumspection in his “Note on Partition.” ²⁸ Wight, “United Europe.” ²⁹ Wight, review of Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy. ³⁰ Wight, “Modern Prophet,” a review of Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilisation on Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), in The Observer, 2 January 1949; reprinted in the present volume. ³¹ Martin Wight, review of Ernst F. J. Zahn, Toynbee und das Problem der Geschichte: eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Evolutionismus (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1954), in The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 6, no. 4 (December 1955), pp. 389–90. ³² Wight, “Modern Prophet.”

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events, as continental peoples rename their streets, we exaggerate into principles of interpretation what should at best be stimuli, and chain ourselves more securely to the tyranny of relativism. The deepest impulse of the historical vocation is the desire to escape from the Zeitgeist, to give a picture of the past that will be more true, in colour, perspective and detail, than any that has been offered before.”³³ In his lectures on the history of thinking about international relations, Wight issued a comparable resounding call for reliance on historical education to provide an escape from the Zeitgeist, from the mean, narrow, provincial spirit which is constantly assuring us that we are at the peak of human achievement, that we stand on the edge of unprecedented prosperity or an unparalleled catastrophe . . . It is a liberation of the spirit to acquire perspective, to recognize that every generation is confronted by problems of the utmost subjective urgency, but that an objective grading is probably impossible; to learn that the same moral predicaments and the same ideas have been explored before.³⁴

Wight admired Collingwood’s conception of history as a re-enactment of past thinking, and accordingly approved Baynes’s approach to late Roman and Byzantine studies: His use of sources is constantly vivified by a Collingwoodian imagination of human motives—of the passionate adherence to tradition of cultivated pagans like Symmachus, who could not know that their cause was lost; of the divided feelings of Roman converts to Christianity like Lactantius, as they foresaw the dissolution of the Empire; of Athanasius putting his luggage on board and ordering it off again as he hesitated whether to obey the emperor’s summons to the capital; of Ambrose, another unlovable saint, skating in his funeral orations with diplomatic smoothness over the suspicious manner in which superfluous members of the imperial family have disappeared.³⁵

Wight found similar merits in Denis Mack Smith’s Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: history’s main function is that enlargement of the experience which Collingwood, perhaps too narrowly, defined as “re-enactment.” The reader of this book not only relives an acute political drama, entering in turn the minds of all its chief ³³ Martin Wight, “Interpreting History,” a review of Homer Carey Hockett, The Critical Method in Historical Research and Writing (New York: Macmillan, 1955), and Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), in The Economist, February 4, 1956; reprinted in the present volume. ³⁴ Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), p. 6; italics in the original. ³⁵ Martin Wight, review of Norman H. Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1955), published under the title “Historical Criticism” in The Economist, June 18, 1955.

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INTRODUCTION actors. “Wherever historians can spend longer studying a statesman’s re-action to a problem than that statesman once spent on the problem itself,” says Mr. Mack Smith, “it often occurs that events appear to have happened more unpredictably and with less conscious purpose behind them than had formerly been thought.” With the best critical history in fact (and this book is such) the historian comes to understand what happened better than the statesmen did, and communicates that understanding to his readers.³⁶

Relating History to International Relations In sum, the goal of a deeper—and successfully communicated—understanding of history remains. In Wight’s words regarding Marc Bloch, “if criticism begins with the rational conduct of doubt as an instrument of knowledge, its final goal is understanding. It excludes judgment, and distrusts both ‘the idol of origins’ and ‘the fetish of the single cause’ as insidious forms of attributing blame.”³⁷ As Douglas Porch observed, Wight’s contributions to scholarship included serving as “a bridge between the ever-evolving practice of history and the emerging discipline” of international relations. “He also was an eminently good judge of quality, able to call balls and strikes in an evolving academic field in which he was a pioneer, but from the perspective of an older, established discipline.”³⁸ Wight demonstrated his ability to do this in various works, notably his incisive reviews of books by Charles Petrie, A. L. Rowse, Jacob Bronowski, Bruce Mazlish, Homer Carey Hockett, and Geoffrey Barraclough, reproduced in the present volume of Wight’s works, History and International Relations. Daniel Moran, another American historian of international security affairs, wrote that “Wight’s enduring attraction to historical study . . . served him as a kind of talisman against theoretical overreach, without discrediting the pursuit of theoretical insight, which remained his central concern.”³⁹ Several of the historians whose works Wight praised—including Marc Bloch, Herbert Butterfield, W. K. Hancock, Denis Mack Smith, Sir Lewis Namier, A. J. P. Taylor, and Veronica Wedgwood—have retained robust and respected professional standing. ³⁶ Martin Wight, review of Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: A Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954); reprinted in the present volume. ³⁷ Martin Wight, “The Historical Vocation,” Review of Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, published in The Economist, July 24, 1954; reprinted in the present volume. ³⁸ Douglas Porch, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, letter, November 7, 2022. ³⁹ Daniel Moran, Professor, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, letter, November 8, 2022. Professor Moran noted Clausewitz’s view: “Theory should cast a steady light on all phenomena so that we can more easily recognize and eliminate the weeds that always spring from ignorance; it should show how one thing is related to another, and keep the important and the unimportant separate.” On War, Book Eight, Chapter One; from Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 578.

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Indeed, Marc Bloch stands out as revered, admired for his courageous participation in the Resistance (and his death in 1944 at the hands of the Gestapo) and for the superlative quality of his posthumous books on the causes of France’s defeat in 1940 and the vocation of an historian.⁴⁰ Of Bloch’s last book—Métier d’Historien, translated as The Historian’s Craft—Wight wrote that it “not only may prove to be the most influential writing of a great humanist, but is also the best explanation yet written of why, in the last century, history has become, and has deserved to become, the queen of the sciences.”⁴¹ According to Bloch’s testament about the historian’s vocation, “The only true history, which can advance only through mutual aid, is universal history.” Wight reasoned, “It follows that history deals with the living as well as the dead, and the study of contemporary history differs from that of the remote past only in degree.”⁴² In other words, the contemporary history that seizes the attention of many students of international relations is part of a comprehensive historical whole. Wight’s firm grounding in history helps to account for his inspiration to scholars finding merits in the “English School,” though this term for a historical and humanistic approach to scholarship concerning international relations did not emerge until nine years after his death. Wight deplored shortcomings in Toynbee’s work—as noted above, “he does not define his terms, he uses false analogies, he argues in circles”⁴³—but remained loyal to his example and accomplishments. In Wight’s words, “history ultimately is less akin to science than to the activity of the trained judgment whereby the critic establishes canons in art or literature; and Toynbee’s achievement illustrates this. He always sees man as a free and tragic being, whose destiny eludes the prosaic techniques of the social scientist.”⁴⁴ In short, Wight’s esteem for Toynbee’s work derived from a shared conviction that historical learning and discrimination in judgment offer more insight than analyses based on the methods of social science.

⁴⁰ Regarding France’s defeat, see Marc Bloch, L’Étrange Défaite: Témoignage écrit en 1940 (first published in French in 1946 by the Société des Éditions Franc-Tireur); Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (first published in English in 1949 by Oxford University Press). ⁴¹ Wight, “The Historical Vocation.” ⁴² Wight, “The Historical Vocation.” ⁴³ Wight, “Modern Prophet.” ⁴⁴ Wight, “Modern Prophet.”

1 What Is International Relations? I assume that the subject matter of our Department takes the plural verb, but that the subject itself takes the singular.∗

1 The difficulties of defining International Relations as an academic subject do not lie altogether in the subject matter itself. They are also due to academic organisation. International Relations as a university subject is a mushroom growth in the interstice between International Law on the one side and History on the other. This has conditioned its development, and deformed it. We have only to consider what International Relations might cover in a university in which there was no History faculty and no teaching of International Law to see how constricted and corseted a subject it is. Illustrations are easy to find, and lie near at hand. In University College International Relations remains under the wing of International Law, in order—as Dr. Schwarzenberger openly says—to protect it from the History Department.¹ Susan Strange is a member of his staff; it is her business to lecture on international history since 1918; but in order to disguise the fact from the rival jurisdiction her course is entitled “Applied International Relations.”² This grotesque subterfuge symbolizes a great part of our problem—the defensiveness and lack of intellectual sincerity that is forced on a subject (not only on a new subject, but on established subjects too, as I think it would be easy to show from the specialization of History itself ) by the exigencies of academic delimitation.

2 What, then, can International Relations be? To classify a new phenomenon we must have a broad notion of the genera and species within which it may be ∗ Martin Wight prepared this paper for a postgraduate seminar at the London School of Economics in June 1950.

¹ [Ed.] Georg Schwarzenberger (1908–1991), an emigrant from Germany to Britain in 1934, pursued a sociological approach to international law, and sought to identify power realities underlying and conditioning the application of legal rules. ² [Ed.] Susan Strange (1923–1998) played a pioneering role in establishing international political economy as a field of study. History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0002

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expected to fall, before we adopt the last resort of writing it down as itself a genus hitherto unknown. The range of kinds of things that International Relations may be is conveniently simple and restricted. It is clear that it is either a branch of History or a branch of the Social Sciences. At the risk of covering elementary ground it may be useful to remind ourselves of the difference between these two fields of knowledge, because our enquiry assumes that we have them in view. History describes what happened, at a given point in space and past time. The Social Sciences describe what happens, in the aoristic present. The Social Sciences make an advance upon History in a greater degree of abstraction—they are concerned not with the elucidation of facts but with the construction of general laws. That is their glory, for the human reason is a law-making instrument. On the other hand, the advance to abstraction has its corresponding disadvantages, for it is an advance away from the richness and concreteness of the particular fact, to recover which is the glory of History. The superiority of one mode of knowledge to the other is perhaps a barren question to canvass (though I shall venture to touch upon it before I end), for it is largely a matter of training, perhaps even a matter of temperament—it may be that we are all either little Historians or little Social Scientists by innate predisposition. It must be noticed, however, that History precedes the Social Sciences both logically and chronologically. History is the crystallization of experience, providing the raw material of facts which the Social Sciences manufacture into general laws. To put it very briefly, History could exist without the Social Sciences, but the Social Sciences could not exist without History. You will see at once that the last sentence narrows the issue to too fine a point: in fact where there is one there is bound to be the other, for both represent natural activities of the human intellect. The controversy between them is carried on, not simply between rival departments of a university, but between rival groups of historians and between rival groups of sociologists; indeed it is carried on in the mind of the individual historian and of the individual sociologist. Indeed for many ages both activities were carried on by the same people. Every historian was a sociological historian, and the pure social scientist was almost unknown. The father of the Social Sciences was Aristotle, but in the two thousand years between him and Machiavelli (who, although he was a historian, was a social scientist rather more) it is difficult to think of any other name that might answer the description. But the father of history, the name that is conventionally bestowed upon Herodotus, was historian and social scientist in one. As he moved about the world, from the capital of the Persian Empire to the Greek colonies in Italy, and from the Ukraine to Egypt, gathering his vast and varied information, he was a sort of travelling one man team of social investigators. He was historian and geographer,

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political scientist and economist, anthropologist and folklorist; and it is due to the exercise of this multiple function that his immortality is largely due. Or take Thucydides. In a famous sentence in his introduction he says that he has thought it worthwhile to record the events of the Peloponnesian War not only because they are striking in themselves; they are the kind of thing that will in all likelihood be repeated.³ He speaks then as a social scientist: “This is not only what happened, it is also what happens.” Acton said in his Inaugural that Politics is the single science deposited by the stream of History.⁴ This rightly expresses the relationship between History and the Social Sciences, but Acton was already out of date in taking Politics as their representative. By 1895, when his Inaugural Lecture was delivered, and which also happened to be the date of the foundation of this School,⁵ the intellectual revolution was already far advanced which split off the Social Sciences from History into a separate branch of knowledge, which multiplied the number and sub-divisions of the Social Sciences, which deposed Politics from the primacy it had held among them since the Greeks and placed Economics in its stead, which deposed Logic as their principal instrument and placed Statistics in its stead, and which has raised the Social Sciences in general into a mighty tree that overshadows the academic sky. If we compare the Social Sciences, as they are now, with History, their differentiae are seen to be three: (a) Their method is the comparative method, the construction of general laws from the largest available number of relevant particular instances. (b) Their purpose and inspiration is pragmatic. They are all either applied sciences, as Political Economy originally was, or closely related to applied sciences, the theoretical shadow of the practical substance, like Economic Theory in relation to Applied Economics, Sociology in relation to Social Science, Politics in relation to Public Administration, Anthropology and Colonial Studies in relation to Colonial Administration. They organise knowledge as a means to action. (c) They tend to be concerned with the present. This follows from the preceding point: for action is in the present, not in the past. That the Social Sciences are mainly concerned with the present is contested by some social ³ “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.” Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: The Modern Library, 1951), pp. 14–15. ⁴ [Ed.] Lord Acton, A Lecture on the Study of History, delivered at Cambridge, June 11, 1895 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911). ⁵ [Ed.] That is, the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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scientists, particularly sociologists, who claim to be concerned indifferently with the whole range of time; and of sociologists this is to some extent true; but the general point will stand. History makes a contrast under these three heads. It is concerned not with general laws but with unique and unrepeatable events, the particular and the concrete: it therefore employs the comparative method only in a very subordinate manner. Its purpose and inspiration are not pragmatic. History is useless. It is an activity of the mind, like philosophy or mathematics, whose results may indeed be put to use by busy-bodies, but which is pursued without any such end in view on the grounds that it is self-justifying. And it is not especially concerned with the present, but with the whole range of time. It can indeed be concerned with the present, but only as the latest available deposit of the past.

3 In this frame of reference, I suggest that International Relations has three characteristics. In the first place, it is a new and transient subject. This obvious fact should control all our thinking about it. The subject was created by the First World War, and grew up in the 1920’s. (The earliest provision in this country for the teaching of International Relations so far as I know was when a paper on “International Law and Politics” was introduced into the Cambridge History Tripos as an optional subject in 1912, a remarkable anticipation.) From 1918 to about 1936 International Relations went through a first phase which might be called, with reference to this country, the Gilbert Murray period;⁶ and with reference to the United States, the Nicholas Murray Butler period;⁷ soon after it entered upon the E. H. Carr phase,⁸ which ended with the breakdown of the United Nations and the recognition of the Cold War against Russia; since then it has entered upon a third phase whose character we cannot yet discern. International Relations is the academic response to the period of the two World Wars. ⁶ [Ed.] Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), a prominent scholar and public intellectual, championed the League of Nations. ⁷ [Ed.] Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) served as President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925 to 1945. He shared the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote peace, including support for the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, which provided for the “renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy.” ⁸ [Ed.] E. H. Carr (1892–1982), a controversial historian and journalist, is best known in studies of international relations as a proponent of realism. As Wight pointed out, “if one turns to E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis after Hobbes’ Leviathan, one cannot fail to note that the basic arguments are the same.” Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), p. 6. See also Wight’s review of Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, first published under the title “The Realist’s Utopia,” The Observer, July 21, 1946, and republished in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 315–16.

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The immaturity of International Relations is illustrated by the continued absence of any classics on the subject.⁹ For a subject becomes securely established only when it is producing great books which deserve notice outside its field. After Montesquieu, it was no longer possible to argue that Comparative Government was not a legitimate study; after Adam Smith it was no longer possible to say it of Political Economy. But what existing book, that is squarely centered on the subject of International Relations, can we suppose will be read in two hundred years’ time? (If we may beg the question for the moment that the present level of culture in the West will be maintained.) Nothing comes to mind which does not more properly belong to a related field. I would vote for Toynbee’s Survey,¹⁰ but that is really history; Lenin’s Imperialism and Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Stalin’s writings are really political theory; Keynes on the Peace Conference,¹¹ if it is not history, is Economics. We have not yet produced our Tocqueville or our Durkheim, our Lombroso or our Fraser, our Marshall or our Webbs. This is the supreme practical handicap for a teacher of this subject. There are no books which he can recommend to a student that illuminate the soul as well as furnish the examination question, or which stand, as Tawney has said of the Webbs’ books, “like Roman masonry in a London suburb.”¹²

4 The second characteristic of the subject is that it is no longer pragmatic. In this it has changed. It started off with as extreme a pragmatism as any of the Social Sciences. It was almost to be the science of peace. This has left its mark in the datedness and indeed unreadability of virtually every book on the subject produced in the ‘twenties. It has left its mark in a more important way, in the significance occupied within the subject by the study of international institutions. For the League of Nations was originally to International Relations what the British and American Constitutions are to the subject known as Government. It was the instrument ⁹ [Ed.] Wight explored this question in his essay, “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 17–34. Wight revised his judgment after reading Raymond Aron’s Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, a treatise that Wight reviewed in “Tract for the Nuclear Age,” The Observer, April 23, 1967. “Why Is There No International Theory?” and “Tract for the Nuclear Age” are available in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 22–38, 327–9. ¹⁰ [Ed.] Working under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Arnold Toynbee prepared, with assistants, the Survey of International Affairs volumes covering the years from 1920 to 1946. ¹¹ [Ed.] John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan and Co., 1920). ¹² [Ed.] R. H. Tawney, “In Memory of Sidney Webb,” Economica, New Series, vol. 14, no. 56 (November 1947), p. 249.

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through which the science might be applied. International institutions of this kind still occupy a central place in our subject, and I think their importance is still exaggerated. But in general there has been the greatest change. I had no more pleasant surprise when I joined this Department than in finding that students do not regard International Relations as being of any use. We no longer believe that we are building peace, that we can abolish war, that international problems have solutions, that we can shape events, and that our subject contributes to these illusory ends. We recognize that International Relations itself is a symptom of disease, not a therapy, and that all our Departments, and conferences, and discussions about the subject are like the rust on the surface, which reveals that the process of oxidation is going on in the iron below. For us the occurrence of a Third World War is almost an axiom, and we are studying its causes. We know that our century is running out towards 1984.¹³ We no longer want to justify ourselves on utilitarian grounds. All we aim at is understanding. What we pursue is wisdom. I believe this to be a very great gain indeed. If on the one hand it means that we fall short, in this respect, of deserving classification as a true social science, it means on the other hand that we earn the more splendid dignity of approximating to a liberal education. It is the tradition of European culture, from Aristotle and Cicero down to Newman, that liberal pursuits are those in which knowledge is pursued as its own end, and that these are superior to useful pursuits as contemplation is superior to action. As students of International Relations we may have lost the confidence of being about to discover the philosopher’s stone for world politics; we have gained the right to consider ourselves as upholding a standard which is more fundamental to civilisation than any political solutions.

5 The third characteristic of the subject, and that which will take longest to consider, is its content. We are familiar with Professor Manning’s analogy between International Relations and History on one side, and Criminology and the History of Crime on the other. This analogy would seem to put Professor Manning on the side of those who classify International Relations among the Social Sciences.¹⁴ But if he will allow me to say so, I am not altogether persuaded that the analogy represents the ambiguity of what International Relations actually does. It seems to me ¹³ [Ed.] Orwell’s novel was published in June 1949, just a year before Wight gave this lecture. ¹⁴ [Ed.] C. A. W. Manning (1894–1978) was a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, 1930–1962. For background, see Hidemi Suganami, “C. A. W. Manning and the Study of International Relations,” Review of International Studies, vol. 27 (2001), pp. 91–107.

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that the subject is, rather, Criminology plus the Heath case, the Haigh case, the Raven case, and the issues arising currently out of the Hume–Setty case.¹⁵ This ambiguity is at the heart of our problem. International Relations appears to me to exist in a tension between two poles, of which one is sociological and the other historical; or again as a spectrum of which Sociology proper is the ultraviolet and History proper the infra-red. Let us examine these two poles, and try to define the kind of History and the kind of Sociology we are concerned with. The historical pole is Contemporary History. Contemporary History—Heath, Haigh, Raven and Hume—may be defined as the history that has elapsed since the terminal date of the history syllabus. This varies from place to place. There is a historian at Oxford, with a high reputation as in the field of military history, now of a great age and retired, who was approached somewhere about the beginning of the recent war [that is, World War II] by an American Rhodes scholar desiring to be supervised for a thesis in the History school. The Rhodes scholar said his mind had been turning over various aspects of the history of the League of Nations, and he wanted guidance about the best to choose. “Nonsense,” said the don, “you can’t play about with subjects like that. History stops in 1700. Of course, there are subjects after that: you might do something on Frederick, you might do something on Bismarck, but it’s much safer not.” This is an extreme case; and it occurred, after all, at Oxford. (The American, needless to add, was enchanted at his dreams of the place coming truer than he had dared hope possible.) I understand that in Durham University, History ends at the Berlin Congress in 1878. In most universities, as in this School, and indeed in official as distinct from diehard Oxford, the date has now been advanced to 1939. Half the papers that are read in our classes are on straight historical topics: “Austria under Four-Power occupation since 1945,” “Some effects of the Second World War,” “Nationalism among Colonial Peoples after World War II,” and so on. We cover the Political History, the Diplomatic History, the Social History, the Economic History of our period in the same way as a History student at Oxford, who has to choose one among a number of foreign periods to be examined in, studies all the aspects of the sixteenth century or the eighteenth century or whatever his choice may be. Several subsidiary points must be made here. (a) Our subject is not limited, as its name might imply, to the relations between nations in Contemporary History. I was interested when Professor Manning gave a ruling on this point in his introductory address at the beginning of last term. Someone asked whether the internal developments of, for example, Spain fell within our scope? Professor Manning answered Yes, and added in effect that no human

¹⁵ [Ed.] Murders by Neville Heath (1917–1946), John George Haigh (1909–1949), Daniel Raven (1926–1950), and Brian Donald Hume (1919–1998) received a great deal of press coverage in Britain around 1946–1950. One of Hume’s victims was Stanley Setty.

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activity should be considered outside our province. If I may presume to say so I strongly agree. We are concerned with Contemporary World Affairs. This is the academic reflection of the fact that, with the technical unification of the world and our headlong slide towards the establishment of a World State, all domestic events come to have an international bearing. Our subject has the name it has because international relations are the dominant interest of the age in which we live. But International Relations as a subject is only the most recent in the respectable succession of studies throughout the ages which have been concerned with the examination of current affairs. During the early Industrial Revolution that study lay primarily in the hands of the Political Economists, from Adam Smith down to the moment when it became clear that the nineteenth century was following the path not of Cobden but of Bismarck: and the greatest figure of that phase was neither Adam Smith nor Cobden but of course that master of the study of his contemporary history Karl Marx. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the study of contemporary history was pursued primarily by the lawyers: the great Spanish jurists who attempted to systematize and moralize the conquest of America, and Grotius, who, by attempting to rationalize the incipient international anarchy, laid the foundations of international law. It is remarkable how regularly contemporary history finds its academic recognition under the form of law, which is one of the first sciences to feel the impact of changing conditions. In the thirteenth century, when the dominant concern was not international relations but the relations of Church and State, the academic appreciation of contemporary history lay in the hands of the Canonists and the Civilians. The London Inns of Court, newfangled, confident, aggressive, suspect, but indispensable, were the equivalent of the London School of Economics in that age. (b) We are dealing with Universal History, not only in the sense of world-wide history, but also in the sense of integral history. I have already referred to the fragmentation of History that has taken place as a result of academic specialization. By the beginning of this century History had become rigidly subdivided in our universities into four main pens or compounds, Political History, Constitutional History, Economic History, and Diplomatic History. There were one or two outbuildings such as Ecclesiastical History for learned clergymen and the History of Art or Kulturgeschichte for dilettantes and Germans; but in general since then research-students have been ruthlessly herded into one or other of the four compounds and not allowed to hang about or sit on any of the fences. The subdivision most relevant to us, our next-door garden, is of course Diplomatic History, which is traditionally the history of relations between governments. (I am not yet sufficiently familiar with what is called International History in this School to know whether it is more than Diplomatic History dressed up.) The Historian’s attack on

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International Relations is that if it is not Diplomatic History it is nothing, and that it is not Diplomatic History because the historian is already doing that himself. But in the field of history since 1939, the field of International Relations, these artificial distinctions are irrelevant. Indeed as far as this aspect of the subject goes, we are not doing anything different from what we would be doing if the Chair founded by Montague Burton, and consequently this Department, had been entitled Contemporary Universal History. (c) We use the techniques and the sources appropriate to Contemporary History, and these are not necessarily the same as those of Ancient or Mediaeval History. History is defined not by its techniques and sources but by its subject-matter: it is the study of the human past. The sources and the techniques of the historian vary according to his period: the modern historian depends primarily on documentary criticism, the mediaevalist on the more specialized branches of it known as diplomatic and paleography, the ancient historian adds epigraphy and papyrology and numismatics to his repertoire, and the pre-historian indulges in aerial photography and manual labour and sets up a separate shop under the name of Archaeology. All this is of secondary importance. Black-balling one another because of different techniques is one of the worst symptoms of academic bigotry. Many academic historians still deny the possibility of Contemporary History, even when the term is extended backwards to include the last tract of time that has been annexed within their History syllabuses, for instance the period since 1939. They advance two arguments, both of which have been demolished many times, but, as is the way in academic controversies, refuse to lie down. First they say that the Contemporary Historian has not enough materials on which to base a judgment. Of this nonsense, for I can use no politer term, the final refutation has been supplied by Professor Woodward, who has pointed out that in fact the documentary materials increase in number as you go forward in time, that the Contemporary Historian is rather overwhelmed by the multitude of his sources than graveled by their shallowness, and that he has far better evidence on which to base his conclusions than the medievalist.¹⁶ The opponents of contemporary history then concede this point and fall back on their second argument—that the Contemporary Historian lacks the perspective necessary for forming a judgment and avoiding tendentiousness. You would think it was sufficient refutation of this argument that if it were true, then half of the world’s great historians have lacked the perspective necessary for forming a judgment, from Thucydides and Polybius, through Guicciardini and Clarendon down to Trotsky and Churchill (and the list is very far from complete), who have all earned their immortality by writing the History of their Own Times; and it ¹⁶ [Ed.] Sir Ernest Llewellyn Woodward, Some Considerations on the Present State of Historical Studies, The Raleigh Lecture on History (London: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1950), pp. 101–5.

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might also be pointed out how strong is the tendency among non-Contemporary Historians of real stature, Burckhardt and Sorel and Henry Adams for instance among the dead, Toynbee and Namier among the living, to have a shot on the side as it were at interpreting the age in which they have lived. (d) The last point to be made under this head is that International Relations does not strictly confine itself to Contemporary History as I have described it. It makes frequent incursions back across the line that divides Contemporary History from nineteenth and twentieth century history. It commits the trespass with muscles defensively contracted and the expectation of meeting an angry game-keeper. But it goes on trespassing, and by its very nature it is bound to do so. In our classes we have papers on “Spain since 1923,” on the interaction of Russian and American policies in Chinese affairs since the end of the nineteenth century, and on “Economic Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy since 1865.” When accosted and charged with trespass, International Relations may seek to excuse itself by saying that its purpose is sociological. This is often true, but equally often it isn’t: the examples I have cited are straight history. The truth is, though perhaps we can admit it only to ourselves, International Relations considers itself free to tackle any aspect of History neglected by the History Departments. When trespassing into pre-Contemporary History it must of course avoid Diplomatic History, which is jealously guarded; apart from that International Relations has every chance of an enjoyable ramble throughout the estate without being apprehended. I think most of us would feel that such a subject as the ambivalent relationship between the German and Russian peoples, culturally, socially, and psychologically, which goes back at least to Peter the Great, or again any of the manifestations of Nazism, except those which are portrayed by the captured German documents, lies legitimately within the scope of International Relations, because we would assume that the History Department does not deal with it. Mr. Reynolds lectures on Soviet Foreign Policy;¹⁷ I suppose that I am not precluded from lecturing, under the head of International Institutions, on the History, Organisation and Activities of the Comintern.

6 If Contemporary History is one of the two poles of our subject, the other pole may be defined as the Sociology of the International Community, or I would prefer to say of international anarchy. ¹⁷ [Ed.] Philip Alan Reynolds taught in the International History Department at LSE. He taught the Soviet Foreign Policy course in 1949–50. The course description was as follows: “A study of the principles of Soviet policy and the relations of the USSR with the League of Nations, and with the countries of Europe, the Near and Middle East and the Far East up to 1939.” This information was kindly provided by Ms. Sue Donnelly, the LSE Archivist.

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We are to take the word Sociology in its widest sense as including also Political Science, Economics, Psychology, Ethics, and also to a rather debatable extent Law. In our classes we have papers on such subjects as “Leadership in International Affairs,” “Public Opinion in International Relations,” “Modern Imperialism,” i.e. British, American, and Russian, comparatively considered, “International Ethics,” and “Social Psychology and International Relations.” These are sociological subjects in the proper sense. The method is to establish generalizations by the comparative study of some of, if not all of, the available relevant instances. From what field, however, are the instances drawn? From the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now just as there are certain historian-imperialists who say that International Relations is, by which they mean ought to be, nothing but Contemporary History, so there are certain sociologist-imperialists who say that it is, by which they mean ought to be, nothing but Sociology. In principle I am opposed to either deformation of the subject; but since sociologists write books quicker and more easily than historians, and thus there is a larger sociological bibliography of the subject to mislead students, I regard the threat from the sociologist-imperialists as the greater. They have no more prominent representative than Professor Schuman. Let me quote from the pontifical Preface for Social Scientists in the first and no doubt the subsequent editions of his International Politics: In the present study an effort has been made to escape from the limitations of the traditional approaches and to deal with the subject from the point of view of the new Political Science. The adjective is used advisedly, since the old Political Science—still all-too-prevalent in the centers of higher learning—has been circumscribed by barren legal and historical concepts. The approach adopted here assumes that Political Science, as one of the social sciences, is concerned with the description and analysis of relations of power in society—i.e., with those patterns of social contacts which are suggested by such words as rulers and ruled, command and obedience, domination and subordination, authority and allegiance. An adequate treatment of these patterns would require the invention of new concepts and the devising of a new vocabulary, for the old Political Science has little to offer which is helpful. The political scientists of the old school who have dealt broadly with international relations have either wandered up the blind alley of legalism or have contented themselves with elaborate fact gathering on a variety of scattered topics which they are unable to put together into any unified scheme of interpretation.¹⁸

This is also Dr. Schwarzenberger’s view of the subject. He sees International Relations as the sociological study of Power relationships throughout history, ¹⁸ Frederick L. Schuman, “A Preface for Social Scientists,” International Politics: An Introduction to the Western State System (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1933), p. xii.

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equally in the time of Genghis Khan and in the time of Thucydides as in the time of Stalin. I venture to disagree with this view on three grounds. (a) It ties down International Relations to the study of Power. This is a characteristic example of the concepts, the abstractions and generalizations from the historical facts, with which the sociologist works, but I am not persuaded that it covers the whole of our field. Do we not deal also with considerations of welfare, with problems of morality, with certain kinds of habitual behavior crystallized in diplomacy and with rudimentary attempts at co-operation, which are nothing or very little to do with Power? (b) It is unhistorical. It exhibits the lack of historical sense which is one of the occupational diseases of the Sociologists, and leads them to compare things which are not comparable. International relations imply three inter-related conditions: (i) a multiplicity of many independent sovereign states acknowledging no political superior; (ii) continuous and organized relations between them; and (iii) the recognition of an all-embracing cultural whole, imposing certain psychological if not political obligations, which we call the society of states.¹⁹ It is this last which we now considering as the object of Sociological study. Every schoolboy knows that these triple conditions came into existence at the beginning of Modern History, round about the end of the fifteenth century, and that they did not exist in the Middle Ages.²⁰ Professor Schuman’s book on International Politics, so far as I remember, goes back as far as the Roman Empire, if not farther; but neither the Roman Empire nor Genghis Khan have anything to do with International Relations, and it seems to me that nothing is to be gained, and something in intellectual honesty and precision is to be lost, by attempting to blow the subject up into the History of Civilizations. ¹⁹ [Ed.] Wight set out these three conditions at the start of his lectures on the theory of international relations and in his classic overview lecture, “An Anatomy of International Thought.” For the latter, see Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 143–4. For the former, see Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), p. 7. “An Anatomy of International Thought” is also available in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 39–48. ²⁰ [Ed.] Wight examined this question in some detail in his essay “The Origins of Our States-System: Chronological Limits,” in Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, in association with the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1977), pp. 129–52.

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(c) Anyway it is not what we do. Even at the level of this seminar we do not discuss the relations between the Roman and Parthian Empires, nor the impact of the Mongol Khan on the Abbasid Caliphate and on the medieval Respublica Christiana. But another question now arises. If International Relations is not concerned with anything beyond the modern state-system or international anarchy, is it concerned with the whole history of the modern state-system or international anarchy? Again the answer is clearly no. If it were yes, it would mean that we ranged the whole field of modern history since the international anarchy came into being for our sociological material, studying Machiavelli as well as Morgenthau, international Calvinism as well as international Communism, the Council of Trent as well as O.E.E.C.,²¹ the policies of Wallenstein and Peter the Great as well as the policies of Hitler and Stalin. But we do not do this. Our backward range in time is bounded by the Napoleonic Wars and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. This is perhaps a pity. We are concerned for practical purposes with the sociology of the international community during its revolutions in the twentieth century. But the international community in the nineteenth century is a great deal less relevant to this; it is a great deal more remote, and less topical, than the international community during the Religious Wars. If the international sociologist is seeking comparisons for the European community overshadowed today by a monstrous Oriental despotism, he may examine indeed the impact of the Tsardom of Nicholas I on the Europe of 1848, but his nearest “comparable” is Europe as it lay in the sixteenth century beneath the shadow of the Ottoman Empire, and that is why the most penetrating recent study of Soviet imperialism interprets it as the new Islam.²² If he is studying the effects of ideological conflict and propaganda upon international politics, the fifth column, the quisling, the resistance movement, the public confession at the staged public trial, he may find material in the French Revolutionary Wars, but he will find far more in the international society of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. The ease with which in the last few years Communist governments have been installed in every capital in Eastern Europe becomes more comprehensible and almost less frightening (because not unprecedented), if it is compared with the way in which the Jesuits conquered half the same belt of countries for the Counter-Reformation. And for the only “comparable” to the great experiment of the League of Nations we have to go, not to its unhappy successor, but back to the Conciliar Movement of the fifteenth century, which, at the very first beginnings of the international state-system, tried to replace an irresponsible and divided papal autocracy by a system of constitutional international government for Europe, just as the League tried to replace ²¹ [Ed.]. The Organization for European Economic Cooperation was founded in 1948 to carry forward the European economic recovery initiated by the Marshall Plan. It was succeeded in 1961 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). ²² Jules Monnerot, Sociologie du Communisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).

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Great Power anarchy by a system of constitutional international government for the world. We might pursue this line of speculation just a little further and consider the subject of Thucydides, who seems to be the King Charles’s Head of discussions about International Relations.²³ Is Thucydides relevant, and if so why more than Genghis Khan or the Roman Empire? On the test that I have suggested he is relevant because he wrote at a time exhibiting the three conditions of a system of international relations that I have described. The period from about the Persian Wars down to the final establishment of the Roman Empire is a period of international anarchy analogous to our own, and provides legitimate material for sociological comparison of the kind Dr. Schwarzenberger desires. Of that period Thucydides has left the supreme historical monument. If we inquire why it is that historians, when asked who is the greatest of their predecessors, so frequently agree on his name when they disagree on everything else, the reason is perhaps something like this: that Thucydides, more than any historian who has ever written, experienced and expressed the tragedy inherent in politics. Whether that in itself should recommend him to the attention of students of International Relations is a question in the philosophy of education which I am not competent to embark upon. For our present purpose he comes under our view by reason of the contribution he makes to the politics of war: class-war and ideologies, revolutionary propaganda and fifth columns, the different foreign policies pursued by bourgeois and by radical governments, the tendency of plutocratic or fascist oligarchies to make common cause across international frontiers, the problem of intervening or remaining neutral, of observing or violating treaties, of treating conquered states with liberality or using them for slave labour, of extending empire or calling a halt to annexation—on all these topics, which are the themes of Hitler’s secret conferences in the captured documents and of Churchill’s memoirs and of the discussions every day in the Kremlin whose records we shall never see, he has written as nobody else has ever written. “I am aware that while men are at war they are always of the opinion that they are engaged in the greatest war in history, but when it is over they succumb to the glamour of antiquity. But the facts of the late war speak for themselves and demonstrate it to have been more important than any that went before.” It might be a sentence from The Gathering Storm.²⁴ “I shall be content if my narrative satisfied those who wanted an objective account of events which not only actually happened, but which are destined in all human probability to repeat themselves in the same or a similar way. I have

²³ [Ed.] A “King Charles’s head” is an irrelevant but recurrent obsession. The expression derives from a character in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield, Mr. Dick, who frequently refers to the beheading of King Charles I in 1649. ²⁴ [Ed.] The Gathering Storm is the first volume of Churchill’s The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948).

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tried to produce, not an ephemeral best-seller, but a permanent contribution to knowledge — a possession forever.” But all this is, I am afraid, a digression. I have been led into discussing, not what International Relations is but what it might be. In fact International Relations does not attempt to cultivate these fields; the difficulties are perhaps insuperable; and one of the considerations to be taken into account is the clamour that the historians might well raise if the claim were made and the title-deeds presented.

7 Having strained your patience with an attempt to analyze the content of the subject, let me now, in a concluding sort of way, mention three qualities of International Relations which seem to me to make it, not only a respectable study, but even a distinguished one, or one with the hopes of yet attaining distinction. 1. In the first place, its subject matter is public affairs at their ugliest and worst. It deals with human activities, not dressed up and canalized in parliamentary and congressional procedures, responsive to the stimuli of government and political obligation, flowing into the molds of public administration, social services and voluntary societies, but raw and bleeding, naked and shameless. It deals with the lower ultimate of human experience—passion and unreason, violence and deceit. Its vision is sometimes extended towards the higher ultimate of human experience; its sky is traversed by a comet like Gandhi or a meteor like Michael Scott,²⁵ or even steadily warmed for a little by a light like Lord Cecil;²⁶ but this is exceptional, and the general level of its attention is with the pettiness and obtuseness of foreign offices, the irrationality and self-deception of publics, the malignity of the men who write and believe the Daily Express and the Chicago Tribune, the Vo¨lkischer Beobachter and Pravda.²⁷ ²⁵ [Ed.] Michael Scott (1907–1983) was an Anglican cleric who campaigned, among other causes, for the independence of South West Africa (now Namibia) and against the apartheid policy in South Africa. He co-authored Attitude to Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1951) with W. Arthur Lewis, Colin Legum, and Martin Wight. Wight called Michael Scott “that indefatigable advocate of the oppressed” in “Reflections on International Legitimacy,” available in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 217. ²⁶ [Ed.] Lord Robert Cecil (1864–1958), a British politician and diplomat, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937 for his work as an architect and champion of the League of Nations. ²⁷ [Ed.] The Daily Express, a national tabloid in the United Kingdom, historically supported the Conservative Party. At the direction of Lord Beaverbrook, its owner at the time, the Daily Express backed Chamberlain’s appeasement policies in the late 1930s. The Chicago Tribune, long under the editorial control of its owner, Robert R. McCormick (1880–1955), took an isolationist position with regard to U.S. involvement in the League of Nations and World War II. The Vo¨lkischer Beobachter was the newspaper of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (the Nazi party) from 1920 to 1945. Pravda (“truth” in Russian) was the newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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It is interesting for us to remember that this is the very reason why International Relations did not commend itself to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and had no original place in the studies of this School.²⁸ Until their conversion to Russian Communism in old age, their view did not extend beyond the shores of England, and all their social labours were built upon the assumption of the rationality, and therefore the permeability and adaptability, of their social material. This point has been well made by Leonard Woolf in his chapter in Margaret Cole’s symposium about the Webbs. It is a remarkable fact that, although they spent the whole of their long lives upon the theory and practice of politics, devoting their great intellectual gifts to investigating the causes of what was good and bad in modern society and to the practical job of encouraging what was good and preventing what was bad, they paid no attention to two of the major problems of modern society, the problem of imperialism and the problem of war and peace. What interested them … was social organisation, and they believed that, if you knew the kind of society which you wanted, you could get it by constructing the appropriate institutions and framework of government … The problems of imperialism, international relations, and war and peace cannot very easily be stated in terms of the structure and functions of institutions or reduced to mere questions of organisation. They have been the major causes of disorder, misery, and evil in the world for the last 100 years and they have made the orderly and civilised life for which the Webbs worked so devotedly impossible. They cannot be reduced to the terms of the Webbs’ doctrine of structure and function, because in the very heart of them are blind passions and obstinate beliefs, the ideas and ideals of ordinary individuals. No doubt questions of organisation and government enter into them, but they have to be considered in terms of passion, fear, hatred; the passion for power; the belief in democracy or liberty or equality; the ideas, ideals, delusions of nationalism and nationality. The problem which confronted us in India or South Africa, the international situation which caused the war of 1914, the phenomenon of fascism and Adolf Hitler cannot be investigated by the methods which the Webbs applied to trade unions and town councils and cannot be covered by any formula limited to social organisation.²⁹

One of the weaknesses of the early and starry-eyed phase of our subject was its being tinged with this Webbian illusion of constructing institutions and manipulating social organization. That phase was ended in the practical sphere by Hitler and in the academic sphere by E. H. Carr. As far as that lap goes, the Marxists have ²⁸ [Ed.] That is, the London School of Economics, founded in 1895 by George Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. ²⁹ Leonard Woolf, “Political Thought and the Webbs,” in Margaret Cole, ed., The Webbs and Their Work (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1949), pp. 260–1.

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had the last laugh, and we can see that our subject deals with what they call the contradictions and antagonisms of society, or what was described by St. Paul as the Wrath of God.³⁰ 2. In the second place, the subject matter of International Relations is integral. It is not only ecumenical, surveying the world from Tibet to Ohio (the Tibet of the Republican Party);³¹ it attempts in its survey a synthetic view, a view that will include the political, the economic, the social, and the psychological elements in their due proportion. No other of the social sciences makes any such attempt except Sociology itself; and I think the difference there perhaps is that the synthetic view of Sociology tends to be static, and the synthetic view of International Relations tends to be dynamic. History is showing signs of being restless with its own subdivision and wanting to reintegrate itself. Professor Butterfield had an article in the Cambridge Journal a little time ago, criticizing the compartmentalization of History in the History Tripos and asking that students should no longer be taught Constitutional History plus Political History plus Economic History but should be given a vision of that wider thing which is the History of England.³² It seems to me that International Relations, within its broader terms of reference, has already led the way. I am not sure that I see any limits to the integralness of the view of our world which International Relations seeks to take. It seems to me that the theory and practice of atomic fission, the problem of soil erosion, the Lysenko controversy, the corrosive acids of Logical Positivism, the heroic affirmations of the Existentialists, the theology of Karl Barth, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the novels of Arthur Koestler and Evelyn Waugh, of Lionel Trilling and Graham Greene, or on a loftier level of Dostoevsky and Proust, are all capable of falling within our field of notice according as they may illustrate, or affect, or express, the last agonies of an international anarchy. I am convinced, at least, that the greatest living painter is relevant to our subject, and that a framed copy of Picasso’s Guernica ought to hang in the International Relations Study Room. 3. In the third place, International Relations, more than any other study, is the point at which History and the Social Sciences converge. If there is no subject which is as constantly and plausibly claimed by both, the reason is perhaps so simple that we scarcely dare embrace it: the subject is both. In this field, and nowhere else so fully, they interpenetrate and fertilise each other; or perhaps I should say they can do so, in proportion as they abandon certain occupational prejudices on ³⁰ [Ed.] Romans 1:18: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.” ³¹ [Ed.] Wight may have called Ohio “the Tibet of the Republican Party” because of the prominence then of U.S. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio (1889–1953). An opponent of the New Deal and U.S. involvement in World War II, Taft was known as “Mr. Republican.” ³² [Ed.] Sir Herbert Butterfield, “The Teaching of English History,” Cambridge Journal, vol. 2 (October 1948), pp. 3–10.

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both sides. The historian’s high theoretical insistence on the uniqueness and particularity that characterize History is very often the ideological cloak of his vested interest in the uniqueness and particularity of his own special historical field—a minute patch where he alone is allowed to cultivate and count the cabbages—and his blurred vision of the hills beyond. In the study of International Relations he is encouraged to acquire an ecumenical sweep, an appreciation of the sociological and comparative method, a recognition of the patterns and repetitions in history. (It is not an accident that Toynbee is pre-eminent both as a contemporary and as a universal historian.) The social scientist, on the other hand, is encouraged to a greater awareness of the time-stream that deposits the grains of gold which it is his business to collect, to observe its velocity, its undulations, and the vegetation along its banks. He is encouraged especially to reflect upon why he is fishing in this particular stretch of the stream, why International Relations is a subject recurrent, not continuous, being the academic study of the international anarchy which occurs at some epochs and not at others. In a word, the historian and the social scientist are both encouraged to do something they intensely dislike: to acquire a philosophy of history. They are encouraged to approach with understanding and without surprise that moment which will come for both of them, when there is the crunch of boots outside, the bang on the door, and the uniformed thugs come in to take them to the concentration camp. We must all have had the experience of arguing with social scientists (with social scientists it happens more, I think, than with historians, and especially with social scientists of the pragmatic and sanguine kind, I am thinking in my own case of many arguments with a distinguished Professor of Social Studies of this University, but not of this School), in which, having confidently surveyed the advances and prospects in psycho-analytic technique, the measurement of behavior, the psychiatric treatment of criminals, labor management and industrial psychology, town and country planning, the public control of national wealth, we are left baffled by their sublime parochialism, and can only exclaim, “But what about the dollar gap? What about the pressure of the world’s population on the world’s food supply? What about the race in atomic armaments? What about the advance of Communism? What about war?” International Relations surrounds and conditions all our specialisms as the Ocean bounded Homer’s world. To this ocean they are all tributaries, however reluctantly they meander through pleasant pastures, and when they discharge their waters into it they become something bigger than themselves. Here the psychologist has to deal with “the mighty shadows that people the distant memories of man”;³³ the criminologist finds criminals who rule empires, and who from the platform of Tempelhofer Feld can inflame the passions of a million Germans, the ³³ [Ed.] John Lawrence Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1938), p. 740.

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largest crowd that any man has ever had before him in person;³⁴ the lawyer has the unprecedented problems of the Nuremberg Tribunal; the student of government grapples with the difficulty of coordinating action in a League of sovereign nations none of which can be legally compelled to accept a decision to which it has not agreed; the moral philosopher confronts the ultimate problem of whether self-sacrifice and vicarious suffering can be right for nations as well as individuals; the historian loses himself in a world in which modern technical history is becoming impossible, because the past is no longer something to be objectively studied, but something to be abolished by government decree, as in Czechoslovakia last week,³⁵ or even to be remolded, as in Soviet Russia, so that it may reflect the present. You will see that these three features of International Relations, its concern with public affairs at their worst, its integral character, and the way in which it is the point where History and the Social Sciences intersect, demanding a philosophy of history from both, are really different facets of the same thing. They are aspects of that tantalizing ambiguity, that amorphousness yet inclusiveness, which I think we all feel to be the character of International Relations. In itself this ambiguity and inclusiveness should not be allowed to disturb us. I often think of a wise saying by Professor Pear of Manchester at the Grimshaw Dinner last summer, that every vital and growing subject is sure to be smudging its boundaries.³⁶ But you may say that I have funked the question I originally set myself, whether International Relations belongs to the Social Sciences or History, and by claiming that it is both have given myself … an illegitimate let-out. So let me end with a statement of faith. As History is anterior to the Social Sciences, so it is more primitive in the sense of being closer to the fundamental experience of men. In normal men the great experiences of life, falling in love, the thrill of artistic creation, religious

³⁴ [Ed.] “Just imagine what his [Hitler’s] feelings must be when he stands, as in peacetime he used to stand, on the platform at the Tempelhofer Field in Berlin, and before him are a million Germans. This is the largest crowd that any man has ever had before him in person. You could never assemble such a crowd in a democracy, because it takes them twelve hours to march into place and twelve hours to march away.” H. R. Knickerbocker, Is Tomorrow Hitler’s? (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942), p. 36, cited in Martin Wight, “Germany,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 309. ³⁵ [Ed.] It has not been possible to identify exactly what Wight had in mind with this observation. He might have been referring to the show trials of Milada Horáková and others convicted and executed by the Communist regime in Prague in June 1950. The regime prosecuted many citizens on charges of treason, espionage, “Titoism,” and “bourgeois nationalism” on the basis of falsified or nonexistent evidence. For a concise account, see Tad Szulc, Czechoslovakia Since World War II (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), pp. 85–93. Alternatively, Wight might have been referring to the Communist regime’s imaginative rewriting of history—to make Woodrow Wilson an opponent of Czechoslovak independence, and Winston Churchill and John Foster Dulles architects of the 1938 Munich agreement, and so on. For details, see Edward Taborsky, Communism in Czechoslovakia 1948–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 490–505. ³⁶ [Ed.] Wight was probably referring to Tom Hatherley Pear (1886–1972), Professor of Psychology at the University of Manchester. For background, see Natalie Bigbie and Nils Muhlert, “Britain’s First Full-Time Professor of Psychology,” The Psychologist, vol. 30, no. 5 (May 2017), pp. 86–7.

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experience, intense suffering, carry with them, in proportion to their intensity, and as part of the datum of the experience itself, the conviction that their significance lies in their uniqueness; and the affirmations of social scientists are intellectual constructs floating a little above the ground of experience, as it were, and passing over it. For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred: Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.³⁷

The Shakespeare of the Sonnets was not open to an assurance that this is a psychological illusion common to lovers. St. Paul on the road to Damascus was not open to reflections upon the incidence of epilepsy. Mindszenty and Rajk when they were being prepared for trial were not open to general considerations upon the nature of the police state.³⁸ This apprehension of a unique significance occurs collectively as well as individually. It occurred for the Russian people in the Ten Days that Shook the World,³⁹ and Trotsky’s great record is saturated with the sense that at this point man for the first time became master of his fate;⁴⁰ it occurred for the German people in the days of the Nazi Machtu¨bernahme [the takeover of power in January 1933]; it occurred for the American people in that same spring [of 1933] when, after the disaster of 1931, Roosevelt entered upon the Presidency and proclaimed that there was nothing to fear but fear itself; it occurred for the British people in the summer of 1940. Now of all this experience of uniqueness—what Kierkegaard called the “hic et nunc,” the existential moment—History is the proper guardian. But it is part of the unique significance of these moments that they come, for the individual and the nation alike, trailing an ambiance of purpose and with the echoes of a transcendental meaning. Therefore the ultimate function of History, when Clio assumes the full range of her powers and becomes a little of the prophetess, is to trace if possible something of the anatomy of destiny. And if International Relations, studying the dynamic surge and slide of world war and world revolution that has brought it into being as an academic subject, finds that it too is led on from analysis and recording and the attempt to understand, to the further attempt to re-enact this experience as a whole, and therefore to interpret it and discern if ³⁷ Shakespeare, Sonnet 104. ³⁸ [Ed.] Cardinal József Mindszenty (1892–1975) was the Primate of Hungary, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in that country, from 1945 to 1973. In a 1949 show trial he was tortured into confessing to several false accusations, such as conspiring to remove the Communist government and seize power himself after a third world war. László Rajk (1909–1949), a Hungarian Communist leader, was accused by Stalin-backed Hungarian Communists of conducting espionage for the Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito and serving as an agent for Western imperialist powers. His accusers promised him an acquittal if he confessed. He made the false confession at a show trial, but was nonetheless condemned to death and executed. ³⁹ [Ed.] Wight was probably alluding subtly to John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), a famous account of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. ⁴⁰ [Ed.] Wight evidently had in mind Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930), a threevolume work translated into English in 1932.

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there may be the anatomy of destiny in it, then it is doing what History does and falls within that domain. That this is or might be the extreme stretch of our subject would be denied with equal vehemence by Professor Zimmern and Professor Webster, Professor MacIver and Dr. Schwarzenberger and Professor Popper;⁴¹ but in the presence of Professor Manning, who is the kindliest of judges, I do not mind confessing that my thoughts tend a little that way.

⁴¹ [Ed.] Professor Sir Alfred Zimmern (1879–1957), usually regarded as an idealist regarding international politics, is perhaps best known for his book, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law 1918–1935 (1936). Professor Sir Charles Webster (1886–1961) was a diplomat and historian whose many works included studies of the foreign policies of Castlereagh and Palmerston. Robert Morrison MacIver (1882–1970), Professor of Political Philosophy and Sociology at Columbia University, wrote many books with sociological themes. Professor Sir Karl Popper (1902–1994) was a philosopher of politics as well as science, the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism (1957).

2 History and the Study of International Relations My point of departure for this paper was a doubt that bothered me, during the writing of another paper, of the propriety of drawing analogies between historical events, or treating them as in any way comparable: that is, a doubt as to whether all historical events should not be regarded as essentially unique.∗ The particular analogy that I had then in mind was one which must, I suppose, have occurred to everyone who has considered the relationship of America to Europe with the relationship between the Roman world-state and the Greek city-state. I finally abandoned the comparison, feeling that it would be unwise to use it even as a decorative flourish (to my argument), but I do not believe that the study of international relations in general can abandon the drawing of analogies—of however careful and qualified a sort—between historical events, and the question of to what degree this can be considered an intellectually respectable pursuit is therefore one which should be faced. (With this question I associate one that I think is related to it: the question of what we mean by pulling together a number of events and calling them a trend, or discerning some pattern in them.) I cannot feel that I found a satisfactory answer to either, but the search raised some general considerations concerning the relationship of history to the study of international relations, which are possibly relevant to our subject of discussion this term even if they are not always relevant to the specific points outlined above. Professor Barker has said that “History, after all, is the record of an experience on which political theory is in the nature of a meditation.”¹ My notion of the study of international relations is that it is essentially a meditation on that part of history which is concerned with the relations between states. This would make it either a brand of political science, or, if political science is thought of as chiefly concerned with the relationship of man to the state, a sister-study to it. In other words, one might say that political science proper considers the struggle for power

∗ Wight did not date this typescript, found among his papers in the archives at the British Library of Political and Economic Science. However, the latest publications cited date from 1954, and the reference to the number of states then in the United Nations places it around 1955–1956.

¹ [Ed.] Sir Ernest Barker, “Reflections on English Political Theory,” Political Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (February 1953), p. 10.

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0003

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among individuals and groups within the state: international relations considers the struggle for power between states. Meditation may seem an unambitious word, but I am taking it to include the mental operations that we call questioning, analysis, and the formulation of hypotheses; and I would include in the record on which our meditations are based all that we know of the relations of states to each other, whether our knowledge comes from Thucydides or this evening’s paper, and any facts or techniques that the social sciences can supply to supplement or help us interpret this knowledge. These qualifications need not affect the parallel with political science: surely the political scientist does much the same in his own field. In short, I would say that to discover how states behave we must look at the way they have behaved (which mostly means looking at history) and in doing this we are following, in so far as the nature of our material will allow, the method of the natural sciences: that is, seeking to establish, by observation, something approximating to uniformities of behavior. However, before looking at the implications of our dependence on history for most of the raw materials of our study, let us look at the possibility that the facts and techniques of the social sciences might provide a substitute for, rather than merely a supplement to, the data provided by history. It seems to me that some doubt is thrown on this possibility if we consider how much of our knowledge of even a relatively simple individual issue is knowledge of a historical sort. One might, for instance, endeavour to explain Australian foreign policy in the period 1945–49 in terms of the sociology of the dominant group, the Australian Labour Party, or in terms of Australia’s economic position, or in terms of the psychology of the then Minister of External Affairs, but none of those explanations would be adequate: they account for some of the cross-currents in policy, but not the main trend. That can only be explained on the basis of history: not specifically the history of Australia, but the history of power relationships in the Pacific. Similarly, one might know everything about the sociology and economics of Korea, but such knowledge would only be of marginal assistance in explaining the present situation in Korea: the main substance of explanation would again be in terms of history, and less the history of Korea than the history of American–Russian relations since the war. I hope these examples are fair ones: I have tried to think of some contemporary situations of a sort that the student of international relations would be interested in, where the preponderant weight, as it were, of explanation would be on the side of the social sciences. Revolutionary movements would perhaps come closest: but even here, historical explanation seems to me to contribute the greater slice of illumination. If one were rash enough, for instance, to attempt some sort of assessment or analysis of the foreign policy of the present Chinese government, the course of history of the revolutionary movement and the history of China’s relations with the outside world during the past century, would probably prove

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a far more rewarding as well as a far more manageable line of enquiry than the economics and sociology of present-day China. In fact it seems to me that we use the data provided by the social scientist only as it affects the state: that is, only as it passes into history. To say all this is only to say that when we attempt to explain any sort of very complex situations—and the situations that international relations studies are always complex—historical explanation is always a large part of our total attempt to explain, because we cannot understand what something is unless we understand what it has been and how it grew. This is what Collingwood means when he speaks of the past being lived in the present:² the past does not die, it lives on even in societies that may seem to have made a break with their pasts through revolution. One has only to consider the importance of a study of the foreign policy of Czarist Russia to an understanding of the foreign policy of the USSR to realize that this is the case. It is not only national objectives that remain constant, but national moods: the anti-cosmopolitan drive in Russia in 1948–49, for instance, bears a striking resemblance to the kind of mood of a late nineteenth century Russian political novel like Turgenev’s On the Eve.³ To again quote Collingwood, “suppose the past lives on in the present; suppose, though encapsulated in it, and at first sight hidden beneath the present’s contradictory and more prominent features, it is still alive and active; then the historian may very well be related to the non-historian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller. ‘Nothing here but trees and grass,’ thinks the traveller, and marches on. ‘Look,’ says the woodsman, ‘there is a tiger in that grass.’ ”⁴ I said above that the facts and techniques of the social scientists might supplement or help us interpret our knowledge of the behavior of states, but I am not sure that, except in the easier cases of statistics, the specific techniques of, for instance, the economist, the psychologist, or the anthropologist, as apart from the general technique of observation and hypothesis which they share with the natural sciences, are really applicable to the study of international relations. We cannot, after all, construct indifference curves for the state’s choice of one alliance over another, or express graphically the diminishing marginal utility of non-aggression pacts: we cannot stretch the sovereign state—or even the sovereign statesman—out on the psychoanalyst’s couch: and though no doubt it would be instructive as well as diverting to lurk around chancelleries and foreign offices, notebook in hand, in the manner of an anthropologist by a witch-doctor’s camp-fire, we are not likely to be given that chance. ² [Ed.] In Collingwood’s words, “the past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present.” R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 97. ³ [Ed.] Although Wight described this novel as “late nineteenth century,” it was published in Russia in 1860. It was, however, not published in English until 1895. ⁴ [Ed.] Collingwood, An Autobiography, p. 100.

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International relations differs from the social sciences in the numbers and the non-comparability in size of the units of studies, which at once rules out the applications of mathematics, which have produced such rapid progress in the case of economics especially. If the states-system which we contemplate were made up of two or three thousand units, none larger than Luxembourg (and I am not sure that that is not a consummation devoutly to be wished), we would perhaps be able to construct a theoretical “average” state, which would help us to understand the behaviour of real states. But in fact we have only a states-system of about eighty units,⁵ varying so greatly in size and nature that it is an effort even to include them all in the general category called “states.”⁶ And of these, moreover, what might be called the “active” agents in international affairs, the states that really shape the events of any particular period, and thus provide the main substance of our study, are usually only a dozen or so great and near-great powers. The dangers of too zealous an effort to make a social-science approach to international relations are, I think, illustrated by some of the workings of anthropologists on this subject: what might be called the “Russians-are-aggressivebecause-they-are-too-tightly-swaddled-as-babies” school of thought.⁷ The historian might suggest that, over any substantial period of time, swaddled Russians can hardly be regarded as more aggressive than non-swaddled Englishmen or Germans or Frenchmen. Though the student of international relations, unlike the historian, is interested in the general rather than the particular, the distinction between the two is less clear-cut than it may appear. E. H. Carr—who is, I suppose, about equally distinguished in both fields—seems to see little difference between them. In The New Society he says that “the function of the historian is not to reshape or reform the past, but to accept it and to analyse what he finds significant in it, to isolate and illuminate the fundamental changes at work in the society in which we live and the perhaps age-old processes which lie behind them; and this will entail a view (which, since it will be present even if it is unconscious, had much better be consciously recognized and deliberately avowed) of

⁵ [Ed.] Wight’s reference to “a states-system of about eighty units” suggests that this paper was written around 1955–1956. The United Nations had 76 members in 1955 and 80 members in 1956. ⁶ [Ed.] In another work Wight wrote, “The smaller the numerical membership of a society, and the more various its members, the more difficult is it to make rules not unjust to extreme cases: this is one reason for the weakness of international law. As a reductio ad absurdum, imagine a society of four members: an ogre twenty feet high, flesh-eating, preferably human; an Englishman six feet high, speaking no Japanese; a Japanese samurai, a military noble, speaking no English; and a Central African pygmy, early palaeolithic; and all on an island the size of Malta. This is a parable of what is called international society.” International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), p. 139. ⁷ [Ed.] For a contemporary source, see Margaret Mead, “The Swaddling Hypothesis: Its Reception,” American Anthropologist, vol. 56, no. 3 (June 1954), pp. 395–409. See also Mark Moberg, Engaging Anthropological Theory: A Social and Political History (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 174.

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the processes by which the problems set to the present generation by these changes can be resolved.”⁸ Perhaps few (not many) historians would be happy with that definition, but many do produce generalizations that belong to political science rather than to history: as, for instance, Acton’s famous remark “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”⁹ Among present day historians, I should say that A. J. P. Taylor is read at least as much for his political aphorisms as for his history. When we consider contemporary events and institutions, the distinction between the historian and the political scientist tends to break down completely. A study of the United Nations, for instance, could hardly avoid some historical narrative, and certainly ought not to avoid some political analysis on a comparative basis. Even though international relations is trying to evolve a body of theory, the theory is not an end in itself: its raison d’être is to assist in the understanding of concrete situations, just as the raison d’être of economic theory is to assist in the understanding of particular economic situations. It is the effort to evolve a body of theory that entails the making of comparisons. In the words of Kenneth Thompson, “The questions that are asked about the foreign policies of states must be general and not particular and must inquire after what is common to the behavior of all states instead of merely what is unique in the conduct of a single state. The political scientist who abstracts from international relations that aspect of behavior which involves the response of a nation in its conduct of foreign policy to a certain objective political situation involving both external and internal factors is thereby enabled to make comparisons when those factors are repeated. Indeed it is precisely in comparisons of this kind that the principles of international politics must be sought.”¹⁰ If Thompson has any doubts about the validity of this proceeding, he does not mention them in his article. Indeed I did not come across any writer on international affairs who considered the question. It is historians rather who are doubtful of the possibility of generalizing from historical events, though Professor Oakeshott, in an enigmatic little essay on “History and the Social Sciences,” does remark that “history and social science can be brought together only by those who are ignorant of the nature of either and careless of the interests of both—the professional matchmakers of the intellectual world.”¹¹ ⁸ [Ed.] Edward Hallett Carr, The New Society (London: Macmillan and Co., 1951), p. 17. Wight’s review of this book was published as “Problems of Mass Democracy,” The Observer, September 23, 1951. ⁹ [Ed.] Acton’s letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887), available in John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Historical Essays and Studies, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan and Co., 1907), Appendix, p. 504. ¹⁰ [Ed.] Kenneth W. Thompson, “The Study of International Politics: A Survey of Trends and Developments,” Review of Politics, vol. 14, no. 4 (October 1952), p. 461. ¹¹ [Ed.] Michael Oakeshott, “History and the Social Sciences,” in Institute of Sociology, The Social Sciences (London: Le Play House Press, 1936), p. 78.

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For ordinary historical purposes we do of course assume that events are not unique, by the mere act of placing them in general categories. To call, for instance, both the events of the period 1914–18 and the events of the period 1939–45 “World Wars” indicates that, whatever the dissimilarities, we have recognized them as members of a general class of events. Similarly, we apply the category “revolution” not only to the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions, but also to the seizure of power by Army officers in some Latin American republic, or to what happened in Egypt recently.¹² In doing so we are abstracting one element of a complex event, and deciding that it is the decisive one, the one by which the event may be recognised for what it is. But in doing so may we not be falsifying the event, deceiving ourselves, imposing our own presuppositions on what actually happened? The process may perhaps be more clearly seen in a book like Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution, in which it is taken a stage further, by making a detailed comparison of the events of the four great revolutions.¹³ The book is in some measure a success: one does concede that the uniformities he traces appear to be there, but one is left with the feeling that essentially what he has done is to devise a conceptual scheme—the reign of the moderates, the accession of the extremists, the reigns of terror and virtue, and Thermidor from the French revolution—and apply it in a rather Procrustean fashion to the other three revolutions, stretching a fact here and lopping off one there to make them more or less fit. Seeing the process of historical comparison in full flower in a book like this does leave one a little doubtful about it even in the embryonic forms of devising any sort of generalisation from history, and indeed of the general process of putting historical events into categories. This is not to say that such comparisons should not be attempted. If, for instance, some enterprising student of international relations attempted an “Anatomy of Aggression” on the same general plan, the result ought to be of value to an understanding of the subject whether any uniformities were established or not. We use the word “history” to mean two things: the actual events of the past and the narrative reconstruction of them that the historian produces. But the actual events of the past are not open to our inspection: they exist only in the historian’s reconstruction of them. We can, of course, check one historian’s account of the past against another’s, and we can in some cases check his account against his sources, but in either case we only know the past through a reconstruction of it, our own or someone else’s. This reconstruction of the past is not a simple record of all the facts: it is a significant record of those facts that the historian deems relevant to his subject. The historian’s choice of which facts to use, and the justifications that he makes ¹² [Ed.] In 1952 Egyptian military officers led by Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed King Farouk. ¹³ [Ed.] Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938). Brinton published a revised edition with Vintage Books in 1965.

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between them—to indicate cause and effect—will be determined by his conceptual framework, and this will be derived, at least in part, from his reading of history. Similarities between historical events, therefore, may arise not from their conforming to a pattern laid up in heaven, but from their conforming to a pattern laid up in the historian’s mind. If this is so, the process of generalisation is a circular one: we reconstruct past events so that they conform to a pattern derived from other past events: then read off a generalisation from this very conformity. Of course, our notions of the present and the future also influence our reconstruction of the past: as Croce said, “Every true history is contemporary history.”¹⁴ E. H. Carr has pointed out that “It is thus the future prospect even more than the present reality which shapes the historian’s view of the past… . Current theories of decline in history are prompted not so much by contemplation of our present difficulties as by the belief that things are going from bad to worse.”¹⁵ One example of the present forcing us to re-assess the past may be said to be arising at present in connection with the history of the nineteenth century. Professor Barraclough not long ago suggested that, now that the events of the twentieth century have made apparent the shift in power away from Europe to the outside world, we must look again at the whole canon of history,¹⁶ derived from von Ranke, which treats Europe as the centre of the world,¹⁷ and re-assess, for instance, the work of the historian Seeley, who apparently saw the beginnings of a movement of this sort as the central fact of the nineteenth century.¹⁸ Whether or not it is proper to draw analogies between events, to see the present in terms of the past, and the past in terms of the present, we must reckon with the fact that people do so, and that the analogies that statesmen and officials draw between the present and the past are among the factors that enter their decisions, and therefore half determine the future. Only the other day Mr. Churchill called for a new Locarno,¹⁹ and if one looks into the factors that produced American ¹⁴ [Ed.] Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), p. 12. ¹⁵ [Ed.] Carr, The New Society, p. 12. ¹⁶ [Ed.] Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955). See especially the chapters entitled “Europe in Perspective: New Views on European History,” pp. 168–84, and “The End of European History,” pp. 203–20. ¹⁷ [Ed.] Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), a German historian, focused on European history. ¹⁸ [Ed.] John Robert Seeley (1834–1895), a British historian, is perhaps best known for his books The Expansion of England (1883) and The Growth of British Policy (1895). Wight commended the latter as an example of historical studies that “convey the nature of foreign policy and the working of the statessystem better than much recent theoretical writing based on the new methodologies.” Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?”, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, and London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 32. This passage in “Why Is There No International Theory?” is also available in Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 36. ¹⁹ [Ed.] The Locarno Treaties of 1925 guaranteed the borders of key Western European states, including Germany’s western borders. On 11 May 1953, Winston Churchill, then the British Prime Minister, praised the Locarno accord as “the highest point reached between the wars,” and suggested

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intervention in Korea, one cannot, I think, escape the conclusion that one of the chief of them was Mr. Truman’s belief that unless action were taken the United Nations would go the same way as the League of Nations.²⁰ Indeed, since a large number of the politicians and officials now concerned with the United Nations were previously concerned with the League, the lessons that seem to emerge from a study of the League will affect the history of the UN whether the two organisations are in fact comparable or not. Similarly, if one looks at Kennan’s book American Diplomacy from the point of view that the writer was the chief of the policy planning division of the State Department, one can say that, independently of whether the lesson that he derived, or believed he derived, from American diplomatic history, was soundly based or not, it must have influenced the State Department’s view of the situation, and therefore the formulation of American foreign policy.²¹ Possibly the generalization that “appeasement never pays” was the wrong one to draw from the events of the thirties, but it was drawn, and for better or for worse, was applied in the post-war period. The experience of the present may ultimately modify it, but we are not yet in a position to say whether it was true or false, useful or disastrous. In the same way, the whole question of generalisation, that is, essentially, the question of whether events should be regarded as unique, requires for the moment a suspended judgement. On the whole, the historians and philosophers who have denied the possibility of abstraction from history seem to have been concerned rather with abstraction in the philosophy of history sense than with abstraction in the much humbler, smaller-scale, less sweeping sense that international relations attempts. This surely is what H. A. L. Fisher means when he speaks of himself as having been unable to discern any pattern in history²² and what Dilthey means when he says that the attempt to “turn the material of particular facts which is found there into the pure

that its “master thought … might well play its part between Germany and Russia in the minds of those whose prime ambition it is to consolidate the peace of Europe as the key to the peace of mankind.” Churchill quoted in Byron Dexter, “Locarno Again,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 32, no. 1 (October 1953), p. 34. ²⁰ [Ed.] “Truman, in an exchange with John Hickerson, the Assistant Secretary of State for U.N. Affairs, said the decisions he had just made [to resist North Korea’s invasion of South Korea] had been for the United Nations. He had believed in the League of Nations with all his heart, Truman said, but the League had failed. The United Nations must not fail. ‘It was our idea, and in this first big test we just can’t let them down.’ ” David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 779. ²¹ [Ed.] George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). ²² [Ed.] “Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. This is not a doctrine of cynicism and despair. The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next. The thoughts of men may flow into the channels which lead to disaster and barbarism.” H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939), preface, p. xv.

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gold of abstraction and compel history to yield its last secret, is quite as fanciful as was ever the dream of an alchemistic nature-philosopher who thought to entice nature into giving up her word of power. There is no such last simple word of history, uttering its true sense.”²³ Philosophy of history in this sense is, as Niebuhr says, an act of faith.²⁴ It is something that is brought to history rather than something derived from it, and it seems to me inimical to the study of international relations. Of course, all historians bring some kind of philosophy, some view of the nature and destiny of men and nations, to their writing of history but not all of them are convinced that they know where history is going, as for instance the adherents of the Marxist philosophy of history are. It is this kind of conviction that I feel is inimical to the study of international relations: there is not much point in constructing a map of the country by painstaking effort, if you believe that you have one already. Croce said that “The false idea of historical necessity breathes harshly like an east wind on moral effort.”²⁵ So it does also on political effort, and even on enquiry. Finally, I want to suggest that there are four directions in which research in international relations might profitably be pursued—attempts to build a body of theory on the subject, like Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations;²⁶ contemporary history like Gathorne-Hardy’s;²⁷ re-considerations of past theorists on international relations (of which I don’t know an example, but on the lines of which a political scientist might treat Hobbes’s Leviathan); and finally, what I can only call history written from the point of view of the questions that international relations seeks to answer: for instance, a history of the balance of power, 1815–1914. There are vast acres of history, especially of the history of the Far East, scarcely trodden by the foot of the political scientist, because the questions that historians have asked about them have not been apposite to our purpose. There seems to me no reason why international relations should not put its own questions to the past.

²³ [Ed.] Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Limits of Generalization in History,” quoted in H. A. Hodges, Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1944), p. 138. ²⁴ [Ed.] Cf. Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949). ²⁵ [Ed.] Benedetto Croce, My Philosophy and Other Essays on the Moral and Political Problems of Our Time, trans. E. F. Carritt (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949), p. 185. ²⁶ [Ed.] Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 2nd edn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954). ²⁷ [Ed.] For example, G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 1920–1939, 4th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).

3 What Makes a Good Historian? Literary criticism is a highly organised body of theory for assessing drama, poetry, and the novel; I do not think there is anything quite the same for the branch of literature we call history.∗ This is partly owing to a difficulty with the word “criticism.” Literary criticism means the business of judging literature. Historical criticism means something different—the discipline of producing a certain kind of literature: the historian’s testing of his sources, his detective activity. It is as if “artistic criticism” meant what Rubens does with his sitter or Cézanne with his landscape rather than what Mr. Eric Newton or Sir Kenneth Clark does with Rubens and Cézanne. Since historical criticism means cross-examining the evidences of the past, therefore, we need another term, like historiographical criticism, to describe the principles for judging the historian’s account of the past.

Durable Merits The Dutch historian Huizinga once remarked that definitions of history defeat themselves when they emphasise its character as a science, because they exclude most of the great historians of the past; and he cited Herodotus, Gregory of Tours, Joinville, Villani, Michelet, and Macaulay.¹ And it is clear that these historians are not discarded. They are classics; indeed, they are not infrequently read. There is high academic authority, moreover, for the view that the training of history students should include a familiarity with historical writings which have more durable merits than that of being up to date. What are these more durable merits? Sir Keith Hancock discusses this question in the most interesting chapter of his reminiscences.² It is by no means a solemn book; rather, it is a discursive, informal, highly personal retrospect of his career by one of the most distinguished of living British historians. The tale of the historian learning and plying his trade in Australia, Oxford, Italy, Australia again, Birmingham, and war-time London culminates in this chapter where he states his historian’s creed. ∗ Martin Wight published this essay in The Listener, February 17, 1955, pp. 283–4. The Listener, a weekly magazine of the British Broadcasting Corporation, was published from 1929 to 1991.

¹ [Ed.] Johan Huizinga, “A Definition of the Concept of History,” in Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (eds), Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936; republished by Harper and Row:, New York, 1963), pp. 3–4. ² W. K. Hancock, Country and Calling (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0004

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He first declared it some fifteen years ago in his greatest book, the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs.³ There are “three cardinal virtues,” he said, “which distinguish the great historian from the crowd of journeymen”; he names them attachment, justice, and span. Attachment is the opposite of detachment. Not impartiality or objectivity are the historian’s initial task, but “getting close to people, getting inside situations.” When he was writing his first book on the Risorgimento in Tuscany, he says, he found himself successively a partisan of every faction: “I was zealous in turn for the House of Austria, the House of Savoy, the Papacy, the Mazzinian people, and half a dozen brands of liberalism or democracy.” But this chameleon-like faculty of the historian sets up a tension, from which is born the virtue of justice or fairness, to redress the balance between different attachments. Justice is the cure for the perversion of attachment we call partisanship. After attachment and justice comes the third virtue, which Hancock calls span. This is “an awareness of background: it places the object of immediate and intense study in its proper perspective with the other objects, near or distant, to which it is necessarily related.” “Getting inside the situation is the opening movement; getting outside it is the concluding one.” These principles of Hancock’s could be stated more broadly, and related to other important points he makes, if it were said that we apply three critical concepts to historical writing: I shall call them historical imagination, historical architecture, and historical reflection. And let it be said at once that we presuppose historical criticism, technique of scholarship, mastery of the sources. The historians who survive have craftsmanship and something more, and it is this something more that we are trying to define. By historical imagination I mean the deep inclination towards the past, a susceptibility both emotional and intellectual, which distinguishes the historian’s vocation: the desire to enter the past, to understand it, to re-enact it. The historical imagination is the function of the historian as time-machine. It was described in a classic phrase by Michelet: “The problem of historiography is the resurrection of life in its entirety.” This approach to history appealed to the sensibility which we associate with the Romantic Movement, and the nineteenth century produced perhaps its greatest masterpieces, the writings of Carlyle in England, and of Michelet himself, the most concrete and picturesque of French historians. The historical imagination attaches itself first to the concrete. It fastens upon physical relics and topographical associations, makes the historian study historical portraits and walk over a battlefield before he writes about it. Dr Trevelyan’s writings are rich with the sudden visual glimpses of the past that the historical imagination offers, as when we see Queen Anne, at a November midnight, standing in the windows of St. James’s Palace to watch the ancient trees of the park being ³ W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs (London: Oxford University Press, 1937–42).

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uprooted by the great gale of 1703, or the Sacheverell rioters being dispersed at last when “the Horse Guards, on their plump, bobtailed chargers” move in among them. Miss Wedgwood’s new book on the Great Rebellion has the same quality.⁴ Yet, a landscape or a building attaches the imagination to the externals of an event; events have also their insides, the purposes and passions which shaped them. The distinction was made by Maitland. Historians, said he, guard against anachronisms about costume, armour, architecture, but it is far more difficult to prevent the intrusion of untimely ideas. And history is the history of ideas, “not merely what men have done and said, but what men have thought in bygone ages.” It has not, I think, been much noticed that Maitland, a working historian, anticipated the doctrine later developed by Collingwood, and put in the extreme form that the historian’s job is nothing but the re-enactment of past thought. The reenactment of past thought is the fruit of Hancock’s quality of attachment, and the fulfillment of the historical imagination. Someone totally lacking in historical imagination, however much he tries to write history, will never be a historian— witness H. G. Wells. Someone with an overdeveloped historical imagination that is not controlled by other qualities will not make a good historian—witness Belloc.

Systematiser of the Past My second critical concept is historical architecture. It is related to historical imagination as synthesis to analysis, or as extensive cultivation to intensive cultivation. It is the function of the historian as systematiser of the past: his function, to quote that vivid phrase of Schlegel, as “backward-looking prophet”—and indeed, if he dares extrapolate his curves into the future, as forward-looking prophet too. While the historical imagination attaches itself to particular moments in the past, historical architecture comes from apprehending the passage of time. This was what inspired Gibbon, as he “sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter”: not the historical imagination, nourishing itself upon the evocativeness of the Roman ruins, like the visions of Piranesi, but an exercise of mental span, at once less intense and more discursive, asking “How did that lead to this?” Architecture of the mind, which Hancock calls “span,” is reflected in architecture of the composition. It has always been difficult to write about Herodotus or Gibbon or Stubbs’ Constitutional History without using architectural and spatial metaphor. Sir John Myres, indeed, in his last book went farther than some could follow in trying to show that Herodotus gave his Histories a “pedimental” structure resembling a Greek temple.⁵ ⁴ [Ed.] C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace, 1637–1641, vol. I of The Great Rebellion (London: Collins, 1955). ⁵ [Ed.] Sir John Linton Myres, Herodotus, Father of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 8, 62, 64, 79, 81–2, 87, 90, 102, 206.

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Span, says Hancock, puts the object of study in proper perspective with the other objects “to which it is necessarily related.” But what is necessary relationship? What is the principle of extensive cultivation? Toynbee begins his Study of History with this question, and answers that there is an intelligible unit of time, an intelligible field of study, which he calls a civilisation. There is, however, another answer, which at present has a wider influence on historical writing. It springs from that same doctrine of Michelet, that historiography is “the resurrection of life in its entirety,” but it puts the emphasis, not on “resurrection,” but on “life in its entirety,” la vie intégrale. The contemporary French school of historians, led by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, use the word civilisation not like Toynbee, to mean the largest cultural groupings into which mankind is divided, but to mean a total social situation. In crude, class-room terms, Toynbee’s use of the word overrides the chronological division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern, while Bloch’s erases its subdivisions of political, economic, cultural, etc. “Do you expect,” says Bloch, “really to know the great merchants of Renaissance Europe, vendors of cloth or spices, monopolists in copper, mercury, or alum, bankers of kings and the Emperor, by knowing their merchandise alone? Bear in mind that they were painted by Holbein, that they read Erasmus or Luther. To understand the attitude of the medieval vassal to his seigneur you must inform yourself about his attitude toward his God as well.”⁶ This is span, but it is lateral instead of longitudinal span, a cross-section instead of an elevation. And here we see the historian trying to resurrect not so much individuals as an entire society, which is not only a multiplicity of individuals but the product also of impersonal social forces, economic resources, and physical environment. To take a recent English example, the delight afforded by Mr. Southern’s book The Making of the Middle Ages is largely due to architecture of this kind: it is a resurrection of Latin Christendom in the eleventh century, moving through concentric layers of social conditioning to lay bare at last the vital principle, in popular emotions and the spiritual life.⁷ But both these uses of the word civilisation provide us with only a provisionally satisfactory unit of extensive cultivation, only a provisionally intelligible field of study. The quality of span leads us towards the magnificent but impossible doctrine of Freeman that history must be studied as a whole; and at least one of the criteria by which we judge any considerable historical writer is his potentiality as a universal historian. Both historical imagination and historical architecture at their best pass over into what I have called historical reflection. By this I mean philosophical implication. With the philosophy of history most historians have small sympathy, whether

⁶ [Ed.] Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), p. 156. ⁷ [Ed.] Richard William Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953).

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it means programmes of providence and destiny on Hegelian lines, or the assertions of philosophers about the nature of historical knowledge. But the historian’s fundamental beliefs about politics and man are necessarily implicit in his discussion of what he calls historical facts, and these beliefs give colour and texture to his picture of history. Historical reflection is the historian’s function as interpreter. Historical reflection can be seen at several levels. Hancock declares that historical writing needs theoretical coherence, but that it must be “concealed theory.” Explicit theory is the business of the social scientist; but theory, as the American economist Jacob Viner has said, “is always simpler than reality,”⁸ and this reality, the complexity and contingency of human experience, is the historian’s business. “Concealed economic theory,” says Hancock, was his motto when writing his book on British War Economy, and his masterpiece, the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, is reinforced by concealed political theory which makes it a contribution to political science in its own right. To take a more recent example, it is not difficult to see that Mr. Alan Taylor’s new book on nineteenth-century international history is firmly modeled about a theory of the balance of power.⁹ But there is a perhaps deeper level, when the philosophical implication is not sufficiently coherent to deserve the name of theory, when it strikes us rather as a prevailing mood, or tone. In Professor Syme’s book, The Roman Revolution, his belief that it is more instructive to identify the agents and ministers of power than to trace legal theories pervades his account of Augustus Caesar’s political system with a somber grandeur like the gleam of autumnal sunlight on the armour of marching men. Mr. Carr’s History of Soviet Russia, which is the biggest attempt at large-scale narrative history in English today, has a similar quality. It is inspired by the belief that historiographical truth lies in the recognition of historical necessity; and even if this means a sacrifice of attachment, of justice towards the defeated side, it gives to his book its compelling tone. And it is surely mood that colours the mind longest after reading Tacitus, a mood derived from an assumption perhaps the very reverse of Mr. Carr’s, which becomes explicit for a moment when Tacitus says he would be sickened by the record of tyranny, massacre, and subservience, if he were not able to discharge the historian’s duty of commemorating the names of those who perished. But we must be on our guard. Implicit theory can go rancid with the lapse of time, which is why Froude, and Carlyle’s Frederick, and even Macaulay’s History, have fewer readers than once they did. The highest task of historiographical criticism would be to discriminate the kind of historical reflection which is not itself subject to decay. It may be significant that there is only one historical writing which, whether designedly or not, is a concealed tragic drama, and this by ⁸ [Ed.] Jacob Viner, International Trade and Economic Development: Lectures delivered at the National University of Brazil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 1. ⁹ [Ed.] A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).

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common consent is the greatest history ever written. Professor Butterfield gives another pointer when he says that he does not know any modern historian with a mind of Shakespearean depth and scope save Ranke. In the end, perhaps, we find the common denominator between Ranke and Thucydides when we say something like this: that history-writing is the intellectual form in which civilisation renders account to itself of its past (the definition is Huizinga’s)¹⁰ and that the best historical writing is that which is impregnated with the deepest reflections of the culture within which it is written. The ways in which civilisation renders account of its past are unlimited. It is sometimes the impertinence of criticism, or of its ugly modern offspring named methodology, to prescribe regulations instead of establishing canons. But criticism is the handmaid, not the supervisor, of creative art. Let me end by adapting an observation of Mr. G. M. Young’s: “Giotto and Gauguin confronted with the same object will make very different pictures, of which no one can say that one is truer than the other; and to impose historiographical rules on historians is to fall into the error, or to commit the presumption, of saying that all Virgins must look like Piero’s or that, if we were sufficiently enlightened, we should see all chairs as Van Gogh saw them. History is the way that Herodotus and Fra Paolo and Tocqueville and Maitland, and all those people, saw things happening.”¹¹

¹⁰ [Ed.] In his exact words, “History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past.” Huizinga, “A Definition of the Concept of History,” p. 9. ¹¹ [Ed.] G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 185. Wight adapted the original statement by replacing Young’s phrase “to impose an Interpretation of History on history is, to my mind, to fall into the error” with “to impose historiographical rules on historians is to fall into the error.”

4 The Principles of Historiographical Criticism Literary criticism is a flourishing profession.∗ We have much discussion of the novel, its character as an art form, whether it is dying or dead or about to open a new chapter of its perennial youth. Yet there is no corresponding attention to the principles whereby we judge historical writing. There is, it is true, much recent writing about historical writing. That vague and elastic term, the Philosophy of History, does cover discussion of what historians actually do, as in Marc Bloch’s book The Historian’s Craft,¹ and this a line of enquiry that theorists and methodologists might well pursue.² But there is the further question of the criteria by which we may judge the success of what they do. I think it is fair to say that the principles of historiographical criticism are a neglected field of study. This is partly due, perhaps, to that protean little word “criticism” itself. When we speak of literary criticism, we mean the business of judging literature. But when we speak of historical criticism, we mean something quite different: the historian’s research and creative activity, his testing of the sources on which his historical writing is based.³ But, supposing his historical writing is in a broad sense literature, we lack a body of principles for judging it. And since “history” has these two meanings, both what men have done in the past, and considered interpretations of what men have done in the past, we need another term, like “historiographical criticism,” to describe the principles for judging the latter. Such a body of principles would organise our thoughts about what a great historian is. It is incontestable that there are historical classics, historians who survive changing fashions as surely as the great dramatists and novelists do. In what does their greatness reside? There are two stock answers. One is that they survive by virtue of their literary power. It is probably true that greatness in a historian, unlike ∗ Martin Wight apparently composed this manuscript in 1955. He seems to have drawn on it in writing “What Makes a Good Historian?” This manuscript nonetheless includes anecdotes, examples, and quotations not in that article.

¹ [Ed.] Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, translated from the French by Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954). Wight published a review of this book under the title “The Historical Vocation” in The Economist, July 24, 1954, p. 275. ² [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin: “Professional historians review each other’s books appealing to standards that are not widely known; the public makes inferior historical writings into best sellers, without being able to criticise them.” ³ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin, without completing the sentence: “It is as if artistic criticism meant what Velázquez does with his sitter or Cézanne with his landscape, not what …” History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0005

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perhaps greatness in a philosopher, presupposes a measure of literary skill, but this is not altogether convincing. It would be possible to argue that Lytton Strachey, simply as a master of English prose, was the superior of Macaulay, but most people would agree that Strachey was the inferior historian. Froude wrote greater literature than Acton, but Acton was incomparably the richer and more durable and profounder historical mind. The other answer is that they survive by virtue of their accuracy and reliability. This answer implies that historiographical criticism can be reduced to historical criticism at one remove: that the complete test of a historian would be to check the entire range of his sources. And it entails the belief that, as new sources multiply and old sources are reworked, so historians are superseded and become useless. The history-books of 1870 are as out of date, we are told, as the physics books of 1870. But this again, I think, is demonstrably untrue. It is not only at the popular level that certain historical writings maintain their vitality—with Penguin translations of Herodotus and Thucydides, and the continuous accessibility in cheap editions of Gibbon or Macaulay. There are also historical writings (a class not entirely coinciding with these popular classics) which continue to be authorities for the historical student. Dr. Trevelyan is our veteran champion of a view of historical education which will include a familiarity with the great historical writings of the past,⁴ but he is not alone. Sir George Clark, in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge eleven years ago, declared that he would like to see undergraduates “less exclusively absorbed in the study of monographs and periodicals than some of them appear to be, and more at leisure to read the great classics of historical and other writing, which have more durable merits than that of being up-to-date.”⁵ The question remains, what are the durable merits of the historical classics, which weed them out from those that fall into obscurity, and giving them a vitality that makes us refer to them as well as to the latest articles in the English Historical Review? What are the elements of historiographical criticism that may give us a clue?

I These questions are discussed in the most interesting and valuable chapter of Sir Keith Hancock’s reminiscences.⁶ It must be said at once, however, that this is not a solemn book. Rather the reverse: it is a highly personal, discursive, informal, colloquial retrospect of his career by an Australian who has spent most of his working life in Britain, to become one of our most distinguished living historians, one of ⁴ [Ed.] G. M. Trevelyan (1876–1962) was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge (1927–1943). ⁵ [Ed.] Sir George Norman Clark, Historical Scholarship and Historical Thought: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Cambridge on 16 May 1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), pp. 8–9. ⁶ [Ed.] W. K. Hancock, Country and Calling (London: Faber and Faber, 1954).

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our leading authorities on the Commonwealth, editor of the U.K. War Histories, and to be called in by H.M.G. to advise on the Buganda constitutional problem last year.⁷ It has much agreeable reminiscence and anecdote about the great figures of the academic world and the civil service. Yet it is not completely an autobiography: it argues a threefold theme, which is covered by the word “Calling” in the title. One aspect is the idea of a university, and Hancock has been a Fellow of All Souls and a Professor at Adelaide, Birmingham, Oxford, and London. A second aspect is the Commonwealth, whose reality as a moral unit his career illustrates and it has largely been his work to explain. “This is one of the really satisfying things about the British Commonwealth,” he says, “there are always more countries than one in which a subject of the Queen may discover and re-discover himself to be at home.” Australian by birth and English by adoption, he is now writing the official life of General Smuts. But the third aspect is the craft of history. When a man writes his autobiography, a peculiar interest always attaches to what he says about his own profession, especially when he has made himself famous in it. Hancock’s chapter on historiography is entitled “Inquiry and Narration.” It is one of the ablest discussions of the historical vocation that has appeared in recent times, and goes along with Marc Bloch’s book The Historian’s Craft, and Sir Lewis Namier’s essay on History,⁸ and the writings of Professor Butterfield. In the course of it Hancock restates what he calls his historical “creed”: that the virtues of the historian are three, attachment, justice and span. By attachment he means the opposite of detachment. Detachment is often claimed to be the first duty of the historian—objectivity, impartiality, noninvolvement in the controversies he studies. Hancock asserts the contrary. “Getting close to people, getting inside situations, is the historian’s initial task.” And he describes how, when he was writing his first book on the Risorgimento in Tuscany, he found himself successively a partisan of every faction: “I was zealous in turn for the House of Austria, the House of Savoy, the Papacy, the Mazzinian People, and half a dozen brands of liberalism or democracy.” But this chameleon-like faculty of the historian sets up a tension, from which the virtue of justice or fairness is born to redress the balance between varying attachments. The perversion of attachment is partisanship, a failure of sympathy and its restriction to one party alone out of several. The cure for this perversion is justice, ⁷ [Ed.] See the Hancock Report: Colonial Office, Uganda Protectorate: Buganda, Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the British Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, November 1954. Cmd. 9320, available at https://www.harryburt.co.uk/uganda/HancockReport.pdf. ⁸ [Ed.] Wight may have had in mind the essay on history in Namier’s Avenues of History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1952). In his review of this book Wight wrote that the essay, entitled “History,” “speaks to perfection of analogy, method and art in history, and places the new technique which has already come to be known as ‘namierisation’—detailed comparative biography of parliamentary figures within their institutional setting.” Wight published this review under the title “The Great Cham of History” in The Observer, June 1, 1952.

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which is essentially the ability to understand and relate fairly every point of view. “Even in the … book that I am now writing,” he remarks, “I have redrafted sentences which seemed to me in their original form to report Hitler unfairly.” But after the two virtues of attachment and justice comes a third, which he calls “span.” This is “an awareness of background: it places the object of immediate and intense study in its proper perspective with the other objects, near or distant, to which it is necessarily related.” “I should think it perverse to open an investigation by putting myself at a great distance in acquaintance and sympathy from the people I am trying to understand; but I like to extricate myself from the scrummage when my investigation is nearing its close. Getting inside the situation is the opening movement; getting outside it is the concluding one. But perhaps I am dissecting too finely the complex and fluid processes of historical thought; the historian does not, after all, do his drill by numbers; he is continually ringing the changes on attachment, justice and span—he attaches himself to one party, he attaches himself to its rivals, he detaches himself from them all. He follows all the intimate criss-crossing paths of the little province that he is exploring yet tries also to see this province in its proper place in the wide map of human experience.” Hancock first declared this creed some fifteen years ago in an appendix to the first volume of his Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs; and there he described these qualities as “the three cardinal virtues which distinguish the great historian from the crowd of journeymen.” They provide some basic principles of historiographical criticism. But I do not think they are quite comprehensive enough. They do not cover all the critical concepts which we are accustomed to employ, unsystematically, when we try to express our satisfaction with the historical classics. These must be considered under at least four headings: Mastery of the Sources, Historical Imagination, Historical Architecture, and Philosophical Depth. The names I have given to them represent a mixture of metaphors, but this perhaps accords with the richness and imprecision of the subject. I shall try to explain and justify each in turn. Mastery of the Sources is the minimum requirement of the historian; it is sometimes made the principal one by that deplorable confusion between the principles of historiographical criticism and the techniques of historical research appropriate to teach to students.⁹ It is argued by eminent professionals that the whole work of the historian is in this research, that the rechauffée is nothing;¹⁰ and that the true test of the historian is the glimpses of his workshop which he offers in the publication of fragmentary essays and reviews. It springs from that historical positivism, outdated but ⁹ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin of his manuscript: “No historian is likely to master all his sources; it is the occupation of the reviewer to remind him that he neglected the Tanver manuscripts or Miss Jamison’s article in the E.H.R.; but he masters a sufficiency. Huizinga.” ¹⁰ [Ed.] The rechauffée means “the reheated.”

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tenaciously lingering, which sought to assimilate history to the natural sciences, and imagined historical knowledge to be an ever-growing corpus of established facts. There is a parallel between this analytical positivist history and analytical philosophy. But a historian has to have a mastery of his sources as an artist has to have a mastery of draughtsmanship. In a good historian this is a surplus of familiarity with the material, so that one has the sense that he could quote a dozen unprinted or little known sources for every major statement, and adduce other examples to support his generalizations besides these he has selected. “Read until you can hear the people talking,” Mr. G. M. Young has said. If we seriously consider Lytton Strachey’s claims to be regarded as an historian, this is the point at which I think he has to be denied that claim. It is not only that he built up his historical portraits from secondary sources, but that he selected them to suit the portrait. There is no surplus of familiarity. One does not “hear the people talking.” Yet a verifiable mastery of the sources, a mastery that can be tested and confirmed by other historians, cannot be the sole criterion of historiographical value. In some cases the sources themselves have disappeared; we are left only with the historian himself, who thus becomes a primary source. This is the case, on the whole, with the historians of antiquity.¹¹ Our criticism of Thucydides and Tacitus is necessarily oblique, from the fragmentary sources that remain, organized by the new sciences of epigraphy and numismatics. Sometimes, again, the sources that a historian has mastered are so vast that it is in the highest degree unlikely that another historian will ever traverse them again. Ranke thought this was the case with the Council of Trent, whose history was written in a partisan spirit by Sarpi the accuser and Pallavicino the defender. A new historian, who would examine these two writers, he said, “must begin again from the very commencement … But this is an undertaking that will never be entered on, since those who could certainly do it have no wish to see it done, and will therefore not make the attempt; and those who might desire to accomplish it do not possess the means.”¹² Ranke has in the event been proved wrong, by Professor.¹³ Gierke once observed that criticism of his work would be difficult because few critics were likely to have read all the works he had. ¹¹ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin: “Burckhardt on Herod. Plutarch.” ¹² [Ed.] Leopold Ranke, The History of the Popes, Their Church and State, and Especially of Their Conflicts with Protestantism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. E. Foster (London: Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden, 1848), vol. III, p. 138. ¹³ [Ed.] Wight left blank the name of the professor he had in mind, no doubt intending to add it before publication. He might have been thinking of Hubert Jedin, who published the first volume of his four-volume Geschichte des Konzils von Trient in 1949. According to John W. O’Malley, “The two trajectories launched by these two publications [by Sarpi and Pallavicino] continue to influence scholarship, but Jedin’s history was a giant step in moving us beyond that impasse.” John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 10.

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Yet, even when we cannot get behind the historians to their sources, the historians remain—some do, at least. Even when the sources from which a historian wrote are swamped and dwarfed by an accumulation of new source material, the historian remains—some do. We now know far more about Nelson than Southey did, but Southey’s remains the best biography,¹⁴ better even than Miss Oman’s.¹⁵ What is the reason? It is that historiographical permanence resides, not in the mastery of sources alone, but in a kind of distillation that this mastery brings, an emanation from it; just as the artistic value of a landscape lies, not in its fidelity to the topographical reality, but in a kind of transformation lent to it. To find the principles of historiographical permanence we must move on from the relationship of the historian to his sources to other qualities. I shall try to analyze them in a second broadcast.

II I have suggested that if we look further than a simple mastery of the sources for our principles of historiographical value, we must consider three other qualities: Historical Imagination, Historical Architecture, and Philosophical Depth. Imagination, architecture, depth—the metaphors are diverse, but perhaps it may be truer to the rich imprecision of the subject not to seek to reword them in the interests of consistency. By Historical Imagination I mean the deep temperamental inclination towards the past, an inclination both emotional and intellectual, which distinguishes the historian’s vocation from those of others: the desire to enter into the past, to understand it from the inside, to re-experience it.¹⁶ The Historical Imagination is the function of the historian as time-machine. What Hancock calls “attachment” is an aspect of it; but attachment is not, I think, a sufficiently broad nor powerful word to cover the whole process. It was described by Michelet in 1869 in a classic phrase: “The problem of history is the resurrection of life in its entirety.” This conception of historiography appealed to the sensibility which we associate with the Romantic Movement, and the nineteenth century saw the production of its greatest masterpieces—those of Michelet himself, the most concrete, graphic, picturesque and colourful of French historians, and of Carlyle in England. The Historical Imagination attaches itself to the concrete. It fastens upon physical relics and topographical associations, makes the historian study historical ¹⁴ [Ed.] Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1969); first published in 1813. ¹⁵ [Ed.] Carola Oman, Nelson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948). ¹⁶ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin: “Wedgwood.”

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portraits and walk over a battlefield before he writes about it, drives him to seek accuracy about the state of the weather and the phase of the moon.¹⁷ Yet a landscape or a building attaches the historical imagination to the externals of an event; events also have their insides, the purposes and decisions which contributed to them, and for these the historian needs documentary evidence. The distinction was made by Maitland. “Against many kinds of anachronism we now guard ourselves. We are careful of costume, of armour and architecture, of words and forms of speech. But it is far easier to be careful of these things than to prevent the intrusion of untimely ideas. … The history of law must be a history of ideas. It must represent, not merely what men have done and said, but what men have thought in bygone ages. … Instead of a few photographed village maps, there will be many; the history of land-measures and of field-systems will have been elaborated. Above all, by slow degrees the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about common things, will have become thinkable once more.”¹⁸ It has not been much noticed that Maitland anticipated the doctrine elaborated independently by Collingwood, and given by him in the extreme form that the whole of the historian’s job is the reenactment of past thought. Maitland, it is true, was a legal historian, and law is a body of ideas. Collingwood was a unique combination of an archaeologist and a philosopher in the Hegelian and idealist tradition, and over-intellectualized the historian’s task; but Collingwood’s inaugural lecture at Oxford was entitled “The Historical Imagination,” and it is of the historical imagination that he has given the extreme, if over-intellectualized, theoretical formulation. It is the faculty that seduces us into defining historical study as being concerned ultimately with people, with human beings.¹⁹ Trends and movements are abstract things, to be re-experienced only in the purposes and passions of individuals.²⁰ “Historical inquiry has its deepest impulse,” says Hancock, “in the lust for life,” and he illustrates this by the often-quoted story of how when two great historians, Pirenne the Belgian and Marc Bloch the Frenchman, visited Stockholm on holiday, they decided first to visit the new town hall. “If I were an antiquarian,” said Pirenne, “I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.” I must confess that I do not hear this pleasant story repeated without a sense of uneasiness, and a fear that a pleasant anecdote about the great in holiday mood may be used to show that historians, too, keep up to date. The lust for life, in this sense, is not specific to the historian, and sociologists, town-planners, and architects might equally give their first interest to the new town hall. I once heard a historian say “Yes, I badly want to go to America—I don’t mean to the United States, ¹⁷ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin: “Trevelyan Queen Anne.” ¹⁸ [Ed.] Frederic William Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), pp. 356, 520. ¹⁹ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin: “Tacitus.” ²⁰ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin: “Maitland on Stubbs.”

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but to get the feel of the Spanish Empire.” This is a no less authentic impulse of the historical imagination than the other. The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, or the deserted opera-house of Manaus, haunted by bats and overgrown by creepers, are a stimulus to the historical imagination, because for the historian the past is not dead, and they too become objects of his lust for life. The antiquarian is one who is interested in the past for its own sake; the historian is one who sees the past as contemporaneous with the present.²¹ Someone totally lacking in historical imagination, however much he tries to write history, can never be an historian—witness H. G. Wells. Someone with an acutely developed historical imagination that is not balanced and controlled by other qualities will not make a durable historian—witness Hilaire Belloc. The first of these other qualities may be called Historical Architecture. It is related to Historical Imagination as synthesis to analysis, or as extensive cultivation to intensive cultivation. Historical Architecture is what Hancock calls “span.” It is the function of the historian as systemiser of the past; it is his function, to quote that vivid phrase of Schlegel, as “backward-looking prophet,” and indeed, if he dares extrapolate his curves into the future, as forward-looking prophet too. Span, says Hancock, “places the object of immediate and intense study in its proper perspective with the other objects, near or distant, to which it is necessarily related.” But what is the necessary relationship? What is the principle of extensive cultivation? The oldest, and perhaps the fundamental answer is that, while the Historical Imagination attaches itself to particular moments in the past, Historical Architecture means an apprehension of the passage of time. It was an apprehension of the passage of time that inspired Gibbon, as he “sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter”: not the Historical Imagination nourishing itself in the mystery and evocativeness of the Roman ruins, like the vision that inspires the drawings of Piranesi, but an exercise of mental span, at once less intense and more discursive, asking “How did that lead to this?” Hancock reveals that the inspiration of his own first book was similar: as an Oxford undergraduate travelling in Italy in the first years of the Fascist Era, loving Italy but repelled by the régime, he asked “After Mazzini, how Mussolini?” and came to write Ricasoli and the Risorgimento in Tuscany.²² But if Historical Architecture means an apprehension of the passage of time, then of how much time? Freeman answered, the whole of historic time. H. W. C. Davis once described how, in obedience to this “magnificent and appalling doctrine,” that if you read history at all you should read it as a whole, he stumbled disgusted and unrewarded through the Merovingian kings. Freeman exaggerated perhaps, but at least one of the criteria by which we judge a historian is his potentiality as a universal historian. ²¹ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin: “Dr. Arnold.” ²² [Ed.] W. K. Hancock, Ricasoli and the Risorgimento in Tuscany (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926).

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Another answer is given by Toynbee as the starting point of his Study of History: there is, he said, an intelligible unit of time, or field of historical study, which he calls a civilisation. But there is another interpretation of an intelligible field of historical study, which at present is more prevalent than Toynbee’s. It springs from that same doctrine of Michelet, that the historiographical problem is “the resurrection of life in its entirety, not only in its superficial manifestations, but in its deep organic inter-relations”; and it puts its emphasis not on resurrection, but on life in its entirety, la vie intégrale. This is the doctrine of the contemporary French school of historians led by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, and they interpret “civilisation,” not like Toynbee, as meaning the largest cultural grouping into which mankind is divided, a society with an average historical life-span of some 1500 years, but a total social situation. In the crude terms of the classroom, Toynbee’s use of the word civilisation does away with the chronological divisions into ancient, medieval, modern etc., while Bloch and Febvre’s erases the sectional distinctions between political, constitutional, economic, and diplomatic history. “Do you expect,” says Bloch, “really to know the great merchants of Renaissance Europe, vendors of cloth or spices, monopolists in copper, mercury, or alum, bankers of kings and the Emperor, by knowing their merchandise alone? Bear in mind that they were painted by Holbein, that they read Erasmus or Luther. To understand the attitude of the medieval vassal to his seigneur you must inform yourself about his attitude toward his God as well.”²³ This is span, but it is lateral instead of longitudinal span, a cross-section instead of an elevation. And here we see the historian trying to resurrect not so much individuals as an entire society, which is not only a multiplicity of individuals, but the product also of impersonal social forces, economic resources, and physical environment. One of the most elaborate exercises in Historical Architecture of this kind is Braudel’s recent book on the Mediterranean world in the time of Philip II, which, starting with the physical geography of the Mediterranean basin, proceeds through the anthropology and social structure of the states around it, their economic and financial systems, to “events, politics and men,” the naval rivalry of Turkey and Spain between 1545 and 1598. Again, to take an English example: the delight afforded by Mr. Southern’s book The Making of the Middle Ages is due in part to architecture of this kind.²⁴ It is at once an anatomizing and a resurrection of Latin Christendom in the eleventh century, moving through concentric layers of social conditioning: not, like Braudel’s book, to a central core entitled “events, politics and men,” but into another dimension of psychological subtlety, revealing the vital principle within the core, the changing “intimations of the nature of God and the economy of the universe,” emphases of popular emotion and intimations of ²³ [Ed.] Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), p. 156. ²⁴ [Ed.] Richard William Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953).

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the spiritual life. Yet, lateral span is logically prior to longitudinal span, and the best resurrections of a civilisation in Febvre’s sense are those which envisage it as in some sense a representative unit of time. We can detect this kind of span, an implicit historical architecture, in those books where specialization illuminates widely, where the pursuit of an adequate intelligibility in a limited field produces observations which have a relevance, perhaps without the historian himself recognising it, far beyond their special reference; or develop in the historian faculties which enable him to make judgments of value outside his field. There is an architecture in the mind and an architecture of the composition. Few people have been able to write a sentence appraising Gibbon without using the architectural metaphor, from his own Suzanne, Mme. Necker, on receiving his second and third volumes in 1781, down to Dr. Gooch and Mr. More at the present day. Sir John Myres has hypostasized the architectural metaphor, and indeed not carried everybody with him, in his captivating attempt to show that Herodotus’ histories are not a rambling collection of myths and anecdotes but a construction resembling the decorations of a Greek temple, with pediments, frieze and metopes.²⁵ Some aspects of history have, so to speak, an inherent architecture, such as constitutional history. Both Historical Imagination and Historical Architecture at their best pass over into and find their fulfillment in what I have called Historical Reflection. By this I mean, philosophical implication. Most historians have as little sympathy for what is called the Philosophy of History as had Burkhardt for what he called Hegel’s “bold anticipation of a world plan.” But in the greatest of them fundamental beliefs about the nature of man and history are implicit in their discussion of facts. These give colour and texture to the structure of history. The Historical Reflection is the historian’s function as interpreter. Historical Reflection works on more than one level. Hancock declares that historical writing needs theoretical coherence, but that it must be “concealed theory.” Explicit theory is the business of the social scientist; but “theory,” as the American economist Jacob Viner has said, “is always simpler than reality,”²⁶ and this reality, the complexity and contingency of human experience, is the business of the historian. “Concealed economic theory,” says Hancock, was his motto when writing his book on British War Economy; and his masterpiece, the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, which displays Historical Imagination and Historical Architecture of a high order, is reinforced by concealed political theory which makes it a contribution to political philosophy in its own right. Or to take a more recent example, you may see how firmly modeled is Mr. Alan Taylor’s new book on nineteenth ²⁵ [Ed.] Sir John Linton Myres, Herodotus, Father of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 8, 62, 64, 79, 81–82, 87, 90, 102, 206. ²⁶ [Ed.] Jacob Viner, International Trade and Economic Development: Lectures delivered at the National University of Brazil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 1.

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century international history about a sharply conceived theory of the Balance of Power.²⁷ But there is a perhaps deeper level, when the philosophical implication of historical writing is not sufficiently coherent to deserve the name theory; when it strikes us as rather a prevailing mood or tone.²⁸ In Prof. Syme’s book on The Roman Revolution,²⁹ for example, his belief that it is more instructive to identify the agents and ministers of power than to speculate about legal theory pervades his account of Augustus’s political system with a sombre grandeur like the gleam of autumnal sunlight on the armour of marching men. The two greatest attempts at large-scale narrative history in English today have this quality. Mr. Carr’s History of Soviet Russia is inspired by a belief that historiographical truth lies in the recognition of historical necessity, and even if this means a sacrifice of “attachment,” of justice towards the defeated side, it gives this book its compelling drive. And it is surely mood which colours the mind longest after reading Tacitus, a mood deriving from an assumption perhaps the very reverse of Mr. Carr’s, which becomes explicit for a moment when Tacitus says he would be sickened by the record of tyranny, massacre and servility, which were the whole content of the world’s political life, if he were not able to commemorate the names of those who perished. But we must be on our guard. Implicit theory can go rancid with the lapse of time, which is the reason why Froude, and Carlyle’s Frederick, and even Macaulay’s History, have fewer readers than once they did. The highest task of historiographical criticism would be to discriminate the kind of historical reflection which is not itself subject to decay. It may be significant that there is only one historical writing which, whether designedly or not, has the quality of pure tragedy, and that by common consent is the greatest history even written. Professor Butterfield has perhaps given another pointer when he said that he does not know any modern historian with a mind of Shakespearean depth and scope except Ranke. Is there a common factor between Ranke and Thucydides? In the end, perhaps, we have to say something like this: that history-writing is the intellectual form in which civilisation renders account to itself of its past (the definition is Huizinga’s) and that the best historical writing is that which is impregnated with the deepest reflections of the culture within which it is written. The difference between Historical Architecture and Historical Reflection is the difference between apprehending time quantitatively and qualitatively. Historical Reflection is aware, not only of the passage of time, but of its modulations. There is a kind of Historical Reflection, again, and this is perhaps the deepest level, which we naturally describe in terms of poetical criticism. The second biggest ²⁷ [Ed.] A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). ²⁸ [Ed.] Here Wight wrote in the margin: “Trotsky.” ²⁹ [Ed.] Sir Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939).

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attempt at large-scale historical writing in English today besides Mr. Carr’s Soviet Russia is Mr. Runciman’s History of the Crusades, which is conceived as an epic, a sweeping narrative of heroism, folly and passion. It is sometimes the impertinence of criticism, and its monstrous modern offspring named methodology, to prescribe regulations instead of establishing canons. But criticism is the handmaid, not the supervisor, of creative art. Let me end by adapting an observation of Mr. G. M. Young’s: “Giotto and Gauguin confronted with the same object will make very different pictures, of which no one can say that one is truer than the other; and to impose historiographical rules on historians is to fall into the error, or to commit the presumption, of saying that all Virgins must look like Piero’s or that, if we were sufficiently enlightened, we should see all chairs as Van Gogh saw them. History is the way that Herodotus and Fra Paolo and Tocqueville and Maitland, and all those people, saw things happening.”³⁰

³⁰ [Ed.] G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 185. Wight adapted the original statement by replacing Young’s phrase “to impose an Interpretation of History on history is, to my mind, to fall into the error” with “to impose historiographical rules on historians is to fall into the error.”

5 The Concept of Europe It seems to me extraordinary, really, that anybody should want a talk on the concept of Europe.∗ A conference on British problems would not start with a talk on the concept of Britain. A conference about the Commonwealth would not start with a talk about the concept of the Commonwealth. Conferences of this kind would be much more likely to start with a general introduction entitled something like “Britain Today” or “The New Commonwealth.” Why should we think of Europe in terms of a concept which needs to be elucidated? “Ah,” you may say, “those are political units we already know about. Europe is a new idea we don’t know about.” But do we not? What civilisation do we belong to? From whence do we have our culture, our religion, our art, the most stimulating influences for our literature, our fashions in dress, and even today, since Hollywood has gone into a decline, our better films? Where do we spend our holidays, if we venture to go abroad? Europe, surely, is something we belong to and always have belonged to. Europe is ourselves and our way of life. Let me quote to you what a famous German philosopher said about Europe shortly after the last war: If we want to define it by names, Europe is the Bible and the classical world. Europe is Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, it is Phidias, it is Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus, Vergil and Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, Cervantes, Racine and Molière, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Nicolas of Cuso, Spinoza, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Cicero, Erasmus, Voltaire. Europe is in cathedrals and palaces and ruins, it is Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Paris, Oxford, Geneva, Weimar. Europe is the democracy of Athens, of republican Rome, of the Swiss and the Dutch and the English-speaking peoples. We could not make an end if we were to number all that is dear to our heart, an immeasurable wealth of the spirit, of morals, and of faith. Such names as these mean something for the man who has lived in what they represent, in the historically unique. The meaning of such a realisation would lead to representation and to the sources, to the towns and the countryside and what has been made, to the monuments and books, to the documents of great men. This is the best and fundamentally the only way of knowing what Europe is. It is in this way that our love is kindled and holds us.¹ ∗

Martin Wight presented this lecture at Seaford on April 5, 1963.

¹ Karl Jaspers, The European Spirit, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: SCM Press, 1948), pp. 34–5. History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0006

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Now, I suppose your having an initial talk on the concept of Europe is intended to propound the question “What is the concept of Europe?” And connected with this is the implicit subordinate question, “What is the connection between this postulated concept of Europe and contemporary developments in Europe, that is to say the Common Market?” I am suggesting to you that there is a prior question, “Why don’t we know about concepts of Europe already? Why do we not feel part of Europe? Why isn’t Europe as luminously clear and self-evident to us as is the Commonwealth or Britain herself ?” Part of the reason is already found when we have already answered that Europe is the civilisation we belong to. For civilisations are ambiguous, tenuous, indefinite things. Not everybody is even sure that they exist. I mean that civilisations exist in the plural, separate and distinct cultures rather than a common civilizing process which sooner or later diffuses itself throughout the whole of mankind. Nations, as everybody would agree, exist, though they have proved almost impossible to define, and it is a regular pastime of political scientists to analyse the inadequacies of the many definitions that have been offered in the past. Civilisation seems still more impossible to define. The very notion that there are civilisations in the plural is a quite recent one in the West. You will remember that writers like Spengler and Toynbee have tried to build a new kind of history round the comparative study of civilisations as the basic units of man’s historical experience. But their attempts, though interesting, have not in general been well received. Toynbee begins by a provisional definition of a civilisation “as an intelligible field of study,” and he shows for example how you can understand very little about British history without seeing that Britain has been simply one member of a larger unit, responding to influences from fellow members of Western Christendom or Europe across the Channel and in her turn reacting upon them, in a complicated minuet of mutual exchanges, intellectual, economic and political. But as Toynbee went on he found that this provisional definition broke down, because there is no intelligible field of study for the historian in the end except the totality of human history.² Still, there is a measure of agreement that there are great culture-units, with long and slowly changing traditions, with unified forms of thought and expression and often institutions too, with distinctive individualities. Such is Islam, or India, or China. Let us describe such a culture or civilisation as the widest unit to which men owe allegiance. Now if we ask what is the widest unit to which we, individually, feel allegiance, what answer do we get? Some of us, who are natural Queen and Country men, may sincerely answer, “Great Britain.” Some who are more liberal and internationalist in outlook, may be able to answer sincerely NATO, or perhaps rather the Western Alliance, or the Atlantic Community. Some who are thorough-going ² [Ed.] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. I (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 17–50.

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internationalists and democratic socialists may answer that the widest unit to which they feel allegiance is nothing less than mankind as a whole. I suspect that very few of us would answer this question with the single word “Europe.” The most strongly Europe-minded among us, the strongest Common Marketeers, are likely to regard European union as only a means to a greater end, and to see the United States of Europe as only a part of a wider whole. Here is an important paradox. It seems that we are beginning to become conscious of Europe, and to want to clarify the concept of Europe, at a moment when Europe is no longer our ultimate allegiance, is no longer the word we would use to describe our civilisation. I must remind you that this is a new situation. Our forefathers were fully conscious of the wider unit to which both England and Scotland belonged, and in which they themselves were proud and active personal participants; and after the word Christendom became obsolete with the decline of the religious wars in the first half of the seventeenth century, the word everybody gave to describe this common civilisation in our part of the world was the geographical word “Europe.” Voltaire gave a famous description of it at the beginning of his greatest historical book, The Age of Louis XIV : For a long time already one had been able to regard Christian Europe (with the doubtful exception of Russia) as a kind of great republic divided into many states, some monarchical, the others with mixed constitution, some of them aristocratic, some of them democratic, but all having broad similarities. They all had fundamentally the same religion, although divided into different sects. They all had the same principles of international law and of political life, unknown in the other parts of the world. It was in accordance with these principles that the European nations did not enslave their prisoners, that they granted diplomatic privileges to the ambassadors of enemy states, and that they agreed above all in the wise political system of maintaining among themselves, in so far as they could, an equal balance of power, never abandoning diplomatic negotiation, even in the middle of war, and maintaining in each other’s capitals, ambassadors or less honourable kinds of spy, who could warn all the governments of the aggressive designs of any single one among them, thus giving the alarm to Europe, and guaranteeing the weaker against the aggressions which the stronger are always ready to undertake.³

Or take Burke’s similar picture of the European Commonwealth of nations which he thought the French Revolution had attacked and perhaps fatally injured. There have been periods of time in which communities, apparently in peace with each other, have been more perfectly separated than, in latter times, many nations ³ [Ed.] Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), p. 40. First published in 1751, this is the beginning of chapter II.

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in Europe have been in the course of long and bloody wars. The cause must be sought in the similitude throughout Europe of religion, laws and manners. At bottom, these are all the same. The writers on publick law have often called this aggregate of nations a commonwealth. They had reason. It is virtually one great state having the same basis of general law, with some diversity of provincial customs and local establishments. The nations of Europe have had the very same Christian religion, agreeing in the fundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies and in the subordinate doctrines. The whole of the polity and economy of every country in Europe has been derived from the same sources … From all those sources arose a system of manners and of education which was nearly similar in all this quarter of the globe; and which softened, blended, and harmonized the colours of the whole. There was little difference in the form of the universities for the education of their youth, whether with regard to faculties, to sciences, or to the more liberal and elegant kinds of erudition. From this resemblance in the modes of intercourse, and in the whole form and fashion of life, no citizen of Europe could be altogether an exile in any part of it. There was nothing more than a pleasing variety to recreate and instruct the mind, to enrich the imagination, and to meliorate the heart. When a man travelled or resided for health, pleasure, business, or necessity, from his own country, he never felt himself quite abroad.⁴

Or take that remarkable declaration of international principle which was inserted in a protocol of the London Conference in 1831 which brought an independent Belgium into existence: “Each nation has its particular rights; but Europe has also her rights; it is the social order that has given them to her.”⁵ We do not know who drafted this sentence: it may have been Palmerston, it may have been Talleyrand, but it stated the basic principle of European life in the hundred years between the overthrow of Napoleon and the First World War, the period of what we sometimes call the Concert of Europe.⁶ It asserted that Europe ⁴ Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, with a Biographical and Critical Introduction by Henry Rogers (London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1842), vol. II, p. 299; italics in the original. ⁵ [Ed.] Wight quoted this statement in French in one of his essays: “Chaque Nation a ses droits particuliers; mais l’Europe aussi a son droit; c’est l’ordre social qui le lui a donné.” As the source, Wight cited C. K. Webster, Foreign Policy of Palmerston (Bell, 1951), vol. I, pp. 109, 132. See Martin Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 30. “Why Is There No International Theory?” is also available in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). The same statement is quoted with a slightly different translation in Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), p. 127. ⁶ [Ed.] Carsten Holbraad, the author of a noteworthy analysis of the Concert of Europe, wrote, “It was Professor Martin Wight, now at the University of Sussex, who originally inspired my interest in the theory of international politics, and later directed it towards the Concert of Europe.” Carsten Holbraad,

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was more than the sum of its national parts, that Europe itself was an international society with rights derived from a social order underlying and common to the various different states which composed it. And when the end of that period came, it came in what was long thought of as the European War. When Sir Edward Grey stood in the window of his room in the Foreign Office on the evening of Monday August 3rd 1914, and looked at the lamps in the dusk below being lit, he said to his friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”⁷ I want to suggest to you that there has been an extraordinary quality about this European civilisation, which distinguishes it from any other civilisation or culture with which we can try to compare it. It is obvious that European civilisation has led all the rest of the world, indeed, to put no finer point upon it, has conquered the other civilisations of the world and given the whole globe a rudimentary economic and political framework. And it is obvious I suppose that Europe has done this in virtue of a greater dynamic or vitality than the other civilisations have had. But what I want to suggest is that this historical achievement of Europe is connected with an ambiguity in the very nature of European civilisation which has made it particularly difficult to describe in any simple formula. Let me try to describe this ambiguity or tension under three heads: First of all, most of those who have been conscious of European civilisation have seen its essence as a variety in unity. Its virtue was seen to lie in the balanced tension between the various different peoples and forms of government which composed it. Hence, as you saw in the passage from Voltaire which I have just quoted, the importance of the theory of the balance of power in all discussions of what Europe is and how it has conducted its affairs. This belief could be traced back very early in modern history. You can find it already in Machiavelli at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In his dialogue on The Art of War he argues that: You know how first class soldiers are produced in great numbers in Europe, in fewer numbers in Africa, and still fewer in Asia. The reason for this is that the two latter parts of the world have usually been organized into one or two empires with very few republics. But Europe alone has had some kingdoms and very many republics. Men become excellent and develop their courage and skill, according to whether they are encouraged by their government whether it be republic or kingdom. It follows therefore that where there are many states, many brave and warlike men are produced; where there are only few, few such men.⁸ The Concert of Europe: A Study in German and British International Theory 1815–1914 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), p. ix. ⁷ [Ed.] Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), vol. II, p. 20. ⁸ [Ed.] It has not been possible to determine where Martin Wight found this translation or whether it is in fact his own translation of the passage. For a recent translation of this passage, see Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War, trans. and ed. Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 58.

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The notion that Europe, because of its multiplicity of states, produces more and better soldiers than the shapeless despotisms of Asia becomes a regular theme of European political literature in early modern times. And the contrast is extended until it includes the greater social vitality, initiative, and inventiveness of the Europeans. You find the idea developed with fine rhetoric in “Purchas, His Pilgrims,” the splendid collection of Tales of Exploration and Discovery which Samuel Purchas published in 1625. Europe is smaller than Asia or Africa, but better. “The Qualitie of Europe exceeds her Quantitie, in this the least, in that the best of the World.” Where else, he says, do we find such “resolute courages, able bodies, well qualified mindes?” What other region is so “fortified with Castles, edified with Townes, crowned with Cities?” Europe is the sole home of the arts and inventions. “The liberall Arts are most liberal to us, having long since forsaken their Seminaries in Asia and Afrike.” Europe has given birth to the “Mechanical Sciences and to Musicall Inventions.” “In the arts of cooking, horse management, chemistry, Europe is pre-eminent.” Europe has discovered paper, mills, guns, printing, perpetual motion, squaring the circle, and “innumerable other Mathematicall and Chymicall devises.” But for Purchas European pre-eminence lies in her genius for exploration: But what speke I of Men, Arts, Armes? Nature hath yeelded her selfe to Europaean Industry. Who ever found out that Loadstone and Compasse, that findes out and compasseth the World? Who ever tooke possession of the Ocean, and made procession round about the vast Earth? Who ever discovered new Constellations, saluted the Frozen Poles, subjected the Burning Zones? And who else by the Art of Navigation have seemed to imitate Him, which laies the beames of his Chambers in the Waters, and walketh on the wings of the Wind?⁹

Quite early, the family quarrels within this balanced European family produced ironical comment. There is a sonnet by the French poet and diplomatist Joachim du Bellay, written about the middle of the sixteenth century, after he had been on a mission to Rome and returned, disillusioned with diplomatic life in Renaissance Italy. It may be translated roughly like this: Of National Character I hate the money-lending avarice Of Florentines, the passionate Siennese, The very rarely truthful Genoese, The sly Venetian’s subtle artifice. ⁹ Purchas His Pilgrimes (Hakluyt Society, Extra Series), I (1905), pp. 248–251, quoted in Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh University Press, 1957), pp. 120–121.

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Ironical, but still I think, fundamentally admiring the vitality and variety of European life. The last great conservative description of Europe in such terms was perhaps that by Ranke, the greatest historian of the nineteenth century and the founder of modern historiography, who saw the essence of European history in the interconnected development of the European nations, and especially of the six great ones—three of them of Roman origin, France, Spain and Italy, three of them of Germanic origin, Germany, England and Scandinavia.¹¹ For him, as for his predecessors, the unity in plurality, or unity in diversity, of European development had been maintained by the free inter-play of the balance of power. I have called Ranke’s picture of Europe the last great conservative statement because such it was, and Ranke was backward looking. But a contemporary of his, Mazzini, was providing a radical alternative picture of Europe and the astonishing thing is how similar in essentials Mazzini’s picture is. Mazzini wants national self-determination for Italy, Poland, and Hungary—the three famous oppressed nations of nineteenth-century Europe. This nationalism did not extend to the wrongs of Ireland nor of the Balkan peoples. Still less did it extend beyond the frontiers of Europe. His whole aim was to change the membership of the European orchestra, to bring in some new blood and hitherto suppressed talent, and perhaps to make Italy the conductor instead of Austria. But an orchestra it was to remain: different nations playing different instruments, and by the very energy of their fiddling and blowing producing the European harmony.¹² European civilisation consists essentially in its national diversities. This belief is so deep, and so well founded in the historical experience of Europe, that when ¹⁰ [Ed.] For the original in French, see Joachim du Bellay, The Regrets: A Bilingual Edition, trans. David R. Slavitt (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), p. 150. ¹¹ [Ed.] Leopold von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (1494 to 1514), trans. G. R. Dennis (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909); first published in 1824 as the Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Vo¨lker von 1494 bis 1514. ¹² [Ed.] See the chapter on Mazzini in Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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after the first world war, the Americans first began delivering lectures to the Europeans on their political backwardness and suggesting that they ought to follow the American example and form themselves into a United States, Europeans already began to reply that political harmony and concord is not the only thing civilisation consists in. “Equalising and leveling might be too great a price to pay for unity. Wars might be a reasonable price to pay for the maintenance of Europe’s specific national cultures.” This argument was put by the great Dutch historian Huizinga in 1924.¹³ And there have been writers since to point out that what was of enduring value in Greek civilisation was bound up with the independence of its city states, and that when the city states lost their independence and were swept up into a wider empire, Greek civilisation, as we can now see, had died.¹⁴ As you will have seen, it is impossible to speak of the peculiar virtues accruing to Europe from its diversity in unity, without making harsh comparisons between fortunate Europe and the less fortunate parts of the world beyond. This contrast was an essential part of the theme. Machiavelli contrasted the valour and skill of European kingdoms with the despotic empires of the East, like the Persian Empire which Alexander conquered and the Turkish Empire of his own day, where if you were fortunate enough to kill the Sultan you could take over the whole state because there were no other centres of political initiative. You get the same contrast more highly developed in the eighteenth century in Montesquieu. He argues that Asia has no temperate zone, that the regions with a very cold climate like Siberia touch immediately on regions with a very hot climate like Turkey, Persia, China, Korea and Japan. His geography was a bit inaccurate, but what concerns us is the conclusions he drew. Cold climates produce brave warriors, hot climates produce lazy cowards; and therefore in Asia the strong and the brave were immediately contiguous to the lazy and cowardly and could conquer them without difficulty. In Europe by contrast the gradations of climate were

¹³ [Ed.] It has not been possible to identify the precise source of this statement. In 1924, however, Huizinga concluded a lecture to an audience of Americans as follows: “This mighty unity of yours, politically spoken, is the hope of the world. Still, political harmony and concord is not the one thing the world stands in need of. However indispensable to civilization peace and order may be, real civilization is not contained in them. They may even be a danger to it, should they be promoted by equalizing and levelling. What we envy you is your unity, not your uniformity. We Europeans feel too keenly that no nation, however prosperous or great, is fit to bear the burden of civilization alone. Each in his turn is called upon, in this wonderful world, to speak his word, and find a solution which just his particular spirit enabled him to express. Civilization is safeguarded by diversity. Even the smallest facets in the many-sided whole may sometimes catch the light and reflect it.” Johan Huizinga, “How Holland Became a Nation,” in Lectures on Holland Delivered in the University of Leyden during the First Netherlands Week for American Students, July 7–12, 1924 (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff ’s Publishing Company, 1924), pp. 17–18. ¹⁴ [Ed.] See the chapters entitled “The States-System of Hellas” and “Hellas and Persia” in Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, in association with the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1977).

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much more gradual and you found innumerable small communities of brave men who mutually enhanced one another’s vitality and valour. If Europe had all the virtues, the rest of the world was not worth serious consideration except in so far as it could contribute to the wealth and comfort of Europe. Dr. Johnson is a good example of the prejudices of eighteenth-century Englishmen, and perhaps not only Englishmen of the eighteenth century either. When Boswell said he would like to travel in a country totally different from what he was used to, for instance Turkey, “Yes, Sir,” replied Johnson; “There are two objects of curiosity, the Christian world, and the Mahometan world. All the rest may be considered as barbarous.”¹⁵ Johnson was enough of a historian and philosophically minded enough to remember that the Mahommedans had played an essential part in the history of Europe. The wogs began beyond Turkey. When Johnson and Boswell went on their tour to the Western Highlands, they had on the island of Col a landlady whom they learned had never visited the mainland. “JOHNSON: That is rather being behind-hand with life. I would at least go and see Glenelg. BOSWELL: You yourself, sir, have never seen, till now, any thing but your native island. JOHNSON: But, sir, by seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show. BOSWELL: You have not seen Pekin. JOHNSON: What is Pekin? Ten thousand Londoners would drive all the people of Pekin: they would drive them like deer.”¹⁶ And this contempt for the non-European world was a reflection, of course, of the process whereby Europe was actually conquering and exploiting the rest of the world. From the sixteenth century European nations could begin to pride themselves on having the capitals of an empire on which the sun never sets. This phrase was first used as a compliment to Philip II of Spain. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was transferred to the British Empire. The world beyond Europe became a set of pawns in the European game of chess. Thus, Europe’s quarrels were exported to the wider world. You remember Macaulay’s famous description of the repercussions of a conflict between the King of Prussia and the Queen of Hungary about a central European province in 1740. The whole world sprang to arms. … The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he might ¹⁵ [Ed.] James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 1218 (10 April 1783). ¹⁶ [Ed.] Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. by Peter Levi (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 346 (11 October 1773); italics in the original.

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rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.¹⁷

And Britain was so secure in Europe that she was able to transfer her main activity and emotional commitment outside Europe. She was even able to indulge the illusion that she had ceased to be a European power. Her foreign policy could consist, as Lord Salisbury once irritably said, in floating lazily downstream and putting out an occasional boat-hook in order to avoid a collision.¹⁸ Of course, the people who were concerned for the defence of Britain, service chiefs and Foreign Office officials, never fell into this illusion, which got its main support from the internationalism of the Free Traders of the Manchester school. Whenever a power arose in Europe to threaten the liberties of the other powers, Britain found that she was very much involved. Nevertheless, this illusion survived the First World War and acquired its greatest influence between the wars. A great deal of thought and research has been given in recent years to British policy in the 1930s, to the policy of appeasement which many people see as having been a curious aberration in the history of British policy.¹⁹ But insufficient emphasis has been given to the element of positive Commonwealth idealism which helps to explain that period of turning away from the insoluble national conflicts of Europe. Most of the people who in the 1930s became notorious as the Cliveden set—Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Lionel Curtis, the founder of Chatham House, Lord Lothian, who had been Lloyd George’s Private Secretary in the First War and became our Ambassador in Washington in the second war, Lord Brand in the City, even John Buchan, who ended up as Governor-General of Canada, and Smuts himself—had started life in Milner’s kindergarten, that band of brilliant young men whom Milner collected round him in the first five years of the century to undertake the reconstruction of South Africa.²⁰ And for these people, as for Neville Chamberlain who found in them ¹⁷ [Ed.] Thomas Babington Macaulay, Frederic the Great (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918), p. 22, quoted in Martin Wight, Power Politics, ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1978), p. 55. ¹⁸ [Ed.] “English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions.” Letter to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (9 March 1877), as quoted in Gwendolen Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921), vol. II, p. 130. ¹⁹ [Ed.] Wight quoted Webster on this point: “The attempt to institute a system of limited liability which only extended to the French and Belgian frontiers was contrary to all her [Britain’s] thinking in the past and was a dismal failure. This failure began a period of British policy which I find it impossible to fit into the pattern of her history. It can only be regarded as an aberration, the causes of which are not yet fully explained.” Sir Charles Webster, The Art and Practice of Diplomacy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), p. 29. ²⁰ [Ed.] They were called “Milner’s kindergarten” because of their work in their youth under Lord Milner, High Commissioner to South Africa, and his successor in that post, the Earl of Selborne. The several studies of “Milner’s kindergarten,” the Cliveden Set, and the Round Table group include John E.

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authoritative support for his own views, Czechoslovakia was a far away country of which we know nothing just because the great Dominions and colonies were very close to their imaginations and dear to their hearts.²¹ You might go so far as to say that the worst enemy of the League of Nations was the idea of the British Commonwealth. The turn towards Europe by British public opinion since 1945 has been due very largely to the transformation of the Commonwealth into something so loose and casual, and something itself involving problems even more insoluble than those of the Sudeten Germans, that it can no longer arouse the old enthusiasm and loyalty. But still it didn’t come quickly enough for Bevin to join the Schuman Plan in 1950, or Eden to take part in the Messina Conference in 1955. Thus again, Europe’s battles decided the possession of those resources beyond Europe. You remember how the elder Pitt said, with splendid exaggeration, “America has been conquered in Germany.”²² And how Napoleon vainly hoped to conquer India, and the Spanish colonies, and the Cape of Good Hope by the victories of his armies on the Elbe and the Oder. But thus again, it was conversely possible for battles outside Europe to decide what happened inside Europe. Perhaps the first people to realize this were the Dutch in their war of independence against Spain. Their piratical activities throughout the oceans of the world had a clear strategic purpose. They meant “by bearding the King of Spain in his treasure-house to cut the sinews by which he sustained his wars in Europe.”²³ The statesmen of the French Revolution complained, rather as Hitler was to do later, that the Indian Empire enabled Britain to subsidise all the powers of Europe against France. But there came a time when the resources of the world outside Europe began to be organised by powers themselves outside Europe. When the British made their naval alliance with Japan in 1902 the Russian Navy dismissed the danger to themselves from this new Asiatic power. “Far Eastern affairs are decided in Europe,”²⁴ they said. Three years later their catastrophic defeat at the hands of Japan proved them wrong and showed there was now a non-European power capable of deciding its local affairs without Europe and even against Europe. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975); Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Books in Focus, 1981); and Alexander May, “The Round Table, 1910–1966,” DPhil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1995. ²¹ [Ed.] Here Wight was alluding to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s comment on the Sudetenland crisis: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Chamberlain, radio broadcast of 27 September 1938, in The Times (London), September 28, 1938. ²² Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913), vol. II, p. 131 (speech in the House of Commons, November 13, 1761). ²³ Quoted in George Edmundson, “Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange,” in Sir A. W. Ward, Sir G. W. Prothero, and Sir Stanley Leathes (eds), The Cambridge Modern History, vol. IV: The Thirty Years’ War (Cambridge University Press, 1906), p. 703. ²⁴ [Ed.] Russian General Dragomirov quoted in G. F. Hudson, The Far East in World Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 74.

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And it was the logical extension of this development of power when the Second World War, which had begun by Germany invading Poland and two other European states, Britain and France, coming to the aid of the victim, was settled by two great non-European powers bringing to bear upon a prostrate Europe the industrial strength of the Mississippi valley and the Urals. The second ambiguity I find in European civilisation arises out of its universalist claims. These are the consequence of the peculiar nature of Christianity, which is the first historical religion to have claimed effectively a universal mission, and has bequeathed this idea of a universal mission to the civilisation with which, accidentally perhaps, it has been most closely associated. In the Middle Ages, Christendom was conceived as being theoretically co-extensive with the whole human race. And when Papal claims were elaborated in the thirteenth century, before the Crusades had ended in failure, these claims included an assertion that the Pope was legitimately Lord of the whole world. Medieval history usually emphasises Papal claims of supremacy over the Emperor, and also Papal claims of authority over heretics. It is only recently that scholars have directed attention towards the international theory of the medieval Papacy, and its assertions that in principle its jurisdiction extended to all mankind. In the middle of the thirteenth century the Papacy sent two missions in the persons of Franciscan friars to the Mongol Khans who had just conquered China. The main purpose of these embassies was to seek an alliance with the Mongols against the Turks who lay between the two and were potentially their common enemy. But the friars carried a supply of Bibles instead of more suitable presents to the great Khan, and were instructed to tell him in diplomatic language that the Pope was by Divine appointment the proper ruler of all mankind and that it was the Khan’s duty to embrace Christianity. Fortunately for the friars, the Khans had a sense of humour, or perhaps were also keen on a political alliance, and the friars returned safe and sound with suggestions that the Pope might in his turn become converted to the Khans’ religion. But you will remember that the great discoveries themselves were launched at the end of the fifteenth century mainly with a Crusading motive, either of evangelising the mass of the heathen, or of seeking an alliance with such potentates as Prester John who might attack the Turks in the rear. Nor did this conception of Europe as having a universal mission, expressed peaceably by evangelisation or forcibly by a Crusade, die with medieval Christendom. It survived the Reformation. It became secularized, and if anything more violent. One of the outstanding features of modern European international history, and distinguishing it from comparable periods of history in any other part of the world, is the successive waves of doctrinal passion, or as we now say of ideology, which have broken over it and temporarily transformed it. The earliest was that which we associate with the wars of religion. The Calvinists, and especially the English Puritans, showed as much sense of a universal mission extending beyond Europe as had the medieval Popes. When John Milton was Latin secretary to the

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Lord Protector Cromwell, he drafted a manifesto in 1655 against Spain, in which for the first time in European history, ill treatment of native peoples was described as a just cause of war. “All great and extraordinary wrongs done to particular persons ought to be considered as in a manner done to all the rest of the human race.”²⁵ (It is beside the point that the treatment of the Red Indians in North America by the English settlers was probably rather worse than the treatment of the Central and South American Indians by the Spaniards.) Here is a source of the anti-colonialist agitation of the United Nations today. The second wave of ideology was of course that of the French Revolution. The initial aim of the French Revolutionaries was to right the wrongs of all mankind. They started out by declaring the general principles upon which all government must rest, not the government of France in 1789 but every legitimate government in the world. “We wish to make a declaration of rights for all men, for all time, and for all countries, and thus serve as an example for the world.”²⁶ This was the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was the preamble to the constitution of 1791. Of course the rights of man very soon began their decline into the privileges of Frenchmen, but the universalist impulse was there. In Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, there is an extraordinary passage of prophetic insight: Rights of Man, printed on Cotton Handkerchiefs, in various dialects of human speech, pass over to the Frankfort Fair. What say we, Frankfort Fair? They have crossed Euphrates, and the fabulous Hydaspes; wafted themselves beyond the Ural, Altai, Himmalayah; struck off from wood stereotypes, in angular Picturewriting, they are jabbered and jingled of in China and Japan. Where will it stop? Kien-Lung smells mischief; not the remotest Dalai-Lama shall now knead his dough-pills in peace.²⁷

It was not until 1911 that the successors of Kien-Lung succumbed to the Rights of Man, and not until 1951 that the Dalai Lama did; but even into the Himalayas at last the tide rose inexorably. ²⁵ [Ed.] “A Manifesto of the Lord Protector to the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, Ireland, etc. Published by Consent and Advice of His Council Wherein is Shewn the Reasonableness of the Cause of This Republic against the Depredations of the Spaniards, Written in Latin by John Milton, and First Printed in 1655; Translated into English in 1738,” in John Milton, The Prose Works of John Milton (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), vol. II, p. 336. ²⁶ [Ed.] Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours quoted in André Lebon, “The Declaration of Rights of 1789,” in The International Monthly: A Magazine of Contemporary Thought, vol. III (January–June 1901), p. 677. ²⁷ Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, vol. II, The Constitution (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), p. 268.

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And the third ideological wave, of course, has been that of Communism, which is only now subsiding. The Bolsheviks went further than the Puritans or the Jacobins, in seeing the world beyond Europe as reserve forces to be thrown into a struggle which they found they could not win in Europe. Already in 1918 or 1919, Trotsky coined the famous phrase that the road to London and Paris lies through Calcutta and Peking,²⁸ which has marked out Communist strategy ever since. Lenin accepted this re-orientation of Soviet policy at the end of his life. On 2nd March 1923, just a week before his second stroke, which forced him to abandon work and to retire to Gorki’s country house for the rest of his life, he wrote in a famous article: In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc. account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is the majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.²⁹

So the second ambiguity about Europe seems to me to lie in this quality European civilisation has had of producing outbursts of missionary fervour which lead to the assertion that Europe stands for some universal creed that needs to be adopted by all mankind. The third ambiguity is seen in the difficulty of describing the content of European civilisation. What principles, what formulae are we going to say are specifically European? It is a question we have all given some thought to in the past 20 years in the rather dreary and inconclusive discussions which no doubt we have all taken part in about “Western values.” What are Western or European values? What, to begin with, do these ideologies of European origin have in common? Beyond their fanaticism and Utopianism it is difficult to see a set of principles which the Counter Reformation Jesuits and Oliver Cromwell and Robespierre and Lenin could all have agreed about. The conventional answer is that the European inheritance is seen in the form of democracy. But this is an extraordinarily selective and inaccurate statement. Parliamentary democracy of our own kind has only come into existence in the past two hundred years, and has been conspicuously confined to the nations of Northern Europe, and their daughter nations overseas. To say that Parliamentary ²⁸ Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879–1921 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 457–8. ²⁹ [Ed.] This passage appears in Lenin’s final article, “Better Fewer, But Better,” and it is quoted in Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), vol. 2: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, p. 254.

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democracy is an essential of European civilisation is simply to express a preference for Parliamentary democracy. The kind of regime General Franco has given Spain is equally essentially European, and indeed is probably more representative of the sort of government found in most places in Europe in most ages. The European religion, Christianity, is a revealed religion, and there is a natural alliance between revealed religions and authoritarian government. If you take the supposed democratic tradition of Europe back to the Greeks, you are faced with Greece having had only one successful democracy so far as we know, Athens. And this aspect of Greek history was only rediscovered and admired by posterity in the last couple of centuries when we, particularly the British, saw in it a mirror for our own virtues. The greatest Greek writer, the most influential thinker, Plato, was severely anti-democratic, and launched that conception of the best government being government by an elite which has been put into effect at different times by the Catholic Church and the Communist Party. But even if we think of European civilisation as in some way finding its essential character in political institutions since the Enlightenment, in the complex of ideas which we call by the names of liberalism or democracy or socialism, we are still not free from uncertainty. Here again there is a great tension, that between freedom and equality. If we are liberals, we believe in political equality, but reluctantly have to concede that political equality does not go far enough in providing justice and a good life for all men. If we are socialists, we believe in economic equality, but must reluctantly admit that economic equality can be the enemy of political liberty, and may be best secured in a quite illiberal regime. Once again, in the sphere of ideas and culture, it seems extraordinarily difficult to confine the spirit of Europe within a formula or representative person. Europe is Bertrand Russell and JeanPaul Sartre, Mauriac and Graham Greene, Picasso and Eric Gill, Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten, Le Corbusier and Sir Basil Spence. I have tried to sketch a three-fold tension in the history of Europe. It has consisted in a multiplicity of states and nations, whose balanced variety has been seen as the essence of the civilisation and whose individual richness has sometimes seemed so satisfying to their members that they have been able to think of themselves as Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans rather than Europeans at all. And the result of this variety has been a vitality which has enabled Europe to expand and conquer the rest of the world and at last to over-reach herself. Moreover, Europe has been a civilisation with the smallest territorial extent of any, at least in the old world, yet generating universalist claims and missionary impulses. And it is impossible to say whether the values of European civilisation are found in Christianity or in humanism, in democracy or in authoritarianism, in liberty or equality, for it includes them all. These ambiguities seem to me to be illustrated in the history of Europe since 1945 in the attempt to find a political and economic integration for Western Europe, over which there hovers the “European concept.” The desire for European

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integration came because Europe had wrecked itself in the Second World War, and found its fate being decided by the powers outside Europe. The mere extent of devastation, the need for rebuilding, the common experience of occupation and defeat, gave the West European states that impulse to build a closer unity which has still not yet flagged. But you notice that the Europe which has come into being is still a “Europe des patries,” and that General de Gaulle is intent to keep it so. You notice also that it is still a Europe which has a large part of the nonEuropean world in tow, and that this is one of the ambiguities about the Common Market which has provided ammunition for its enemies. As the shadow of the Common Market there follows Eurafrica, the Associated Overseas Territories. Perhaps this is a fair and balanced relationship between Europe and the non-European world, and so long as the former French colonies in Africa are content to accept it you must suppose it to be so. But we know that those outside the Common Market, Dr. Nkrumah and Mr. Nyerere especially,³⁰ have suspected that the Common Market is a league of rich consumers, of ex-colonial powers putting themselves into a more powerful position to bargain with the African primary producers, and determined to keep them in a disadvantageous position. And if Europe has been characterized by these recurrent universalist claims, it has been a criticism of the Common Market precisely that it has lacked this dimension, that it is too inward looking, too little universalist; that it has had too little to offer for the solution of the world’s larger ills, and has tended to break up the degree of unity in the West laboriously achieved since 1945. We might adapt the lines which Oliver Goldsmith wrote as a mock obituary of his friend Burke: Here lies our Good Europe, Whose genius was such, We scarcely can praise it Or blame it too much; Which, born for the universe, Narrowed its mind, And to EEC gave up What was meant for mankind.³¹ ³⁰ [Ed.] Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) served as the first prime minister of the Gold Coast (1952– 1957) and its successor state, Ghana (1957–1960), and as the first president of Ghana (1960–1966). Julius Nyerere (1922–1999) served as the first president of Tanzania (1964–1985). ³¹ [Ed.] “Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, We scarcely can praise it, or blame it too much; Who, born for the universe, narrow’d his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.” These lines from Goldsmith’s poem “Retaliation” may be found in The Poems and Plays of Oliver Goldsmith (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1910), p. 38.

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The third uncertainty about Europe is its uncertain values, and this surely is illustrated in the politics of the Six.³² The tension between democracy and authoritarianism could not be better expressed than in the position of de Gaulle himself. The assertion that Europe is essentially connected with parliamentary democracy in the sense in which we understand it could not be better refuted than by looking at the return of France to plebiscitary democracy and the methods, familiar enough in Germany under Bismarck, but unusual elsewhere, by which Dr. Adenauer has maintained his rule over Western Germany. I might add that this ambiguity is extended into the social sphere in the uncertainty as to whether the Common Market will bring any benefits to that part of the Six which is most desperately in need of economic development, namely the South of Italy and Sicily. For my part, don’t know what to make of “the Concept of Europe.” I can understand and respect the starry-eyed federal idealism of the Council of Europe at Strasbourg. I can understand and respect de Gaulle’s conception. I do not know that I understand or respect the idea of Europe which lay behind HMG’s attempt to enter Europe—if there was one.³³ But I am convinced that what matters for us all is an understanding of the deeper, older, richer reality of Europe which underlies them all.

³² [Ed.] The Six were the founding members of the European Communities: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany). ³³ [Ed.] It should be recalled that Wight presented this paper in April 1963. This was soon after President de Gaulle announced at his press conference of January 14, 1963, that he was vetoing the United Kingdom’s application to join the European Economic Community. (The acronym HMG refers to Her Majesty’s Government.)

6 United Europe: The Historical Background The historical background is a pleasantly vague expression which gives the lecturer a wide latitude.∗ The historical background of the enthusiasts for the European idea extends back as far as Charlemagne, and the city of Aachen as you know presents an annual Charlemagne prize to the person who they think has forwarded the European idea the most in the past year. General de Gaulle has been compared to Louis XIV and to Napoleon. Dr. Adenauer, who has played his own part in the forming of the Common Market, is very generally compared to Bismarck. But I guess that you will not want me to range back as far as this at the beginning of our course, so let us think about the more restricted historical background since the Second World War. Nevertheless, I am bound to warn you that I think the remoter past is no less relevant, and I shall come back to it at the end of the lecture. History is not like a train which passes through a succession of stations and leaves them behind, so that we can say, “Oh, we passed through Charlemagne junction ages ago,” or “Hitler was two stops back, and we didn’t get out there thank goodness.” History is much more like an organic growth, which carries forward its earlier stages wrapped up in the centre of the new bark or the new skin which it adds annually. And you will remember that modern psycho-analysis has shown us that what we were as individuals in infancy, we still are very much, though in transformed or distorted ways, in our adulthood. But it is obvious that the immediate causation of the movement towards a united Europe was the Second World War, the German conquest of Europe and the Allied liberation. And United Europe was the product of three forces: first the experiences and the consequences of the war; secondly, fear of Germany after the war; and thirdly, gradually replacing the fear of Germany, the fear of Russia. The wartime experience was seminal. A high proportion of the statesmen and officials who have brought the European Economic Community into being and are guiding it from Brussels were exiles in London in the years between 1940 and 1944. There they met and were united in the insight given by the tragedy that had befallen their respective countries, and in the resolve to repair the follies which ∗ According to Gabriele Wight, Martin Wight probably gave this lecture as part of a course at the Westminster College of Education, then at Oxford, in May 1963.

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0007

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had led to the swift German conquest of Europe. The most obvious folly of course was the folly of not having co-operated against the Nazi menace at a time when it might have been checked without war. The most distinguished, as we can now see—I mean to say the one who has proved the most influential—of these exiles in London was Jean Monnet, whom everybody agrees is the real father and founder of the Common Market. This extraordinary man, who is now 74,¹ who moves unobtrusively from capital to capital and is received without fuss but with the utmost respect by the President in Washington and the Prime Minister in London, but who still holds no official position on the European Commission, was in London in the Second World War. He was in charge of co-ordinating Anglo-French supplies from America, which was the same job that he had created for himself as a young man in his later twenties during the First World War. He came to London after the fall of France, and it was he who proposed the plan for Anglo-French union while the battle of France was raging and who drafted Churchill’s historic statement. He urged Roosevelt to provide war materials to Britain without bothering about the cost, and it was Monnet again who coined Roosevelt’s phrase “We must become the great arsenal of democracy.” In London Monnet kept himself apart from the other great statesman who was rallying the Free French and restoring a sense of the national greatness of France, de Gaulle, because Monnet in style and in conviction is the opposite of de Gaulle: the discreet and self-effacing bureaucrat as against the flamboyant or bombastic statesman, the believer in international co-operation contrasted with the prophet of national grandeur. So Monnet did not join the Free French outfit, but preferred to become a British civil servant. When France was liberated he returned to Paris, but he had already sowed the seeds for the Lend-Lease programme.² Western Europe after liberation had, as we can now see, a number of valuable assets. One was the very fact of having been occupied and largely devastated, which was of course particularly the case with Germany herself. This gave the supreme incentive to rebuild and modernize industry, and has produced that strange paradox which still puzzles us: that Britain whom we are told was on the winning side ¹ [Ed.] Jean Monnet (1888–1979) remains best known for the contributions cited by Martin Wight. ² [Ed.] Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1941, Lend-Lease was a critical step away from the isolationist and non-interventionist policies defined in the U.S. Neutrality Acts of the 1930s. An important preceding step was the “cash and carry” policy signed into law by FDR in November 1939. Under “cash and carry,” belligerents could buy materiel from U.S. suppliers as long as they paid at once in cash and transported the purchased goods in their own ships. The “cash and carry” approach reached its limits when Britain ran short of assets that could be liquidated. U.S. neutrality legislation prohibited lending money to belligerents, however. The imaginative solution in Lend-Lease was for the United States to provide materiel aid to the British Empire and Commonwealth, the Soviet Union, the Free French, and others fighting the Axis powers in return for leases to military facilities, scientific and technical cooperation, and other forms of “reverse Lend-Lease.” Monnet played key roles in the genesis of Lend-Lease, in the negotiation of Lend-Lease assistance for France, and in the initiation of a follow-on U.S. economic aid program for France. For background, see William I. Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 29–31, 35.

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in the war is very much worse off today as a nation than Germany, whom we are told lost the war. In addition to this was a large labour surplus ready to be absorbed into expanding industry. In Germany this was supplied by the refugees from the Eastern parts of Germany, where the Poles had either evicted the German population, or the Russians had driven them away by imposing Communism on their zone. And Italy of course had its permanent pool of unemployment in the neglected regions of the South and Sicily. These material conditions were the basis of the “economic miracle” in both countries. The second asset it had was the enthusiasm of a few for the idea of uniting Europe. The most systematic and coherent of these enthusiasts worked for a federal union of Europe along the lines of the United States of America, and in due course they helped bring into being the Council of Europe, which was inaugurated in 1949. But it is the sad truth that enthusiasm of this kind, and starry-eyed idealism, achieve very little in international affairs except in so far as they can provide a climate of opinion favourable to the adjustments of competing interests for the people who hold power—governments and economic magnates. The Council of Europe, like the United Nations, to which it has many resemblances, has remained nothing more than a talking shop on the fringe of great events, playing only such a role as the great powers do not want to play themselves. If these were assets, the greatest difficulty of liberated Europe was fear of the defeated monster Germany. Hitler was dead, the Nazi leaders had been tried at Nuremberg, Nazism had been eradicated from the political life of Germany, in so far as the blundering, methodical administration of a team of victorious Allies who were beginning to explore their own mutual disagreements, could achieve. But all minds were still dominated by the fear of the past danger (except at the very top and among the very far-sighted who could already clearly see the new danger of Stalin). The diplomacy of those immediate postwar years in Europe, which in our memories is associated with the burly figure of Ernest Bevin,³ centres round precautions against a renewed threat from Germany. In 1947 Britain and France signed the Treaty of Dunkirk, a defensive alliance which was to last for 50 years. In 1948 this was extended to the three Benelux countries by the Treaty of Brussels, and the resulting defensive organization is the first to which the name Western Union was given.⁴

³ [Ed.] Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) served as Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1945– 1951. ⁴ [Ed.] The Western Union was formed on the basis of the 1948 Brussels Treaty, a mutual defense pact concluded by Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. These countries established the Western Union Defence Organization (WUDO). In 1951, when NATO set up its Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the WUDO was disbanded and its facilities, staff, and plans were transferred to SHAPE. In 1954, Italy and West Germany acceded to the Brussels

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But the German threat was not simply a military one. Germany’s military power was built on her enormous economic spring. The great economic question of those postwar years in Europe was how to control the German power house of the Ruhr, which with its coal mines and steel mills is within a few hundred square miles the greatest concentration of economic power in Europe. You will remember that there was an American plan, the Morgenthau Plan, during the war for eradicating the Ruhr industries and dismantling and destroying all the plant and equipment. When the British took over the Ruhr as part of their zone in 1945, of course the problem was to keep the coal mines there going as well as possible, in order to restore some semblance of economic life throughout the defeated and prostrate regions which it served. The British Labour Party believed that the Ruhr could be brought under control if its industries were nationalized. American influence prevailed and imposed a policy of “decentralization,” which sought to introduce competition into what had been one of the most rigid monopolies of Europe. This had the effect of largely increasing the share of foreign interests in the Ruhr industries. It was perhaps the first practical effective Europeanisation of the economic life of Western Europe. When the three Western occupation zones were at last amalgamated and it became necessary to recognize a West German government, the French insisted as their condition of approval that the international control of the Ruhr should be given a more formal structure. Therefore America, Britain and France agreed in 1949 to set up the International Ruhr Authority. Its purpose was [to ensure] “that the resources of the Ruhr shall not in the future be used for the purpose of aggression but shall be used in the interests of peace; [and] that access to the coal, coke and steel of the Ruhr, which was previously subject to the exclusive control of Germany, be in the future assured on an equitable basis to the countries cooperating in the common economic good.”⁵ But it is interesting to note that the document which set up the Authority expressed a hope of lowering trade barriers and closer economic co-operation among the countries of Europe. It was at this point that the processes of international growth seem to have come most quickly. Within a year of its setting up the International Ruhr Authority, this tiny bud which I have just mentioned, had become a long shoot bearing a flower within which the European Economic Community is already discernible. Two particular forces were at work.

Treaty, which (in amended form) served as the basis for a new organization, the Western European Union (WEU). ⁵ [Ed.] Agreement for Establishment of an International Authority for the Ruhr, Signed at London, April 28, 1949, American Journal of International Law, vol. 43, no. 3, Supplement: Official Documents (July 1949), pp. 140–53. The Ruhr Authority’s members consisted of Germany and the Signatory Governments: Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

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The French were determined to shift the centre of West European heavy industry from the Ruhr to Lorraine and to the Saar. They hoped to replace Germany permanently as the biggest steel producer in Europe. The consequence of this hope, as you might expect, was not a simple transference of economic power from the Ruhr to Lorraine, but the creation of a much larger economic unit which included them both. And this too was a bringing out into the open of something which was in the nature of things, and had its own long history. The Ruhr–Lorraine–Saar– Luxembourg coal and steel industry had formed a commercial unit for nearly fifty years, from the foundation of the German empire in 1871, which you remember coincided with the detachment of Alsace-Lorraine from France and its transference to the new united Germany, down to 1919 when Alsace and Lorraine were re-transferred to France, and the Saar was also temporarily detached from Germany. But beneath the fluctuating political frontiers the intrinsic economic unity of this great economic complex continued to express itself. In the years between 1919 and the outbreak of the Second World War, the steel masters of France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg were united in an entente cordiale d’acier, an international crude steel cartel supplemented by cartel agreements for finished steel products. These mutual economic interests now began to make themselves felt again. The second particular force at work was the German demand for equality of rights.⁶ You remember how the defeated Germany of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, in those first negotiations about general disarmament, had repeatedly pleaded for equality of rights, Gleichberechtigung. Weimar Germany had been compulsorily disarmed by the Treaty of Versailles, but the Treaty had also included an ambiguous promise by the Allies that they themselves would disarm too. Could Germany be kept permanently with unequal rights, especially in the vital military field, while her victors ignored a promise which they had voluntarily given to her? You remember the skill with which Hitler exploited this issue of equality of rights, and how his abandonment of the disarmament conference in 1933 and every successive unilateral revision of the Versailles Treaty was justified with this compelling excuse, until at last the bemused Western publics were persuaded that he was nothing more than a simple-minded if rather uncouth advocate of fair treatment for his own country. And so the problem is still debated by historians on whether history might have been changed if the Western powers had had the ⁶ [Ed.] In 1945 Germany and Berlin were divided into four occupation zones, one for each of the four powers with rights concerning the ultimate disposition of the German question: Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The three Western zones became the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1949. Konrad Adenauer, who served as West Germany’s first chancellor in 1949– 1963, attached great importance to his country gaining “equality of rights” (Gleichberechtigung) with the victors in World War II. This was impractical in the military and security domain, as each of the four powers became a nuclear-weapon state. However, as Wight observes, West Germany could successfully pursue “equality of rights” in the economic domain.

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vision, before the Weimar Republic collapsed, to concede equality of rights to such Republican statesmen as Stresemann.⁷ Exactly this issue now came up again after 1945. Germany could not be kept indefinitely divided into four occupied zones. A West German government came into existence and was recognized in the natural course of things. But could this new Federal Republic of Germany be kept in relation to the three Western powers who had brought it into existence, in a state of relative servitude and inequality of rights? Its most glaring inequality of rights was represented by the International Ruhr Authority. This limited the economic sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany and damaged the interests of some of Germany’s most powerful industrialists. When Adenauer took office as Federal Chancellor in September 1949, in his address to the occupying powers, he raised this issue of equal rights and duties. “We see,” he said, “another opening for creating a positive and viable European federation in the hope that the control of the Ruhr region would cease to be a unilateral arrangement and that it would gradually grow into an organism which would embrace the basic industries of other European countries as well.”⁸ And this time history took a different turning. The disposition of material interests was favourable, and the minds of men were prepared. The response to Adenauer’s plea came when in May 1950 the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, launched before the Council of Europe his famous plan for pooling French and German coal and steel production. The Schuman plan embodied the idea of equality of rights: it involved the same sacrifice of national sovereignty by all who joined it. At the same time it achieved the French national purpose of keeping the Ruhr out of the unfettered control of the German government by bringing it into a wider organisation. It was an example of Monnet’s principle that in order to solve international problems you must widen the context in which you are trying to deal with them. When you widen the context and the perspective, the problem itself begins to look different and is easier to solve. I need hardly tell you that the Schuman plan was drafted by Monnet himself. So a year after the Schuman plan had been announced, in 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community was set up. It was a new international authority, “on supra-national lines, independent of all national governments, and thereby by definition not subject to German control.”⁹ It included, besides Germany and France, the three Benelux countries, which were already associated with the International Ruhr Authority as well as being members of the Brussels Western Union of 1948. It also included Italy, a country which was eccentric to the Ruhr–Lorraine economic combine, and whose industrial interests were indeed to some extent ⁷ [Ed.] Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) served as Germany’s Foreign Minister in 1923–1929. ⁸ [Ed.] Konrad Adenauer, speech on September 21, 1949, in Beate Ruhm von Oppen (ed.), Documents on Germany Under Occupation, 1945–1954 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 419. ⁹ [Ed.] It has not been possible to identify the source of this quotation.

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threatened by that combine. But the French had already been discussing the possibility of a customs union with Italy, and probably the French wanted to have the Italians as a make-weight and a safe ally in keeping Germany in line. This much had been accomplished by the fear of Germany. But already, of course, the politics of Western Europe had fallen under the longer shadow of Russia. You will remember the Soviet seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1948, the dramatic murder—or was it suicide?—of Jan Masaryk,¹⁰ and the Berlin blockade of 1948–1949. The Russian threat raised the question of German re-armament for the defence of Western Europe, and this of course reinforced the fear of Germany herself. It is one of those paradoxes or ironies which are of the essence of international politics: the need to re-arm a defeated enemy whom you fear and suspect in order to protect yourself against a heroic ally whom you are beginning to admire rather less. Letting Germany have an army again was a more contentious issue than getting the industry of the Ruhr working again. The general principles for solving the problem were the same: let Germany have soldiers, but let them not be a national army but simply a contingent in an international army whose control should be more with Germany’s allies than with Germany herself. The counterpart of the Schuman plan on the economic side was the Pleven plan of October 1950 which launched the idea of a European Defence Community.¹¹ I need hardly tell you that the Pleven plan was drafted by Jean Monnet. Controversy over the European Defence Community, or E.D.C., went on until 1954, when you remember the whole thing was thrown out by the French Parliament. The plan involved the sacrifice of national sovereignty, to which the French could not bring themselves. At this point, the British intervened, on the only occasion in which they had played a creative part in any of this story. If you have read the third volume of Eden’s Memoirs you will remember the dramatic chapter in which he recounts these events and claims the result as one of the diplomatic successes which he looks back on with the most satisfaction.¹² Even Mr. Dulles described Britain’s initiative as brilliant and statesmanlike.

¹⁰ [Ed.] The body of Jan Masaryk (1886–1948), the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia at the time of his death, was found in the courtyard of the Ministry below his window. Whether he committed suicide or was murdered by Soviet or Communist agents remains in dispute. ¹¹ [Ed.] René Pleven (1901–1993) was serving as France’s Prime Minister when he proposed the European Defense Community in 1950. The French government’s objective in proposing the EDC was to create a framework that would permit the establishment of West German military forces as elements of a multi-national military force, with contributions from Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany). The French government wished to keep West Germany out of NATO and to avoid the establishment of an autonomous German General Staff or large West German military units while creating an arrangement that would satisfy the U.S. demand that West German military forces contribute to the defense of Western Europe. As Wight points out, the French-proposed constraints on national sovereignty in the EDC’s multi-national military force proved in the end unacceptable to France. For a valuable account, see Edward Fursdon, The European Defense Community: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980). ¹² [Ed.] The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, vol. 3: Full Circle (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1960), pp. 164–94.

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Eden toured the European capitals, and then proposed that the re-armament of Germany should take place within the framework of NATO, and at the same time that the Brussels Treaty of 1948 should be expanded to include Germany and Italy, with “some mutual guarantees of full military aid in the case of attack in Europe by each to all;”¹³ and that Britain would give confidence to her European friends by undertaking to maintain her present forces on the Continent and not to withdraw them against the wishes of the majority of powers in the expanded Brussels Treaty. These proposals were gratefully accepted and triumphantly embodied in treaty form, under the name of Western European Union. They got everybody out of the embarrassment which followed the collapse of the E.D.C. Nowadays, as we look back at them, they seem a lot of self-congratulation about very little. But this is apt to be the case with diplomatic successes—they seem so obvious in retrospect that one cannot understand the amount of effort involved in the decision to cooperate with nature. At this point the European stream was flowing strongly. Stalin was dead, the Korean war was over, Khrushchev and Bulganin were touring the world dispensing much goodwill and some abuse, and there was a general mood of hopefulness. The European Coal and Steel Community was forging ahead. Germany was a respected, prosperous, independent and equal member of the West European community; she had been admitted to the Brussels defensive treaty and to NATO. It was time to move forward to the further fields of co-operation which the idealists and the Federalists had envisaged. But at the same time, the failure to fuse the military needs of the Cold War with the ideal of Western European Union integration had shaken the more sober and better-informed supporters of European Union. In 1955 they brought about a conference at Messina in Sicily of the Foreign Ministers of the European Coal and Steel Community. Its aim was to discuss plans to co-ordinate European transport, civil aviation, power production, and atomic energy. The Messina Conference set up a committee under the Chairmanship of Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Foreign Minister who had been the first President of the Common Assembly of the Community,¹⁴ and the committee reported the following year. The Spaak Report is to the Common Market what the Schuman Plan was to the European Coal and Steel Community. It firmly shifted the emphasis from the economic co-operation envisaged at the Messina Conference to the principle of a united Europe, the development of the supra-national principle. On the whole this shifted emphasis is maintained in the Rome Treaty instituting the European Economic Community, which was signed on 25th March 1957.

¹³ [Ed.] It has not been possible to identify the source of this quotation. ¹⁴ [Ed.] Paul-Henri Spaak (1899–1972) was a Belgian statesman who held many prominent positions, including as Prime Minister of Belgium, President of the UN General Assembly, President of the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community, and Secretary General of NATO.

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Thus was set in motion that great bandwagon of United Europe, a potential third force in the Cold War, which the British Government belatedly announced its intention of climbing on to in 1961. I don’t think it is the purpose of a lecture on the historical background of such a matter to offer opinions as to whether the Conservative Government’s policy was wise or unwise and whether de Gaulle’s veto on Britain’s entry was deplorable or otherwise. On these questions, no doubt we all have our own opinions. But I think it might be appropriate to step back, and to look at this extraordinary success story for Monnet and his associates in the light of some other considerations. I have said very little hitherto about Britain’s part in the building of United Europe. There is, as you know, very little to say. Churchill, when he was out of office, made some famous speeches which had their part in creating a mood,¹⁵ but led Europeans to think that Britain was likely to do far more than she did do and so in the end may have led to disappointment and to confirm belief in British hypocrisy. Eden congratulates himself in his memoirs on the British contribution to bringing a Western European Union out of the ruins of the E.D.C.,¹⁶ and the achievement should not be under-estimated. But nothing in Eden’s volume is more drearily unimaginative and backward looking than his re-iterations that Britain is an island community which has always been on the edge of Europe and not part of it, and is traditionally unable to commit herself to fixed constitutions and rigid alliances, let alone potential federations.¹⁷ The British were invited to the discussion of the Schuman plan in 1950, but they quickly dropped out of the discussions. They were invited to the Messina conference in 1955 but they forgot to answer the invitation and did not appear. There are those who say that the French and the federalists wanted to keep the British out from the start, knowing that they would be un-cooperative allies. Whether this is true or no, the British lost opportunity after opportunity of presenting themselves as eager and worthwhile partners. The reasons for this go very deep into the past. Britain was so secure in Europe that she was able to transfer her main activity and emotional commitment outside Europe. She was even able to indulge the illusion that she had ceased to be ¹⁵ [Ed.] Wight may have had in mind Churchill’s speech at the University of Zurich, September 19, 1946. In this speech Churchill said, “we must re-create the European family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe, and the first practical step will be to form a Council of Europe.” This speech may be found at the website of the Council of Europe: http://www.coe.int/t/ dgal/dit/ilcd/Archives/selection/Churchill/ZurichSpeech_en.asp ¹⁶ [Ed.] As noted above, The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, vol. 3: Full Circle, pp. 164–94. ¹⁷ [Ed.] “The American and British peoples should each understand the strong points in the other’s national character. If you drive a nation to adopt procedures which run counter to its instincts, you weaken and may destroy the native force of its action. This is something you would not wish to do— or any of us would wish to do—to an ally on whose effective cooperation we depend. You will realize that I am speaking of the frequent suggestions that the United Kingdom should join a federation on the continent of Europe. This is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do.” Anthony Eden, speech at Columbia University, January 11, 1952, quoted in The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, vol. 3: Full Circle, p. 40; emphasis added.

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a European power. Her foreign policy could consist, as Lord Salisbury once irritably said, in floating lazily downstream and putting out an occasional boat-hook in order to avoid a collision.¹⁸ Of course, the people who were concerned for the defence of Britain, service chiefs and Foreign Office officials, never fell into this illusion, which got its main support from the internationalism of the Free Traders of the Manchester school. Whenever a power arose in Europe to threaten the liberties of the other powers, Britain found that she was very much involved. Nevertheless, this illusion survived the First World War and acquired its greatest influence between the wars. A great deal of thought and research has been given in recent years to British policy in the 1930s, to the policy of appeasement which many people see as having been a curious aberration in the history of British policy. But insufficient emphasis has been given to the element of positive Commonwealth idealism which helps to explain that period of turning away from the insoluble national conflicts of Europe. Most of the people who in the 1930s became notorious as the Cliveden set—Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Lionel Curtis, the founder of Chatham House, Lord Lothian, who had been Lloyd George’s Private Secretary in the First World War and became our Ambassador in Washington in the Second World War, Lord Brand in the City, even John Buchan, who ended up as Governor-General of Canada—had started life in Milner’s kindergarten, that band of brilliant young men whom Milner collected round him in the first five years of the century to undertake the reconstruction of South Africa.¹⁹ And for these people, as for Neville Chamberlain who found in them authoritative support for his own views, Czechoslovakia was a far away country of which we know nothing just because the great Dominions and colonies were very close to their imaginations and dear to their hearts.²⁰ You might go so far as to say that the worst enemy of the League of Nations was the idea of the British Commonwealth. The turn towards Europe by British public opinion since 1945 has been due very largely to the transformation of the Commonwealth into something so loose and casual, and something itself involving problems even more insoluble than those of the Sudeten Germans, that it can no longer arouse the old enthusiasm and loyalty. But still it didn’t come quickly enough for Bevin to join the Schuman Plan in 1950, ¹⁸ [Ed.] “English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions.” Letter to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (9 March 1877), as quoted in Gwendolen Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, vol. II (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921), p. 130. ¹⁹ [Ed.] The several studies of “Milner’s kindergarten,” the Cliveden Set, and the Round Table group include John E. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975); Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Books in Focus, 1981); and Alexander May, “The Round Table, 1910–1966,” DPhil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1995. ²⁰ [Ed.] Here Wight alluded to Neville Chamberlain’s comment on the Sudetenland crisis: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Chamberlain, radio broadcast of September 27, 1938, in The Times (London), September 28, 1938.

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or Eden to take part in the Messina Conference in 1955. A cynic might say that we are having this conference about European Union now only because Europe has proved its success and the Commonwealth has proved itself a failure. But if Britain has been consistently isolationist in her attitude towards Europe, one must not underestimate the residual nationalism among the Six themselves, and particularly, of course, of France. France destroyed the E.D.C., and she has prevented the extension of the Common Market to include Britain and Britain’s associates. Today the European Community is represented no longer by Monnet, for the moment anyway, but by that great man with whom Monnet did not want to associate himself in the years of exile during the war. De Gaulle’s vision is a different one from that of Monnet. But we should be foolish if irritation prevented us from seeing that it is not a less noble vision. It is difficult yet to say whether de Gaulle’s memoirs will be regarded by posterity as a great book, but they do convey unmistakably the flavor and the grandeur of a great man. And his vision is the obverse of the sort of arguments which have been prevalent in England against joining Europe. They are logical, they are traditional, and their defect, if they have a defect, is the same as the defect of the British arguments—that they lack a generous flexibility and a belief that the future will iron out a lot of logical muddles. De Gaulle believes in a “Europe des patries,” a Europe in which the various fatherlands do not lose their identity, and indeed if truth be told do not lose their sovereignty. Anyhow not any more than small countries have always lost some of their sovereignty in their relationships with big countries. And of course in this Europe France is herself a big country. There is a fascinating precedent for the unification of Europe in the unification of Germany in the last century. Then, Austria and Prussia were the rivals. The question was whether Germany was going to be organized round one or the other or in some way round both. Today, in the organization of Europe, France and Britain–America are the two rivals. France plays the part of Prussia, Britain and America jointly play the part of Austria. We have learned that de Gaulle regards Britain as the stooge of America, and since the British have made so much of their national myth of the special relationship with America and the private line from Whitehall to Washington, we can hardly blame him. Bismarck’s diplomacy in the nineteenth century culminated in what was called the “little German” solution of the German problem. This was the establishment of a German Reich under the dominance of Prussia but excluding Austria. It was true that Austria was herself a Germanic empire ruled by Germans. But her interests were not in German nationalism but in the medley of peoples in the Danube valley and the Balkans, who for Bismarck were not “worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier.”²¹ ²¹ [Ed.] “Ich habe gesagt: ich werde zu irgend welcher activen Betheiligung Deutschlands an diesen Dingen nicht rathen, so lange ich in dem Ganzen fu¨r Deutschland kein Interesse sehe, welches

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In the same way, de Gaulle has chosen a “little European” solution to the task of unifying Europe. He excludes Great Britain as Bismarck excluded Austria. It is true that Britain has ideals and memories in common with France and the other countries of Europe, but fundamentally she is not a European country. Her world-wide interests and commitments make her a non-European influence within Europe, and also the spearhead of American power. Most important, the British presence in Europe would endanger the France–Germany combination. If Britain was a member of the European Community, Germany would have an alternative to her marriage with France. She could switch her affections to Britain and threaten France with isolation. In other words, two’s company and three’s none. There is realism and good sense in this vision. We must never forget that at the heart of it there is the actual achievement of ending Franco-German hostility and bringing them together in what seems an unshakeable and permanent liaison. Moreover, we must not forget that this is only the first step in de Gaulle’s plan. He sees that a Europe thus united under France–German auspices is only a fragment of the true Europe, which extends over the Western half of the Soviet Empire. As the Chinese threat to Russia grows, and so makes Russia more ready for accommodation with the West, so the possibility will grow of coming to terms with Russia about her Western frontier. And here it is de Gaulle’s Europe which has the goods to deliver: that is to say a peace treaty in which Germany will recognize for the first time since 1945 a legally agreed Eastern frontier. “Les Anglo-Saxons” have the overseas world for their domain. They are not being deprived of rightful influence. And the whole world will be a healthier place if between “les Anglo-Saxons” and the Russians there has emerged a great free united Europe able to trade on equal terms with either, and to act as reconciler and mediator between them. This is a noble vision. It has one obvious flaw, that it is unworkable in the sense that de Gaulle’s France depends for its defence on the United States. And here the parallel with Bismarck’s Prussia breaks down, because Bismarck’s united Germany was not dependent for its defence on any other power. But history in its own good time will probably weave together de Gaulle’s conceptions and Monnet’s and make of them some third thing which we cannot now envisage. I want to make a third and concluding observation about the story of European Union. It relates to the field of values. What are the ideals that Europe stands for or represents? To what end is this great new combine? We should be foolish if we answered this question in the terms of the pacifist. European Union makes no contribution to peace and the aversion of nuclear catastrophe. After 1945 there was virtually no possibility of Franco-German war again. The danger of war had shifted to another frontier. The Union of Europe only creates another giant out of auch nur—entschuldigen Sie die Derbheit des Ausdruds—die gesunden Knochen eines einzigen pommerschen Musketiers werth wa¨re.” Otto von Bismarck, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, Reichstagsprotokolle, 24 Sitzung am 5 Dezember 1876, seite 585, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/ Blatt3_k2_bsb00018384_00615.html.

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many little powers to take its place in the general international anarchy. And since this new giant is busily insisting on equipping itself with nuclear weapons one could even argue that European Union in de Gaulle’s hands increases the danger of war rather than reduces it. What then does the new Europe stand for? The usual answer is given eloquently in an article by M. Spaak: It is certainly difficult to sum up in a few words the essentials of a civilization such as Western civilization. We know that it was born in Greece, we know the great expansion given it by Rome, we know of the work of the humanists and of the nineteenth-century philosophers, we know what the world owes to the industrial revolutions and we know what the imperatives of social justice contributed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All these things go to make up Western civilization. And if one goes more deeply into the question, one finds that the essential of Western civilization is the concept it has of man himself and of his inherent dignity.²²

But we should not conceal from ourselves that there is an uncertainty about all this. Social justice, the inherent dignity of man, parliamentary democracy—are we not bound to say that these ideals have only matured fully in the countries of northern Europe and their daughter nations overseas—in the British Isles, and in Holland and in Scandinavia? If you look elsewhere, you are apt to find a much more uncertain picture. And indeed it might be said that this libertarian and egalitarian ideal in European civilisation is a minority report by European history. The greatest of European philosophers, Plato, who has influenced all subsequent civilisation, was the greatest critic of democracy. Though he certainly believed in the inherent dignity of man, he argued that this could be best institutionalised in a hierarchic society in which the simpler people who are the majority of us were governed for our own good by the more enlightened who alone can see into the essence of things. It has become fashionable in recent years to describe Plato as the first Fascist, and it has often been pointed out that his ideal found its fulfillment in the medieval Catholic Church or the Bolshevik party in Russia. Moreover, the religion which distinguishes Europe from other civilisations, Christianity, is a revealed religion. And there is a natural tendency of revealed religions to persecute and to express themselves in autocratic governments which will safeguard their monopoly of truth. M. Spaak speaks of the inherent dignity of man. How much is the inherent dignity of man recognized in Sicily today, where Dolci fights heroically against an ancient and vicious social system and the opposition of the Church and the slow and tepid benevolence of the secular authorities, against evils which would ²² [Ed.] It has not been possible to identify the source of this quotation.

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be almost incredible if they were not so well documented?²³ Or take the case of France herself, the mother of European civilisation. France is today nominally a democracy, but it is a plebiscitary democracy with many precedents in her own history and very different from what we are accustomed to. Moreover, in France there has appeared, as a result of the wars in Indo-China and Algeria, a spread of that moral practice which was an essential part of government in Germany in the 1930’s and ’40’s, but which is the exact opposite of the ideal of the inherent dignity of man: I mean the practice of torture.

²³ [Ed.] Danilo Dolci (1924–1997), sometimes called “the Gandhi of Sicily,” promoted popular education and campaigned against poverty and the Mafia.

7 Europe After 1945 “After” in this lecture means both “in” and “since.”∗ The contrast between 1945 and 1919 provides us with a starting point. There are three initial points to be made, three headings: 1. The nature of the war: the worst war yet. 2. The survival of Versailles Settlement. 3. The absence of a new peace settlement, with no conference or treaty. These circumstances, and their consequences, really embrace all post-war history.

1. The Second World War was the greatest and worst war ever Every successive war has been the greatest mankind has known ever since Thucydides.¹ This is one incontrovertible evidence of human progress. But what did this quality consist in? Casualties? The bulk was transferred from the Western to the Eastern front. The destructiveness of material civilization? But while science makes war hugely destructive, it also gives society untold recuperative powers. The Western powers went from rearmament in the Korean War in 1950 to recession in 1952 and the German economic miracle and the Rome Treaty in 1957. But it was the greatest war, not objectively, but subjectively. In politics subjectivity is the ultimate truth. Not materially (possibly) but psychologically it was the greatest war. It was the first war in which the aggressor, the dominant power, had occupied all of Europe—the first, that is, since European states had attained national selfconsciousness. The Nazis conquered and occupied all continental Europe except Spain and Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden, and the British Isles. The nearest precedent was the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon did occupy Spain and Portugal, but he did not occupy Scandinavia, the Austrian Empire, or the Balkans except for the Venetian domains and Illyria. ∗

Martin Wight presented this paper at Oxford on July 24, 1963.

¹ [Ed.] In the first paragraph of his history, Thucydides wrote that the Peloponnesian War was “the greatest . . . yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world—I had almost said of mankind.” Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: The Modern Library, 1951), p. 3. History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0008

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Hitler’s conquests were more extensive in Europe, although he did not, like Napoleon, occupy Moscow. Hitler occupied all of Europe from Leningrad to Crete, from Brittany to Ukraine. The whole continent experienced NationalSocialism: the rule of the Gestapo; the application of racial laws; and trains winding across the country loaded with slaves for labour camps, political prisoners for the concentration camps, and Jews for the gas-chambers. The whole continent also experienced, in varying degrees, the Resistance movement. And this was a highly sophisticated continent in national terms, where nations had experienced, as they had not yet in Napoleon’s time, independence and freedom. This common experience explains, as nothing else can, twin European movements after 1945: the tendency towards European unification in the West, and the acceptance—not imposition—of Communism in the East.² It has never been seriously questioned that the Second World War in Europe was worth fighting. There is a parallel between the French and German hegemonies in Europe. Each made two attempts: the first in traditional political terms (Louis XIV and the Kaiser), and then in revolutionary terms, more destructive and ranging wider and deeper. Each attempt was defeated by a Grand Alliance. But after the defeats of the traditional attempts, the question was asked if the war was really necessary. Britain changed sides and betrayed her allies in the Spanish Succession War [in 1701–1714] and 100 years later Southey could write about Blenheim “But what they fought each other for I could not well make out.”³

Likewise, immediately after the Kaiser’s War, with its frightful slaughter on the Western Front, the question began to be asked if it had been worthwhile, and would it have mattered if Germany had won? There are still eminent historians in this country who believe that it was a mistake for Britain to intervene in 1914, because the defeat of Germany only enhanced the potential ascendancy of the Russian colossus. One might compare Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War, ² [Ed.] This formulation (“the acceptance—not imposition—of Communism in the East”) is inconsistent with Martin Wight’s critical views expressed elsewhere on the legitimacy of the German Democratic Republic and other “People’s Democracies,” as he termed them in this paper. Indeed, at a later point in this paper he stated that the Peoples’ Democracies “were based on no principle of legitimacy known to Western political philosophy.” Stalin himself said, “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.” Joseph Stalin, April 1945, quoted in Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 114. ³ [Ed.] Robert Southey, “After Blenheim,” a poem written in 1796 about the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. See Wight’s comments on this poem in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 228–9, 314n.

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which never refers to war-aims or to what the Tommies at Passchendaele and [Field Marshal Douglas] Haig believed that the war was about.⁴ Nobody ever seriously questioned that the war against Napoleon was necessary nor that the war against Hitler was necessary. These wars, psychologically, opened a new epoch.

2. The Versailles frontiers remained This is a positive statement, and the opposite side of the coin to the negative circumstance that there was no agreed peace settlement. Are we to say, simply, that because there wasn’t a peace conference, therefore the Versailles map was left unaltered, faute de mieux, pending a peace settlement? No: The Versailles frontiers remained because they were acceptable. 1945 confirmed 1919. We are accustomed by historical atlases to think that every General War leads to a reshufflement of the European map. Think of the changes of frontiers between 1648 and 1815, and between 1815 and 1919. 1945 suggests that in 1919 Europe reached its final territorial organization, at least so long as nation-states are the unit. This is a belated vindication of the Wilsonian settlement. There were one or two exceptions, and worth noting. In Western Europe, Germany’s frontiers were put back “as you were” of 1939. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France again. Schleswig remained divided between Germany and Denmark along the plebiscite line of 1920.⁵ The Saar was again detached from Germany. France was hoping to acquire or control this industrial power-house. The attempt to regularise this detachment in 1954 by “Europeanising” the Saar under a special statute was rejected by a plebiscite in 1955, confirming the plebiscite of 1935, and in 1956 the Saar was again incorporated in Germany. Italy’s frontiers were also “as you were,” including the Brenner frontier. Hitler had annexed the South Tirol in 1943, after Mussolini’s fall and Italy’s surrender to the Allies. This German province was returned to Italy in a flagrant violation of selfdetermination. In Southeastern Europe (south of the Carpathians and the Danube), Yugoslavia, which the Axis had taken to bits, was put together again including Macedonia, the contested territory. Yugoslavia acquired Venezia Giulia, which the 1919 settlement, by a crying injustice, had given to Italy, placing half a million Yugoslavs under Italian rule. Rumania recovered Transylvania from Hungary, reversing the Vienna Award of August 1940, when Ribbentrop and Ciano had partitioned it, giving twothirds to Hungary. Bulgaria retained, from Rumania, Southern Dobrudja, which ⁴ [Ed.] The stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War premiered in London in March 1963. ⁵ H. W. V. Temperley, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (London: H. Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1920–1924), vol. II, p. 205.

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the inhabitants probably desired. Carpatho-Ruthenia, the tail of Czechoslovakia, was united with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, placing all Ukrainians for the first time in a single state. Czechoslovakia acquired a trans-Danubian bridgehead from Hungary, opposite Bratislava. These provisions tidied up and confirmed the Versailles Settlement, especially its supposed injustices to Hungary. Northeastern Europe (north of the Carpathians and the Danube) saw the great changes, but these too were largely on Wilsonian lines. Poland’s Eastern Ukrainian frontiers were fixed roughly along the Curzon Line, which Poles had spurned in 1919 and 1920. On the north and west, Poland reacquired Poznan and Pomorze, which had been part of the “Polish Corridor,” and acquired Danzig and Stettin, a good Baltic coastline, the southern half of East Prussia, and Pomerania and Silesia up to the Oder-Neisse line. This was a gross violation of national justice. But historic justice takes the form rather of retribution, and Germany’s treatment of Poland had not given her claim to anything else. Russia’s frontiers showed the greatest change. Russia acquired: (i) Petsamo from Finland, which had been Finland’s Arctic Ocean port, and thereby gained a common frontier with Norway; (ii) the Karelian isthmus and Viipuri (Viborg) from Finland, which were approaches to Leningrad; (iii) the three Baltic states, occupied in 1940;⁶ (iv) the northern half of East Prussia, plus Ko¨nigsberg; (v) the Ukrainian and White Russian half of Poland, up to the Curzon Line; (vi) Carpatho-Ruthenia from Czechoslovakia; and (vii) Bessarabia from Rumania. To the last three acquisitions—Bessarabia, Poland’s eastern lands and Ruthenia—Russia had national claims. To the Baltic States and the Finnish acquisitions, Russia had historical claims as they roughly reinstituted Russian imperial frontiers. The annexation of the Baltic States (after their reconquest from Germany) was the supreme violation of self-determination not yet recognised by the Western Powers. The annexation of half of East Prussia rested only on the right of conquest. These territorial gains established Soviet mastery of Eastern Europe. (i) The Soviet Union had a common frontier with Norway. (ii) The USSR also had a Baltic coastline from Viborg to Ko¨nigsberg; and the Baltic became a sea with one great power on its shores. (iii) The acquisition of Ruthenia separated Poland from Rumania, and gave her a common frontier with Hungary and an avenue across the Carpathians to the Central Danubian plain. (iv) The acquisition of Bessarabia brought Russia to the mouth of the Danube, making her a riparian power again for the first time since 1918. Thus the territorial settlement of 1945–1946 was doubly ambiguous: the Versailles nationalities’ map of Europe was broadly confirmed and even improved but ⁶ Their internal boundaries altered. Vilna, which Poland had seized from Lithuania in 1920, was now given to Lithuania (although predominantly White Russian).

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with Russia reacquiring many Tsarist frontiers; and these Soviet gains seemed to some not reacquisition simply but a general territorial advance like Louis XIV’s at Nymwegen in 1678 or the French Directory’s at Campo Formio in 1797 or Russia’s menacing ascendancy in 1815, which nearly wrecked the Congress of Vienna. Transfers of population were made compulsorily: the obverse and counterpart of defining frontiers in nationally mixed regions. The Versailles Settlement had refused to sanction this (except for the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia), and pursued minorities protection arrangements instead. Now the uprooting of peoples was undertaken on a large scale. Nazi Germany herself had set precedents. Seven and a half million Germans were driven out of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia by Poland. Two and three-quarter million Sudeten Germans were expelled from the Sudetenland by Czechoslovakia. Another 200,000 Germans were forced from Hungary. Poles were removed from east of the Curzon Line. Four million Germans in Rumania were deported to the Soviet Union for labour in 1951. Estonians, Letts, and Lithuanians were deported en masse to Siberia to destroy nationalities. All this confirmed and fixed the nationalities’ map of Europe.

3. There was no peace settlement If one takes a broad view of European history, this is really the most extraordinary circumstance about Europe after 1945. There was of course a de facto settlement: there was an accumulation of ad hoc decisions by the Allied Powers, plus an accumulation of unilateral decisions and actions in consequence of which, by the end of 1945, an administrative order had emerged throughout Europe. But there was no de jure settlement, no legal pacification. We are accustomed to think of the Congress of Westphalia, the Treaty of Utrecht, the Congress of Vienna, and the Peace Conference of Paris as majestic milestones along the road of European history when Europe took stock of herself, reconsidered her basic principles, and redistributed her power and resources. Now there was none. The succession ended. The Versailles Settlement appeared to have been the last, and Europe had to get along without another. And we still, today, have no peace treaty with Germany.⁷ The first qualification to the absence of a peace settlement is the Potsdam Conference, which was held from 17 July to 2 August 1945. This has been called “the nearest thing to a general peace settlement that the Powers were able to achieve.”⁸ ⁷ [Ed.] The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, also known as the Two Plus Four Agreement, was concluded in 1990 by the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and the four powers that had occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War: France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. ⁸ F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 352.

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This was the last meeting of the three heads of the three Great Allied Powers (excluding France) and it did agree in a fashion on principles for treating prostrate Germany, especially regarding reparations and economic policy, and on the new boundaries of Poland. However, as William McNeill has observed, “many of the agreements published in the final communiqué were merely agreements to discuss disagreements further through a new Council of Foreign Ministers.”⁹ The second qualification was the Paris Peace Conference, from 29 July to 15 October 1946. It was a peace settlement with the small Axis Powers, Germany’s former allies: Italy, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Finland. It was a ghost of the great conference of 1919. It had the same Foreign Office representatives, e.g. Arnold J. Toynbee—showing a passion for continuity in Britain. But how different it was. Heads of governments themselves did not attend. The conference was in effect a standing commission of the Council of Foreign Ministers, presided over erratically by Byrnes, Molotov and Bevin in the intervals of their altercations pursued in London, Moscow, and New York.¹⁰ But there is a much more important qualification to be made. There is a much more important contrast with 1919. It is an axiom of international politics that a successful peace conference simply registers an existing balance of power. In 1945 there was a new and stable balance of power. Europe was partitioned across the middle between Soviet power and Anglo-American power, and this transcended in importance both the confirmation of the Versailles frontiers and the absence of a peace settlement. It transcended the Versailles frontiers in importance in that the national map of Europe was now receding into the past. Power no longer rested with the nationstates. They were slowly becoming transformed into local government units within vaster structures. In Western Europe, there would be an American structure, soon to be organised, after a year’s hesitation, by the Marshall Plan and the O.E.E.C.,¹¹ economically, and by NATO politically, later the W.E.U.¹² In Eastern Europe, there was a Soviet structure, organised immediately through actual Soviet domination and the Cominform (the Communist Information Bureau, initially sited at Belgrade in 1947) coordinating the ruling parties in the new People’s Democracies.

⁹ William Hardy McNeill, America, Britain, & Russia: Their Co-Operation and Conflict, 1941–1946 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 607. ¹⁰ [Ed.] Ernest Bevin was the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from July 27, 1945 to March 9, 1951. James F. Byrnes was the U.S. Secretary of State from July 3, 1945 to January 21, 1947. Vyacheslav Molotov was the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs from May 3, 1939 to March 4, 1949 and from March 5, 1953 to June 1, 1956. ¹¹ [Ed.] The Organisation for European Economic Cooperation was established in 1948 to assist in the administration of the U.S. Marshall Plan aid for European reconstruction. It was superseded by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in 1961. ¹² [Ed.] NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, was founded in 1949. The Western European Union was established in 1954 on the basis of the 1948 Brussels Treaty. Italy and West Germany acceded to the Brussels Treaty, and the establishment of the WEU and its institutions helped to make possible West Germany’s membership in NATO in 1955.

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The Warsaw Pact followed in 1955 in answer to the W.E.U.¹³ The Belgium and Bulgaria of 1950 were quite different political animals from the Belgium and Bulgaria of 1925. It transcended the absence of a peace settlement in importance because if one had to choose between legal pacification without a balance of power and a balance of power without a legal pacification, the latter is the more sensible choice. It has often been observed that the weakness of the Versailles Settlement in 1919 was not in any supposed injustice of the treaties but in its having been framed without the cooperation and over the heads of the two inextinguishable Great Powers of Eastern Europe—Germany, prostrate through defeat, and Russia, prostrate through defeat, revolution, and civil war—and that when these Powers recovered their strength, the whole of the Versailles Settlement was bound to be called into question. After 1919 Europe had a highly intelligent, even doctrinaire, intellectual and legal structure—a redrawing of the map on the basis of national selfdetermination—but a balance of power so unstable as to have been no equilibrium at all. After 1945 Europe had a most uncertain, disputable, ramshackle legal structure—full of anomalies, disagreements, and lacunae, with such territorial idiocies as the position of Berlin—but a thoroughly firm distribution of power, which has become firmer with the years. The simplest test of its stability is a historical comparison. We are now [in 1963] 18 years’ distance from 1945. This is that notorious half generation which generally brings revision to a territorial settlement. The corresponding year after 1919 is 1937, and after 1815 it is 1833, after 1713 it is 1731, and after 1659 it is 1677. By contrast with these examples of a dissolving settlement, we have today the settlement solidified and symbolized in the Berlin Wall.¹⁴

4. The European state-system came to an end All this could be summed up simply by saying that we had reached the end of Europe. It was the end of a European state-system that had begun in 1453 or 1494 and which had been the mainspring of world history for 500 years.¹⁵ ¹³ [Ed.] For an authoritative account, see Vojtech Mastny, “The Warsaw Pact as History,” in Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne (eds), Cardboard Castle?: An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005). ¹⁴ [Ed.] The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) began to construct the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961. On 9 November 1989 the GDR government indicated that its citizens were free to travel to West Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). ¹⁵ [Ed.] See Martin Wight, “The Origins of Our States-System: Chronological Limits,” in Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, in association with the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1977), pp. 129–52.

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This had been a brilliant period—vital, ebullient, unstable, restless, dynamic, and Faustian. Its achievements depended (as with the Greek city-states) on the organisation of the state-system: (1) a multiplicity of states, especially the historic Great Powers, (2) a succession of aspirants to hegemony, and (3) a balance of power to preserve independence. The role of maintaining the balance depended on peripheral powers: Russia and Britain/USA. Now the last daemonic attempt to dominate Europe with resources based in Europe yet demanding a break out from Europe had been crushed by resources from the Mississippi valley and beyond the Urals. Europe was a burnt-out volcano-crater, a vast puddle of dereliction between two non-European Powers. No European recovery, or economic miracle, could raise the old European Great Powers again to the stature of the new Great Powers able to determine the game of hegemony and balance. Europe had ceased to be the seat of the Great Powers club. This was now transferred to the whole world where the game of balance and hegemony would be played out on a larger stage. Europe had become reduced, on this new map of power, to an enlarged cockpit, comparable to the role of the Netherlands and Italy in the European states-system. Europe had become a vital buffer zone, and no longer a source of independent power. The question of the location of the United Nations arose. Where was the new World Instrument to be seated? Why not Europe? There was a debate in the Preparatory Commission in Church House, London, in December 1945. The old diplomacy made the location of the conference a prestige matter. Geneva? But there was the same desire to break with the past as seen in the UN terminology. Brussels? Vienna? Europe was nearer more capitals than the United States. A small power was preferable to a Permanent Member of the Security Council upsetting the balance between Permanent Members. Britain and France wanted Europe. China and Russia wanted the USA. What were Russia’s motives? A Ukrainian, supporting a UN site in the Preparatory Commission, said that his mind was decided by the argument of a Greek delegate that Europe was sick and that the UN therefore should be in Europe, near the seat of trouble. This was a curious negative admission that Russia wanted Europe to remain sick, and a seat of trouble.¹⁶

¹⁶ [Ed.] In another work, Wight noted that the idea of establishing the UN headquarters “in the territory of a great power” drew criticism, and that “most of the arguments against appealed to the balance of power.” However, these arguments were rejected as “obsolete, since the concept underlying the United Nations was collective security.” Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), pp. 179, 262.

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5. The period of pre-occupation with the stability of the new Balance of Power in the reduced European cockpit lasted from 1945 to 1950 Was the 1945 balance of power stable? You remember that for many years we didn’t think it so. The Western Powers lived in daily fear of a Russian steam-roller moving forward to conquer Western Europe. There were calculations of how many days it would take the Red Army to reach the Atlantic. Before the war ended Churchill was instructing Montgomery to store arms captured from surrendering Germans since they might be needed against the Russians. The Russians themselves had a corresponding fear that the Western Powers would roll forward again—first subverting Peoples’ Democracies, and then renewed German aggression (the bulk of Germany being under Allied control), all backed by the A-bomb. This belief in the instability of the balance of power was expressed positively in an appeal to the unity of Europe. The Western Powers talked of liberating Eastern Europe at least up till the [U.S.] Presidential election of 1952, as if gestures could unseat Peoples’ Democracies which were based on no principle of legitimacy known to Western political philosophy. A vestige or rudiment of this is the continued Western refusal to accord recognition to the German Democratic Republic (which more than any of them violates Western principles of legitimacy).¹⁷ Correspondingly, Russia seems to have believed that Western Europe could be subverted. Hence the importance of the Communist Party in Italy and France till 1948, when it became clear that neither by strikes nor elections could they take the countries over. Russia did take over Czechoslovakia in 1948, straightening the boundary of her half of Europe. Russia promoted war in Greece till 1949. The World Peace Movement was a Communist front organization, and Stalin’s alternative to the UN. It originated at the Wroclaw Conference of Intellectuals in 1948 and launched the “Partisans for Peace,” who were wholly anti-American. Other milestones were Rome and Paris in 1949 and the Stockholm Peace Appeal in 1950. Plans for London or Sheffield in the autumn of 1950 were foiled by the Attlee government’s refusal of visas.¹⁸ Other events were held in Berlin and Vienna in 1950. Frédéric Joliot-Curie urged a Treaty of Peace with a united and demilitarized Germany.¹⁹ The claim was that there were 562 million signatures to the Peace Appeal, representing a fourth of the human race. There were 7 million signatures in France, as a result of street-bystander collection. There was an attempt ¹⁷ [Ed.] It should be recalled that Wight wrote this in 1963. The West German government’s new Ostpolitik in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to the recognition of the GDR by the principal Western powers in 1973–1974. ¹⁸ [Ed.] The Korean War had begun in June 1950. ¹⁹ [Ed.] Frédéric Joliot-Curie and his wife Irène won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. He was a prominent Communist, and the Soviet Union awarded him the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951.

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to organize revolutionary discontent in Europe with post-war shortages, and a big Vienna Congress in 1952. Claiming that it was a mass-movement fizzled out with Stalin’s death [in March 1953]. The partition of Germany has ever since 1945 been referred to as the chief source of instability in Europe. It is a flagrant violation of the principle of national self-determination, undoing the greatest achievement of the nineteenth century. It is a flagrant violation of strategic good sense for the West to have an indefensible enclave in Soviet territory (an indefensible enclave [Berlin] that they have nevertheless managed to defend under great pressure for nearly 20 years). The partition of Germany is the price to be paid for the stability of Europe. Is it too great a price?

6. The period of preoccupation with organizing the separate halves of bisected Europe lasted from 1950 to 1960 Of course these two periods overlapped, and there were two intertwining tendencies. First one was recessive, and then the other. Let us confine ourselves to the organising of the Western half. (The concept of Europe contracts to “Western Europe.” ) The organisation of Eastern Europe was provided by the presiding Great Power. The organisation of Western Europe was tactfully left by the presiding Great Power to the states involved. Western Europe after liberation had positive assets. The occupation and devastation provided an incentive to rebuild and modernise. The surplus labour force included German refugees and expellees, as well as the Italian pool of unemployment in the south and Sicily. Key leaders (including Monnet, Spaak, and de Gaulle) had a common experience in exile. The rival conceptions have been between those who recognize (such as Monnet and Spaak) and those who deny (such as Eden and de Gaulle) that the European state-system is finished. These views coexisted in exile in London during the war. Monnet was the father and founder of the Common Market, the European Economic Community. Now 74, he moves unobtrusively from capital to capital.²⁰ He is received without fuss but with the utmost respect by the President in Washington and the Prime Minister in London. He still holds no official position in the European Commission. He was in charge of coordinating Anglo-French supplies from America in London in the Second World War—the same job he had created for himself in his late 20s in the First World War. He came to London after the Fall of France and proposed the plan for an Anglo-French union, and drafted Churchill’s statement about it. He urged FDR to provide war-materials without bothering about the cost and coined the phrase “we must be the great arsenal of ²⁰ [Ed.] Jean Monnet lived from 1888 to 1979.

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democracy.”²¹ He kept apart from de Gaulle in London. In style and conviction he was the opposite of de Gaulle. It was a question of a discreet and self-effacing bureaucrat vs. a flamboyant and bombastic statesman, of international cooperation vs. national grandeur. He did not join the Free French but became a British civil servant till the Liberation of Paris. Paul-Henri Spaak, a former Belgian Foreign Minister, spent the war in London.²² He went back to arrange the Benelux Customs Union, and the Western Union, sometimes called Spaakistan.²³ He then became Monnet’s political counterpart and mouthpiece. They cooperated in pursuing the 1949 Agreement for an International Authority for the Ruhr, which was seen as the economic seat of German militarism, because it represented the greatest concentration of economic power (coal and steel) in Europe. The next project was to bring together France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg in the Ruhr-Lorraine-Saar-Luxembourg steel cartel or combine via the 1950 Schuman Plan (drafted by Monnet). The European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 included Italy and the Netherlands too. The six countries of the European Coal and Steel Community agreed at the 1955 Messina Conference to commission the Spaak Report, which led to the European Economic Community set up by the Rome Treaty in 1957. Britain had shown no political creativity in world affairs since 1914. It had no share in organizing the European Union. It would not join the European Coal and Steel Community, and it would not attend the Messina Conference. Britain was ready to believe that “Europe was ended” as far as other historic Great Powers were concerned, but not as far as herself might be concerned. She had a special relationship with Washington as well as the Commonwealth. The volte-face of the [1961] decision to apply to join the European Economic Community was due to economic stagnation and the desire for a new Conservative policy.

²¹ [Ed.] FDR used this phrase in his radio broadcast fireside chat on national security, Washington, D.C., 29 December 1940. ²² [Ed.] Wight wrote the word “Munichite” here without developing the point. Wight was probably referring to Spaak’s insistence on a policy of “independence” and “neutrality” in the years before the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. In his memoirs Spaak wrote, “Everything humanly possible had been done to improve Belgium’s chances of avoiding being dragged into a war in which her own interests were not directly involved.” Paul-Henri Spaak, The Continuing Battle: Memoirs of a European 1936–1966, trans. Henry Fox (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), p. 14. According to a biographer, “the Spaak of the late ‘thirties showed himself to be a Chamberlainite and a Munichite” owing to his determination to maintain a policy of neutrality that might keep Belgium out of the impending war. Jakob Herman Huizinga, Mr. Europe: A Political Biography of Paul Henri Spaak (New York: Praeger, 1961), p. 86. ²³ [Ed.] Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom established a defensive alliance known as the Western Union, or the Brussels Treaty Organization, via the Brussels Treaty signed on 17 March 1948.

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De Gaulle is the man above all others who does not believe that Europe is finished. He believes in a “Europe des patries” where the various fatherlands do not lose their identity, nor indeed their sovereignty. There is a fascinating precedent for de Gaulle’s theory of European unity in the unification of Germany in the nineteenth century. Then, Austria and Prussia were rival uniters. Today, in the organization of Western Europe, America/Britain and France are rivals. France plays the part of Prussia, while the United States and Britain play the part of Austria. (De Gaulle regards Britain as the stooge of America; and since the British have made so much of their national myth of a “special relationship” and private Whitehall-Washington line, we can scarcely blame him.) Bismarck’s diplomacy in the nineteenth century culminated in a “little German,” or Kleindeutsch, solution of the German question—that is, a German Reich dominated by Prussia, excluding Austria. Similarly, de Gaulle has chosen a “little European” solution to the task of unifying Europe. He excludes Great Britain as Bismarck excluded Austria. Britain is fundamentally not European as Austria was fundamentally not a German power. Britain has world-wide commitments and interests as Austria had Slav interests in the Danube valley and in the Balkans, which for Bismarck were “not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier.”²⁴ Moreover, if Britain were in the E.E.C., Germany would have an alternative to marriage with France. She could switch her affections to Britain and threaten France with isolation. In other words, “two is company, three is none.” There is realism and good sense in de Gaulle’s vision. At its heart is the actual achievement of ending Franco-German hostility and bringing them into what seems an unshakable partnership. But this is only de Gaulle’s first step. This Western Europe is only a fragment of the true Europe which stretches to the Urals and includes the Western half of the Soviet Empire. As the Chinese threat to Russia grows, the possibility of making Russia come to terms about her Western frontier will grow and here de Gaulle’s Europe has goods to deliver—a peace treaty in which Germany for the first time will recognise a legally agreed eastern frontier. “Les Anglo-Saxons” have the overseas world for their domain, and the whole world will be healthier if between “les Anglo-Saxons” and the Russians there emerges a great free united Europe able to trade on equal terms with either and to be the reconciler and mediator between them. It is a noble vision. The one obvious flaw is that it is unworkable. De Gaulle’s France depends for its defence on the USA. There is no true parallel with Bismarck, because Bismarck’s Prussia was not dependent on any other power. It was itself

²⁴ [Ed.] Otto von Bismarck, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags, Reichstagsprotokolle, 24 Sitzung am 5 Dezember 1876, p. 585, http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt3_k2_bsb00018384_ 00615.html (accessed May 21, 2012).

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economically and militarily the most vigorous and powerful state among those it was engaged with. After all, it defeated Austria in war in order to expel Austria from Germany and impose a Kleindeutsch unification. France could not do this to Britain, let alone to the USA, to impose a “little European” version of Europe. De Gaulle may actually see this, because he is a great man, a deep man, a subtle man.

Conclusion To recapitulate, the Second World War was the last struggle of one of Europe’s historic Great Powers for the hegemony of Europe. This cannot recur. The absence of a peace settlement underlines this finality. The Second World War ended by two great extra-European powers partitioning the aggressor—an unprecedented circumstance. She remains partitioned and therefore no peace treaty with her is possible. The European state-system is finished. Europe is now only a pocket in world politics. Therefore the European union, though in a sense it begins a new chapter and is certainly exciting and sympathetic, has limited international importance. It cannot produce a Third Force equal to the great World Powers for obvious reasons underlined by last week’s Test Ban Treaty.²⁵ For all that can be said about the technological and economic progress of the European Economic Community, it is, in historical perspective, a mutual benefit society for old folk, powers that have retired from the world stage. The Union of Europe is only possible now because it comes too late.

²⁵ [Ed.] Wight was evidently referring to the start of the Moscow negotiations for the Partial Test Ban Treaty on 15 July 1963. The PTBT banned test detonations of nuclear warheads in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space, thereby confining tests to underground sites. The Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the PTBT on August 5, 1963, and it entered into force on 10 October 1963.

8 British Policy in the Middle East I When you did me the honour of inviting me to speak to this Club, I chose the subject of British policy in the Middle East because I hoped to get something clear in my own mind, to find some answer to the question, what has been wrong with Britain’s Middle Eastern policy?∗ For years past, as one calamity has succeeded another, the breakdown of the Palestine mandate, the nationalisation of Abadan, the sacking of Glubb Pasha, the seizure of the Suez Canal Company, one has read articles in the British press proclaiming that Britain’s policy in the Middle East is in ruins and that the Foreign Office must find another—articles in papers of all political complexions, Conservative as well as Labour, Spectator as well as New Statesman. I wanted to get clear in my own mind just why it is in ruins, when it broke down, and what alternative policy was possible.

II I had another reason for choosing the subject. The Suez crisis, beginning when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company on 26 July [1956], has had an extraordinary effect on British party politics. For a generation past, the Conservative Party has been a party without a foreign policy. The last Conservative achievement in foreign policy was negotiating the Locarno treaties in 1925. After that, a nullity, not even imperial nostalgia, except in the lunatic fringe Beaverbrook Press—only imperial sloth.¹ There followed the years of appeasement, when a Conservative government forgot the principle of the balance of power and sacrificed one position to Hitler after another in order to stave off a war which they made inevitable. ∗ Martin Wight presented this paper to the International Relations Club, University of Chicago, November 30, 1956.

¹ [Ed.] The Beaverbrook Press consisted mainly of the Daily Express, the Evening Standard, and the Sunday Express, newspapers with extensive circulations in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Lord Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken (1879–1964), owned or effectively controlled these newspapers and influenced their editorial policies. See A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972).

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0009

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In these years, the Liberal and Labour parties, traditionally the parties of international idealism, stepped into the vacant role and became also the parties of national interest, because national interest was now bound up with the balance of power under its new guise of collective security. The Churchillian years in 1940–1945 don’t alter the picture. All foreign policy was reduced to winning the war (and Churchill made grave mistakes). Moreover, Churchill was not a true Conservative. He was really a liberal, distrusted by Conservatives, and, like Eisenhower, was a talisman of victory for a largely unreconstructed party. After the war, foreign policy was made by Labour, i.e., by Bevin, who came into office during the Potsdam Conference;² and the same foreign policy was taken over by the Conservatives when they returned to power in 1951. It was a bipartisan policy. When Labour first developed it, the Conservatives cooperated; and when the Conservatives continued it, Labour cooperated, with marginal outbursts of Socialist lunacy, as over German rearmament. One of its features was the abandonment of overseas commitments. If Labour withdrew from India, it was Churchill’s government which in 1954 withdrew from the Suez Canal Zone. But the seizure of the Suez Canal Company ended this phase of foreign policy and produced spontaneously a quite extraordinary reaction to historical attitudes. First of all the reel was wound back, in a flash, to the Boer War. The first debate in the House of Commons after Nasser’s act showed the Conservatives, after 30 years of aberration, resuming their historic role as the exclusive champion of Britain’s national interest. Gaitskell was momentarily acting the part of the Liberal Imperialists, Rosebery or Grey redivivus.³ The critics and doubters were almost as few and discredited as the Little Englanders were. But as opinion crystallized and settled in succeeding weeks, the reel flashed back another generation. The Conservatives were settling with more assurance into the robes and arguments of Disraeli and Salisbury.⁴ Gaitskell was trimming his sails to lead the large body of Liberal–Labour opinion which manifested itself in the historic position of Gladstonian liberalism—as supporters of internationalism. ² [Ed.] The Potsdam Conference (July 17–August 2, 1945) brought together the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States to make decisions about the occupation of Germany (which had surrendered on May 8, 1945), and other matters, including Indochina and Poland. Stalin represented the Soviet Union, and Truman the United States. Owing to Labour’s victory in the 1945 general election, Clement Attlee replaced Winston Churchill as Prime Minister on July 26, 1945. Attlee had participated in the Potsdam Conference from the outset with Churchill, and assumed leadership of the British delegation as the new Prime Minister. Attlee chose Ernest Bevin to serve as Foreign Secretary, and Bevin participated in the final days of the Potsdam Conference. ³ [Ed.] The Liberal Imperialists, a circle in the Liberal Party at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century, supported British imperialism and a strong national military posture in conjunction with the Liberal agenda on social reform. Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister in 1894–1895. Sir Edward Grey was Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916. ⁴ [Ed.] Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) and Lord Salisbury (1830–1903) championed the power, prestige, and enlargement of the British Empire. Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) was Leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 1963.

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We went right back to the classical foreign policy debate of the 1870s, the Midlothian campaign, the Bulgarian atrocities, and resumed that debate almost in its own terms. For example, in a protest meeting at Holborn Hall on 13 August [1956], organized by the Suez Emergency Committee of the Labour Party, the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor, the last of the English radicals, used as his own the words of the great Oxford Liberal historian, E. A. Freeman, at a similar protest meeting against Disraeli’s policy in 1876: “Perish the interests of England. Perish our Dominion of the East, rather than that we should do one stroke against the right.”⁵

Opinion was deeply divided: in ordinary social relationships you could quickly reach the point where it was impossible to continue discussing foreign policy and you had deliberately to change the subject. Strangers spoke to one another in trains. I left England on September 15 [1956], and obviously the division has deepened since then. It was an interesting experience to live through because one saw it less as being a problem in foreign policy than as a study in national psychology. You can only understand British policy over the Suez crisis if you can sympathize with (I don’t mean “approve”) the deep emotion by which it was governed. Since 1945 there had been so many abdications, withdrawals, and evacuations, that one began to marvel at the placidity of the old lion, at the maturity—or was it the apathy?—of the British people. No Great Power in history has ever given up so much, in so short a time, so gracefully. I remember coming down the Strand in a bus in March [1956] and seeing on a newspaper placard that Jordan had sacked Glubb, and thinking to myself, “Now there’s bound to be an explosion.” But there wasn’t. Eden was conciliatory and moderate in the House of Commons, recognizing Jordan’s right.⁶ Then Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company and the flashpoint was reached. A chord was struck, memories were stirred—Disraeli, Kipling’s “East of Suez,”⁷ the lifeline of Empire, how Churchill in Britain’s darkest hour in the summer of 1940 sent two divisions out of Britain to protect the Middle East—and the old lion reacted at last. ⁵ [Ed.] Freeman’s statement on this occasion is usually quoted as follows: “Well, if it be so, let duty come first and interest second, and perish the interests of England, perish our dominion in India, rather than that we should strike one blow or speak one word on behalf of the wrong against the right.” Freeman cited in W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L., LL.D. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895), vol. II, 113. ⁶ [Ed.] In March 1956 King Hussein of Jordan dismissed Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb, widely known as Glubb Pasha, the commander of the Arab Legion, a military force in Jordan then subsidized by the United Kingdom. King Hussein replaced Glubb and eight other British officers in the Arab Legion with Jordanians. ⁷ [Ed.] Rudyard Kipling popularized the phrase “East of Suez” in his poem “Mandalay,” first published in 1892. The phrase has long functioned as shorthand for British interests east of the Suez Canal, extending as far as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia.

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I think the arguments about the vital interests at stake, though of course they had their validity, were subordinate to this profound emotion. Let me give you one illustration of it. The Times (the paper which insists on its prerogative to be called, not the London Times, but The Times) is always punctilious in the courtesies of address. Until September 3, 1939, it spoke of Herr Hitler. Until June 1940, it spoke of Signor Mussolini. Until his death it spoke of Marshal Stalin. But the morning after the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, it had a leading article in which it denounced “Nasser.” This was virtually a declaration of war by Printing House Square, and it was as striking as a profane oath from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Perhaps this should have been a warning. It was an interesting experience to live through—and I say “interesting” because very few people indeed thought it possible that the government should actually go to war. In its first issue after the Government had gone to war, The Observer (approximately the Sunday Manchester Guardian) began its leader thus: We wish to make an apology. Five weeks ago we remarked that, although we knew our Government would not make a military attack in defiance of its solemn international obligations, people abroad might think otherwise. The events of last week have proved us completely wrong: if we misled anyone, at home or abroad, we apologise unreservedly. We had not realised that our Government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.⁸

It was an interesting experience, just because one did not see it as alarming: the Mediterranean build-up seemed to be only an expensive adjunct to diplomatic pressure, and one could live through it with some degree of detachment.

III Well, as I say, when I thought of giving you a talk on British policy in the Middle East, these were the questions and experiences which I wanted to think out for myself. That was before British policy in the Middle East had brought us to the verge of World War III. This dramatic dénouement has obviously ended a chapter, and British policy in the Middle East is henceforward going to be largely different from what it has been in the past. ⁸ “Eden,” The Observer, 4 November 1956. [Ed.] The Manchester Guardian became The Guardian in 1959.

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Next year Aneurin Bevan will be Foreign Secretary, and British policy will acquire a new accent.⁹ But it is perhaps still worth while getting it into perspective, asking what went wrong, why it is in ruins, and whether things could have worked out differently. It is possible to argue that the whole story was inevitable, and this argument, which when it is advanced by politicians to excuse their actions the historian must always treat with the utmost skepticism, has a peculiar cogency here, because of the intractability of the problems with which Britain has been grappling. But let us provisionally disallow it. It is also possible to argue that British policy is not in ruins and that out of the present imbroglio something which has been aimed at will at last be gathered. This of course is the position of the British cabinet today. I, for one, don’t believe it. I don’t expect you do, and one wonders if they really do. That is to say, something stable may emerge out of the present imbroglio. It depends on the United States. But if it does emerge, it will not be attributable to constructive, purposive British statesmanship. I am not a spokesman of the British Information Services. I can give you the satisfaction which a Middle Western audience will always have in hearing an Englishman confess that England has made a colossal blunder. But perhaps a University of Chicago audience will not be offended if I add my belief that the State Department has some share of the blame. Britain’s Middle Eastern policy is in ruins. I imagine we can agree on this. What went wrong?

IV What were Britain’s interests in the Middle East which her policy has failed to protect? You can remember them conveniently by two very similar transactions which illustrate the heyday of capitalist imperialism. One is famous, Disraeli’s purchase of the Khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal Company in 1875. The other is less celebrated: the Asquith Government’s purchase of controlling shares in the Anglo Persian Oil Company in 1914. In about 1906, the Royal Navy began to turn over to oil fuelling, and an anxious search began for sources of petroleum where Britain would not have to compete in the open market. ⁹ [Ed.] Wight’s forecast proved to be mistaken. Aneurin Bevan was the Labour Party’s shadow Foreign Secretary in 1956–1959, and Labour held the lead in opinion polls over the Conservative Party in the wake of the Suez Crisis. However, the popularity of the Conservatives revived under Harold Macmillan, the successor to Anthony Eden, and the Conservatives were returned to power with an increased majority in the October 1959 general election.

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The Anglo-Persian oil transaction was completed just before the First World War. It was the achievement of Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, giving Britain oil resources under her own control. The assumption of course was that Britain would continue to command the seas and continue to control the canal. These two transactions together produced the great complex of material interest which was Britain’s stake in the Middle East. It is worth remembering these two transactions together, because as Nasser has undone the first, so Mossadegh undid the second when he nationalized Iranian oil in 1951.¹⁰ The Abadan crisis produced the nearest thing in Britain to the emotional explosion of the Suez crisis.¹¹ The Labour Government’s refusal to react forcibly produced the nearest thing to the breakdown of bipartisan policy. Punch had a cartoon in which “Abadan” was inscribed beside “Munich.” But the Abadan crisis was settled after three years by negotiation with the good offices of Herbert Hoover Jr. The contrast with the Suez crisis is instructive. Of course the Abadan crisis was less serious: 1. Mossadegh was a less formidable statesman personally than Nasser. 2. Iran is not an Arab country, and the reverberations of Arab nationalism were less intense. 3. Iran was more susceptible to the Russian danger than any Arab country and therefore less disposed to push a quarrel with Britain to extreme lengths. 4. The Abadan crisis was primarily an economic issue, where the USA was prepared to play her part. Yet the settlement of the Abadan crisis does provide some standard by which to judge the handling of the Suez crisis, and some index of difference in foreign policy between a Labour and a Conservative government. Herbert Morrison is generally reckoned a failure at the Foreign Office but perhaps in retrospect he will be kindlier judged.¹² ¹⁰ [Ed.] Mohammad Mossadegh (1882–1967) was Iran’s Prime Minister in 1951–1953. The spelling of his name by Wight—Mossadek—has been here replaced by one commonly used today. ¹¹ [Ed.] The Abadan crisis arose with Iran’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in March 1951. The crisis persisted through the British–U.S. coup d’état ousting Mossadegh in August 1953. It was resolved a year later, in August 1954, when Herbert Hoover Jr., President Eisenhower’s special envoy, concluded the negotiations. For background on the British–U.S. intervention in the Ababan crisis, see David S. Painter, The United States, Great Britain, and Mossadegh (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 1993). ¹² [Ed.] Wight’s speculation that posterity might come to regard Morrison’s service in a more positive light does not seem to have been proven correct yet. Morrison was Foreign Secretary from March to October 1951, and, according to a standard biography, “his seven months at the Foreign Office damaged his reputation… . Characterizations of him as parochial seemed vindicated when he spent more time on the Festival of Britain on London’s south bank than on his departmental affairs. These involved serious challenges particularly in Iran, where Dr Mossadeq nationalized British oil interests and Morrison raised the prospect of military action… . His interventionist views were not endorsed by

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V To these two things, the Canal and oil, were added as a kind of superstructure the vast accession of territorial empire after 1918. This in itself was not a vital interest, and Britain divested herself of it as quickly as possible. Its last material vestiges were the special treaty relations with Iraq and Jordan. But it carried with it and left behind it two residua of a different and more awkward kind: a general tutelage of the Arab world, and a Jewish National Home. Here, as you were expecting, we reach the crux, and move out of the field of concrete interests into the more dangerous and uncertain realm of emotions and loyalties. Perhaps one can formulate the question in this way: Why did British policy not recognize the maintenance of the Jewish National Home as a vital interest of the same order of magnitude as the Canal and oil? The standard answer, current all these years, is that it would have antagonized the Arabs, on whose goodwill the Canal and oil depended. Now we have reached the end of the chapter and perhaps we can reconsider the standard answer with the wisdom of hindsight.

VI The long balancing act between Arabs and Jews went through three phases. I would be inclined to call them Imperial Romanticism, Appeasement, and Imperial Resentment. The years of Imperial Romanticism ran from 1914, when Kitchener first promised the Sherif of Mecca to establish an independent Arab nation. In 1919, at the summit of her power, fired by an ebullient political romanticism, Britain believed that she could make the desert blossom with the roses of Arab and Jewish national states bound to her by gratitude. Don’t let us rehash the old debate whether the promises to the Jews and the Arabs were mutually incompatible. To the generation that made them, they did not seem so; nor to the generation that accepted them. At the [1919] Peace Conference [Emir] Faisal did not extend the claim of Arab independence to the region scheduled for a Jewish National Home—and the argument that the Balfour Declaration was inconsistent with the McMahon promises was first used by the Arabs much later.¹³ most of his cabinet colleagues; the limits of Britain’s claim to great power status were already evident.” David Howell, “Morrison, Herbert Stanley, Baron Morrison of Lambeth (1888–1965),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition, January 2011, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/35121. ¹³ [Ed.] The Balfour Declaration was a letter from Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, to Walter Rothschild, a prominent leader in the British Jewish community. The letter, signed

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At the outset everybody whose judgment was worth having thought Britain could bring it off. This included Middle East experts such as Mark Sykes, Cox, G. Bell, Lawrence, and Philby (all except Arnold Wilson), as well as statesmen and scholars. It was the euphoria of unchallenged ascendancy.

VII The years of Appeasement could be dated conveniently from 1933, when Hitler’s accession to power gave the Jewish National Home an entirely unforeseen urgency. This was appeasement in the technical sense, consecrated by the Chamberlain experience of making concessions to trouble-makers in the hope of pacifying them. It is in these years that the aberrations of policy began, that the failure of policy must be traced. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended partition.¹⁴ The Government funked it when the Arabs rebelled. Here is the beginning of a recurring pattern. When a political project is rejected at first, and afterwards comes into being under conditions which are less controllable, we are entitled to judge that the first decision was mistaken. This happened in the spring of 1939 at the London Round Table Conferences, when for the first time Arab states sent delegates to discuss the Jewish question and their status as participants was recognized—contrary to the Mandate.¹⁵ The result was the White Paper of 1939, which Churchill denounced as “a breach and repudiation of the Balfour Declaration,”¹⁶ and which was condemned by the Mandates Commission.¹⁷ on November 2, 1917, stated that “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The “McMahon promises” consisted of commitments regarding the future status of Ottoman lands made by Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, in correspondence with Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in 1915–1916. ¹⁴ [Ed.] The Palestine Royal Commission, chaired by Lord Peel, investigated the political turmoil in Palestine and recommended that it be divided into Jewish and Arab areas. ¹⁵ [Ed.] The Palestine Mandate, also known as the British Mandate for Palestine, was a League of Nations mandate to Britain in 1922. It assigned London the responsibility of governing temporarily the former Ottoman territories that are today known as Israel and Jordan, plus the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The mandate in Jordan, then called Transjordan, ended in 1946; and that in Palestine concluded on May 14, 1948. On that same day, David Ben-Gurion, then the president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, published the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. ¹⁶ [Ed.] Churchill said, “There is much in this White Paper which is alien to the spirit of the Balfour Declaration, but I will not trouble about that. I select the one point upon which there is plainly a breach and repudiation of the Balfour Declaration—the provision that Jewish immigration can be stopped in five years’ time by the decision of an Arab majority.” Churchill speech in the House of Commons, May 23, 1939, in Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches 1897–1963, vol. VI: 1935–1942, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York: Chelsea House Publishers in association with R. R. Bowker Company, 1974), 6132. ¹⁷ [Ed.] The Permanent Mandates Commission, founded in 1919 under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, was assigned responsibility for the supervision of the mandates established in the wake of the First World War.

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Appeasement led to war, and the war gave a pointer to the relative value of Britain’s two protégés. The Jews of Palestine fought with great bravery on the side of Britain in the limited sphere they were allowed to. The Arab states showed their reliability as allies by the Rashid Ali coup,¹⁸ by various intrigues with the Axis, and by declaring war on the Axis at last in 1945. Now, I should not wish it to be thought that my own position is pro-Jew and anti-Arab. At different times, and under different stimuli, I think I can be both pro-Jew and pro-Arab. Obviously the outcome of the Second World War was of vital concern to Jews; and I don’t think it particularly concerned Arabs—it was a European Civil War and they had an emotional predisposition in favour of defeat of the Imperialist Power sitting on their own backs. I can understand the Arab point of view. My concern is with Britain’s appreciation of her own interests.

VIII What I think of as the years of Imperial Resentment are the post-war years; and there was resentment because it was understood, I think, if not formulated on a conscious level, that the situation was out of control. This was shown very strikingly by the case of Ernest Bevin. Bevin was a giant, the greatest Foreign Secretary since Grey, but his blind spot was Palestine. It is impossible to defend and difficult to explain his Palestine policy. Bullock is writing the official life of Bevin, and this will be the trickiest chapter of all.¹⁹ His policy seemed touchy and vindictive. Labour was solidly pledged to a Zionist policy, to unrestricted immigration and a Jewish state comprising the whole of Palestine. And he emphasized that the livelihood of 50 million people in Great Britain depended on free, unobstructed use of the Canal, ergo, on Arab good will. Why this bias? Because it was not so much Bevin’s policy as the policy of the Foreign Office where, it is important to note, Bevin is still loved and revered, very unlike Anthony Eden. And why the bias of the Foreign Office? Is it because of oil interests? I have no evidence, but I am willing to believe it. In the game of explanation in international ¹⁸ [Ed.] In 1941, the Rashid Ali coup, also known as the Golden Square coup, overthrew the proBritish regime headed by the Regent of Iraq, Prince Abd al-llah, and Prime Minister Nuri as-Said and put in Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani as Prime Minister. The coup-makers received military aid from Germany and Italy, collaborated with German intelligence, and benefited from Vichy French assistance in Lebanon and Syria. The British promptly intervened to restore the Regent and his pro-British government, and British forces remained in Iraq until late 1947. ¹⁹ [Ed.] Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, was published in three volumes by William Heinemann Ltd in London: volume I, Trade Union Leader, 1881–1940 (1960); volume II, Minister of Labour, 1940–1945 (1967); and volume III, Foreign Secretary, 1945–1951 (1983).

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politics, oil interests is a card you can usually play with some assurance that it will supply the need. Is it because the Foreign Office is pro-Arab? I am sure this is true, from my own experience. The British governing class is temperamentally pro-Arab, and it is symbolised in the case of the Foreign Office by the figure of Mr. Harold Beeley, reputedly Bevin’s éminence grise.²⁰ Is it because the Foreign Office is anti-semitic? I am convinced that this is true. In the British governing class, as also I imagine in the French and the American, if you trouble the waters much, you will stir up this mud. And so one comes back to an ideological issue far underlying the calculation of national interest. Sometimes it seems that the whole history of Western man in this century could be interpreted from the standpoint of the Jewish question, which is of course not a Jewish question at all but a Gentile question, the question of what the Gentiles are going to think and do about the Jews. The instinctive repugnance felt by many Westerners for a nation of Israeli pioneers is the Gentile counterpart of the claim which Zionists and Israelis sometimes make, that Gentiles owe a special duty towards Israel or that Israel has a special mission in the world which deserves acknowledgement and respect. I do not want to be led into these thickets of historical metaphysics. This is enough to continue the clarification of Britain’s national interest in the Middle East. In this period of Imperial Resentment, there was an assumption of impartiality between Britain’s two ungrateful protégés, an impartiality which nevertheless was paradoxically weighted in favour of the Arabs. The way in which Britain took no steps to secure Israel’s right of passage through the Canal until Britain’s own right of passage seemed endangered is only an example of the egotism of all Great Powers, but it illustrates what I mean, as does the toleration of Arab declarations about exterminating Israel. Britain refused arms to Israel when we were already quarreling with Nasser. The perfect diplomatic expression of this assumed impartiality was the Tripartite Declaration of 1950 that Britain (with France and the United States) would come to the aid of whichever side was attacked by the other.

²⁰ [Ed.] Sir Harold Beeley (1909–2001), a prominent British diplomat, focused on Middle Eastern affairs and won distinction as an expert on the Arab world. According to an obituary, “Although his sympathies were—and remained—with the Palestinians, Beeley did his utmost to reconcile Britain’s conflicting obligations to both sides. This did not prevent his being cast, alongside Bevin in Israeli legend, as a malevolent midwife at the birth of the state.” Michael Weir, “Sir Harold Beeley,” The Guardian, July 31, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/jul/31/guardianobituaries An éminence grise (literally, a grey eminence) is an influential behind-the-scenes adviser or agent, a term first applied to François Leclerc du Tremblay, a counsellor to Cardinal Richelieu. The adjective “grey” derived from the color of his habit as a Capuchin friar.

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But there was a vice at the heart of this impartiality. It rested on the premise that Britain still did not have to choose. It was a superiority attitude. It assumed an imperial ascendancy which was dissolving. There was an assumption that political hegemony was necessary to ensure the flow of oil, rather as if Britain needed a garrison in Buenos Aires to buy meat from Argentina. There was also an unreadiness to treat Arab states as equals who should neither be controlled nor appeased at the expense of neighbouring states. For appeasement itself perhaps is rooted in an attitude of patronage. It is connected with an inability to believe that the Power you are appeasing can be a threat to you. At present, Britain acts like a schoolmaster who is indulgent when some breach of the rules is committed by the small boys of the Arab League, but who, when the more grown-up Israelis are at fault, grows suddenly stern: ‘I expected better things of you, Ben-Gurion.’²¹

And I think this same posture of superiority can be detected, conversely, in Eden’s motive for his intervention in Egypt. Eden is an interesting and inscrutable figure, but one thing is absolutely clear—that he saw his Suez adventure in the light of the failure to check Hitler. He returned to this theme over and over again. The picture I have is of a statesman of a simple and unsubtle cast of mind who is obsessed with a single principle and misapplies it.²² It is agreed now that Hitler could have been checked by a show of force when he remilitarised the Rhineland. Therefore Nasser must be checked by a show of force when he likewise breaks an international engagement in order to assert full sovereignty over the Canal. The parallel is specious but deceptive. It assumes that the world will regard Nasser’s threat to British interests—because the British weren’t concerned with Nasser’s threat to Israel—as on all fours with Hitler’s threat to everybody’s interests. It is as if a schoolmaster argued that the whole of the social order depended on his reasserting his authority over a grown-up ex-pupil who has been impertinent to him. I would go that far towards agreeing with those who interpret the British action as being essentially, morally, a reversion to “colonialism.” I think one might draw a lesson from this, that an attitude of impartiality towards a rivalry between other Powers is only pragmatically justified when your ascendancy is so overwhelming and they are so puny in comparison that they cannot incommode you. ²¹ “Users’ Choice,” The Spectator, no. 6691, September 21, 1956. ²² [Ed.] See also Wight’s review essay, “Brutus in Foreign Policy: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden,” International Affairs, vol. 36, no. 3 (July 1960), pp. 299–309.

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I wonder whether it may not be a requirement of foreign policy to be quite clear in your own mind which horse you are going to back, which you mean to be your ally when the chips are down. The British always assumed that this was unnecessary. And when now and again, the suggestion was made that Israel was Britain’s natural ally in the Middle East, as the only stable state, the only democratic state, and that Britain had a vital interest in Israel’s existence, which deserved to be put into the form of binding military engagements—for instance, after Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Company, the suggestion that the British response should be a military agreement with Israel and to put two divisions into the Negev—the answer always was that this would mean Arab hostility, the blocking of the Canal, the cutting of the pipelines, the loss of oil. Well, all this has come about through the very effort to avoid it. Why couldn’t Britain have rationed earlier? For a connoisseur of historical irony, the whole episode is singularly rich.²³ In order to control the life-line of the Empire, Britain has almost destroyed the Commonwealth. The party which has claimed a particular concern with the Commonwealth and the American alliance has imperiled these ties. France and Britain, who for a century disputed control of Egypt, have brought their two empires to the edge of disaster in a joint attack on Egypt. Eden, the champion of the rule of law in international relations, has defied the United Nations and committed aggression. But perhaps the most relevant irony is this: Just as it was Jews, not Arabs, who fought with Britain in the Second World War, so when the chips were down in November 1956, the Tripartite Declaration was tossed overboard and Britain found herself taking military action with the despised Jews against the Arabs. As the greatest of British diplomats in the eighteenth century wrote under comparable circumstances, “We have lowered and exposed ourselves to the evils we fear by the very means we take to avoid them.”²⁴ “On rencontre sa destinée Souvent par des chemins qu’on prend pour l’éviter.”²⁵

When this happens in politics, one is entitled to a certain freedom of critical speculation. ²³ [Ed.] See also Wight’s essay, “Fortune’s Banter,” presented under the title “Fortune and Irony in International Politics,” at the inaugural meeting of the History Society, University College, Dublin, May 17, 1960. This essay has been published as an appendix to Michele Chiaruzzi’s noteworthy study, Martin Wight on Fortune and Irony in Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). It is also available in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 282–312. ²⁴ James Harris, Earl of Malmesbury, Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury, edited by his Grandson, the Third Earl (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), vol. iv, p. 190. ²⁵ [Ed.] Jean de la Fontaine, “L’Horoscope,” Fables, Livre VIII, Fable 16. “One often meets one’s destiny on the roads taken in an effort to avoid it.”

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One is entitled to ask whether it would not have been wise when first the Arab states assaulted Israel and tried to destroy her for Britain to make it clear that she regarded Israel, like Turkey, as a military bastion of international order in the Middle East and as demanding her special commitments. If the official apologist replies (as he will) that this would have endangered our material interests and led to disaster, one can at least say that the disaster couldn’t have been greater than his own policy has produced. These conclusions are not novel, but from the standpoint of the present moment they may acquire a fresh cogency. I am not entirely happy about them, but it is possible they may have some general application and may have some bearing on the task of the United States, which now has to pick up the Middle Eastern threads where Britain has dropped them. Et de vobis, Americani, fabula narratur.²⁶

²⁶ [Ed.] This final sentence might be translated as follows: “And the story would be yours, Americans.” Horace wrote in one of his satires, “Quid rides? Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur.” That is, “Why are you laughing? Change but the name, and the story would be yours.”

9 Brutus in Foreign Policy The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden

Sir Anthony Eden’s Memoirs might have been conceived as a sequel to the War Memoirs of Sir Winston Churchill.∗, ¹ They will be an important example when the literary historian comes to trace Sir Winston’s literary influence on politics, and to show how his language and cadences have affected Conservative writing and speaking for a generation. Apart from the special words like “summit” which Sir Winston has given to international politics, Eden has the characteristic Churchillian vocabulary, “disarray,” “sustain,” “crunch,” the double verbs (“Communist power was thrusting and obtruding itself in many lands,” p. 178; “it had flashed and flared in our faces,” p. 515), the indulgently dismissive climaxes (“All this did not matter very much,” p. 184). But it would be quite unfair to suggest that his Memoirs are a pastiche of Churchill. They have a skill in construction, a terse, clean efficiency of style, and an occasional distinction of phrasing that are their own. It is difficult to think that reviewers’ complaints that the book is dull are not due to political prejudice. It is not only in literary influence that the shadow of Churchill lies over Eden’s record. In an engaging sentence he refers to “the long era as crown prince . . . a position not necessarily enviable in politics” (p. 266), and he sees himself as the agent and heir of Churchill’s foreign policy. The identity of view and purpose is reiterated, perhaps with conscious skill. Returning to London from Paris in April 1954, revolving in his mind whether Dien Bien Phu could be saved, “I found that Sir Winston and I, though physically separated by hundreds of miles, had formed exactly the same conclusion” (p. 104). The Anglo-Egyptian agreements of 1952 for giving self-determination to the Sudan were “one of the rare occasions when I differed from Sir Winston Churchill on a matter of foreign policy. As he remarked on another occasion, you could put each of us in a separate room, put any questions of foreign policy to us, and nine times out of ten we would give the same answer. This was certainly true and I think Sir Winston was influenced on this occasion by his own memories of the Sudan many years before” (p. 247). What Churchill disagreed over is not made clear, but the impression is left that on this single recorded occasion of difference, Eden was the more liberal. One Sunday in ∗

Wight published this review-essay in International Affairs, vol. 36, no. 3 (July 1960), pp. 299–309.

¹ The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Sir Anthony Eden, K.C., P.C., M.C.: Full Circle (London: Cassell, 1960).

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0010

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October 1956, when “the crunch” is beginning, Churchill invites himself to lunch at Chequers, discusses the military plans, and says as he leaves, “I must look up and see exactly where Napoleon landed” (p. 534). When the crunch was over there was another lunch with Churchill, the score was added up, and Churchill concluded with “What a magnificent position to fight back from” (p. 575). If Eden’s judgment is to be censured, it seems, Churchill’s must be censured too. The most sublimely self-assured sentence in the book comes when a concerted AngloAmerican policy towards Musaddiq first appears possible: “I felt that we had made a beginning which might check the ‘long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender’” (p. 203). No reference for the quotation is given. Readers who matter will recall Churchill’s sleepless night of 20 February 1938, and his vision of “one strong young figure” standing up against the drawling tides and embodying “the life-hope of the British nation.”² Yet Sir Anthony may not have intended to leave an impression that his confidence rests, not on his own judgment and experience, but on the Churchillian anointing. Memoirs, Sir Llewellyn Woodward has said, “are among the best and the worst of historical sources. They are more self-revealing and personal than documents of state; their evidence is less reliable.”³ Eden’s Memoirs, with their failure to afford new information on the Suez story, have had a worse press than his premiership itself did. The evasions and omissions are indeed remarkable in a book published so soon after events that are fresh in mind, on which a good deal has been written. The book will not be an important source for the domestic history of his administration. There is no mention of the Eden-must-go movement, of Eden’s unprecedented announcement of 7 January 1956 that he did not intend to resign, and the effect of these upon his mind; of the private discussions with the Opposition from July 1956 onwards; of Cabinet dissensions about the Suez expedition and the ministerial resignations, least of all Mr Nutting’s. The accounts of the removal of Mr Macmillan from the Foreign Office and Sir Walter Monckton from the Ministry of Defence are perfunctory and unconvincing. (The curious reader may note that Sir Anthony pays a decent tribute to the talents or success of every minister or official who served under him, with the single exception of the man who succeeded him.) In places the chronology becomes blurred, and speeches and documents are quoted without being dated. But perhaps criticisms of this sort are beside the point, because they mistake the kind of book it is. Some memoirs, like Cordell Hull’s, verge upon the annalistic, and convey the inconsequential and desultory quality of political life; others, like Bismarck’s, are unified by a single theme, selecting and subordinating the material for a didactic purpose. Eden’s Memoirs stand at the latter end of the spectrum. Their value may well prove to be, not as a personal

² Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. I: The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), p. 201. ³ E. L. Woodward, War and Peace in Europe 1815–70 (London: Constable, 1931), p. 167.

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narrative of a dramatic failure in British policy, but as an essay in diplomatic theory. They claim to expound and illustrate the principles of foreign policy which inspired Churchill, Eden, and Bevin alike, and led Eden to the desperate decision of 1956. And here arise the central questions about the book. Did Eden’s policy really show this continuity and consistency, and in what sense anyway is consistency a virtue in foreign policy? Were the principles of the Suez expedition indeed those of the opponents of appeasement? We can ask Eden, in the words the poet gives to Brutus, Pacemne tueris Inconcussa tenens dubio vestigia mundo?⁴

The earlier part of the book narrates a series of diplomatic successes, largely overlapping and simultaneously negotiated: the Korean armistice and the repatriation of prisoners, the partition of Trieste, the Geneva Conference of 1954 which ended the Indo-China War, the conjuring of Western European Union out of the ruins of E.D.C., and the settlement of the oil dispute with Iran, which at the end of 1954 he reckoned “the toughest of all” (p. 219). Here we see classic diplomacy at work, and many of its principles get formulated by the way. Eden was a great diplomatist because of the capacity to understand the interests of the diplomatic adversary, even when he was the ideological enemy—to appreciate Soviet objectives in Europe, Chinese interests in Asia, the demands of Yugoslav prestige over Trieste. “The best diplomacy is that which gets its own way, but leaves the other side reasonably satisfied” (p. 357). The true function of diplomacy is “open covenants secretly arrived at” (p. 175).⁵ Do not humiliate your enemy before negotiating, nor threaten him militarily during negotiation. “It was not that I minded ‘noises off.’⁶ They could be helpful, but only under certain very definite conditions” (p. 120). “In the most tangled diplomatic problems it seldom pays to snatch a short-term advantage, especially if this limits the area of manoeuvre” (pp. 178–9). It is best not to begin with a package proposal, but to move step by step, “starting from small issues and working to the great” (p. 11). Haggling over inessentials may lose the larger objectives as well as the world’s goodwill. “It is usually prudent to be conciliatory on matters of secondary importance, though in dealing with the Russians these can add up to quite a bill” (pp. 61–2). Avoid rigid time-tables: “It ⁴ Lucan, ii, 247–8: “Are you the guardian of peace, holding your path unshaken in a tottering world?”—Brutus addressing his exemplar Cato. ⁵ [Ed.] Wight cited this formula from Eden’s Memoirs in International Theory: The Three Traditions, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991), p. 202, and added, “One might put the distinction crudely: the Kantian believes in open covenants openly arrived at, the Grotian in open covenants secretly arrived at, and the Machiavellian in secret covenants secretly arrived at.” ⁶ [Ed.] “Noises off ” is a stage direction calling for sounds offstage that are intended to be heard by the audience and thereby carry forward the action of the plot. Eden was evidently referring to extraneous events that might be exploited by decision-makers.

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is sometimes wise to order a train for departure, but one must have control of the train” (p. 291). “Thinking aloud about the next move is a dangerous practice. It almost inevitably destroys the chances of success for the present move” (p. 469). And two fundamental principles: that foreign policy is always the choice of a lesser evil; and that it frequently demands the seizing of situations to alter them by injecting new elements into them, at the risk of war. “Peace is not just something that happens. At times it is necessary to take risks and even to increase the immediate danger to win a lasting agreement” (p. 188). These maxims may be accounted diplomatic wisdom because they accord with age-long experience, or truisms because they state generalities which nobody would want to dispute. Moreover, they furnish little guide to action. They are sparks struck off incidentally from a variety of international collisions, and their combined illumination is of the kind Coleridge meant, when he said that the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us. Perhaps this is one of the essential differences between international politics and domestic. Just as international law has more difficulty than municipal law in framing general and uniform rules, because of the heterogeneity of its subjects and the disparateness of the legal situations that arise, so the combinations of international politics are so various, the regularities so tenuous, the conjunctures so unforeseen, the consequences of any course of action so speculative, each crisis is so marked by historical uniqueness, that it is extraordinarily difficult to organize diplomatic experience into a system, let alone a theory, of foreign policy. It is interesting, therefore, to see how the consummate diplomatic flexibility of the first half of the Eden Memoirs becomes congealed and rigidified, in the second half, into a political principle felt as having compelling force. “To take the easy way, to put off decisions, to fail even to record a protest when international undertakings are broken on which the ink is scarcely dry, can only lead one way. It is all so much more difficult to do later on, and so we come full circle. The insidious appeal of appeasement leads to a deadly reckoning” (p. 579). It has generally been recognized that there is a point of change from international fair weather to storm, where the art of political navigation must discard some methods and take on others, and diplomacy becomes occupied less with seeking agreement than with arranging coercion. It is the point, in Sir Harold Nicolson’s precise language, “where diplomacy ends and foreign policy begins.”⁷ Grotius was concerned with it, when he sought to define the justifiable causes of war as defence, recovery of rights, and punishment; it was later described in terms of rectifying the balance of power; it was at the heart of the doctrine of collective security. That the point of change is difficult to define in general terms does not bear out those who

⁷ See Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–1822 (London: Constable, 1946), pp. 164–5; a book dedicated to Anthony Eden.

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deny its reality, asserting on the one side that all foreign policy is potential war, or on the other side that diplomacy is nothing but conciliation. The scales of the balance of power [wrote Bolingbroke⁸] will never be exactly poized, nor is the precise point of equality either discernible or necessary to be discerned. It is sufficient in this, as in other human affairs, that the deviation be not too great. Some there will always be. A constant attention to these deviations is therefore necessary. When they are little, their increase may be easily prevented by early care and the precautions that good policy suggests. But when they become great for want of this care and these precautions, or by the force of unforeseen events, more vigour is to be exerted, and greater efforts to be made.

It is exactly the case that Sir Anthony urged on President Eisenhower for undoing Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal. This is the principle he sees as the lesson of his lifetime. “We are all marked to some extent by the stamp of our generation, mine is that of the assassination in Sarajevo and all that flowed from it” (p. 516). He heard of Sarajevo a few days after his seventeenth birthday, on the river at Eton; and looking back, he holds that Britain failed in that crisis “by an inability to tell what we would do. . . . It is impossible to read the record now and not feel that we had a responsibility for being always a lap behind” (pp. 516–17). In the ‘thirties the democracies showed the same fault. “As my colleagues and I surveyed the scene in these autumn months of 1956, we were determined that the like should not come again. We had seen how insidious was the excuse, how difficult the action. There might be other mistakes, there would not be that one” (p. 518). There is, however, another lesson of Eden’s lifetime. It is broadly true that the supporters of Munich were the supporters of Suez, that those who applauded him when he resigned from the Government in 1938 opposed him when he led the Government in 1956. Why was this? Had his old supporters grown softer? Had he himself grown less supple? His book does not notice that these questions can be asked. The main threat to the balance of power came from Russia and China, but with the end of the Indo-China War this was reduced to manageable proportions. In several respects the Geneva Conference of 1954 marked the revival of normal diplomatic assumptions between Britain and the Communist Powers. Its success was largely due to Eden and Molotov having recognized a common interest in averting an American–Chinese conflict. It gave effect to Eden’s plan for a “protective pad” of States to halt Communism as far north of Malaya as possible, and this traditional policy was put forward as offering a measure of advantage and security to both sides. Moreover, it was the first international conference where Eden was conscious of the deterrent effect of the H-bomb. “Too frightened to fight, too ⁸ Letters on the Study and Use of History (London, 1752), vol. II, p. 47.

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stupid to agree,” as Talleyrand said of the Great Powers at Vienna, describes as healthy a state of international politics as can often be reached—and he was speaking of Powers not divided from one another ideologically. Aversion from nuclear war, along with Stalin’s death, had given Soviet policy a new restraint and subtlety. The long-term implacable hostility could still be assumed, but when the Russian leaders came to England in April 1956 they showed themselves good listeners, and understood the warning that Britain would fight for Middle Eastern oil. When the attack on Egypt began, Soviet technicians were discreetly withdrawn to Khartoum, and Russian help for Egypt, apart from skilful diplomatic propaganda, was limited to the Soviet consul stimulating resistance in Port Said. The new Soviet methods were seen in the sale of arms to Egypt, which leapfrogged the Baghdad Pact. But the danger lay less in the intruder than in the nature of the region he broke into. In 1953 the Americans had been fearful of Soviet control over Iran, and had argued for coming to terms with Musaddiq lest he throw in his lot with Russia or actually give place to the Communists. Eden had replied that the choice did not lie only between Mussadiq and Communism. It was true that the longer Musaddiq stayed in power, the stronger the Communists became; but the Iranians had an elasticity that made an alternative government possible. Moreover, Mussadiq’s foreign policy was to play the Great Powers off against one another. In this case the event vindicated Eden’s judgment. But in the Arab world he saw a different picture. Here it was not Communism, but Nasser, whose industrious valour threatened To ruin the great work of Time, And cast the kingdoms old, Into another mould,⁹

particularly the Hashemite kingdoms. Hence the occasional uncertainty, in Eden’s scheme of historical recurrence, whether Nasser is Mussolini to Russia’s Hitler, or Hitler himself. Eden saw Egypt and Saudi Arabia as willing accomplices of Russia. “The agents of King Saud, their pockets bulging with gold, were co-operating everywhere with the communists against Western interests. . . . ARAMCO money was being spent on a lavish scale to abet communism in the Middle East” (pp. 342–3). And he wrote to Eisenhower, “I have no doubt that the Bear is using Nasser, with or without his knowledge, to further his immediate aims” (p. 452). The logic of the analysis led to the need for getting rid of Nasser, but without the reasonable assurance that there was a better alternative. All Eden can say, when wondering whether a more rapid advance down the Canal by the British and French would have toppled Nasser, is that “Militant dictators have more enemies at home than the foreigner ever dreams” (p. 559), a thin and desperate hope. ⁹ [Ed.] Andrew Marvell, “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” 1650.

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The most remarkable weakness of the Eden Memoirs is the neglect of Arab nationalism. It shows the difficulty of breaking out of the mental framework of Britain’s Middle Eastern policy. The Arab world has been probably the hardest part of the British Empire to let go; largely, no doubt, because of oil; but partly too perhaps because it was the latest field of imperial expansion and effort, and having escaped formal annexation it has escaped also the tranquillizing family intercourse of the Commonwealth. Egypt, moreover, shares with the United States and Ireland the distinction of being Britain’s great imperial failures. Eden’s Arab world is dominated by his friend of thirty years, Nuri es-Said, whose regime in Iraq is painted in the brightest colours to contrast with Nasser’s misgovernment in Egypt. It is a pre-revolutionary world of douceur de vivre, where King Faisal sends a cornflower from his dinner-table in Baghdad to his fellow old Harrovian at Chartwell,¹⁰ and Nuri is appropriately dining at Buckingham Palace and Downing Street in the week that Nasser seizes the Canal. Eden recalls discussing the Baltic States at Geneva between the wars with a foreign statesman who said, “Malheureusement ce ne sont pas des états viables” (p. 392).¹¹ He does not extend the judgment to the Arab political creations of the same peace settlement. The villain of the Memoirs, on the other hand, remains curiously featureless. Eden meets Nasser once, on his way to the SEATO conference at Bangkok in 1955, but there is too little sympathy for a description or character-sketch of the man. (We must hope that the famous meeting with Mussolini in June 1935 will get better treatment in the next volume.) The only picture of Nasser here, vivid and hostile, is in a letter to Eden from Mr Menzies (pp. 470–3). As to Arab nationalism, Eden does not refer to it until Nasser has seized the Canal, and he mentions it only four times, the first two being in quotations from Nasser’s own speeches. It is like an account of Sarajevo that leaves out South Slav nationalism. Hence much is imperfectly explained, and in the final crisis a good deal is omitted: Iraq’s proposing the expulsion of Britain from the Baghdad Pact, Jordan’s denouncing the AngloJordanian Treaty, Saudi Arabia and Syria breaking off diplomatic relations with Britain, the Beirut meeting of the Arab States which talked of economic sanctions, the sabotage of the pipe-lines, and the riots and strikes in Bahrein and Kuwait. No doubt these did not make a great noise in the general hubbub from Port Said, New York, and Budapest, but they are not fairly covered by the sentence, “Not a mouse moved in Arab lands” (p. 543). The attentive reader will begin to notice where the limits come in applying the diplomatic maxims of the earlier part of the book, hints that Britain’s relations with the Middle Eastern States proceed on principles a little different from those that govern the international community at large. The assumption about these ¹⁰ [Ed.] Douceur de vivre means “sweetness of life.” The Harrovian in question, King Faisal’s former fellow student at the Harrow School, was Winston Churchill, who lived at Chartwell, his country house, from 1922 to 1965. ¹¹ [Ed.] “Unfortunately these are not viable states.”

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countries is not that you must understand their interests so as to find an accommodation between your interests and theirs, but that they must be persuaded “where their true interests lie,” and that your proposals “meet as far as possible their requirements” (pp. 203, 228). Nasser’s argument, whether sound or unsound, that the timing of the Turco-Iraqi Pact would damage collaboration between the Arab States and the West is dismissed with petulance: “I was familiar with this plea; it is never the right time for some” (p. 221). Package proposals have been deprecated in general as a mode of negotiating, but they are presented to Musaddiq in 1953 and to the Egyptian Government in the talks of the same year about a new treaty. The latter negotiations broke down because the Egyptians on their side argued that an agreement on evacuating British troops must be reached first, and Middle Eastern defence as a whole could be discussed later. Similarly, the Menzies mission to Cairo in August 1956 is empowered only to expound the proposals of the London Conference and not to consider alternatives. With Iraq, indeed, “it was important to get rid of any taint of patron and pupil” (p. 220); magnanimity towards dependants is not difficult. It is clear that the independence of the Sudan was made easier for the British because they could continue the role of protecting the infant State against Egyptian encroachments. For the same reason, it was imprudent to punish Jordan for the dismissal of Glubb. “It was an occasion for doing nothing. As a result of doing nothing, we were able gradually to pick up the pieces and to mend our relations with Jordan” (p. 353). But Nasser’s activities were too seldom the occasion for doing nothing and picking up the pieces. In dealing with Egypt, there is a deep-rooted assumption of inequality of rights. In the Suez controversy the word collusion has come to have a special meaning. The accusation it contains is not referred to in Eden’s Memoirs, and the word itself appears only once, in an unexpected context. The main threat to British interests in the Middle East, he says, “was the growing influence of Nasser with his antiWestern ideology and collusion with Russia, especially in arms supply” (p. 352). A strange sentence, revealing the doctrinal perversion of terms that the Americans have shown when they argued that trading with China was collusion with Communism. The question whether Nasser had a legal right to nationalize the Canal Company is never fairly considered. “It was implicit in the Convention [of 1886] that the operation of the canal should not be entrusted to any single power” (p. 475). Possibly; but it is not admitted that the interpretation or infringement of the Convention had hitherto rested with Britain alone, and that if Egypt had blocked the Canal to Israeli ships she had the precedent of the British blockade against hostile shipping in the two World Wars. A casual sentence at the end of Eden’s first long chapter on Egypt remarks that “the 1936 treaty did not give us a right to a base in Egypt, nor to the large forces we maintained there” (p. 261). There is some truth in saying that the Memoirs show Eden as having lost touch with the changes in the world since 1939. Not so much in respect of Anglo-American relations. He recognized that now there were only two Great

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Powers in the world, and that Britain was subordinate ally to one of them; and the consideration he asked for from the United States was only what he himself normally showed to Britain’s weaker partners in the Commonwealth and outside. Possibly the Americans did have a juster appreciation of Afro-Asian nationalism, as the British on their side had a less emotional attitude towards the Communist Powers; but it is difficult to see how any British Foreign Secretary could have dealt better with an ally so uncertain, equivocating, and unreliable as Mr Dulles. There is much more force in the charge against Eden as regards Anglo-European relations. Here Britain was the predominant partner, her initiative eagerly awaited, and [the] W.E.U. [Western European Union] was not the United States of Europe that Churchill had taught the Europeans to hope for when he was out of office. The most drearily uncreative speeches in the book are those rehearsing the argument that “we are still an island people in thought and tradition, whatever the modern facts of weapons and strategy may compel” (p. 168; cf. pp. 36–7). But Eden’s lack of sympathy with Arab nationalism raises more complex considerations. It is possible to think it an intellectual fault rather than a moral one. It is possible to blame his actions without blaming his purpose, or to blame his purpose without blaming his analysis of the situation he dealt with. “The dispute over Nasser’s seizure of the Canal,” he says, “had, of course, nothing to do with colonialism, but was concerned with international rights” (p. 499). We may question the first part of the sentence and still accept the second. There is a kind of crisis of international society more fundamental than threats to the balance of power; it is when the principle of international obligation itself deliquesces. Such a crisis has been endemic in international politics ever since 1776, with the slow fermenting of the doctrine that the only valid claim to membership of the society of nations is to have established a State expressing the popular will, and the slow exploration of the corruptions that the popular will is liable to.¹² The revolution teaches [wrote the youthful Acton to a correspondent in 1861] that a government may be subverted by its subjects, irrespective of its merits; while that theory lasts, the Pope can never be safe against his own subjects except by force. Even good government is no security in a revolutionary age—see the cases of Louis Philippe, of Tuscany, in ’59. While the revolutionary principle has power, therefore, the papal sovereignty must depend on the aid of its neighbours against its subjects. But the revolutionary theory has also an international application and teaches that a State may be absorbed by its neighbours even if it has not attacked them, when a wish of the kind is presumed on the part of the people, or expressed by insurrection, or ascertained afterwards by vote, or even ¹² [Ed.] Wight discussed aspects of domestic and international legitimacy in several chapters of his book International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

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for rectification of physical boundaries, or for the sake of ethnological connexion. Therefore . . . the same revolutionary doctrine which puts governments at the mercy of the people, prevents neighbours protecting it [sic] against the people. Therefore in an age where the duty of allegiance and even good government are no security, treaties, and international guarantees, and public law, can be no security.¹³

These doctrines have been prevalent in widening circles of the world since 1918, and have found a great organ in the United Nations. In the Arab world they have been specially powerful. National self-determination has a gallant ring of freedom and fulfilment, but its methods are assassination and arms-running, insurrection against established governments, confiscation of foreign property, repudiation of agreements, dissolution of moral ties. King Saud was making a continuous attempt to undermine the Gulf sheikhdoms (whom the Americans anyway believed were rightfully part of Saudi Arabia) as well as to subvert Jordan. The Egyptian Government was planning revolutionary upheavals in Iraq and Jordan, intriguing against the Governments of the Lebanon, Libya, and the Sudan, arming the Algerian rebels, and inflaming anti-colonial passions from Aden to West Africa by means of Cairo Radio. Israel was keeping alive the memory of the indeterminately wider frontiers of Eretz Israel, and Egypt, after having been defeated in war, pursued a policy unprecedented in international law of refusing to make peace, and continued to proclaim that Israel must be annihilated. Eden’s account of the famous Paris meeting of 16 October 1956, which describes the problem whether it would be the lesser evil if Israel were to break out against Jordan or Egypt (pp. 511–13), is concerned with an abiding problem that none of his critics have solved on paper. Nor has this behaviour been by any means confined to the Arab world. In 1957 Indonesia confiscated the assets of Dutch companies, forcing thousands of Dutch citizens to flee and refusing compensation until the Netherlands should cede Western New Guinea. The United Nations, on which as an organ of anti-colonialism Eden has some of his justest words, has consistently refused to condemn breaches of international agreement. World sentiment regards colonialism as wrong and revolt against it as right; and in the same way, Western sentiment tends to regard any revolutionary nationalist government as progressive and virtuous. It has been shrewdly remarked that if the Suez Canal Company had been nationalized not by Nasser but by Farouk, the British people would have been much more united on the need for punitive action. The difficulty of maintaining the rule of law and civilized international intercourse in a world of dissolving standards is perhaps the deepest theme of Eden’s Memoirs. The phrases “international agreement” and “international interest” ¹³ F. N. Gasquet, Lord Acton and his Circle (London: Allen, 1906), pp. 248–9. This letter was written the year before the essay on “Nationality”, when Acton was twenty-seven.

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recur throughout the book as regularly as the historical parallels that have occasioned so much comment. True, that the breaches of agreement he was concerned with were so many stages in the liquidation of British power; but it is not the whole truth. Under the lee of British power many minor Powers had sheltered, and interdependent systems of order had grown up, and rights had taken root and gained acceptance. “From the start, the Suez crisis was never a problem between Egypt and two, or even three, powers only; it concerned a very large part of the world” (p. 491). Some of Eden’s critics seem to argue that the right policy is to grant independence to the rest of Asia and Africa as quickly as possible, and let the newly enfranchised members of international society settle down to industrialize themselves and practise democracy with only such benevolent help from the older Powers as the newer themselves will ask. This may be a dream-transformation of the historical experience called Balkanization, which means a Kleinstaaterei of weak States, fiercely divided among themselves by nationalistic feuds, governed by unstable popular autocracies, unaccustomed to international law and diplomatic practice as they are to parliamentary government, and a battle-ground for the surrounding Great Powers. If it were clearer that this is not the future of the uncommitted world, it would be clearer that Eden’s analysis was wrong, however much he may be blamed for not finding policies whereby a declining Great Power can mitigate the evil. Already the Suez expedition seems remote and rounded-off, a failure of high drama but small historical effect; less consequential internationally than the Mexican expedition of Napoleon III, less consequential domestically than the failure to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. Both sides in the controversy promised calamities that have not come to pass. The Anglo-American alliance was restored to sufficient health for the joint occupation of the Lebanon and Jordan less than a year afterwards, the Commonwealth has not disintegrated, British prestige in the Middle East has not declined more steeply than it would have done if Eden had not attacked Egypt, the Conservatives remain in office; Nasser has shown himself able to run the Canal with no less efficiency or respect for its users than did the Company, and while the Canal was blocked the countries of Western Europe found that it was not as vital to their economic life as they had been persuaded. But Eden’s moral dilemma has a lasting significance. In trying to preserve the political conditions of international life he became doctrinaire; in trying to enforce the moral conditions of international life he allowed himself to become unscrupulous. Was Brutus the hero of liberty, “by awful virtue urg’d” to the last extremity in defence of principle, or a traitor in the senseless hope of restoring a regime past restoration?¹⁴ A clear-sighted resister against any power that set itself above ¹⁴ [Ed.: Wight quoted the poem “The Seasons: Winter” (1735) by James Thomson: And thou, unhappy Brutus, kind of heart, Whose steady arm, by awful virtue urg’d, Lifted the Roman steel against thy friend.]

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the laws, or a blind rebel against the inevitability of monarchy? “Events seemed to play with all the plans he had formed. His scruples about legality had caused him to lose the opportunity of saving the republic; his horror of civil war had only served to make him begin it too late. It was not enough that he found himself forced, in spite of himself, to violate the law and fight against his fellow-citizens, he was constrained to acknowledge, to his great regret, that in expecting too much of men he was mistaken.”¹⁵ Reduce the heroic scale; make it international society and not the Roman Republic; and Eden explored the same region of the moral universe of politics, with similar high-mindedness and self-righteousness, blindness and clear-sightedness, misjudgment and courage.

¹⁵ Gaston Boissier, Cicero and his Friends (English translation, London: Innes, 1897), p. 357.

10 Germany in The World in March 1939 The Nazi annexation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, together with the conquest of Austria the year before, was a renewal and fulfilment of German history.∗ The Third Reich, which had been erected on the foundations of the Second Reich but within more contracted boundaries, now suddenly assumed the aspect of the ancient Reich, expanding to its eastern confines and claiming its inheritance. As the Napoleonic Empire had invoked the Carolingian tradition, so Hitler’s Greater Germany appealed to the Ottonian tradition.¹ The annexation of Bohemia and Moravia re-established the eastern frontiers of the Saxon and Salian Emperors, and was undertaken with explicit reference to a “thousand-year-old historical past.”² The previous summer, after the Anschluss with Austria, the imperial regalia of the Holy Roman Empire had been brought back from Vienna to Nuremberg, now the seat of the annual Parteitag, the new community-festival of the German people.³ I have caused the insignia of the old German Empire to be brought to Nuremberg [said Hitler], in order that not only our own German people but also a whole world may bethink themselves that more than half a millennium before the discovery of the New World already a mighty Germanic-German Reich was ∗ This chapter was first published in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 293–365.

¹ For example, on 2 July 1938 Himmler made a ceremonial visit at midnight to the tomb of Henry the Fowler at Quedlinburg, and this shrine became the object of regular SS pilgrimages. ² See the preamble to the decree of 16 March 1939 regulating the status of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Dokumente der deutschen Politik, vol. 7, part 2, p. 502; N.C.A. viii. 404; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 62–63). [Ed.: N.C.A. stands for Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (A collection of documentary evidence and guide materials prepared by the American and British prosecuting staffs for . . . the International Military Tribunal at Nu¨rnberg); 8 vols., with “Opinion and Judgement” and Supplements A and B (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1946–1947) here and in subsequent references. Documents (R.I.I.A.) stands for Documents on International Affairs for 1928–1938; 13 vols.; for 1939–1946, in progress (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1929–) here and in subsequent references.] Cf. Hitler’s historical excursus in his Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939 (Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1610–11; cf. Documents (R.I. I. A.) for 1939–46, i. 220– 1). [Ed. Hitler, Speeches (Baynes) or Speeches (Baynes) stands for Adolf Hitler, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939, ed. Norman Baynes (London: Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1942) here and in subsequent references.] ³ Cf. Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 205–6; ii. 1470. The regalia had reposed at Nuremberg from 1424 until 1796, when they were moved to Vienna to be out of reach of the French. They were formally given back into the custody of the city of Nuremberg on 6 September 1938.

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0011

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in existence. . . . The German Reich has slumbered long. The German people is now awakened and has offered itself as wearer of its own millennial crown.⁴

The appeal to the Ottonian tradition was a new and more potent mode of asserting the secular German claim to overlordship in Europe, and especially among the peoples of Eastern Europe. Ribbentrop told Matsuoka⁵ that “the new German Reich would actually be built up on the basis of the ancient traditions of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which in its time was the only dominant power on the European Continent.”⁶ When Hitler upbraided the Hungarian Foreign Minister Csáky in January 1939 for Hungarian complaints of the injustice of the Vienna Award of the previous November, he said that the Hungarians thought about nothing but the thousand-year-old realm of St. Stephen, but he himself would override these pretensions in the name of the ancient Germanic Empire.⁷ But all these claims showed the present remoulding the past in its own image. For the Reich whose suzerainty Bohemia had acknowledged since the tenth century, and which had nearly reduced Hungary to dependence in the eleventh, had been something other than a German national state, and it was not until the later fifteenth century, in response to nascent German nationalism, that the words “of the German Nation” were formally added to the title of the Holy Roman Empire.⁸ Hitler’s early conquests had a more immediate impetus than medieval memories. They were the liquidation of a non-national past, in which the German people had been separated into many weak states or divided between Bismarck’s Empire and Austria-Hungary. They were the final repudiation of the Habsburgs, “the effete and degenerate dynasty”⁹ that had been an obstacle to German unity, and the fulfilment of the grossdeutsch policy which it had been Bismarck’s work to frustrate. The appeal to the old Reich was the reconciliation of Germany with her past by the myth that the injuria temporum had only been an historical interlude. ⁴ Nuremberg speech, 12 September 1938 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1498–9). The claim that the Third Reich was to last a thousand years seems to have arisen not only from the intoxication of talking in millennia but also from projecting the tausendja¨hrige geschichtliche Vergangenheit into the future. Four years earlier Hitler said: “It is our wish and will that this State and this Reich shall continue to exist in the coming millennia” (Nuremberg speech, 10 September 1934: ibid. i. 627). ⁵ Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1940–1. ⁶ Notes on talk between Ribbentrop and Matsuoka, 5 April 1941 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxix. 82 (1882PS); N.C.A. iv. 527). [Ed. I.M.T. Nuremberg stands for Trials of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945–1946, Proceedings and Documents in Evidence, 42 volumes (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947–1949) here and in subsequent references.] ⁷ Compte rendu de l’entretien de Hitler avec Czaky, 16 janvier 1939 (Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 25, p. 76). [Ed. Documents secrets du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères d’A llemagne, trans. From the Russian by Madeleine and Michel Eristov, Paris, Éditions Paul Dupont, 1946–7).] ⁸ By Frederick III. On the character of the first Reich see G. Barraclough, The Mediaeval Empire: Idea and Reality (London: Philip, Historical Association publications, General Series G17, 1950). ⁹ Mein Kampf, p. 573; tr. Murphy, p. 421. [Ed. Hitler, Mein Kampf ; tr. Murphy or simply Mein Kampf stands for Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols. in 1, 305th–306th ed. (Munich, NSDAP, 1938); trans. James Murphy, 2 vols. in 1 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939) here and in subsequent references.]

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(a) The National Socialist Revolution The ingredients of Hitler’s success were a national resurrection after defeat, a militaristic tradition, a messianic leader. The factors had coexisted before, but in the case of Nazi Germany they had acquired a peculiar potency. The obvious and superficial aspect of the Nazi movement was that of a national revival after defeat. Its most potent myths in conquering Germany were those of the Dolchstoss in den Ru¨cken, the army stabbed in the back by the civilian November traitors, the fiction that Germany had not been militarily defeated in the First World War;¹⁰ and of the Versailler Diktat, the Allies imposing mutilation, servitudes, and tribute upon Germany by force and treachery.¹¹ Its most potent claim in recovering for Germany the position to dominate Europe was Gleichberechtigung, the restoration of Germany’s equality of rights in the international community, the ending of the servitudes of Versailles.¹² But the promulgation and acceptance of these myths pointed to a disturbance in Germany and Europe far more deep-seated than any impulse to restore national prestige. The proudest claim of the Nazi movement was that it accomplished a true revolution in Germany—a transformation, the victory of a Weltanschauung, compared with which the “Revolution” of 1918 was no more than a change of government.¹³ The analogue for the National Socialist Machtergreifung was not the July Revolution of 1830,¹⁴ but the great French Revolution itself; and the General War of 1939–45 was to be the war of the German Nazi Revolution as the General War of 1792–1815 was the war of the French Revolution. France [said Hitler in 1934] carried her great Revolution beyond her borders with the conception of the nation. With the conception of race, National Socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world. . . . This revolution of ours is the exact counterpart of the great French Revolution. And no Jewish God will save the democracies from it.¹⁵ ¹⁰ Mein Kampf, vol. i, chapter x and pp. 583–92; tr. Murphy, pp. 428–35. For the inadvertent English origin of the legend of the stab in the back see John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Wooden Titan: Hindenburg in Twenty Years of German History, 1914–1934 (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1936), pp.167, 229, 238. ¹¹ Mein Kampf, pp. 523–4; tr. Murphy, pp. 389–90. ¹² “As regards their foreign policy the National Government consider their highest mission to be the securing of the right to live and the restoration of freedom to our nation. Their determination to bring to an end the chaotic state of affairs in Germany will assist in restoring to the community of nations a State of equal value and, above all, a State which must have equal rights,” proclamation by the Government to the German Nation, 1 February 1933 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 114–15). ¹³ Cf. Hitler’s speech at Munich of 19 March 1934 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. pp. 211–12). ¹⁴ Survey of International Affairs, 1933 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 112–14. [Ed. Subsequent references to this annual survey published by Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs are indicated simply by Survey and the year covered.] ¹⁵ Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), p. 230; cf. the same author’s Germany’s Revolution of Destruction (London and Toronto: William Heinemann Ltd, 1939),

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The year 1939 was the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the French Revolution, and Fascist philosophers had already announced that the era inaugurated by the French Revolution had come to an end.¹⁶ But the resemblance between the National Socialist and French Revolutions was exhausted by their being termini of the same epoch and their disruption of the international order. For the National Socialist Revolution was a new portent in European history. Hitherto the great revolutions of the West had effected or confirmed the transfer of power to a new class, with a corresponding extension of political and social liberties. This had been true both of revolutions within an established state, like the English in the middle of the seventeenth century and the French at the end of the eighteenth century, as well as of revolutions that were bound up with a war of national independence, like the Dutch at the end of the seventeenth century and the American in the eighteenth. But the National Socialist Revolution was neither the revolution of the middle class, like its Western predecessors, nor the revolution of the proletariat, as its Russian contemporary claimed to be. It was a revolution (and in a rudimentary way this was true also of its Italian Fascist precursor) conducted by a class that had not before attained size or prominence in European history, and which had to be described by a word abrogating the ordinary conceptions of class. It was a revolution of the déclassés, of those elements which had lost their place in society, their traditions, their loyalties.¹⁷ Germany was unique in the material it offered for a revolution of this kind. The defeated army of the First World War had dissolved into the military adventurers whose crimes of violence marked the politics of the early Republic, the men of the Freikorps and the Vehmic courts, the murderers of Kurt Eisner and Erzberger and Walther Rathenau. These demobilized and unemployable soldiers were the original source of the National Socialist Movement, and Hitler himself, the Gefreiter des Weltkrieges, was their exemplar. But the rank and file of a mass movement were supplied by the deracinated middle class, whose final destruction came in the inflation of 1923. And this accession of numerical strength was confirmed and p. 73. On the value of Rauschning as an authority see H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 4–5. ¹⁶ See Mussolini: La dottrina del fascismo, in Scritti e discorsi, viii. 83–84 (translated in Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge: University Press, 1939), p. 175). By 1939 the abrogation of the French Revolution had become the stock-in-trade jointly of Fascists and Nazis, but there seems to have been originally a difference of attitudes, the Italians regarding the French Revolution with the spite of the impoverished aristocrat, the Germans with the emulation of the parvenu (cf. Katharine Duff, “Italy,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 193, note 1, and Martin Wight, “Germany,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 351, note 7). It was the Italians and not the Germans who imitated and dismissed the French Revolution by reckoning a new chronological era from their Fascist Revolution. ¹⁷ Cf. Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Gollancz, 1944), pp. 17, note, and 280. (See also Martin Wight, “Germany,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 305, note 5.)

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made overwhelming when the world economic crisis of 1929–31 raised the figures of the unemployed in Germany to 5 millions and gave the National Socialist Party its first great parliamentary success.¹⁸ But though the National Socialist Revolution was occasioned by the defeat of Germany in the First World War, it had its roots much deeper, and while in one aspect it seemed a perversion, in another aspect it was a fulfilment of German history. It posed with a new sharpness the problem of whether there is any method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people, the question in what way a modern nation can be held responsible for its capture and debauch by a totalitarian party, and whether successful revolt against a totalitarian government armed with the civil, military, and propaganda power is technically possible. It was the first concern of Nazi propaganda to identify the German people with National Socialism, to diffuse and generalize responsibility, to involve the nation morally in the actions of its rulers. Every nation is, indeed, in an ultimate sense reflected in the government which it tolerates,¹⁹ and the character of opposition within a totalitarian state can only be inferred from the vigour of its political life before the curtain has fallen. The Nazi Party never obtained a majority in a free election;²⁰ but in the last year before it attained power it had become the largest party in the Republic, and the democratic parliamentary parties were incompetent to combine against it. Opposition within the Third Reich was heroic and sometimes saintly in individual terms, but its overriding characteristic, as of the opposition to William II and his Chancellors, to Bismarck, and to Frederick William IV, was political weakness and futility. Bismarck had obtained the surrender and abdication of the Liberals in 1866, which destroyed Prussia’s last chance of developing into a parliamentary democracy. Hitler received the surrender and abdication of the Centrum, which had first sabotaged the Weimar Republic by its high-minded confessional opportunism, and in the end destroyed the last chance of parliamentary resistance to the Nazi Revolution by voting for the Enabling Law of 16 March 1933 that set up the dictatorship—the Centrum “which had defied Bismarck and beat him, and now crawled Catholic and universal before Hitler.”²¹ ¹⁸ In the general elections of September 1930, National Socialist representation in the Reichstag rose from 12 to 107 (Survey for 1930, p. 8). ¹⁹ ‘Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite (Joseph de Maistre, Lettres et opuscules inédits, 6th edition (Paris: Vaton, 1873), i. 264: letter of 15 August 1811). ²⁰ In the general elections of July 1932, the Nazis won 37.4 per cent. of the votes and 230 seats, becoming the strongest single Reichstag party. In the elections of November 1932 their strength receded: they won 33.1 per cent. of the votes and 196 seats. This was the last free election in Germany. At the next election, on 5 March 1933, Hitler had been Chancellor for over a month, the Reichstag Fire had given occasion for the arrest of all the Communist deputies, and the Terror was already in being. Even now the Nazis gained only 44.1 per cent. of the votes, with 288 seats. But the Nationalists of Papen and Hugenberg, who were in coalition with the Nazis, had 52 seats; and the coalition thus had 340 seats out of a total of 647—a bare majority in the Reichstag of just over 51 per cent. (Survey for 1933, pp. 142–4.) ²¹ R. T. Clark, The Fall of the German Republic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935), p. 487; cf. pp. 74–76, 306, 312–13, 485.

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Only the Social Democrats were loyal to the republic which they had failed to defend and by a final gesture, impotent but noble, voted unitedly against the bill. But even the Social Democrats went on to show the fatal weakness which had destroyed German liberties. When in May 1933 the Reichstag was recalled to approve Hitler’s foreign policy, the Social Democrats did not repeat their brave act: some abstained, most voted with the National Socialists.²² Four months before Hitler seized Prague, the impotence of whatever forces of traditional decency may have been supposed to have survived in the Third Reich was vividly shown in the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938, the worst outbreak of domestic savagery in Germany since the massacres of 30 June 1934.²³ In the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848 Wilhelm Jordan had concluded his proclamation of the aims of German nationalism with the words “Freedom for all, but the power of the Fatherland and its weal above all.”²⁴ This cry had since then been the theme of German history, and it culminated in Nazi propaganda. The Third Reich was a system of government by terror, but it was nevertheless deeply popular. It fulfilled for the Germans collectively their most profound and ambiguous wishes: a restoration of self-confidence which was the resumption of national arrogance, the completion of internal unity by the suppression of minorities, the union of all German-speaking peoples in a Greater Reich through the subjugation of the Slavs. The Nazi Revolution, like the French Revolution, continued the main course of the national life at the same time that it widened its banks and deepened its channel. It gathered up all the forces of German history, the military fanaticism of the Prussian army, the unscrupulous tenacity of the Junkers and their hatred of the Poles, the demand for economic empire of the industrialists and their middleclass supporters, the “Austrian mission” wherewith the Habsburg Monarchy had justified its ascendancy in Eastern Europe, giving all these a demonic drive and intensity through a mass support they had not previously possessed. The intensification brought many trends to the point where their fulfilment passed over into their reversal. The Third Reich consummated the unification of Germany by Prussia, and finally erased the ancient La¨nder of the Reich as the French Revolution erased the ancient provinces of the French Monarchy.²⁵ But at the same time it destroyed the historic Prussia. The Social-Democratic Prussia which had ²² A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), pp. 212–13. ²³ Cf. Michael Power, Religion in the Reich (London: Longmans, Green, 1939), pp. 159–60. ²⁴ See L. B. Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals, Raleigh Lecture on History, 1944, from the Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. xxx (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 88. ²⁵ “Many people ask why we are abolishing the German States. I can only answer: ‘I do not know why we are doing this. I only know that I must do it. You lose the past and gain the future’,” Hitler’s speech to German students at Munich, 26 January 1936 (The Times, 28 January 1936). The Gleichschaltung of the La¨nder began with the law for co-ordinating the German states of 7 April 1933 (Survey for 1933, p. 147), and was completed with the law on the reconstruction of the Reich of 30 January 1934. The La¨nder were replaced in effect by the Gaue or tribal districts, units of Nazi Party organization (see Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 266–76; Stephen H. Roberts, The House that Hitler Built (London: Methuen, 1937), pp.

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been the bulwark of the Weimar Republic was destroyed by Papen’s coup d’état in July 1932, the prologue to the Nazi Machtu¨bernahmen; the old Prussian aristocracy was superseded by a new Nazi élite of South German and Rhineland origin, and was itself in July 1944 to provide some of the last ineffectual opponents of the Austrian Fu¨hrer’s régime. But in a more important way the Third Reich reversed Bismarck’s work, inheriting the kleindeutsch Reich he had built to exclude the German Austrians, and replacing it by the grossdeutsch Reich that came into existence with the conquests and annexations of 1938. Although the National Socialist Revolution was a German phenomenon, it was no less a crisis of the civilization of which Germany was part. The evils of Nazi Germany were most disturbing and menacing not in those features which might have been peculiar to Hitler or to the Teutonic mind, but those which are liable to occur in other lands and systems, those moreover which some men were predicting, without any thought of Germany, in the nineteenth century.²⁶ National Socialism was the German, and most virulent, form of Fascism, but Fascism neither began nor ended in Germany. It was a universal phenomenon, which had first seized power among a people more cultivated and more intelligent than the Germans, in a country with more ancient traditions of civilization and which had been, moreover, for twenty centuries the seat of the Catholic Church. There were similarities between the Italy that succumbed to Mussolini and the Germany that fell under Hitler. Both had attained national unification later than the other states of Western Europe—only two generations before the First World War. Neither had traditions of parliamentary government. Both were dissatisfied with the consequences of the First World War: Germany as being defeated, Italy as having barely vindicated her claim to be a Great Power, and as having acquired (though one of the victors) rewards far smaller than she had claimed. These circumstances made Italy and Germany alike more susceptible to the disease of extreme nationalism in its new totalitarian form. But the disease was endemic in Western Civilization as a whole. When Gibbon reflected upon the barbarian invasions that overthrew the Roman Empire, he concluded that cannon and fortifications now form an impregnable barrier against the Tartar horse; and Europe is secure from any future irruption of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous. Their gradual advances in the science of war would always be accompanied, as we may learn from the example of Russia, with a proportionable

67–70, 91–97; and Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939), vi.109. ²⁶ H. Butterfield, ‘Reflections on the Predicament of Our Time’, Cambridge Journal, October 1947, p. 12; cf. Survey for 1933, pp. 120–1.

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improvement in the arts of peace and civil policy; and they themselves must deserve a place among the polished nations whom they subdue.²⁷ In the century after Gibbon wrote, the possibility of an external barbarian invasion of Europe, resembling that which overturned the Roman Empire, was removed altogether through the extension of European civilization over the entire globe, leaving no barbarian penumbra of the old kind at all. But the pressure upon European civilization of masses imperfectly assimilated to it did not disappear. It was now provided by the vast increase in population that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. In the four generations between Gibbon and the First World War the population of Europe was more than trebled, and the population of North America multiplied fifty-fold.²⁸ How free institutions could survive the rise of the masses was the preoccupation of the greatest nineteenth-century political thinkers who remained outside the socialist movement, of Tocqueville and Mill, Burckhardt and Acton, and they generally expressed the danger in terms of the opposing extremes of Caesarism and Communism. But in 1919 Rathenau interpreted the revolutionary mass-movements that accompanied the First World War as “a vertical invasion of the barbarians,”²⁹ and ten years later Ortega y Gasset developed the

²⁷ Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by J. B. Bury, 2nd edition (London: Methuen, 1901), iv. 167. The impossibility of new barbarian invasions was a frequent theme with eighteenth-century writers. ‘Le temps s’écouloit, et de nouveaux peuples se formoient dans l’inégalité des progrès des nations. Les peuples policés environnés de barbares, tantôt conquérans, tantôt conquis, se mêloient avec eux: soit que ceux-ci reçussent des premiers leurs arts et leurs loix avec la servitude, soit que vainqueurs ils cédassent à l’empire naturel de la raison et de la politesse sur la force, la barbarie diminuoit toujours’ (A. R. J. Turgot, Discours sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain, prononcé en Sorbonne le 11 décembre 1750, in Oeuvres (Paris, 1808), ii. 65–6). [Ed.: ‘Time passed, and new peoples took shape in the inequality of the progress of nations. The civilized peoples surrounded by barbarians, sometimes conquering, sometimes conquered, mixed with them: either the latter received first their arts and laws with servitude, or the victors yielded to the natural power of reason and civilization over force, this barbarousness always diminishing.’ ] ‘In modern war the great expence of fire-arms gives an evident advantage to the nation which can best afford that expence; and consequently, to an opulent and civilized, over a poor and barbarous nation. In ancient times the opulent and civilized found it difficult to defend themselves against the poor and barbarous nations. In modern times the poor and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilized. The invention of firearms, an invention which at first sight appears to be so pernicious, is certainly favourable both to the permanency and to the extension of civilization’ (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book v, chapter i, part i (edited by Cannan, ii. 202)). ²⁸ In 1770 the population of Europe was about 150 millions, in 1914 about 460 millions, in 1933 about 519 millions. In 1770, the population of North America was perhaps 2 millions, in 1914 about 100 millions, in 1933 about 137 millions. See A. M. Carr-Saunders, World Population (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 19, 42; José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, authorized translation from the Spanish (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932), pp. 54, 119. ²⁹ “Die Vo¨lkerwanderung von unten nach oben hat begonnen” (Walther Rathenau, Der Kaiser (Berlin: Fischer, 1919), p. 54). [Ed.: “The migration of nations from lower to higher has begun.’ ] ‘. . . wir die lange Epoche der—vertikalen—Volkerwanderung betreten, in der die Ebene der Welt-zivilisation sich senkt” (W. Rathenau, Kritik der dreifachen Revolution (Berlin: Fischer, 1919), p. 41). [Ed.: “We are entering the long epoch of migration in which the level of world civilization sinks.” ] Cf. a letter written by Macaulay “in the last years of his life” to an American friend (quoted in Arthur Bryant, Macaulay (London: Davies, 1932), pp. 144–7): “Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of Government, with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the Twentieth Century as the Roman Empire was in the Fifth; with this difference, that the Huns

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idea into a famous book and described “the revolt of the masses” as the governing tendency of the age.³⁰ His book was a broad interpretation of Fascism, then already an established feature of European politics, and the National Socialist Revolution in Germany confirmed many of his predictions.³¹ Among the Germans there was a self-conscious barbarian tradition, a certain aloofness from European civilization, the recollection that it was German tribes who overthrew the Roman Empire in its decadence and inaugurated the new medieval era to which the name “Gothic” was once generally given and to whose supreme mode of expression it still applies. In the sixteenth century German national consciousness became definite and impassioned through hostility to Papal Rome. Arminius was already being made into a national hero as Hermann;³² and Gibbon recorded the patriotic remark of a Prussian count of his own day, “that most of the Barbarian conquerors [of the Roman Empire] issued from the same countries which still produce the armies of Prussia.”³³ But a self-conscious barbarian tradition, which began as a harmless literary archaism, insensibly degenerated into a genuine neo-barbarism equally self-conscious. After the War of Liberation against Napoleon extreme German nationalists harked back to the traditions of the ancient Teutons, which in their belief involved anti-Semitism, the proscription of persons of Slav descent, and the replacement of the French invention of the guillotine by beheading with the axe. A hundred years before Hitler came to power, Heine, in the most astonishing political prophecy of the nineteenth century, foretold a German Revolution which would make the French Revolution seem like an innocent idyll, when Thor and the old stone gods would arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries, there would

and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.” ³⁰ José Ortega y Gasset’s La Rebelión de las Masas was published in 1930, and translated as The Revolt of the Masses. “The rebellion of the masses is one and the same thing with what Rathenau called ‘the vertical invasion of the barbarians’” (p. 57). “The European who is beginning to Predominate—so runs my hypothesis—must then be, in relation to the complex civilisation into which he has been born, a primitive man, a barbarian appearing on the stage through the trap-door, a ‘vertical invader’” (ibid. p. 95; cf. p. 89). ³¹ Cf. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939), v. 335; vi. 56–7. “There was a time when the most frequent method of completely replacing a governing class was a barbarian invasion. Barbarians invaded a country, conquered it, governed it and crushed the previous inhabitants. Thus we may say that an event in foreign politics became an event in domestic politics. On another occasion I shall have no difficulty in establishing some interesting analogies between the ancient barbarian invasions and the consolidation of Fascist movements in modem states. By this I do not mean, as many do, that Fascism is barbaric because it is based on one class rather than another. My meaning is rather that it is barbaric because it mobilizes and marshals all the relics of primitive barbarism that still survive in modern man, whether plebeian or aristocratic. It frequently succeeds also in contaminating many of its political opponents, who, struggling against Fascism by Fascist methods, become barbarians themselves—Red barbarians” (Ignazio Silone, The School for Dictators, trans. from the Italian by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (London: Cape, 1939, p. 88; cf. pp. 135–6; New York: Harper, 1938; Toronto: Nelson; Clarke Irwin, 1939)). ³² C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (London, Cape, 1938) p. 46. ³³ Gibbon, op. cit. iv. 343, note 7.

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appear “Kantians as little tolerant of piety in the world of deeds as in the world of ideas, who will mercilessly upturn with sword and axe the soil of our European life in order to extirpate the last remnants of the past,” and there would be aroused again the ancient German eagerness for battle, which Christianity had not entirely quenched, and “which combats not for the sake of destroying, not even for the sake of victory, but merely for the sake of the combat itself.”³⁴ And on a visit to Germany in 1924, when Hitler was a prisoner in Landsberg-am-Lech and his movement had collapsed, D. H. Lawrence saw the gangs of German students, youths and girls, with their rucksacks, “their non-materialistic professions, their half-mystic assertions,” as loose scattered tribal bands, and understood intuitively that the inflation and the occupation of the Ruhr had completed what the war had begun, that the old hope of peace and production was broken, and that the Germans had subconsciously apostasized from Europe. The old flow, the old adherence is ruptured. And a still older flow has set in. Back, back to the savage polarity of Tartary, and away from the polarity of civilized Christian Europe. This, it seems to me, has already happened. And it is a happening of far more profound import than any actual event. It is the father of the next phase of events.³⁵ Hitler came back to capture and organize the Wandervo¨geln. His central conception of his historic mission lay in the claim that the Nazi movement was a new barbarian inroad, coming to end another outworn civilization and to replace it by a rejuvenated culture built on the principles of race. “They regard me as an uneducated barbarian,” he exclaimed jubilantly. “Yes, we are barbarians! We want to be barbarians! It is an honourable title. We shall rejuvenate the world! This world is near its end. It is our mission to cause unrest.” He then launched into a verbose exposition of what he called an “historical necessity.” Barbarian forces, he claimed, must break into decadent civilizations in order to snatch the torch of life from their dying fires.³⁶ Hitler was the first overlord of Europe to reject the ancient title of Emperor that embodied the claim to universal dominion. Charles V was elected to the imperial dignity in succession to his ancestors; Gustavus Adolphus and Louis XIV aspired to it; Napoleon assumed it; Bismarck’s king nationalized it. Hitler’s chosen title ¨¨bner Tru bner ³⁴ Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, trans. by John Snodgrass (London, Tru bner, 1882), pp. 159–62. This was first published in 1834. Heine’s perception that “the German revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the ‘Critique’ of Kant, by the ‘Transcendental Idealism’ of Fichte, or even by the Philosophy of Nature” (ibid. p. 158), was independently elaborated by George Santayana in Egotism in German Philosophy, 2nd edition (London: Dent, 1939). ³⁵ D. H. Lawrence, “A Letter from Germany,” in Stories, Essays, and Poems (London: Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1939), pp. 282–6. “A Letter from Germany” was first published in the New Statesman of 13 October 1934, which, however, wrongly gave the date of the letter as 1928 instead of 1924. ³⁶ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 87; cf. Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, pp. 53–54. In Mein Kampf (p. 433; tr. Murphy, pp. 329–30) Hitler displayed a mood of historical prudery, declaring that it was outrageously unjust to describe the old pagan Germans as barbarians: they were only handicapped by the severity of the climate in their northern wilderness.

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of Fu¨hrer of the German Volk represented a ruder source of authority than the Roman imperium: the charismatic leadership of the tribe.³⁷ At the height of his power he wrote to Mussolini: Above all, Duce, it often seems to me that human development has only been interrupted for fifteen hundred years and is now about to resume its former character. That destiny should have given to the two of us so eminent a position in this struggle binds me year by year more closely to you.³⁸

When Alaric and Gaiseric sacked Rome they were not animated by memory of the Greek barbarians who had sacked the Minoan capital some 2,000 years before; nor were the Greek barbarians consciously imitating their predecessors, the authentic Aryans, who had previously invaded and destroyed Sumerian Civilization. The development in National Socialism of a barbarians’ historical memory and purpose that spanned a millennium and a half was one of the most remarkable evidences of human progress.³⁹ But just as National Socialism was not the only form of Fascism, so the Fascist revolutions of Europe were not the first mass-movements of the twentieth century and did not establish its first totalitarian régimes. They had their precursor and their exemplar in the Communist Revolution in Russia. The connexion between ³⁷ Hitler also repudiated the name of dictator, which implied something different from leader (see Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 196–9, and Franz Neumann, Behemoth: the Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Gollancz, 1942), pp. 73–5). “I am not the Head of the State in the sense of being either Dictator or Monarch: I am the Leader of the German People! I could have given to myself—of that folk may be convinced—quite other titles. I have kept my old title and I will keep it so long as I live, because I do not wish to be anything else and never think of becoming anything else. The old title contents me,” speech at Munich, 8 November 1938 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes) ii. 1559). On 27 June 1939 it was decreed that official appointments were thenceforward to be made in the name of the Fu¨hrer simply, not, as previously, in the name of the Fu¨hrer and Chancellor. ³⁸ Unpublished letter of Hitler to Mussolini, 29 December 1941, quoted in Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Rome–Berlin Axis: A History of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 263. The name “the Gothic Line” for the last German line of defence in Italy in 1944 seems to have been a deliberate reference to the defence of the Gothic Kingdom of Italy against Belisarius, the great precursor in the sixth century A.D. of the Allies’ Italian strategy during the Second World War. ³⁹ The analogy often made between Hitler and Alaric or Attila was imperfect, because at the time when Hitler declared war on it Western Civilization was not yet organized into a universal state whose capital city it was his achievement to sack. The indigenous barbarians of twentieth-century Europe were comparable, in terms of relative chronology, to the Cimbri and Teutones who invaded the Roman world three-quarters of a century before the establishment of the Roman Empire. But in their character, their impact upon the minds of their contemporaries, and the social degeneracy to which they bore witness, the resemblance of the Fascist revolutions was rather to the Catilinarian conspiracy. Hitler was Catiline become triumvir; and one of his subjects wrote secretly in 1941 that “the most significant event in the twentieth century is the rise of the Catilinian power-state” (Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, translated from the German by Alexander Dru (London: Harvill Press, 1949) p. 165). It may be noted that, just as the German Communists named their party after Spartacus, so the Nazi leaders had a sense of historical affinity with the period of the dissolution of the Roman Republic, which was expressed in an enthusiasm for the blond and blue-eyed dictator Sulla, lieutenant and supplanter of Marius, the victor in the Cimbrian War (see Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, p. 92, and his Hitler Speaks, p. 257).

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Fascism and Communism at first appeared to be dialectical: the Fascist dictators claimed to be saving their countries from the dangers of Bolshevism. But from the outset their techniques for the revolutionary seizure of power and its totalitarian consolidation were modelled upon those of the Bolsheviks; and by the beginning of 1939, when the Soviet régime was over twenty years old, the Fascist régime in Italy over fifteen years old, and the National Socialist régime was at the height of its power after a bare six, it was becoming apparent to discerning observers that their similarities were greater than their contrasts, and that they might be represented as gradations in a single phenomenon of militant national Bolshevism.⁴⁰ Hitler did not invent the phrase “National Socialism,” but he was the first European statesman to perceive that socialism and nationalism are two aspects of the same revolt of the masses, and to found his policy upon their identification.⁴¹ The connexion between Russian Communism and German National Socialism was particularly close. Germany was the original home of the international socialist movement; the German Social Democratic Party was the original mass-party⁴² and was the world’s greatest Marxist party before 1914; and after its foundation in 1920 the German Communist Party was the largest Communist party outside Russia. It was to the German working class above all that the Russian Bolsheviks looked, in their first triumphs, for the seizure of state power that would turn the Russian Revolution into the world revolution. But German Communism was to have a different role, as the pace-maker of the National Socialist movement. It was from Communism that Hitler learned most of his techniques of revolutionary agitation;⁴³ and the Communist Party, though perpetually engaged in civil brawls with the Nazis, collaborated with them to make parliamentary government ⁴⁰ Cf. Michael Polanyi, “Collectivist Planning,” in The Contempt of Freedom (London: Watts, 1940), pp. 27 seqq. ⁴¹ He laid this down at the very outset of his career in a speech of 12 April 1922: “‘National’ and ‘social’ are two identical conceptions. . . . At the founding of this Movement we formed the decision that we would give expression to this idea of ours of the identity of the two conceptions: despite all warnings, on the basis of what we had come to believe, on the basis of the sincerity of our will, we christened it ‘National Socialist.’ We said to ourselves that to be ‘national’ means above everything to act with a boundless and all-embracing love for the people and, if necessary, even to die for it. And similarly to be ‘social’ means so to build up the State and the community of the people that every individual acts in the interest of the community of the people and must be to such an extent convinced of the goodness, of the honourable straightforwardness of this community of the people as to be ready to die for it” (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 15). On the assimilation of Communism and nationalism cf. L. B. Namier in H.P.C., iv. 77–78 and In the Margin of History (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 76; E. H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 19; and Franz Borkenau, Socialism: National or International (London: Routledge, 1942), passim. The phrase “National Socialism” had originated with Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919), who founded the Nationalsozialer Verein in Germany on 23 November 1896. Naumann also coined the phrase “Mitteleuropa” (see below, note 200 and accompanying text). [Ed. H.P.C. stands for A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, ed. H. W. V. Temperley (London: Oxford University Press for British Institute of International Affairs, 1920–1924) here and in subsequent references.] ⁴² Cf. Karl Otten, A Combine of Aggression: Masses, Élite, and Dictatorship in Germany, trans. by Eden Paul and F. M. Field (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942), pp. 176–7. ⁴³ Mein Kampf, pp. 45–6, 541–2; tr. Murphy, pp. 49, 401. See below, notes 139–55 and accompanying text.

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in the Weimar Republic impossible and to neutralize Germany’s feeble indigenous democratic elements. “The twin enemies of western civilization do their work nobly; they split and make impotent the only force that is perhaps capable of saving it.”⁴⁴ From 1931 onwards, when the Republic entered its death-agonies, the co-operation between Communists and Nazis became explicit, a tactical alliance comparable to the future Nazi–Soviet Pact. By adopting under Stalin’s orders a politique du pire the Communists lent their strength to the last push that brought the Nazis into power, supporting the Nazi agitation for a plebiscite in Prussia in 1931, voting in alliance with the Nazis a motion of no-confidence in the Braun Government in the Prussian Diet in June 1932, joining a Nazi strike against the Berlin transport board in November 1932.⁴⁵ As Napoleon was the Child of the Revolution, so Hitler claimed: “I am not only the conqueror, but also the executor of Marxism.”⁴⁶

(b) Hitler The creator and personification of the National Socialist Revolution was Hitler himself. To those whose temperament and circumstances did not expose them to the magnetism of his personality, he was a being so mean in his appearance, so uncultivated in mind and expression, so debased in his moral purposes, that the first mistake made by his contemporaries was to underestimate his power and ability. In the last months of the Republic the myth of Hindenburg’s loyalty to the Constitution had its obverse in the myth of Hitler’s mediocrity.⁴⁷ Many German politicians thought that it would be good for the Nazis to form a government: within a few months their incompetence would be exposed, their prestige broken, and they would be laughed out of politics.⁴⁸ Even after Hitler’s accession to power it was easy to see him as the expression of a social phenomenon, and to concentrate on the social phenomenon rather than on the individual. His colleague Otto Strasser called him “the cork of the German Revolution,”⁴⁹ and one of the earliest ⁴⁴ R. T. Clark, Fall of the German Republic, p. 206. ⁴⁵ See Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (London, Faber, 1938), pp. 342–7, 376; Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 331–2, 363–6, 388, 412–13. ⁴⁶ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 185. “In 1930 Hitler surprised a circle of his friends by asking them if they had read the just-published autobiography of Leon Trotzky, the great Jewish leader of the Russian Revolution, and what they thought of it. As might have been expected, the answer was: ‘Yes . . . loathsome book . . . memoirs of Satan . . .’ To which Hitler replied: ‘Loathsome? Brilliant! I have learned a great deal from it, and so can you’” (Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 245. Quotations by permission of Messrs. Victor Gollancz and Curtis Brown). ⁴⁷ Cf. the impression Hitler made on Dorothy Thompson in 1932 (Dorothy Thompson, I Saw Hitler (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1932), pp. 13–14). ⁴⁸ See the views attributed to Meissner and Papel in Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 422. Severing, the Prussian Minister of the Interior, privately expressed a similar opinion in 1932. ⁴⁹ Quoted in Rudolf Olden, Hitler the Pawn (London, Gollancz, 1936), p. 411. Otto Strasser himself was one of the earliest shipwrecks of the German Revolution: he quarrelled with Hitler and left the

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biographies published abroad was called Hitler the Pawn.⁵⁰ But the object of this depreciation had himself already written: “It will often be found that apparently insignificant persons will nevertheless turn out to be born leaders.”⁵¹ Few of the revolutionary titans of history were so completely merged in their revolutions as Hitler, and found their identity so exclusively in their role as the revolution’s mouthpiece and personification. Cromwell was in many ways the representative Puritan Englishman of the seventeenth century, but apart from becoming general and Protector he played a respectable role as a local magnate, and the core of his life was an individual spiritual struggle. Napoleon was the consolidator of the French Revolution, but only because he had first been its condottiere, and his genius, even if it had not brought him supreme power, would in any circumstances have assured him a degree of military and political leadership. Lenin was the maker of the Russian Revolution, but only because he was already pre-eminent as a Marxist ideologue and social scientist. Mussolini, a smaller figure, had had a career as a journalist before he entered politics, and after his fall from power he wished to reconstruct for himself a private life. Hitler was an anonymity of the Vienna slums who became the conjurer and medium of a mass revolution; besides this he was nothing. It was as if the historical requirements for revolutionary leadership in twentieth-century Germany had been pared away until there remained neither moral stature, nor accepted social status, nor autonomous professional and intellectual skills, but only an intensity of concentration upon the revolutionary task itself. It was characteristic of the First World War, which was the first war of the masses, that its hero in every country was not a great commander but an Unknown Soldier.⁵² Hitler repeatedly declared himself the unknown soldier of Germany—“only a nameless German soldier, with a very small zinc identification number on my breast”⁵³—not buried under wreaths in the national shrine but walking his country for revenge.⁵⁴ When people called him, half contemptuously, “the drummer of national Germany,” he accepted the metaphor with pride.⁵⁵ In this self-identification with the German masses he found his power and intoxication. Apart from it, his figure loses its outline and becomes smudged. Journalists strove with little success to find in him the personal idiosyncrasies that Party on 4 July 1930 (R. T. Clark, Fall of the German Republic, pp. 322–3; Otto Strasser, Hitler and I, trans. from the French by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher (London: Cape, 1940), p. 127). His abler brother Gregor remained to be murdered on 30 June 1934. ⁵⁰ Olden, op. cit.; see especially p. 403. Rudolf Olden was formerly Political Editor of the Berliner Tageblatt. ⁵¹ Mein Kampf, p. 650; tr. Murphy, p. 473. ⁵² Cf. Pertinax, The Gravediggers of France (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1944), p. 333. ⁵³ Speech at the Industrie-Klub, Dusseldorf, 27 January 1932 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 821). ⁵⁴ Cf. Hitler’s Sportpalast speech of 26 September 1938: “And we wish now to make our will as strong as it was in the time of our fight, the time when I, as a simple unknown soldier, went forth to conquer a Reich and never doubted of success and final victory” (ibid. ii. 1527). “Parties cannot save Germany, but only a man—the unknown soldier of the World War,” Goebbels in 1930 (Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 276). ⁵⁵ Speech at the Industrie-Klub, Du¨sseldorf, 27 January 1932 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 826).

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commend leaders to their peoples. When we seek a precise picture of his early life and ambitions, his artistic talents, his recreation, his personal and emotional relationships, his stunted marriage with Eva Braun, we are met by blurred and uncertain impressions, as if we are dealing with a generalized symbol of massman rather than a particular individual, or with a typical figure of a remote epoch; and it is fitting that even the circumstances of his death, after twelve years of preeminence, should be tinged with the same obscurity.⁵⁶ His life was drained of meaning by the concentration upon power; and the dominating figure of his age became nebulous, enigmatic, and legendary less through his achievements than because he had virtually no private attributes.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, while there would have been a revival of German nationalism anyway, and the revival would have found its leader and all this was indeed foreseen, Hitler brought to the German Revolution the talents of a consummate political genius, which establish his claim to be regarded as the greatest European figure not since Bismarck but since Napoleon, and as the greatest German figure not since Bismarck but since Luther.⁵⁸ His power of personality was itself a decisive historical force. It built him out of nothing a position of supreme political authority, and continued to control men after the political structure had crumbled in disaster.⁵⁹ Go¨ring fell under his spell at their first meeting in 1921 when he heard Hitler speak only two sentences; and years later, on being asked by a foreign diplomat “Are you really afraid of him?,” he replied after thought: “Yes I think so . . . You don’t know him!”⁶⁰ Speer was fascinated by him, and Schacht confessed or pretended that he never left Hitler’s presence without feeling uplifted and refreshed.⁶¹ Nor were foreigners immune. Lloyd George was only the most eminent of the English ⁵⁶ This is in spite of a wealth of research and information. On Hitler’s early life see Heiden, Der Fuehrer; on his last years see Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler. ⁵⁷ The same was true of Hitler’s contemporary and rival, Stalin. “The ordinary man is a hotchpotch of desires. He likes eating, drinking, smoking, keeping a canary, playing tennis, going to the theatre, being well-dressed, having children, stamp-collecting, doing his job, and many other things besides. That is the reason he remains a nobody; he spreads himself over so many little things. But the born politician wants nothing but power and lives for nothing but power. It is his bread, his meat, his work, his hobby, his lover, his canary, his theatre, his stamp-album, his life-sentence. The fact that all his powers and energies are concentrated upon one thing makes it easy for him to appear extraordinary in the eyes of the masses and thus become a leader, in the same way as those who really concentrate on God become saints and those who live only for money become millionaires” (Silone, School for Dictators, p. 69; cf. ibid. pp. 219–20). ⁵⁸ If Lenin is to be considered in a European as well as in a Russian context, he appears as a Robespierre whose Bonaparte was distributed between two figures: Hitler the transient demonic destroyer, and Stalin the patient despotic consolidator. For Heine’s prophecy of the third German emancipator, “the gleam of his golden armour shining through his purple imperial mantle,” who would complete what Luther began and what Lessing carried forward, see Religion and Philosophy in Germany, p. 96. The Germans were susceptible to this kind of vaticination; it was ironical that Heine, who did it better than anyone else, should have been undervalued in Germany even before he was banned by the Nazis. ⁵⁹ Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, pp. 185–6, 226–7. ⁶⁰ Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 91–2, 591; Go¨ring’s evidence, I.M.T. Nuremberg, ix 237–9. ⁶¹ See Trevor-Roper, op. cit. pp. 45–6; Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 188, 265. For Schacht’s retrospective picture of Hitler, see Hjalmar Schacht: Account Settled, trans. from the German by Edward Fitzgerald (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1949), chapter ix.

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politicians who were seduced by a visit to Hitler,⁶² and even Mussolini, who began with a Latin scepticism, and became gnawed by jealousy, and experienced much cause for anger and resentment, remained under the psychological domination of the Fu¨hrer.⁶³ Hitler’s monologues, which reduced private interviews and conferences with his Ministers and generals to the level of mass oratory, did not impair his ascendancy; they were rather a means of asserting it.⁶⁴ Of many witnesses I will cite only one—the judgment of a Canadian: “I could listen to Hitler talk for an hour on one side of a subject and then if he turned round and for the next hour directly contradicted everything he had previously said, I would follow him and believe him. That is what I think of Hitler’s persuasive powers! If he can get me that way, how much more can he get the German audiences!”⁶⁵ There were those, of course, who remained untouched by Hitler’s magnetism, particularly the generals in Germany and Ciano among foreign politicians; but it was the others who mattered.⁶⁶ The first of Hitler’s political gifts was oratory, the handling of mass audiences by the spoken word. This was his decisive endowment, as handling armies was Napoleon’s. “Words are battles today,” wrote one of Ludendorff ’s staff at the crisis of the First World War. “The right word is a battle won. The wrong one is a battle lost.”⁶⁷ It was in this spirit and from the same circumstances that Hitler had learnt the arts of propaganda.⁶⁸ Judged by the range and depth of the disturbance that he could evoke, he was the greatest mass-orator in history. Just imagine what his feelings must be when he stands, as in peacetime he used to stand, on the platform at the Tempelhofer Field in Berlin, and before him are a million Germans. This is the largest crowd that any man has ever had before him

⁶² See Survey for 1936, p. 350, note 2: Churchill, Second World War, i. 195; Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, p. 103. ⁶³ See Wiskemann, Rome–Berlin Axis, pp. 82, 287. No foreign statesman has given a better description of an interview with Hitler than [Grigore] Gafencu in Les derniers jours de l’Europe: un voyage diplomatique en 1939, revised edition (Paris: Egloff, 1947), pp. 94 seqq. ⁶⁴ See Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, p. 248; cf. Keitel’s evidence, I.M.T. Nuremberg, x. 485. ⁶⁵ N. H. Baynes: “National Socialism before 1933,” History, March 1942, p. 264; cf. Mein Kampf, p. 522; tr. Murphy, p. 388. ⁶⁶ For a general judgement on Hitler’s magnetic personality see Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 23. Ciano made the best comment for the recusants: “I believe that at heart Hitler is glad to be Hitler, because this permits him to talk all the time” (Ciano: Diario (1939–43), 19 December 1942). [Ed. Ciano: Diario (1939–43) stands for Galeazzo Ciano: Diario 1939 (–1943), 2 vols., 4th ed. (Milan: Rizzoli, 1947); Ciano’s Diary 1939–1943, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge (London: Heinemann, 1947) here and in subsequent references.] ⁶⁷ Colonel von Haeften, “Two Projects for a German Political Offensive in 1918,” Berlin, 14 January 1918 (“forwarded by me [Ludendorff ] with the strongest possible recommendation, to the Imperial Chancellor”) (Erich Ludendorff, Urkunden der Obersten Heeresleitung u¨ber ihre Ta¨a¨tigkeit 1916–18, 2nd edition (Berlin: Mittler, 1921), p. 477; trans. by F. A. Holt as The General Staff and its Problems (London: Hutchinson, 1920), ii. 557). ⁶⁸ See Mein Kampf, vol. i, chapter vi.

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in person. You could never assemble such a crowd in a democracy, because it takes them twelve hours to march into place and twelve hours to march away.⁶⁹ His speeches to German audiences illustrated his principles of simplicity of statement, repetition, and appeal to the brutal emotions.⁷⁰ Endlessly discursive and reiterated, regularly accusing his enemies of the crimes that he himself intended to commit against them, there was a sense in which they were all the same speech.⁷¹ But he had another principle, equally important, that oratory should be adapted to the particular audience.⁷² The success of his speeches was not limited to Germans prejudiced in favour of what they were to hear from him, for those who were prejudiced in favour of what they were to hear from him were not limited to Germany. And even for those in foreign countries not so prejudiced, when they heard Hitler’s speeches of 1938 and 1939 on the wireless, the rasping voice with its suggestion of femininity and hysteria brought the communication of his baleful power.⁷³ It was by his oratory that Hitler rose to power in Germany: his speeches were then what the victories in Italy were to the young Napoleon. In January 1932 Hitler met the chiefs of the heavy industry of Western Germany at the Industrie Klub in Du¨sseldorf—he addressed an ice-cold audience

⁶⁹ H. R. Knickerbocker, Is Tomorrow Hitler’s? (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942), p. 36. One of Hitler’s most vivid early memories was his first sight of a mass demonstration in Vienna: “I stood dumbfounded for almost two hours, watching that enormous human dragon which slowly uncoiled itself there before me”; and this experience, like so many others, contributed to his later armoury of mass suggestion (Mein Kampf, pp. 43, 536; tr. Murphy, pp. 47, 398). ⁷⁰ See the speech in the Bu¨rgerbra¨u Keller, Munich, 27 February 1925, paraphrased in Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 205–7 (it is not in Hitler, Speeches (Baynes)). ⁷¹ Cf. a description of the pattern of Cromwell’s speeches in Wilbur Cortez Abbott, The Writings & Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, vol. iv (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 463: “Yet, in a sense, it was nearly always the same speech, with variations due to time and circumstance. It often began with an historical introduction. It denounced his opponents and defended his course and that of his party, so interpreting events that whatever course they took seemed natural, necessary, even inevitable. He attacked the actions and especially the motives of his opponents vigorously, even violently, attributing to them the very ambitions and activities which, as the event demonstrated, were those which his own party put into effect. . . . He painted a dark picture of conspiracy, rebellion and new civil war, contrasting it with the peace which his own rule conferred upon his country, and offering his hearers in effect a choice between these two alternatives.” All this is true of Hitler’s speeches. But on a more general comparison between Hitler and Cromwell, the last word has been said by Sir Ernest Barker, Oliver Cromwell (Cambridge: University Press, 1937). ⁷² “Moi, je sais toujours en face de qui je me trouve et je parle pour qui est en face de moi. . . . La valeur d’un orateur n’a qu’une mesure en fin de compte: son efficacité . . . L’immense erreur des partis bourgeois est de s’être entêtés à parler au peuple le langage des intellectuels. Il fallait savoir distinguer les publics différents”: Hitler as quoted by Philippe Barrès: “Hitler et l’Autriche,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 8ème période, xliv (1938), p. 546, reproduced in Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii 1707. [Ed. “Me, I always know who is in front of me and I speak to the one who is facing me. The worth of an orator has but one measure in the final analysis: its effectiveness. . . The immense error of bourgeois parties is that they stubbornly speak to the people the language of the intellectuals. It was necessary to know how to distinguish among different publics.” ] Cf. Raeder on the nature of Hitler’s speeches (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xiv. 35). ⁷³ Among other “examples of Hitler’s effect on England” at the time of the Munich crisis, it was recorded that during the Nuremberg speech of 12 September 1938 “a seven-year old boy, woken up by the wireless, rushed downstairs terrified and cried: ‘Stop that horrible woman screaming’” (The New Statesman and Nation, 17 September 1938, p. 407).

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of hard-headed business men, and at the end of the speech he had won their enthusiastic agreement. It is perhaps his greatest achievement as an orator. It is a superbly ingenious argument. That speech is a landmark in the history of National Socialism.⁷⁴ Another decisive oratorical victory, at a more sombre domestic crisis, was the Reichstag speech of 13 July 1934. In the preceding fortnight he had murdered over a thousand people and many Nazi Party leaders; he had now to justify this to the survivors in a Reichstag where the massacre had left a score of seats empty. For perhaps the only time in his life he was heard for twenty minutes in silence, until, “raising his right hand, fore-finger pointed on high, he stood on his toes and roared: ‘In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and in these 24 hours I was therefore the supreme court of the nation in my own person,’ ” and found at last the customary applause.⁷⁵ But once Hitler was in power his speeches acquired a wider range. They were now not addressed to the German audience only, but became a series of psychological victories over British and French opinion, from the Friedensrede of I7 May 1933, when he made himself spokesman of the world’s need for peace,⁷⁶ down to the Reichstag speech of 7 March 1936, in which, wielding a Gladstonian theme, he justified the reoccupation of the Rhineland on the grounds of moral right.⁷⁷ At this point his speeches, shifting to Germany’s vital interests abroad, gained new overtones of menace, and developed every modulation between the assurance of immediate peace and the assertion of the conditions upon which alone Germany would withhold from war. Now, he said, the struggle for Gleichberechtigung was accomplished; in Europe Germany had no territorial claims to put forward; and he felt more than ever before the obligations towards other states which the recovery of national honour and freedom imposed.⁷⁸ Again, he said that in the three years since the Nazi Revolution the Germans had done nothing to injure any other people, had stretched out their hand to nothing that did not belong to them, had remained within their own frontiers; and if now lies were spread abroad that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow Germany would invade Austria or Czechoslovakia, these lies originated not with the peace-loving millions but with a small

⁷⁴ Baynes, “National Socialism before 1933,” History, March 1942, p. 278. The date of the speech was 27 January 1932 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 777–829) ⁷⁵ Knickerbocker, Is Tomorrow Hitler’s?, pp. 39–40. The speech is in Hitler, Speeches (Baynes) i. 290–328, from the version of the Frankfurter Zeitung; but the sentence quoted above is the more familiar translation from The Times, 14 July 1934 (contrast Speeches (Baynes), i. 321). ⁷⁶ Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1041–58, especially pp. 1046–7; Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 485–90. ⁷⁷ “It is not wise to imagine that, in so small a household as Europe, there can be a permanent commonwealth of nations in which each nation has its own jurisprudence and in which each wants to uphold its own concept of law and justice” (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1273). This sentence was quoted by Professor R. W. Seton-Watson on the title-page of Britain in Europe, 1789–1914 (Cambridge: University Press, 1938). ⁷⁸ Reichstag speech, 7 March 1936 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1300).

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international gang of agitators—the Jews.⁷⁹ A little later: if he had carried out the measures for achieving Gleichberechtigung without consulting the Versailles Powers each time and even without informing them, it was because this made it easier for them to accept the decisions, for they would have to accept them in any case; but now that all this had been accomplished, the so-called period of surprises was at an end.⁸⁰ And then the climax, when he declared that he stood before the last problem that had to be solved, the last territorial claim he had to make in Europe, but a claim from which he would not recede; for with regard to the problem of the Sudeten Germans his patience was now at an end.⁸¹ It was not until the seizure of Prague on 15 March 1939 that the hypnotic spell finally broke, the suggestibility of his foreign audiences was dissipated, and he won no more victories by words alone. In the second place, Hitler possessed a kind of genius for organization. He had nothing of Napoleon’s superb intellectual equipment and executive gifts, the capacity for unremitting work, the command of detail, the power of moving with equal mastery from one topic to another over a vast range. Hitler was a spasmodic worker, capricious and undisciplined. He disliked reading reports and memoranda, and acquired such information as he wanted by interrogating men without allowing them to advise him.⁸² “The laborious work of calculating and checking every possible detail is not to his taste. He loses patience with it, gets tired of it. In throwing out a sketch with a few strokes of genius—that is where he finds supreme satisfaction.”⁸³ The only subject he studied with any thoroughness was strategy, for it was his unfulfilled ambition to be as great a military strategist as revolutionary leader.⁸⁴ The only sphere in which he had detailed knowledge (and it was remarkable) was that of fortifications and armaments, which united his fascination by gadgets and his passion for immensity. He was the sciolist and café politician on a throne. But he was something more. His talent for organization consisted in his range of planning, his tenacity of purpose, and his power of making men his instruments. ⁷⁹ Speech in the Lustgarten, Berlin, 1 May 1936 (ibid. p. 1322). ⁸⁰ Reichstag speech, 30 January 1937 (ibid. p. 1336). ⁸¹ Sportpalastspeech, 26 September 1938 (ibid. pp. 1517, 1526). Cf. Chamberlain’s speech in the House of Commons on 28 September 1938: “In the first place he repeated to me with great earnestness what he had said already at Berchtesgaden, namely, that this was the last of his territorial ambitions in Europe and that he had no wish to include in the Reich people of other races than Germans” (House of Commons Debates [hereafter H.C. Deb.] 5th ser., vol. 339, col. 22; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1938, ii. 285). ⁸² See Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 302; Keitel’s evidence, I.M.T. Nuremberg, x. 484–5. ⁸³ See Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 265–6; cf. pp. 183, 254–5. Hitler once confided to a fellow prisoner of his Landsberg days: “In the last half hour, while I have been resting, I have invented a new machine-gun and an apparatus for bridge-building, as well as composing a piece of music in my head” (Erich Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1948), p. 53). ⁸⁴ On Hitler’s military gifts see Franz Halder, Hitler as War Lord, trans. From the German by Paul Findlay (London: Putnam, 1950); B. H. Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill (London: Cassell, 1948), pp. 9–10, 305–9. An extreme statement of Hitler’s strategical genius is in Keitel’s evidence, I.M.T. Nuremberg, x. 600.

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Like every successful revolutionary movement, National Socialism had a double technique, of violent upheaval and rapid advance supplemented by the slower methods of infiltration and undermining. It was his mastery of the second of these that distinguished Hitler from revolutionary adventurers who, like Napoleon III and Mussolini and the majority of Hitler’s contemporary dictators, have taken advantage of a transient revolutionary situation. There was a rhythm in the history of National Socialism, an alternation between advance and consolidation. The Munich putsch of 1923 was premature.⁸⁵ It was followed by ten years of adherence to “legality,”⁸⁶ which meant organization and infiltration. Hitler could not overthrow in a year the Weimar Republic, but within the National Socialist organisation itself he could fashion a miniature State which, when the day of victory came, should be ready to occupy the cadres of the Unstaat—the State which was not worthy of the name of State—and carry on the government of the German Empire without intermission. That is the task of the years after Landsberg. And in the life of Hitler there is perhaps nothing more remarkable than this sustained work within the party . . . And at the time when the fortunes of the party were at its lowest ebb, Hitler appointed a commission of jurists to work out the form of the constitution of the National Socialist State of the future. When Hitler was asked in after years how it was that he could hold out his arm continuously for four hours in the Nazi salute, he replied “Willpower . . . Go¨ring can’t do it!” Glaube—der Sieg einer Idee—Faith! the Victory of an idea. It has become vulgarised through constant repetition in countless speeches, but the appointment of that commission just then must never be forgotten if you would attempt any explanation of Hitler. The Department for Foreign Affairs, the Department for Propaganda, the organisation of youth, the association of National Socialist teachers, the National Socialist organisation of women, the Motor Corps, the Flying Corps, not to speak of the SS. and the SA.—the Party should be ready when the hour struck to supersede the Unstaat and to carry over its institutions into its own State.⁸⁷ This long period of the hard work of constructive subversion is something which has no counterpart in the careers of Cromwell or Napoleon, and is imperfectly resembled by Lenin’s life in exile between 1900 and 1917. It bore its fruit when the great advance came in 1933, the Machtu¨bernahme, the taking-over of power. ⁸⁵ The immediate result was Hitler’s sentence to detention in a fortress at Landsberg-am-Lech from 1 April to 20 December 1924. Hitler, no less than Peter the Great and Lenin, is a conspicuous example of Toynbee’s principle of Withdrawal-and-Return (see Study, iii. 248 seqq.). ⁸⁶ See Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 161–2. ⁸⁷ N. H. Baynes, “National Socialism before 1933,” History, March 1942, pp. 275–6; cf. Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 415. Baynes has written in similar terms of the way in which Constantine the Great built for the future: “Within the pagan Empire itself one could begin to raise another—a ChristianEmpire: and one day the walls of the pagan Empire would fall and in their place the Christian building would stand revealed” (Byzantium, ed. Baynes and Moss, p. xviii). For what is apparently the original version of the story of Hitler giving the Nazi salute for hours on end, see Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), p. 40.

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But then, on a wider field and in different circumstances, the pattern was repeated. A new period of “legality” began, of legality in the international sphere. The Germans’ boundless love for their own national traditions, said Hitler, made them respect the national claims of others and desire from the bottom of their hearts to live with them in peace and friendship; no German Government would of its own accord break an agreement which could not be removed without being replaced by a better one; Germany did not wish to take any other path than that recognized as justified by the treaties themselves.⁸⁸ The attempted coup-d’état in Vienna in July 1934, when Dollfuss was murdered, was conceived of as the extension of the Machtu¨hernahme to Austria; its failure showed that the time was not ripe and that it was really the analogue of the Munich putsch. The decision for the July uprising was right, [wrote the Gauleiter Rainer afterwards] but many mistakes were made in carrying it out. The result was the complete destruction of the [Party] organization, the loss of entire groups of fighters through imprisonment or flight into the “Altreich,” and, with regard to the political relationship between Germany and Austria, a formal acknowledgement of the existence of the Austrian State by the German Government. With the telegram to Papen, instructing him to reinstitute normal relationships between the two States, the Fu¨hrer liquidated the first stage of the battle and began a new method of political penetration.⁸⁹ The work of international revolutionary preparation and penetration, which went forward unceasingly behind the statements of adherence to international legality, was conducted in two spheres. One was the acceleration and completion of rearmament inside Germany. As soon as he came to power Hitler “made a clear political request to build up for him in five years, that is, by the 1.4.38, Armed Forces which he could place in the balance as an instrument of political power.”⁹⁰ With Go¨ring’s announcement of the existence of an air force on 10 March 1935, the reintroduction of conscription on 16 March 1935,⁹¹ the secret Reich Defence Law and the appointment of Schacht as plenipotentiary-general for war economy on 21 May 1935,⁹² and the formal unilateral repudiation of the Versailles armaments restrictions in Hitler’s Reichstag speech on the same day,⁹³ the first and secret phase of German rearmament was successfully achieved. ⁸⁸ Friedensrede, 17 May 1933 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1047, 1056; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1933, pp. 201, 207). “We shall triumph by the same inexorable logic of fact in our foreign policy as in our home policy. I shall attain my purpose without a struggle, by legal means, just as I have come to power—simply because the inner logic of events demanded it” (Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 112). ⁸⁹ Report on the events in the NSDAP of Austria between the beginning of the last stage of battle and the seizure of power on 11 March 1938, enclosed in a letter from Gauleiter Rainer [of Salzburg] to Bu¨rckel, 6 July 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 349 (812-PS); cf. ibid. xvi. 380; cf. N.C.A. iii. 589). ⁹⁰ “History of the War Organization and the Scheme for Mobilization” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 473 (135-C); cf. ibid. xiv. 16–18; N.C.A. vi. 947). ⁹¹ Survey for 1935, i. 172. ⁹² I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxx. 60–2 (2261-PS); N.C.A. iv. 934–6. ⁹³ Survey for 1935, i. 172.

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History will know only a few examples [wrote the German general Thomas ten years later] of cases where a country has directed even in peacetime all its economic forces so deliberately and systematically towards the requirements of war as Germany was compelled to do in the period between the two world wars.⁹⁴ The other sphere was the organization of Auslandsdeutschtum, of Germans in foreign countries. During the First World War the German General Staff had enunciated a principle for Imperial Germany, which is to some extent the same for all Great Powers: “German prestige demands that we should hold a strong protecting hand, not only over German citizens, but over all Germans.”⁹⁵ Under National Socialism this was accomplished. The Auslands-Organisation (AO) and the subsidiary Volksbund fu¨r das Deutschtum in Ausland (VDA) became in a smaller degree to the world what the Party itself had been to Germany between 1923 and 1933.⁹⁶ In 1937 the AO became a department of the German Foreign Ministry; it was partially fused with the diplomatic and consular services, and its activities acquired the shelter of diplomatic immunity. It thus became a highly developed medium for the revolutionary penetration of foreign countries by propaganda and espionage, the establishment throughout the world of fifth columns and a network of Stu¨tzpunkte.⁹⁷ With its control supplemented by the Gestapo, its formations and associations embraced not only Party members but all Germans in their social and professional lives, and supervised their activities in every sphere. In some places it set up paramilitary organizations, usually in the form of an Ordnungsdienst or police service, nominally for maintaining order among the members of the Party but capable of being used as a striking-force. There was also an attempt to direct the emigration of Germans to areas of strategic importance, like Northern Slesvig, South Africa, and Latin America, and the movement of reinforcements under the guise of tourists, technicians, and commercial travellers was highly organized. Foreign nations and foreign statesmen [said Go¨ring’s official organ in 1937] must recognize that in the future fruitful relationships between Germany and other world-peoples can take place only on the basis of the organized activity of foreign Germans as natural agents of German culture and commerce.⁹⁸ Within four months of the seizure of power within Germany Hitler made his first direct appeal to Germans beyond the frontiers of the Reich.⁹⁹ The official disclaimers of irredentist and imperialist purposes had already lost credit by the

⁹⁴ “Basic Facts for a History of German War and Armaments Economy, 1923-44” (N.C.A. iv. 1089). ⁹⁵ Colonel von Haeften in Ludendorff, op. cit. p. 481 trans. Holt, op. cit. ii 562. ⁹⁶ The AO was founded in 1931; its Gauleiter was Bohle. The VDA was the former Verein fu¨r das Deutschtum im Ausland, founded in 1881 and gleichgeschaltet in 1933. See “Note on Auslandsdeutschtum” in Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1063–79; cf. Survey for 1936, pp. 41–48. ⁹⁷ Cf. Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, pp. 260–1. ⁹⁸ Richard Csaki in The Four Years Plan, quoted in the New York Times, 26 October 1937 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1072). ⁹⁹ His broadcast message to Danzig of 27 May 1933, before the Danzig elections of 28 May (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1060–3).

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time the offices of the AO in Barcelona were searched and their documents seized and published by the Spanish Government after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936.¹⁰⁰ Much of the organization of Auslandsdeutschtum, like much German organization of any kind, was supererogatory and fruitless. This was true of the immense ramifications of the Nazi Party in Latin America, and the less successful activities of the Deutsche-amerikanische Volksbund in the United States and of the Deutsche Bund in Canada. But it produced its European results in the Nazification of Danzig four months after the seizure of power in Germany,¹⁰¹ the Nazification of Austria that prepared the Anschluss, the disruption of Czechoslovakia through the Sudeten Germans, the marshalling of the German minorities throughout Eastern Europe,¹⁰² and the penetration and paralysis of Norway.¹⁰³ These could not be so directly Hitler’s achievements as was the building of the Party and the corrosion of the Weimar Republic. They followed from the impetus he gave to the natural German tendency to laborious, blind, and expansive organization. Nevertheless the spirit and the purpose were his. Whoever imagines Socialism as revolt and mass demagogy is not a National Socialist [he said in 1934]. Revolution is not games for the masses. Revolution is hard work. The masses see only the finished product, but they are ignorant, and should be ignorant, of the immeasurable amount of hidden labour that must be done before a new step forward can be taken.¹⁰⁴ Apart from its doctrinal drive and propagandist techniques, the skeleton of the Nazi system of government was gangsterism magnified to a national scale. One of its chief incentives was organized corruption; among its most powerful means of coercion were espionage and personal blackmail.¹⁰⁵ These were developed with an eye to their use in international politics, but their efficacy diminished outside Germany, and Hitler’s foreign successes were attributable to other aspects of his genius than the conception of a comprehensive card-index of the vices of every influential person in the world. More important in its international effects was Hitler’s characteristic method of government by playing men off against one another and cultivating the rivalries of subordinates. Like Franklin Roosevelt, he multiplied contradictory assignments and conflicting agencies;¹⁰⁶ but for reasons which were beyond the scope of Hitler’s moral and political philosophy the result in Germany was not harmonious but centrifugal, and the monolithic Nazi state ¹⁰⁰ See The Nazi Conspiracy in Spain by the editor of The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, trans. From the German manuscript by Emile Burns (London: Gollancz, 1937); Survey for 1937, ii. 127, note 1. ¹⁰¹ By the elections of 28 May 1933 (Survey for 1933, p. 187). ¹⁰² See below, notes 194–5 and accompanying text. ¹⁰³ Cf. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. I, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948), pp. 600–2, 605–8, 648–50. ¹⁰⁴ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 175. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid. pp. 98–9, 267–70. The most important instance of the use of blackmail in high politics was in the dismissal of Blomberg and Fritsch in February 1938. ¹⁰⁶ See Schacht, Account Settled, pp. 212–13; L. B. Namier, Europe in Decay: A Study in Disintegration, 1936–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 232.

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dissolved under the strain of war, as Trevor-Roper has described, into “a confusion of private empires, private armies, and private intelligence services.”¹⁰⁷ In 1939 the process was far from complete, but since Hitler came to power foreign policy had been pursued through conflicting organs and involved in personal rivalries. In 1933 the ideologist of Nazi expansion, Rosenberg, was put in charge of the Foreign Policy Office of the Nazi Party, which organized foreign penetration under the guise of spreading National Socialism abroad. The official Ministry of Foreign Affairs remained under Neurath from 1932 to 1938 and preserved diplomatic appearances.¹⁰⁸ But Neurath had a jealous rival in Ribbentrop, who followed an independent line as Hitler’s Ambassador-at-large, and at length replaced Neurath as Foreign Minister.¹⁰⁹ Go¨ring, moreover, as chief of the Luftwaffe and president of the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich, was also a prominent diplomatic figure, entertaining distinguished visitors to Berlin, and having conversations with potentates in foreign capitals. This variety of influences encouraged the illusion among British politicians that Hitler was a visionary, ill-advised or only partially informed by extremist subordinates, that Ribbentrop was a sinister influence, or Go¨ring a moderating one.¹¹⁰ But in truth there was never any foreign policy in Nazi Germany except Hitler’s, which inspired and included the intrigues of his Ministers; it needed no enhancement from sinister influences outside; and when the moment came it was he alone who made the decisions. In the third place, Hitler possessed in a supreme degree the virtuosity of politics: sheer technical competence in the struggle for power. Its central source was his extraordinary strength of will. But in addition to this, his tactical elasticity and adroitness in manoeuvre, his sensing of the enemy’s weak points and probable reactions, his suppleness in biding his time and confusing the enemy before striking, had the Napoleonic range.¹¹¹ And though Hitler moved by intuition, and lacked anything resembling Napoleon’s intellectual clarity over a wide horizon, he made power politics the object of his study; he understood the theory of it; and he has left dicta thereon as penetrating and enduring as Machiavelli’s, like the

¹⁰⁷ Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, p. 2. ¹⁰⁸ “Neurath is unimaginative. Shrewd as a peasant, but with no ideas. At the moment it’s his benevolent appearance that is of most use to me. You can’t imagine a man like that going in for a revolutionary policy, they will say in England” (Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 268–9). ¹⁰⁹ Ribbentrop was Hitler’s chief adviser on foreign affairs from 1932; appointed commissioner for disarmament questions in April 1934; became Hitler’s Ambassador-at-large in May 1935, and in that capacity negotiated the Anglo-German naval agreement; was made Ambassador in London on 11 August 1936, without relinquishing the previous post until 1937; and became Foreign Minister on 24 February 1938. ¹¹⁰ Cf. Henderson, Failure of a Mission, pp. 65, 69, 83–4, 176–7, 251. Cf. Final Report by Sir Nevile Henderson on . . . the Termination of his Mission to Berlin, September 20, 1939, Cmd. 6115 (London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939), paras. 18, 75–6. ¹¹¹ Hitler’s capacity for biding his time was often carried to the point where it appeared like irresolution (Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, pp. 172, 288; Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 293, 592). See further below, notes 280–7 and accompanying text.

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principles that the masses fall victims more readily to the big lie than the small lie,¹¹² and that a shrewd conqueror will enforce his exactions by stages.¹¹³ The main source of his prestige in 1939 was his political flair, his recognition of the moment for action, what was called in Germany his Fingerspitzgefu¨hl. In the succession of foreign crises since 1933 he had been constantly right when his political and military advisers were wrong. The last decision on foreign policy about which he informed the Reich Government in advance was the leaving of the League of Nations.¹¹⁴ “It was a hard decision. The number of prophets who predicted that it would lead to the occupation of the Rhineland [sc. by the French] was large, the number of believers was very small.”¹¹⁵ His own decision to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936 was made spontaneously, a couple of days beforehand, without consulting his Cabinet¹¹⁶—“once more an act thought to be impossible at that time. The number of people who believed in me was very small.”¹¹⁷ As his adventures increased their scope, the opposition of the General Staff grew stronger. Throughout the conference of 5 November 1937 there was an undercurrent of doubt and disapproval from Blomberg, the Minister for War, and Fritsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. They argued that France would have a military superiority on the German frontier even if she were at war with Italy, and that the Czechoslovak fortifications were comparable in strength to the Maginot Line.¹¹⁸ In February 1938 Blomberg and Fritsch were accordingly removed from office, and Hitler himself became Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces; Neurath was replaced by Ribbentrop, and Schacht was replaced at the Reichsbank by Funk. These were the outward signs of the first collision between Hitler and the army, a governmental crisis which Hitler solved with enhanced prestige by the occupation of Austria.¹¹⁹ When he signed the directive of 30 May 1938 for the destruction of Czechoslovakia, Jodl wrote that the whole contrast becomes acute once more between the Fuehrer’s intuition that we must do it this year and the opinion of the army that we cannot do it as yet, as most certainly the Western Powers will interfere and we are not as yet equal to them.¹²⁰

¹¹² Mein Kampf, p. 252; tr. Murphy, p. 198. ¹¹³ Ibid. pp. 759 and 544 respectively; see also below, notes 222–9 and accompanying text. ¹¹⁴ Lammers’s evidence (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xi. 39). ¹¹⁵ Hitler, speech to his commanders, 23 November 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 328 (789-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 529; cf. N.C.A. iii. 573). ¹¹⁶ Neurath’s evidence (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xvi. 626); Lammers’s evidence (ibid. xi. 39). ¹¹⁷ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 328 (789-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 529; cf. N.C.A. iii. 573. ¹¹⁸ Hossbach Memorandum (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 413 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 38; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 24; cf. N.C.A. iii. 304). [Ed. The full reference for “D.Ger.F.P., series D” is Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, published jointly by the British Foreign Office and the U.S. Department of State. Series D (1937–45). (Washington: U.S.G.P.O. and London: H.M.S.O., 1949).] ¹¹⁹ For the Fritsch–Blomberg crisis see H. B. Gisevius, To the Bitter End, trans. from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (London: Cape, 1948), chapter vi, especially pp. 254–5. ¹²⁰ Jodl’s diary (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxviii. 373 (1780-PS); N.C.A. iv. 364).

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In July 1938 the General Staff submitted to Hitler a memorandum, drawn up by Beck, the Chief of the General Staff, which argued that Germany’s military inferiority was such that though she might have initial successes against Czechoslovakia she would be defeated by France, and that therefore war should not be risked over the Sudetenland.¹²¹ The memorandum provoked Hitler’s anger: he dismissed Beck and replaced him by Halder. In February the generals had been unprepared for action; in the September crisis, under Halder’s leadership, it was arranged that immediately upon the outbreak of war Hitler should be overthrown.¹²² But now came Mr. Chamberlain, and with one stroke the danger of war was avoided. Hitler returned from Munich as an unbloody victor glorified by Mr. Chamberlain and M. Daladier. Thus, it was a matter of course that the German people greeted and enjoyed his successes. Even in the circles of Hitler’s opponents—the senior officers’ corps—those successes of Hitler’s made an enormous impression.¹²³ From Munich onwards there was no organized opposition to Hitler inside Germany for six years. It has been said that the final failure of Hitler’s politics and strategy lay in the corruption of irresponsible power and the absence of criticism “essential to such a random genius.”¹²⁴ This is entirely true. But the attempt to estimate his political gifts involves deeper questions. There is an ultimate level of analysis on which we have to consider the standards by which we judge political achievement. Is it virtù, mere brilliance of execution; or service to the interests of the state; or service of values lying behind the interests of the state?¹²⁵ For the last, Hitler indeed claimed that his was not a purely national policy, it aimed at biological objectives.¹²⁶ This was the substitution of pseudo-science for the principles of Western Civilization. As to the interests of Germany, he made her the instrument of universal unsettlement, creative unrest, permanent revolution;¹²⁷ and he himself gave an unintentional verdict on this when he wrote that “the object of a diplomatic policy must not be to see that a nation goes down heroically but rather that it survives in a practical way.”¹²⁸ There remains virtù. Hitler sometimes interpreted this quality at its very lowest, as mere slickness. “Politics is a game, in which every sort of trick is permissible,” he said, “and in which the rules are constantly being changed by the ¹²¹ Interrogation of Halder, 25 February 1946 (N.C.A. Supp. B, pp. 1548–50); Rundstedt’s evidence (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxi. 33); Liddell-Hart, The Other Side of the Hill, pp. 39–40. ¹²² Interrogation of Halder, 25 February 1946 (N.C.A. Supp. B, pp. 1547–60); Gisevius, op. cit. pp. 277–327; Allen Welsh Dulles, Germany’s Underground (New York: Macmillan, 1947), chapter 4. ¹²³ Interrogation of Halder, 25 February 1946 (N.C.A. Supp. B, p. 1558); cf. Keitel’s evidence (I.M.T. Nuremberg, x. 509). ¹²⁴ Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, pp. 254–9. ¹²⁵ Cf. W. K. Hancock, Politics in Pitcairn (London: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 26–7. ¹²⁶ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 243. ‘The paramount purpose of the State is to preserve and improve the race’ (Mein Kampf, p. 430; tr. Murphy, p. 328). ¹²⁷ Cf. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 175–6, 186–8, 248–9. ¹²⁸ Mein Kampf, p. 693; tr. Murphy, p. 501.

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players to suit themselves.”¹²⁹ But politics on this level have no criterion except success, and in the long run Hitler was not a success. If virtù means something more than this, that brilliant technique shall be governed by an adequate appraisal of the circumstances in which it is to be employed, then we must take into account the ambiguity of Hitler’s terrible combination of realism and fanaticism.¹³⁰ For it meant that while he saw certain things with extraordinary clarity, the periphery of his lens was always liable to be fogged by nonsense. His discernment could be hampered by his creed and his temperament alike, as when he believed that the United States was undergoing a racial disintegration which would show itself in military inefficiency,¹³¹ or that the only outstanding men in the world were himself and Mussolini and Stalin, and the only kind of statesmanship was theirs.¹³² His seizure of Prague on 15 March 1939 assumed that “the little worms” Chamberlain and Daladier, whom he had seen at Munich,¹³³ had personally no reserves of purpose deeper than the level of that fatal meeting, and that England and France had no reserves of moral strength deeper than the policy of Chamberlain and Daladier. The technical criterion itself raises the question whether the fundamental flaw in Hitler’s policy was not a moral impoverishment that made him misjudge the ultimate nature of the civilization he sought to destroy. In one respect Hitler was unique among the great political adventurers of history. It was the fortune of Cesare Borgia to fulfil a pattern of state-craft already conceived by so potent a thinker as Machiavelli.¹³⁴ But Hitler, as befitting the Borgia of an age of universal semi-literacy and popular journalism, was both Cesare and Machiavelli in one; and had expressed very early in his career, under a transparent veil of detachment, the consciousness of being the rare combination of practical politician and political thinker.¹³⁵ His most enduring monument, outlasting the physical consequences of his assault upon Western Civilization, might well be Mein Kampf. It was a landmark in political philosophy, at the point where the justification of authority was superseded by the assertion of power, where the rule of reason was impugned by philosophic irrationalism, and where the ordered processes of government were replaced by the manipulation of the masses for the purposes of destructive revolution. “Mein Kampf is a handbook for revolutionaries and contains more practical advice about revolutionary tactics than all Marxist

¹²⁹ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 273. ¹³⁰ Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, pp. 193–4. ¹³¹ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 14, 78–9. ¹³² Cf. Hitler’s speech to his commanders of 22 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 339 (798-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 443–4; cf. N.C.A. iii. 582; vii. 753). ¹³³ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 343 (798-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 446; cf. N.CA. iii. 585; vii. 753. ¹³⁴ H. Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London: Bell, 1940) p. 130. ¹³⁵ Mein Kampf, pp. 231–2; tr. Murphy, p. 183.

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literature put together.”¹³⁶ Contemptible as literature, but nevertheless animated by barbaric force, like a gale of bad wind down an avenue of dry trees, it was perhaps the representative political book of the twentieth century. Apart from its political content, Mein Kampf deserves analysis for the way in which it illustrates Hitler’s psychological insight into the circumstances of his own time. He painted in it not only the broad lines of the policy he was to pursue when ten years later he was head of the German Reich, but also the state of mind in the world which would enable him to do so. He described how the masses in general fell into the sedative and feckless attitude of “It can’t happen here”;¹³⁷ how the bourgeois shut their eyes to the political future, being bound to what they had inherited from the immediate past by a passive obstinacy which never passed over into active defence;¹³⁸ how when the bourgeois were brought to the point where they could no longer deny that evil exists, they could not summon the energy to fight it, but tried from a safe distance to show that such an enterprise was theoretically impossible and doomed to failure.¹³⁹ He was writing of the struggle between the Nazi movement and the bourgeois parties of the Republic, but he was also predicting the later struggle between Germany and the bourgeois world, and the psychological foundations of the policy of appeasement.¹⁴⁰ When he described how under the Republic his party was deprived of official protection, because the police instead of arresting the disturbers of the peace prohibited as a precautionary measure the lawful activities of the innocent,¹⁴¹ he was foreshadowing the debility to which international authority was reduced by Mussolini and himself in the Spanish Civil War. He passed judgement on the foreign policies of the Western Powers before 1939 when he wrote that national spirit is more important than armaments, and that a state will have no international weight in which the main part of the population is at least passively opposed to any resolute foreign policy.¹⁴² But the fascination of Mein Kampf lies deeper than this, in the description not of Hitler’s enemies, but of National Socialism and of himself. Mein Kampf is probably the most sustained example in political literature of the psychological phenomenon of projection, the transfer of one’s own unconscious attitudes into a scapegoat. It is in this oblique and reflective sense, rather than directly, that Mein

¹³⁶ F. A. Voigt, Unto Caesar (London: Constable, 1938), p. 116; cf. Baynes, “National Socialism before 1933,” History, March 1942, pp. 272–3. For the customary depreciation of Mein Kampf see Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 226–7. ¹³⁷ “Uns kann nichts geschehen!” (Mein Kampf, p. 170; tr. Murphy, p. 140). Sinclair Lewis used the current cliché for his novel, It Can’t Happen Here (London, Cape, 1935), whose theme was the capture of the United States presidency in the 1936 elections by a dictator compounded of Hitler and Huey Long of Louisiana. ¹³⁸ Mein Kampf, pp. 736–7; tr. Murphy, p. 529. ¹³⁹ Ibid. pp. 450 and 340–1 respectively. ¹⁴⁰ Cf. the acid sentences on appeasement in L. B. Namier, Diplomatic Prelude 1938–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 60, 148. ¹⁴¹ Mein Kampf, p. 545; tr. Murphy, pp. 403–4. ¹⁴² Ibid. pp. 366–7 and 279–80 respectively.

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Kampf is the authority on National Socialist Germany. When Hitler described the Jewish–Marxist menace,¹⁴³ the picture that emerged from the intensity of his hatred was of himself, his own tactics, and his own movement. It is generally forgotten that the two famous passages in Mein Kampf which described the power of propaganda referred only indirectly to Hitler. The principle of the bigger the lie the greater the credibility was the principle on which the Jews had attributed the collapse of 1918 to Ludendorff,¹⁴⁴ and it was “only the Jew” who realized that by an able and persistent propaganda heaven could be represented as hell and the most miserable of lives as if it were paradise.¹⁴⁵ When Hitler described the Marxists’ methods of mental terrorism and physical intimidation,¹⁴⁶ their technique of breaking up bourgeois meetings or having them suppressed as provocation against the proletariat,¹⁴⁷ the Social Democratic subversion of the trade union movement,¹⁴⁸ and the parliamentary party programmes in which every section of society was promised everything it wanted,¹⁴⁹ he was describing the methods by which the Nazis conquered power, and which he congratulated himself on having copied from his adversaries. The Jewish state, he said, had never had frontiers, but was distributed throughout the world, constituted exclusively from the membership of one race; and consequently the Jews already formed a state within the state.¹⁵⁰ For Eastern Europeans this was a description less of the Jews than of the Germans; and later in Mein Kampf Hitler claimed for the Germans that they, too, should possess a territorially undelimited state—the German frontiers are the outcome of chance and are only temporary frontiers that have been established as the result of political struggles which took place at various times . . . State frontiers are established by human beings and may be changed by human beings.¹⁵¹ And when he wrote of the imminent Jewish conquest of the world, since Bolshevism could not continue to exist without encompassing the whole earth, but would be shaken by the survival of a single independent national state,¹⁵² he was describing the logic of Nazi imperialism, which was driven by the same fatality to conquer Czechoslovakia and afterwards to experience the penalty of failing to conquer England.¹⁵³ “Only in the brain of a monster,” he wrote, “and not that of a man, could the plan of this organization take shape whose workings must finally bring

¹⁴³ For the dogma of the identity of the Jew and the Marxist or Social Democrat, see ibid. pp. 54, 350–1, and 55, 268 respectively. ¹⁴⁴ Ibid. pp. 252 and 198 respectively. ¹⁴⁵ Mein Kampf, p. 302; tr. Murphy, p. 231. ¹⁴⁶ Ibid. pp. 45–6 and 48–9 respectively. ¹⁴⁷ Ibid. pp. 547–8 and 314 respectively. ¹⁴⁸ Ibid. pp. 51–2 and 53 respectively. ¹⁴⁹ Ibid. pp. 410–11 and 314 respectively. ¹⁵⁰ Ibid. pp. 165 and 136 respectively. ¹⁵¹ Ibid. pp. 740 and 531–2 respectively. ¹⁵² Ibid. pp. 723 and 520–1 respectively. ¹⁵³ Cf. Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons of 18 June 1940: “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war” (H.C.Deb. 5t h ser., vol. 362, col. 60).

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about the collapse of human civilization and turn this world into a desert waste.”¹⁵⁴ In this frenzied loss of moral balance and discrimination the hater and the hated became indistinguishable, and Hitler himself said the last word on Hitler.¹⁵⁵ The essence of Mein Kampf was hatred, and the central object of the hatred was the Jews. Nazi anti-Semitism was the climax of a long tradition in Central Europe. Hitler got it from Vienna in the days of Scho¨nerer and Lueger.¹⁵⁶ But his belief in the Jewish world-plot had its probable source in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery springing from the same soil of political illiteracy and malevolence, the same half-baked semi-intellectual beliefs in world conspiracies and subterranean dictators and secret weapons, in the power and ubiquity of Jews and Jesuits and free-masons, as Mein Kampf itself. Mein Kampf was the reality of which the Protocols were the premonition.¹⁵⁷ But the intensity of Hitler’s reaction to his first sight of a Jew, which afforded one of the most vivid pages in Mein Kampf,¹⁵⁸ was peculiar to himself; and the mounting hatred that followed was the most evil expression of his mind. His anti-Semitism transcended sociological or historical explanations, and must be interpreted ultimately in psychological and theological terms. As Marxism in its essence was a perversion of the New Testament, a secularized debasement ¹⁵⁴ Mein Kampf, p. 68; tr. Murphy, p. 65. ¹⁵⁵ Besides this unintentional self-portrait Mein Kampf contains several prescient condemnations of Hitler’s subsequent policy. “In the case of a people like the Germans, whose history has so often shown them capable of fighting for phantoms to the point of complete exhaustion, every war-cry is a mortal danger. By these slogans our people have often been drawn away from the real problems of their existence” (ibid. pp. 633 and 462 respectively). “The fact of forming an alliance with Russia would be the signal for a new war. And the result of that would be the end of Germany” (ibid. pp. 749 and 538). Cf. the Reichstag speech of 30 January 1937 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1339). In another passage he wrote that if the battles of the First World War had been fought not in Flanders, Poland, and the Balticum but “in Germany, in the Ruhr or on the Maine, on the Elbe, in front of Hanover, Leipzig, Nu¨rnberg, etc. we must admit that the destruction of Germany might have been accomplished” (Mein Kampf, pp. 763–4; tr. Murphy, p. 547. Cf. ibid. pp. 693 and 501 respectively, quoted above). ¹⁵⁶ Mein Kampf, pp. 107–10; tr. Murphy, pp. 93–95; cf. Borkenau, Austria and After, pp. 128–54, and Martin Wight, “Eastern Europe,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 217. [Ed. Reprinted as chapter 11 in the present volume.] Hitler lived in Vienna from October 1907 until May 1913. Georg von Scho¨nerer (1842–1921) was leader of German nationalism in the Dual Monarchy from 1882 to 1899, though after that the Pan-German leadership passed to his abler lieutenant, the Sudetendeutscher, K. H. Wolf (1862–1941). Karl Lueger (1844–1910) was leader of the Catholic antiSemitic Christian Social Party, and mayor of Vienna from 1893 to 1910. ¹⁵⁷ The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were an anti-Semitic plagiarism (probably forged by the Russian political police at the beginning of the twentieth century) of Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Brussels: Mertens, 1864), which was a brilliant polemical tract against the Second Empire. On the whole subject see John S. Curtiss, An Appraisal of the Protocols of Zion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), and Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 12–22. For Hitler’s avowal of having learned from the Protocols see Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 235–6. The only reference to the Protocols in Mein Kampf is on p. 337 (tr. Murphy, p. 258): “What many Jews unconsciously wish to do is here clearly set forth. It is not necessary to ask out of what Jewish brain these revelations sprang; but what is of vital importance is that they disclose, with an almost terrifying precision, the mentality and methods of action characteristic of the Jewish people and these writings expound in all their various directions the final aims towards which the Jews are striving. The study of real happenings, however, is the best way of judging the authenticity of those documents.” Again Hitler was gesticulating in front of a mirror: was this a judgement on the Jews and the Protocols or upon the Germans and Mein Kampf ? ¹⁵⁸ Mein Kampf, p. 59; tr. Murphy, pp. 58–9.

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of the Messianic story, so National Socialism was a perversion of the Old Testament, the self-appointment of a new Chosen People, appropriating the promise without the judgement.¹⁵⁹ Hitler’s hatred of the Jews had its roots in this spiritual usurpation.¹⁶⁰ The Nazi demonology was indeed exploited for political purposes; as in most tyrannies, an adversary who could be both a scapegoat and a bogy was a requirement of Fascist propaganda; and the Jewish menace was of great importance to Hitler’s national and international politics as a means of brutalizing his party, of intimidating his opponents, and of cementing in his own support the German people, the governing class throughout Eastern Europe, and all those elements abroad that were infected by the anti-Semitic corruption which marks a society in crisis. Hitler’s genius combined doctrinal fanaticism with the coldest consideration of expedients.¹⁶¹ Nevertheless his anti-Semitism was far from being simply tactical; it was a matter of his ultimate beliefs. The last words of his will, dictated amid the ruins of his empire in the Berlin bunker on 29 April 1945, on the day before his suicide, enjoined upon his successors that they must, “above all else, uphold the racial laws in all their severity, and mercilessly resist the universal poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.”¹⁶²

(c) The Direction of Hitler’s Foreign Policy Balfour had seen as early as 1916 that though Germany might be defeated in the First World War, her predominance in Central and Eastern Europe would nevertheless be enhanced if at the same time the Dual Monarchy broke up.¹⁶³ And in 1919, though Germany was temporarily defeated, her potential strength in Europe was relatively greater than it had been in 1914. For of all the continental Powers Germany had suffered least. She had waged the war wholly beyond her own frontiers.¹⁶⁴ Virtually single-handed, she had by 1917 accomplished the defeat of her two greatest military rivals. The defeat of the Russian Empire was confirmed by the imposition of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty upon its Bolshevik successors in March 1918. France ceased to be the greatest Allied military Power on the western front after the mutinies of 1917, and surrendered the main part to Britain, content, as Pétain said, to “wait for the Americans and the tanks.”¹⁶⁵ When the war ended ¹⁵⁹ The two thus illustrated the approximating opposites of Futurism and Archaism (Toynbee, Study, v. 383–5; vi. 97–101; cf. Survey for 1933, p. 121, note 2; Survey for 1934, p. 373). ¹⁶⁰ Cf. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 232. ¹⁶¹ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 233–4. ¹⁶² Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, p. 196. ¹⁶³ “The Peace Settlement in Europe,” memorandum dated 4 October 1916, printed in David Lloyd George’s War Memoirs (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1933), ii. 877–88, and in Blanche Dugdale’s Arthur James Balfour (London: Hutchinson, 1936), vol. ii, appendix ii. ¹⁶⁴ Cf. Mein Kampf, pp. 763–4; tr. Murphy, p. 547 (quoted above, note 155). ¹⁶⁵ C. R. M. F. Crutwell, A History of the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p. 416.

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Germany was incapable of further military resistance; but her circumstances did not compare with the convulsions of Russia and the exhaustion of France. The Russian Empire had disintegrated far more dramatically than the German; it had lost more of its territory; it was torn by civil war, and supreme power was precariously held by a revolutionary clique whose success would be bought at the price of total exclusion from the community of nations. France, a more civilized and socially complex state than Russia, had been the main victim of the war: her richest territories had been laid waste and the decline in her population had been accelerated.¹⁶⁶ In Germany the transition from empire to republic had been effected without any social upheaval; the unity of the Reich had been strengthened; the “revolution” of 1918 had provided a classic example of a revolution that was no revolution; the governing class, the army, and the administration remained in uninterrupted control. The principal change in Germany’s position was wrought by the disappearance of the other two military monarchies of Eastern Europe, one of which, Russia, she had herself destroyed, while the third, Austria-Hungary, had been her own partner. Since the Congress of Vienna Germany had faced west. Her watch was on the Rhine, and her disputed frontier provinces were Alsace and Lorraine. Her eastern border for a hundred years had not been in question. It marched with Russia across the partitioned state of Poland, and swung back west and south along the mountain boundaries of Bohemia. But this apparently settled frontier concealed a weakness and an anomaly; for the Prussian state and the German nation differed in extent, and they converged only temporarily in Bismarck’s Reich. The German Confederation of 1815 had inherited the ancient boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire, including on the one hand the Austrian and Bohemian territories of the Habsburg Emperor, and on the other hand excluding the Polish provinces of the Prussian king. When in 1866 the German Confederation was dissolved and the North German Confederation replaced it, there came into being for the first time in history a Germany which took in Polish lands and left out Bohemia and Austria.¹⁶⁷ Prussia– Germany, which was finally erected into the Second Reich, contained one-fifth of the Polish nation,¹⁶⁸ and excluded the 10 million Germans of Austria and the Sudetenland. This was the result of the kleindeutsch policy, a delicate balance that it was Bismarck’s life-work to achieve and maintain. It required the preservation of Junker rule in the Polish provinces of Prussia, and the preservation of the Habsburg Monarchy as an independent and multi-national state under the control of its German inhabitants and their Magyar allies.

¹⁶⁶ Survey for 1920–3, p. 59, and D. R. Gillie, “France,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. AshtonGwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 166–71. ¹⁶⁷ See Taylor, Course of German History, pp. 49, 131. ¹⁶⁸ In 1914 there were approximately 4 million Poles in Prussia, 4¼ million in Austria-Hungary, and 13 million in Russia (H.P.C. vi. 226, note 1).

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Both these objectives were destroyed by the revolution in Eastern Europe that accompanied the First World War. The fall of the Russian Empire meant the liberation of Poland and the loss of Prussia’s Polish provinces. The fall of the Habsburg Empire meant the setting adrift of the Austrian and Bohemian Germans and the possibility at last of a grossdeutsch policy, the inclusion of all Germans in one state. The appearance of a chain of national states in Eastern Europe, from Finland to Albania, provided Germany with an entirely new arrangement of power on her eastern frontier. France, from Louis XIV to Napoleon, had been able to expand on her eastern frontier against a buffer zone of weak principalities. There was now opened up for Germany a similar buffer zone in the east. It had been first created by the settlement of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, which detached Finland, the Baltic States, Russian Poland, Bessarabia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus from Russia. “We saw reproduced, in the twentieth century, and five hundred miles farther east, a new version of Napoleon’s plan for a Confederation of the Rhine.”¹⁶⁹ For a moment this German plan was frustrated by the defeat in the west, but the new situation on Germany’s eastern frontier remained; and with it the certainty in due course of Germany’s expansion in that direction. The leaders of Republican Germany could acquiesce in the loss of AlsaceLorraine and accept as final the new western frontier with France and the Low Countries. They could not assent to the surrenders in the east—the loss of Danzig; the cession of West Prussia and Posen to a new Polish Power, severing East Prussia from the body of the Reich; the cession to Poland of Upper Silesia;¹⁷⁰ the exclusion from the Reich of the Germans of Austria and Bohemia. Stresemann, in a celebrated letter to the ex-Crown Prince in 1925, laid down the three great tasks that confront German foreign policy in the more immediate future— In the first place the solution of the Reparations question in a sense tolerable for Germany, and the assurance of peace, which is an essential promise [? premiss] for the recovery of our strength. Secondly, the protection of Germans abroad, those 10 to 12 millions of our kindred who now live under a foreign yoke in foreign lands. The third great task is the readjustment of our Eastern frontiers; the recovery of Danzig, the Polish corridor, and a correction of the frontier in Upper Silesia. In the background stands the union with German Austria, although I am quite clear that this not merely brings no advantages to Germany, but seriously complicates the problem of the German Reich.¹⁷¹ ¹⁶⁹ Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath (London: Butterworth, 1929), p. 97. ¹⁷⁰ One of Hitler’s earliest political successes was to predict that Germany would lose the coal-basin of Upper Silesia despite her success in the plebiscite of 1921 (see Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 94). For the plebiscite itself see H.P.C. iv. 261–5. ¹⁷¹ Letter to the ex-Crown Prince, 7 September 1925 (Gustav Stresemann, His Diaries, Letters, and Papers, ed. and trans. Eric Sutton, vol. ii (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 503).

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The Locarno Treaties of 1925 gave expression to this general line of German policy. They stabilized Germany’s western frontier by mutual guarantees of the Franco-German and Belgo-German frontiers, and also of the Demilitarized Zone. But Germany refused to pledge herself to accept similarly her eastern frontiers, which she then hoped to rectify by peaceful change.¹⁷² The French regarded the security of their eastern allies as indispensable to French security, desiring the same guarantees for the Polish–German and Czechoslovak–German frontiers as for the Franco-German.¹⁷³ Britain, however, refused to extend her commitments to Eastern Europe and supported the German case; and consequently Poland and Czechoslovakia gained from Locarno only treaties of arbitration with Germany and treaties of mutual assistance with France.¹⁷⁴ Therefore, though the Locarno settlement opened a new period of security and confidence in Western Europe and prepared for Germany’s accession to the League of Nations, it also suggested that Germany’s obligation to respect her western frontier rested not upon the Versailles Treaty but upon her subsequent voluntary assent made during the Locarno negotiations, and that since she had given no voluntary consent with regard to her eastern frontier she was under no obligation to respect it. For the time being this landscape was concealed by the mists of treaties of arbitration, obligations under the Covenant, and provisions for peaceful change in accordance with Article XIX. But it was the logical consequence of Locarno that when France made the Franco-Soviet Pact with the only Power capable of exerting an independent pressure upon Germany’s eastern frontier, Hitler made this the excuse for denouncing the Locarno Pact and remilitarizing the Rhineland. The Locarno balance of power was thus translated from the language of juridical obligations into that of fortifications and armaments: the Siegfried Line consolidated the Franco-German frontier, and Germany prepared in security for the armed revision of her eastern frontier.¹⁷⁵ German ascendancy in Eastern Europe was based upon two traditions and two concrete assets. The first tradition was that of the supremacy of the Teutonic Knights in the Balticum, of which East Prussia and the dispossessed aristocracies of German Balts in the Baltic Republics were the vestige. The social engine of this tradition was the Junker class of Eastern Germany. These were the great agrarian capitalists of the colonial lands of the east, where their forebears the Teutonic Knights, those “consummate economists,” had conquered and expropriated the Slav peoples and reduced them to landless labourers. The words Slav and slave still remained undifferentiated in the German mind; the Slavs were the consuetus hostis, the hereditary enemy of Christians, as Gerbert had once called them,¹⁷⁶ ¹⁷² Survey for 1925, ii. 28. ¹⁷³ Ibid. p. 30. ¹⁷⁴ Ibid. pp. 49–61. ¹⁷⁵ See Survey for 1936, pp. 10, note 1, 261–2, 478, note 3. ¹⁷⁶ Lettres de Gerbert (983–997), published with an introduction and notes by Julien Havet (Paris: Picard, 1889), p. 92. Cf. a remark of the Emperor William II to Sir Edward Goschen on 16 October 1910:

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though the Slavs had since become Christian and the German Government had returned to paganism; and exploitation of the peoples beyond the Elbe had always appeared to Germans as a civilizing mission. Bismarck’s Polish expropriation law of 1886 and the redoubled persecution of the Poles under Bu¨low were conceived as the crusade of German culture against barbarism. The Ostbahn of the 1840s, the first railway east of Berlin, was claimed by the Junkers as “the greatest German thrust into Eastern Europe since the Teutonic Knights.”¹⁷⁷ The German frontier tradition went back through the centuries with every variation of brutality and vigour—to the Lithuanian man-hunts which were the winter pastime of the Teutonic Knights in their decadence;¹⁷⁸ to the Wendish Crusade of 1147 with its slogan of baptism or extermination;¹⁷⁹ to the summons sent out by Adolf of Holstein for settlers in the Baltic lands where he founded Lu¨beck,¹⁸⁰ and to the earlier appeal by the spiritual and temporal princes of Saxony,¹⁸¹ at the beginning of the great German movement of colonization in the twelfth century, when the fertile and illimitable continent beyond the Elbe was to the northern peoples of Christendom like the land beyond the Ohio River to the United States at the time of its achievement of independence; perhaps even to the campaigns in the later eighth century when Charlemagne harried the Saxons and forced upon them in the first place the Christianity which they in turn were to force upon the Slavs.¹⁸² Of this Prussian and Baltic tradition the chief National Socialist exponent was Alfred Rosenberg, a German Balt from Estonia, who, having been a student in Moscow at the time of the Russian Revolution, escaped and embraced German nationality, and in 1923 effected the meeting between Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.¹⁸³ “I am all for the white man against the black, whether they be Chinese, Japanese, niggers or Slavs” (G. P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914, London: H.M.S.O., 1926–38), vi. 531). ¹⁷⁷ Taylor, Course of German History, p. 67. ¹⁷⁸ Henri Pirenne, A History of Europe, trans. by Bernard Miall (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939), p. 476. ¹⁷⁹ “Ut eoshristianee religioni subderet, aut Deo auxiliante omnino deleret,” Annales Magdeburgenses, sub anno 1147 (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, ed. G. H. Pertz, Scriptorum tomus xvi (Hanover: Hahn, 1858), p. 188); Auctarium Gemblancense, sub anno 1148 (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, ed. G. H. Pertz, Scriptorium tomus vi (Hanover: Hahn, 1844), p. 392). ¹⁸⁰ Helmold: Chronica Slavorum, lib. i, cap. 57 (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, ed. G. H. Pertz, Scriptorum tomus xxi (Hanover: Hahn, 1868), p. 55); cf. G. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946), p. 262. ¹⁸¹ ‘The Slavs are an abominable people, but their land is very rich in flesh, honey, grain, birds, and abounding in all produce of fertility of the earth when cultivated so that none can be compared with it. So they say who know. Wherefore O Saxons, Franks, Lotharingians, men of Flanders most famous, here you can both save your souls and if it please you acquire the best of land to live in’ (Rudolf Ko¨tzschke, Quellen zur Geschichte der Ostdeutschen Kolonisation im 12. bis 14 Jahrhundert (Leipzig, Teubner, 1912), p. 10, as freely translated in H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London: Arnold, one volume edition 1936), p. 203). The writer is indebted to Professor Geoffrey Barraclough for pointing him to the original of this proclamation. It might be a National Socialist pronouncement, except that the Nazis had substituted the preservation of the German race for the salvation of individual souls. Cf. Hitler’s speech of 12 September 1936, quoted below in note 215 and accompanying text. ¹⁸² Toynbee, Study, ii. 343–5; iv. 488–90. For Hitler’s defence of Charlemagne’s policy see The Goebbels Diaries, trans. and ed. by Louis P. Lochner (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), p. 280. ¹⁸³ See Heiden, Der Fuehrer, chapter i and p. 198.

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The second tradition was that of Austria, the other German Great Power. Austria had been the standard-bearer of German culture south of the Carpathians¹⁸⁴ as Prussia had been to the north. The Austrian role was historically later and more important than the Prussian, and had become formally represented by the Habsburg tenure of the imperial throne. It answered to the Turkish conquest of South-Eastern Europe, which made Austria the bulwark of Western Christendom. But just as this role was forced upon the Habsburgs, whose policy had hitherto been greedy, hesitating, and inglorious, so they sought to exploit its advantages long after its necessity had disappeared with the recession of the Turkish menace. Even in the nineteenth century, when the Austrian Empire was steadily growing weaker and more disordered, and had become the European China,¹⁸⁵ with all its powers of growth exhausted, unable to offer its renascent peoples anything but the duty of loyalty to an inflexible and unlearning dynasty, the pretence of a German and Catholic civilizing mission among the nationalities of Eastern Europe was maintained as the envelope for inefficiency and oppressiveness.¹⁸⁶ The two concrete assets upon which German ascendancy in Eastern Europe was built were the preponderance and distribution of her population, and her economic strength. The main European demographic change of the nineteenth century was the growth of the German population to become the largest—the Russians excepted—of Europe.¹⁸⁷ The assertion of this numerical superiority was one of the principal themes of Nazi propaganda. But it was the political distribution of the German population that made Germany unique among the Great Powers. Never before 1938 had Germany approximated to the coincidence of state with Volk that was the character of other nations. The German population of Europe was not the same thing as the inhabitants of Germany.¹⁸⁸ Down to 1866 ¹⁸⁴ The exception is Galicia, the Austrian share of Poland, which brought the Austrian frontier, from 1772 to 1918, well to the north of the Carpathian watershed, and compensated on the north for the loss of Silesia to Prussia in 1740. ¹⁸⁵ “Coningsby . . . could not comprehend how a free government could endure without national opinions to uphold it; and . . . governments for the preservation of peace and order, and nothing else, had better be sought in China, or among the Austrians, the Chinese of Europe” (Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (London: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1931), p. 318). ¹⁸⁶ See A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918, 2n d edition (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1948), pp. 175–6. ¹⁸⁷ At the beginning of 1939 the populations of the European Great Powers were approximately as follows: Germany, 80 millions; United Kingdom, 45 millions; Italy, 44 millions; France, 42 millions; U.S.S.R., 166 millions. For the preponderance of Germany’s population over those of the states of Eastern Europe see Martin Wight, “Eastern Europe,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 206, note 3. [Ed. This chapter is reprinted as chapter 11 in the present volume.] ¹⁸⁸ The tendency towards German national unification was accompanied by the disappearance of an international society specifically comprising all German states. Until 1866 the German states, however complete their sovereignty, were included also in the Reich and its successor the Confederation. (For the exception of the Napoleonic interregnum between the abolition of the Reich in 1806 and the establishment of the Confederation in 1815, see Martin Wight, “Eastern Europe,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 212, note 1.) [Ed. This chapter is reprinted as chapter 11 in the present volume.] Since 1866

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the boundaries of the Reich, and afterwards of the Confederation, had included the great majority of Germans, though much else besides. From 1866 to 1938 the central German Power excluded a fringe of German-speaking peoples amounting to about 15 per cent. of the potential total nation. It was not until the Anschluss in 1938 that for the first time in history the frontiers of the principal German state included more than nine-tenths of the German-speaking peoples of Europe without including also considerable non-German populations, and Grossdeutschland came into existence.¹⁸⁹ But the distribution of the German people was further peculiar in that they were not all collected in a single compact mass. There were disconnected communities of Germans scattered throughout Eastern Europe, whose inclusion in a central German state was only possible through the incorporation also of the non-German peoples among whom they formed minorities. There was a German minority in every Eastern European state except Finland, Albania, and Greece. In Estonia and Latvia there were the “Baltic Barons,” the descendants of the Crusaders who had first conquered the Baltic shore and of the Hanseatic traders who had developed it. In Lithuania there was a minority of German Protestant settlers who had fled from oppression in Germany and taken refuge in this province of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Memel was by origin a German city, and nearly one-half of the population of the Memel territory was German.¹⁹⁰ Poland had considerable German minorities in Poznán and there has been no such comprehensive German society, certain fragments on the circumference of the German nebula flying off into complete independence of the German Great Powers (an independence only ephemerally impaired by those Powers’ conquests and annexations during the First and Second World Wars). The German Confederation was dissolved by article iv of the Austro-Prussian Treaty of Prague, 1866 (Hertslet: Map of Europe by Treaty, iii. 1722). The members of the Confederation (numbering twenty-nine after Prussia had annexed Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Holstein, Nassau, and Frankfurt) thereupon ceased to have any form of connexion. Liechtenstein and Luxembourg have ever since retained this independence of Germany, Liechtenstein gravitating instead towards Switzerland, and Luxembourg towards Belgium (see Martin Wight, “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 152, note 1, and 154–7). [Ed. This chapter is reprinted as chapter 13 in the present volume.] The partially German state of Austria, transformed in 1867 into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, survived down to 1918. Apart from these peripheral units there remained twenty-six German states. The establishment of the North German Confederation in 1867 reduced their number to five: the North German Confederation itself, Bavaria, Wu¨rttemberg, Baden, and the parts of the grand duchy of Hesse south of the River Main (see, however, Hertslet, op. cit. iii. 1828, note). These five were all united into the Second Reich in 1871. In 1918 the disintegration of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary brought into existence a purely German Austrian Republic; and in 1919 the purely German Free City of Danzig was erected out of a city of the defeated German Reich (see Wight, “Eastern Europe,” 1952, p. 232, note 1). There were thus in 1919 five different German national units: Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Danzig. ¹⁸⁹ Cf. Hitler: “On 13 March Great Germany was created and on 10 April that creation will be confirmed,” speech in the Berliner Sportpalast, 28 March 1938 (Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1448); “This plebiscite signifies the creation of Great Germany: now, German people, hold this Great Germany fast in your fist and never let it be wrested from you,” speech at Klagenfurt, 4 April 1938 (ibid. ii. 1453); “It is Great Germany which in these days makes its appearance at Nuremberg for the first time,” speech at the opening of the Nuremberg Parteitag, 6 September 1938 (ibid. ii. 1470). ¹⁹⁰ See Wight, “Eastern Europe,” 1952, p. 232, note 2. Memel resembled Danzig in being a German foundation. In other respects they differed. Danzig for the greater part of its history was connected with

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Pomorze, mainly the result of Prussian efforts to Germanize those provinces when they had been Posen and West Prussia;¹⁹¹ there was another German minority in Polish Upper Silesia; there were German colonists in what had been formerly Russian Poland, farmers and a large population of industrial workers, especially in Lodz; and farther east in Poland there were bodies of German peasant colonists who had settled at the end of the eighteenth century in Austrian Galicia, Volhynia, and Chelm. Czechoslovakia contained a larger German minority than any country, so ancient an element of the population that it was disputed whether they were colonists or original inhabitants. The majority of them were in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia; they mainly formed compact masses round the outer rim of those provinces, including the chief mining and industrial regions, but there were also large German enclaves elsewhere and colonies in the main towns, particularly Prague. And there were German minorities of different origin in Slovakia and Carpatho-Ruthenia, the descendants of colonists in the old Hungary. Hungary itself contained a German element only less ancient than that in Bohemia and Moravia. The medieval kings of Hungary and Bohemia and Poland, backward countries with purely agricultural economies, had encouraged German immigration, especially after the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century, and for many hundreds of years the Germans supplied their bourgeoisies. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century almost all Hungarian towns were predominantly German, though they became largely Magyarized. In addition there were German-speaking agricultural colonies; some were of medieval origin, but most of them dated from the colonizing schemes of the Habsburgs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when South Germans or “Swabians” were brought in to settle the country after its reconquest from the Turks.¹⁹² They were found mostly round Budapest, north of Lake Balaton, and in the south-west. The Swabian colonies in the Voivodina had been transferred, under the Treaty of Trianon, to the successor states of Yugoslavia and Rumania. They formed the chief German minority of Yugoslavia, but there were other islands of German colonists in Croatia and Slovenia, and even a few in Serbia. Rumania was more extensively riddled with German minorities than any country except Czechoslovakia. In Transylvania were the Saxons, a body of colonists dating from the thirteenth century, who had become one of the three privileged nations of Transylvania,¹⁹³ and retained a high cultural tradition and Poland; Memel from its foundation until 1919 was with unbroken continuity part of the Prussian state. Danzig in 1919 was erected into an independent state, with certain reservations; Memel in 1924 was made an autonomous unit under Lithuanian sovereignty. The population of the Free City of Danzig was 95 per cent. German: in the Memelland, the population of the city itself was likewise almost entirely German, but the Lithuanians and Memellanders outnumbered the Germans in the Territory as a whole. ¹⁹¹ Though there were small German colonies of medieval origin, as in Thorn, a city founded by the Teutonic Order and afterwards a member of the Hanseatic League. ¹⁹² C. A. Macartney, Hungary and her Successors . . . 1919–1937 (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1937), p. 384. ¹⁹³ R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Roumanians (Cambridge: University Press, 1934), pp. 21–2, 101–3. These “Saxons” were originally Rhinelanders and Luxemburgers (Macartney, op. cit. p. 254).

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elaborate national organization; in the Banat were Swabians; in the Bukovina, in Bessarabia, and in the Dobruja were smaller German groups dating mainly from the nineteenth century. In Bulgaria there was a negligible German minority. But more than a thousand miles to the east, on the lower reaches of the Volga, was another community of Germans, established there by Catherine the Great, erected in 1923 into the Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans, and only dispersed and expelled to Siberia by the Soviet Government in the autumn of 1941 after Hitler’s invasion of Russia.¹⁹⁴ The Germans were the most widespread of the minorities of Eastern Europe, and because of their connexion with the dominant Power of the Continent they became the most dangerous. Like the nation of which they were distant outcrops, they had been for the most part traditionally loyal to the governments under which they lived, economically advanced and prosperous, attached to their national language and culture, docile and valuable colonists. But with the National Socialist Revolution they underwent the spiritual revolution that had already befallen the Reichsdeutsch. Within a few months of the Machtu¨berernahme the Nazis declared their intention of bringing into the Party all German citizens living beyond the frontiers, and of awakening in all German minorities the consciousness of being Volksgenossen, racial comrades, members of the German people. A Volksgenosse was defined as anybody of German descent and German blood; the German nation, as distinct from the German state, was claimed to embrace a population of 100 millions; and the German minorities in Eastern Europe were transformed into an international fifth column of unique power.¹⁹⁵ ¹⁹⁴ Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: a new Civilisation, 3rd edition (London: Longmans, Green, 1944), p. 113, note 2; B. H. Sumner, Survey of Russian History (London: Duckworth, 1944), p. 41. ¹⁹⁵ Cf. above, notes 97–102 and accompanying text, and further below, notes 276–9 and accompanying text. The size of the German minorities in the countries of Eastern Europe, and the percentages they formed of the total populations, were in 1938, before the first partition of Czechoslovakia, approximately as follows: per cent. Estonia Latvia Lithuania Memelland Poland Czechoslovakia Hungary Rumania Yugoslavia Bulgaria

16,346 62,144 29,231 (1923 census) 67,671 (1925 census) 741,000 3,231,688 478,630 740,000 513,472 4,171

1.5 3.9 1.44 43.4 2.3 22.3 5.5 4.1 4.2 0.1

The figures for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Memelland are taken from Royal Institute of International Affairs: Baltic States, tables on pp. 36, 33, 30, and 94; for Poland and Czechoslovakia, from Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941 (Cambridge: University Press, 1945), appendix, pp. 430–1; for the remainder, see Royal Institute of International Affairs, South-Eastern Europe: a Political and Economic Survey, 2nd (rev.) edition (London: R.I.I.A., 1939), table on p. 8. The figures are in each case the official estimates; the German estimates were sometimes 30 or 40

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The second concrete asset upon which Germany’s predominance in Eastern Europe was based was her enormous economic strength. The century that ended with the First World War had made Germany the industrial master of Europe, and with the growth of German industrialization there grew, like its shadow, the conception of Eastern Europe and the Near East as Germany’s sphere of influence. In this conception, however, economic considerations were always subordinated to considerations of power. It was characteristic that the Prussian Zollverein was originally intended to promote trade between North Germany and the outer world, but became, as List desired it to be, an instrument for the economic unification of Germany for the purposes of war.¹⁹⁶ Thus, too, in Hitler’s time the arguments for Germany’s right to dominate Eastern Europe did not rest upon economic grounds. For the Eastern European countries indeed, if they were offered no alternative by the Western Powers, Germany was essential as the market for their primary products;¹⁹⁷ but the Eastern European countries were not essential to Germany. Compared with Germany’s total trade her trade with Eastern Europe was small. The exertion of her economic supremacy in Eastern Europe was due not to economic needs, but to political purposes.¹⁹⁸ The chief embodiment of the German claim to predominance in Eastern Europe had been, for about a century, the conception of Mitteleuropa. This was one solution of the problem of the relations between the Austrian Empire, on the one hand, and the German Confederation and Empire on the other. Essentially it asserted the need for unifying Central Europe under German leadership. List, the prophet of the Prussian Zollverein and the German railway-system, came to believe that Germany’s destiny lay not westwards across the oceans but towards the Danube basin and European Turkey, and he originated the idea of the Berlin–Baghdad Railway.¹⁹⁹ Bruck, the German merchant who founded the Lloyd Triestino and the commercial greatness of Trieste, and became Austrian Minister of Commerce under Schwarzenberg, wished to incorporate the entire Austrian Empire in the German Confederation, so that the Germans united under the Habsburgs might become the masters of an organized Central Europe.

per cent. higher (see ibid. and Macartney: National States, appendix iii). The Volga German A.S.S.R. [Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic] in 1933 numbered 588,000 (N. Mikhaylov, Soviet Geography (London: Methuen, 1935), p. 222), but a third of its population was Russian or Ukrainian. ¹⁹⁶ Cf. Taylor: Course of German History, p. 63. ¹⁹⁷ See Wight, “Eastern Europe,” pp. 260–1 of 1952 edition of The World in March 1939. [Ed. This chapter is reprinted as chapter 11 in the present volume.] ¹⁹⁸ See H. C. Hillmann, “Comparative Strength of the Great Powers,” in The World in March 1939, ed. by Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 484–7. ¹⁹⁹ There is a useful account of List’s contribution to military thought by Edward Mead Earle in “Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List: The Economic Foundations of Military Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, edited by Edward Mead Earle (Princeton, N.J.: University Press, 1944), pp. 138–52.

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Bismarck’s defeat of Austria, which resulted in the transformation of the Habsburg Empire by the Ausgleich in 1867 and in the establishment of the Second German Reich in 1871, brought into being an empirical Mitteleuropa through the leverage which Germany obtained over the Dual Monarchy and its Emperor. The Ausgleich made a German minority uppermost in Austria, and a Magyar minority uppermost in Hungary, leaving them both dependent in the last resort on the support of Berlin. The First World War welded the Central Powers more closely together, and brought Mitteleuropa at last fully into being, besides producing as well its classic theoretical formulation,²⁰⁰ in the last years of the Habsburg Monarchy. The War proved Austria-Hungary’s value to Germany. The Habsburg Monarchy, which to short-sighted Pan-Germans (not to Bismarck) had seemed a cumbersome survival impeding the road to a reunion of the entire German nation, proved the most valuable asset for Mittel-Europa, the German World-Empire. Even the extremest Pan-Germans in Austria became converted to the Habsburg Monarchy. There was now a platform common to all the Austrian Germans— Austria was to be maintained, reconstructed on a German basis, and firmly fitted into the Germanic system; her policy was to be subordinated to that of Central Europe, and the entire Habsburg inheritance was to be taken over and secured by the joint strength of the German nation. Through Mittel-Europa the Austrian Germans returned both to the Pan-German and to the Great-Austrian idea, now reconciled with each other. They beheld themselves once more an integral part of the German nation, and as part of it resumed an “imperialism” too wide for them in their previous isolation.²⁰¹ There was much speculation about Nazi foreign policy in terms of these traditions of eastern expansion. When Hitler inaugurated his foreign policy by a spectacular accord with Poland²⁰² it was easy to assume that, being himself an Austrian, his policy would be in the Habsburg not the Prussian tradition, and that having effected his declared aim of the Anschluss,²⁰³ he would resume the historic Drang nach Osten to the south of the Carpathians. The influence of Alfred Rosenberg, it is true, was supposed to be in favour of north-western expansion, towards the Balticum of which he was himself a native;²⁰⁴ but the sequence of Hitler’s foreign successes down to March 1939—the treaty with Poland followed by the conquest of Austria and Czechoslovakia—might confirm the first supposition. ²⁰⁰ Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin: Reimer, 1915), trans. by C. M. Meredith, with an introduction by W. J. Ashley, as Central Europe (London: King, 1916). ²⁰¹ L. B. Namier in H.P.C. iv. 71. ²⁰² Survey for 1933, pp. 184–6; Survey for 1934, pp. 386–7; Survey for 1935, i. 60, 204–10. It was not known at the time that Hitler negotiated his non-aggression pact with Poland only after an offer of a similar pact to Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1933 had been rejected by Benes (see Benes’s letter to Namier of 20 April 1944, in Namier: Europe in Decay, pp. 281–2). ²⁰³ See Mein Kampf, p. 1. ²⁰⁴ For the “Rosenberg Plan” see Survey for 1933, p. 176 and note 2.

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The error was to suppose that Nazi policy would confine itself to one or other of these policies as if there was an incompatibility between them. Hitler never considered himself an heir to the Habsburgs: he was as contemptuous of their anti-national policy as he was ignorant of the problems of statecraft with which, in his own Vienna days, they had been wrestling.²⁰⁵ He was grossdeutsch by origin, but he had become head of a kleindeutsch Reich, and the greater included the less.²⁰⁶ His anti-Russian policy had immediate antecedents in the Habsburg rather than the Hohenzollern tradition, but he himself expressed it in terms of a pristine Germanic destiny that was pre-Habsburg and pre-Hohenzollern. His foreign policy amalgamated the Habsburg and Prussian traditions, and at the same time transcended them as Napoleon’s policy transcended the traditions of Bourbon aggrandizement. The immediate aims of National Socialism went far beyond the abolition of the Versailles Treaty and the restoration of the former frontiers of the Second Reich;²⁰⁷ its ultimate ambitions exceeded the historic Prussian ascendancy in the Baltic and the historic Habsburg ascendancy in the Danube valley and the Balkans. The old conception of Mitteleuropa was transformed and swallowed up in the new theory of Lebensraum. The change had taken place in the stress and tumult of the First World War, when the collapse of the Russian Empire revolutionized German policy. For the first time in six centuries no great state stood between the Reich and the Eurasian steppes, and for six months at the supreme crisis of the war German rule had extended from the Somme to the Don.²⁰⁸ This was the empire that Hitler meant to restore. Therefore we National Socialists have purposely drawn a line through the line of conduct followed by pre-War Germany in foreign policy. We put an end to the perpetual Germanic march towards the South and West of Europe and turn our eyes towards the lands of the East. We finally put a stop to the colonial and trade policy of pre-War times and pass over to the territorial policy of the future. But when we speak of new territory in Europe to-day we must principally think of Russia and the border States subject to her.²⁰⁹ . . . To-day there are eighty million Germans in Europe. And our foreign policy will be recognized as rightly ²⁰⁵ See Mein Kampf, pp. 13–14, 100–3, 118–19, 139–43; tr. Murphy, pp. 26–7, 88–91, 102, 118–20. Cf. Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 46, 55. ²⁰⁶ See Taylor, Course of German History, pp. 218–9. ²⁰⁷ Mein Kampf, pp. 736, 738–9; tr. Murphy, pp. 529, 530–1. ²⁰⁸ Cf. Wight, “Eastern Europe,” pp. 211, note 3, and 282, note 3, of 1952 edition of The World in March 1939. ²⁰⁹ Mein Kampf, p. 752; tr. Murphy, p. 533; cf. pp. 154 and 128 respectively. (The Ukraine is not mentioned by name in Mein Kampf.) At about the same time as Hitler wrote these words, Churchill was formulating the same objective of German policy, in his criticism of Falkenhayn’s decision in 1916 to attack in the west instead of the east. “It would appear that the true strategic objectives of Germany in 1916 were the Black Sea and the Caspian. These lay within her grasp and required no effort beyond her strength. A continued advance against the south lands of Russia into the Ukraine and towards Odessa would have secured at comparatively little cost sufficient food for the Teutonic peoples . . . One-half

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conducted only when, after barely a hundred years, there will be 250 million Germans living on this Continent, not packed together as the coolies in the factories of another Continent but as tillers of the soil and workers whose labour will be a mutual assurance for their existence.²¹⁰

For a century and a half Russia and Prussia had been united by the common interest of subjugating Poland. When in 1914 war broke out between Russia and Germany for the first time since the Seven Years War, the Polish problem was once more placed in the forefront of European politics. In its shadow appeared the question of the Ukraine, which had for a generation been an Austro-Hungarian interest,²¹¹ and now became an inescapable object of German policy. The new system of power that came into existence in Eastern Europe after the First World War confirmed this: across a belt of weaker states the German return to the Ukraine lay permanently open. The former Cossack hetman Skoropadski lived at Wannsee near Berlin, exile or pretender according to circumstances; Ukrainian projects were among the Nazi stock-in-trade;²¹² Rosenberg in his prospectus of foreign policy elaborated the broad statements of Mein Kampf ;²¹³ and with the Machtu¨bernahme the Ukrainian plans became an avowed part of German foreign policy.²¹⁴ If we had at our disposal [said Hitler in a celebrated indiscretion in 1936] the incalculable wealth and stores of raw material of the Ural Mountains and the unending fertile plains of the Ukraine to be exploited under National Socialist leadership, then we would produce, and our German people would swim in plenty.²¹⁵

In Hitler’s secret counsels, the need for Lebensraum was consistently emphasized as the theme of National Socialist foreign policy. At the conference of 5 November 1937, when Hitler laid down his fundamental ideas on foreign policy and asked that they be regarded as his last will and testament, he stated the principle at the outset that the future of Germany was “wholly conditional upon the the effort, one-quarter the sacrifice, lavished vainly in the attack on Verdun would have overcome the difficulty of the defective communications in ‘the rich lands of the Ukraine’”, Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1916–1919, part i (London: Butterworth, 1927), pp. 80–1, 82. The preface to this volume is dated 1 January 1927; the second volume of Mein Kampf was published on 10 December 1926. ²¹⁰ Mein Kampf, p. 767; tr. Murphy, p. 549. ²¹¹ H. Wickham Steed, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 4th edition (London: Constable, 1919), pp. 289– 93; (W. E. D. Allen, The Ukraine: a History (Cambridge: University Press, 1940), p. 251; Elizabeth Wiskemann, Undeclared War (London: Constable, 1939), pp. 196–7. ²¹² Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 73, 80, 122; Max Beloff, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1929– 1941 (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1947–9), i. 94. ²¹³ Alfred Rosenberg, Der Zukunsftsweg einer deutschen Aussenpolitik (Munich: Eher, 1927), 97–98. ²¹⁴ Cf. Allen, Ukraine, pp. 330–1, 341. ²¹⁵ Speech to the Labour Front at the Nuremberg Parteitag, 12 September 1936 (Survey for 1936, pp. 381–2 and note; Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 929).

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solving of the need for space.”²¹⁶ He then examined whether the need for expansion could be circumvented either by autarky or by increased participation in world economy. Germany within her existing frontiers could attain only a very limited self-sufficiency in raw materials, and none at all in foodstuffs. The world economy was already breaking down through the industrialization of backward countries and the formation of great economic empires. Therefore the only remedy, and one which might appear to us as visionary, lay in the acquisition of greater living space—a quest which has at all times been the origin of the formation of states and of the migration of peoples. . . . If, then, we accept the security of our food situation as the principal question, the space necessary to insure it can only be sought in Europe, not, as in the liberal-capitalist view, in the exploitation of colonies. It is not a matter of acquiring population but of gaining space for agricultural use. Moreover, areas producing raw materials can be more usefully sought in Europe in immediate proximity to the Reich, than overseas; the solution thus obtained must suffice for one or two generations. . . . The question for Germany ran: where could she achieve the greatest gain at the lowest cost.²¹⁷ He left the question unanswered in this conference, but there was only one answer, the answer he had himself given eleven years earlier in Mein Kampf.²¹⁸ The conquest and dismemberment of Russia was the central aim of Hitler’s foreign policy, to which all other aims were subordinated.²¹⁹ Behind the shifts of opportunism and tactics this remained constant. “Danzig is not the object of our activities,” he said in May 1939, when the Danzig crisis was maturing. “It is a question of expanding our living space in the east, of securing our food supplies.”²²⁰ Again, in the conference of 23 November 1939, Our growing population demands a larger Lebensraum. My aim was to create a reasonable relation between the number of people and the space in which they ²¹⁶ Hossbach Memorandum, I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 404 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 30; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 17; cf. N.C.A. iii. 296. ²¹⁷ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 406 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 31–2; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939– 46, i. 18–19; cf. N.C.A. iii. 298. ²¹⁸ ‘Wenn wir aber heute in Europa von neuem Grund und Boden reden, ko¨nnen wir in erster Linie nur an Russland und die ihm untertanen Randstaaten denken’ (Mein Kampf, p. 742; tr. Murphy, p. 533). [Ed. ‘If we talk about new ground and soil in Europe today, we can think first and foremost only of Russia and the peripheral states subject to it.’ Italics in the original.] ²¹⁹ Cf. Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, pp. 5–7. Cyril Falls, in The Second World War (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 1, adduces the argument that “the war of 1939 . . . . was essentially a war of revenge. . . . It is not too much to say that German National Socialism, the Nazi creed, stood first and foremost for revenge. The other aims, the ‘living room’ to be obtained by the subjugation of neighbouring states, the absorption of all Teutonic or allegedly Teutonic populations, the colonization of agricultural districts like the Ukraine, the control of all major industries in Europe, were either the means of consolidating the revenge once achieved or the expression of purely predatory instincts such as had always flourished in Prussia and had more recently been diffused by Prussia over all Germany.” The argument appears to be internally inconsistent as well as unsupported by the documents and history of the Third Reich. It is, perhaps, a belated example of the inability of the foreign liberal to believe the self-declared truth about Hitler. ²²⁰ Minutes of conference of 23 May 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 548 (079-L); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 272; cf. N.C.A. vii. 849).

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live. . . . To relate the number of Germans to the space available is a perpetual problem. The necessary space must be secured. No calculated cleverness is of any help, a way can only be won by the sword.²²¹

(d) The Character of Hitler’s Foreign Policy Non-aggressive states tend to seek security in collaboration, in order to preserve the balance of power. Expanding states seek to divide and rule. Deal with your enemies one by one, isolate the adversary with whom you are at present concerned, avoid general negotiations: these are the principles of all the great masters of aggressive statecraft. In its main lines Hitler’s political strategy was the same as those of Bismarck, Napoleon, and Louis XIV. In Mein Kampf Hitler emphasized economy of objectives in foreign policy. He attacked the Parlamentschwa¨tzern who expended their indignation on the South Tyrol question instead of upon the aim of conquering Lebensraum.²²² “Because we keep on howling against five or ten States, we fail to concentrate all the forces of our national will and our physical strength for a blow at the heart of our bitterest enemy.”²²³ This was impressive propaganda; once the Nazis were in power, though the principle was retained, its application was reversed. It was not the bitterest enemy who was struck at, but, in an ascending succession, the weakest and most inoffensive.²²⁴ Frederick the Great once quoted with approval the classic saying of one of the princes of Savoy: “Mon fils, le Milanais est comme un artichaut; il faut le manger feuille par feuille.”²²⁵ Churchill used a phrase destined to become equally famous: “One by one, there is the process; there is the simple, dismal plan which has served Hitler so well.”²²⁶ It was in the application of the principle of economy of immediate objectives that Hitler’s political genius was most clearly displayed. Napoleon’s enemies were for the most part dynasties; Hitler’s were democracies, electorates, masses with a public opinion, who had to be confused, anaesthetized, “played along.” His chief contribution to this political art may be called the rule of the graduated dose. He had laid it down in one of the most penetrating passages in Mein Kampf, whose relevance only slowly broke upon the peoples of the Western Great Powers. ²²¹ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 329 (789-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 529–30; cf. N.C.A. iii. 574. ²²² Mein Kampf, pp. 707–11; tr. Murphy, pp. 510–12. ²²³ Ibid. pp. 718 and 517 respectively. ²²⁴ Cf. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 83, 214. ²²⁵ Frederick the Great: Histoire de mon temps, chapter I, in Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand (Berlin, 1846 seqq.), ii. 31. Cf. Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution Française, i. 393. [Ed.: “My son, the Milanese is like an artichoke; it must be eaten leaf by leaf.” ] ²²⁶ Broadcast of 24 August 1941 on the Atlantic meeting with Roosevelt (Winston S. Churchill, The Unrelenting Struggle: War Speeches, compiled by Charles Eade (London: Cassell, 1942), pp. 235–6).

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A shrewd conqueror will always enforce his exactions on the conquered only by stages, as far as that is possible. Then he may expect that a people who have lost all strength of character—which is always the case with every nation that voluntarily submits to the threats of an opponent—will not find in any of these acts of oppression, if one be enforced apart from the other, sufficient grounds for taking up arms again. The more numerous the extortions thus passively accepted so much the less will resistance appear justified in the eyes of other people, if the vanquished nation should end by revolting against the last act of oppression in a long series. And that is specially so if the nation has already patiently and silently accepted impositions which were much more exacting.²²⁷ Hitler divined and exploited not only the weaknesses of his victims but also their virtues; for instance, the perseverance of the British Government in seeking a peaceful settlement of Europe and in going to extreme lengths in putting up with provocation and with actual loss of position rather than be responsible for precipitating another war. The abortive Austrian putsch of 1934 was a miscalculation of forces,²²⁸ and it was Hitler’s only coup before 1938 that evoked the movement of troops in opposition to it.²²⁹ Not the least of Hitler’s achievements was the success with which, as far as a foreign opinion was concerned, he glossed over both this affair and the massacres he had carried out inside Germany a month before;²³⁰ and for the rest, the period up to March 1939 was a series of perfectly graduated triumphs, each in turn homologated or applauded by the dominant part of public opinion in the Western Great Powers—the withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations on 14 October 1933;²³¹ the Polish–German Pact of 26 January 1934,²³² the Saar plebiscite on 13 January 1935;²³³ the announcement that a German air force was once more in existence on 10 March and the reintroduction of compulsory military service on 16 March 1935;²³⁴ the Anglo-German naval agreement of 18 June 1935;²³⁵ the reoccupation

²²⁷ Mein Kampf, p. 759; tr. Murphy, p. 544. ²²⁸ See Survey for 1934, pp. 471–87. For subsequent evidence upon the German Government’s implication in this putsch see Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, 1933–1938, ed. by William E. Dodd, jr., and Martha Dodd (London: Gollancz, 1941), pp. 143–4, entry for 26 July 1934; affidavit of George S. Messersmith (see below, note 246), 28 August 1945; I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxviii. 255–93 (1760-PS); N.C.A. iv. 305–25), and report of the American Consul-General in Vienna to thc Secretary of State, 26 July 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxviii. 94–96 (273-L); N.C.A. vii. 1094–5). ²²⁹ The movement of four army divisions by Mussolini to the Brenner and the Carinthian border (Survey for 1934, p. 475). The next example of troop movements in opposition to Hitler was the partial Czechoslovak mobilization of 20–21 May 1938 (see Wight, “Eastern Europe,” notes 281–2 and accompanying text). But the failure of the Austrian putsch of 1934 was more encouraging than otherwise for Hitler, since it showed the reluctance of the Western Powers to embark on any action more energetic than protests. ²³⁰ Survey for 1934, p. 325. ²³¹ Survey for 1933, pp. 305–6. ²³² Ibid. pp. 184–6; Survey for 1934, pp. 386–7; Survey for 1935, i. 60, 204–10. ²³³ Survey for 1934, p. 619. ²³⁴ Survey for 1935, i. 140–2. ²³⁵ Ibid. pp. 178–88.

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of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936;²³⁶ the announcement of the Rome–Berlin Axis on 1 November 1936;²³⁷ the recognition of Franco’s Government in Spain on 18 November 1936,²³⁸ and the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan on 25 November 1936;²³⁹ the Anschluss with Austria on 13 March 1938,²⁴⁰ and the first partition of Czechoslovakia at Munich on 29 September 1938.²⁴¹ “The period which lies behind us,” said Hitler in May 1939, “has been put to good use. Every step taken was directed towards our goal.”²⁴² At which point in this sequence should resistance have been concerted by other Powers? Each one, argued on its merits, was capable of being seen as a rectification of the injustices of Versailles or a consolidation of the forces of anti-Communism. In retrospect it was clear that the remilitarization of the Rhineland was the watershed, after which events acquired a fatal downward momentum.²⁴³ But at the time, “we have no more desire,” said Baldwin, “than to keep calm, to keep our heads and to continue to try to bring France and Germany together in a friendship with ourselves.”²⁴⁴ Another aspect of Hitler’s statecraft was his adroitness in the art of timing. The series of diplomatic coups by which he demolished the Versailles Treaty were regularly carried out on Saturdays, when the English week-end meant that the governmental machine of his chief potential opponent would be awkwardly placed for immediate action.²⁴⁵ More important than the exploiting of his enemies’ ²³⁶ Survey for 1936, pp. 263–6. ²³⁷ Ibid., pp. 581–2. ²³⁸ Survey for 1937, ii. pp. 256–7. ²³⁹ Survey for 1936, p. 384. Another minor German success in the same month was the denunciation of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty relating to German waterways on 14 November l936 (Survey for 1937, i. 373–7; cf. Wight, “Eastern Europe,” notes 242–6, 379–81, and accompanying text, and Wight, “Germany,” below, note 259, and accompanying text). ²⁴⁰ Survey for 1938, i. 211–12. ²⁴¹ See Wight, “Eastern Europe,” notes 289 seqq., and accompanying text. ²⁴² Speech to his commanders, 23 May 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 548 (079-L); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 272; cf. N.C.A. vii. 848). ²⁴³ Cf. Wight, “Eastern Europe,” note 235 seqq. Hitler understood this well. “Yes,” he said to Schuschnigg on 12 February 1938, “two years ago, when we marched into the Rhineland with a handful of battalions—then I risked a great deal. If France had marched then, we would have had to withdraw . . . But now for France it is too late!’ (Kurt von Schuschnigg, Ein Requiem in Rot-Weiss-Rot (Zurich: Amstutz, 1946), p. 43). Cf. Schmidt, Statist auf diplomatischer Bu¨hne, p. 320; and Hitler’s speech to his commanders of 22 August 1939: “Reference to previous risks. . . . The most dangerous step was the invasion of the neutral zone. Only a week before, I got a warning through France. I have always accepted a great risk in the conviction that it may succeed” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 341 (798-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 445; cf. N.C.A. iii. 584); and Vocke’s evidence (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xiii. 57). Flandin claims to have seen this at the time: ‘Cette fois, l’abandon sera décisif, car il sera générateur de toute une série d’autres abandons’ (Politique francaise, 1919–1940, p. 204). [Ed.: “This time the abandonment will be decisive, because it will generate a whole series of other abandonments.” ] ²⁴⁴ 9 March 1936. H.C. Deb. 5th ser., vol. 309, col. 1841 (quoted in Survey for 1936, p. 276); cf. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. i: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948), pp. 197–8, 215–17. ²⁴⁵ The following is the list of Hitler’s Saturday crises: the withdrawal from the League on 14 October 1933; the official notification to other Governments of the re-creation of the German air force on 9 March 1935 (Survey for 1935, i. 140, note 1), and the announcement of conscription on 16 March 1935; the reoccupation of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936; the resumption of full control over German waterways on 14 November 1936; and the invasion of Austria on 12 March 1938 (it began on the night of Friday the 11th; the Anschluss was legally consummated on Sunday the 13th). 30 June 1934 was also

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social routine was the exploiting of their political and military preoccupations. In the summer of 1935, the Nazis were eagerly awaiting a war between Italy and Ethiopia, reckoning that this would cause disturbances in the European situation from which they would be able to benefit:²⁴⁶ it permitted them to reoccupy the Rhineland.²⁴⁷ The Spanish Civil War provided the background for the seizure of Austria and Czechoslovakia. The political instability of the world situation, in which the occurrence of sudden incidents cannot be prevented, demands constant preparedness for war on the part of the German armed forces in order (a) to meet attacks at any time²⁴⁸ and (b) to be able to exploit militarily any favourable political opportunity that may offer itself.²⁴⁹ In the autumn of 1937 the opportunity for an attack on Czechoslovakia and Austria was seen as arising from the outbreak either of civil war in France or of a Mediterranean war between France, England, and Italy. “A 100 per cent. victory for Franco was not desirable . . . from the German point of view,” said Hitler at the conference of 5 November 1937; “rather were we interested in a continuance of the war and in the keeping up of the tension in the Mediterranean.”²⁵⁰ After Munich, when he had assumed a complete European hegemony, these considerations became less important, and he supplied his own diversions. But Hitler’s timing was something more than skilful opportunism. It was governed ultimately by his long-term judgement of German strength in relation to the shifting balance of European forces. On 20 February 1933 he enunciated an important principle in a speech at a meeting of industrialists: We must first get complete power into our hands, if we want to crush the other side completely to the ground. So long as one is still gaining in power, one should not begin the struggle against the opponent. Only when one knows that one has reached the pinnacle of power, that there is no further upward development, should one attack.²⁵¹

This was laid down with reference to the political struggle in Germany and the forthcoming election, the first of the Nazi régime. “In Prussia we must gain another a Saturday, but this was determined by the development of the stresses within the Party (see Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 592). The Ides of March 1939 fell upon a Wednesday. ²⁴⁶ Affidavit by George S. Messersmith for the Nuremberg Tribunal (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxx. 309 (2385-PS); N.C.A. v. 36–37. ²⁴⁷ Cf. Survey for 1935, ii. 339–40 and 394, note 1. ²⁴⁸ The preceding paragraph had laid down the assumption “that Germany need not take into account an attack from any side.” ²⁴⁹ Blomberg directive on the combined preparations for war of the Wehrmacht, 24 June 1937 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 735 (175-C); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 8; cf. N.C.A. vi. 1007). ²⁵⁰ Hossbach Memorandum (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 411 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 37; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 23; cf. N.C.A. iii. 303). ²⁵¹ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxv. 46 (203-D); cf. N.C.A. vi. 1083. The writer is indebted to Miss Elizabeth Wiskemann for drawing his attention to this speech; she was the first to point out its importance (see Wiskemann, Rome–Berlin Axis, p. 18).

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ten seats, and in the Reich another thirty-three. That is not impossible if we throw in all our strength. Then only begins the second action against Communism.” But the same principle, of waiting to strike till the moment of maximum relative strength, der Ho¨hepunkt der Macht, underlay his foreign policy. In the conference of 5 November 1937 he defined the years 1943–5 as marking the zenith of German power. “After this date only a change for the worse, from our point of view, could be expected.” By that time German war preparations would have reached their highest point in relation to the counter-measures of other Powers, and the danger of German armaments becoming out of date would increase. “The recruiting of reserves was limited to current age groups; further drafts from older untrained age groups were no longer available.” Any year could then bring a crisis in Germany’s food supplies. The difficulty of keeping up large armed forces, the danger of a decline in the standard of living and a drop in the birth-rate, “the aging of the [Nazi] movement and of its leaders,” all suggested that downward trends would then begin. “Nobody knew today what the situation would be in the years 1943–45. One thing only was certain, that we could not wait longer. . . . If the Fu¨hrer was still living, it was his unalterable resolve to solve Germany’s problem of space at the latest by 1943–45.”²⁵² It was within this chronological limit that the moment for military action might be advanced by seizing favourable contingencies, such as civil strife in France or a war between France and Italy. On 22 August 1939 Hitler told his commanders that all the factors in the European situation were now advantageous for an attack on Poland. “For us it is easy to make decisions. We have nothing to lose; we can only gain. Our economic situation is such, because of our limitations, that we cannot hold out more than a few years.”²⁵³ With the overwhelming of Poland the Ho¨hepunkt der Macht seemed manifest. “Time is working for our adversary,” said Hitler on 23 November 1939. “Now there is a relationship of forces which can never be more propitious, but can only deteriorate for us. . . . Today we have a superiority such as we have never had before.”²⁵⁴ Perhaps it was the defect of ²⁵² Hossbach Memorandum (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 408–9 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 34–5; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 21; cf. N.C.A. iii, 300–1). ²⁵³ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 340 (798-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 444; cf. N.C.A. iii. 582. It was the question of timing that produced the conflict of policy between Germany and Italy at this moment, on the eve of the war: Mussolini’s Ho¨hepunkt der Macht did not coincide with Hitler’s. See the conference between Hitler and Ciano of 12 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxix. 41–53 (1871PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 172–81; cf. N.C.A. iv. 508–17, with the comment in Peter De Mendelssohn, The Nuremberg Documents: Some Aspects of German War Policy (London, 1946), p. 169), and Hitler’s letter to Mussolini of 3 September 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxviii. 547–9 (1831-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 507–8; cf. N.C.A. iv. 465–6). ²⁵⁴ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 332 (789-PS); N.C.A. iii. 576. Hitler was also driven forward by a similar calculation about his own age and indispensability. On 23 August he told Henderson that he preferred war now, when he was 50, to when he would be 55 or 60 (Great Britain, Foreign Office, Documents concerning German–Polish relations and the Outbreak of Hostilities between Great Britain and Germany on September 3, 1939, Cmd. 6106 [referred to hereafter as Cmd. 6106] (London, H.M.S.O., 1939), no. 58). Cf. his estimate of the importance of his own personality in his speech to his commanders on 22 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 339 (798-PS) Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 443; cf. N.C.A. iii. 582).

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Hitler’s policy, on its own principles, that in the delicate balance between exploiting favourable opportunities and waiting for the culmination of German power relative to his enemies, he showed an increasing preference for the former; his long series of successes created a habit and took the edge off his judgement, and the tendency to double the stakes was inherent in a dynamic policy. An aggressive Power tends to independent action; it is cautious about association with other Powers except upon its own terms; if it enters into engagements they will be bilateral, not multilateral. “I principi debbono fuggire quanto possono lo stare a discrezione d’altri.”²⁵⁵ Like Napoleon, Hitler aimed at separate transactions with every Power, and avoided general negotiations.²⁵⁶ He told Halifax that “he was a fanatical enemy of conferences which were doomed to failure from the start. He would in no case allow himself to be persuaded to take part in such proceedings by statesmen who considered that a conference was due every quarter.”²⁵⁷ It was the logical inauguration of his diplomacy to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations;²⁵⁸ he inevitably advanced towards the destruction of the Locarno treaties; and he refused to take part in any other multilateral engagements except those he initiated himself.²⁵⁹ But independence in policy, as soon as it is successful, attracts associates and scavengers, and raises the obverse problem of how these are to be best handled. From 1936 onwards, when Germany formed separately both the Axis entente with Italy²⁶⁰ and the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan,²⁶¹ this was a concern of her policy. Italy was the closest associate, but Hitler acted independently of her whenever it suited him. On 25 September 1937, during a visit to Berlin, Ciano proposed the fusion of the German–Japanese pact with a similar treaty for which the Italians were at that time in negotiation with Tokyo. Neurath replied that tripartite arrangements were unnecessary and it was preferable to keep to bilateral

²⁵⁵ Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, chapter xxi, ed. L. A. Burd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), pp. 343–4. [Ed.: “Princes must avoid to the maximum extent possible being subject to the discretion of others.” ] ²⁵⁶ Cf. H. Butterfield, The Peace Tactics of Napoleon, 1806–1808 (Cambridge: University Press, 1929) pp. 56, 74, 82–83, 170, 207; and the same author’s Napoleon (London, Duckworth, 1939), pp. 78–79. ²⁵⁷ Conversation between Hitler and Halifax, 19 November 1937 (D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 63–4). ²⁵⁸ See Survey for 1933, pp. 305–6; Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 535. The threat of withdrawal had been contained in the Friedensrede of 17 May 1933: ‘Any attempt to do violence to Germany by means of a simple majority vote . . . could only be dictated by the intention of excluding us from the conferences [i.e. the Disarmament Conference]. The German people, however, today possesses sufficient character in such a case not to impose its co-operation on other nations but, though with a heavy heart, to draw the only possible consequence. It would be difficult for us as a constantly defamed nation to continue to belong to the League of Nations’ (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1057). ²⁵⁹ For the use of unilateral denunciation to revise the Versailles régime for the German waterways see Survey for 1937, i. 371–3; Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, p. 79, note 2; Namier, Europe in Decay, p. 233. ²⁶⁰ Survey for 1936, pp. 581–2. ²⁶¹ Ibid. p. 384.

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agreements with Japan.²⁶² A month later Germany had changed her policy, and the initiative came from her. Considering his mission to London a failure, and that England could not be attracted into the anti-Communist orbit, Ribbentrop now arrived in Rome to press for Italy’s adhesion to the Anti-Comintern Pact.²⁶³ But in Hitler’s plan for aggression of 5 November 1937, recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum, there was no question of co-operation with Italy. The time for our attack on the Czechs and Austria must be made dependent on the course of the Anglo-French-Italian war. . . . Nor had the Fu¨hrer in mind military agreements with Italy, but wanted, while retaining his own independence of action, to exploit this favorable situation, which would not occur again, to begin and carry through the campaign against the Czechs.²⁶⁴ Germania farà da se.²⁶⁵ It was the first of the principles upon which the conquest of Czechoslovakia was planned the following summer. Germany has not committed herself to any military alliance which would automatically draw Germany into a warlike conflict between foreign powers. The settlement of the Czech question by my own free decision stands as the immediate aim in the forefront of my political intentions.²⁶⁶

The independence of its stronger partner was a basic characteristic of the Axis system, and was never so brutally displayed as in the crisis of March 1939. “The Axis functions only in favour of one of its parts, which tends to preponderate, and acts entirely on its own initiative with little regard for us.”²⁶⁷ The same principles governed Hitler’s handling of his minor jackals.²⁶⁸ Poland was skilfully flattered with this role until the time came to transform her into prey. ²⁶² Compte rendu de l’entretien de Neurath avec Ciano [25 September 1937] (Documents secrets (Eristov) vol. iii (Espagne), no. 2, p. 21). For Mussolini’s visit to Germany of 25–29 September 1937, see the Survey for 1937, i. 334–5, and 339, note 1. ²⁶³ Ciano, Europa, pp. 214–16; Eng. version, pp. 139–41; see further below, notes 360–372 and accompanying text. [Ed. The full reference is L’Europa verso la catastrofe: 184 colloqui verbalizzati de Galeazzo Ciano (Milan: Mondadori, 1948); Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, trans. Stuart Hood (London: Odhams Press, 1948).] ²⁶⁴ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 412 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 37–38; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 24; cf. N.C.A. i. 386 and iii. 304. ²⁶⁵ [Ed.] “Germany will act on its own.” ²⁶⁶ Draft for the new directive, 18 June 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 446 (388-PS, item 14); D.Ger.F.P., series D, ii. 473; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 34; cf. N.C.A. iii. 324). ²⁶⁷ Ciano: Diario (1939–43), 14 March 1939. Again, in the speech to his commanders of 23 May 1939, Hitler laid down the principle: ‘Secrecy is the decisive requirement for success. Our object must be kept secret even from Italy or Japan’ (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 556 (079-L); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 277; cf. N.C.A. vii. 854). Thus Japan was not informed beforehand of the Soviet–German Pact of 23 August 1939 (see De Witt C. Poole, ‘Light on Nazi Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, October 1946, pp. 187–8). ²⁶⁸ They are suggested by an obscure sentence in the draft directive of 18 June 1938, following Hitler’s assertion that he meant to solve the Czech problem by his own free decision, and to exploit every favorable political opportunity to realize this aim: “Friends, interested parties, and enemies could thereby be brought in and other powers remain indifferent, although they could not be included with absolute certainty in any one of these categories beforehand.” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 446 (388-PS, item

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Hungary was controlled more adroitly than Italy. She was Germany’s traditional ally as the subordinate Herrenvolk of Eastern Europe; a weaker Power than Italy, she was less embarrassing to Germany either as an associate or in an independent part. Hitler could always inform her that he did not require her co-operation, but that unless she co-operated she would get none of the pickings. When Imrédy visited Hitler on 23 August 1938 to discuss the attack on Czechoslovakia, he was most relieved when the Fu¨hrer stated to him that, in this particular case, he required nothing of Hungary. He himself did not know the precise moment. He who wanted to sit at table must at least help in the kitchen. If Hungary desired General Staff conversations, he had no objections.²⁶⁹ Five months later, talking to Csáky, Hitler compared Germany and her associates to a football team.²⁷⁰ The figure was true of Munich, when Hitler unleashed a plurality of appetites and presided over their concatenation, suffering no disadvantage from those that escaped his immediate control. By March 1939 the system had changed a little; Hungary was bound more closely into the German orbit,²⁷¹ but Poland had spun out into the neutral and impotent condition between collaboration and enmity.²⁷² The most important and characteristic feature of Hitler’s diplomacy was the political penetration and psychological paralysis of other states, and the promotion of revolutionary unrest. In previous ages of European history the dividing-line between war and peace had become blurred and indistinct; it had been especially so during the ascendancy of Philip II, in the Wars of Religion, another period of fanaticism and mass passions. Hitler’s policy assumed and exploited this diplomatic twilight. It was a further legacy from the Bolsheviks, who in the infancy of the Soviet Republic had declared “No war, no peace” against the capitalist world.²⁷³ Undeclared war, “that brilliant totalitarian German campaign in which propaganda is intertwined with politico-military threats—war is only the continuation of policy—with economic pressure, and the fullest exploitation of the presence of a German minority,”²⁷⁴ was the condition of Europe from the Nazi Revolution onwards, and culminated in the tremendous achievements of 1938–9. Nor

14); D.Ger.F.P., series D, ii. 473; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 34; cf. N.C.A. iii. 324)—on its face value a remarkable forecast of Munich. ²⁶⁹ German Foreign Ministry minute on conversations between Hitler, Ribbentrop, Imrédy, and Kánya, 23 August 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxi. 137 (2796-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, ii. 611). The repetition of clichés and figures of speech was a feature of Nazi diplomacy: Hitler saw Imrédy in the afternoon; the same morning Ribbentrop told Kánya that “he who does not assist departs with empty hands” (ibid. pp. 136 and 610 respectively). ²⁷⁰ Compte rendu de l’entretien de Hitler avec Czaky, 16 janvier 1939 (Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 25, p. 79). ²⁷¹ See Wight, “Eastern Europe,” notes 368–80 and accompanying text. ²⁷² See Wight, “Eastern Europe,” notes 356–62 and accompanying text. ²⁷³ Trotsky’s declaration of 10 February 1918 at Brest-Litovsk (see J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, BrestLitovsk: The Forgotten Peace (London: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 185–6, 226–7). ²⁷⁴ Wiskemann, Undeclared War, p. 7.

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was military war, when it succeeded propaganda war, to be announced by the formalities of declaration.²⁷⁵ I well remember one conversation I had with Goebbels in the earliest period of the Nazi Government [said George S. Messersmith in his affidavit for the Nuremberg Tribunal], in which I expressed the opinion that they could never get away with their program in Europe. His reply was “But you don’t know what we can do by creating dissension—without anything being done specifically on our part or which can be laid to our door, we will get these people to fight among themselves and so weaken themselves that they will be an easy prey for us.” I can still recall the cynical manner in which he specifically indicated the “sore spots” in Austria and in Czechoslovakia and in other countries and on which by insidious means German agents could arouse dissension and get the peoples in the countries themselves disunited.²⁷⁶

The creation of revolutionary unrest was Hitler’s master technique, the “new weapon” on which he prided himself. It was the adaptation of propaganda, gangsterism, and insurrection to the conduct of international relations. In 1932 he said: “How to achieve the moral break-down of the enemy before the war has started— that is the problem that interests me.”²⁷⁷ The task was facilitated in Eastern Europe by the presence of national and above all German minorities. Propaganda warfare must on the one hand intimidate the Czechs by means of threats and wear down their power of resistance; on the other hand it must give the national minorities indications as to how to support our military operations and influence the neutrals in our favor. Economic warfare has the task of employing all available economic resources to hasten the final collapse of the Czechs. ²⁷⁵ On declaration of war in general see Oppenheim, International Law, ii. 234–41. None of Hitler’s invasions of other countries was preceded by a declaration of war. He declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, however, since he was unable to invade her. It may be added that the Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939 was unaccompanied by a declaration of war, though Soviet diplomacy showed a greater degree of formality than German by denouncing the non-aggression treaty with Finland of 1932 on 28 November and severing diplomatic relations with Finland on 29 November 1939. In Nazi diplomacy the advantages of a surprise attack were not to be marred by the slightest preliminary intimations. Cf. memorandum on ‘Timing of the X-Order’, 24 August 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 461 (388-PS, item 17); N.C.A. iii. 333): “Also, the question raised by the Foreign Office as to whether all Germans should be called back in time from prospective enemy territories must in no way lead to the conspicuous departure from Czechoslovakia of any German subjects before the incident. Even a warning of the diplomatic representatives in Prague is impossible before the first air attack, although the consequences could be very grave in the event of their becoming victims of such an attack (e.g. death of representatives of friendly or confirmed neutral powers).” ²⁷⁶ Affidavit by George S. Messersmith for the Nuremberg Tribunal (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxx. 298–9 (2385-PS); N.C.A. v. 26). Messersmith was United States Consul-General in Berlin from 1930 to 1934, and United States Minister to Austria from 1934 to 1937. ²⁷⁷ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 19.

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The opening of the propaganda and economic campaign may precede military operations in point of time.²⁷⁸

Yet it was not in the states of Eastern Europe, with their insecure political and social structures and their German fifth columns, but in France, the greatest state of Western Europe, that Hitler’s technique of producing moral breakdown prior to the armed clash produced its most remarkable result. There is a note in the first sketch of the plan for the attack on Czechoslovakia which tersely sums up the principal elements in Nazi diplomacy: “Basic Principle: Create Accomplished Facts so that (a) help comes too late—other powers do not intervene, (b) Allies take part (like wolves also want something out of it), (c) State collapse from within. Propaganda: Directions to Germans. Threats to others.”²⁷⁹ Hitler’s policy showed the same personal philosophy that is characteristic of the great political adventurers, of Napoleon and Frederick, Wallenstein and Cesare Borgia. It was a threefold belief, fusing opposite extremes—fatalism, the sense of co-operation with destiny; an extreme assertion of the personal will, the mystique of brutal decisions; and a cult of chance, of those surprise turns to affairs that give the leader the moment for his inspired interventions, which Cromwell knew as “providences” or “dispensations.”²⁸⁰ These elements constantly reappear at the basis of Hitler’s policy. He said: “I go with the assurance of a sleepwalker on the way which Providence dictates,”²⁸¹ perhaps the most terrifying sentence he ever uttered, expressing the menace of a resistless revolutionary tread that was itself one of the causes of demoralization in his adversaries. But sometimes he seemed not to embody or follow destiny, but to wrestle with it, as Cromwell wrestled with God. “Only he who struggles with destiny can have a good intuition. In the last years I have experienced many examples of intuition.”²⁸² His intuition showed him those critical moments in which the course of destiny could be seized and diverted. ²⁷⁸ Revised draft directive for Operation “Green” of 20 May 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 423–4 (388-PS, item 5); D.Ger.F.P., series D, ii. 301; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 29; cf. N.C.A. iii. 312). ²⁷⁹ “Bases of the dissertation on ‘Gruen,’ ” 22 April 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 418 (388-PS, item 2); N.C.A. iii. 308). ²⁸⁰ Cf. Butterfield, Napoleon, pp. 78, 80; also his “Napoleon and the Study of History,” Time and Tide, 22 January 1949, pp. 80–2; C. H. Firth, Oliver Cromwell (London: Putnam, Heroes of the Nations, 1924), pp. 477–82, and the same author’s The Parallel between the English and American Civil Wars (Cambridge: University Press, 1910), pp. 36–7. ²⁸¹ Speech at Munich, 15 March 1936 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1307). Cf. a conversation between Germans in 1934 quoted in Nora Waln’s Reaching for the Stars (London: Cresset Press, 1939), p. 85: “‘We are all Germans—Germans in trouble—Germans caught in an Alpdruck.’ (An Alpdruck is a nightmare in which the dreamer is pressed as with the weight of the Alps). . . . ‘Wir sind ein schlafwandelndes Volk.’” [Ed. “We are a sleepwalking people.” ] ²⁸² Hitler’s speech to his commanders, 23 November 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 336 (789-PS); N.C.A. iii. 580). Cf. Mein Kampf, p. 20; tr. Murphy, p. 31: ‘lndem mich die Go¨ttin der Not in ihre Arme nahm und mich oft zu zerbrechen drohte, wuchs der Wille zum Widerstand, und endlich blieb der Wille Sieger.’ [Ed. “When the goddess of adversity took me in her arms and often threatened to break me, the will to resist grew, and at last the will remained victorious.” ]

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“Providence has had the last word and brought me success. On top of that, I had a clear recognition of the probable course of historical events, and the firm will to make brutal decisions.”²⁸³ The making of brutal decisions could become intoxicating, almost an end in itself. In the last crisis before the outbreak of general war he said to Henderson that he was “a man of great decisions. . . . The Fu¨hrer repeats that he is a man of ad infinitum decisions by which he himself is bound”:²⁸⁴ an infinite series of tactical decisions disguised each one at the moment as infinitely binding, the perfect expression of opportunism. It was part of the leader’s decisive role that his decisions were satisfying and self-justifying not only as “brutal” but also as “irrevocable.” “The Fu¨hrer said that his decision was irrevocable. Everyone knew what a decision by the Fu¨hrer meant.”²⁸⁵ That one irrevocable decision, like the rapprochement with Russia in 1939, could be cancelled by another, like the invasion of Russia in 1941, did not invalidate their irrevocability. Each was tactically justified and emotionally satisfying at the moment. To irrevocable decisions, as to treaties of eternal friendship, the clause rebus sic stantibus was always tacitly attached; and Hitler’s policy differed from that of Bolshevism only in being too little sophisticated to justify inconsistencies and tergiversations by a theory of dialectics. Virtù and fortuna are opposite sides of the Machiavellian coin. Hitler’s policy, having no principle except the extension of German power, was in practice completely opportunist. Heiden describes as the secret of Hitler’s political method “that the vaster the politician’s field of action, the more he can expect one difficulty to be superseded and thus solved by another.”²⁸⁶ It was not until al-‘A lamain and Stalingrad that the secret lost its efficacy, the increase of the field of action began to produce diminishing returns, and difficulties, instead of being successive and self-cancelling, became cumulative.²⁸⁷ Power becomes opportunist in expression the more it is emancipated from morality; it becomes destructive in character in proportion as it has no purpose save its own expansion. Thus opportunism passes over into nihilism. Hitler’s

²⁸³ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 328 (789-PS); N.C.A. iii. 572–3. The assertion of the leader’s personal will is connected with Hitler’s doctrine of the leader’s ‘responsibility’, that is to say, his irresponsibility (his responsibility to nothing except his own intuitions). In the German democracy “the leader is freely chosen and is obliged to accept full responsibility for all his actions and omissions. The problems to be dealt with are not put to the vote of the majority; but they arc decided upon by the individual and as a guarantee of responsibility for those decisions he pledges all he has in the world and even his life” (Mein Kampf, p. 99; tr. Murphy, p. 88). In other words he is a tyrant who can only be removed by assassination or defeat in war. Cf. ibid. pp. 378–9, 501–2 and 289, 375–7 respectively. ²⁸⁴ Interview between Hitler and Sir Nevile Henderson, 25 August 1939 (Cmd. 6106, no. 68). ²⁸⁵ Conference between Hitler and Hácha, 15–16 March 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxi. 145 (2798PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 55; cf. N.C.A. v. 439). ²⁸⁶ Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 592; cf. p. 293. ²⁸⁷ Probably the most dramatic example in Hitler’s life of waiting upon chance was in April 1945 when the death of Roosevelt was expected to reverse the fortunes of Germany as the death of the Tsarina Elizabeth reversed Prussian fortunes in 1762. Here the bankrupt gambler’s worship of luck reached its nadir of futility. See Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, pp. 109–12.

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opportunism was carried to an extent that probably was without parallel in previous Western history. Since his aims were limitless, and his methods unqualified by conformity to any exterior standard, his power tended, when checked in its operation, to destroy both itself and the field in which it was exercised. Neither in the war he declared on the Weimar Republic nor in that he later declared on Western society was there any possibility of a drawn battle or a compromise peace. “Every hope of compromise is childish: Victory or defeat! The question is not the fate of a national-socialist Germany, but who is to dominate Europe in the future.”²⁸⁸ This determination was enshrined in the myth of the capitulation which, by definition, would never be repeated,²⁸⁹ whose alternative was conflict continued beyond the bounds of purpose, towards self-destruction and universal destruction. Here was the authentic nihilism of the Third Reich. Weltmacht oder Niedergang was its fundamental issue,²⁹⁰ and its deepest logic drove it to the experience of first one and then the other.

(e) The Combinations of Hitler’s Foreign Policy Hitler divided the international community into three classes—Powers which were the object of conquest for the purpose of acquiring German Lebensraum; Powers whose hostility to German expansion would make them inevitable enemies; and Powers which could be cast for the role of temporary allies. The type of the first was Russia; of the second, France; and contrasted types of the third were Italy and Britain. But as German expansion was successively achieved, these three classes would be reduced to two—Powers that would be destroyed altogether and Powers that would be allowed to retain a limited existence as vassals.²⁹¹ When Hitler speaks about Russia in Mein Kampf or in his private discourses, a distinction can be observed between Russia considered as a geographical area of potential living-space and Russia considered as a Great Power. He repeatedly asserted that the first must be conquered, but nowhere did he explicitly state that ²⁸⁸ Hitler’s speech to his commanders, 23 November 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 334 (789-PS; N.C.A. iii. 578). ²⁸⁹ “But even if we could not conquer . . . we should drag half the world into destruction with us, and leave no one to triumph over Germany. There will not be another 1918. We shall not surrender,” Hitler in early 1934 (Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 125). “I would, therefore, like to assure all the world that a November 1918 will never be repeated in German history,” Hitler’s Reichstag speech, 1 September 1939 (Cmd. 6106, no. 106, p. 165; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 511). “I shall stand or fall in this struggle. I shall never survive the defeat of my people. No capitulation to the outside forces, no revolution from the interior forces,” Hitler’s speech to his commanders, 23 November 1939, ad fin. (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 336 (789-PS); N.C.A. iii.580). ²⁹⁰ See Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, p. 5. The formula does not appear in Mein Kampf ; the phrase there is “Deutschland wird entweder Weltmacht oder u¨berhaupt nicht sein” (p. 742, tr. Murphy, p. 533). [Ed. “Germany will be either a world power or not at all.” The phrase Weltmacht oder Niedergang could be translated as “world power or decline” or “world power or fall.” ] ²⁹¹ Cf. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 128.

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the second must be declared war upon, invaded, and defeated. His basic attitude, perhaps, was that of the German marcher prince of the twelfth century, for whom all the illimitable land to the east was unorganized and stateless, inhabited by primitive and heathen tribes who were beyond the confines of the international community. “Once again the new German Empire should have set out on its march along the same road as was formerly trodden by the Teutonic Knights.”²⁹² But superimposed upon this basic conception was a provisional acknowledgement of the existing international community and of the Soviet Union as a member of it. And on this second level there was the possibility, with regard to Soviet Russia, of an Interimsethik. Hostility to the Soviet Union was, on the face of it, the most marked feature of the new German foreign policy inaugurated by the Third Reich. Within eighteen months it had brought about a diplomatic revolution; the German– Russian entente first concluded at Rapallo in 1922²⁹³ was broken; and Russia was driven into the camp of the Western Powers, into the seat on the Council of the League that Germany herself vacated, and into alliance with France.²⁹⁴ There was a German council of Ministers on 4 September 1936 to discuss intensification of rearmament; Go¨ring, who was in the chair, declared it to be “of greater importance than all previous meetings,” and based his authority on a memorandum from the Fu¨hrer which “starts from the basic thought that the showdown with Russia is inevitable.”²⁹⁵ There are not many references to aggression against Russia in the Nuremberg documents; this is perhaps the earliest. But the river had eddies and undercurrents beneath its main course, and those which were for a little while to become uppermost in August 1939 were already present.²⁹⁶ The anti-Communist propaganda and policy of the Third Reich was a double bluff, designed at this time more for the edification of Western opinion than to cover the fulfilment of the basic plans of Nazi expansion. “The parade of anti-Bolshevik sentiments proved the most potent instrument in sterilising anti-Nazi reactions in the democratic countries of Europe and America.”²⁹⁷ With the conclusion of the German–Soviet Pact Hitler ascended to the level of the single bluff, and in June 1941 the hour arrived when, all bluff abandoned, he could speak openly.²⁹⁸

²⁹² Mein Kampf, p. 154; tr. Murphy, p. 128. ²⁹³ Survey for 1920–3, pp. 30–1; cf. the review of German–Russian relations in the Survey for 1930, pp. 125–7. ²⁹⁴ See Wight, “Eastern Europe,” note 222 seqq.; Survey for 1934, pp. 388–404; Survey for 1935, i. 77–82. ²⁹⁵ Minutes of Cabinet meeting of 4 September 1936 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvi. 489–90 (416-EC); N.C.A. vii. 471–2). ²⁹⁶ See Beloff, i. 94–100, and Heiden, Der Fuehrer, pp. 481–2; cf. Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, pp. 271–5. ²⁹⁷ Beloff, i. 94. ²⁹⁸ “German people, National-Socialists! oppressed by grave cares, condemned for months to silence, the hour has now arrived when I can speak openly,” Hitler’s proclamation to the German people on the invasion of Russia 22 June 1941 (The Times, 23 June 1941).

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Russia was the positive pole of Nazi hostility, France the negative. The future goal of our foreign policy ought not to involve an orientation to the East or the West: but it ought to be an Eastern policy which will have in view the acquisition of such territory as is necessary for our German people. To carry out this policy we need that force which the mortal enemy of our nation, France, now deprives us of by holding us in her grip and pitilessly robbing us of our strength. Therefore we must stop at no sacrifice in our effort to destroy the French striving towards hegemony over Europe.²⁹⁹

Hitler came to political maturity, and formulated his views on Germany’s foreign relations, at a time when France was the preponderant European Power. In January 1923 the French occupied the Ruhr;³⁰⁰ in November of the same year Hitler made the Munich putsch; from April to December 1924, he was in fortress detention in Landsberg, and wrote the first part of Mein Kampf. In both its volumes that book reflects the French occupation of the Ruhr.³⁰¹ When the French put their threats into effect [he wrote], and penetrated, at first hesitatingly and cautiously, into the coal-basin of Lower Germany the hour of destiny had struck for Germany. It was a great and decisive moment. If at that moment our people had changed not only their frame of mind but also their conduct the German Ruhr District could have been made for France what Moscow turned out to be for Napoleon.³⁰² Hitler’s attitude towards France was the converse of the ambiguous mood of defeat in victory with which the French themselves had come out of the First World War.³⁰³ It had three elements: (1) From the defeat of Germany in 1918 until the rearmament of Germany after the National Socialist Revolution, France was the strongest military Power in Europe.³⁰⁴ She was once again the Grande Nation before whom the German experienced traditional inferiority.³⁰⁵ (2) Nevertheless this renewed ascendancy was temporary, accidental, and in a sense fictitious.³⁰⁶ ²⁹⁹ Mein Kampf, p. 757; tr. Murphy, p. 542. ³⁰⁰ Survey for 1920–3, pp. 201–2; Survey for 1924, pp. 268 seqq. ³⁰¹ The French evacuated the Ruhr in July–August 1925 (Survey for 1925, ii. 47; supplement, p. 134). ³⁰² Mein Kampf, p. 757; tr. Murphy, pp. 550–1. ³⁰³ See Survey for 1920–3, pp. 60–4. ³⁰⁴ Mein Kampf. pp. 695–6; tr. Murphy, p. 503. ³⁰⁵ Ibid. pp. 705 and 509 respectively. Cf. Ciano’s description of Laval at Hitler’s headquarters in the Forest of Go¨rlitz on the eastern front in December 1942: “Laval is a filthy Frenchman—the filthiest of all Frenchmen. To get into the good graces of the German bosses he doesn’t hesitate to betray his own compatriots and to defame his own unhappy country . . . Still, how the Germans respond to the charm of the French! Even of this Frenchman. Except for Hitler, all the others were crowding around trying to talk to him . . . it looked like the entrance of an erstwhile great lord into a circle of new-rich parvenus. Ribbentrop also did his best, but he ended with a gaffe. He reminded Laval that his ‘eminent compatriot’ Napoleon had once been in that same forest. If I am not mistaken, Napoleon was there under entirely different conditions” (Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 19 December 1942). ³⁰⁶ “Hitler well understood this: ‘Today [1923] the disproportion between outward power and inner strength in France is greater than ever. France has only the momentary weakness of Germany to thank

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Her population and social strength was declining. Dependent for military manpower upon colonial troops, she was “becoming more and more obsessed with negroid ideas.”³⁰⁷ (3) Nevertheless France had encircled Germany by her system of eastern alliances, and would in the interests of self-preservation be implacably hostile to German expansion in Eastern Europe. The remark ascribed to Clemenceau, that the trouble with the Germans was that there were twenty millions too many of them, illustrated the anxieties of the French; Nazi propaganda appropriated it to prove their cruelty.³⁰⁸ The greatness of France depended upon the weakness of Germany, and to keep Germany weak was therefore the main object of French policy. The destruction of France was consequently no less an object of German policy. As long as the eternal conflict between France and Germany is waged only in the form of a German defence against the French attack, that conflict can never be decided and from century to century Germany will lose one position after another. . . . Only when the Germans have taken all this fully into account will they cease from allowing the national will-to-life to wear itself out in merely passive defence; but they will rally together for a last decisive contest with France. And in this contest the essential objective of the German nation will be fought for. Only then will it be possible to put an end to the eternal Franco-German conflict which has hitherto proved so sterile. But although this objective is essential in German policy it is still only secondary. “Of course, it is here presumed that Germany sees in the annihilation of France nothing more than a means which will make it possible for our people finally to expand in another quarter.”³⁰⁹ With the resurgence of Germany, the second of these elements in the FrancoGerman relationship overshadowed the first and the third. Hitler’s judgement was in nothing more penetrating than in his estimate of French weakness. As early as 1932 he remarked that France would be crushed “because of the Maginot Line.”³¹⁰ In October 1936 he spoke of France to Ciano, “as do the other Germans—only superficially and with slight contempt. Some abuse of the Jews who govern her and nothing further. In their opinion France has ceased—at least for the moment—to be an active factor in foreign policy.”³¹¹ Perhaps the last official reflection of the old for her present position of power’—again the profound insight into the weakness of the enemy to which he has owed so many of his successes” (Heiden, Der Fuehrer, p. 135—giving, as always, no source for the quotation from Hitler). ³⁰⁷ Mein Kampf, p. 704; tr. Murphy, p. 508. ³⁰⁸ See Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1381, 1592–3. ³⁰⁹ Mein Kampf, pp. 766–7; tr. Murphy, p. 549, where, however, the phrase die Vernichtung Frankreichs is flaccidly given as “the suppression of France.” Cf. eine Vernichtung der franzo¨sischen Hegemoniebestrebung in Europa [Ed.: “an annihilation of the French hegemonic aspirations in Europe”] (Mein Kampf, p. 757, tr. Murphy, p. 542; quoted above, notes 293–9 and accompanying text). ³¹⁰ F. A. Voigt, “December in Europe,” The Nineteenth Century, January 1942, p. 2. Cf. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 124. ³¹¹ Conversation between Hitler and Ciano at Berchtesgaden, 24 October 1936 (Ciano, Europa, pp. 98–9; Eng. version, p. 60; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 4).

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view of an implacably dangerous and hostile France was in the Blomberg directive of 24 June 1937, which considered, as the first of its Kriegsfa¨lle, a war on two fronts with the main struggle in the west: “Presumably hostilities will open with a surprise attack on Germany by the French army and air force and with concerted operations by the French fleet.”³¹² But in the conference of 5 November 1937 Hitler stated as one of the principal contingencies which German policy must reckon with, that social tensions might bring France to the verge of civil war, making her impotent to aid Czechoslovakia.³¹³ Though he regarded French proximity to the Ruhr as a matter of particular danger for Germany,³¹⁴ in his conferences of 1938 and subsequently Hitler treated France as no longer the chief enemy, but as ancillary to Britain. Russia and France were the original and lasting objects of Hitler’s hostility. Britain and Italy were the original objects of his collaboration. The argument on foreign policy in the second volume of Mein Kampf led to the conclusion that “for a long time yet to come there will be only two Powers in Europe with which it may be possible for Germany to conclude an alliance. These Powers are Great Britain and Italy.”³¹⁵ Now, as in antiquity, the penultimate stage in the unification of the world was to be a triumvirate, a triumvirate not of political leaders within an already existing world-state, but of revolutionary Powers.³¹⁶ Hitler’s British and Italian policies were entwined with one another and must be considered together. The change in his British policy which occurred about 1937 was the turningpoint in the development of National Socialist foreign relations, more important than the sinuosities of his Russian policy, because there the general direction and the ultimate objective were always the same, while with Britain he was compelled, perhaps not without reluctance, to abandon a plan of collaboration and adopt the assumption of enmity. Originally he admired Britain as a ruthless and successful state, showing “brutality and tenacity in its government,” which had built a world-empire and proved its will to survival in the First World War.³¹⁷ Expansion ³¹² I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 738 (175-C); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 10. The passage is omitted from N.C.A. (see vi. 1009). ³¹³ Hossbach Memorandum (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 409, 411 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 35, 36; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 21, 23; cf. N.C.A. iii. 301 and 303). Cf. minutes of conference between Hitler and Ciano on 12 August 1939: “Moreover, the Duce was convinced that the present enthusiasm in England and France could not last very long. Soon, particularly in France, the union sacrée would once more be replaced by party discord, provided the Axis kept quiet for a time” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxix. 49 (1871-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 178; cf. N.C.A. iv. 514). ³¹⁴ “It is imperative for England that the war should be brought as near to the Ruhr basin as possible. French blood will not be spared (West Wall). The possession of the Ruhr basin will determine the duration of our resistance,” conference of 23 May 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 550 (079-L); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 273; cf. N.C.A. vii. 850). Cf. conference of 23 November 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 334 (789-PS); N.C.A. iii. 578). ³¹⁵ Mein Kampf, p. 705; tr. Murphy, p. 509. ³¹⁶ Cf. Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, pp. 237–9. ³¹⁷ Mein Kampf, p. 366; cf. pp. 158, 746–7; tr. Murphy, pp. 279, 131, 536. There is little evidence that Hitler attached importance, as the politicians and propagandists of the Second Reich sometimes did, to England’s claims to be an Aryan or Nordic Power. In the conference of 23 May 1939, when speaking

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in Eastern Europe implied association with Britain just as expansion on the oceans had implied conflict with Britain: “Only by alliance with England was it possible to safeguard the rear of the new German crusade.”³¹⁸ Hitler’s attitude towards Britain was confirmed by the international situation at the time when he entered politics. He contrasted the British and French attitudes towards defeated Germany: “England did not want Germany to be a World Power. France desired that there should be no Power called Germany.”³¹⁹ Britain was alarmed by the new French military predominance in Europe which culminated in the occupation of the Ruhr,³²⁰ and her policy leaned correspondingly towards Germany. It was the same with Italy. But Hitler’s choice of Italy as a partner had older and more personal roots than his British policy. In his Vienna days before the First World War Italy, like himself, had been “deutschfreundlich, o¨sterreichfeindlich.”³²¹ She was the natural ally for a grossdeutsch policy whose first aim was the partition of Austria-Hungary. The Triple Alliance had been built on the fallacy that the hereditary enemies Italy and Austria could ever fight side by side.³²² The failure of German diplomacy in the First World War had confirmed Hitler’s prejudices. He hated the Habsburg Empire, where German interests were increasingly subordinated to those of the Slavs;³²³ Germany had fought the war in alliance with the Habsburgs and in support of their interests; Italy had deserted the German alliance in order to fight the Habsburgs; the Habsburg Empire had perished, and Germany had been defeated. “It was the fantastic idea of a Nibelungen alliance with the decomposed body of the Habsburg State that brought about Germany’s ruin.”³²⁴ After the war Italy, like Britain, became a potential ally, alarmed by French preponderance and hostile to the French occupation of the Ruhr.³²⁵ An alliance

of the tenacity of British opposition to Germany, he said: “They have the love of adventure and bravery of the Nordic race” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 552 (079-L); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 274; cf. N.C.A. vii. 851), but this was en passant and not an habitual interpretation. Indeed the puritanism and commercial greatness of Britain made her a supreme exponent of the Jewish spirit (cf. Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, p. 205). But neither Italy nor Japan was Aryan except in the occult sense of the word. Hitler’s political combinations were untouched by racial ideology. ³¹⁸ Mein Kampf, p. 154; cf. p. 157; tr. Murphy, pp. 128, 130. “Little German ambitions were directed against England and France, and, being anti-Polish, were by implication friendly to Russia; Greater German ambitions, directed against the Slavs and the Ukraine, were antiRussian and, indifferent to colonies, were by implication friendly to the western powers.” (Taylor, Course of German History, p. 218). ³¹⁹ Mein Kampf, p. 699; tr. Murphy, p. 505. ³²⁰ There is a passage in Mein Kampf describing the danger to Britain of French military and air establishments (pp. 699–700; tr. Murphy, p. 505) which echoes Ramsay MacDonald’s celebrated letter to Poincaré of 21 February1924 and was perhaps based upon it (see The Times, 3 March 1924; cf. Survey for 1924, p. 360). ³²¹ Mein Kampf, p. 162; tr. Murphy, p. 134. ³²² Ibid. pp. 142–3 and 120 respectively; cf. Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 55. ³²³ Mein Kampf, p. 142; tr. Murphy, pp. 119–20. ³²⁴ Ibid. p. 712 and 513 respectively; cf. Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 46. ³²⁵ Mein Kampf, p. 768; tr. Murphy, p. 550. Hitler exaggerated the Italian reaction to the French occupation of the Ruhr: see Survey for 1924, p. 268 and Maxwell H. H. Macartney and Paul Cremona, Italy’s Foreign and Colonial Policy, 1914–37 (London: Oxford University Press,1938), pp. 145, 154.

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with Britain and Italy would free Germany from the threat of French invasion, and transfer the political initiative out of French hands.³²⁶ Italy, moreover, was the country of the first Fascist state, the first European country to be redeemed from the Jewish world-hydra of freemasonry, Marxism, and internationalism.³²⁷ In 1923 Hitler tried to imitate Mussolini: the Munich putsch was to be the beginning of a National Socialist March on Berlin, and it was the failure of the putsch that taught him that every national revolutionary movement must adopt its own methods for gaining power.³²⁸ The Italian alliance was the original illustration of Hitler’s doctrine of selectivity in foreign policy, the sacrifice of a lesser objective in order to gain an ally for a greater.³²⁹ Between Italy and Germany lay the Italian annexation of the South Tyrol, and the Italian prohibition of the Anschluss. Hitler contemptuously repudiated a German interest in the South Tyrol; the liberation of 200,000 Germans was not important when 7 million Germans elsewhere were under foreign rule.³³⁰ This renunciation at the beginning of his political career was one of his most striking acts of statecraft. The Austrian problem took fifteen years longer to settle, and when, misjudging its ripeness, he had Dollfuss murdered in July 1934, Mussolini concentrated four army divisions on the Brenner, the only military reply to Hitler’s aggressions by any Great Power before the Munich crisis.³³¹ Go¨ring said in a conversation with Mussolini in January 1937, coming to the Austrian question as the last and most important subject in their political survey: “In Germany, there is the impression that Austria is being deliberately held in reserve by as yet unidentified forces like a sort of hand grenade which, at the opportune moment, would serve to blow up the Italo-German front.”³³² Nevertheless Hitler remained confident that the destinies of Italy and Germany would ultimately converge. He had hailed Mussolini as the inaugurator of revisionism in Europe;³³³ he had perceived that Italy and Germany had the same enemies.³³⁴ In 1938 the renunciation of the South Tyrol brought in its returns, and Hitler fixed the Brenner as the definitive frontier between Italy and Greater Germany.³³⁵ ³²⁶ Mein Kampf, p. 755; tr. Murphy, p. 541. ³²⁷ Ibid. pp. 521, 755, 774 and 388, 519, 554 respectively. ³²⁸ See G. Ward Price, I Know these Dictators (London: Harrap, 1937), p. 79, quoting a remark of Hitler’s in 1935. Cf. Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), i. 159–60. ³²⁹ Mein Kampf, pp. 711, 718–19; tr. Murphy, pp. 512, 517. See above, note 222. ³³⁰ Mein Kampf, pp. 707–11; tr. Murphy, pp. 510–12; Rauschning: Hitler Speaks, p. 47; Heiden: Der Fuehrer, p. 133. ³³¹ Survey for 1934, p. 475. Cf. above, p. 339, note 3. ³³² Conversation between Mussolini and Go¨ring, 23 January 1937 (Ciano: Europa, p.140; Eng. version, p. 89). In the next sentence Go¨ring went on to identify the unidentified forces: “In France, in England and in Russia they were probably of the opinion that the Italo-German agreement is not dangerous so long as there exists the possibility of blowing it up by means of Austria.” ³³³ Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1000. ³³⁴ Ibid. p. 1001. ³³⁵ Hitler’s letter to Mussolini of 11 March 1938 (Survey for 1938, i. 218). In his speech at the banquet in the Palazzo Venezia on 7 May 1938 Hitler defined the inviolable German–Italian frontier more vaguely as the Alps (Wiskemann: Rome–Berlin Axis, pp. 108–9).

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It was only after the surrender of Italy to the Allies in 1943 and the consequent German occupation of half the peninsula that Germany at last annexed the South Tyrol: a perfidy which more than most of Hitler’s perfidies could be defended by the argument rebus sic stantibus.³³⁶ The consistency with which Hitler pursued the Italian alliance was one of the most remarkable features of his political career.³³⁷ Of Italy’s military value as an ally he never entertained any opinion, though his conversation lacked the biting animadversions upon Italian prowess that enlivened Bismarck’s; for indeed Hitler’s conversation lacked wit or pungency of any kind.³³⁸ His opinion of Mussolini is difficult to assess. He would describe Italy as “driven by necessity and led by a genius,”³³⁹ and his attitude seems to have combined a general vindication of the dictatorial status with a degree of patronage for the individual.³⁴⁰ It was a regard for the forerunner who had become the auxiliary and dependant, a regard therefore that was not endangered by jealousy, and which only in the last years turned into disillusionment about one who showed, in a desperate struggle, that he lacked “the broad qualities of a world-wide revolutionary and insurrectionist.”³⁴¹ In June 1934 when Hitler made his first journey beyond the frontiers of Germany and German Austria in order to meet Mussolini at Venice, the Duce treated him with studied discourtesy.³⁴² Mussolini was then at the summit of his power, Hitler a beginner ³³⁶ The South Tyrol was incorporated in the Reich on 5 October 1943 (Wiskemann: Rome–Berlin Axis, p. 313). ³³⁷ Cf. Rauschning, Germany’s Revolution, p. 226. ³³⁸ For Hitler’s opinion of the Italians as soldiers see Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 37, 57. It may be thought that if he had been in the habit of commenting freely upon Italian military qualities, Ciano would have recorded it in his Diary, for use in swaying Mussolini against the German alliance. ³³⁹ Hossbach Memorandum (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 407 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 33; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 20; cf. N.C.A. iii. 299). ³⁴⁰ Cf. Hitler’s speech to his commanders on 22 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 339 (798-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 443; cf. N.C.A. iii. 582). Some time in 1934 Hitler’s opinion of Mussolini was that ‘he lacked breadth and boldness of outlook. He could never get beyond the completely misleading prototype of the Imperium Romanum’ (Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 276). When Ciano went to Berchtesgaden for the first time in October 1936 and gave Hitler a special greeting from the Duce, Hitler expressed gratitude to “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself ” (Ciano, Europa, p. 93; Eng. version, p. 56). Three years later Hitler had acquired this right, and declared himself “personally fortunate to live at a time in which, apart from himself, there was one other statesman who would stand out great and unique in history; that he could be this man’s friend was for him a matter of great personal satisfaction” (memorandum of conversation between Hitler and Ciano at Obersalzberg, 13 August 1939 (N.C.A. viii. 529 (077-TC); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 184). ³⁴¹ The Goebbels Diaries, p. 378. Cf. Wiskemann, Rome–Berlin Axis, pp. 312–14. ³⁴² Survey for 1934, p. 468. The most detailed description of Mussolini’s behaviour on that occasion is probably in Vernon Bartlett, This Is My Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937), pp. 269–72. There was another side to the meeting: “Hitler did not make a good impression on Mussolini; he talked without stopping for an hour, repeating in different words all the arguments from Mein Kampf, and only allowing Mussolini a few minutes in which to reply. Mussolini himself told me, when he got back to Rome, that Hitler was simply a gramophone with seven records, and that when he had played them all he began again at the beginning. He said the same thing to everyone who had accompanied him to the interview and the catchword was repeated with admiration all over Rome by his ‘incense-bearers’” (Pietro Badoglio, Italy in the Second World War, trans. by Muriel Currey (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 2).

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entangled in the difficulties he solved in blood at the end of the same month. Hitler never repaid the humiliation.³⁴³ Once Germany had gained the ascendancy, Mussolini’s authority in Italy was the pledge of Italian loyalty to the alliance.³⁴⁴ But already, before that first meeting between them in 1934, Hitler’s revolution had trodden out paths of destruction and negation beyond the range of Mussolini’s, and at the beginning of that year Hitler had spoken of Fascism with almost hostile contempt, as a half-measure. “The Italians can never be trained to become a warlike people, nor has Fascism ever understood the real meaning of the great upheaval of our era. Of course, we can make temporary alliances with Italy; but ultimately we National Socialists stand alone, as the only ones who know the secret of these gigantic changes, and therefore as those chosen to set their seal on the coming age.”³⁴⁵ In the end what committed Nazi Germany to Fascist Italy was neither their common origins nor their common creed, but Italy’s usefulness as an ally too weak to limit Hitler’s independence, or to require anything but second place. Towards Britain Hitler’s policy was much more ambivalent. Here, perhaps more than in any other question of his foreign policy, it is difficult to strike the balance between his aims and his tactics, his public statements and his private talk, and to allow for the infinite flexibility which made him ready to experiment with every combination, perceiving the weakness of desirable allies and the strength of potential enemies, and weighing a Power one day as a partner and the next as an object of attack. There is much in the conversations of 1932–4 recorded by Rauschning to show that Hitler emphasized and built upon the quiescence, the pacifism, the arrogance, the degeneration of Britain, planning to dismember her Empire and invade her shores.³⁴⁶ But the Nazi leaders, and especially Ribbentrop, who survived the Second World War to be interrogated by their captors, said that they and their leader always hoped for an ultimate accommodation with England.³⁴⁷

³⁴³ The slights subsequently put upon Mussolini by Hitler have the appearance of being not calculated, but due to Hitler’s natural lack of breeding. See, for instance, the account of Mussolini’s visit to Hitler’s headquarters in the Ukraine in August 1941, when Mussolini was treated with neglect and discourtesy, and recouped his injured vanity by asking permission to pilot the Fu¨hrer’s plane, a request which could not be refused (Dino Alfieri, Due dittatori di fronte (Milan: Rizzoli, 1948), pp. 220–1). ³⁴⁴ See Hitler’s speeches to his commanders on 22 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 339 (798PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 443; cf. N.C.A. iii. 582), and 23 November 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 331 (789-PS); N.C.A. iii. 575–6). ³⁴⁵ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 130; cf. p. 276. On the failure of Fascism to extirpate the traditional institutions and ruling classes of Italy see Franz Borkenau, Totalitarian Enemy (London: Faber, 1940), pp. 41, 152–3, 229–30. It made a contrast to which Hitler and Mussolini both frequently referred. ‘On the whole, there are only three great statesmen in the world: Stalin, myself, and Mussolini. Mussolini, the weakest, has not been able to break either the power of the crown or of the church’, the unauthenticated minute of Hitler’s speech to his commanders on 22 August 1939 (N.C.A. vii. 753 (3-L); cf. Mussolini’s own remarks recorded in Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 27 March 1939 and 25 May 1939. ³⁴⁶ Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 34, 71–72, 82, 123–4, 127–9. ³⁴⁷ See De Witt C. Poole, “Light on Nazi Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, October 1946, pp. 132–3, 145–6, 154.

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Hitler appeared never to have found it possible to understand why the elephant, Germany, and the whale, England, should not develop their respective realms in mutual understanding and peace. He came back to that idea in the confusion of the very end.³⁴⁸ Hitler’s rearmament of Germany avoided a great naval programme like that launched by Tirpitz and Bu¨low a generation earlier, and the extreme of AngloGerman rapprochement was marked by the naval agreement of June 1935.³⁴⁹ This showed, said Doenitz later, that Hitler’s policy aimed solely “to secure Germany’s land frontiers against hostile neighbours: his chief potential enemy was Russia, and none of the great naval powers was considered to be among the future opponents of Germany.”³⁵⁰ Go¨ring took a less limiting view. The Nazis esteemed the Naval Agreement which Ribbentrop signed with Great Britain in 1935 a splendid achievement, and Ribbentrop’s reputation came to a high point. Go¨ring said the Nazis would have settled for less than 35 per cent.; the important thing was that the shackles of Versailles had now been broken and the armament situation could be remade.³⁵¹ But when the Italo-Ethiopian War broke out in the autumn of 1935, Hitler was placed in a dilemma by the conflicting interests of his two prospective allies. Speer had the impression that he was hesitating whether to side with the Italians or the English. He considered this a fundamental decision. Even then, he emphasised, as he frequently repeated later on, that he was ready to place the Reich with its Wehrmacht at the disposal of the British Empire as a “guarantee,” if England would give him a “free hand” in the East. He was much preoccupied with this question at the time, especially since he realised the inadequacy of Italy as an ally. He said that it was part of the political testament which Hindenburg had left him . . . that Germany should never again join forces with Italy. In the days of the Abyssinian conflict, therefore, he was distressed by the fact that the situation as he saw it called for Italian co-operation against England.³⁵² But at that juncture the next step in securing Germany’s position was to remilitarize the Rhineland, a blow at Anglo-French interests, and not the conquest of Austria, a blow at Italian. So having waited through the winter without committing himself, Hitler was able in his own time to seize the Rhineland, which incidentally

³⁴⁸ Ibid. p. 146. Cf. Ribbentrop’s letter to Churchill and Eden, undated but after Hitler’s death (N.C.A. vii. 839–47). ³⁴⁹ Survey for 1935, i. 178–93. ³⁵⁰ Doenitz, “Essay on the Conduct of the War at Sea,” from an official but unpublished source. ³⁵¹ De Witt C. Poole, op. cit. p. 133. “Indeed, Ribbentrop looked good at first to the whole Nazi crowd; they had yet to find out, Go¨ring sneered, that he knew France only through champagne and England through whiskey.” ³⁵² Examination of Albert Speer, June–July 1945, from an official but unpublished source dated 28 August 1945; cf. Survey for 1935, pp. 90–2. Speer’s evidence on this point, and at this date, is perhaps thin: Hitler does not seem to have been in the habit of discussing policy in terms of “Hindenburg’s political testament” with his intimates.

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supplied Mussolini with a welcome diversion for his enemies.³⁵³ Afterwards Hitler drew heavily upon Italian gratitude for having “stood by Italy when she fought her heroic struggle for her vital rights in Abyssinia.”³⁵⁴ From then on the policies of Germany and Italy ran parallel; the least that Germany now expected of Italy was benevolent neutrality;³⁵⁵ and military agreement slowly developed out of political association. The last obstacle was Italian opposition to the Anschluss. When in 1938 Mussolini did not again send divisions to the Brenner to protect the independence of Austria, did not stab Germany in the back, Hitler overloaded him with thanks. “I will never forget it, whatever will happen. If he should ever need any help or be in any danger, he can be convinced that I shall stick to him whatever might happen, even if the whole world were against him.”³⁵⁶ It was a promise which, five years afterwards, it suited Hitler dramatically to keep. After 1935 [said Go¨ring in captivity] the decline towards war set in. Ribbentrop made a mess of things in London, and Hitler himself remained unable to understand the English and their way of political thinking. He was tremendously surprised by the English reaction to the Rhineland occupation, which on the whole was severe, even though a few in England concurred in what Germany had done.³⁵⁷ Ribbentrop was appointed Ambassador in London on 11 August 1936, though he did not take up his post until October. Hans Frank³⁵⁸ told Mussolini during a visit to Rome in September that “the despatch of Ribbentrop to London represents the final attempt to make Great Britain understand the needs and position of Germany.”³⁵⁹ For Germany was already looking to Japan for an alternative third partner in the triumvirate of revolutionary and renovating Powers. Hitler himself expounded his policy in a long talk with Ciano at Berchtesgaden on 24 October 1936. In his opinion there is no doubt that England will attack Italy or Germany, or both, if she feels that she can do so with impunity or with ease. . . But—and this is the active part of the policy proposed by the Fuehrer—if England sees the gradual formation of a group of Powers which are willing to make common front with Germany and Italy under the banner of anti-Bolshevism, if England has the ³⁵³ See Survey for 1936, pp. 259–60. For the rumours that Hitler was considering the invasion of Austria as an alternative, see ibid. pp. 261, note, and 402, note 4. ³⁵⁴ Reichstag speech, 30 January 1939 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1576). ³⁵⁵ Blomberg directive of 24 June 1937 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 738 (175-C); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 10). The passage is omitted from N.C.A. (see vi. 1008). ³⁵⁶ Transcript of telephone conversation between Hitler and Prince Philip of Hesse, 11 March 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxi. 369 (2949-PS); N.C.A. v. 642; see also Mendelssohn: Nuremberg Documents, pp. 161–2). For Hitler’s letter to Mussolini of 11 March 1938, see Survey for 1938, i. 217–18; for his telegram to Mussolini of 12 March 1938, see ibid. pp. 211, 218. ³⁵⁷ De Witt C. Poole, loc. cit. ³⁵⁸ At that time Reichsminister without Portfolio. ³⁵⁹ Ciano, Europa, p. 75; Eng. version, p. 44. For similar German optimism about Britain’s attitude at this time, see Ciano’s conversation with the German Ambassador Hassell on 30 July 1936 (ibid. pp. 45–46 and 22 respectively).

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feeling that we have a common organized force [in Europe] in the East, the Far East and in South America, not only will she refrain from fighting against us, but also she will seek means of agreement and common ground with this new political system.³⁶⁰

But if Britain remained aloof from the Anti-Comintern front, which was about to be inaugurated by the German–Japanese Pact of 25 November 1936,³⁶¹ Germany and Italy were rearming much more rapidly than Britain and could check her offensive plans. Ciano concluded that Hitler was still influenced by Ribbentrop’s Anglophil optimism, but that Neurath, who detested Ribbentrop, would use any means to wreck the mission to London.³⁶² When Go¨ring saw Mussolini in Rome in January 1937 he was not hopeful about an agreement with England: Germany was not interested in the characteristic English offers of economic advantages in return for political concessions,³⁶³ and in Britain the fear of Germany was apparently becoming as strong as the fear of Bolshevism.³⁶⁴ In May, Neurath told Mussolini that “English policy is being revealed with increasing clarity—to strike Italy first and then Germany, or even both countries together. British insistence on collective pacts aims at tying the hands of both authoritarian States.”³⁶⁵ In the Blomberg directive of 24 June 1937, which laid the plans for the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, British neutrality was regarded as likely and of extreme importance to Germany.³⁶⁶ But from June onwards Anglo-German relations deteriorated rapidly; the speed of British rearmament was accelerating, and the conflict of policies between Britain and France on the one side and Germany and Italy on the other over non-intervention in Spain was acute. Even the sanguine Ribbentrop now confessed failure. On 21 October he arrived in Rome to urge Italy’s adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact, only four weeks after Germany had rejected a similar suggestion from the Italian side.³⁶⁷ He told Mussolini how he had wished to learn by means of his mission to London how far England would be willing to go towards meeting Germany’s wishes, and towards recognising her vital interests. Today he must frankly admit that his mission failed. Several ³⁶⁰ Ciano, Europa, pp. 95–96; Eng. version, p. 58; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 2. ³⁶¹ Survey for 1936, p. 384. ³⁶² Ciano, Europa, p. 98; Eng. version, pp. 59–60; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 4. For Neurath’s opinion of Ribbentrop’s illusions see also Ciano’s conversation with Neurath in Berlin, 21 October 1936 (Ciano, Europa, p. 88; Eng. version, p. 53). ³⁶³ Ibid. pp. 129 and 82 respectively. ³⁶⁴ Ibid. pp. 137 and 87 respectively. ³⁶⁵ Conversation between Mussolini and Neurath, 3 May 1937 (ibid. pp. 177 and 116 respectively). ³⁶⁶ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 744 (175-C); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 13; cf. N.C.A.,vi. 1010. ³⁶⁷ See Compte rendu de l’entretien de Neurath avec Ciano [25 September 1937] (Documents secrets (Eristov) vol. iii (Espagne), no. 2, p. 21); conversations between Ciano and Ribbentrop’s Chief Counsellor, Raumer, 20 October 1937, and between Ciano and Ribbentrop, 22 October 1937 (Ciano: Europa, pp. 214–15; Eng. version, pp. 139–40; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 14). See fn. 262 above.

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recent British gestures—among them the Conservative Party vote against the cession of Colonies to Germany—have proved that the interests of the two countries are irreconcilable. At one point he had even thought of attracting England into the sphere of the anti-Communist countries. That has been impossible, since in England the Communist peril is neither felt nor fully understood.³⁶⁸

A month later the irreconcilability of German and British interests was confirmed by Halifax’s visit to Hitler, when Halifax behaved with firmness.³⁶⁹ Hitler said that “means of solving international problems would be very difficult to find until either the political parties became reasonable or methods of government were introduced which gave these parties no longer so much influence on the governments”; Halifax replied that Britain did not propose to change her form of government.³⁷⁰ Halifax said that the colonial question could only be considered as part of a general settlement, including other interested countries; Hitler replied that he was “a fanatical enemy of conferences.”³⁷¹ No agreement was reached. But already on 6 November 1937, between Ribbentrop’s visit to Rome and Halifax’s visit to Germany, Italy had signed the protocol by which she acceded to the Anti-Comintern Pact with the status of an original signatory. The Axis and the Anti-Comintern Pact were thus amalgamated; the triumvirate was now formally completed, with Japan in the place of Britain; and at the same moment the AntiComintern Pact became a coalition not only against Russia but also against the Western Powers.³⁷² In June 1937 Blomberg had signed his directive on the combined preparations for war of the Wehrmacht;³⁷³ in November 1937 Hitler had expounded to his Commanders-in-Chief his fundamental ideas on German expansion, which were to be looked upon if he died as his last will and testament.³⁷⁴ ³⁶⁸ Conversation between Mussolini and Ribbentrop, 22 October 1937 (Ciano: Europa, p. 216; Eng. version, pp. 140–1; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 15). ³⁶⁹ D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 55–71; Survey for 1937, i. 337–40. “When Lord Halifax met Hitler at Berchtesgaden shortly before the Runciman mission to Czechoslovakia, he spoke as a churchgoer— according to the interpreter, Paul Schmidt—and Hitler as a racial propagandist. The meeting broke up in a strained atmosphere” (De Witt C. Poole, “Light on Nazi Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, October 1946, p. 140). ³⁷⁰ D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 60. ³⁷¹ Ibid. pp. 61, 63. ³⁷² Survey for 1937, i. 42–46. In the course of their conference in the Kremlin on the night of 23– 24 August 1939 Ribbentrop observed ‘that the Anti-Comintern Pact was basically directed not against the Soviet Union but against the Western democracies’, and Stalin replied that it ‘had in fact frightened principally the City of London and the small British merchants’ (Nazi–Soviet Relations, p. 75; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 406–7). Cf. the opinion of the Irish Foreign Ministry as given in the despatch from the German Minister in Dublin of 17 November 1937 (D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 50– 52). [U.S. Department of State: Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office, ed. R. J. Sontag and J. S. Beddie] (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1948), referred to hereafter as Nazi–Soviet Relations.] ³⁷³ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 732 seqq. (175-C); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 7 seqq.; cf. N.C.A. vi. 1006 seqq. ³⁷⁴ Hossbach Memorandum (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 402 seqq. (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 29 seqq.; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 16 seqq.; cf. N.C.A. iii. 295 seqq.).

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When we asked von Neurath when Hitler definitely decided on war [says Poole] he simply answered, “1937.” We were unsuccessful in obtaining any real enlargement of the answer. The old man, who seemed that day a bit senile but gave this answer very firmly, may have been enunciating a general or intuitive impression. Perhaps he remembered that in 1937 Hitler remarked to a high official in the Ministry of Agriculture (as we had already heard from others) that he would have to have “a little war in the west and a big war in the east.”³⁷⁵

1937 was the watershed of Hitler’s plans for war, and it also marked the point at which he finally assumed British hostility and bracketed Britain with France. This already appeared at the conference of 5 November 1937: “German policy had to reckon with two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the center of Europe was a thorn in the flesh.”³⁷⁶ On 2 January 1938 Ribbentrop addressed a highly confidential memorandum to Hitler in which he raised “the fateful question”—“Will Germany and England eventually be forced to drift into separate camps and will they march against each other one day?”³⁷⁷ Ribbentrop now tended to think so, and proposed therefore the formation of a militarily superior coalition with Italy and Japan. The British plan for a colonial settlement, put forward by Henderson in March 1938, awoke no response in Hitler; he said that he simply wanted the restoration of Germany’s former colonies, that he was in no hurry, and that “one could wait quietly for 4, 6, 8, or 10 years.”³⁷⁸ The British offer came three years too late. It was an irony of the policy of appeasement that it was inaugurated after Hitler had abandoned hope of an alliance with Britain and had transferred her to his list of potential objects of war.³⁷⁹ Hitler’s conquests of 1938 were calculatedly made in the interval of AngloFrench weakness when Anglo-French intervention was improbable. It was after Munich that German plans shifted from a defensive war in the west, resistance against intervention, to an offensive war against the west, the forestalling of ³⁷⁵ De Witt C. Poole, op. cit. pp. 138–9. The Kriegsfa¨lle considered in the Blomberg directive were “war on two fronts with the emphasis in the west (Operation ‘Red’)” and “war on two fronts with the emphasis in the south-east (Operation ‘Green’)” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 736 (175-C); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 9; cf. N.C.A. vi. 1008). ³⁷⁶ Hossbach Memorandum (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 406 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 32; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 19; cf. N.C.A. iii. 298). ³⁷⁷ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxix. 91–92 (075-TC); N.C.A. viii. 513. ³⁷⁸ Conversation between Hitler and Henderson, 3 March 1938 (D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 247; Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, pp. 88–89; see also Wight, “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia.” Hitler, intending eastern continental conquests, used the colonial issue as a diversion; this does not mean that he would not have been prepared to accept overseas colonies in order to increase the diversion. The possibility is seen in his statement at the conference of 5 November 1937 that Britain and France “saw in the establishment of German military bases overseas a threat to their own communications, a safe-guarding of German commerce, and, as a consequence, a strengthening of Germany’s position in Europe” (Hossbach Memorandum: I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 406 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 32; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 19; cf. N.C.A. iii. 298). ³⁷⁹ Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister on 28 May 1937; Eden resigned the Foreign Secretaryship on 20 February 1938.

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future intervention. Munich itself had been an example of intervention and Hitler resented it. He had been balked of a local war against the Czechs; the glory, even for Germans, had gone less to him who had conquered than to Chamberlain who had surrendered; and a few days later Schacht overheard him saying to his SS entourage: “That fellow has spoiled my entry into Prague.”³⁸⁰ Moreover, Chamberlain had returned from Munich not to slacken Britain’s warlike preparations but to intensify them, and Hitler’s anger at the undependability of appeasement was seen in his public attacks on the British Opposition.³⁸¹ Germany’s action in Czechoslovakia [said Raeder in his history of German naval policy] certainly caused a deterioration in English opinion and the Fu¨hrer began to feel English political resistance everywhere, and believed he could see in England the soul of resistance to Germany throughout the world . . . In the six-month period commencing with the winter of 1938 the Fu¨hrer considered the abrogation of the Naval Treaty of 1935. The behaviour of England in the autumn crisis of 1938 had made a strong impression upon him, and he was firmly convinced that England at that time was prevented from seriously considering war only because of the weak position of its aerial preparedness and as a consequence was forced to seek an agreement.³⁸²

When Ribbentrop went to Rome in October 1938 to press for the tripartite military pact, he told Mussolini that Hitler was convinced that they must count on inevitable war with the Western democracies within a few years.³⁸³ Japan was now ³⁸⁰ I.M.T. Nuremberg, xii. 531: Wheeler-Bennett, Munich, pp. 331–2 (inaccurately stating that the remark was made by Hitler to Schacht); Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain [referred to hereafter as Feiling: Chamberlain] (London: Macmillan, 1947), p. 390. Hitler’s resentment about Munich was shown a year later in the first speech to his commanders on 22 August 1939, when, according to the more colourful but less reliable account, he said: ‘The occasion is favourable now as it has never been. I have only one fear and that is that Chamberlain or such another dirty swine [Schweinhund] comes to me with propositions or a change of mind. He will be thrown downstairs. And even if I must personally kick him in the belly before the eyes of all the photographers’ (N.C.A. vii. 754; cf. I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 343 (798-PS); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 446; N.C.A. iii. 585). In his Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939 Hitler imputed his own disappointment to the democracies: “If the cry of ‘Never another Munich’ is raised in the world to-day, this simply confirms the fact that the peaceful solution of the problem appeared to be the most fatal thing that ever happened in the eyes of those warmongers. They are sorry no blood was shed—not their blood, of course: for these agitators are, of course, never to be found where shots are being fired, but only where money is being made! No, it is the blood of many nameless soldiers” (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1617; cf. Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 214, where the full text of the speech is given): another example of the projection discussed above, notes 143–55 and accompanying text. ³⁸¹ “It only needs that in England, instead of Chamberlain, Mr. Duff Cooper or Mr. Eden or Mr. Churchill should come to power, and then we know quite well that it would be the aim of these men immediately to begin a new World War,” Hitler, speech at Saarbru¨cken, 9 October 1938 (Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1535. Cf. ibid. 1532, 1546–9, 1555–9). ³⁸² Erich Raeder, “The Development of German Naval Policy, 1933–1939” (N.C.A. viii. 688, 700, with the writer’s emendations). ³⁸³ Conversation between Mussolini and Ribbentrop, 28 October 1938 (Ciano: Europa, p. 373; Eng. version, p. 242; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 146).

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in full control of China, and “the immediate objective of the Japanese is not Russia but Great Britain.”³⁸⁴ Germany’s military position was excellent; Czechoslovakia was liquidated; with Poland Germany intended to continue a policy of friendship;³⁸⁵ Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Hungary wanted to tighten their links with the Axis; Russia was weak and would remain so many years; “all our energies can be directed against the Western Democracies.”³⁸⁶ On 16 December Weizsa¨cker gave his friend Hassell a gloomy account of the “Ribbentrop or Hitler policy,” which he said was clearly heading for war: They only hesitate whether to turn directly against England, while securing Poland’s neutrality, or first against the East in order to liquidate the German– Polish and the Ukrainian question—and naturally the Memel business, though in Hitler’s opinion this calls for no armed force but merely a registered letter to Kaunas.³⁸⁷

Thus already before 15 March 1939 German policy was becoming pre-occupied with the great question, East or West, which was to be its central theme in the month following the fall of Prague: the choice of initiative that rests with a Power possessing interior lines, the obverse of encirclement. The annexation of Bohemia and Moravia was a clearing-up operation, completing the work of Munich, and leaving Hitler poised above Europe, able to turn this way or that at will.³⁸⁸ Some in Germany saw that this last stroke differed in kind from its predecessors and would rally foreign opinion against the Reich; Weizsa¨cker said to Hassell on 28 March: “It is clear that with the Czech affair the Niedergang has begun.”³⁸⁹ But, as always, the Germans of this kind were scattered and impotent. On his triumphant entry into the Hradcany Hitler turned to Dietrich, the Reich Press Chief, and asked: “Have you news of military movements in France, in the Soviet Union or of a mobilisation of the English fleet?” The answer was no. Hitler turned exultantly to his entourage and said: “I knew it! In a ³⁸⁴ Ciano, Europa, p. 374; Eng. version, p. 243. Ribbentrop must have known this was false: the Japanese War Office at this stage conceived of the tripartite alliance as directed primarily against Russia (Records of the Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (in mimeograph), pp. 33718–19, and pp. 34116–19). ³⁸⁵ Four days earlier in a conversation with Lipski at Berchtesgaden Ribbentrop had opened the Polish question by proposing a general settlement of the issues between Poland and Germany, including the incorporation of Danzig in the Reich (see Wight, “Eastern Europe,” notes 356–7 and accompanying text). ³⁸⁶ Ciano, Europa, p. 375; Eng. version p. 244; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 148. ³⁸⁷ Ulrich von Hassell, Vom andern Deutschland (Zu¨rich: Atlantis, 1946), p. 37. ³⁸⁸ “Then followed the establishment of the Protectorate and therewith the basis for the conquest of Poland was laid, but I was not clear at that time whether I should advance first against the east and then against the west or vice versa,” Hitler’s speech to his commanders, 23 November 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 329 (789-PS); Documents for 1939–46, i. 529; cf. N.C.A. iii. 573). ³⁸⁹ Hassell, op. cit. p. 55. On 22 March Hassell wrote in his diary: “This is the first case of blatant hybris of the overstepping of all bounds and all decency” (ibid. p. 52).

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fortnight nobody will speak of it any more.”³⁹⁰ Formal protests he had anticipated and meant to ignore. A day or two later an official of the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin declared to a Frenchman: “We have before us so many open doors, so many possibilities, that we no longer know which way to turn or what direction to take.”³⁹¹

³⁹⁰ Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, p. 146. ³⁹¹ Despatch from Coulondre, 19 March 1939 (Livre jaune français, no. 80).

11 Eastern Europe in The World in March 1939 Eastern Europe in March 1939 was a belt of small countries lying between Germany and Italy on the one side and Russia on the other: a buffer zone along Germany’s eastern flank, as Switzerland and the Low Countries and Scandinavia were a buffer zone along her west and north.∗ From the Barents Sea in the north to the Aegean Sea in the south there straggled a line of states, which varied in size,¹ but were all small and weak compared with the Great Powers on the west and the east.² At the beginning of March 1939 they numbered fourteen.³ A year earlier there had been fifteen, but Austria had disappeared under pressure from the West, and under the same pressure, on 15 March 1939, Czechoslovakia dissolved, leaving in its place the doubtfully sovereign successor state of Slovakia. This illustrated the ambiguity of a buffer zone, which may be created as a barrier or containing wall, but is liable to be transformed, by a political subsidence, from a watershed of power into an extent of low-lying flats, open to inundation by the floods from either side. This belt of small states had come into existence through the rolling back of previous imperial floods. It was a new aspect of Eastern Europe. In 1914 there had been no such belt; more than half these states had not existed; to the north of the ∗ Wight’s chapter “Eastern Europe” was published in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 206–93.

¹ See Martin Wight, “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia”, in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), ab initio. [Ed. Reprinted as chapter 13 in the present volume.] ² Italy had a population of 44 millions; Germany had 69 millions before the Anschluss, 76 millions after it, 80 millions after the annexation of the Sudetenland; the U.S.S.R. had 166 millions. The largest of the states of Eastern Europe was Poland, with about 33 millions; next came Rumania with 18 millions, Czechoslovakia before her partition in 1938–9 with 15 millions, and Yugoslavia with nearly the same. But the numerical balance of nationalities was much more adverse to the peoples of Eastern Europe in their relation to the Great Powers than the numerical balance of the populations of their states. Most of the Eastern European states were not nationally homogeneous, and conversely there were still German minorities outside Germany. There were only about 22 million Poles, 13 million Rumanians, 11 million Yugoslavs (Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes combined), 10 million Czechoslovaks, and 10 million Hungarians. This enumeration omits the largest nationality of Eastern Europe, the 36 million Ukrainians, of whom the great majority were incorporated in the U.S.S.R. ³ From north to south: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Free City of Danzig, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey (of which only a fraction lay in Europe), Greece.

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0012

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Carpathians the great empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia marched together, and it was only in the lower Danube valley and the Balkans that there was a knot of half a dozen small countries forming a buffer zone between Russia and Austria-Hungary on the north and the shrinking Ottoman Empire on the south.⁴ A hundred years earlier, at the Peace Settlement of 1815, these too had not existed, and the whole of Eastern Europe from the Gulf of Finland to the island of Crete had been partitioned between Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Turkey.⁵ Of these four military empires, only the Austrian and the Ottoman had their historic capitals and centres of gravity within Eastern Europe. For Prussia and Russia, Eastern Europe was a frontier region offering advantages for expansion.⁶ The historical retrospect must be carried back half a century before 1815 to catch sight of a purely Eastern European state to the north of the Carpathians, the old kingdom of Poland, still unsubmerged by the advancing tide of the Great Powers. And behind the PrussoRussian partition of Poland (1772–95) lay the long and brilliant history in which Poland herself had once been a Great Power, had crushed the Ordensstaat of the Teutonic Knights, had stretched in union with Lithuania from the Baltic to the Black Sea, had invaded Russia and held Moscow, and had at last surrendered the mastery of the Baltic to a Sweden that was also a Great Power.⁷ All this belt of states, then, had come into existence since 1815, and half of them as late as 1918. The First World War, with its prologue in the Balkan Wars of 1912– 13, had caused a political rearrangement of Europe on a scale more extensive than any before. Four empires, the Ottoman, the Romanov, the Habsburg, the Hohenzollern, had collapsed. Seven new sovereign states appeared in Eastern Europe.

⁴ The small states of Eastern Europe in 1914 were: Rumania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Albania, Turkey, Greece. ⁵ There were three exceptions: the republic of Cracow, a vestige of Poland, neutralized from 1815 till 1846 in the interstice between Russia, Austria, and Prussia; the principality of Montenegro (see note 16 below); and the Ionian Islands, conquered from the French by the British in 1809, and a British protectorate from 1815 to 1864. But the history of Eastern Europe had not been as favourable as that of Western Europe to the survival of Lilliputian states on the scale of Cracow, Montenegro, and the Free City of Danzig. Cf. Martin Wight, “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia,” ibid. ⁶ Its attraction was illustrated by two almost simultaneous developments in Prussian and Russian history. In 1701 the Elector Frederick of Brandenburg, when he at last attained royalty, took his kingly title from his duchy of Prussia, because it lay beyond the confines of the Empire, and staged his coronation in the ducal capital of Ko¨nigsberg. In 1703 the Tsar Peter the Great of Russia founded the city of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland as a new capital to replace Moscow; and the capital was not restored to Moscow until 1918. ⁷ Poland was a Great Power from her dynastic union with Lithuania under Wladislaw II Jagellon in 1386, and her consequent defeat of the Teutonic Order at the battle of Tannenberg in 1410, down to her defeat by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Swedo-Polish War of 1617–29, which ended with the Truce of Altmark, and was the Baltic prelude to Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War. Sweden was a Great Power from this defeat of Poland, and her consequent intervention in the Thirty Years War, down to her own defeat by Russia in the Great Northern War of 1699–1721. Cf. Martin Wight, “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia”, ibid.

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Finland,⁸ Estonia,⁹ and Latvia¹⁰ had never before been independent states. Albania had nominally become an independent state in 1912 through the First Balkan War, but in 1918 her independence was still to be established and her frontiers still to be defined.¹¹ Lithuania,¹² Poland,¹³ and Czechoslovakia¹⁴ were reattaining

⁸ The pagan barbarian Finns were conquered by the Swedes in 1154. Finland remained part of the kingdom of Sweden until 1809, when it was ceded to Russia under the Treaty of Frederikshamn. It was an autonomous grand duchy connected with Russia until 1917 when it declared itself an independent republic; formal recognition of its independence was granted by Soviet Russia in January 1918. A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, ed. H. W. V. Temperley (London: Oxford University Press for British Institute of International Affairs, 1920–4), hereafter H.P.C. vi. 287). ⁹ The pagan barbarians of Estonia were conquered by the Danes from 1219 onwards. The province was sold by Denmark to the Teutonic Order in 1346. It was annexed by Sweden from the Teutonic Order in 1561 and ceded by Sweden to Russia under the Treaty of Nystadt in 1721. It declared itself an independent republic in 1917; its independence was recognized by Soviet Russia in the Treaty of Dorpat of 1920 (H.P.C. vi. 295; Survey of International Affairs, 1920–3, p. 240). [Ed. Subsequent references to this annual survey published by Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs are indicated simply by Survey and the year covered.] ¹⁰ Latvia approximately covered the former provinces of Livonia and Courland, which were conquered from their pagan barbarian inhabitants by the Teutonic Order from 1158 onwards, and were ceded to Poland in I561. Livonia was ceded by Poland to Sweden under the Treaty of Altmark in 1629, and by Sweden to Russia under the Treaty of Nystadt in 1721, an indicator of the transference of Baltic ascendancy between these three Powers. Courland was a duchy under Polish suzerainty from 1561 to 1795, when Russia annexed it in the Third Partition of Poland. Latvia declared itself an independent republic in 1918; its independence was recognized by Soviet Russia in the Treaty of Riga of 1920 (ibid.). ¹¹ From the seventh to the fourteenth centuries Albania was variously under the rule of the Bulgarian, Byzantine, and Serbian Empires, and of Latin princes. There was a period of disunited native rule from 1359 to 1392, when Albania was conquered by the Turks. Albania declared its independence of Turkey in 1912 during the First Balkan War; see below, notes 170–8 and accompanying text. ¹² Lithuania was the last heathen Power in Europe before the twentieth century. It was converted to Christianity in 1386 when its grand duke became king of Poland, and remained united with Poland until it was annexed by Russia in the partitions of Poland. It negotiated its independence with Germany, as occupying Power, in 1917–18; its independence was recognized by Soviet Russia in the Treaty of Moscow, 1920 (H.P.C. vi. 302–5; Survey for 1920–3, p. 251). ¹³ Poland was one of the members of Western Christendom from the tenth century, first as a duchy and from 1300 as a kingdom. It was successively partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1772, 1793, and 1795. With the exceptions of the Napoleonic grand duchy of Warsaw (1807–14), the nominally autonomous “Congress” kingdom of Poland under the Tsar (1815–31), and the republic of Cracow (1815–46), there was no Polish state from 1795 till the declaration of an independent Polish republic in 1918. The independence of Poland was recognized by Soviet Russia in the Treaty of Riga of 1921 (H.P.C. vi. 322). ¹⁴ Bohemia, with its dependencies of Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia, was a member of Western Christendom from the ninth century, acknowledged the suzerainty of the Empire from 950, finally became a kingdom in 1198, and developed into one of the seven original electorates of the Empire. In 1526, by the election of a Habsburg as Bohemian king, it was finally united dynastically with Austria. After the Bohemian revolt of 1618 had been crushed at the battle of the White Mountain in 1620, Bohemia was deprived of its independence as an elective monarchy in 1621 and merged for 300 years into the hereditary Habsburg dominions. Slovakia had been included ln the Bohemian–Moravian state in the ninth century, but at the end of that century was conquered by the Magyars and remained for 900 years incorporated in Hungary. Czechoslovak union and independence were established simultaneously in 1918 (ibid. iv. 105–6, 112–14, 261–5, 270).

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independent statehood after a long disappearance. Rumania,¹⁵ Yugoslavia,¹⁶ and Greece¹⁷ were expanding towards the fulfilment of a national self-determination that was only a century old. Austria and Hungary were by the same process being forcibly reduced from imperial into national states, and Hungary was simultaneously recovering an independent national existence;¹⁸ Bulgaria was being shorn

¹⁵ The Rumanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia grew up on the frontier of Eastern Christendom in the thirteenth century. Wallachia was made tributary to the Turks in 1391, Moldavia in 1513; and they remained the only parts of Eastern Christendom (Russia apart) which were not formally annexed to the Ottoman Empire. By the Treaty of Paris in 1856 they were placed under the guarantee of the Great Powers, and Turkish suzerainty became only nominal. In 1859 they united de facto, in 1862 de jure, to form the principality of Rumania. Its independence was recognized by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, and in 1881 it became a kingdom. ¹⁶ The duchy of Croatia grew up on the Adriatic frontier of Western Christendom in the ninth century, became a kingdom in 924, and was united dynastically with Hungary in 1102, remaining so for 800 years. Serbian principalities grew up on the corresponding frontier of Eastern Christendom from the ninth century; a kingdom of Serbia uniting them was established in 1217; it became the dominant Power of Eastern Christendom under Stephen Dushan (1331–55) who assumed the imperial title in 1346. In 1389 Serbia was conquered by the Turks at the battle of Kosovo; it remained tributary till 1459 when it was reduced to a pashalik. The prince-bishopric of Montenegro alone maintained a desperate and uncertain independence from the Turks, in tenuous continuity with the Old Serb kingdom of Zeta. The Serbian War of Independence in 1804–13 brought the grant of a limited autonomy by the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812. This autonomy was gradually enlarged until the independence of Serbia was recognized by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878; in 1882 it became a kingdom, and Montenegro followed suit in 1910. In 1918 Serbia and Croatia united to form the Serb–Croat–Slovene kingdom, and were joined by Montenegro (H.P.C. iv. 112–14, 196–204). ¹⁷ Greek national consciousness was based on the tradition of the Byzantine Empire, the original and presiding Power of Eastern Christendom, which was destroyed by the Western Crusaders in 1204, and after an imperfect restoration was finally conquered by the Turks in 1453 (see William Miller in Byzantium, ed. Norman H. Baynes and H. St. L. B. Moss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), pp. 326–9). The Greek War of Independence of 1821–9 led to the establishment of an independent Greek kingdom by the Treaty of London of 1832—the earliest of the Ottoman Empire’s successor states. ¹⁸ Hungary became a member of Western Christendom at the end of the tenth century, and a kingdom in 1001. In the twelfth century it was engaged in struggle with the Byzantine Power in the south, and in the fifteenth century with its successor the Turkish Power. In 1526 Hungary was conquered by the Turks at the battle of Mohács. It was consequently partitioned into three: three-quarters of Hungary was occupied and annexed by the Turks; Transylvania became a semi-independent principality under Turkish suzerainty; the nominal Hungarian crown, together with the north-western fringe of Hungary, for which tribute was paid to the Turks, passed in 1526–7 to the Habsburgs. In the war of 1683–99 which ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz, Austria reconquered Hungary and imposed suzerainty on Transylvania. In 1687 Hungary was changed from an elective into a hereditary monarchy; by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723 it was declared an integral part of the Habsburg dominions; in 1849 it was administratively amalgamated with the Austrian Empire. By the Ausgleich of 1867 the Austrian Empire was transformed into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary: Hungary became a sovereign state equal with the Austrian half of the monarchy, united thereto by the dynasty and by the common services for foreign policy, finance, and war, but otherwise independent; home rule was granted by Hungary to Croatia, but Transylvania was reduced to an integral part of Hungary. The abdication of the last Habsburg in November 1918 made Hungary for the first time since 1526 a fully independent state (H.P.C. iv. 118–19, 487–8).

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of territory as the price of defeat.¹⁹ The final destruction of the Ottoman Empire in Europe had been accomplished in the two Balkan Wars of 1912–13; it was now confirmed, at the same time as the remainder of the Ottoman Empire dissolved in Western Asia, by the creation of a national Turkey.²⁰ The most ephemeral among these national revenants or new arrivals was the Ukraine, which appeared as an independent state from the ruins of the Russian Empire, existed for less than a year under the shadow of Germany’s eastern conquests, and was then swallowed up again in the Russian Power as a member of the Soviet Union—tracing a path which was to be followed or approached within a generation by most of the other successor states of Eastern Europe.²¹

¹⁹ Bulgaria was a member of Eastern Christendom from the ninth century, and at two periods, from 893 to 972, and again from 1186 to 1258, it became the dominant Power of Eastern Christendom. It was conquered by the Turks in 1393. As a result of the revolutionary movement which culminated in the outbreak of 1875 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 established Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia as two autonomous provinces tributary to the Turks. In 1885 the two provinces established a united principality of Bulgaria. In 1908 Bulgaria proclaimed its complete independence as a kingdom. ²⁰ The European frontier, i.e. Eastern Thrace up to the Maritsa, which was attained by Turkey in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 (H.P.C. vi. 108–9), was virtually the same as that she won for herself from Bulgaria in the Third Balkan War and confirmed by the Treaty of Constantinople of 29 September 1913 (British and Foreign State Papers, cvii. 706–21). ²¹ Ukrainian national consciousness in its extreme form is based on the memory of the principality of Kiev, which was converted to Orthodoxy at the end of the tenth century and became the original Power of Russian Christendom. In 1240 it was conquered by the Mongols. The principality of Galicia or Red Russia remained the only autonomous representative of the future Ukraine, until it was annexed by Poland in 1349. Lithuania extended its frontiers to the mouth of the Dnieper in 1363; in 1386 it united with Poland, and thus the greater part of the Ukraine was incorporated in the Polish kingdom. In the sixteenth century Cossack communities grew up on the Dnieper, becoming the nucleus of the new Ukrainian nation. They developed into a semi-independent Power, and transferred their allegiance from Catholic Poland to the Orthodox Moscow Tsar by the Pereyaslavl Agreement of 1653. By the Treaty of Andrusovo of 1667 Poland and Russia partitioned the Ukraine along the Dnieper line. After Pugachev’s rebellion of 1773–4, the Russian Government deprived the Cossacks of their liberties in 1775, and in 1781 Little Russia, i.e. left-bank Ukraine or the Ukraine east of the Dnieper, was absorbed administratively into the Russian Empire. In 1793 Russia acquired right-bank Ukraine by the Second Partition of Poland. In November 1917 the Ukraine declared its independence; this was recognized by the Central Powers on 1 February 1918, and on 8 February by the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Ukraine became their economic protectorate. In the anarchy following the German evacuation in 1919 a Ukrainian Soviet Republic was consolidated, which became in 1923 the second largest and most important constituent of the Soviet Union. “It is hardly possible then to discuss the question of a distinctive ‘Ukrainian’ nationality and its origins, before a peculiar combination of historical factors operating between 1590 and 1700 produced a community on the borderland of the Polish realm which became united by common economic and political circumstances, the vast majority of whose members confessed the Orthodox Greek faith, and which made use of a form of Russian speech—itself continuously subject to modification and adaptation in accord with the circumstances of day-to-day social and economic life” (W. E. D. Allen, The Ukraine: a History (Cambridge: University Press, 1940), p. 65).

E ASTERN EUROPE IN THE WORLD IN MARCH 1939 AALAND Oslo

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Figure 11.1 Eastern Europe in March 1939.

Istanbul

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(a) National Conflicts The territorial revolutions of Europe before 1918 normally diminished the numbers of states and increased their size by annexations or mergers, and the most notable triumphs of the national principle, the union of Italy by Piedmont and of Germany by Prussia, also had this effect. There was no precedent for the creation of half a dozen new small states, suddenly, simultaneously, and ex nihilo. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 created two new sovereign states by recognizing the Swiss Confederation’s independence from the Empire and the United Provinces’ independence from Spain, but this was the formal recognition of long-established facts. The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 also created two new sovereign states, Serbia and Rumania, laying as well the foundations of a third in Bulgaria, and this was the most important stage in the fragmentation of Eastern Europe before its climax in 1918; but Serbia and Rumania were already thriving autonomous principalities before their independence was recognized, unlike any of the new states of 1918 with the doubtful exception of Finland. The nearest analogy to the multiplication of states in 1918 was the attainment of legal independence by the states of Germany when the Holy Roman Empire was abolished in 1806.²² But this gave juridical sanction to an independence which they had already possessed in fact since the Westphalian settlement of 1648; moreover, it was part of a process that was already driving them into a new and stricter dependence upon France, through the creation and extension of the Confederation of the Rhine. Cut adrift from a conservative Great Power, the small states were immediately swept under the harsher protection of a revolutionary Great Power. In Eastern Europe in the twentieth century the same process was at work, but was spread over thirty years. For here the ground had been more completely cleared than in Western Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The successor states of Eastern Europe owed their existence to a unique circumstance, the destruction or disablement of all the adjacent Great Powers, and they remained independent only until Germany and Russia resumed their ineluctable predominance. If this was the condition for the establishment of the successor states, the cause lay in the extreme doctrine of nationality, that a common language meant a single nation, and that every nation had the right to form a single independent state. The rearrangement of Eastern Europe in 1918 was the most extensive triumph of national self-determination, and was to provide the classic example of its

²² Sixteen German states were original members of the Confederation of the Rhine; twenty-six originally outside it; see Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution Française, vii. 52–3. By the Act of the Confederation of the Rhine on 17 July 1806 the sixteen signatories seceded from the Empire; Napoleon then declared that he no longer recognized its existence, and on 6 August Francis II abdicated the imperial dignity. The Confederation of the Rhine was eventually joined by every German state except Austria, Prussia, Hesse-Cassel, and Brunswick (James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, new edition, revised (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 409, note 1).

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limitations. When the Western European creed of linguistic nationalism was carried into Eastern Europe, it came to a region whose national groupings had not undergone the historical development and discipline which in the west had produced the nationalist creed itself. Stable nationality had been the product of slow growth and favourable conditions. Every nation had a fringe, however small, of partially assimilated elements which in other circumstances might adhere to other nations; and conversely, it had proved possible in Western Europe, in the histories of Switzerland and Belgium, for a purely political nationality to be created out of linguistically heterogeneous elements. But in other historical conditions, linguistic nationalism offered the possibility of breaking up nations into their component elements, and either keeping them separate or putting them together again in different combinations. The history of Eastern Europe had been unfavourable to the development of stable nationality for the very reason that the history of Western Europe had been favourable. Western Europe, in the farthest extremities of the European peninsula, was sheltered and insulated by Eastern Europe, whose history was punctuated by the flow of invasions from the east and their reflux from the west. For Eastern Europe lies across the neck of the European peninsula between the Baltic and the Black Sea; the Baltic coasts are a section of the great plain that stretches from the Rhine delta, scarcely interrupted by the Urals, to Siberia; and the Danubian basin, though partially sheltered by the Carpathians, is the terminus of the steppes that stretch through Central Asia and the Zungarian Gate to Mongolia. Along these avenues came the successive migrations that subverted and replenished the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Europe. Within the lifetime of Christendom Western Europe had been sheltered from the onslaughts of the Mongols and the Turks, because Eastern Europe had taken the brunt of them;²³ and the Tatar invasion governed the historical development of Russia as the Turkish invasion governed the historical development of the Balkans and the Danubian basin. Within the same span Eastern Europe had undergone continuous pressure from the stronger societies of the west, invasions that were slower but more deeply penetrating than the nomadic irruptions from Asia. Polish eastward expansion had conditioned the history of Lithuanians, White Russians, and Ukrainians; German eastward expansion had conditioned the history of the Poles themselves, the Baltic peoples, Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Yugoslavs, and Rumanians; Scandinavian eastward expansion had conditioned the history of the Finns, the Baltic peoples, and of the earliest Russian state. Eastern Europe was divided into two regions by the Carpathians: to the north the Baltic basin, to the south the Danubian basin with its Balkan appendage. Each had its subdivisions, but there was the general difference between them that ²³ “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the civilization of Western Europe is a by-product of the Byzantine Empire’s will to survive” (Norman Baynes, in Byzantium, ed. Baynes and Moss, p. xxxi).

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south of the Carpathians there were natural frontiers that might have provided the moulds for national communities, in the Baltic region there was none. The Powers that had grown up on this unvaried plain—the Ordensstaat of the Teutonic Knights, Lithuania, Poland, the Swedish Empire, Prussia—had fluctuated wildly in extent, having no frontiers save where their colonists could be planted or where their armies stood. The oscillation of the Polish–Soviet War of 1920, which first took Pilsudski’s armies into Kiev, then brought the Red Army antistrophically to the gates of Warsaw, and finally carried the returning Polish forces to rest along the Riga Line which became the Polish eastern frontier, was only the most recent illustration in 1939 of this principle,²⁴ providing the most conspicuous contradiction of the nationalistic principle that was the basis of the new settlement. South of the Carpathians there were natural frontiers and geographical units. Bohemia was compact within its quadrangle of mountains, though Moravia lay open to the south-east through Lower Austria. Great Hungary with its back against the curve of the Carpathians and facing south across the Save was a geographical unit comparable to France with its back to the Atlantic and its face towards the Rhine.²⁵ Transylvania was made by nature for a lovelier Switzerland, and had in the seventeenth century played such a role; the Rumanian principalities lay like another Low Countries at the mouths of the Danube; the Mediterranean peninsula of Greece was a second Italy. But none of these corresponded with a national bloc. Bohemia and Moravia contained a population two-thirds Czech, a third German; of Great Hungary only half the population had been Magyar; Transylvania contained half Rumanians, a third Magyars, and the rest Germans; the Rumanian principalities failed to include one-third of the Rumanian nation.²⁶ Not only were there minorities. There were also sub-nationalities, potential nations whose inclusion in larger national states in 1919 or whose erection into separate states were equally the source of political difficulties. Such were the Austrians in relation to the Germans. Such were the Slovaks in relation to the Czechs.²⁷ Such, according to many Poles, were the Lithuanians in relation to the Poles.²⁸ The

²⁴ H.P.C. vi. 274–8, 318–22. The great historical example of this Polish–Russian dialectic was the Hundred Years War that ruined the old Polish kingdom. It carried Ivan the Terrible to the shores of the Baltic in the Livonian War of 1558–83; it then brought Poland back in an attempt to conquer Russia during the Muscovite Time of Troubles (1603–13) which culminated in the Polish occupation of Moscow in 1610–12; it finally took Russia advancing westwards again in her first annexation of Polish territory under the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667, which was the precursor of the Polish partitions. ²⁵ “If Hungary had been ruled by national Kings in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, she might well have solved her national problem as completely as France did” C. A. Macartney, Hungary and her Successors . . . 1919–1937 (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1937), p. 35; cf. p. 487). ²⁶ In 1914 the population of Rumania was 7 millions, and there were nearly 3½ million Rumanians in Hungary. ²⁷ H.P.C. iv. 245–8, 270; Macartney, Hungary, pp. 94–110. ²⁸ H.P.C. vi. 278–9; The Cambridge History of Poland, ed. W. F. Reddaway, J. H. Penson, O.Halecki, R. Dyboski, vol. ii (Cambridge: University Press, 1941), pp. 522–4; Walter Kolarz, Myths and Realities in Eastern Europe (London: Drummond, 1946), pp. 108–10. Lithuanian was a totally different language

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South Slavs, who were distributed in a belt south of the Danube from the Black Sea coast to the Julian Alps, were a spectrum of intermerging sub-nationalities: Bulgarians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes. The two states that became established after 1919, Bulgaria and a Serbia enlarged to include the remainder of the South Slavs, showed the chief lines of linguistic division. But Macedonia, where the South Slavs intermingled with the non-Slav Greeks and Albanians, remained a spiritual terra nullius, a land of contention between Yugoslavia and Greece, who divided the greater part of it between them, Bulgaria, who had historic claims to it, and Albania, because a third of the Albanian nation lived there:²⁹ a province which other Powers had a continual interest in inflating into an independent state. The possibility of regrouping the South Slavs was the main origin of the continual projects for a Balkan federation. Yet in Macedonia, more clearly than anywhere in the Balkans, nationalist categories were irrelevant to the life of the people. ‘Macedonian peasants describe themselves as Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians or Serbs according to political circumstances, and no one knows what the truth is, not even the peasants themselves.’³⁰ The largest example of a sub-nationality was afforded by the Ukrainians or Ruthenes in relation to the Great Russians. North of the Carpathians the Ukraine was a greater and more dangerous political counterpart to Macedonia. It was a submerged nation, politically visible in the second largest constituent republic of the U.S.S.R., but running far out westwards beneath the frontiers of the Versailles states, comprising two-thirds of Poland east of the Curzon Line and a sixth of Poland’s total population, lapping over the Carpathian watershed towards the Danube in the northern fringe of Slovakia itself and in Carpatho-Ruthenia, which was the caudal appendage of Czechoslovakia, and interpenetrating with the Rumanian provinces of Bukovina and Bessarabia.³¹ Yet there were almost as many gradations of Ukrainian national consciousness as of South Slav. Eastern Galicia was the centre of the most Westernized and anti-Russian Ukrainian national movement, which had formerly been encouraged by Austria-Hungary to embarrass Russia. The Ukrainian peasants of Volhynia and Rumania were pro-Russian. “Even so, there remained in the Polish–Russian borderlands numbers of peasants from Polish, but the Polish case for federating or incorporating Lithuania with Poland was based on the tradition of the Polish–Lithuanian Union preceding the partitions of Poland. ²⁹ The population of Albania was just under one million. The Albanian minority in Yugoslav Macedonia just across the frontier was nearly half a million. ³⁰ Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941 (Cambridge: University Press, 1945), p. 311. Cf. H. N. Brailsford, Macedonia (London: Methuen, 1906), pp. 99–103, and Elizabeth Barker, Macedonia: Its Place in Balkan Power Politics (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1950), pp. 9–12. ³¹ At the beginning of 1939 the distribution of Ukrainians in Europe was approximately as follows: in the U.S.S.R. (primarily in the Ukrainian S.S.R.), 31 millions; in Poland, 5 millions; in Rumania, half a million; in Czechoslovakia, half a million; in Hungary (as a result of the first partition of Czechoslovakia), 38,000. See Bulletin of International News, 14 January 1939, p. 5, with correction on p. 13, and C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1934), appendix iii.

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without clearly defined national character, who described themselves as ‘people from here’” (tutejszi).³² Those of Carpatho-Ruthenia were non-national and partly Magyarized, as unconcerned whether the Ruthenes were to be identified with Ukrainians as the East Galician nationalists were indignant if Ukrainians were identified with Great Russians.³³ The Ruthenians, along with the White Russians,³⁴ were the only Eastern European nationalities at the disposal of the Paris Peace Conference which were regarded as so backward politically that they could not be erected into states but must be placed under tutelage. Therefore Carpatho-Ruthenia was given to Czechoslovakia,³⁵ and the Great Powers recognized Poland’s seizure of East Galicia and her acquisitions at the expense of Soviet Russia.³⁶ Poland dishonoured her obligation to grant autonomy to East Galicia; Czechoslovakia with some reason postponed the fulfilment of hers towards Carpatho-Ruthenia. The eastward expansion of Western Christendom from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries had created in Eastern Europe a social stratification along lines of linguistic nationality. There was a widespread German bourgeoisie, and in parts a Polish or Magyar aristocracy, which were alien in speech and culture from the peasantry. There were in consequence many great cities different in nationality from the countrysides in which they stood. Danzig was a German port for a Polish hinterland, Memel a German port for a Lithuanian and White Russian hinterland. Vilna was disputed between Lithuania and Poland because Lithuanians predominated in the surrounding province and Poles in the city itself; but the argument really lay between two non-Western and therefore in Western eyes inferior peoples, for Lithuanians and Poles together were outnumbered in the city by Jews, and in the region round by White Russians.³⁷ Lwów, once Lemberg, the capital of East Galicia, gave Poland her best claim to that province, since it was a Polish island in a Ukrainian sea. In the industrial region of Upper Silesia, on the other hand, the towns were largely German, the countryside largely Polish. Trieste was an Italian port with a Slovenian hinterland, Fiume an Italian port with a

³² H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, pp. 321–2. ³³ “Ruthenus” was a medieval Latinization of the Russian name. It was officially adopted for the Ukrainians of Austria and Hungary by the Austrian Constitution of 1849 (Allen, Ukraine, p. 248). On the development of the Ruthene question see Macartney, Hungary, pp. 206–11. ³⁴ The White Russians of Eastern Europe, like the Ukrainians, were potentially a terra irredenta of a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of 1939 there were approximately 5½ million White Russians in the White Russian S.S.R; 1½ million in Poland; 36,000 in Latvia; 4,000 in Lithuania. ³⁵ H.P.C. iv. 272–3. ³⁶ Ibid., vi. 283, note. ³⁷ See Survey for 1920–3, p. 255, note 2, and The Baltic States, prepared by the Information Department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1938), p. 89, note 3. The Lithuanian claim to Vilna rested principally on historical grounds, however, since Vilna had been the capital of Lithuania down to the Union of Lublin in 1569.

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Croatian hinterland—the Danzig and Memel of the Adriatic.³⁸ The same principle was illustrated by the great Danubian metropolis of Vienna itself, which had never produced a native Austrian bourgeoisie, and in the last half century of the Habsburg Monarchy had instead acquired one predominantly composed of Jews.³⁹ These towns were incapable of being fitted into a framework of national states without social mutilation: like the Hellenistic cities, their only happy political setting was that of an oecumenical empire. Since they could be claimed on national grounds with equal plausibility or lack of it by two contestants, they were among the most acute causes of international conflict. And Vienna, which pre-eminently among East European cities had had its international character guaranteed for many centuries as a great imperial capital, was the source of a form of social conflict more corroding and insidious than international war, the anti-Semitism that Hitler had learned from Scho¨nerer and Lueger and taken to Berlin to become the central feature in the policy of the German Government. The same mingling of peoples that could combine provinces of one nationality with capitals of another produced also national leaders of different origin from the nations they championed. The social anomaly of great men who are in origin peripheral to the society they dominate, as Napoleon was a Corsican and Stalin a Georgian, had many examples in Eastern Europe. Kemal Atatu¨rk was of Albanian and Macedonian descent,⁴⁰ Pilsudski of Lithuanian. The Hungarian Prime Minister Go¨mbo¨s “was of German origin, and caused some amusement by his unsuccessful attempts to prove a Hungarian noble pedigree.”⁴¹ His successor Imrédy, who made anti-Semitism a legislative programme in Hungary, was compelled to resign in February 1939 when confronted with the evidence that he derived from a Jewish great-grandfather.⁴² The Slovak leader Tuka, for many years the most influential figure of the Slovak People’s Party after its founder Hlinka, was a renegade Hungarian who had learned Slovak when approaching middle age.⁴³ The romantic Codreanu, founder of the Iron Guard and extoller of Rumanian nationalism, was of Ukrainian and German descent with the real name of

³⁸ Smyrna at the end of the First World War just failed by the numerical test to repeat this pattern as the Greek port for a Turkish hinterland, though in everything except numbers the Greeks there predominated over the Turks (see A. J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (London: Constable, 1922), pp. 133–4). This was before the Turks had driven out the Greeks in the Anatolian War of 1919–22. ³⁹ See Franz Borkenau, Austria and After (London: Faber, 1938), pp. 93–102. ⁴⁰ On the resemblance between Atatu¨rk and Venizelos, who was born an Ottoman subject in Crete, see the Survey for 1930, p. 167. A critic has commented at this point: “The test of Ottoman Turkish nationality was linguistic and cultural, not strictly racial. Atatu¨rk was not felt to be ‘peripheral’ any more than we felt Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Ramsay MacDonald to be peripheral.” ⁴¹ H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 193. ⁴² See Elizabeth Wiskemann, Undeclared War (London: Constable, 1939), p. 22. ⁴³ See H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 410; R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks (London: Hutchinson, 1943), p. 334. Tuka was a marginal example of the type, for he probably never genuinely exchanged his Magyar for a Slovak national loyalty. For contrasted views of his trial for treason in 1929, see R. W. Seton-Watson, op. cit. p. 335, and Macartney, Hungary, pp. 132, 140.

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Zilinsky.⁴⁴ His Hungarian counterpart Szálasi, leader of the Hungarian Nazis and champion of Magyar racial purity, was of mixed Armenian, Slovak, and German origin.⁴⁵ The elevation of the Vienna destitute and ‘Bohemian corporal’⁴⁶ to the supreme power in the German Reich was only the most distinguished Eastern European example, and the least extreme or ridiculous, of a national leader having begun as a frontiersman or an alien.⁴⁷ There ran through Eastern Europe, however, an older and deeper division than the divisions of nationality. For the neck of land between the Baltic, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea was the region of the historic frontier between Western Christendom and the two Eastern Christendoms of Byzantium and Russia; and there still lay across it, beneath the political frontiers, the line between Catholics and Protestants on the one side and the Orthodox Churches on the other.⁴⁸ This cultural and religious frontier passed approximately down the eastern or Russian frontiers of the four Baltic States; bisected Poland along the Curzon Line,⁴⁹ which was the

⁴⁴ See Wiskemann, Undeclared War, p. 55; Survey for 1937, i. 424. ⁴⁵ Wiskemann, Undeclared War, p. 16. ⁴⁶ This was Hindenburg’s phrase for Hitler before the Nazi Revolution (J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg: the Wooden Titan (London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 407). ⁴⁷ Cf. Macartney, National States and National Minorities, p. 10. “The immensely complicated problem of nationality in this area is well illustrated by a story which is supposed to have occurred at Geneva in 1924. The League was discussing a minorities question, and someone suggested that, as between Greece and Albania, language was the true criterion; that is to say, the language which a man spoke in his own home. It then transpired that the rulers of these two countries each belonged, by this criterion, to his opponents’ country; Bishop Fan Noli, then Prime Minister of Albania, was said to speak Greek at home (though he is the greatest living Albanian scholar), while the President of the Greek Republic, Admiral Kondouriotis, a member of one of the Albanian families long settled in Hydra, habitually spoke Albanian in his own home circle” (Vandeleur Robinson, Albania’s Road to Freedom (London: Allen & Unwin, 1941), p. 35). ⁴⁸ The frontier had indefinable salients eastwards in the Uniat or Greek Catholic Churches, which had reunited with the Holy See while retaining the Byzantine rite. These were among the conquests of the Counter-Reformation. The two most important were the Ruthenian Catholic Church, which was created at the Synod of Brest in 1596 as an instrument of Polish ecclesiastical imperialism in the Orthodox provinces of Poland, and the Rumanian, which was created by the Synod of Alba Julia in 1698 to serve a similar purpose for the Habsburgs in Transylvania (for the latter see R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Roumanians (Cambridge: University Press, 1934), pp. 124–5). They soon became limited to the subject nations, distinguishing them from their Polonized Catholic or Magyarized Calvinist governing classes. They were thus, like the Orthodox Churches themselves, authentic expressions of the Ukrainian and Rumanian nations, and had an important role in the nationalist movements, but were correspondingly weakened once independence was achieved. In March 1939 the Uniat Church in Ruthenia and Polish Galicia numbered about 4 millions, and in Rumania about 1½ millions. The other Uniat Churches in Eastern Europe were numerically insignificant. See Donald Attwater, The Catholic Eastern Churches, revised edition (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Bruce, 1937), pp. 279–82, statistical summary. ⁴⁹ The Curzon Line was the minimum eastern frontier, on ethnographical principles, within which the Supreme Council on 8 December 1919 authorized Poland to establish a permanent administration. See H.P.C. vi. 275, 322; Survey for 1920–3, p. 251; S. Konovalov, Russo-Polish Relations (Princeton, N.J.: University Press, 1945), p. 34 and appendixes 3 and 4; L. B. Namier, Facing East (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947), pp. 109–13. Almost half the area of Poland (64,000 square miles out of 150,000) and one-third of the population (10½ millions out of 33 millions) lay between the Curzon Line and the frontier finally won by the Treaty of Riga in 1921.

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only part of this frontier to have been delimited by an international authority; separated Carpatho-Ruthenia from Slovakia; followed the frontier between Hungary and Rumania; and then cut through northern Yugoslavia in the arc that divided the Catholic Croats from the Orthodox Serbs, following up the line of the Save to the west and swinging south down the Dalmatian coast to beyond Dubrovnik.⁵⁰ This frontier was a line of potential nationality as well as of religion, since in Eastern Europe the two were not fully differentiated. It was along this line that Poland and Yugoslavia were to fracture in the course of the Second World War. To have overpassed it in self-aggrandizement was Poland’s chief internal cause of weakness in 1939, as was shown by her fear of a Ukrainian nationalism radiating from Carpatho-Ruthenia.⁵¹ It was the principal cause of weakness also of Yugoslavia, for it provided one of the two main lines of differentiation on the South Slav spectrum. The frontier between Croatia, Slovenia, and Dalmatia, on the one side, as parts of the Catholic West, and Serbia and Bosnia on the other, seemed still in 1939 no less real and enduring than the linguistic frontier between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and a united state of Serbs and Bulgars was scarcely less of an intrinsic possibility than the united state of Serbs and Croats.⁵²

(b) Social Conflicts The national antagonisms of Eastern Europe were largely also social antagonisms, and the vertical conflict between states was often bound up with a horizontal conflict between classes. The principal social characteristic of Eastern Europe was the absence or weakness of an indigenous middle class. It was the consequence of the retarding of commercial development over ten centuries by invasion, warfare, and the deadening rule of the Turkish Empire—another aspect of how the growth of Western Europe had been purchased by the stunting of Eastern Europe. But in many cases this catastrophic history had done more than prevent the growth of a middle class, it had altogether destroyed the aristocracy and governing class; and ⁵⁰ The line was faintly continued on the farther side of the Adriatic across Italy from the Gargano peninsula to Gaeta. This was the frontier between Byzantine Italy on the south and the kingdom of Italy on the north from the ninth to the eleventh centuries (Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939), iv. 343–4, 610–11); and it was reflected, from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, in the more northerly frontier between the kingdom of the Two Sicilies or of Naples and the Papal States. This ancient cultural boundary was not erased by the Risorgimento, and the Duce of Fascism succeeded in obliterating it as little as King Alexander the Unifier succeeded in obliterating the analogous boundary in Yugoslavia. ⁵¹ This cultural frontier roughly traced the western edge of the submerged Ukrainian nation. The word “Ukraine” means frontier or border. It had originally referred to the southern marches of the Russian world (which were under Polish-Lithuanian rule) over against the Tatars of the Crimea (Allen: Ukraine, pp. 64–5). But by the twentieth century the Ukraine had been transformed into the Russian world’s western march over against Western European civilization. ⁵² Arnold J. Toynbee, The World after the Peace Conference (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), p. 70, note 1.

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in so far as a governing class in the widest sense is normally the bearer of a nation’s traditions and historical consciousness, this had made it possible to divide the peoples of Austria-Hungary into the ‘historic’ and the ‘unhistoric’ nations.⁵³ In this respect the Eastern European nations fell into four classes. (1) The flowering states of Balkan Christendom had been cut short by the Turkish conquest in the fourteenth century, which destroyed their aristocratic and nascent middle classes. The resurgence of these nations against the Turkish Empire in the nineteenth century reciprocally destroyed the Turkish official and aristocratic class, leaving entirely peasant states with a governing class of the first generation. To this there were two exceptions. The Greeks never fully became an unhistoric nation, for they had soon made themselves indispensable to their conquerors and established a privileged position as the administrative and commercial class of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Independent Greece, because of its geographical position and tradition, was a maritime and commercial nation, accessible to sea-power; and thus, though the heir of that Greek Empire which was the core of Eastern Christendom, it became the most Western in sentiment of the Turkish successor states.⁵⁴ In Rumania, again, there had developed a landowning class of partially Greek origin which was allied with Jews and the foreign interests that exploited the oilfields. (2) In Central Eastern Europe, which comprised both the north-eastern bulwark of Eastern Christendom and the eastern tier of Western Christendom, the decisive event had been not the Turkish conquest but the Mongolian invasion two centuries before. It had depopulated the Rumanian principalities and Hungary and Poland; and the rulers of Poland and Hungary had called in German colonists to repair the damage. At the same time the ruling classes of the Ruthenes, Slovaks, and Rumanians, in so far as they existed, were either Polonized or Magyarized. (3) The Czech Lands, Bohemia and Moravia, were sui generis. Unlike Poland and Hungary, they were part of the medieval Reich, and the Mongolian ⁵³ The distinction was coined in Vienna, apparently by Karl Renner, at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was equally applicable to the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The historical nations par excellence of Eastern Europe were the Germans, the Italians, the Turks, and the Russians. The Magyars and the Poles in Austria-Hungary, and the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, were also among the historical nations, because their national traditions had never been lost and they had retained or acquired a privileged position. All the rest were the unhistorical nations: in Austria-Hungary, the Czechs and Croats (despite occasional recognition of their historical rights), the Slovaks, Ruthenes, Rumanians, Slovenes, and Serbs; in the Ottoman Empire in Europe, the Bulgars, Serbs, Rumanians, and Albanians; in the Russian Empire in Europe, the Ukrainians, White Russians, Lithuanians, Letts, Estonians, and Finns. ⁵⁴ Cf. Elizabeth Monroe, The Mediterranean in Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 22–3. It is to be remembered that although modern Greek nationalism appealed to the tradition of the Byzantine Empire, the heart of Byzantine Orthodox Christendom had been not Greece but Asia Minor; Greece had been an outlying fringe over against the Western world, included in the patriarchate of Rome down to 732, and afterwards encroached upon and occupied by French and Venetians.

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invasion did not reach them. They were very completely colonized and developed by German artisans and traders; and they maintained a highly developed national independence until they elected a Habsburg king in 1526. Their attempt to reject the Habsburg succession at the beginning of the Thirty Years War brought defeat, conquest, and national submergence. A process of Germanization and Catholicization effaced the native Bohemian aristocracy as surely as the Turkish conquest destroyed the native aristocracies of the Balkans, and the Czechs joined the unhistoric nations. (4) The Baltic was the colonial domain of medieval Western Christendom, where pagan barbarians had been subjugated, in Finland by the Swedes, and in Livonia and Prussia by the Teutonic Order. In these countries there was a native peasantry under an alien governing class. The Lithuanians alone of these barbarians maintained their independence by uniting with Poland, at the price of becoming rapidly Polonized, and the pattern recurred. But the accumulated heritage of national strife and injury that had divided Eastern Europe for centuries into the historic and the unhistoric nations gave them all alike a sharper and deeper historic consciousness than the nations of Western Europe. The Germans preserved the memory of their defeat by the Poles and Lithuanians at Tannenberg in 1410, to avenge it at last in Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff ’s victory over the Russian army on the same field in August 1914.⁵⁵ The Magyars sought to redeem the disaster at Mohács, the ‘Flodden of the East’ where the Turks slaughtered the Hungarian king and chivalry, by making it part of the legend of their defence of Christendom.⁵⁶ The peasantries of the unhistoric peoples, even during the period of their national submergence, kept alive the traditions of their past. The Serbs had a cycle of ballads that told the story of their conquest by the Turks at Kosovo; and though the Czech literary tradition became virtually extinct in the century after the battle of the White Mountain, ⁵⁵ Tannenberg “is a German island in a Slav sea. Yet this island contains one of the sacred places of a people to whom the sword is a symbol of moral virtue. Moreover, the place commemorates the triumphant revenge taken by the German nation for the terrible defeat inflicted upon Teutonic chivalry five centuries before. It might be thought that all recollection of defeat would have been lost in the course of five hundred years. The victory of Tannenberg in 1914 revealed that it had merely been lying dormant. Patriotic songs and military marches prevented the emotional and historic appeal of the Eastern Marches from becoming moribund” (Ian F. D. Morrow, The Peace Settlement in the German– Polish Borderlands (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1936), p. 217). ⁵⁶ Cf. Zoltán Gerevich in La Hongrie et la civilisation, edited by Georges Lukács (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1929), p. 66. For the arrogance and impolicy of the Hungarian ruling class which led to the defeat of Mohács, and the reaction thereto of the subject Croats, see R. W. Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (London: Constable, 1911), p. 19 and note 5. Like Tannenberg, Mohács was afterwards avenged on the same spot, by the great Imperialist victory over the Turks in 1687.

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the Bohemian serfs who rose in revolt against their German masters in 1775 sang Hussite songs.⁵⁷ Like the Irish, the only Western nation with a comparable experience, these peoples regained their freedom because they lived among their ancient wrongs and glories. History was the stuff of their politics, and all their politics turned back to history. It was as if one should drive along the South Downs, turning off the main road and following by-roads in to the downlands at Sullington and Washington and Steyning, and should find buildings where persons involved in the tragedy of Richard II had but newly cast aside their garments in mourning, where the sound of their weeping was hardly stilled.⁵⁸ There was a far greater affinity than in Western Europe between the extreme assertions of fanatical nationalists and the purposes of governments, and the foreign policies of the Eastern European states were directed by historical claims and memories to an extent that would have been paralleled in the west only if the basic object of British policy had been the recovery of Guienne and Normandy. The truncated Hungary of Trianon would not abandon a fraction of the historic rights of the Crown of St. Stephen; the inflated Rumania of Trianon was sustained by the Dacian myth; the Polish Republic was haunted by the kingdom of the Jagellons, Bulgaria by the empire of the Asens and the earlier empire of Tsars Symeon and Samuel, the Serbs of Yugoslavia (but not the Croats or Slovenes) by the empire of Stephen Dushan; and the Albanians found compensation for their present weakness in their claim to be ‘the original and autochthonous race of the Balkans,’ for whom the Slavs were but immigrants of yesterday, and to possess, not only Skanderbeg, but also Pyrrhus of Epirus and Alexander the Great.⁵⁹ The only Eastern European nations that escaped the self-imposed burden of a mighty past were Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, and even among the Finns there were those who dreamed of a Greater Finland that would include the whole of East Karelia and the Kola peninsula.⁶⁰ The middle class of Eastern Europe was supplied since the Middle Ages by the Germans, but latterly also by the Jews. In March 1939 the Jews were still a predominantly Eastern European people, and had been so since about 1800; the end of this chapter of the Galuth was now at hand. They had been first settled in Poland by Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century; and in the nineteenth, driven from behind by the persecution of the Russian Government and attracted from in front by an incipiently liberal society and the opportunities of commercial

⁵⁷ R. J. Kerner, Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 279. ⁵⁸ Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Record of a Journey through Yugoslavia in 1937 (London: Macmillan, 1941), i. 523; cf. i. 157. ⁵⁹ Brailsford, Macedonia, pp. 271–2. Cf. Robinson, Albania’s Road to Freedom, pp. 11–12. ⁶⁰ For a study of this archaistic nationalism see Kolarz, Myths and Realities in Eastern Europe. Cf. H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, chapter viii.

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advancement, had migrated into Hungary and Rumania, taking over the middleclass functions which the Magyars in particular were unwilling to perform for themselves.⁶¹ The Jews as a minority afforded the extreme of contrast with the Germans: they had no fatherland, no Great Power protected their interests, they were predestined victims of class and nationalist spite, and to pillage them became an international interest, which Germany skilfully exploited. This absence of established indigenous middle classes determined the social history of the Eastern European states, and the absence of bourgeois civilization conditioned in its turn their political history. Except in Czechoslovakia and Finland there were neither the social foundations nor the moral traditions of constitutional government; in Hungary alone there was a tradition of parliamentary institutions, but it was oligarchic and illiberal. At the end of the First World War the appearance of the successor states in the comity of nations was applauded by the West. They had the indefeasible certificate of national self-determination, they added the claim to be democratic republics and constitutional monarchies, and it was easy to see them collectively through a haze of Masaryk and Venizelos, as if Eastern Europe were a nursery of liberal statesmen. By March 1939, in all of them except Finland and perhaps Czechoslovakia, parliamentary government had been replaced by some degree of dictatorship.⁶² It was then perhaps too little ⁶¹ The chief Jewish minorities of the world at the end of 1938 were as follows: in the United States, 4,700,000; in Poland, 3,345,000; in the Soviet Union, 3,180,000; in Rumania, 800,000; in Hungary, 480,000; in Germany with Austria, 475,000; in Palestine, 440,000; in the United Kingdom, 370,000; in Czechoslovakia, 315,000. See Arthur Ruppin, The Jewish Fate and Future, trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Macmillan, 1940), chapter ii, especially p. 35. ⁶² Finland: unbroken parliamentary government from 1918 onwards, with restriction of civil liberties in 1930–2 to meet the Fascist Lapua movement. Estonia: dictatorship 1934–40, under President Paets and General Laidoner. Latvia: dictatorship 1934–40, under the Prime Minister Ulmanis, who became President in 1936. Lithuania: dictatorship 1926–40: under the Prime Minister Voldemaras 1926–9, under President Smetona 1929–40. Poland: parliamentary government 1919–26, Witos as leader of Peasant Party. Dictatorship 1926–39: under Pilsudski 1926–35, the rule of the Colonels 1935– 9 (triumvirate of President Móscicki, the Commander-in-Chief Smigly-Rydz, the Foreign Minister Beck). Czechoslovakia: parliamentary government, the Agrarian Party being the dominant factor in successive coalitions, from 1919 till after the first partition in 1938; authoritarian democracy 1938–9. Austria: parliamentary government 1919–33 (Seipel as Christian Socialist Chancellor 1922–4, 1926– 9). Dictatorship 1933–8: under Dollfuss 1933–4, under Schuschnigg 1934–8. Hungary: Communist régime under Bela Kun 1919, White Terror and restoration 1919–20. Horthy as Regent 1919–45. Nominal parliamentary government and veiled dictatorship 1919–45: Prime Ministers Bethlen 1921–31, Go¨mbo¨s 1932–6, Darányi 1936–8, Imrédy 1938–9, Teleki 1939–41. Rumania: parliamentary government 1919–37, Liberals under Bratianu in power 1922–8, National Peasants under Maniu 1929–31 and 1932–3. From 1930 King Carol II (1930–40) acquired personal ascendancy. Anti-Semitic ministry of Goga 1937; royal dictatorship 1937–40. Yugoslavia: parliamentary government 1921–8, Serbian Radical Party under Pasic, Croat Peasant Party under Radic; Radic assassinated 1928. Royal dictatorship under King Alexander 1929–34, continued under Prince Regent Paul 1934–41 (Stoyadinovic Prime Minister 1935–9). Bulgaria: parliamentary government 1919–23, with Stamboliski as leader of Peasant Party and Prime Minister; Stamboliski murdered 1923. Succession of governments controlled by terrorist Macedonian Revolutionary Organization 1923–4. Military dictatorship 1934–5, under Velchev and Georgiev. Royal dictatorship 1935–43 under King Boris II (1918–43). Albania: council of regency 1920–4; rebellion by Ahmed Bey Zogu 1925, who ruled as president of the republic 1925–8, and as King Zog 1928–39. Greece: Venizelos Prime Minister 1917–20. King Constantine, restored, 1920– 2; King George II, under army rule, 1922–3. Republic 1924–35, Venizelos Prime Minister 1928–32.

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understood that it had been the destiny of the successor states to come to birth in an upheaval that destroyed constitutional government throughout the greater part of the world, and Eastern Europe only failed to attain to what half Western Europe failed to preserve. The rule of the Macedonian Terrorist Organization in Bulgaria,⁶³ the atrocities of the Polish pacification of Eastern Galicia in 1930,⁶⁴ the Rumanian plundering and misgovernment of Bessarabia,⁶⁵ were not only in the tradition of Turkish and Ukrainian history; they also prefigured the kind of government which was soon, after this interlude of independence, to be imposed on Eastern Europe once more from without, and they reflected at the same time the internal conflicts that made this possible. From Poland to the Balkans there was a gulf between the peasant masses and the ruling class, with resentment and often real misery below, police oppression, brutality, and corruption from above. Eastern Europe was in a pre-revolutionary condition, and its social conflicts became in some degree polarized in terms of the antagonism between the two adjacent revolutionary Great Powers. The ruling classes, who were to prove susceptible to the counter-revolutionary propaganda of Germany, already feared, exaggerated, and inadvertently contributed to the masses’ susceptibility to the revolutionary propaganda of Russia. A peasant who complained of an act of injustice was denounced as a ‘Communist,’ sent before a military court, beaten from time to time, and sentenced either to prison or to forced labour under military discipline. . . . A peasant who did not like to have his daughters raped or his property stolen by a gendarme must be a ‘Bolshevik.’⁶⁶ Almost every state in Eastern Europe was liable, under pressure or shock, to fracture along horizontal lines. Eastern Europe was an agrarian region, and its nations were self-consciously peasant nations. Czechoslovakia was the only one in which more than half the population was not engaged in agriculture.⁶⁷ They were mostly overpopulated, and agricultural under-employment was for them what industrial unemployment was in the west. This was a subsidiary motive for the spread of industrialization since 1919. But the main cause of industrialization was the application of King George II (1935–47) restored by military coup 1935; constitutional monarchy 1935–6, dictatorship under General Metaxas 1936–41. Turkey: exclusive rule of Republican People’s Party from 1923 onwards, under President Kemal Atatu¨rk 1923–38, under President Ino¨nu¨ after 1938. ⁶³ See below, note 161 and accompanying text. ⁶⁴ See especially the Manchester Guardian, 14, 22, 24, and 25 October, 17 November, and 29 December 1930; H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 335. The intention of a full treatment of the Ukrainian question, which was declared in the Survey for 1932, p. 368, note 1, was not fulfilled. ⁶⁵ H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, pp. 148–9, 336–8. ⁶⁶ Ibid. pp. 149–50; cf. pp. 153, 241, 262–3, 317, 337, and Wiskemann, Undeclared War, pp. 98, 107–8. ⁶⁷ These were the approximate percentages of the occupied population who were engaged in agriculture in 1939: Finland, 60; Estonia, 60; Latvia, 66; Lithuania, 77; Poland, 63; Czechoslovakia, 34; Hungary, 55; Romania, 73; Yugoslavia, 75; Bulgaria, 80; Greece, 61; Turkey (the whole country), 82. In Albania, the most primitive, almost the entire population was engaged in pastoral farming and stock-raising.

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nationalist principles to economic life. The establishment of the successor states meant economic as well as political fragmentation. Of two great economic units one, the Russian Empire, was deprived of its most industrially advanced provinces along its European frontier; the other, Austria-Hungary, which had united the middle Danube valley in a single customs area, was broken up into five separate economic units divided by tariff barriers.⁶⁸ Feeble efforts at Danubian economic co-operation in the later 1920s were a failure; and the world depression accelerated the drive towards autarky, through the artificial development of agriculture by Czechoslovakia and Austria, and of industry by the agrarian states. The consequence was a general reduction of Danubian trade and of Eastern European trade as a whole. For the states of Eastern Europe were not economically complementary, and they were left with a large surplus of agricultural produce for which they had to find external markets. The pressure of this economic necessity, growing heavier through the 1920s, delivered them into the hands of the Great Power that was ready to take their exports, and had enabled Germany, by March 1939, to effect an economic conquest of South-Eastern Europe that foreshadowed political conquest.

(c) The Versailles Settlement The new states which thus appeared in Eastern Europe in 1918, precociously nationalist, socially divided, and economically unbalanced, were also precarious internationally. The strength of the Versailles Settlement was in its conformity to national self-determination. Its weakness lay in its disconformity to the foreseeable balance of power. The Versailles Settlement was only a recognition of the new system of Eastern Europe.⁶⁹ That system dated from 1918, not 1919; the national revolutions had ⁶⁸ The economic unity of the Habsburg Empire was an ambiguous matter: it was largely a function of economic backwardness and the low standard of living of the Empire’s inhabitants. “Much more was heard of the natural economic unity of the Monarchy after 1918 than before it” (C. A. Macartney, Problems of the Danube Basin (Cambridge: University Press, 1942), p. 78. The evils of economic nationalism led to controversies involving a retrospective justification of the Habsburg Empire. Thus Frederick Hertz (in The Economic Problem of the Danubian States (London: Gollancz, 1947)) claims that there was a decline in the national income of the successor states, in contradiction to Colin Clark in The Conditions of Economic Progress (London: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 1, 27–36. ⁶⁹ The term “Versailles Settlement” was strictly a misnomer in relation to Eastern Europe, since the Versailles Treaty of 28 June 1919 was limited to Germany, affecting Eastern Europe only by the definition of Germany’s eastern frontier. The treaties by which the Allies gave juridical form to the new system of Eastern Europe were the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye of 10 September 1919 with Austria, the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine of 27 November 1919 with Bulgaria, the Treaty of Trianon of 4 June 1920 with Hungary, and the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 with Turkey (replacing the Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920). The Versailles Treaty is printed in H.P.C. iii. 100 seqq. The Austrian and Hungarian treaties are printed ibid. v. 170 seqq.; the Bulgarian treaty, ibid. v. 305 seqq. The two Turkish treaties are not printed in H.P.C. and will be found respectively in Treaty Series No. 11 (1920), Treaty of Peace with

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preceded the Paris Peace Conference; and the main decisions of the conference, more than those of any previous conference at the end of a general war, were determined by forces outside the control of the conference itself. The new system had been created from below by a single overmastering political impulse, that of nationalism; and so far as could be seen in March 1939 the change was permanent. The revision of the Versailles Settlement was then in full swing, but it did not appeal back from the national principle to the pre-national principle of dynasticism. It claimed rather to be the fulfilment of nationalism, succeeding by the manipulation and perversion of the national principle as that was understood in 1919. Democratic nationalism, like all great political forces, supplied also the dominant conception of political justice of its time; and its fruition in the collapse of the eastern empires had the character, for those involved in it, of a tremendous act of emancipation.⁷⁰ Like its great predecessors 1789 and 1848, the year 1918 brought the sense of revolutionary fulfilment, the beginning of a new age, the bliss of springtime or of dawn.⁷¹ This intoxication was itself perhaps the most important political circumstance of the Peace Conference, especially in its dealings with Eastern Europe, and the reaction from it was one of the most important aspects, cause as much as effect, of the rise of Nazi Germany. The same dialectic that had led from the Festival of the Federation to the Terror and the Empire, and from Lamartine and Bakunin and Mazzini to Louis Napoleon and Bach and Cavour, led also from the liberated Eastern Europe whose most splendid figure was Masaryk to the Turkey: signed at Sèvres, August 10, 1920, Cmd. 964, and Treaty Series No. 16 (1923), Treaty of Peace with Turkey, and other instruments: signed at Lausanne on July 24, 1923, Cmd. 1929. ⁷⁰ The most brilliant brief description of this process within Austria is by L. B. Namier: “The Downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy”, H.P.C. vol. iv, chapter i, part iii; see especially pp. 90, 113. [Ed.] Wight examined competing principles of regime and international legitimacy in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). ⁷¹ “For the old Turkey had gone and its successor had no interest in Empire, and Russia was a Union of Soviet Republics, and the Hapsburgs were fallen; and the treaties of Versailles and Trianon and St. Germain had set the small peoples free. Freedom was for these peoples an ecstasy. . . . Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Czecho-Slovakia and Yugoslavia, they were all like young men stretching themselves at the open window in the early morning after long sleep” (West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, ii. 494). Cf. T. E. Lawrence: “It felt like morning, and the freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us” (suppressed introductory chapter to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, quoted in The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, ed. David Garnett (London: Cape, 1938), p. 262, and in a later version in T. E. Lawrence, Oriental Assembly, ed. A. W. Lawrence (London: Williams & Norgate, 1939), p. 142). In Siberia the spring came rather earlier, round about 1904: “The youth of the revolutionary generation coincided with the youth of the labor movement. It was the epoch of people between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Revolutionists above that age were few in number and seemed old men. The movement was as yet utterly devoid of careerism, lived on its faith in the future and on its spirit of self-sacrifice. There were as yet no routine, no set formulae, no theatrical gestures, no ready-made oratorical tricks. The struggle was by nature full of pathos, shy and awkward. The very words ‘committee’, ‘party’ were as yet new, with an aura of vernal freshness, and rang in young ears as a disquieting and alluring melody” (Leon Trotsky, Stalin, translated from the Russian by Charles Malamuth (London: Hollis & Carter, 1947), pp. 53–54). In Germany it came of course with the Nazi Revolution: see Hitler’s speech at Munich of 19 March 1934 (The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939, trans. and ed. N. H. Baynes [referred to hereafter as Hitler, Speeches (Baynes)] (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1942), i. 212).

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Eastern Europe of March 1939, dominated by the Eastern European expatriate who had become Fu¨hrer of the German Reich. It was a subsequent achievement of Hungarian and German revisionist propaganda to represent the Versailles Settlement as a bleak reversal by which the under-dogs of the old régime became the top-dogs of the new.⁷² But many more of the states, and millions more of the population of Eastern Europe, obtained by it national freedom and national fulfilment than were brought under alien rule. There was no parity between the revisionist and the satisfied states. There were nine ‘victorious’ nations: Finland and the three Baltic States, which had risen independent out of the ruins of the Russian Empire; Poland; Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia, the principal successor states of the Habsburg Empire; and Greece.⁷³ The defeated nations were five: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia.⁷⁴ Germany and Russia were in a different class from the states of Eastern Europe: they were Great Powers, and their revisionism took a revolutionary and imperialist form unconnected with the rectification of the alleged injustices of the Peace Settlement. Austria was not a revisionist state in the pure sense. She was a state lacking the will to existence, since her original wish had been for an Anschluss with Germany,⁷⁵ which had been forbidden by the Allies;⁷⁶ and lacking also the means to existence, since she had to be kept alive in her early years through the artificial respiration of League loans.⁷⁷ From then on Austria scarcely had an active foreign policy, and furthermore she obtained an accession of territory, at the expense of Hungary, in the Burgenland, which put her paradoxically in the class of territorial gainers.⁷⁸ The two chief revisionist states of Eastern Europe were Hungary and Bulgaria, but their revisionism differed. Bulgaria’s defeat in 1918, unlike Hungary’s, was the second in seven years, and her discontent was consequently less embittered and more resigned.⁷⁹ Moreover, Bulgaria had extraordinary ties with Yugoslavia. The tradition of Stamboliski and ⁷² “ In the national field, a complicated system of hierarchies had, as we have seen, evolved in many districts. The 1919 settlement roughly reversed the earlier positions, with the single exception that the Ruthenes remained national under-dogs after 1919, as they had been before it” (Macartney, Problems of the Danube Basin, p. 120; cf. pp. 151–2, 108–9; and Toynbee, World after the Peace Conference, pp. 60–1). ⁷³ Albania fell into neither class, having been neither a belligerent in the war, nor anything but an object of policy; and her frontiers as finally delimited did not greatly differ from those of 1913. She certainly had a grievance about the Albanian minority in Yugoslav Macedonia, but was precluded by her weakness from pursuing a revisionist policy. ⁷⁴ Turkey was also on the losing side in the First World War, as registered in the Treaty of Sèvres, 1920; but arose victorious from the Graeco-Turkish War of 1919–23, as registered in the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923. ⁷⁵ H.P.C. iv. 119; Borkenau, Austria and After, p. 206. ⁷⁶ H.P.C. iv. 391–2, i. 347, ii. 13–14. ⁷⁷ Survey for 1920–3, p. 316. ⁷⁸ H.P.C. iv. 382–3; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 304–7. ⁷⁹ Ibid. pp. 333–4. The first defeat had been inflicted by Greece, Serbia, Rumania, and Turkey in the Second Balkan War of 1913. Like other contrasts between them, the difference in the quality of their revisionism may not have been unconnected with the fact “that Bulgaria has the most equalitarian social structure in Eastern Europe, and Hungary the least” (H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 130).

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of Velchev was one of collaboration with Yugoslavia tending towards a South Slav Union, and for this reason Bulgaria nearly became a signatory of the Balkan Pact of 1934.⁸⁰ There was never any question of Hungarian accession to the Little Entente. Hungary had no Stamboliski and no Velchev. For the cleavage between victorious and revisionist Powers was less important than the older cleavage between the historic and the unhistoric nations. The deepest grievance of the Germans and the Hungarians was not that the settlement had done them an injustice, but that it had deprived them of their age-old right of ruling over other peoples.⁸¹ And the force of this older distinction was illustrated again by the one Power of Eastern Europe that combined the advantages of being both a historic and a victorious nation, Poland. The criticism of the Versailles Settlement that it created as many new minority problems as those it solved⁸² was fallacious. The problems it created were not numerically comparable with those it solved: they were of a different order. The revolutions of 1918 liberated the national majorities; and it was this great and broadly irreversible achievement that brought into existence the problem of the minorities. The national doctrine in the form in which it actually triumphed in Eastern Europe from 1918 onwards was too extreme to carry within itself the principle of its own correction. “The most certain test,” said Acton in a famous sentence,⁸³ “by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.” On this test the new system of Eastern Europe, taken as a whole, failed to establish freedom: it established only the rights of national majorities. And the history of this failure, of this acquiescence in a partial freedom, illustrated another profound saying of Acton’s: The greatest adversary of the rights of nationality is the modern theory of nationality. By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. . . . The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society.⁸⁴

The oppression of minorities in Eastern Europe under the Versailles Settlement was part of a process that speedily transformed nationalism into its own opposite. ⁸⁰ Survey for 1934, pp. 524–5. ⁸¹ On the ambiguity of justice, see H.P.C. iv, 439–42. “It is surprising how often one finds the same nationalist German declaring that to cut off East Prussia from the Reich was impossible, but that it was absurd to question the practicability of Deutsch-Bo¨hmen” (Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans: A Study of the Struggle in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of lnternational Affairs, 1938), p. 86). ⁸² “There are no fewer suppressed minorities to-day in the various successor states of the Austrian Empire than existed before its disruption” (Borkenau, Austria and After, p. 83). Cf. the reply of the Allied and Associated Powers to Hungary of 6 May 1920, in H.P.C. iv. 422. ⁸³ In “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” The History of Freedom and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 4. ⁸⁴ “Nationality,” ibid. pp. 297, 290.

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For the assertion of the rights of national majorities at the expense of those of minorities led to the assertion of the rights of the largest national majority at the expense of those of all the other nationalities together, and the subordination of the peoples of Eastern Europe to the will of 80 million Germans. It was along the sharpest bend in this spiral path that Hitler walked in the six months between his declaration before Munich that he did not want to rule a single Czech⁸⁵ and his annexation of Bohemia and Moravia as belonging to the living-space of the German people.⁸⁶ But although the national principle was the basis of the Versailles Settlement, its details showed many modifications in the interests of strategy and economics. For the settlement was not only the redrawing of frontiers in accordance with a principle, but also a decision imposed by victors on vanquished as the result of a general war. Consequently it was exclusively in the interests of the victors that the modifications of the national principle were made.⁸⁷ The geographical and historic unit of Great Hungary was partitioned on the overriding principle of nationality.⁸⁸ The geographical and historic unit of Bohemia and Moravia was preserved in defiance of nationality, on the ground that a purely Czech state would be neither economically nor strategically viable.⁸⁹ In September 1938 the Munich Agreement unravelled the Versailles Settlement and created a purely Czech state;

⁸⁵ “And I have further assured him that at the moment when Czechoslovakia solves her problems, that means when the Czechs have come to terms with their other minorities, and that peaceably and not through oppression, then I have no further interest in the Czech state. And that is guaranteed to him! We want no Czechs!”: speech in the Berliner Sportpalast, 26 September 1938 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1526; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1938, ii. 259). [The Documents (R.I.I.A.) consist of Documents on International Affairs for 1928–38, 13 vols.; for 1939–46, in progress (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs).] ⁸⁶ See preamble to the decree regulating the status of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 16 March 1939 (Reichsgesetzblatt, 1939, part i, p. 485; N.C.A. viii. 404 (051-TC); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 62). The contradiction between “national” and “territorial” aggrandizement was the theme of Hitler’s conversation with Csáky on 16 January 1939. Hitler upbraided Hungary for her folly in having asserted her demands during the first partition of Czechoslovakia in the form of national claims and not of territorial acquisition. Hungary’s assertion of the national principle had embarrassed German diplomacy: had she co-operated with Germany on the territorial principle Hitler would have been able to laugh at Chamberlain (report of conversation between Hitler and Csáky, 16 January 1939, in Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie) no. 25.) Similarly, when he saw Tiso on 13 March 1939, Hitler said that “in the decisions which he took at Munich [he] . . . was not playing power politics, but was working for the good of the German people” (German Foreign Ministry minute of interview between Hitler and Tiso, 13 March 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxi. 152 (2802-PS); translation in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 48; cf. N.C.A. v.445). ⁸⁷ “When once, during the next creative bout in 1919, a Polish diplomat expounded to me the very extensive (and mutually contradictory) territorial claims of his country, and I inquired on what principle they were based, he replied with rare frankness: ‘On the historical principle, corrected by the linguistic wherever it works in our favour’” (L. B. Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals, Raleigh Lecture on History, 1944, from the Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. xxx (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press), p. 66). Cf. Survey for 1920–3, p. 228, note 3. ⁸⁸ H.P.C. iv. 418–19. ⁸⁹ Ibid. pp. 276–7.

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its dissolution and disappearance six months later perhaps vindicated the wisdom of the Peace Conference.⁹⁰ The victorious states extended their frontiers to include in general all their adjacent terre irredente. This optimum expansion could be attained only by swallowing alien minorities.⁹¹ The defeated states were correspondingly deprived of groups of their nationals, or in the case of Germany were not allowed to be joined by groups which on the principle of self-determination desired to do so.⁹² This enforced separation applied a fortiori to groups that were non-contiguous. East Prussia was separated from Germany, but remained under her sovereignty; the German Bohemian enclaves were separated from Austria and passed under Czechoslovak sovereignty; the Magyar enclave in Transylvania was separated from Hungary and passed under Rumanian sovereignty. But it applied also to contiguous groups. Austria and the Bohemian Germans were not allowed to join Germany; Danzig and Memel were detached from East Prussia; districts with Magyar majorities in Slovakia and the Voivodina were severed from Hungary. The country most sorely thus pared and sheared was Hungary, the country most unnaturally swollen was Poland. The separation of East Prussia from Germany was established primarily on national grounds, since the intervening provinces of Poznania and Pomorze had Polish majorities, and secondarily on the economic ground of giving Poland access to the sea. The popular term ‘Corridor’ emphasized the artificiality of this arrangement, by its cutting off a German province from the body of Germany. The tradition and habit of continental Great Powers made it impossible that Germany, or the rest of the world, should learn to regard the German colony of East Prussia as an island, whose separation was no greater a hardship than that imposed by ⁹⁰ The inter-war history of Bohemia and Moravia as a geographical unit was reversed by that of Anatolia. In the Anatolian War of 1919–23 the Turks triumphantly vindicated the national unity of Anatolia against the will of the Allies by the expulsion of the Greek minority and the erasure of the Smyrna enclave contemplated by the Sèvres Treaty (H.P.C. vi. 53–4, 110). After the Second World War Czechoslovakia followed this violent example in an attempt finally to solve her minority problem. ⁹¹ Minorities formed the following approximate percentages of the total population of the Eastern European states in 1938: Finland, 11; Estonia, 12; Latvia, 23; Lithuania (excluding Memel), 16; Poland, 31; Czechoslovakia, before the first partition (viz. other than Czechs and Slovaks), 33; Hungary, 10; Rumania, 25; Yugoslavia (viz. other than Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), 12; Bulgaria, 10; Albania, perhaps 5; Greece, 12; Turkey in Europe (excluding Istanbul, which had a considerable Greek minority), none. ⁹² Nearly one-third of the Hungarian nation were outside Hungary’s Trianon frontiers: 1½ million in Rumania, three-quarters of a million in Czechoslovakia, half a million in Yugoslavia; in Trianon Hungary there remained 7 millions. The situation was less marked in Neuilly Bulgaria, which contained 5¼ million Bulgars; outside its frontiers there were half a million, or a whole million if Bulgaro-Macedonians be included; 360,000 in Rumania; 70,000 pure Bulgarians and half a million Bulgaro-Macedonians in Yugoslavia; 82,000 Macedonians in Greece. Of Albanians, a third lived outside the frontiers of Albania, half a million in Yugoslavia, and 19,000 in Greece. Of Turks, there were 18 millions in Turkey; over half a million in Bulgaria, 190,000 in Greece. For the German minorities in Eastern Europe, see Martin Wight, “Germany,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 332, note 2 [Ed: reprinted as “Germany in The World in March 1939” in the present volume: see note 195].

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nature between Italy and Sicily, or on the further shore of the Baltic between Sweden and Gottland.⁹³ The urge to territorial unity had been the strongest force in Prussian history; it would inevitably continue; and it could be foreseen that, when the balance of power shifted, the Polish Corridor would prove the most ineffective balk between the massing waters on either side.⁹⁴ When Hitler took possession of Memel on 23 March 1939 he refused to cross the Polish Corridor, but came instead by sea, sailing from Swinemu¨nde in the Deutschland at the head of the German war fleet, and going ashore in a torpedo boat. ‘It is said that on the trip he was violently sea-sick, and that this hardened his determination to obtain from the Poles an overland connexion with East Prussia.’⁹⁵ East Prussia itself possessed two contiguous irredente. Danzig lay at its western end at the mouth of the Vistula, an ancient German commercial town that was Poland’s historic gateway to the sea.⁹⁶ Memel lay at the north-eastern corner of East Prussia at the mouth of the Niemen, a minor Prussian seaport that could provide the only outlet to the sea for the new state of Lithuania.⁹⁷ Both of these, by a compromise between their German national character and the economic claims upon them of Poland and Lithuania respectively, were given a degree of autonomy. Danzig became a true buffer state, being made a free city under the protection of the League of Nations; and its preservation became a vital interest of Polish policy. ⁹³ Cf. L. B. Namier, Diplomatic Prelude 1938–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1948), p. 17, note 1. On the colonial character of East Prussia see H.P.C. ii. 289–90, and Morrow, Peace Settlement, pp. 223–5. ⁹⁴ See H.P.C. ii. 210, vi. 255–6. The Nazi Government made early provision for the development of East Prussia as a war base (see Brauchitsch’s memorandum of 29 September 1934: N.C.A. vi. 280–1 (3585-PS)), and if the annexation of Danzig had preceded the attack on Poland it would have had to be carried out from East Prussia (see I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 481–3 (137-C); translated in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 97; cf. N.C.A. vi. 949–50). ⁹⁵ Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, p. 88; Daily Telegraph, 24 March 1939. Hitler “once told Raeder: ‘On land I am a hero, but at sea I am a coward’” (Anthony Martienssen, Hitler and his Admirals (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), p. 2). “The seizure of West Prussia is the most pardonable theft Berlin ever committed. . . . Even Napoleon, when he beat Prussia to earth, did not venture to reverse this inevitable outcome of the geographical situation. . . . Now that the lapse of a century has cemented more firmly than ever the union between West Prussia and the German lands on either side of it, we should be ill-advised if we departed from Napoleon’s precedent. . . . . If every other question in Europe had been justly solved, West Prussia would suffice in itself to plunge all Europe into another war” (A. J. Toynbee, Nationality and the War (London: Dent, 1915), p. 75). ⁹⁶ Danzig grew from a fishing-village into an important port between the tenth and twelfth centuries. It was captured by the Teutonic Order in 1308, and became a member of the Hanseatic League in 1361; in 1466 it was ceded by the Order to Poland under the Treaty of Thorn. It remained a free city under Polish suzerainty from 1466 until acquired by Prussia at the Second Partition of Poland in 1793; the First Partition in 1772 cut it off from Poland by Prussia’s acquisition of a “Prussian corridor”, viz. West Prussia, connecting Brandenburg with East Prussia, and it was preserved in this precarious detachment until 1793 by Russian jealousy of Prussia. In 1807 it was detached from Prussia by Napoleon under the Treaty of Tilsit, and re-erected into a free city under French protection; in 1814 it was recovered by Prussia. In 1919 it was erected again into a free city under the protection of the League of Nations (see H.P.C. ii. 291–3, 366–7, 383, 391–2; vi. 257–61; Morrow, Peace Settlement, chapter ii). ⁹⁷ Memel was founded by the Teutonic Order in 1252, and remained part successively of their Ordenstaat and of the succeeding duchy and kingdom of Prussia down to 1919. It was then ceded by Germany to the Allied and Associated Powers, but was seized by Lithuania in 1923, to whom sovereignty was conveyed in 1924 on condition that Memel should have local autonomy (H.P.C. ii. 290–1, 366–7, 383, 391; vi. 247–8; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 256–61; Morrow, Peace Settlement, chapter xiii).

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Memel was given a degree of local autonomy under Lithuanian sovereignty; this status was not less a vital interest for Lithuania, and was less likely to be maintained only inasmuch as Lithuania was smaller and weaker than Poland. Czechoslovakia was the only victorious state that was land-locked, having no direct access to the sea at all, though, after Germany had resumed command of the Baltic, Poland and the Baltic States were forced strategically into a similar position.⁹⁸ Just as Poland was defensible only on the assumption that Germany and Russia would not combine against her, so Czechoslovakia was defensible only on the assumption that she would not have to sustain unaided the joint attack of Germany, Poland, and Hungary; and the time came when these assumptions were not granted. Poland ensured the enmity of Germany by her acquisitions under the Versailles Treaty, of Russia by her conquests in 1920.⁹⁹ Czechoslovakia ensured the enmity of Germany by incorporating the Bohemian Germans who had wished when the Habsburg Monarchy dissolved to remain part of a “German-Austria” which had voted for union with the Reich;¹⁰⁰ of Poland, because in 1919–20 she seized Teschen from Poland;¹⁰¹ of Hungary, because the drawing of her southern frontier had been heavily weighted against Hungary. Poland was chiefly vulnerable from Germany, with Pomorze lying between two parts of the Reich, defensible only by means of a general war. Czechoslovakia too was chiefly vulnerable in relation to Germany. While Czechoslovakia was strong, her position could be compared to a spring-board for Bolshevik aggression or a base for French bombers according to the current anxieties of German propaganda;¹⁰² but when she became weak, her Bohemian head was fastened between the German jaws of Austria and Silesia. It therefore became an important part of both Polish and Czechoslovak policy to break this encirclement by establishing territorial contiguity with friendly states. Czechoslovakia had desired a corridor separating Austria and Hungary and establishing a common frontier with Yugoslavia, but the Peace Conference

⁹⁸ J. F. C. Fuller, The Second World War,1939–45 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), p. 48. ⁹⁹ “Germany, indeed, would always have causes for dispute with Poland. It was, however, possible and desirable to reduce these causes to the minimum demanded by justice. In such circumstances the Poles would be wise to avoid all possible cause of quarrel with Russia, even if it meant in some cases recognizing Russian claims whose justice they disputed. Above all, it was dangerous to take advantage of Russia’s temporary weakness and annex border peoples without securing a free expression of their wishes. Such action, as it separated Russia and Germany in space, would bring them together in spirit and might easily result in a new and this time perhaps a final Partition of Poland from which no human power could save her” (H. J. Paton in H.P.C. vi. 240. This prophecy was published in 1924). ¹⁰⁰ See Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, p. 83; A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918, 2nd edition (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), p. 250. ¹⁰¹ H.P.C. iv. 356–63. ¹⁰² Cf. Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939: “a bridge to Europe for Bolshevik aggression”, “a bastion extending into the German Reich” (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1612–13; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 222–3; cf. Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), pp. 1488, 1519, 1597, and Survey for 1935, i. 296).

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rejected such a subordination of national to strategic principles.¹⁰³ Czechoslovakia had originally desired also a common frontier with Russia.¹⁰⁴ This was prevented when the Polish conquest of East Galicia and the Treaty of Riga created instead a common Polish–Rumanian boundary.¹⁰⁵ Czechoslovakia nevertheless acquired Carpathian Ruthenia, and, though its original purpose was denied her, it became the centre of her strategic system. Through Ukrainian territory on either side of the Carpathians, Poland and Czechoslovakia stretched long fingers down to touch Rumania. It is Slovakia and Ruthenia [said Benes in 1933] which have rendered possible the whole conception of our foreign policy in collaboration with Poland, Roumania, and Yugoslavia, and it is that collaboration which makes us, in the eyes of France and of all Western Europe, a force in the whole policy of Central Europe. We shall therefore never allow our territorial link with Roumania to be cut.¹⁰⁶ Ruthenia was the strategic turn-table of Eastern Europe. It offered contiguity alternately between Czechoslovakia and Rumania, which was its function from 1919 to 1938, as the land-bridge of the Little Entente; or between Communist Hungary and Soviet Russia, which was the reason for Bela Kun’s attempt to conquer it in 1919;¹⁰⁷ or between conservative Hungary and conservative Poland, a contiguity which was brought about in March 1939. And if its Ukrainian national character ever led to its union with the Soviet Ukraine, it would give the Soviet Power territorial access by a broad avenue between Poland and Rumania to Czechoslovakia and Hungary, a bridgehead over the Carpathians towards the great Danubian plain.

(d) International Politics of Eastern Europe The new system in Eastern Europe, which was confirmed and defined by the Versailles Settlement, illustrated, almost in a laboratory form, the politics of a Kleinstaaterei, the workings of a congeries of small states whose destiny is ultimately determined not by themselves but by Great Powers outside. When once the general war had shattered the eastern empires, the new states came into existence through the will and exertion of their own nationals. But, immediately, they became objects of Great Power policy, and were cast for a role in wider schemes than they themselves controlled. They were first conceived of ¹⁰³ See H.P.C. iv. 273–4; T. G. Masaryk, “Independent Bohemia”, confidential memorandum of April 1915, in R. W. Seton-Watson’s Masaryk in England (Cambridge: University Press, 1943), p. 129; Macartney, Hungary, pp. 51–3. ¹⁰⁴ See H.P.C. iv. 273; R. W. Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England, pp. 45, 23. Cf. Survey for 1937, i. 406. ¹⁰⁵ H.P.C. i, 335–9; iv. 104–5, 135; vi. 266–74, 283, note; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 271–2. ¹⁰⁶ Speech at Nové Zámky, 7 December 1933 (Macartney, Hungary, p. 249). ¹⁰⁷ H.P.C. i. 356; iv. 139, 160, 489; vi. 246.

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as a barrier to German expansion eastward, which would prevent the German conquest and penetration of Russia that had been consummated in the Peace of Brest-Litovsk in March 1917, and would balance the Germans of Austria and Prussia. The condition of stability in the territorial rearrangement of East Europe [wrote H. J. Mackinder about Christmas 1918] is that the division should be into three and not into two State-systems. It is a vital necessity that there should be a tier of independent States between Germany and Russia.¹⁰⁸

This consideration had been put forward by the representatives of the new states themselves when they had sought Allied support and recognition during the war.¹⁰⁹ But as the focus of Western apprehension shifted from prostrate Germany to revolutionary Russia, the tier of Eastern European states acquired a new function as a cordon sanitaire protecting Central and Western Europe against the Bolshevik danger from the east. This purpose was believed to be fulfilled by Poland in the Polish–Russian war of 1920 (although Poland had herself provoked it), when the French sent Weygand to save her from defeat at the battle of Warsaw.¹¹⁰ France was the chief architect of the dual conception of the new Eastern Europe. It was the last phase of her tradition of making alliances in the rear of the Habsburg or German enemy. Once her aim had been to encircle that single enemy, and her alliances had been with other Great Powers, the Valois and Louis XIV with Turkey, Richelieu with Sweden, the Third Republic with Nicholas II. Now she was reduced for allies to unstable satellites of whom Poland was the chief, and simultaneously their function was doubled: no longer to encircle one Great Power, but to separate two Great Powers, the traditional masters of those satellites and each alone potentially more powerful than France herself. This system in Eastern Europe could last only so long as Germany and Russia were in collapse. With their recovery, the political value of the successor states would depreciate at the moment when the French need for them matured, France would be compelled to seek more substantial allies, and the balance of Europe would be restored to the hands of the Great Powers. Eastern European politics were haunted by the longing for collective independence in international affairs, and by the fancy of political self- sufficiency. The conception of the Little Entente was ‘of an organization of Central Europe in which our liberated countries have been their own masters, without the predominating influence or domination of any Great Power.’¹¹¹ This was the purpose also of the ¹⁰⁸ Sir Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1944), p. 118. ¹⁰⁹ Cf. Masaryk’s war-time memoranda, in R. W. Seton-Watson’s Masaryk in England, especially pp. 130, 193–6. ¹¹⁰ H.P.C. vi. 318. Cf. Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath (London: Butterworth, 1929), chapter xiii. ¹¹¹ Benes, speech at Nové Zámky, 7 December 1933 (Macartney, Hungary, p. 249).

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Balkan and Baltic Ententes. The illusion was always pursued, and never attained, that there might be built up in Eastern Europe an autonomous third force, a neutral bloc that would itself have the defensive weight of a Great Power. Polish policy aimed in successive phases at creating such a grouping, whether it were a Baltic constellation or one stretching south to the Danube, based on the Polish alliance with Rumania. It was indeed the fallacy of France’s policy in Eastern Europe that she sought from her allies the performance of functions that in the long run were within the capacity of a Great Power alone. But there is no political avoirdupois by which an aggregation of small states can be made to equal a Great Power. The Eastern European blocs never stood the strains for which they were devised. The centrifugal pull of the Great Powers was too strong, and one or other of the small states would always give preference to its Great Power relationships over its relations with its putative allies. Only once in history had the states of Eastern Europe displayed a collective independence, when the Balkan League in 1912 defied the Concert of the Powers in order to partition the Ottoman Empire in Europe. But that adventure had been moved by a dynamic and aggressive purpose. The history of the Versailles system in Eastern Europe showed in microcosm, what the League of Nations showed in the world at large, that sovereign states are incapable of disciplined co-operation for a long period in defence of a static international order. This failure to attain effective independence was with the Eastern European states from the beginning. They had come into existence under a kind of tutelage, not only political but juridical as well. For all of them were compelled to accept international obligations, supervised by the League of Nations, for the treatment of their minorities. This system of international servitude was confined to the states of Eastern Europe. It was intensely resented, partly as an infringement of the new-won sovereignty, and particularly because the Great Powers were exempted from it. The minorities system was regarded as preventing the assimilation and encouraging the disloyalty of minorities, weakening the unity of the state and institutionalizing intervention. The minority treaties were consistently violated by governments, and the protection of minorities by the Council of the League faded simultaneously with every other expression of the League’s authority. Intervention on behalf of minorities then became a German monopoly, more arbitrary and oppressive than anything Eastern Europe had suffered under the League of Nations.¹¹²

¹¹² On the whole subject see H.P.C. vols. v, chapter ii, and iv. 434–5; Survey for 1920—3, pp. 213–25; Macartney, National States and National Minorities; Jacob Robinson and others, Were the Minorities Treaties a Failure? (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1943). The only other state (counting Turkey as an Eastern European state) which was subjected to similar international obligations for the treatment of its minorities was Iraq, when the British mandate ended and she entered the League of Nations in 1932 (Survey for 1934, pp. 208–11).

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The attraction and influence of the Great Powers was the chief cause of Eastern European disunity. Within Eastern Europe itself the organization of states on the national principle gave some promise of a period of stability, because the majority of states were satisfied, and were capable of holding down the dissatisfied. The revisionist issue therefore became of less importance than the differences between the victor states. Thus the successful imperialism of Poland was a more consistently disturbing factor than the frustrated imperialism of Hungary throughout the twenty years which culminated, in March 1939, in their achieving territorial contiguity along the crest of the Carpathians. But these differences were only increased to a decisive magnitude through their exploitation by the Great Powers. The Little Entente and the Balkan Entente did not fall to pieces from within, but were prised asunder by external influences. It was remarkable that the two revisionist states, Hungary and Bulgaria, acted as allies of Great Powers, not as allies of one another. Hungarian revisionism was geared into German revisionism, so that the Magyars resumed their role under the Dual Monarchy of ‘the obedient advanced guard of Berlin,’¹¹³ but Bulgarian revisionism was not similarly geared into Hungarian: in so far as Bulgaria was not a client, first of Italy and later of Germany, her policies and alliances were confined to her immediate neighbours. The system of Eastern Europe illustrated all the particulars of a balance of power. Finland, Estonia, and Latvia formed a simple buffer belt. Their backs were to Russia, their faces to the sea, which gave them Britain as a neighbour as well as Germany;¹¹⁴ though Finland was also an advanced zone of the Scandinavian neutral bloc, into which she dove-tailed strategically through her retention of the Swedish Aland Islands, and which she insulated from Russia through her acquisition of the Petsamo Corridor to the Arctic Ocean.¹¹⁵ But below Latvia the buffer belt became politically complex, with a double tier of states, widening out to become three deep where Austria and Hungary and Rumania lay between the source of the Danube in Germany and its mouths in the Euxine. The belt ended in another inland sea, where Greece and Turkey like the Baltic States had Britain as a neighbour. But they had these advantages over the Baltic republics, that they were peninsular not continental states; they were divided from Germany and Russia

¹¹³ Masaryk, “Independent Bohemia”, confidential memorandum of April 1915, in R. W. SetonWatson’s Masaryk in England, p. 130. ¹¹⁴ In the two decades ending in March 1939 Britain and Germany accounted for half the exports and three-quarters of the imports of Estonia and Latvia (see Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Baltic States, pp. 125–7, 164–7). ¹¹⁵ On the Aland Islands dispute see Survey for 1920–3, pp. 234–8. Finland obtained the Petsamo Corridor from Russia by the Treaty of Dorpat of 1920, although it had not formed part of the previous grand duchy of Finland (see Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Baltic States, pp. 226–7, 240). The Corridor was to be retained by Finland under the Treaty of Moscow of 12 March 1940 (Finland Reveals her Secret Documents on Soviet Policy, March 1940–June 1941 (Blue-White Book of Finland), ed. H. J. Procopé (New York: W. Funk, 1941), p. 35), but was retroceded to Russia by the Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1947 (The World Today, December 1946, ii. 584; April 1947, iii. 198, map). Russia thereby regained a common frontier with Norway.

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by the whole depth of the Balkans and the Danube valley, and Turkey’s common frontier with Russia was marked by the Black Sea and the natural barrier of the Armenian mountains; and in the Mediterranean, but not in the Baltic, Britain was the dominant Power. Thus the international politics of Eastern Europe were shaped by the search for or the dread of territorial contiguity,¹¹⁶ the fear of encirclement, the desire for alliances with Powers in the rear of a potentially hostile neighbour.¹¹⁷ These, however, were features common to every balance of power. The peculiarity of Eastern European politics was provided by the minorities. They were of three kinds.¹¹⁸ First, there were border minorities contiguous with the state to which they would have preferred to belong, and these provided the greatest danger of disintegrating the state within which they were included. The extreme example was Czechoslovakia, with German minorities strung continuously along her Bohemian and Moravian frontiers. Secondly, there were scattered enclaves at a distance from the state to which they owed spiritual allegiance, a potential fifth column in every international crisis; and it was Germany who had the advantage both in the number of such German minorities and in the power of exploiting them. Thirdly, there were regions of mixed population, usually in frontier regions, whose loyalty was doubtful. The classic example was Macedonia, but there were many others, such as the Voivodina between Yugoslavia and Hungary, Transylvania between Hungary and Rumania, the Dobruja between Rumania and Bulgaria, Bessarabia between Rumania and Russia. The existence of these minorities gave a tenseness and ferocity to international relations in Eastern Europe which had no counterpart in Western Europe, unless it were in the relations between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. They determined, moreover, the characteristic wars of Eastern Europe. These tended to be horizontal as well as vertical, war within states as well as war between states. Guerrilla warfare rising into civil war could be carried on for long periods without a declaration of war between governments, because the irregular and terroristic bands who waged it could be disowned by the state in whose interest it was conducted. War of this kind had become endemic in Eastern Europe with the growth of the national movements under the Ottoman Empire; and by a curious ¹¹⁶ Stalin emphasized the importance of common frontiers in the interview he gave to Roy Howard on 1 March 1936. “History shows that when some State is intent on making war against any other State, even though not adjacent, it begins to seek frontiers across which it could reach the frontiers of the State which it desires to attack. Usually the aggressive State finds such frontiers. It finds them either with the aid of force, as in 1914 when Germany invaded Belgium in order to deal a blow to France, or it ‘borrows’ such a frontier, as Germany did with regard to Latvia, for instance, in 1918, in attempting to break through to Leningrad across Latvia. I do not know what specific frontiers Germany could adapt for her purposes [sc. of aggression against Soviet Russia], but I think those willing to lend a frontier to her can be found” (Manchester Guardian, 5 March 1936). ¹¹⁷ See L. B. Namier, Conflicts (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 14, on the “sandwich system” of international politics. ¹¹⁸ See H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, pp. 269–72.

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verbal transplantation the characteristic form of political activity in Western parliamentary states, the committee, had provided the name for the bands of irregular soldiers who represented the characteristic political activity of Eastern Europe, the Comitadji. With the dissolution of the eastern empires after the First World War this form of warfare spread, being the natural form of strife in states with an inflamed nationalism and minority problems; it was the most concrete expression of what was meant in Western Europe by ‘the Balkanisation of Central Europe.’¹¹⁹ During most of 1919 and 1920 the whole of Eastern Europe was in the throes of this irregular warfare, and it appeared again within the frontiers of dissolving Czechoslovakia between Munich and March 1939. At that date, when they were at the meridian of their success in utilizing it over this fair field for aggression that lay beyond their eastern frontiers, the Germans did not see that it was to become, in the form of partisan warfare during the Second World War, a principal means of breaking up their Eastern European empire and transferring its fragments to the allegiance of the rival Eastern European Great Power.¹²⁰ A balance of power has its proper laws of libration. Insight into their nature can provide foresight, of the kind which was often claimed and displayed between the First and Second World Wars as a property of the Marxist analysis of social conflicts. In a memorandum written as early as February 1925 the Historical Adviser to the British Foreign Office described the successive derangements of the Eastern European balance of power which, if unprevented, would lead to another Anglo-German war. It is the real interest of this country [wrote J. W. Headlam-Morley] to prevent a new alliance between Germany and Russia, an alliance which would no doubt be cemented by an attack on Poland. We cannot now be indifferent if Germany breaks through upon the east and there begins to acquire a new accession of territory and strength which would inevitably in the future be brought to bear upon ¹¹⁹ “It now looks as if the Near East were infecting conflicts of nationality in Western Europe with the ferocity of fanaticism which it has imported into its own. Before the War, the ancient conflicts of interest between Ulstermen and Catholics in Ireland or Germans and Poles in Silesia were waged with some restraint, and bloodshed was uncommon. In 1921 both these and other zones of national conflict in the West were a prey to revolutionary bands, semi-official bashy-bozuks, regular combatants whose activities were disavowed while approved by their governments, and all the other indecencies familiar in the Armenian vilayets or Macedonia. This moral Balkanisation is also unmistakable, and it is more dangerous than the political and economic manifestations of the tendency” (Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, pp. 26–7). [Ed. Bashy-bozuks were irregular Ottoman soldiers, notorious for their lack of discipline and reliance on plunder.] ¹²⁰ Liddell Hart finds in T. E. Lawrence the first great modern commander to recognize this mode of warfare and to embody it in his strategy in the Arabian campaign of the First World War. “For orthodox concentration, Lawrence substituted dispersion. For battle, he substituted a creeping paralysis—produced by intangibility and ubiquity. But he did more than paralyse the Turks. He foreshadowed what I believe will be the trend of the future—a super-guerrilla kind of warfare” (B. H. Liddell Hart, in T. E. Lawrence by his Friends, edited by A. W. Lawrence (London: Cape,1937), p. 184). Cf. the same author’s T. E. Lawrence—in Arabia and After (London: Cape, 1934), p. 438; and Julian Amery, Sons of the Eagle (London: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 165–9.

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the Rhine. . . . Has anyone attempted to realize what would happen if there were to be a new partition of Poland, or if the Czechoslovak State were to be so curtailed and dismembered that in fact it disappeared from the map of Europe? The whole of Europe would at once be in chaos. There would no longer be any principle, meaning or sense in the territorial arrangements of the continent. Imagine, for instance, that under some improbable condition, Austria rejoined Germany; that Germany, using the discontented minority in Bohemia, demanded a new frontier far over the mountains, including Carlsbad and Pilsen, and that at the same time, in alliance with Germany, the Hungarians recovered the southern slope of the Carpathians. This would be catastrophic, and, even if we neglected to interfere in time to prevent it, we should afterwards be driven to interfere, probably too late.¹²¹

It is the purpose of the rest of this chapter to trace the working-out of the inherent weakness of the Versailles system in Eastern Europe, thus early recognized, and counteracted by no supporting and containing influences from outside. For the detailed narrative of the German conquest of Czechoslovakia, of the Sudeten problem, the Munich Conference, the Vienna Award, and the final seizure of Prague, the reader is referred to the second and third volumes of the Survey of International Affairs for 1938. All that is attempted here is to show how the general European crisis of March 1939, which is the theme of the present volume, arose, by degrees which in retrospect acquired the delusive texture of inevitability, out of the unstable constellation of power in Eastern Europe; how that constellation of power was governed by its own laws, by the principles of irredentism and of political alliance, by the problem of national minorities and the importance of common frontiers; how the attempts of the Eastern European states to combine, from the Little Entente to the Polish–Rumanian project for a neutral bloc, were doomed to failure; and how, with the abdication of responsibility by the remoter Great Powers in Western Europe, the destinies of Eastern Europe were decided by the contiguous Great Powers, and above all by Germany and Russia.

(e) The Delimitation of Eastern Europe Against Soviet Russia The struggles for national self-determination were the principal internal theme of Eastern European politics in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. But they were overshadowed in importance by an external theme: the delimiting of an eastern frontier for Eastern Europe over against Russia. Bolshevik Russia was at that time considered a greater danger to Europe than defeated Germany; ¹²¹ Sir James Headlam-Morley, Studies in Diplomatic History (London: Methuen, 1930), pp. 183–4, quoted by permission of Messrs. Methuen.

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and moreover, in its aspect as the Russian Empire in dissolution, Bolshevik Russia offered handsome opportunities for territorial acquisition by the contiguous states, and for the expansion of the influence of the Western Great Powers. The most powerful of the successor states, and the chief instrument of the antiBolshevik policy of the Allies (particularly of France) was Poland. In 1918–19 Poland conquered East Galicia and overthrew the Ukrainian authorities there. The Supreme Council then authorized her to occupy the territory on condition of giving it autonomy; and then again granted her a twenty-five years’ mandate for it; and when the Poles repudiated both of these proposals for placing them under an international obligation, the Supreme Council in 1923 at last assigned East Galicia to Poland in full sovereignty.¹²² In 1920 Poland transgressed the defensive role allotted her by the Allied Great Powers and invaded the Soviet Ukraine. The ensuing war, in which the Poles first captured Kiev and the Russians nearly captured Warsaw in return, ended with the Treaty of Riga in 1921, whereby Poland secured extensive tracts of the Ukraine and White Russia, far beyond the Curzon Line, the provisional eastern frontier laid down for her in 1919 by the Allies in Paris.¹²³ Rumania had already obtained territorial advantage from the dissolution of the Russian Empire. When the Central Powers imposed the Treaty of Bucharest on her in May 1918, they gave her a free hand to absorb Bessarabia, ‘an absolutely unique example of a country crushingly defeated in war, yet aggrandized at the expense of one of her own allies.’¹²⁴ Rumania’s national claims to Bessarabia were good, though they were quickly nullified as far as the will of the population was concerned by her brutal misgovernment. The annexation was recognized by the Supreme Council;¹²⁵ it remained an obstacle to normal relations between Rumania and the Soviet Union until the latter entered the League in 1934.¹²⁶ One reason for the Polish conquest of East Galicia in 1919 was to establish a common frontier with Rumania,¹²⁷ and in 1921 Poland and Rumania formed a defensive alliance against Russia,¹²⁸ an alliance that remained the only constant factor in Eastern European diplomacy down to the out-break of the Second World War. Together the two Powers, one of them a Baltic state and the other a Danubian and Black Sea state, held the neck of Europe against the Bolshevik menace from the east.

¹²² H.P.C. i. 335–8; iv. 84–5, 95, 103–5, 135; vi. 245–6, 272–4, 283, note; Survey for 1920–3, p. 282. According to Macartney (National States and National Minorities, p. 199) this was “the only instance in which an attempt was made to apply the mandatory principle in Europe”. But Italy was offered the mandate for Albania (see below, note 170 and accompanying text). ¹²³ H.P.C. vi. 275, 318–22; Survey for 1920–3, p. 254. ¹²⁴ R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Roumanians, p. 520; cf. H.P.C. iii. 50; iv. 220. ¹²⁵ H.P.C. iv. 139–40, 228–9; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 273–8. ¹²⁶ Survey for 1924, pp. 263–5; Survey for 1927, pp. 297–300; Survey for 1934, p. 378. The Soviet Union was not recognized by Rumania until her admission to the League, when the Bessarabian question was tacitly shelved (ibid. p. 392). ¹²⁷ H.P.C. i. 337; vi. 269. ¹²⁸ Survey for 1920–3, pp. 271–2. The treaty was renewed in 1926 (Survey for 1926, p. 154).

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South of Rumania, the delimitation of Eastern Europe rested not so much with the Eastern European states themselves as with the Western Great Powers, whose sea-power here gave them something in the nature of a common frontier with Russia. The Danubian delta and the Black Sea Straits represented the line at which they had held the southward advance of Russia in the nineteenth century. The Danubian and Straits questions were connected geographically as well as historically, because the Danube, which was the greatest waterway of Eastern Europe, had its ultimate mouth not at Sulina but at the Dardanelles.¹²⁹ The Danube was potentially contested between the two Danubian Great Powers, Germany (formerly AustriaHungary) and Russia; and the Small Power most concerned was Rumania, who after recovering Bessarabia in the north from Russia and the Dobruja in the south from Bulgaria¹³⁰ held sovereignty over the whole of the Danubian delta. The Black Sea Straits were potentially contested between Russia, the dominant Power in the Black Sea, and Britain, the dominant Power in the Mediterranean; and the Small Power most concerned was Turkey, who had throughout modern history possessed sovereignty over both shores of the Straits. The simultaneous collapse of Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire in 1918 enhanced the influence of the Western Powers in the Danube and the Straits, or, to use the language of the Western Powers, made possible an unprecedented degree of internationalization for these regions. The Danube had first been internationalized by the Paris Congress of 1856, which set up a European Commission of the Great Powers and Turkey (together with Rumania after 1878) to administer the mouths of the Danube, and a Riparian Commission to supervise the whole course of the river above its mouths. The Riparian Commission was disliked by Austria-Hungary and soon discontinued; the European Commission proved one of the most successful experiments in international collaboration, a European institution that grew with the independence of the Rumanian state, in the interstice between the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires.¹³¹ By the Versailles Treaty in 1919 the European Commission, whose powers extended over the maritime Danube as far up as Braila, was confirmed; it was to consist of Britain, France, Italy, and Rumania. A new International Commission was foreshadowed for the fluvial Danube, from Braila up to Ulm, to consist of Britain, France, Italy, and the riparian states, two representatives, however, being assigned

¹²⁹ Cf. Grigore Gafencu, Préliminaires de la guerre à l’Est de l’accord de Moscou, 21 août 1939, aux hostilités en Russie, 22 juin 1941 (Fribourg: Egloff, 1944), p. 84 [transl. by Fletcher Allen with title Prelude to the Russian Campaign (London: Muller, 1945)]. Russia had twice had a Danubian frontier, through the possession of Southern Bessarabia: between the Russo-Turkish Treaty of Bucharest in 1812 and the Treaty of Paris in 1856, and between the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. ¹³⁰ H.P.C. iv. 12, 414, 433, 449–50. ¹³¹ See International Affairs, Peace Handbooks issued by the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, vol. xxiii (London: H.M.S.O., 1920), no. 149 (International Rivers, by Georges Kaeckenbeeck), pp. 30–6.

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to the ‘German riparian states,’ for France at that time was hoping that Germany would break up.¹³² These provisions were embodied and established in the Definitive Statute of the Danube in 1922.¹³³ The non-riparian Great Powers thus obtained a predominating influence in the Danube regime, which met with increasing opposition from Rumania;¹³⁴ and within a few years Russia and Germany were demanding to be admitted to the European Commission. The regime for the Black Sea Straits, which had been based on international agreement since the London Convention of 1840, was another index of the balance of power. Russia’s interest in the Straits was more vital than that of the other Powers, and since she was always inferior in naval strength to Britain and France it was her normal policy to prevent entry into the Black Sea for foreign fleets rather than to secure exit from it for her own. Moreover, the Straits régime involved the security of Turkey in a much greater degree than the Danube régime affected that of any Danubian Small Power. When in 1918 Russia and Turkey both collapsed, control of the Straits and of the Black Sea passed to Britain and France, who used it to intervene directly against the Soviet Government by supporting Denikin and Wrangel in Southern Russia, and indirectly against Turkey by encouraging the expansionist aims of Greece. The twelfth of Wilson’s Fourteen Points had declared that ‘the Dardanelles should be permanently opened to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees’; but when the United States refused a mandate for the Straits,¹³⁵ they were jointly occupied instead by Britain, France, and Italy, which meant the preponderance of Britain as the strongest naval Power and the growing jealousy of the other two.¹³⁶ By the Treaty of Sèvres which the Allies imposed on Turkey in 1920, Eastern Thrace (including Gallipoli and most of the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara) was added to Greece, so that the only part of the former European Turkey remaining under Turkish sovereignty was Constantinople and its hinterland. Full freedom of passage through the Straits was established for the first time; a Commission of the Straits, comparable to the European Commission of the Danube, was created to administer them; and both sides of the Straits, whether under Greek or Turkish sovereignty, were created a demilitarized zone in which Britain, France, and Italy alone could maintain troops.¹³⁷ The Treaty of Sèvres was never ratified and was at once made obsolete by the Kemalist revival in Turkey. The Western ascendancy in the Straits produced

¹³² Treaty of Versailles, articles 346–7; H.P.C. ii. 107–8; iv. 274, 435. Similar international commissions were established for the Elbe (representing Germany, Czechoslovakia, Britain, France, Italy, and Belgium), and the Oder (representing Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Britain, France, Denmark, and Sweden). ¹³³ Survey for 1920–3, pp. 328–32. ¹³⁴ Survey for 1925, ii. 165–6. ¹³⁵ H.P.C. vi. 26–28. This solution of the Straits problem had apparently first been proposed in Toynbee’s Nationality and the War, pp. vii, 375–8. ¹³⁶ H.P.C. vi. 64. ¹³⁷ Ibid. pp. 60–3.

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by reaction an alliance between Nationalist Turkey and Soviet Russia, signed at Moscow in 1921, which proclaimed the freedom of the Straits to be guaranteed under a statute drawn up by a conference of the littoral states of the Straits and the Black Sea: that is to say, excluding the Western Powers and giving Turkey and Russia a preponderant voice.¹³⁸ When in 1922 the Turks drove the Greek invaders out of Anatolia and themselves advanced into the Straits demilitarized zone as far as Chanak, Britain was abandoned by France and Italy and the foundations of the Sèvres settlement were swept away. The Mudania armistice of 1922 embodied a compromise, whereby the Allies conceded that Eastern Thrace should be restored to Turkey and Turkey accepted the British conception of the freedom of the Straits.¹³⁹ At the subsequent Lausanne Conference the conflict of interests between the Western Powers and Russia became uppermost, with Turkey in a position of detachment. The Western Powers wanted the Straits to be open to a limited number of warships, which would give themselves access to the Black Sea at the price of giving Russia similar access to the Mediterranean; Russia wanted the Straits to be closed to all warships. Turkey was prepared to come to terms with the Western Powers; Eastern Thrace was restored to her, and the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 included a Straits Convention with the following provisions: (1) Freedom of passage was established for merchant vessels in peace and war. (2) Freedom of passage was allowed to all warships in time of peace, except that no Power might send a fleet into the Black Sea larger than the largest fleet of a littoral Power (which meant that, though no single fleet larger than the Soviet fleet might pass the Straits, a combination of hostile fleets was still possible). (3) The shores of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus only were demilitarized (and not, as under the Sèvres Treaty, of the Sea of Marmara as well). (4) An international Straits Commission was established to see that the provisions concerning the passage of warships were carried out. (5) Turkish security was protected by permission to close the Straits to enemy ships in a war in which she was herself belligerent, and by a joint guarantee of the freedom of the Straits and the security of the demilitarized zones by Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. This treaty struck a balance between the predominance of the Western Powers and Turkish national interests; Soviet Russia signed it under protest and did not ratify it.¹⁴⁰ The diplomatic links between Russia and Turkey were renewed as a result of the conflict of interests between Britain and Turkey over the question of Mosul, on the Turco-Iraqi frontier; and in 1925 a Russo-Turkish treaty of friendship and neutrality was signed at Paris.¹⁴¹ Thence-forward Turkey alone of the Eastern European

¹³⁸ Survey for 1920–3, pp. 370–2. ¹³⁹ H.P.C. vi. 38–9, 104–6. ¹⁴⁰ Ibid. pp. 108–10; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 374–6; Survey for 1936, pp. 595–8. ¹⁴¹ Survey for 1925, i. 525; ii. 66. This treaty was renewed in 1929 and 1931 (Survey for 1931, pp. 340–1), and again in 1935, and was denounced by the Soviet Government in 1945.

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states, through the strength of her strategic position and the sagacity and sobriety of her policy, and by not leaning heavily to one side or the other, succeeded in combining an independent course and tolerable relations with all the neighbouring Great Powers, of whom the two most important for her were Russia and Britain.¹⁴²

(f ) The Ascendancy of France The Allied Great Powers confirmed and established the small states of Eastern Europe as a barrier to Bolshevik Russia and a counterpoise to defeated Germany. The centre of this system was Poland. Being twice the size in population of any other Eastern European nation, and relying on her historic traditions as the dominant Power of Eastern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, she now aspired to the rank of Great Power.¹⁴³ Poland aimed to be supreme in the Baltic region. The Baltic had become for a brief interval what it had not been before in modern history: a sea without a Great Power on its shores. Before 1914 it had been dominated by the German navy at the expense of the second Baltic Great Power, Russia. Russia had now lost her Baltic seaboard, except for less than a hundred miles, largely icebound, where Leningrad lies at the head of the Gulf of Finland. Of Germany’s Baltic predominance the main instrument had been the Kiel Canal,¹⁴⁴ which was opened by the Versailles Treaty to all nations at peace with Germany, though its continuance under her sovereignty was an assurance of restored dominion.¹⁴⁵ There being from 1919 to 1933 no active Great Power on the Baltic, the new Poland, which controlled the Vistula, could ¹⁴² Turkey had a common frontier with Britain all along her western and southern coasts where she bordered a sea in which Britain was the dominant Power; with France, on the southern border of Anatolia where she marched with the French mandated territory of Syria; with Italy, through the Italian possession of the Dodecanese. She made a treaty of friendship with Italy in 1928, which, however, had little foundation or consequence (see below, notes 194–6 and accompanying text); and another with France in 1930 (Survey for 1930, p. 316), which was followed, after the cession to Turkey of the Sanjaq of Alexandretta in 1938, by a Franco-Turkish declaration of mutual assistance (Survey for 1938, i. 491). Turkey did not form diplomatic ties with Britain until the eve of the Second World War, which resulted in the Anglo-Franco-Turkish treaty of alliance of 19 October 1939. ¹⁴³ The Poles numbered 19 millions in 1919; the Rumanians, the next largest, were 11½ millions; the three Yugoslav peoples together, 10 millions; the Czechoslovaks collectively, 9 millions. On Poland’s “brevet rank as a Great Power”, cf. Toynbee, World after the Peace Conference, pp. 35–6; Survey for 1926, pp. 20 seqq.; Survey for 1933, pp. 184–5, 206, 218; Survey for 1934, p. 409; Survey for 1936, pp. 393–4. ¹⁴⁴ See Toynbee, Nationality and the War, pp. 339, 347–58. ¹⁴⁵ Treaty of Versailles, articles 380–6; H.P.C. ii.199–201; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 233–4. By the Treaty of Versailles (article 195) Germany had further to demolish all fortifications along her Baltic coastline. “The Baltic has served many successive lords, but the Germans, in the later Middle Ages the German Hansards, and in modern days the German Reich, have wielded an unrivalled supremacy. One of the two gates into the sea, the Kiel Canal, belongs to Germany alone; the other, that through Scandinavian waters, she can practically close at will. Her Baltic coastline, which for seventy years stretched from Flensburg as far as Memel, was broken only from 1919 to 1939 by the short strips amputated at Versailles. Even then her ten ports on the Baltic formed a galaxy unrivalled by any other State” (W. F. Reddaway, Problems of the Baltic (Cambridge: University Press, 1940), p. 104).

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claim the role. In October 1920, in the flush of victory over Russia, Poland seized Vilna from Lithuania.¹⁴⁶ Like Poland’s other acts of violence this created its train of bad blood. Lithuania in consequence refused to establish diplomatic relations with Poland, their common frontier remaining in a state of blockade for eighteen years.¹⁴⁷ Her tradition of hostility towards Poland set up a corresponding tradition of diplomatic amity with Soviet Russia,¹⁴⁸ and it was assisted by the Riga Treaty, which separated Lithuania from Russia by a belt of territory that gave Poland a common frontier with Latvia.¹⁴⁹ In 1923 Lithuania in her turn flouted the Allied Powers and compensated herself by seizing Memel, whose status had remained indefinite. The Allies could only recognize the Lithuanian fait accompli as they had recognized its Polish precedents, and they assigned the sovereignty over Memel to Lithuania on condition that it should be constituted an autonomous area.¹⁵⁰ From Rumania and Poland, the chain of Russia’s frontier states continued north in Latvia, Estonia, and Finland; like Poland they had reason to fear Russia, because they had won their independence at her expense, and even after it had been recognized by the Soviet Union their relations with her remained bad. Poland might seem their natural protector and ally, and Polish policy aimed at forming a Baltic Union under her hegemony; but the aim was frustrated by her bad relations with Lithuania and the suspicions aroused by her aggressive policy. In 1924 Finland entered the Scandinavian group, since her historic links were with Sweden, and the loss of the Aland Islands, in the Scandinavian political atmosphere, was not intolerable;¹⁵¹ and after 1925 the Baltic States turned their attention to a triple bloc between themselves. The Polish–Rumanian alliance was the only internal diplomatic link between the Baltic and Danubian regions; the Carpathians formed a political as well as a physical barrier. Poland, whose existence involved bad relations with Germany and Russia, whose aggression had established a frontier with Russia in which Russia could never acquiesce and had made an enemy of Lithuania, lived in bad relations also with Czechoslovakia, with whom she had an overriding common defensive interest against Germany. The dispute centred upon Teschen, which was partitioned between the two in 1920; and the Poles felt that the Czechs had taken advantage of Polish weakness during the Russo-Polish War to extract concessions which could not have been obtained in times of peace.¹⁵² North of the ¹⁴⁶ H.P.C. vi. 309; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 250–6. ¹⁴⁷ Survey for 1934, pp. 412–13. See below, notes 283–4 and accompanying text. ¹⁴⁸ Survey for 1920–3, p. 249; Survey for 1927, pp. 225–6; Survey for 1934, p. 412. ¹⁴⁹ Survey for 1920–3, pp. 243–4. ¹⁵⁰ Ibid. pp. 256–61. ¹⁵¹ Ibid. p. 241; Survey for 1924, p. 461. See Martin Wight, “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952). On the Aland Islands dispute see Survey for 1920–3, pp. 234–8. ¹⁵² H.P.C. iv. 348–67; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 210, 299; Survey for 1924, pp. 457–8; Survey for 1935, i. 279–86. There was a slight rapprochement in 1925 (Survey for 1925, ii. 247–50).

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Carpathians the main centre of unrest was Poland, an ‘historic nation’ temporarily victorious and encroaching upon its neighbours; south of the Carpathians the source of unrest was Hungary, an historic nation temporarily defeated and seeking the restoration of its historical rights in revisionist claims upon its neighbours. In 1920–1 the three leading successor states of the Dual Monarchy, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, formed the Little Entente against Hungarian revisionism and the danger of a Habsburg restoration.¹⁵³ The Little Entente remained for seventeen years the diplomatic skeleton of the Eastern European system. What clothed it with flesh, and at the same time provided an external link between the Danubian and Baltic regions, was the French alliance. A military alliance between France and Poland was signed in 1921, after General Weygand’s mission had saved Poland from military collapse in the Russo-Polish War.¹⁵⁴ In 1924 a treaty of friendship and alliance was signed between France and Czechoslovakia.¹⁵⁵ These two alliances, between France on the one hand and Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other, were embodied in the Locarno Pact of 1925 in the form of treaties of mutual guarantee.¹⁵⁶ But the Locarno Pact already weakened the Versailles system in Eastern Europe by the distinction it made between Germany’s western frontier (which was multilaterally guaranteed by Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, and Italy) and Germany’s eastern frontier, which Britain refused to guarantee, and which thus seemed to be recognized as possessing a less sacrosanct character. The French system of alliances was completed by a Franco-Rumanian alliance in 1926¹⁵⁷ and a Franco-Yugoslav alliance in 1927.¹⁵⁸ This series of treaties marked the high point of Eastern Europe as a political ridge or wall. Thenceforward it was subject to steady Italian erosion, unwittingly preparing for German expansion ten years later.

(g) The Ascendancy of Italy Though the immediate history of the Turkish and Russian successor states after the First World War was similar, and drew them together, their circumstances soon became different. Soviet Russia was pillaged, ostracized, suspected, and feared, for she had adopted a creed that accentuated the old antagonism between Holy Russia and Europe, and she never lost her potential status of Great Power. Nationalist Turkey liquidated the heritage of the Ottoman Empire, repulsed her invaders, and transformed herself into a well-conducted national Small Power on the Western model. Greece endeavoured to wring gains from Turkey’s weakness as Poland did ¹⁵³ H.P.C. iv. 428, 436, 493–6; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 287–303. ¹⁵⁴ Ibid. pp. 272–3. ¹⁵⁵ Survey for 1924, p. 441. ¹⁵⁶ Survey for 1925, ii. 52, 55, 451–2. It was the Franco-Czechoslovak treaties of 1924 and 1925 (the latter an integral part of the Locarno Pact) that France evaded and dishonoured at Munich. ¹⁵⁷ Survey for 1926, pp. 156, 485–7. ¹⁵⁸ Ibid. pp. 156–7; Survey for 1927, pp. 154–5, 162–3, 539–41.

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from Russia’s, and between 1919 and 1922 followed a brief dream of eastern expansion,¹⁵⁹ but the Anatolian sea-board proved a Curzon Line she could not pass. She was once more confined to a Balkan policy, and her foreign policy became concerned again with relations with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to her north.¹⁶⁰ Greece, Yugoslavia, and Rumania had the same kind of common interest against Bulgarian revisionism that Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia had against Hungarian. But there were certain differences. There were ties between Bulgaria and her victors which had no counterpart in the case of Hungary; and there were larger disagreements between the victors than in the case of the Little Entente, so that a Balkan Entente was not concluded until 1934. The main tie between Bulgaria and her victors was that with Yugoslavia. It was Stamboliski’s policy to establish a Balkan federation based on the unity of the South Slav peoples, and though he was thrown from power before he could advance towards his aim, the ideal remained deeply rooted in the Bulgarian mind. The Balkan vortex was centred not on Bulgaria itself so much as on Macedonia, the indeterminate region where the frontiers of Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria all met, and here the conflict of interests was triangular. Bulgaria had irredentist claims to Serbian Macedonia, and became the headquarters of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), although she was herself the worst victim of that body.¹⁶¹ Bulgaria’s chief loss by the Neuilly Treaty was Western Thrace, and she had constant claims upon Greece for access to the Aegean through Dedeagatch or a similar port.¹⁶² But Yugoslavia likewise had southward-thrusting claims against Greece, for access to the Aegean at Salonika, and these for many years were the cause of bad relations between the two.¹⁶³ But just as the relationships of the Baltic states were ultimately determined by the positive pressure or the negative attraction of Germany and Russia, so the relationships of the Danubian and Balkan countries were not self-determining. Before 1914 Balkan politics had been overshadowed by Austria-Hungary and Russia. After 1918 Russia’s influence was temporarily in abeyance; but with the disappearance of Austria-Hungary, whom the Italians considered as their ancient enemy, Italy immediately stepped into the Austro-Hungarian role as the dominating influence and disturbing factor in South-Eastern Europe. In the 1920s Mussolini’s flamboyant and provocative part in European politics was comparable to that

¹⁵⁹ On Venizelos’s dream of creating “a real Magna Graecia” [sic] in Asia Minor see H.P.C. iv. 452–3. ¹⁶⁰ See Survey for 1920–3, pp. 333–8. ¹⁶¹ IMRO was founded in 1896 to liberate Macedonia from Turkish rule and unite all Macedonians for that purpose irrespective of their nationality. After the First World War it became the main instrument of Bulgarian revisionism against Yugoslavia, until it was suppressed by Velchev in 1934. It was the European prototype of a liberation movement which degenerates into a terrorist organization. See J. Swire, Bulgarian Conspiracy (London: Hale, 1939); H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, pp. 247–51, 312–16; Barker, Macedonia, pp. 16 seqq., 36–45. ¹⁶² H.P.C. iv. 456–9; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 338–40. ¹⁶³ Ibid., pp. 340–3; Survey for 1926, pp. 165–77; Survey for 1928, pp. 183–7.

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played at earlier times by Kaiser Wilhelm II or Napoleon III,¹⁶⁴ and an overture to that about to be played by a more considerable dictator north of the Alps. Italian policy in South-Eastern Europe was consistently malignant in that it pursued opportunist designs of hegemony which Italy herself lacked the strength to fulfil, a prestige policy of rivalry with France, with the aim and effect of exacerbating conflicts and promoting new hatreds. Like Greece, Italy had aims of aggrandizement in the Aegean at Turkey’s expense. These were first realized when she occupied the Dodecanese and Rhodes in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12. Her pledge to evacuate them only when the Turkish evacuation of Libya was complete allowed her to be in continued occupation of the islands when the First World War brought the opportunity of a more extensive partition of Turkey.¹⁶⁵ By the secret Treaty of London of 1915 Italy was to obtain the Adalian sector of Anatolia and the Dodecanese in full sovereignty, despite previous disclaimers of an intention of annexing Greek islands.¹⁶⁶ By the Venizelos–Tittoni agreement of 1919, Italy agreed to cede the Dodecanese to Greece, and to hold a plebiscite in Rhodes when Britain ceded Cyprus; this agreement was to have simultaneous effect with the Treaty of Sèvres, by which Italy obtained an enlarged sphere of Anatolia. But Italy’s Anatolian dreams along with those of Greece were blown away by the Kemalist renaissance in Turkey. In 1922 she accordingly denounced the Venizelos–Tittoni agreement as invalidated by the nullity of the Treaty of Sèvres; and under the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 she finally secured the sovereignty of the Dodecanese, a modest but satisfying balance out of her Near Eastern speculations,¹⁶⁷ but at the expense of creating lasting hostility in Turkey and Greece. The nearer and more urgent object of Italian policy was to succeed to the inheritance of Austria-Hungary. The irredentist formula was ‘Trent and Trieste,’ which meant in effect the Brenner frontier and control of the Adriatic. By the secret Treaty of London of 1915 Italy was conceded the Brenner frontier, and had this gain confirmed at the Peace Conference on grounds of strategic necessity, although it meant not only the redemption of the Italian Trentino but also the acquisition of the purely German South Tyrol or Alto Adige, and the drawing of a frontier that

¹⁶⁴ Survey for 1927, p. 115. ¹⁶⁵ For the original connexion between the Dodecanesian and Libyan questions see Turkey in Asia, Peace Handbooks issued by the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, vol. xi (London: H.M.S.O., 1920), no. 64 (Islands of the Northern and Eastern Aegean), pp. 19–20; and Spanish and Italian Possessions: Independent States, vol. xx of the same series, no. 127 (Italian Libya), pp. 22–26, with appendixes. ¹⁶⁶ For the text of the secret Treaty of London of 1915, see H.P.C. v. 384–91. Italy’s territorial claims in Asia Minor were defined by the Agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne of 1917, which, however, never obtained the necessary consent of Russia (ibid. vi. 18–22). ¹⁶⁷ Ibid. pp. 31, note, 37–38, 117; Survey for 1924, pp. 470–1. The Dodecanesian question, which was originally entangled with that of Libya, at this stage became entangled with that of Jubaland (Survey for 1924, pp. 465–8).

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put the new Austrian Republic at Italy’s military discretion.¹⁶⁸ It was an index of Austrian weakness that the Fascist Government’s ruthless policy of denationalization against the German minority in the South Tyrol,¹⁶⁹ unparalleled in pre-war Austrian policy in the Trentino, did not, as it would have done between states of a more equal size, cause permanent bad relations, or prevent Austria from becoming an Italian satellite. Control of the Adriatic involved two separate aims—control of Albania, and control of Istria with the Croatian and Dalmatian coasts. Albania was a principal strategic position of Eastern Europe, one of the historic gate-ways between Western Europe and the Balkans, controlling also, by the splendid harbour of Valona, the Straits of Otranto leading into the Adriatic. Albanian independence from a hostile Power was as vital an interest for Italy as the independence of the Low Countries for Britain. The declaration of Albanian independence in 1912 during the First Balkan War was accepted by the Great Powers as preferable to the partition of Albania between Serbia and Greece, because Austria-Hungary and Italy had determined on the creation of an Albanian buffer state. In 1913 Albania was accordingly recognized by the Great Powers as a sovereign principality, to be neutralized like Belgium under their guarantee.¹⁷⁰ With the outbreak of the First World War this status was never confirmed, and in Italian policy the buffer state quickly developed into a bridgehead. In November 1914 Italy occupied Valona, and by the secret Treaty of London of 1915 she was to acquire the port, with a protectorate over Albania. At the Peace Conference she was offered a mandate over Albania, but she returned it in 1920, chiefly because of the success of Ahmed Bey Zogu in playing on a small scale the role of a Mustafa Kemal as leader of the forces of Albanian nationalism against foreign intervention. By an Italo-Albanian agreement of 1920 Italy withdrew her troops from Albania, retaining only the island of Sasseno which dominated the Bay of Valona.¹⁷¹ In the same year Albania was admitted to the League of Nations, without the question of her neutralization having been revived.¹⁷²

¹⁶⁸ H.P.C. iv. 280–7. ¹⁶⁹ Survey for 1927, pp. 185–201. ¹⁷⁰ Organic Statute of the Albanian State, 29 July 1913, clause 3 (G. P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914, London: H.M.S.O., 1926–38), vol. ix, part ii, no. 1186; G. F. de Martens, Nouveau recueil général de traités, 3rd ser., vol. ix (Leipzig: T. Weicher, 1938), p. 650). The Great Powers had accepted the principle of Albanian autonomy on 20 December 1912 (Gooch and Temperley, vol. ix, part ii, no. 403), and the settlement of Albania had been reserved for their decision by the Treaty of London of 30 May 1913, article iii (Martens, Nouveau recueil, viii. 16). ¹⁷¹ See J. Swire, Albania: The Rise of a Kingdom (London: Williams & Norgate, 1929), pp. 322–4. Sasseno had been a dependency of Corfù and Paxo when these islands were neutralized on the cession of the Ionian Islands by Britain to Greece in 1864 (see below, note 177). In 1914 Italy prevailed upon Greece to cede Sasseno to Albania (British and Foreign State Papers, cvii. 889). ¹⁷² See H.P.C. iv. 338–47; Oppenheim, International Law, ii. 231, note 1; Robinson, Albania’s Road to Freedom, pp. 41–6.

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The frontiers of Albania were fixed in1921.¹⁷³ At the same time the Allied Great Powers declared that the violation of Albania’s frontiers or independence ‘might constitute a danger for the strategic safety of Italy,’ and that if Albania should appeal to the Council of the League because her independence was endangered the Great Powers would ‘recommend that the restoration of the territorial frontiers of Albania should be entrusted to Italy.’¹⁷⁴ Italy thus secured a reversionary interest in Albania amounting to a contingent mandate.¹⁷⁵ The delimitation of Albanian frontiers upon the spot was not completed until 1926,¹⁷⁶ and the process involved sharp conflicts of interests between Italy on the one side and Yugoslavia and Greece on the other, giving occasion for the first assertion of Italian power and prestige by the Fascist Government. In 1923 Italy took advantage of the murder of an Italian general engaged in the delimitation of the Graeco-Albanian frontier to deliver an ultimatum to Greece, followed by the bombardment and occupation of Corfù, one of the most important strategic points in the Mediterranean, which had been neutralized since 1864.¹⁷⁷ This act of violence marked the international début of Italian Fascism, and left an enduring impression on Greek minds.¹⁷⁸ The condonation of the Polish seizure of Vilna now had its fruit in the first defiance of the new international order and of the League of Nations by a Great Power. By the secret Treaty of London of 1915 Italy was to succeed Austria-Hungary in possession of Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and half the Dalmatian coast, as well as Valona in Albania, on strategic grounds which would have put 750,000 Yugoslavs under Italian rule. The corollary of this policy was intense Italian hostility to the enlargement of Serbia into an Adriatic Yugoslav state.¹⁷⁹ Italian claims were whittled down by the Peace Conference, leaving as their residue the unsettled question of a buffer-state of Fiume, which by the Italo-Yugoslav Treaty of Rapallo in 1920 ¹⁷³ Survey for 1920–3, pp. 343–8. ¹⁷⁴ Declaration by the Governments of the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan, in regard to Albania, 9 November 1921 (League of Nations Treaty Series, xii. 383; Survey for 1927, pp. 166–7). ¹⁷⁵ See Robinson, Albania’s Road to Freedom, p. 46. ¹⁷⁶ See Survey for 1925, ii. 282–8. ¹⁷⁷ See Survey for 1920–3, pp. 343–8; George Glasgow, The Janina Murders and the Occupation of Corfu (London: Anglo-Hellenic League, 1923). Corfù, Paxo, and their dependencies had been neutralized when Britain ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece, by the Treaty of London, 1864, article ii (Hertslet, Map of Europe by Treaty, iii. 1592; cf. C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1937), pp. 11, 55). This neutrality was violated by the protecting Powers themselves, Britain, France, and Russia, when they occupied Corfù in 1916 (see G. F. Abbott, Greece and the Allies 1914–1922 (London: Methuen, 1922), pp. 85–6, and J. W. Garner, International Law and the World War (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), ii. 241 seqq.). It appears, however, that after the First World War Corfù automatically resumed its neutral status, since the Treaty of London, 1864, remained in force, and that in this respect the Italian act of aggression in 1923 was aggravated, though it was not an aspect of the matter to which Britain and France could conveniently advert (see Quincy Wright in The American Journal of International Law, 1924, xviii. 104–8, who does not mention, however, the Allied violation of Corfiote neutrality in 1916). ¹⁷⁸ See Monroe, Mediterranean in Politics, pp. 179–80. ¹⁷⁹ On Italian opposition to the recognition of the Serb–Croat–Slovene state, see H.P.C. iv. 131, 206– 7; v. 158–9.

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was at length erected into a free city.¹⁸⁰ It took Germany twenty-one years to extinguish the Free City of Danzig, and then at the cost of precipitating a European war; it took Italy only four to extinguish Fiume: an index of the difference in strength between a defeated Germany and a victorious Italy, a resolute Poland and a weakened Yugoslavia, as well as the difference between the constellations of European power in 1923 and 1939. One of the first achievements of the Fascist Government was to take over the inheritance of d’Annunzio by incorporating Fiume in Italy de facto; and in 1924 Yugoslavia was compelled to consent to the partition of the territory, Italy gaining the chief advantage.¹⁸¹ As a result of the Peace Settlement, therefore, Italy gained important positions in Eastern Europe, which enabled her to pursue an active policy of intervention and disruption that was the conditioning factor in Balkan and Danubian politics until she was eclipsed by Nazi Germany. Now Italy can only move in an easterly direction [said Mussolini after the Fiume Agreement in 1924], the fact being that on the west there are national states which have taken definitive form and to which we can send nothing except our labour. . . . Therefore the lines for the pacific expansion of Italy lie towards the east.¹⁸²

Italian policy pursued four related aims: the extension of a virtual protectorate over Austria in the north and Albania in the east; the isolation and disruption of Yugoslavia, which was not only contiguous but was also the strongest of the Balkan Powers, by fomenting the Croat question in the north and the Macedonian question in the south;¹⁸³ the support of the revisionist Powers, Bulgaria and Hungary; and consequently opposition to Yugoslavia’s ally France as dominant Power in Eastern Europe. These aims were pursued not only by diplomatic means, but secretly, by the subsidizing of Fascist and terrorist groups in other countries, and illegally, by arms-running in contravention of the Peace Treaties. In the Szent Gotthard incident of January 1928, Italy was implicated in the smuggling of machine-guns to Hungary; and in January 1933 the socialist workmen at the Austrian arms factory at Hirtenberg exposed a similar smuggling of rifles and machine-guns, probably destined not only for Hungary but also for the Heimwehr in Austria.¹⁸⁴ Italy patronized and financed both IMRO, the Macedonian terrorist ¹⁸⁰ H.P.C. iv. 301–35. ¹⁸¹ Survey for 1924, pp. 408–22. ¹⁸² Ibid. p. 442. ¹⁸³ “Albania and Bulgaria were separated by Jugoslav Macedonia, to parts of which each advanced claims on ethnical grounds. From Durazzo to Salonica, across Albania, Jugoslav and Greek territory, had once gone the ‘Via Egnatia,’ highway of Imperial Rome for the domination of the Balkan Peninsula” (H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 367). Italy promised Albania a common frontier with Bulgaria (Swire, Bulgarian Conspiracy, p. 214). ¹⁸⁴ Survey for 1928, pp. 161–7; Survey for 1933, p. 247, note 2; Survey for 1934, p. 494, note 2. There are versions of these obscure incidents in George Seldes, Sawdust Caesar (London: Barker, 1936), pp.

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organization, and Ustasa, its Croatian counterpart. In 1929 the Ustasa leader Pavelic had to flee from Yugoslavia, Ustasa and IMRO concluded a formal alliance, and thenceforward Pavelic lived mainly in Italy or Hungary.¹⁸⁵ The international revolutionary policy of Fascist Italy culminated in the murder of Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934. The Italian forward policy first became overt in 1926, when Mussolini rejected a French and Yugoslav proposal of a tripartite treaty between France, Italy, and Yugoslavia for the stabilization of the Balkans.¹⁸⁶ In November 1926 Italy and Albania signed a treaty of friendship and security, which the British Minister in Tirana regarded as incompatible with Albanian independence¹⁸⁷ and which initiated a crisis that lasted for a year. In April 1927, Italy and Hungary signed a treaty of friendship and arbitration.¹⁸⁸ Yugoslavia replied by securing, on 11 November 1927, the signature of her treaty of friendship and arbitration with France, which completed the links between France and the Little Entente.¹⁸⁹ On 22 November 1927 Italy and Albania signed a defensive alliance, which was the outward expression of the increasing Italian hold over the military and economic organization of Albania.¹⁹⁰ In 1928 Italy secured treaties of friendship with Turkey and Greece, by which she hoped to consolidate her influence in the Eastern Mediterranean.¹⁹¹ For Turkey this was a reinsurance against her treaty of 1925 with the Soviet Union,¹⁹² as well as an attempt to avert Italian expansionist claims; for Greece it served to bring pressure to bear on Yugoslavia for a settlement of the Salonika dispute.¹⁹³ But Turkey and Greece did not abate their suspicions of Italian imperialism, their memories of Anatolian claims, of the Dodecanese and Corfù;¹⁹⁴ and when the Graeco-Turkish rapprochement which Italy had striven for as the third side of her East Mediterranean triangle was finally achieved in 1930,¹⁹⁵ it proved to be, not an

264–7, and George Eric Rowe Gedye, Fallen Bastions: The Central European Tragedy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939), pp. 74–6. ¹⁸⁵ Survey for 1934, p. 559, note 3; Swire, Bulgarian Conspiracy, especially pp. 49, 169–70, 223– 4; Macartney, Hungary, p. 374. Sec also Cecil F. Melville, Balkan Racket (London: Jarrolds, 1942), chapter i. ¹⁸⁶ Survey for 1927, p. 154. ¹⁸⁷ Ibid. pp. 156, 169–71. On the incident of the British Minister, see H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 371; Swire, Albania, p. 473; Robinson, Albania’s Road to Freedom, pp. 76–77; cf. Survey for 1927, p. 173. ¹⁸⁸ Ibid. p. 159. The corresponding entente between Italy and Bulgaria was not enshrined in a treaty, but was crowned by the marriage of Tsar Boris to an Italian princess in 1930 (Survey for 1930, p. 156, note 2). ¹⁸⁹ Survey for 1927, pp.162–3. ¹⁹⁰ Ibid. pp. 163, 182–3. ¹⁹¹ Survey for 1928, pp. 158–61. ¹⁹² Ibid. p. 158. ¹⁹³ Ibid. p. 185. ¹⁹⁴ Survey for 1925, i. 526, note 3; Survey for 1934, p. 330; Survey for 1925, ii. 83 and note 2; Survey for 1936, pp. 601–2. “Italy’s historical objectives are Asia and Africa,” Mussolini’s speech of 18 March 1934. ¹⁹⁵ Survey for 1930, pp. 157–68.

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instrument of Italian designs, but the most enduring bulwark of the status quo in Eastern Europe.¹⁹⁶ In 1932 Turkish policy as a conservative Power was crowned by her entry into the League of Nations.¹⁹⁷ It was under the combined leadership of Greece and Turkey that the tendency towards Balkan unity now acquired new momentum, as a reaction against the division of the Balkan states between the French and Italian systems. An unofficial Balkan Conference was set up of the six Balkan states, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, and Turkey, which held annual sessions from 1930 to 1933.¹⁹⁸ They failed of any lasting political agreement, because of the Bulgarian revisionism that refused to sign any general Balkan treaty involving recognition of the status quo. The only result of the movement towards Balkan unity was the conclusion in 1934 of the Balkan Pact, by which Yugoslavia, Rumania, Greece, and Turkey mutually guaranteed their frontiers against aggression by a Balkan state, and also against a Balkan state which joined another Power in aggression against a signatory.¹⁹⁹ The latter clause quickly disclosed that the interdependence of the Balkan Powers did not outweigh their several dependence upon non-Balkan Great Powers: Turkey qualified the Pact by insisting that she would not be obliged to go to war with Russia on behalf of Rumania, because of the Russo-Turkish treaty of 1925, and Greece by insisting that she would not be obliged to go to war with any Great Power, meaning Italy.²⁰⁰ The Pact was open to the adherence of the other two Balkan countries, but they never joined. The omission of Albania already impaired the Entente in its character of a united front against the Great Powers. Albania had shown a disposition to join, having in 1931 so far emancipated herself from Italian supervision that she refused to renew the treaty of 1926, but by 1934 Italy had resumed sufficient control to forbid her signing the Pact.²⁰¹ The omission of Bulgaria gave the Balkan Entente as purely anti-revisionist an appearance as the Little Entente, and nullified its character as an embryonic Balkan federation by leaving a dissident state in a key position, as a foothold for any Great Power.²⁰² The isolation of Bulgaria, however, was by no means as complete as that of Hungary. Her relations with Yugoslavia, against whom she had the largest territorial claims, were by turns fratricidal and fraternal, and in 1933 and 1934 the latter tendency was so marked that it alarmed Greece and Turkey.²⁰³ The formation of the Balkan Entente encouraged the coup d’état in ¹⁹⁶ Cf. Survey for 1931, pp. 326–9; Survey for 1934, pp. 518–19. This was the only one of the treaties between Eastern European Powers which survived the Second World War (The Times, 6 April 1948). ¹⁹⁷ Survey for 1934, pp. 216–20. ¹⁹⁸ See Survey for 1930, pp. 145–56; Survey for 1931, pp. 324–40; Survey for 1934, pp. 508–11. ¹⁹⁹ Ibid. pp. 526–7. ²⁰⁰ Ibid. pp. 527–8. The contingency foreseen by the Turks was that in a war between Russia and Rumania, Bulgaria might be drawn in on the Russian side, and Turkey thereby obliged to go to war against Bulgaria and Russia. ²⁰¹ Survey for 1934, pp. 523, note 2, and 535–6. ²⁰² On the importance of Bulgaria’s strategic position, see H.P.C. iv. 444–6; Survey for 1934, p. 512. ²⁰³ Ibid. pp. 513–16; cf. pp. 352–3; Survey for 1936, p. 601.

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Bulgaria in 1934 by Velchev and Georgiev, who at long last suppressed IMRO and drew tighter the bonds with Yugoslavia.²⁰⁴ But the overthrow of Velchev by Boris in 1935 meant that the policy of Bulgaro-Yugoslav rapprochement was brought to fruition by other hands, and with other implications. From 1930 until 1934 Italian influence in Eastern Europe moved towards its zenith, at the same time as the rivalry between the French and Italian systems was becoming blurred and eclipsed, first by the world economic crisis, and then by the resurgence of Germany. These causes produced a tendency towards consolidation in the Danubian region as well as in the Balkans, though fainter and less successful. Czechoslovak policy had consistently sought to renew economic collaboration between the Danubian states (Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Rumania), on a basis of acceptance of the existing frontiers, and the need was sharpened by the world crisis. In 1931 Austria proposed to improve her own economic position by concluding a customs union with Germany. France and Czechoslovakia energetically opposed the project and secured its defeat on the ground that it must lead to the forbidden political union.²⁰⁵ They were joined in their opposition by Italy, the first occasion that French and Italian interests in Eastern Europe had coincided,²⁰⁶ and for the next three years Italy was establishing her own control over Austria. France and Czechoslovakia replaced the proposal for an Austro-German customs union by a Danubian customs preference plan, associated with the name of Tardieu, which would consolidate French influence in Central Europe; but this was wrecked on the opposition of Italy and Germany.²⁰⁷ Italy had one thing in common with Germany, opposition to the extension of French influence in Eastern Europe, as she had one thing in common with France, opposition to the extension of German influence. In February 1933, a fortnight after Hitler’s accession to power in Germany, the states of the Little Entente signed a Pact of Organization, by which they renewed their original bilateral treaties of alliance in perpetuity, and set up a Permanent Council of Foreign Ministers to unify their foreign policy.²⁰⁸ This was the high point in the consolidation of the Little Entente. A month later Mussolini proposed a Four-Power Pact between Italy, France, Britain, and Germany which would formally replace the French hegemony in Eastern Europe by a directory of the Great Powers, among whom France would be in a minority, and from whom Russia was excluded. The four Powers were to promote the revision of the peace treaties and to concede equality of armaments by degrees to Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The plan was a logical conclusion of Italy’s policy of prestige, revisionism, and rivalry with France. It was vigorously countered by the Little Entente and ²⁰⁴ ²⁰⁵ ²⁰⁶ ²⁰⁷ ²⁰⁸

Ibid. pp. 531–2; H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 374. Survey for 1931, pp. 36–8, 297–323. Ibid. pp. 243, note 3, and 319–20. Survey for 1932, pp. 22–3; Survey for 1933, p. 205, note 3; Survey for 1934, pp. 487–9. Survey for 1933, pp. 203–5.

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Poland, and successfully emasculated by the French, so that the Four-Power Pact that was finally signed in June 1933 had been deprived of its original features and rendered safely innocuous.²⁰⁹ As the project for an Austro-German customs union prefigured the Anschluss, so the Four-Power Pact prefigured Munich. But now France and her allies were still able to stave off what they feared, and Italy, lacking the strength to reorganize and control the Concert of the Powers as Germany did five years later, fell back instead on the consolidation of the small revisionist states of Eastern Europe. The year 1934 shook the structure of Eastern Europe to its foundations. In 1933 Dollfuss had suspended parliamentary government in Austria, seeking, by one of those political moves so frequent in international affairs, to avert the effects of the Nazi Revolution in Germany by imitating it.²¹⁰ The janissaries in the Austrian dictatorship were Starhemberg’s Heimwehr, who were financed from Italy, and were scarcely less the Italian faction in Austria than the Austrian Nazis were the German faction; and Dollfuss cultivated the patronage of Italy. In February 1934 he suppressed the Social-Democrats in a brief civil war, and finally transformed Austria into a Fascist state.²¹¹ He had the support and encouragement of Mussolini, who had his own grievance against the Social-Democrats of Austria for their exposure of the Hirtenberg scandal.²¹² A month later Austria signed with Italy and Hungary the Rome protocols, providing for consultations on matters of policy and economic co-operation.²¹³ This crowned Italian policy towards her Danubian satellites, and successfully prevented the formation of a common front against Germany.²¹⁴ When, in July 1934, Dollfuss was murdered in the Nazi putsch in Austria, Italy mobilized four divisions on the Italo-Austrian frontier and declared her intention of defending Austrian independence.²¹⁵ It was the culminating point of Italian power in Eastern Europe between the wars. Thenceforward her power ebbed, as she dissipated her forces in Africa and Spain, until in less than four years she accepted the German annexation of Austria. The Franco-Italian competition for the hegemony of Eastern Europe had, however, one last violent act. French policy in 1934 concentrated on establishing a rapprochement with Italy against Germany, and this involved a settlement of the feud between Italy and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had seen with alarm the increase of Italian control over Austria, which, when it was coupled with Italian control ²⁰⁹ Ibid. pp. 208–21; cf. Max Beloff, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia 1929–1941 (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1947–9) i. 90–1. ²¹⁰ Survey for 1934, pp. 435–6. ²¹¹ Ibid. pp. 456–67. ²¹² See H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 376. [Ed.] The “Hirtenberg scandal” was the revelation in January 1933 by the Austrian Social Democratic Arbeiter Zeitung that Mussolini’s Italy was smuggling weapons to Hungary. For a contemporary account, see “Shift by Austria Laid to Mussolini,” New York Times, February 21, 1933. ²¹³ Survey for 1934, pp. 487–507. ²¹⁴ Survey for 1933, p. 205, note 3. ²¹⁵ Survey for 1934, pp. 471–5.

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over Albania, threatened to encircle Yugoslavia on three sides, as Germany was later to encircle successively Czechoslovakia and Poland. In 1933 and again in July 1934 Yugoslavia had declared that if Italian forces entered Austria, Yugoslav forces would follow suit.²¹⁶ French attempts to establish an understanding with Italy produced a refroidissement between France and Yugoslavia. In October 1934 King Alexander of Yugoslavia sailed to Marseilles to meet Barthou, the French Foreign Minister, and was there assassinated.²¹⁷ The purpose of his mission died with him, whether he went to warn France that Yugoslavia must have equal rights with France and Italy in any international arrangement to safeguard Austria, or to inform France of the prospects of the Balkan Pact, or in connexion with Barthou’s plans for an Eastern European pact.²¹⁸ The assassination laid bare the nature of Italian policy in the Balkans: it was the fruit of Italian and Hungarian patronage of Croat terrorists, it had been organized from Italian and Hungarian territory, and after the murder Italy refused to extradite Pavelic or to put him on trial;²¹⁹ and by a twist which showed the unity of the attack on Yugoslavia the assassin himself was a Bulgarian member of IMRO.²²⁰ France was concerned to prevent international repercussions that would endanger a rapprochement between herself, Italy, and Yugoslavia; she therefore put pressure on Yugoslavia not to accuse Italy, and secured in exchange that Italy would not shield her satellite Hungary. In this way the League Council achieved a compromise.²²¹

(h) The Ascendancy of Germany Inherently weak and divided, weakened and divided further by ten years of Polish imperialism, Italian intervention, and Macedonian terrorism, Eastern Europe was ripe for German expansion. The Nazi Revolution threw its ripples outwards to disturb first the Baltic and Danubian regions, where Germany was herself a Power, and then the Balkans from which she was divided by a double or triple layer of intervening states. International revolutionary terrorism passed from Italian-sponsored hands into German, where it was more firmly and purposefully ²¹⁶ Ibid. pp. 341, 475–6, 556–7 and note. ²¹⁷ Ibid. pp. 537–77. ²¹⁸ Ibid. p. 538. ²¹⁹ Ibid. pp. 560–1. ²²⁰ See Swire, Bulgarian Conspiracy, pp. 33–4, 291–2. “The Croats and Macedonians trained in Italy and Hungary who killed King Alexander of Yugoslavia represented the highest point of expertise in terrorism that man has yet attained” (West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, i. 365). ²²¹ “In thus composing a political dispute which had been embittered by an inveterate national feud, envenomed by a dictated Peace Settlement, and brought to a head by a series of violent “incidents” culminating in the assassination of the head of one of the two states concerned, the League of Nations had achieved a remarkable success” (Survey for 1934, p. 573). “The ‘solution’ of the Marseilles incident, acclaimed by many well-meaning people as a ‘triumph of the League of Nations’, was in point of fact a peculiarly discreditable piece of “secret diplomacy” (H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, pp. 377–8).

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wielded. The French system of alliances in Eastern Europe, devised to meet this contingency, was at once distorted and soon destroyed by it. For the German revival produced a diplomatic revolution, which called in Soviet Russia to replace Poland as the Western Powers’ counterweight to Germany;²²² relieved Poland herself of the fear of encirclement, Rumania of the pressure of Russia, and Yugoslavia of the pressure of Italy, so beginning the disintegration of the Little Entente;²²³ at length drew Italy into Germany’s wake, and sealed off Eastern from Western Europe. The Powers most immediately menaced by the Nazi Revolution were Austria and Poland: Austria, because the Anschluss was the declared aim of Hitler’s policy;²²⁴ Poland, because Germany had never acquiesced in the losses of territory along her eastern frontier. But the diplomatic revolution in the Baltic was spectacular. For Poland, Nazism was an ambiguous phenomenon. It offered an opportunity of dividing Poland’s enemies, since the new German régime was anti-Bolshevik and repudiated the entente with Soviet Russia that had been the basis of Weimar foreign policy. Nazism showed goodwill towards Poland, not only in Germany, but also in Danzig, where the Nazis captured political control in May 1933.²²⁵ Moreover, Pilsudski hated Russia more than Germany, and there seemed an affinity between his illiberal régime in Poland and the reactionary and anti-Communist aspects of the Nazi régime in Germany. In March and again in November 1933 Pilsudski proposed military preventive measures against Hitler to France, which France rejected.²²⁶ This alternative blocked, Poland accordingly signed in January 1934 a ten years’ non-aggression pact with Hitler, the first crack in the French system in Eastern Europe.²²⁷ The Polish–German rapprochement made its consequences felt immediately on the states contiguous with Poland. Its first effect was a revival of Polish hostility to Czechoslovakia, which gave the Polish–German Pact the appearance of covering an understanding for the joint satisfaction of Polish and German irredentist claims on Czechoslovakia.²²⁸ Its second effect was to excite the three Baltic States into collaboration. On 17 February 1934, Latvia and Estonia, already alarmed by the threat of the Nazi Revolution to themselves as possible German irredente, had signed a defensive alliance modelled on the Balkan Pact and the Little Entente Pact of Organization.²²⁹ But the more particular consequence of the Polish–German Pact ²²² See however Beloff, i. 140: “The French generals, and such professional diplomats as Alexis Léger, regarded a Franco-Soviet agreement as desirable mainly in order to destroy any bonds which might remain between the U.S.S.R. and Germany, and to strengthen the position of Poland and Roumania. The Red Army was not thought of as a serious supplement to the armed might of France and her allies.” ²²³ Cf. Survey for 1934, pp. 341–2. ²²⁴ See Mein Kampf, p. 1. ²²⁵ Survey for 1933, p. 187; Survey for 1935, i. 213–15. ²²⁶ Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, pp. 97, note 3, and 439; Beloff, i. 92, note 1. ²²⁷ Survey for 1933, pp. 183–6; Survey for 1934, pp. 327–8; Survey for 1935, i. 204 seqq. ²²⁸ Survey for 1935, i. 288–98. ²²⁹ Survey for 1934, p. 411.

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was to encircle Lithuania. Lithuania had hitherto carried on a feud with Poland over Vilna and with Germany over Memel, a double policy which was possible only so long as Poland’s own attention was divided between hostility towards Russia and hostility towards Germany. The Polish–German Pact was a junction of Lithuania’s enemies, putting Lithuania in a position which foreshadowed that in which Poland herself was afterwards placed by the German–Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939. This stimulated Lithuania into joining the Estonian–Latvian Pact on 12 September 1934.²³⁰ The third effect was to confirm Russia’s tendency towards joining the anti-revisionist camp, which led to her admission to the League of Nations on 18 September 1934.²³¹ This move was preceded by the recognition of the Soviet Union de jure by Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania, which left Yugoslavia as the only Eastern European state that had still not established full diplomatic relations with Russia.²³² The diplomatic revolution was crowned by Soviet Russia’s pacts of mutual assistance with France of 2 May 1935,²³³ and with Czechoslovakia of 16 May 1935,²³⁴ which finally alined her among the anti-revisionist Powers. With this rearrangement of forces the political subsidence of Eastern Europe was accomplished. Instead of a barrier it became a valley, imperfectly traversed by the ridge of Czechoslovakia. But the Franco-Soviet Pact, which for France was the core of that eastern pact she had been seeking as a counterpart to Locarno, was declared by Germany to be inconsistent with Locarno, and served as the occasion for the German remilitarization of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936.²³⁵ There followed the working-out of logical consequences: the elimination of French influence in Eastern Europe and the substitution for it of German domination. The process was not imposed on the Eastern European countries solely by the changing relations between the Great Powers. It was accelerated by their

²³⁰ Ibid. pp. 414–15. ²³¹ Ibid. pp. 388–404. The Russian reaction to the Polish–German Pact was guarded (see Survey for 1935, i. 62–3, 279, and Beloff, i. 140), but a little later its aggressive purpose was assumed by European Communists in the broad and undiscriminating lines of their world-picture. Cf. R. Palme Dutt, World Politics, 1918–1936 (London: Gollancz, 1936), pp. 268–9, 297–302. ²³² By Hungary on 6 February 1934; by Czechoslovakia and Rumania, after a meeting of the Permanent Council of the Little Entente, and with Yugoslav approval, on 9 June; by Bulgaria on 23 July; by Albania on 17 September (Survey for 1934, pp. 391–2; Beloff, i. 131, note 2). The recognition by Rumania did not involve any settlement of the Bessarabian question (Survey for 1934, pp. 378, 382). Yugoslavia continued to refuse recognition because of the personal repugnance for the Bolshevik régime of King Alexander and after him of his brother the Regent Prince Paul, with their Tsarist connexions and upbringing; and diplomatic relations between Yugoslavia and Soviet Russia were not established till 24 June 1940. ²³³ Survey for 1935, i. 79–81. ²³⁴ Ibid. p. 82. ²³⁵ Survey for 1936, pp. 252–66. Though the Franco-Soviet Pact was signed on 2 May 1935, it was not ratified by the French Chamber till 27 February 1936, and by the French Senate until 12 March 1936. But what Germany was exploiting was not the formal process of treaty ratification but the irreparable clash of interests between the Western Powers and Italy over the Italo-Ethiopian War. For the German argument on the incompatibility of the Franco-Soviet Pact with Locarno, see Survey for 1935, i, 84–9.

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own weaknesses and mistakes. Their economic weaknesses made them ripe for the German trade drive that preceded the establishment of Germany’s political control. Their political mistakes prevented them from forming a united front against German diplomacy. The world economic crisis had revealed one of the main deficiencies of the French system in Eastern Europe: that it was a diplomatic arrangement without basis in economic interest. The depression brought the countries of Eastern Europe to the verge of ruin by accentuating their constant problem of disposing of their agricultural surpluses. Their trade fell catastrophically. France was incapable of taking their agricultural exports, being herself agriculturally self-sufficient, or of supplying their need for industrial goods. The French system could not be widened into a general economic and political association with Western Europe, because Britain had adopted a policy of imperial protection with the Ottawa Agreements and refused to undertake political or economic commitments in Eastern Europe. Soviet Russia was herself one of the world’s great primary producers, nor was her industrial productivity yet capable of meeting Eastern European needs for imports. Her economic interests competed with those of Eastern Europe instead of being complementary. Yugoslavia and Rumania were developing an important market in Italy, but they sacrificed it in support of collective economic sanctions against Italy in 1935, and no alternative outlet was given them.²³⁶ The predestined market, the predestined supplier of industrial goods for Eastern Europe was Germany, and although the Western Powers regarded this as a danger, they did nothing adequate to avert the fatality. In 1936 the German economic conquest of Eastern Europe began under the direction of Schacht.²³⁷ The Eastern European countries were offered an unlimited demand for the greater part of their produce, and prices well above the level of the world market. Their trade rose again rapidly from the trough into which it had fallen during the world crisis, economic life quickened, employment improved, and the standard of living went up. These short-term advantages were immense, and governed the considerations of every politician in Eastern Europe. But the economic revival was directed towards and dominated by Germany. The trade it stimulated was always bilateral, with Germany in the economically more powerful position. In return for the German market, the countries of Eastern Europe were forced to purchase, not goods that they wanted, but goods that Germany was equipped to produce, which were to an increasing extent inessentials. In return for the high German prices, they were repeatedly forced to raise the exchange-rate of the Reichsmark with their currencies, and their internal price-levels rose correspondingly, making it cumulatively difficult for them to find alternative economic associations.²³⁸ Eastern ²³⁶ Survey for 1935, ii. 228, 235–6, 484; Survey for 1936, p. 468; Wiskemann, Undeclared War, pp. 154–5. ²³⁷ Survey for 1936, pp. 526–33. ²³⁸ Survey for 1937, i. 459–65.

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Europe became penetrated with German commercial and technical missions, the avant-garde of political and military control. The remilitarization of the Rhineland debilitated the French system of alliances, as it was meant to do, making it impossible for France to come to the aid of her allies by invading Germany across a frontier zone which was both unfortified and of vital economic importance to Germany.²³⁹ France could no longer be the policeman of Eastern Europe by such a measure as the occupation of the Ruhr. The immediate effect of this stroke was to unknit the Polish–German entente and draw Polish policy once more towards France. On the day that German troops marched into the Rhineland, the Polish Government renewed their assurances of fidelity to the French treaty, declaring that in the event of war Poland would be at France’s side, and decided to take the same military measures as France.²⁴⁰ Even the timidity and failure of French policy in that crisis did not decisively alienate Poland, whose policy from now on was to maintain her position in French eyes as the original ally in Eastern Europe, preferable to the U.S.S.R., and to hold the balance between the groups of Great Powers, a role appropriate to a weak Great Power and one which had been played by Italy in the 1920s. But Poland tried also to combine the policy of detachment with the advantages of acting as Germany’s jackal, and she continued to play with revisionist forces in Eastern Europe, and to show hostility to Russia, to the Little Entente, and above all to Czechoslovakia.²⁴¹ From 1936 to 1938 Germany’s policy concentrated on expansion to the southeast, and in the Baltic the balance of power shifted for the time being without violence. The Anglo-German naval agreement of 18 June 1935, by which Britain condoned German violation of the naval restrictions of Versailles, had given Germany once more the command of the Baltic, and led naturally to the refortification of the Baltic coast.²⁴² The process culminated in the German resumption, on 14 November 1936, of full sovereignty over the Kiel Canal.²⁴³ The policy of détente with Poland was extended to Lithuania, and in August 1936 a comprehensive commercial treaty was signed between Germany and Lithuania.²⁴⁴ And German

²³⁹ Survey for 1936, pp. 10, note 1, 262, 478, note 3. ²⁴⁰ Léon Noël, L’agression allemande contre la Pologne (Paris: Flammarion, 1946), pp. 128–9; Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, pp. 440–2; J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1948), p. 287. ²⁴¹ Survey for 1936, pp. 393–401. “The new Polish policy was to maintain Poland’s position as a Great Power by oscillating between the other Powers of Europe in response to the successive changes in the balance between the non-Polish forces” (ibid. p. 394). “His [Beck’s] aim, in a dangerously tense European situation, was to preserve Poland’s (seeming) freedom of action, and to continue the nonstop acrobatic performance of balancing between Germany and Russia” (Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, p. 92; cf. p. 42). ²⁴² Survey for 1935, i. 178–88; cf. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. i: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948), pp. 137–40, 195, 318. ²⁴³ See Survey for 1937, i. 373–5, 379–80; cf. extract from History of the German Navy, 1919–1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 175 (017-PS); N.C.A. vi. 824). ²⁴⁴ Survey for 1936, p. 538.

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influence reached out, in the form of a visit by a man-of-war, to confirm Finland’s diplomatic inclination towards Germany.²⁴⁵ In the Danubian region the change from Italian to German ascendancy was speedily seen. After the breakdown of the Stresa front and the formation of the Italo-German entente in 1936, Austria could no longer rely on Italian protection, and Italy, because of the financial strain of the Ethiopian War, could no longer finance the Heimwehr.²⁴⁶ In July 1936 Germany forced a pact upon Austria which transformed her from an Italian into a German satellite, and placed two pro-Nazis in Schuschnigg’s Cabinet.²⁴⁷ At the same time full German pressure was turned on Czechoslovakia.²⁴⁸ Though Germany did not denounce the German-Czechoslovak arbitration treaty that went with the Locarno Pact, the validity of that treaty in the changed circumstances was evidently questionable;²⁴⁹ and Hitler’s peace offers after the reoccupation of the Rhineland did not mention Czechoslovakia. In the Czechoslovak general election of May 1935 Henlein’s Sudetendeutsche Partei won an impressive victory, polling more votes than any other single party, and the support of two-thirds of the Sudeten German population.²⁵⁰ A strong lever for the disruption of the Czechoslovak State was thus to Hitler’s hand, and its character was made apparent when, on 21 June 1936, Henlein demanded in a speech at Cheb that the German minority should have rights, not individually, but corporately as a racial group: a claim which the minority treaties of 1919 had not dreamed of, making the minority an imperium in imperio, and which in the next two years was to disrupt and subjugate the states of Eastern Europe.²⁵¹ It was symbolic that Masaryk had resigned the Czechoslovak presidency in December 1935. Perhaps the greatest European statesman of the twentieth century, he had embodied, as nobody else could, the better features of the peace settlement. Benes succeeded him, assuming full power at the moment when his lifework was to be tested.²⁵² In Europe Czechoslovakia was isolated. From her French ally she was divided by the breadth of the Germany she feared; and the remilitarization of the Rhineland meant that even if France still had the will to help her, she could not do so except ²⁴⁵ Ibid. pp. 534–5. ²⁴⁶ Ibid. p. 413; Survey for 1938, i. 184–5. ²⁴⁷ Survey for 1936, pp. 450–4, 478–9; “Primarily it was an Italo-German agreement about Austria, in which the latter was forced to concur” (Gedye, Fallen Bastions, p. 193). ²⁴⁸ Survey for 1936, pp. 469–86. ²⁴⁹ Survey for 1938, ii. 63, note 2. ²⁵⁰ The three largest parties were the Sudetendeutsche Partei, 1,249,530 votes; the Czechoslovak Agrarians, 1,176,593 votes; the Czechoslovak Social Democrats, 1,034,774. The Sudetendeutsch National-Socialist Party had been dissolved on 4 October 1933; Henlein had founded the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront on 30 September 1933, and this changed its name to Sudetendeutsche Partei before the general election of May 1935 (see Survey for 1936, pp. 491–3; Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, chapter xiv). ²⁵¹ Survey for 1936, pp. 498–9; Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, pp. 249–51. Cf. the same author’s Undeclared War, pp. 32–3, 152. ²⁵² Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, pp. 238–42.

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by a full-scale war against Germany. From her Russian ally she was separated by the strip of Ukrainian territory which had been brought under Polish and Rumanian sovereignty after the war, though it was less than a hundred miles across. For Poland and Rumania one of the problems of politics was whether to allow Russian troops to advance over their territory to the assistance of Czechoslovakia. Poland, who herself had an alliance with neither Czechoslovakia nor Russia, and whose relations with both indeed were unfriendly, was determined to refuse this; to her, the Czechoslovak–Russian entente represented a partial encirclement and a threat to Eastern Galicia.²⁵³ Rumania, however, was in alliance with Czechoslovakia, and since 1934 had improved her own relations with Russia; moreover, she had signified her approval of the Soviet–Czechoslovak Pact.²⁵⁴ In Rumania there was a sharp conflict of policies (similar to that going on in France) between the advocates of strengthened links with France, Czechoslovakia, and Russia, and those who feared to offend Germany—a cleavage between those who feared Germany more than Russia, and those who feared Russia more than Germany. The leader of the former group was Titulescu, a man of extraordinary clear-sightedness and frankness, for many years the director of Rumanian foreign policy, next to Benes the chief architect of the Little Entente, and himself the chief architect of the Balkan. But like Wilson and Venizelos, he pursued his triumphs abroad to the neglect of his position at home; and his fall from power in August 1936 was a sign of the changing political wind as unmistakable as the fall of Litvinov three years later.²⁵⁵ The succeeding régime continued the construction of the Bukovina–Transylvania railway which would give communication between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia,²⁵⁶ but it refrained from committing Rumania to diplomatic co-operation as the middle link. During 1936 and 1937 German pressure was remorselessly tearing the Little Entente apart. Germany bore hard upon Czechoslovakia; Poland drew off Rumania; Italy drew off Yugoslavia.²⁵⁷ Czechoslovakia leaned increasingly on her alliance with Russia; Yugoslavia alone of the states of Eastern Europe refused to renew diplomatic relations with Russia; Rumania was as divided on the Russian issue as France. Czechoslovakia was the main obstacle to German control of Eastern Europe, both as a strategic fortress and as a resolute democracy, and the pressure upon her was proportionate to the obduracy with which Benes and his people refused to serve German interests.²⁵⁸ Into the German–Czechoslovak ²⁵³ Survey for 1935, i. 280. ²⁵⁴ Ibid. p. 82, note 3; Survey for 1936, pp. 522–4. ²⁵⁵ Ibid. pp. 517–19. ²⁵⁶ See H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 391. ²⁵⁷ Survey for 1936, pp. 502–7; Survey for 1937, i. 405–14. ²⁵⁸ Ibid. pp. 343–4. There is nothing in the Nuremberg Documents to support Seton-Watson’s contention that “if Benes had been willing to follow the examples of Beck and Stojadinovic, Hitler would have been willing to leave the ‘Sudeten Germans’ where they were” (Eastern Europe, p. 392). From the Hossbach Memorandum of 10 November 1937 onwards (see I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 409–10 (386-PS);

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vortex were drawn Hungary and Poland, in hope of territorial gain. Hungary’s revisionism, with German encouragement, turned away for the time being from the south and east towards her northern frontiers, relieving the pressure on Yugoslavia and Rumania and weakening for them the value of the Little Entente.²⁵⁹ It became the object of Hungarian diplomacy to trade a renunciation of Hungarian territorial claims on Yugoslavia for a Yugoslav promise of neutrality if Hungary went to war with Czechoslovakia, to associate Germany with this through a German guarantee of the Hungaro-Yugoslav frontier, and to obtain staff talks with Germany for a combined attack on Czechoslovakia.²⁶⁰ Poland maintained her bad relations with Czechoslovakia.²⁶¹ Polish diplomacy at this time aimed at recultivating the French and Rumanian alliances (without offence to Germany) and indulged grandiose and chimerical hopes of forming a neutral group in Eastern Europe, with a repetition of the motive of anti-German consolidation that had inspired the Rome bloc.²⁶² In September 1936 Beck sought a rapprochement with Lithuania, but was rebuffed. Rumanian policy, under Titulescu’s successor Antonescu, also aimed at strengthening Rumanian–Polish relations, a renewal of the old cordon sanitaire of 1921, which afforded these two countries the illusion of pursuing an independent line, and served Germany’s purpose by weakening the existing diplomatic structure of Eastern Europe.²⁶³ Small Powers cannot pursue a successful policy of reinsurance inter se against an aggressive Great Power; that requires association with another Great Power. At the same time Yugoslavia was forming unprecedented economic ties with Germany, and unprecedented diplomatic ties as well as the old economic ties with Italy. The murder of Alexander in 1934 had been the turning-point in Italo-Yugoslav relations;²⁶⁴ from then on, with the German shadow lengthening towards the Adriatic, Mussolini vigorously pursued a policy of reinsurance with Yugoslavia, which was interrupted but not ended by Yugoslavia’s participation in sanctions during the Ethiopian War. In Stojadinovic Mussolini had his Colonel Beck, and the two signed a pact of friendship in March trans. in D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 35; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 21–22, cf. N.C.A. iii. 301), it is the conquest, not the neutralization, of Czechoslovakia that is the immediate objective. [Ed. The full reference for “D.Ger.F.P., series D” is Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, published jointly by the British Foreign Office and the U.S. Department of State. Series D (1937–45). (Washington: U.S.G.P.O. and London: H.M.S.O., 1949).] ²⁵⁹ Survey for 1936, pp. 441, 457–8, 506. When Darányi and Kánya visited him on 25 November 1937, Hitler advised that Hungary should not scatter her energies in different directions but should follow a single line—in Czechoslovakia (see Documents Secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 3). ²⁶⁰ Ibid. nos. 3 to 24. It seems that none of these ends was formally attained. ²⁶¹ Survey for 1935, i. 296–8; Survey for 1936, pp. 395, 401, note 1, 506; Survey for 1937, i. 344, 383, 386, 406. ²⁶² Survey for 1936, pp. 393–401; Survey for 1937, i. 383. ²⁶³ Survey for 1936, pp. 524–6; Survey for 1937, i. 410–12. “In those bygone years the PolonoRumanian cordon sanitaire had been desired by France as a means of preventing Russia from joining hands with Hungary and Germany; in 1936 the same Polono-Rumanian combination was desired by Germany as a means of preventing Russia from joining hands with Czechoslovakia and France” (Survey for 1936, p. 525). ²⁶⁴ Survey for 1934, p. 328 and note 3.

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1937 which was the Adriatic counterpart of the German–Polish treaty of 1934. A treaty which, if King Alexander had negotiated it, would have crowned his work by securing from Italy a recognition of Yugoslavia’s right to exist on the other shore of the Adriatic, now had the appearance of a weakening of the Little Entente for the sake of an impolitic and frivolous association with the Axis.²⁶⁵ Rumania and Yugoslavia were signatories of the Balkan Pact as well, and their policies of detachment or of vacillation towards the Axis prevented the consolidation of that entente. Greece already had defined her commitments under the Balkan Pact to exclude the danger of being drawn into war with a non-Balkan Power, particularly Italy.²⁶⁶ Bulgaria fell earliest and most completely under the economic domination of Germany, and resumed her old role as German fulcrum in the Balkans.²⁶⁷ When Yugoslavia and Bulgaria signed a simple pact of eternal friendship in January 1937, it might have been the fruition of the great tradition of Stamboliski and Alexander and Velchev, a drawing together of the Byzantine Slavs against the age-long exploitation and aggression of the West, had not both Yugoslavia and Bulgaria been ruled by unpopular dictatorships, whose policies were already following the lines dictated by their German masters.²⁶⁸ The only country of the Balkan Entente whose policy was shaped in freedom from the German pressure was Turkey, the Eastern European state with the smallest territorial commitment in Eastern Europe and the only one that had the advantages as well as the dangers of a common frontier, not only with Russia, but also with the Western Powers. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 had reverberated to the farther end of Eastern Europe and been followed within four months by the remilitarization of the Black Sea Straits. This was a demand raised regularly by Turkey since 1933,²⁶⁹ and by 1936 the Great Power guarantee of Turkish security under the Lausanne Treaty had lost all its value. The diplomacy which led to the Montreux Conference of June–July 1936 gave Turkey the moral prestige of pursuing treaty revision by peaceful methods. But a conference called originally for the purpose of allowing Turkey to remilitarize the Straits went on to modify the conditions of passage through the Straits, which Russia wished to alter in her own favour. Like the Lausanne Conference in 1923, the Montreux Conference developed into a conflict of interests between Britain and Russia, but with France now on the Russian side; Turkey once again held the balance, having gained her objective in principle (the remilitarization of the Straits now, as it had been the restoration of Eastern Thrace in 1923) before the conference began. Russia had greatly increased ²⁶⁵ Survey for 1937, i. 407, 465–85; Wiskemann, Undeclared War, pp. 120–1. For the unpopularity of the Italo-Yugoslav pact in Serbia cf. West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, ii. 46. ²⁶⁶ Survey for 1936, pp. 519–20. ²⁶⁷ Ibid. pp. 531–2. ²⁶⁸ Ibid. pp. 512–16; H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 390. ²⁶⁹ Survey for 1936, pp. 600–3.

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in power and prestige since Lausanne, and now desired egress from the Straits for the purpose of secure communication with her French ally. Britain wished to loosen the Turkish reliance on Russia, and to obtain compensation for permission to Russia to send her fleet into the Mediterranean, which would affect the Mediterranean balance of power. But Britain at Montreux was isolated, and the Montreux Convention of July 1936 established a new régime for the Straits on the following terms: (1) The principle of freedom of passage for merchant vessels through the Straits was reaffirmed. (2) Non-Black Sea Powers might send only light surface vessels into the Black Sea, with a limitation on their aggregate tonnage; but Black Sea Powers might send capital ships of any size into the Mediterranean. (3) The International Straits Commission was abolished and its functions were transferred to Turkey. (4) Turkey was allowed to close the Straits in time of war or of an imminent threat of war. (5) Turkey was given permission to remilitarize the Straits immediately.²⁷⁰ The role of malcontent played by Russia at Lausanne was played at Montreux by Italy, for the limitation of her influence in the Mediterranean was the common aim of Turkish, Russian, and British policies; she therefore neither attended the conference nor signed the convention. The Montreux settlement struck a balance between the interests of Russia, once more given formal recognition as dominant Power in the Black Sea, and the national security of Turkey; and as it marked the end of the period in which Italy could speak of her “historic objectives in Asia” and dream of an ascendancy in the Aegean, so it adumbrated the conflict for the control of the Balkans which five years later was to be the main factor in disrupting the German–Soviet entente.²⁷¹

(i) The Anschluss Since the formation of the Rome–Berlin Axis in 1936 the Anschluss had been virtually inevitable. A small state which is a buffer between two Great Powers that are hostile may succeed in retaining its independence, since this will be the interest also of the weaker Great Power. But if the Great Powers establish an entente, the buffer state is likely to be partitioned. This was the case with the German conquest of Austria on 11–12 March 1938. The Anschluss was a veiled partition; for although its most obvious aspect was the annexation of the Austrian Republic to the Third Reich,²⁷² it brought also the recognition by Germany of the Brenner frontier and the abandonment to Italy of that part of the Austrian nation which had ²⁷⁰ Ibid. pp. 603–45. ²⁷¹ Cf. Molotov’s conversations with Hitler and Ribbentrop on 13 November 1940 (U.S. Department of State, Nazi-Soviet Relations 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office, ed. R. J. Sontag and J. S. Beddie [referred to hereafter as Nazi–Soviet Relations] (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1948), pp. 244–6, 252–3); Gafencu, Préliminaires de la guerre à l’Est, pp. 136–7. ²⁷² Survey for 1938, i. 185–223.

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been annexed by Italy in 1919 and had been living, submerged and persecuted, in the South Tyrol.²⁷³ The moment the Nazis successfully set up their standard in Vienna [wrote Namier in 1935], the whole of Central and South-Eastern Europe, from the Bohemian Mountains and the Carpathians down to the Adriatic, Greece, and the Straits, would be aflame, and the political balance of Europe would be destroyed.²⁷⁴

The overturning of the balance of power by the Anschluss was like that produced by the French invasion of Italy in 1796; the conquests of the small states by the expanding Power became cumulative, one making the next more easy and more certain, until the vacuum between the Great Powers was filled up, and within eighteen months the Soviet Union signed her Campo Formio. By annexing Austria, Germany thrust herself forward down the Danube, and found a common frontier with Hungary and Yugoslavia.²⁷⁵ The Czech provinces were encircled along four-fifths of the length of their frontiers. The Austrian Anschluss . . . not only achieved a national aim of long standing, but also contributed to the strengthening of our military power by creating a definite improvement in our strategic position. Whereas, hitherto, Czechoslovak territory had thrust up into Germany in a most menacing way (a wasp-waist in the direction of France and an air base for the Allies, particularly for Russia) now Czechoslovakia in turn was also held in a pincer-grip. Her own strategic position had now become so unfavourable that she was bound to fall victim to an energetic attack before effective help could reach her from the West.²⁷⁶

Hitler had not always intended to conquer Austria before Czechoslovakia; five months earlier he had declared the necessity of conquering them simultaneously;²⁷⁷ and on 21 April, five weeks after the fall of Vienna, when the tide of suicides had scarcely ebbed in the conquered capital,²⁷⁸ and the Terror was only beginning to become routine, he began the detailed consideration of the ²⁷³ Ibid. p. 218. ²⁷⁴ Manchester Guardian, 28 June 1935, reprinted in L. B. Namier’s In the Margin of History (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 33. ²⁷⁵ Survey for 1938, i. 220–1. ²⁷⁶ Lecture by General Jodl at Munich on “The Strategic Position in the Beginning of the 5th Year of War,” 7 November 1943 (trans. from I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 634–5 (172-L); cf. N.C.A. vii. 923). Cf. Borkenau, Austria and After, pp. 327–30. ²⁷⁷ “For the improvement of our politico-military position our first objective, in the event of our being embroiled in war, must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West” (Hossbach Memorandum of 10 November 1937). ²⁷⁸ See Gedye, Fallen Bastions, pp. 305–7, 349–50; Survey for 1938, i. 226, with criticism in Namier, Conflicts, pp. 107–8. T. G. Masaryk’s first book, published at Vienna in 1881, had been Suicide as a Collective Social Phenomenon of Modern Civilization.

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attack on Czechoslovakia.²⁷⁹ Three days later Henlein raised the standard of revolt within Czechoslovakia by a speech at Carlsbad in which, not tentatively as at Cheb in 1936, but with all the authority of the triumphant Reich behind him, he demanded administrative autonomy as well as legal personality for the German folk-group, and their right to “profess German nationality and German political philosophy”: the dismemberment of the democratic republic by the establishment of a Nazi totalitarian régime in its German area.²⁸⁰ He asked also for “a revision of Czechoslovak foreign policy, which had led the country into the ranks of the enemies of the German people.” During the night of 20–21 May, in view of reports of German troop concentrations, Benes ordered a partial mobilization.²⁸¹ This angered Hitler and made him advance his plans; on 30 May he wrote: “It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.”²⁸² The derangement of the balance of power altered the relationships of the small states not only with Germany but also among themselves. The jackals improved their positions and looked for pickings. Poland had contemplated a military occupation of Lithuania to offset the Anschluss; but she sent instead an ultimatum on 17 March demanding the establishment of normal diplomatic relations.²⁸³ Russia warned Poland that in the event of an armed Polish attack on Lithuania, she reserved the right to take action.²⁸⁴ Hungary and Bulgaria could not be compelled to remain subject to the restrictions of a peace settlement which Germany had triumphantly destroyed. On 31 July Bulgaria signed a non-aggression pact with the Balkan Entente at Salonika, which recognized her equality of status in the matter of armaments and full sovereignty over her frontiers, without her joining the Balkan Entente or renouncing her revisionist claims.²⁸⁵ On 22 August a similar agreement was signed at Bled between Hungary and the Little Entente.²⁸⁶ These agreements might have had the character of Small Power consolidation against the German menace, if Bulgaria was not already as much the vassal of Germany as she had been ten years before of Italy; and if Hungary was not half-transformed,

²⁷⁹ See Plan for Operation “Green” (code name for the invasion of Czechoslovakia), summarizing a conversation between Hitler and Keitel of 21 April 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 415–17 (388-PS, item 2); trans. in D.Ger.F.P., series D, ii. 239–40; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 26–27; cf. N.C.A. iii. 306–8). See also Survey for 1938, ii. 141–2. ²⁸⁰ See The Times, 25 April 1938; cf. Survey for 1938, ii. 94–97. ²⁸¹ See Survey for 1938, ii. 122–5. ²⁸² See revised directive for “Operation Green,” 30 May 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 434 (388-PS, item 11), trans. in D.Ger.F.P., series D, ii. 358; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 30; cf. N.C.A. iii. 316). Cf. Jodl’s diary, undated entry (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxviii. 373 (1780-PS); N.C.A. iv. 363) and Keitel’s evidence (I.M.T. Nuremberg, x. 509). See also Survey for 1938, ii. 143–4. ²⁸³ See Survey for 1938, iii, part II, section ii. ²⁸⁴ See Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow (London: Gollancz, 1942), pp. 191–2; Vladimir Potemkin, Histoire de la diplomatie (Paris: Librarie de Médicis, 1953), iii. 643–4. ²⁸⁵ See Survey for 1938, iii, part IV, section i. ²⁸⁶ Survey for 1938, ii. 290–1.

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willy-nilly, politically as well as economically, into a gleichgestellte Hilfsmacht.²⁸⁷ The Anschluss had stimulated both the German and the Hungarian Nazis inside Hungary and increased German pressure and propaganda; in May 1938 Horthy replaced Darányi by Imrédy, in order to stem Hungarian National Socialism, but Imrédy, like Dollfuss and Carol and Stojadinovic, could pursue no policy except an imitation of the threatened disease whose effect was not to immunize the subject but to prepare the way for the real thing. The only sign of vitality in the Little Entente during the summer when the Czechoslovak crisis was mounting was the number of young Yugoslavs who offered their services to the Czechoslovak legation and consulates in the event of war. They were the most enthusiastic visitors at Prague in July at the last great festival of the national gymnastic association, the Sokols, coming to the aid of Masaryk’s country as once Masaryk had embroiled himself at the Agram trial, when the former Europe was sliding to its ruin, in the cause of the Serbs and Croats.²⁸⁸ But, as in almost every such crisis, it was not the Small Powers but the Great who in the end settled the Czechoslovak question.

(j) The First Partition of Czechoslovakia The first partition of Czechoslovakia in September–November 1938 was the consequence of an unfought war which overthrew the Versailles Settlement and made Germany undisputed master of Eastern Europe.²⁸⁹ This crisis subjected the policies of the Powers of Eastern Europe (no less than those of the Western Great Powers) to a telling strain, and provided an alternative pattern of forces for the true war that broke out a year later. The decisive factor was the policy of the Western Powers, their determination to render the Franco-Czechoslovak alliance inoperative,²⁹⁰ the fate of Eastern Europe thus being decided once again by forces beyond Eastern Europe; but next most important were two factors within Eastern Europe, the policies of Poland and of Czechoslovakia herself. Polish policy was purely ²⁸⁷ The Bled Agreement was disagreeable to Germany, since it suggested a rapprochement between Hungary and the Little Entente; Kánya was at pains to assure Ribbentrop that Hungary’s renunciation of the use of force under the agreement was not intended by her to become effective. See memoranda of conversations between Ribbentrop, Imrédy, and Kánya on 23 August 1938 and between Ribbentrop and Kánya on 25 August 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxi. 135–9 (2796/7-PS); trans. in D.Ger.F.P., series D, ii. 609–11, 623–4; cf. N.C.A. v. 430–3). See also Survey for 1938, ii. 295–8. [Ed.] According to Elizabeth Wiskemann, Hitler defined Hungary’s role as that of “an auxiliary power of equal status”—“a gleichgestellte Hilfsmacht for Germany.” Wiskemann, The Rome–Berlin Axis: A History of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), page 131. ²⁸⁸ See Wiskemann, Undeclared War, p. 123; H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, p. 394; Gedye, Fallen Bastions, pp. 428–9. ²⁸⁹ For an exact prediction of this, written before October 1937, see the Survey for 1936, pp. 479–81. ²⁹⁰ “. . . . the representatives of the two Governments were guided by a desire to find a solution which would not bring about a European War, and, therefore, a solution which would not automatically compel France to take action in accordance with her obligations,” Chamberlain in the House of Commons at Westminster, 28 September 1938, describing the Anglo-French discussions of 18 September (House of Commons Debates, 5th ser., vol. 339, col. 16; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1938, ii. 281).

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opportunist, what Beck naïvely called a policy “of independence.” In appearance it was based on an equal fear of Germany and of Russia, and it toyed again in September 1938 with the chimera of a neutral bloc between them, inflated now into ‘a Helsinki–Bucharest axis,’²⁹¹ as if Poland by standing on a chair could make herself a Great Power. But with war imminent it became clear that Poland was not holding the balance between Germany and Russia: though Germany was the more immediately dangerous of the two, it was towards Germany that Poland inclined, and towards Russia that her hostility was the more active. There was another factor at work, the desire for immediate territorial advantage. If Germany fought Czechoslovakia alone, Poland would join Germany in defeating and dismembering Czechoslovakia; although Poland’s military measures might not be concerted with Germany’s and she might feel herself to be acting independently.²⁹² Even if France honoured her alliance with Czechoslovakia, Poland would give to Noël, the French Ambassador in Warsaw, no assurance of neutrality.²⁹³ Here the French system of alliances finally jammed in its own contradictions. Poland, bound to France by an alliance directed mainly against Germany, would join Germany in attacking France’s other ally Czechoslovakia, even when France in defence of Czechoslovakia went to war with Germany. The Poles explained this by the arguments that Czechoslovakia was bound to break up anyway, that it was Poland’s interest in this event to recover her stolen territories, that it was France’s interest to see Poland thus strengthened and aggrandized as the leader of the Eastern European neutral bloc between Germany and Russia:²⁹⁴ the combined arguments of necessity, covetousness, and misjudgement that are the fully matured substitute for adherence to principle. But probably more important was Poland’s dislike of Czechoslovakia’s Soviet ally. To fight against Germany on Czechoslovakia’s side would almost certainly mean fighting on Russia’s side, with the danger of having to grant passage to the Soviet army and air force, and to this Poland would in no circumstances consent.²⁹⁵ In the last resort Poland was not equally balanced between Germany and Russia: she would co-operate with Germany against Russia,²⁹⁶ but in no circumstances would she co-operate with Russia against Germany; the reverse of Czechoslovak relations with those Powers.

²⁹¹ Noël, L’agression allemande contre la Pologne, p. 209. ²⁹² See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section iv I. ²⁹³ Noël, op. cit. p. 217. The Polish Opposition believed, however, that if France stood by Czechoslovakia Poland would be compelled to follow suit; see Namier: Diplomatic Prelude, p. 447, note 2. The Polish White Book contains, on the Munich crisis, nothing but one extract each from Hitler’s Nuremberg and Sportpalast speeches (cf. Poland, Ministry for Foreign Affairs: Official Documents concerning Polish-Soviet Relations 1933-1939 (Polish White Book). [Translated and] published by Authority of the Polish Government (London, Hutchinson, [1940]). p. 33). ²⁹⁴ Georges Bonnet, De Washington au Quai d’Orsay (Geneva: Bourquin, Éditions du Cheval Ailé, 1946), pp. 256–7. ²⁹⁵ See Survey for 1938, ii. 132–4; cf. Noël: L’agression allemande contre la Pologne, p. 22. ²⁹⁶ The limits to Poland’s co-operation with Germany became much more definite after Munich (see Survey for 1938, iii, part II, section i (b) (5)).

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Poland’s own claims upon Czechoslovakia were limited to Teschen. But she held out her hands southwards to Hungary, whose desire to dismember Czechoslovakia was second only to Germany’s, and to Rumania, who had an essential part in the defence of Czechoslovakia as a link between her and Russia. With Rumania Poland had a common frontier; with Hungary this was still to create. The urge towards contiguity between Poland and Hungary was the small core of reality and achievement within the Polish project of a neutral bloc, and it had a partial aim of widening the barrier between Germany and Russia. It was to be won by Hungary’s expanding once more to her old frontier on the crest of the Carpathians, which would be the fulfilment of her utmost revisionist claims against Czechoslovakia, the reincorporation not only of the Magyar irredente but also of Ruthenia and perhaps Slovakia as well.²⁹⁷ For Poland, what mattered was the extinction of Ruthenia as a centre of potential Ukrainian nationalism; and if the province was recovered by Hungary, the Hungarians could be depended upon to eradicate that. But this implied the collapse of the Little Entente, that Yugoslavia and Rumania would not go to the aid of Czechoslovakia. Hungary had sought an assurance of neutrality from Yugoslavia in exchange for an abandonment of her claims on Yugoslavia, and she had also sought an undertaking from Mussolini to attack Yugoslavia if Yugoslavia attacked Hungary.²⁹⁸ It does not seem that formal engagements were obtained in either case. Stojadinovic was cautious: both to Hitler, when he visited Berlin in January 1938, and afterwards to the French,²⁹⁹ he had reaffirmed Yugoslavia’s commitments to the Little Entente. The Anschluss probably deflected Yugoslav policy several points towards the Axis, and as the Czechoslovak crisis was being kindled and fanned through the summer, Yugoslavia was informing the Italians that she would not intervene in a Hungaro-Czechoslovak conflict provided that Hungary left the initiative in aggression either to Germany or to the appearance of Czechoslovak provocation.³⁰⁰ Italy, too, was non-committal: if Yugoslav relations with the Axis were good, a Yugoslav attack on Hungary would not occur.³⁰¹ For Italy was hoping to draw Yugoslavia into the Rome bloc,³⁰² and even to extend Italian patronage discreetly as far north as Warsaw. It was Mussolini who, speaking at Trieste on 18 September 1938, first publicly widened the Sudeten controversy to include the Hungarian and Polish minorities in Czechoslovakia,

²⁹⁷ Hitler had apparently promised this to Darányi and Kánya when they visited him on 25 November 1937 (see Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 12). ²⁹⁸ See Survey for 1938, ii. 292–4. ²⁹⁹ Survey for 1938, ii. 293; cf. Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), nos. 24 and 9; and Survey for 1937, i. 409, 484–5. ³⁰⁰ See Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 21; Ciano: Europa, pp. 328–9, 359; Eng. version, pp. 213, 233. [Ed. The full reference is L’Europa verso la catastrofe: 184 colloqui verbalizzati de Galeazzo Ciano (Milan: Mondadori, 1948); Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, trans. Stuart Hood (London: Odhams Press, 1948).] ³⁰¹ See Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 22. ³⁰² Ibid.

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and these subsidiary claims had his ostentatious support in his speech-making tour throughout Northern Italy during the height of the crisis.³⁰³ Rumania alone of the Little Entente Powers had no common frontier with the Axis, and alone had a common frontier with Russia; this gave her policy a greater independence towards Germany. Moreover, her vital interest in the Little Entente was as much greater than Czechoslovakia’s or Yugoslavia’s as her Hungarian minorities were greater than theirs. Yet Rumanian policy was paralysed by the complementary terrors of Germany as an aggressor and of Russia as an ally. A Hungarian attack upon Czechoslovakia in league with Germany was different from the Hungarian revisionism against which the Little Entente had been formed seventeen years before: it might bring German forces across Hungarian soil to the frontiers of Rumania.³⁰⁴ Russian assistance to Czechoslovakia would certainly bring the Soviet air force, if not the Soviet army, across Rumanian soil: Rumania would become a German–Russian battleground, and there was no confidence that when the war was over the Soviet forces would retire once more behind the Bessarabian frontier. On this great issue of the missing strategic link in the Franco-Czechoslovak-Soviet alliance, Rumania prevaricated and temporized.³⁰⁵ In March 1938 Litvinov had replied to a question about it with a phrase something like: “If the non-aggressive nations take up that problem seriously it can be solved. . . . ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way’”; which had been interpreted as meaning that if necessary Russia would violate Polish and Rumanian territory to reach Czechoslovakia.³⁰⁶ But Soviet policy was still ostensibly hoping for collective action. On 2 September 1938 Litvinov proposed to the French chargé in Moscow,³⁰⁷ and Maisky proposed to Churchill, for transmission to the British Foreign Office, that Rumanian reluctance should be overcome through the agency of the Council of the League acting under Article XI of the Covenant.³⁰⁸ British and French aversion to the League of Nations and collective action relieved Rumania from the odium of rejecting this proposal. She could now entrench herself strategically behind the non-completion of the Bukovina–Transylvania railway, which might make it impossible for Soviet troops to reach the Bohemian front in under three weeks,³⁰⁹ and legally behind the clause of the Polish–Rumanian alliance that obliged her to concert her Russian policy with Poland.³¹⁰ Thus with

³⁰³ See Survey for 1938, ii. 338 and Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1938, ii. 239–43. ³⁰⁴ See Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 18. ³⁰⁵ Survey for 1938, ii.132, 276–81. ³⁰⁶ Press conference in Moscow, 17 March 1938 (The Times, 18 March 1938); cf. Survey for 1938, ii. 67–68; Davies, Mission to Moscow, p. 191; Beloff, ii. 122–3. This intention was later expressly denied by Litvinov (Bonnet, De Washington, p. 200). ³⁰⁷ Survey for 1938, ii. 278. ³⁰⁸ Ibid. p. 279. For a general estimate of Soviet policy at this time see Beloff, ii. 163–6. ³⁰⁹ Survey for 1938, ii. 280. ³¹⁰ Bonnet, De Washington, p. 201, where the clause is wrongly cited as 4 instead of 2: see the treaty printed in the Survey for 1920–3, pp. 504–5.

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her left hand Poland restrained Rumania from the defence while with her right hand she beckoned Hungary to the attack. The Czechoslovak plan of defence against Germany assumed the alliance with France in the west and the consequential alliance with Russia in the east, and, if attack came from Hungary as well, the older alliance with the Little Entente Powers too. The Czechoslovak General Staff calculated that it could hold up the Germans, and even if necessary the Hungarians, for from three to six months, giving time for the arrival of Russian support by way of Rumania and for a French assault upon the Rhineland.³¹¹ The foundation of this plan was destroyed by France’s betrayal of her obligations. In June 1938 Hitler had written: ‘I shall, however, only decide to take action against Czechoslovakia if, as in the case of the occupation of the demilitarized zone and the entry into Austria, I am firmly convinced that France will not march and therefore Britain will not intervene either.’³¹² The British, however, who had taken upon themselves to mediate, and the French who were allies of Czechoslovakia, intervened on the side not of Czechoslovakia but of Germany herself, issuing the ultimata to Czechoslovakia that broke her moral resistance. The first ultimatum, on 21 September, declared that if Czechoslovakia rejected the Anglo-French plan for the cession of the Sudetenland that resulted from Chamberlain’s visit to Berchtesgaden on 15–16 September, Britain and France would disinterest themselves in her fate.³¹³ Benes accepted this in the hope of gaining time to buy off Poland and Hungary, who were concentrating their forces along the Czechoslovak frontiers; “I have made plans,” he said, “for all eventualities.”³¹⁴ On the same day, 21 September, Poland demanded that the question of the Polish minority in Czechoslovakia should be settled immediately in the same way as the Sudeten German question, and denounced the Polish–Czechoslovak minorities treaty of 1925.³¹⁵ On 22 September Hungary made a similar demand for the Hungarian minorities³¹⁶ and there were demonstrations in Warsaw for a Polish–Hungarian frontier. The increase of Hitler’s demands at Godesberg on the same day,³¹⁷ the apparent stiffening of the Western Powers in consequence, and Czechoslovakia’s ³¹¹ See Gedye, Fallen Bastions, p. 368. The opinion of British military authorities was that Czechoslovakia might hold out at most for one month. One of the reasons for German–Hungarian staff talks urged by Hungary in April 1938 was that a simultaneous Hungarian attack on Czechoslovakia would forestall the arrival of Russian parachutists in Slovakia and Ruthenia: see Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 14. ³¹² General strategic directive of 18 June 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 446 (388-PS, item 14); trans. in D.Ger.F.P., series D, ii. 473; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 34; cf. N.C.A. iii. 324). ³¹³ Survey for 1938, ii. 355–63. ³¹⁴ Broadcast of 22 September 1938 (Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1938, ii. 226). ³¹⁵ Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section iv (c). The Polish note to Czechoslovakia is printed in L. B. Namier’s Europe in Decay: A Study in Disintegration, 1936–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 286–7. ³¹⁶ Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section v (b). ³¹⁷ At Godesberg Hitler assumed the championship of the Polish and Hungarian claims: see Survey for 1938, ii. 376–91.

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mobilization on 23 September, afforded the Czechs a momentary release from the four-Power pressure, and it seemed that an anti-German coalition might at last be formed. On 21 and again on 23 September Litvinov, who was then at the League Assembly at Geneva, reaffirmed Soviet commitments to Czechoslovakia within the framework of collective security under the Covenant, and conditional upon the fulfilment of the Franco-Czechoslovak treaty.³¹⁸ On 23 September Russia warned Poland that she would denounce the Soviet–Polish non-aggression pact if Poland invaded Czechoslovakia. In these circumstances Benes’s plan for buying off Poland was put into operation. On 22 September he had addressed to Moscicki, the Polish President, a personal letter accepting Polish claims in principle and consenting to immediate negotiations; this was delivered on the 25th.³¹⁹ Beck rejected the proposal, desiring a spectacular humiliation of Czechoslovakia.³²⁰ Benes afterwards said that this provided him with ‘the last and decisive reason’ for capitulating to Germany, in spite of Russian support.³²¹ While Polish policy remained brutal and predatory, the Little Entente Powers were trimming. Their aim was to stay neutral;³²² it was clear that they would not in any case commit themselves until the Western Powers were committed, that is to say, until the war had begun. On 23 September the Rumanian Minister in Rome told Ciano that Rumania was resisting, and would continue to resist, Soviet demands for the free passage of Soviet troops; that she approved the return to Hungary of the purely Magyar parts of Czechoslovakia, though she would deprecate Hungarian claims on Slovakia; and that in the event of war between Russia and Poland she would support Poland, giving her alliance with Poland precedence over her commitments to Prague.³²³ On 24 September the Yugoslav Government banned public meetings in an attempt to suppress the mass demonstrations which were not only in favour of Czechoslovakia but also against Stojadinovic. The next day Stojadinovic agreed in principle to a Rumanian proposal for a joint declaration by the two Powers, to be made verbally to the Hungarian Government, that they would accept a rectification of Czechoslovak–Hungarian frontiers in Hungary’s favour if it was limited to regions with a majority of Magyar inhabitants, but ³¹⁸ Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1938, ii. 224–5, 233–4. For a discussion whether the Soviet Government went beyond their treaty commitment in their offer of help to Czechoslovakia, see Survey for 1938, ii. 369–72. ³¹⁹ Printed in Namier, Europe in Decay, pp. 289–90; cf. Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section iv (c). Bonnet (De Washington, pp. 258–9, 364–6) says that on the night of 24–25 September Benes agreed at French instigation to cede Teschen, on condition that Poland would change camps and resume the policy of an ally of France, affording Czechoslovakia if not military co-operation at least a benevolent neutrality. ³²⁰ See Noël, L’agression allemande contre la Pologne, p. 234. ³²¹ See letter from Benes to Namier of 20 April 1944 (Namier: Europe in Decay, p. 284). ³²² Cf. the Yugoslav Minister’s opinion given to Ciano in Rome on 13 September 1938 (Ciano, Europa, pp. 358–9; Eng. version, p. 233). See also Alexander Henderson, Eyewitness in Czecho-Slovakia (London: Harrap, 1939), pp. 226–8: Henderson drove from Czechoslovakia through Hungary and Yugoslavia to Italy between 24 and 30 September. ³²³ Ciano, Europa, pp. 364–5; Eng. version, pp. 236–7.

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that they could not remain unmoved by a Hungarian annexation of Slovakia.³²⁴ At the request of Berlin this démarche was never made;³²⁵ the project of it was the last throe of the Little Entente. The dictate of the Great Powers overrode all. On 29 September the heads of the two Axis Powers and the two Western Powers met at Munich, and agreed on a partition of Czechoslovakia that differed only illusorily from Hitler’s Godesberg demands.³²⁶ This was imposed on the Czechoslovak Government the same evening, with unusual brutality, by the second Anglo-French ultimatum.³²⁷ The Poles, in such an extremity, deserted by all their allies, and with an enemy crouched behind every frontier, would probably still have fought. The Czechs, cautious, circumspect, self-possessed, submitted. Benes’s decision was based on a cool estimate, not only of the strength of Czechoslovakia’s enemies, but also of the balance of forces within the country. For the leaders of the army and the Agrarians, the dominant political party, regarded the loss of the Sudetenland as a lesser evil than the intervention of the Red Army in the guise of an ally.³²⁸ If Czechoslovakia had taken up arms in defiance of the Munich Powers she would have depended on the sole assistance of the Soviet Union. This would have bound her to the Bolshevik Power in an ideological struggle against the West, captained by Nazi Germany, which would have fulfilled the assertions of Nazi propaganda and perhaps prevented any ultimate assistance from the Western Powers. For all the traditional slavophily of the Czechs, the Czechoslovakia of Masaryk and Benes (like the Bohemia of the Prmzyls and the Luxemburgers) was a Western not a Byzantine state, and it was the Western Powers that had stood sponsors at her rebirth in 1918. The Western Powers had betrayed her; the isolated assistance of Russia was dangerous in the degree in which it was not doubtful, and repudiated by half the country; and thus Czechoslovakia was forced back upon the last hope of small nations, that by compliance to their neighbours they may earn a tolerated neutrality.³²⁹ Yet speculation will always play with the contingency of her having resisted,

³²⁴ See N. P. Comnène, Preludi del grande dramma (Rome: Edizioni Leonardo, 1947), pp. 109–11, 119–20. ³²⁵ Ibid. pp. 155–6, 137; cf. Hubert Ripka, Munich: Before and After (London, Gollancz, 1939), p. 145. See also Survey for 1938, iii, part IV, section ii. ³²⁶ Survey for 1938, ii. 437–44; Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section i. For text of Agreement see D.Brit.F.P., 3rd Series, ii. 627–9. [Ed. D.Brit.F.P. series refer to Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, ed. E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler (London: H.M.S.O., 1949–50).] ³²⁷ See Hubert Masarik’s report in Ripka, Munich, pp. 224–7, also Survey for 1938, ii. 444–7. ³²⁸ “To fight with Russian support alone was to court civil war in Czechoslovakia itself ” (WheelerBennett, Munich, p. 175; cf. pp. 81–2, 127–8). The Prime Minister and the Ministers of Defence and of the Interior were all Agrarians. There is evidence suggesting that the Prime Minister, Hodza, who was a Slovak, was pursuing a policy throughout the crisis that was at variance with Benes’s (see ibid. pp. 55, note 2, 121–2, and D.Brit.F.P., 3rd series, i. 519–20, 524). ³²⁹ Cf. Syrovy’s broadcast of 30 September 1938 (Survey for 1938, ii. 446–7; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1938, ii. 326–8).

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whether it would have accelerated the outbreak of war between the Great Powers, and whether these Powers would then have assumed different alinements.³³⁰ The Munich settlement was the introduction to the Second World War, and prefigured many of its consequences. The three conspicuous absentees from the Munich Conference were Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia, and each omission had its distinct importance. The settlement was the fruition of the tendency towards the establishment of a Great Power directory in Europe, disposing arbitrarily of the territories and interests of minor Powers, which Czechoslovakia and Poland had together checked in 1933. While it marked the spurious zenith of Italy’s claim to be a Great Power, with Mussolini as the mediator and peacemaker of Europe,³³¹ it marked also the end of Poland’s pretensions to be a Great Power: the first gloss upon Beck’s policy of plagiaristic bullying was his not being invited to Munich. Russia too was not invited; and though this new exclusion from Eastern Europe lasted only eleven months, it strongly confirmed her hostility to the Western Powers and affected her future relations with them.³³² The Munich settlement marked the end, not only of the French system of alliances, but of the long history of French influence in Eastern Europe of which they were the most recent expression, an influence that stretched back four centuries to the founding of the entente between Francis I and the Grand Signior after Pavia, and still farther, to the Angevin dynasty in Poland and Hungary and the Peloponnese, to its designs upon Byzantium, and to the revolution in Papal policy which in the thirteenth century placed the brother of St. Louis upon the throne of Sicily.³³³ It marked the beginning of the end of British influence in Eastern Europe apart from the peninsular outposts of Greece and Turkey, an influence that was not redeemed by the guarantees to Poland and Rumania in 1939, and finally disappeared in the barren agreements at Yalta in 1945. And it marked the end of Czechoslovakia as the only Western parliamentary state in the heart of Europe. Betrayed and discarded by the Western Powers, she sank into a satellite and then a protectorate of Nazi Germany, and came ten years later by another path, through the Second World War and its

³³⁰ Cf. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. i: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948), p. 302. “I have always believed that Benes was wrong to yield. He should have defended his fortress line. Once fighting had begun, in my opinion at that time, France would have moved to his aid in a surge of national passion, and Britain would have rallied to France almost immediately.” ³³¹ “The point which Italian observers particularly like to emphasize is that . . . the fact that the leaders of two of the great democracies appealed to Signor Mussolini at the last moment to save the situation shows that they have at last realized Italy’s value as the keystone of a Europe organized for peace” (Rome correspondent, The Times, 30 September 1938). ³³² See Survey for 1938, iii, part III, section iii (c). ³³³ Charles of Anjou (1226–85) was invested with Sicily as a papal fief by Clement IV in 1266. He ruled the undivided kingdom until 1282; after the revolt of the island, he and his house ruled in Naples alone until 1435, they were suzerains or rulers of the principality of Achaia from 1267 to 1377, and titular emperors of Romania from 1313 to 1373. His house ruled in Hungary from 1308 to 1387, and in Poland from 1372 to 1398.

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aftermath, to that exclusive dependence upon Russia which she had rejected in September 1938.³³⁴ The partition of Czechoslovakia proceeded smoothly and rapidly. The German occupation of the Sudetenland was carried out between 1 and 10 October; on 13 October the International Commission in Berlin of the four Munich Powers together with the nominal representation of Czechoslovakia, which provided a veil of decency for the transaction and deferred to every German demand,³³⁵ decided to dispense with plebiscites in the ceded zones; on 20 November the final frontier was determined by a German–Czechoslovak protocol. The line of demarcation approximated to Hitler’s Godesberg demands: it followed mainly ethnographical considerations, but also gave Germany strategic advantages, placing the rump of the Czech Lands at her discretion.³³⁶ While Bohemia was being thus partitioned for the first time in its history, and Henlein’s followers were celebrating their reunion with a Reich to which they and their ancestors had never belonged, the northern and southern frontiers of Czechoslovakia were caving inwards. Here history spun backwards to 1919–20, and territories she had gained then were wrenched from her. On 30 September, as soon as it was plain that Czechoslovakia was abandoned and prostrate, Poland presented an ultimatum demanding surrender of the Teschen district:³³⁷ the reversal of the Czechoslovak annexation of Teschen while Poland was preoccupied in 1920. On 1 October Czechoslovakia yielded, and between 2 and 12 October Poland occupied a territory in which, by Czech estimates, the Czechs were 53.5 per cent. and the Poles only 33.5 per cent. of the population.³³⁸ On 1 October Hungary demanded negotiations with Czechoslovakia on frontier revision. The negotiations were conducted between the Slovaks and the Hungarians at Komárno (Komárom) from 9 to 13 October, when they broke down because of the extensiveness of Hungarian demands.³³⁹ On 12 October Hungary had already resorted to military action, and a smallscale irregular war ensued for several weeks in eastern Slovakia and Ruthenia, the ³³⁴ “We should not accept lessons in democracy and constitutionalism from those who are responsible for Munich, who bargained about our existence with Hitlerite Germany, and wholly undemocratically and illegally tore up the treaties of alliance and friendship with Czechoslovakia”—reply of the Czechoslovak Prime Minister, Gottwald, to the joint American, British, and French note condemning the Communist coup d’état in Czechoslovakia, 27 February 1948 (Manchester Guardian, 28 February 1948). ³³⁵ “The Munich settlement gave Germany all she immediately wanted. In applying the Agreement, every contentious point was decided in Germany’s favour”: Halifax, speech at Leeds, 20 January 1940 (Viscount Halifax, Speeches on Foreign Policy (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1940), p. 347. For an account of the work of the International Commission see Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section ii. ³³⁶ It transferred to the Reich a tenth of the Czech people (719,127) together with 2,806,638 Sudeten Germans. ³³⁷ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section iv (c). The ultimatum is printed in Namier, Europe in Decay, pp. 297–300. ³³⁸ 123,000 Czechs, 77,000 Poles, 20,000 Germans, and 11,000 other foreigners, mostly of Polish nationality (D.Brit.F.P., 3rd series, iii. 225). ³³⁹ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section v (c).

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Hungarian– Czechoslovak war of 1919 in reverse.³⁴⁰ As in 1919, the conflict was not fought out in a straight issue between the two Small Powers; one of them had the military superiority, the other had the backing of the Great Powers, and the latter triumphed.³⁴¹ After further abortive direct negotiations, the Czechoslovak and Hungarian Governments submitted the dispute to the arbitration of Germany and Italy; and thus it was that in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, on 2 November, Ribbentrop and Ciano traced a new Hungaro-Czechoslovak frontier, completing the partition of Czechoslovakia.³⁴² The injustice of 6 per cent. of the Magyar nation having been incorporated in Czechoslovakia was now rectified by incorporating 20 per cent. of the Slovak nation in Hungary.³⁴³ At Vienna as at Munich the absentees were important, and the most conspicuous were the two Western Munich Powers, in contradiction to the annex to the Munich Agreement which envisaged a quadripartite settlement of the Polish and Hungarian claims. The exclusion of Britain and France from Eastern Europe now received its first diplomatic expression.³⁴⁴ Hungary had wanted Poland to be an arbitrator with Germany and Italy; Czechoslovakia demanded that if Poland, then also Rumania. The SmaII Powers therefore were once again excluded and Poland was once again one of them. The question at issue in the Vienna Award was the establishment or not of the Polish–Hungarian common frontier, which meant the disposal once again, as in 1919, of Ruthenia. It was the object of Hungary and Poland that Hungary should regain her old Carpathian boundary with minor frontier rectifications in Poland’s favour, and they were supported by Italy; the policy of the Rome bloc joined hands with the policy of the Polish bloc. Poland tried to bring Rumania into the partition of Ruthenia, but Rumania was prevented by the fear of Hungarian revisionism turning next to Transylvania: the last negative expression of the common interest that had created the Little Entente.³⁴⁵ Once again the consolidation of the satellites was ambivalent: to Germany, the

³⁴⁰ See A. Henderson, Eyewitness in Czecho-Slovakia, pp. 248–54. The irregular war did not end with the Vienna Award but went on until January 1939, and appeared along the Polish as well as the Hungarian frontiers of Czechoslovakia (Ripka: Munich, pp. 506–8). On the Hungarian–Czechoslovak war of 1919, see H.P.C. i. 354–5; iv. 160; F. J. Vondracek, The Foreign Policy of Czechoslovakia, 1918– 1935 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), pp. 34–40. ³⁴¹ On the military weakness of Hungary compared with Czechoslovakia at this time see the report of the conversation between Hitler and Csáky at Berlin on 16 January 1939, when Csáky admitted that Hungary without German help was militarily impotent (see Documents secrets (Eristov) vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 25). ³⁴² See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section v (ƒ ). ³⁴³ The Vienna Award transferred to Hungary 859,885 Czechoslovak subjects, of whom 505,808 were Magyars, 276,287 Slovaks, the remainder Jews, Germans, and Ruthenes (D.Brit.F.P., 3rd series, iii. 225–6). ³⁴⁴ “Munich represents a decisive turning-point in the history of Central Europe. The Powers of the Rome–Berlin Axis on that occasion took into their hands the settlement of the outstanding questions in Central Europe, as the Western Powers themselves have recognized”: Csáky to the Budapest Correspondent of the Popolo d’Italia, 21 December 1938 (Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1938, i. 252). ³⁴⁵ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section v (d).

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Polish–Hungarian common frontier was represented as strengthening an antiSoviet group that would be ancillary to German policy; but its main motive was perhaps anti-German, barring the road to the east.³⁴⁶ The Vienna Conference revealed the latent conflicts within the Axis, Italy supporting Hungary, but Germany supporting Slovakia with preponderant voice. The Award mutilated Slovakia and Ruthenia more arbitrarily than the partition of Bohemia, but preserved a rump Ruthenia, like the rump Czechoslovakia of which it remained a part, for an instrument of German purposes.

(k) From Munich and Vienna to Prague The new Czechoslovakia was from the outset a German puppet state. Its natural defences and prepared fortifications had been surrendered; strategically and economically it was not viable, and existed at German discretion; and Germany from the outset was preparing for its complete annexation.³⁴⁷ The Czechoslovak Government used the popular fury against the Western Powers to co-operate with the Axis. On 5 October Benes resigned the presidency and on 22 October left the country.³⁴⁸ Two internal developments in Czechoslovakia followed upon Munich, the achievements of a demagogic radicalism stimulated by Germany. The first was the federalization of the country, the second the partial establishment of a Fascist system. In the German grip Czechoslovakia disintegrated into its component nationalities, and their autonomist tendencies, hitherto latent or frustrated, came to fulfilment. On 6 October an autonomous government was set up for Slovakia;³⁴⁹ on 11 October another for Ruthenia,³⁵⁰ which having lost its old capital, Uzhorod, to Hungary, was now compelled to set up a new capital in the wretched village of Chust. On 17 November a new Constitution was adopted for the whole country, in which the name Czechoslovakia became Czecho-Slovakia, and autonomy statutes for Slovakia and Ruthenia were formally enacted on 21 November.³⁵¹ In the Czech Lands there was a constitutional revolution: a fusion of political parties into two groups with the elimination of the rest and a concentration of power in the hands of the executive.³⁵² But the two new autonomous governments, lacking ³⁴⁶ See Michael Winch, Republic for a Day (London: Hale, 1939), p. 228; Ripka, Munich, p. 499; Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, p. 37. ³⁴⁷ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section iii. Hitler’s secret directive of 21 October 1938 laid down “the liquidation of the remainder of the Czech State” as the object of the German armed forces second only to the defence of the German frontiers. “It must be possible to smash the remainder of the Czech State at any time if it should be inclined to pursue a policy hostile to Germany” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 480 (136-C); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 38; cf. N.C.A. vi. 947–8). ³⁴⁸ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section vi (a). ³⁴⁹ Ibid. (b). ³⁵⁰ Ibid. (c). ³⁵¹ The non-hyphened form “Czechoslovakia” will continue to be used here throughout. ³⁵² See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section vi (d).

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roots and traditions of independence, were more under German influence than that of Prague. In Slovakia, where there had always been a clerical and authoritarian tradition, a totalitarian régime was established, under the Slovak Populist Party with its Hlinka Guard modelled on the Nazi SS. Slovakia became in some degree the model Nazi satellite state, eclipsing Hungary: the leader of the German minority, Karmasin, was made Secretary of State for German Affairs and virtually supervised the Government.³⁵³ Ruthenia was so backward as to be incapable of effective self-government; Volosin, the elderly Uniat priest who became Premier, was as little prepared for such an eminence as Hácha, the elderly judge who had succeeded Benes as President of Czechoslovakia; a semi-Fascist régime was set up under the inspiration of the Ukrainian nationalists, with anti-Semitic measures and a storm-trooper organization named Sic, modelled on the Hlinka Guard;³⁵⁴ but the importance of Ruthenia was as an advanced position for further German expansion. “Par un curieux renversement du destin,” wrote Coulondre in December 1938, “la Tchécoslovaquie, établie comme un bastion pour contenir la poussée allemande, sert aujourdhui de bélier au Reich pour enfoncer les portes de l’Orient.”³⁵⁵ Through the conquest of Austria and Czechoslovakia Germany had encircled Hungary on the west and north, and virtually annexed her economically to the Reich, a subjection for which Hungary’s meagre territorial acquisitions did not compensate. More striking was the new position of Poland. Poland was, next to Czechoslovakia herself, the chief and most immediate loser by the Munich and Belvedere settlements; and this went far beyond her loss of prestige through her exclusion from a share in them. As the Anschluss had encircled Czechoslovakia on three sides, so the conversion of Slovakia and Ruthenia into German satellites encircled Poland on three sides, putting her in her turn at a strategic disadvantage which Beck had failed to foresee. The first note of the new theme was sounded when on 24 October 1938, a little more than three weeks after the conference at Munich, Ribbentrop summoned Lipski, the Polish Ambassador in Berlin, and presented him with a demand for the cession of Danzig to the Reich and an extraterritorial road and railway across the Polish corridor.³⁵⁶ Being drawn more

³⁵³ Ibid. (b). ³⁵⁴ Ibid. (c). ³⁵⁵ Despatch to Bonnet of 15 December 1938 (France, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères: Le livre jaune français. Documents diplomaliques 1938-1939. . . . [referred to hereafter as Livre jaune français] (Paris; Imprimerie Nationale, 1939), no. 33); cf. Namier: Diplomatic Prelude, p. 37. [Ed.: Coulondre wrote in December 1938: “Through a curious reversal of destiny, Czechoslovakia, established as a bastion to contain the German thrust, now functions as a battering ram for the Reich to break open the doors of the East.” ] ³⁵⁶ See Survey for 1938, iii, part II, section i (b) (5). Yet it was not Poland, but Lithuania, who was marked down by Germany as the next victim after Czechoslovakia: the directive of 21 October 1938 defined the task of the German armed forces as being, after the protection of the Reich’s frontiers and the liquidation of the remainder of the Czech State, the seizure of Memel (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 477–8 (136-C); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i, 38; cf. N.C.A. vi. 947). A month later, on

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closely than she willed into the German wake, a danger which it was her folly not to have avoided long before her own territorial integrity was brought into question, Poland now felt a common interest with the other major Power that had been excluded from the Munich and Vienna settlements, and leaned to the east. On 26 November 1938, in order to contradict reports that Poland was about to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, Poland and Russia issued a joint communiqué reaffirming their non-aggression pact of 1932.³⁵⁷ The most evident threat to Poland was not the pressure upon her western frontiers but the autonomous Ruthenia, which became, from Munich to March 1939, the fulcrum whereby Germany sought to break up the remaining structure of Eastern Europe. In Ruthenia Germany set on foot a Ukrainian nationalist movement, and the little backward province, which had been a bridge between Czechoslovakia and Rumania, and was to become for a brief period the bridge between Hungary and Poland, was promoted into an irredentist centre, a Ukrainian Piedmont, whose attractive force was intended to spread far beyond its own exiguous frontiers, among the oppressed Ukrainians of Eastern Poland and the great body of the nation in the Soviet Ukraine.³⁵⁸ From October 1938 onwards the German press called it Carpatho-Ukraine, and on 31 December this change of name became official.³⁵⁹ Here the wheel of history tended backwards, not to the confused struggles of 1919, but to the brief apogee of German power in the preceding year, when between the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the collapse of the German front in the west a vassalized autonomous Ukraine made an avenue for the German armies as far east as the Don.³⁶⁰ For eighteen years Poland had expected and feared the irredentist influence upon her Ukrainian population from the Russian east; it now appeared from the German south. From here it endangered the industrial reservoir round Sandomierz, the Central District or Triangle of Security with its back to the Carpathians, which had been chosen and developed precisely because of its remoteness from the German and Russian frontiers alike. On 8 December 24 November, Keitel signed a supplementary instruction which added the occupation of Danzig as a further task: “The assumption is a lightning occupation of Danzig, exploiting a favourable political situation, not a war against Poland” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 481–2 (137-C); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 97; cf. N.C.A. vi. 949). ³⁵⁷ See Survey for 1938, iii, part II, section i (b) (5). ³⁵⁸ For first-hand accounts of Carpatho-Ukraine from January to March 1939 see Winch, Republic, (reviewed in Namier, In the Margin of History, pp. 181–5) and A. Henderson, Eyewitness in CzechoSlovakia, pp. 274–87. ³⁵⁹ Ripka, Munich, p. 243, apparently referring to an enactment of the Czechoslovak Parliament. The change was confirmed or effected by a decree of the Ruthenian Government on 2 January 1939, though the name Carpatho-Russia still remained a valid alternative (The Times, 3 January 1939; Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1938). ³⁶⁰ Ripka, Munich, p. 325. The Central Powers recognized the Ukraine as an independent sovereign state on 1 February 1918; on 8 February it became their economic protectorate by the first Brest-Litovsk Treaty; on 1 March the Germans occupied Kiev and reinstated the Ukrainian government overthrown by the Bolsheviks; by the middle of May the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation of the Ukraine was complete, and the German evacuation did not take place until after the Western armistice of 11 November 1918 (see Allen, Ukraine, pp. 286–306).

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1938 the Ukrainian National Democratic Party in Poland demanded the kind of autonomy now obtained by Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine: a separate army, and a share in the control of foreign relations. Poland was threatened by the same combination of external encirclement and internal disruption that had destroyed Czechoslovakia, and the latter was the more alarming.³⁶¹ The partition of Czechoslovakia not only marked the limit of German revisionism according to the national principle, beyond which it would move into imperialism. It also stirred up the small revisionist states, the minorities, the subnationalities of Eastern Europe. For the first time the national principle had been invoked for its new purpose of disintegrating the successor states that had formerly been built upon it; the Croats in Yugoslavia, like the Ukrainians in Poland, were excited by the spectacle of Slovak and Ruthenian autonomy.³⁶² And for the first time German revisionism had provided subsidiarily a degree of satisfaction for a small revisionist Power; Bulgaria’s appetite was sharpened by the extension of Hungary’s frontiers. These movements offered a variety of opportunities to German policy; but while Germany was concentrating on the final destruction of Czechoslovakia, and beginning her pressure upon Poland, she aimed at a general consolidation of her mastery over South-Eastern Europe rather than the promotion of new divisions. As in 1936, when she had first isolated Eastern Europe from the West, her exploitation of the field was inaugurated by Schacht’s tour of the Danubian and Balkan capitals as Minister of Economics,³⁶³ so in the last quarter of 1938 Germany’s ascendancy was celebrated and cemented by Schacht’s successor Funk in a similar journey.³⁶⁴ Ribbentrop, when he met Mussolini and Ciano in Rome on 28 October 1938, numbered among “other countries which want to form still closer bonds with the Axis” not only Hungary but Yugoslavia and Rumania also.³⁶⁵ Nevertheless, German diplomacy here was not unimpeded by obstacles, and at the end of the year and the beginning of 1939 there appeared throughout the Danube valley a faint tremor of resistance. These states attempted, while maintaining their subservience to Germany in foreign policy, to establish increased control and independence in domestic affairs. A German trade mission to Bucharest in ³⁶¹ Cf. Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 25 February 1939. A common fear of the Greater Ukraine agitation underlay the Polish–Russian joint communiqué of 26 November 1938. Russia and Poland now found the same interest in standing shoulder to shoulder over the prostrate Ukrainian nation that Russia and Prussia had had throughout the nineteenth century in standing shoulder to shoulder over the prostrate Polish nation. [Ed. Ciano, Diario (1939–43) stands for Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1939 (–1943), 2 vols, 4th edn (Milan: Rizzoli, 1947); Ciano’s Diary 1939–1943, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge (London: Heinemann, 1947) here and in subsequent references.] ³⁶² On 15 January 1939 the Croat Opposition, at Zagreb, passed a resolution demanding the settlement of the Croat question in accordance with the principle of self-determination. ³⁶³ Survey for 1936, p. 529, note 1. ³⁶⁴ Survey for 1938, i. 50–5. ³⁶⁵ Ciano, Europa, p. 375; Eng. version, p. 244. Cf. Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 8 January 1939: “closer relations with Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania, and possibly Poland, for the purpose of ensuring raw materials”.

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November and December failed to obtain the long-term commercial agreement it was seeking,³⁶⁶ and on 30 November the Iron Guard leader Codreanu, who had been in prison since April, was murdered by Carol only a week after Carol’s return from a visit to Berchtesgaden. Hitler was intensely indignant, and Gafencu believed, with characteristic self-dramatization, that his appointment as Foreign Minister on 23 December was to handle a situation in which there might be a German “punitive expedition” down the Danube.³⁶⁷ Throughout the winter Rumania was the most active of all the Eastern European Powers in the pursuit of solidarity, being not yet contiguous with Germany and paralysed into subordination, nor so remote from danger as Greece and Turkey, who left the initiative in other hands. But solidarity against Germany was less easy to achieve than solidarity against Bulgaria, and the only concrete result of Gafencu’s busy journeyings to foreign capitals was the meeting of the Balkan Entente at Bucharest on 22 February1939, which reaffirmed the existing frontiers against any revisionist claims.³⁶⁸ The Yugoslav alliance was still of cardinal importance to Italy. On 8 January 1939 Mussolini definitely included the annexation of Albania in his programme of expansion, but it was to depend on Yugoslav support, and Yugoslavia for her part was to be encouraged in the conquest of Salonika.³⁶⁹ From 18 to 23 January Ciano visited Yugoslavia and conferred with Stojadinovic. At Germany’s request Ciano asked whether Yugoslavia might join the Anti-Comintern Pact; on Italy’s account he proposed the Albanian partition; and to both suggestions Stojadinovic responded favourably.³⁷⁰ But in the general elections of 11 December 1938 Stojadinovic had been virtually defeated: the dictatorship had gone far towards transforming the Croat autonomous movement into a Yugoslav national opposition backed by the majority of Serbs as well;³⁷¹ and on 4 February 1939 Stojadinovic was compelled to resign, and Axis influence in Belgrade was shaken. “With the removal of Stoyadinovich,” wrote Ciano, “the Yugoslav card has lost for us 90 per cent. of its value.”³⁷² Mussolini now decided, “if the Stoyadinovich policy still holds, to go ahead with the partition of Albania between us and Yugoslavia; if

³⁶⁶ Survey for 1938, i. 55–6. ³⁶⁷ See Grigore Gafencu, Les derniers jours de l’Europe: un voyage diplomatique en 1939, revised edition [referred to hereafter as Gafencu, Derniers jours] (Paris: Egloff, 1947), p. 39 [trans. by Fletcher Allen with title The Last Days of Europe (London: Muller, 1947)]; cf. Survey for 1938, iii, part IV, section iii. ³⁶⁸ See Ripka, Munich, p. 322; Gafencu, Derniers jours, pp. 148–50. ³⁶⁹ See Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 8 and 15 January 1939. ³⁷⁰ Ibid. 17 and 19 January 1939; and Ciano, Europa, pp. 407–12; Eng. version, pp. 268–72. See also Survey for 1938, iii, part IV, section iii. ³⁷¹ See H. Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe, pp. 236–7. “The final result was announced as being 1,643,783 votes for the Government and 1,364,524 for the United Opposition—and it should not be forgotten that this was the Government estimate of the votes” (Wiskemann, Undeclared War, p. 125). ³⁷² Ciano: Diario (1939–43), 7 February 1939. Ribbentrop, however, was complacent in the belief that Cincar-Markovic, the Yugoslav Minister in Berlin, who was now promoted to be Yugoslav Foreign Minister, was pro-Axis (ibid. 6 February 1939; Germany, Auswa¨rtiges Amt, Dokumente zum Konflikt mit Jugoslawien und Griechenland (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1941), no. 34).

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not, then occupation of Albania by us without Yugoslavia, and, if necessary, even against Yugoslavia.”³⁷³ The satellite whose relations with Germany were most ambiguous was Hungary. Hungary strongly resented not having obtained Ruthenia under the Belvedere Award and believed that she had been deprived by German meanness of her just demands. Her feelings were vented in the continuance of terroristic attacks along the Slovak and Ruthenian frontiers, and in criticism of Germany in political speeches and in the press. This in turn angered both Hitler and Mussolini.³⁷⁴ In December the Hungarian Foreign Minister Kánya, whom Hitler regarded as an enemy of Germany, was succeeded by Csáky; and on 13 January 1939 Csáky had a stormy interview with Hitler, from which he withdrew, however, with the assurance that Hitler no longer forbade a Hungarian occupation of Ruthenia.³⁷⁵ Three days before his meeting with Hitler, Csáky announced that Hungary had accepted an invitation to join the Anti-Comintern Pact;³⁷⁶ and on 2 February Russia broke off relations with Hungary on the ground that Hungary had now virtually lost her independence.³⁷⁷ Rumania was pleased by this further alienation of two of the three Powers that had claims on her territory. On 14 February Imrédy was forced to resign by the increasing unpopularity of his subservient policy towards Germany; the discovery of a Jewish streak in the ancestry of the anti-Semitic politician suggested the capricious but ineluctable destiny against which his country itself was fighting in vain. He was succeeded as Prime Minister by Teleki, but Csáky retained his post. Hungary formally signed the Anti-Comintern Pact on 24 February, the fourth adherent and the first Small Power on the roll; on the same day Teleki dissolved the Hungarian Nazi Party in the hope of insulating his domestic from his foreign policy. It seemed at the time as if the German occupation of Prague in March might have been decided upon partly ‘in order to break the insubordination being shown at the time by most of Germany’s smaller neighbours to her east and south’.³⁷⁸ Rumania had long wished to secure the same unrestricted sovereignty over the mouths of the Danube that Turkey obtained in 1936 over the Black Sea Straits. As early as 1925 Rumania had sought the abolition of the European Commission of

³⁷³ Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 5 February 1939. ³⁷⁴ Cf. ibid. 10 January 1939. ³⁷⁵ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section x (a). See also report of conversation between Hitler and Csáky, 16 January 1939, in Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 25. On 27 February Csáky sent a servile and deprecatory message to Berlin that the Hungarian desire for Ruthenia was based only on economic reasons: see report of conversation between Weizsa¨cker and the Hungarian military attaché, 27 February 1939 (ibid. no. 26). ³⁷⁶ This had been prepared by Ciano’s visit to Budapest on 19–22 December 1938. ³⁷⁷ Manchester Guardian, 3 February 1939. Russia discriminated between the Small and Great Powers of the Pact, and the representation of Hungarian interests in the Soviet Union was appropriately entrusted to Japan, one of the three Powers whose invitation to Hungary to join the Pact had caused the severance of Russo-Hungarian relations (ibid. 9 February 1939). ³⁷⁸ Wiskemann, Undeclared War, p. 92; cf. pp. 62, 237.

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the Danube and its replacement by the International Commission, and her discontent was increased by the success of Turkish diplomacy at Montreux.³⁷⁹ Moreover, Russia had been demanding representation on the European Commission since 1925, and Germany since 1927.³⁸⁰ When in November 1936 Germany denounced the provisions of the Versailles Treaty concerning international waterways, and withdrew from the international river commissions, she struck a decisive blow at the international régime for the Danube.³⁸¹ The Rumanian campaign against the European Commission obtained its objectives at the Sinaia Conference of August 1939, when the Commission renounced all its powers which were incompatible with Rumanian sovereignty.³⁸² On 1 March 1939 Germany was at last admitted to the European Commission. But the régime of 1856 was now virtually dead; Rumania had been engaged in destroying a European guarantee of her own independence; and the way was cleared for a conflict, to control the mouths of the Danube, between Germany and Russia.

(l) The Second Partition of Czechoslovakia “It was clear to me from the first,” said Hitler afterwards, “that I could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-German territory.”³⁸³ The Munich frontiers of Bohemia and Moravia were not viable for Czechoslovakia, but neither were they likely to remain acceptable to Germany: a Czech salient still deformed her eastern frontier, and proclaimed the strategic desirability of straightening the line between the southern tip of Silesia and the north-eastern tip of the Ostmark.³⁸⁴ On 16 January 1939 Hitler told Csáky that between October and March no military operation was possible in Europe.³⁸⁵ This pointed, for the final conquest of Czechoslovakia, to the month in which in previous years Germany had reintroduced conscription, had remilitarized the Rhineland, and had conquered Austria. Throughout the winter of 1938–9 the fulfilment of what had been only half achieved at Munich was in preparation. The military and economic plans were complete; the German fifth ³⁷⁹ Survey for 1925, ii. 165–6; Survey for 1937, i. 372, note; Jean Duvernoy, Le régime international du Danube (Paris: Pédone, 1941), pp. 130–6. ³⁸⁰ Sir Osbert Mance, International River and Canal Transport (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1944), p. 67. ³⁸¹ Survey for 1937, i. 368–80; Mance, International River, p. 55. ³⁸² Duvernoy, Régime international, pp. 141–3. ³⁸³ Hitler’s conference with his Commanders-in-Chief, 23 November 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 329 (789-PS); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 529; cf. N.C.A. iii. 573). ³⁸⁴ “Geographically the situation was already made clear by the fact that Bohemia and Moravia were enclosed by Germany, and Germany could never tolerate in her own territory a hotbed of unrest,” minutes of a conference between Hitler and Tiso, 13 March 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxi. 151 (2802PS); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 48; cf. N.C.A. v. 444). ³⁸⁵ See Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. ii (Hongrie), no. 25, p. 79; Documents (R.l.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 194.

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column inside Czechoslovakia was highly organized; the diplomatic pressure on the Prague Government was constant. But it was through a national Auflo¨sung that the destruction of Czechoslovakia was designed.³⁸⁶ By the beginning of 1939 the three component parts of the state were ceasing to function within a common framework, and were assuming separate international existences. Ruthenia as the base for a Nazi Ukrainian agitation was exacerbating the relations of Prague with Poland and Hungary. The Nazi exploitation of Slovak separatism was preparing the opportunity for German intervention; the Slovak extremists were given the role in the second act that had been played by Henlein’s party in the first. In February 1939 their agitation for Slovak independence reached its height. The Prague Government had to decide whether to acquiesce in the disintegration of the Czechoslovak State, or to take action which might precipitate a crisis. On 6 March they intervened in Ruthenia,³⁸⁷ and on 9 March in Slovakia,³⁸⁸ dismissing the Ministers who were most active in the separatist movements. These acts were the last attempts of a government in Prague to assert its authority throughout the territories of the Czechoslovak Republic. The situation was now ready for German intervention. Under strong Nazi pressure, and the threat of seeing their country handed over to Hungary, the Slovak Diet voted the independence of Slovakia on 14 March.³⁸⁹ The people of Bratislava received the declaration of independence with apathy and pessimism. It was the last tribute to the republic of Masaryk and Benes that the separation of the Slovaks from the Czechs had to be carried through by German violence and could not be invested with any appearance of spontaneity. On the same evening the Government in Chust followed suit and proclaimed the independence of Carpatho-Ukraine.³⁹⁰ The previous midnight the Ruthenes had sent a telegram to Hitler asking him to accept Carpatho-Ukraine as a German protectorate, but this was never answered.³⁹¹ For less than twenty-four hours the Ruthenian province became for the first and last time in its history an independent state, the republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, cut loose from Czechoslovakia, not yet reabsorbed in Hungary, but seeming, as the last mutilated embodiment of the hopes of a free Ukrainian nation, like a faint echo of the Ruthenian principality of Galicia on the farther side of the Carpathians, which in the second half of the thirteenth century, at the flood-tide of the Mongolian invasion, had been the last representative of the old Kievan Russian world.³⁹²

³⁸⁶ Livre jaune français, no. 65. ³⁸⁷ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section x (c). ³⁸⁸ Ibid. (b). ³⁸⁹ Ibid. section xi (a). ³⁹⁰ Ibid. ³⁹¹ See Winch, Republic, pp. 280–1; Livre jaune français, no. 66. ³⁹² See Allen, Ukraine, pp. 38–40; Toynbee, Study, vi. 310, note 2. “In twenty-four hours we lived in three different States. We woke up in the Czechoslovak Republic. By the evening Carpatho Ukraine was

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On the evening of 14 March Hitler summoned Hácha to Berlin, and in the interview that was held in the early hours of the following morning, the most notorious and brutal as well as the best attested to which Hitler ever subjected a foreign statesman, he forced Hácha, by the threat of the immediate destruction of Prague from the air, to sign an agreement which ‘placed the fate of the Czech people and of their country in the hands of the Fuehrer of the German Reich.’³⁹³ At dawn that day, 15 March, the German army invaded Czechoslovakia from all sides, advancing rapidly through heavy snow; and in a proclamation to the German people Hitler declared that ‘Czecho-Slovakia has ceased to exist.’³⁹⁴ He himself entered Prague in the evening, shortly before the streets had been cleared by the imposition of a curfew, and slept the night in the Hradcany. From there on 16 March he issued a decree annexing Bohemia and Moravia and creating them a Protectorate.³⁹⁵ Of protectorates in Europe there had been none hitherto except at one time or another the diminutive interstitial states of Andorra and Monaco, San Marino and the Ionian Islands, the republic of Cracow and the Free City of Danzig.³⁹⁶ The reduction of so ancient and considerable a territory as Bohemia and Moravia, which even in its Habsburg servitude had remained juridically a kingdom, to a status which was primarily a legal instrument of Western expansion against the Islamic world and among primitive peoples, showed a more advanced stage in the dissolution of Western society than the Balkanization which was already infecting it from Eastern Christendom³⁹⁷—its colonialization. The Western Powers would no longer monopolize the prestige of imperial possessions, for Germany would provide herself with colonies and protectorates in Europe.³⁹⁸ When the independence of Slovakia was declared on 14 March, Hungary instantly sent an ultimatum to Prague, demanding the withdrawal of Czech troops from Ruthenia.³⁹⁹ While Hácha was on his way to Berlin the Czech Government a free land. Next day the Hungarians came in. The Germans, who had occupied Prague early that morning, were, it was announced, ‘not interested’ in Carpatho Ukraine, and thus the little Republic, which all Europe believed was to be the germ of a Great Ukraine, was crushed at birth” (Winch, Republic, p. 276). See also Anne O’Hare McCormick in the New York Times, 17 March 1939. ³⁹³ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section xi (d). For text of the agreement see Dokumente der deutschen Politik, initiated by the Deutsche Hochschule fu¨r Politik and continued by the Deutsches Auslandswissenschaftliches Institut (Berlin: Junker and Du¨nnhaupt, 1940), vol. 7, part 2, pp. 498–9; trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 56; cf. N.C.A. viii. 402 (049-TC). ³⁹⁴ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section xi (e). For text of proclamation see Dokumente der deutschen Politik, vol. 7, part 2, pp. 499–500; trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 57; cf. N.C.A. viii. 402–3 (050-TC). Wheeler-Bennett (Munich, p. 346) dramatically makes Hitler write this proclamation in the Hradcany; but it was dated from Berlin and given out over the wireless by Goebbels at 6 a.m. on 15 March, several hours before Hitler had left his own capital. ³⁹⁵ Text of decree in Dokumente der deutschen Politik, vol. 7, part 2, pp. 501–6; N.C.A. viii. 404–6 (051-TC); Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 62–5. ³⁹⁶ Oppenheim, International Law, i. 175–6 and note 4. See Wight, “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia” ab initio; and “Eastern Europe”, note 5. ³⁹⁷ See above, notes 116–119 and accompanying text. ³⁹⁸ Mein Kampf, pp. 153, 742; tr. Murphy, pp. 127, 533. ³⁹⁹ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section xi (b).

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accepted the ultimatum in substance, and on the same evening Hungarian troops cautiously began the invasion of Ruthenia. For the next two days they moved slowly up the mountain valleys in a blizzard, being resisted by Ukrainian guerrillas. Volosin offered the country to Rumania, himself fleeing thither. But Rumania was in panic; she had mobilized in the expectation that the Hungarian invasion of Ruthenia would be followed by an invasion of Transylvania, and in the fear of Bulgarian movements in the south; and with the very structure of her state seeming in danger, she contented herself by occupying only a few Ruthenian frontier communes.⁴⁰⁰ On 16 March the Hungarians captured Chust and reached the Polish border, and Teleki proclaimed the annexation of Ruthenia in Budapest. On 19 March the occupation was officially completed, though fighting continued for some days. Hungary once more stretched to the Carpathian crests, and the common frontier with Poland was achieved. Slovakia like Ruthenia was fully independent only for a day, but it was not its fate to be annexed. On 15 March, while Hitler was on his way from Berlin to Prague, Tiso begged him by telegram to take Slovakia under his protection; on 16 March, by another telegram, Hitler formally complied.⁴⁰¹ From that date onwards German troops entered Slovakia and occupied all the positions of strategic importance. A treaty of protection was signed in Vienna on 18 March and in Berlin on 23 March, whereby Germany virtually took over the defence and foreign relations of Slovakia.⁴⁰² In Berlin a secret protocol was added, making Slovakia an economic as well as a political protectorate of the Reich, and establishing de facto a customs union between them.⁴⁰³ Nevertheless, German protection for Slovakia was provisional and equivocal. It did not prevent Hungary from invading south-eastern Slovakia on 23 March, while German attention was occupied with the seizure of Memel, and taking possession of the Ung valley railway line with several towns. The Hungarians argued that this occurred some hours earlier than the signature of the German–Slovak treaty in Berlin, but the subsequent fighting went on until the end of the month.⁴⁰⁴

⁴⁰⁰ Livre jaune français, no. 73, p. 97; Ripka, Munich, pp. 389–90; Wiskemann, Undeclared War, pp. 64–6. ⁴⁰¹ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section xi (ƒ ). For text of telegrams see Dokumente der deutschen Politik, vol. 7, part 1, p. 9; trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 49, note 1. Namier (Diplomatic Prelude, pp. 71, 415) wrongly gives the date of Tiso’s request to Hitler as 16 March. ⁴⁰² See Survey for 1938, iii. For text of treaty see Dokumente der deutschen Politik, vol. 7, part 1, pp. 12–13; trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 83–84; cf. N.C.A. iv. 18–19 (1439-PS). In terms of the constitutional organization of the British Empire, the difference in status between Slovakia and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was now that between a protected state and a colonial protectorate. ⁴⁰³ Confidential Protocol concerning Economic and Financial Collaboration between the German Reich and the State of Slovakia (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxi. 121–3 (2793-PS); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 84–6; cf. N.C.A. v. 427–8). ⁴⁰⁴ The Times, 29 March 1939. A Slovak–Hungarian frontier agreement was signed on 4 April, giving Hungary the full extent of her claims; but the Slovak Government continued to protest against it and frontier clashes continued to occur.

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The price paid by Hitler for the acquisitions of March 1939 was the abandonment of his Ukrainian designs. He told Brauchitsch on 25 March⁴⁰⁵ that he no longer entertained immediate plans for establishing a Ukrainian state.⁴⁰⁶ This was the necessary condition for a German–Russian rapprochement, and it is not impossible that Hitler already saw its advantages in that respect.⁴⁰⁷ The extinction of the Ukrainian Piedmont relieved Eastern European politics of what had been their most disturbing and imponderable factor since Munich. The common Polish–Hungarian frontier meant relinquishing what had been virtually a common German–Rumanian frontier, and this was conceded now by Germany with a show of deference to Hungarian and Polish wishes.⁴⁰⁸ Nevertheless, when the dust of collapsing Czechoslovakia had settled, and the new pattern of power could be clearly seen, the small states, severally and collectively, found their positions decisively weakened. Hungary was enslaved by her territorial gains, and lay in vassalage with the Germans now along her northern as well as her western frontier. Rumania was threatened more gravely by the German–Hungarian combination than she had been by the German control of the Ruthenian corridor; Magyar imperialism had been fleshed along the north, and might next be encouraged to turn to the east.⁴⁰⁹ In the emotional repercussions of the fall of Prague, Rumania signed a long-term commercial treaty with Germany on 23 March of the kind that she had refused in December; it made Rumania an economic vassal to Germany, but it ⁴⁰⁵ See Survey for 1938, iii, part I, section xi (h). ⁴⁰⁶ “The Fuehrer does not want to go into the Ukraine. Possibly one could establish a Ukrainian State. But these questions also remain open” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxviii. 274 (100-R); N.C.A. viii. 84). ⁴⁰⁷ In Stalin’s speech to the Eighteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U. (B.) on 10 March 1939 there was a confident reference to the unlikelihood of “the gnat, namely, the so-called Carpathian Ukraine”, annexing “the elephant, that is, the Soviet Ukraine” (J. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, trans. from the 11th Russian edition (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1945), pp. 603–4); but there is no evidence that Stalin was anticipating Hitler’s gesture. [Ed. With further regard to this speech Wight referred the reader to the conclusion of his chapter “The Balance of Power,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 508–31. This chapter is also available in Martin Wight, “The Balance of Power in The World in March 1939,” in Martin Wight, International Relations and Political Philosophy, ed. David S. Yost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 95–118.] ⁴⁰⁸ In his Reichstag speech of 28 April 1939 Hitler described how the Vienna Award had been unsatisfactory to Hungary and Poland, and continued: “It was a fact that perhaps only one single state was interested in the preservation of the status quo, and that was Rumania; the man best authorized to speak on behalf of that country told me personally how desirable it would be to have a direct line of communication with Germany perhaps via the Ukraine and Slovakia. I mention this as an illustration of the feeling of being menaced by Germany from which the Rumanian Government—according to the American clairvoyants—are supposed to be suffering. But it was now clear that it could not be Germany’s task permanently to oppose a development or actually to fight for the maintenance of a state of affairs for which we could never have made ourselves responsible. The stage was thus reached at which in the name of the German Government I decided to make a declaration to the effect that we had no intention of any longer incurring the reprobation of opposing the common wishes of Poland and Hungary as regards their frontiers, simply in order to keep open a road of approach for Germany to Rumania” (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1619). This passage probably affords evidence not for what Carol said to Hitler but for what had been one of the less explicit of Hitler’s several purposes in establishing an autonomous Carpatho-Ukraine. ⁴⁰⁹ As it did the following year. The Second Vienna Award, on 30 August 1940, gave northern Transylvania to Hungary.

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might imply a German guarantee of her frontiers.⁴¹⁰ Yugoslavia too felt the premonitions of national disintegration. The reaction of the Serbs was characteristically more positive than that of any people in Eastern Europe; there was now increasing demand in Belgrade for a Serbo-Croat government of national union. But in Croatia there were still two minds about the Slovak model of autonomy under the German hand, and the Italians anxiously saw the German shadow creeping forward over Fiume and Trieste and the Adriatic.⁴¹¹ The country most immediately menaced was Poland. The disappearance of the Ukrainian danger from Ruthenia was altogether nullified by the appearance of German troops in Slovakia, a cruder and more massive threat. The bloodless solution of the Czech conflict in the autumn of 1938 and spring of 1939 and the annexation of Slovakia rounded off the territory of Greater Germany in such a way that it now became possible to consider the Polish problem on the basis of more or less favourable strategic premises.⁴¹² The encirclement of Poland was illustrated and emphasized, in the opposite quarter, by the German seizure of Memel from Lithuania on 23 March,⁴¹³ the colophon to the violent events of March 1939. ‘Henceforth the Germans overflowed with “generosity” towards Lithuania, hoping to find in her, because of Vilna, an ally against Poland: another Slovakia on her northern flank.’⁴¹⁴ The new position was incisively drawn in a report by the United States military attaché in Berlin. The military and strategic advantages which Germany has gained by the occupation of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia are enormous. Strategically Germany has placed herself between Poland and Hungary and definitely and forever prevented joint Polish–Hungarian action against her. Further, in case Germany desires to move against Poland, she now commands the gateway to Krakow, Limburg, and the Russian Ukraine. Her new position now places her armies on three sides of ⁴¹⁰ “Twenty-one years earlier, in May 1918, the victorious Central Powers had imposed a treaty upon Roumania which, if very much harsher in detail, was not dissimilar in principle. . . . Shrewder people now began to speak of the three types of German protectorate since March 15th. The first, in Bohemia and Moravia, had comprised the complete subjection of the Czechs; the second had provided the Slovaks with diplomatic representation and a territorial guarantee, which was promptly followed by a Hungarian invasion and the cession of Slovak territory to Hungary; the third was established by the commercial treaty with Roumania” (Wiskemann, Undeclared War, pp. 93, 95). ⁴¹¹ See ibid. pp. 128–30; Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 16 and 17 March 1939. In Belgrade, democratic Serb public opinion was probably a less potent force at this juncture than the Yugoslav army (mainly Serb in its upper ranks) which two years later was to carry out the coup d’état of 25 March 1941. ⁴¹² Jodl’s lecture at Munich on “The Strategic Position in the Beginning of the 5th Year of War”, 7 November 1943 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 635 (172-L); N.C.A. vii. 923–4). Cf. Hitler’s speech to his military commanders, 23 November 1939: with the erection of the Protectorate “the basis for the conquest of Poland was laid” (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 329 (789-PS); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 529; cf. N.C.A. iii. 573). See also Namier: Diplomatic Prelude, pp. 85–6. ⁴¹³ See Survey for 1938, iii, part II, section iii (e). ⁴¹⁴ Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, p. 88. The relevant documents are in Dokumente der deutschen Politik, vol. 7, part 2, pp. 531–61.

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Poland, poised for a quick and telling blow. With respect to Hungary, Germany also threatens Budapest from the north and west and her armies are in a position to march directly into the fertile plains of Hungary, or through Hungary to Roumania. The occupation of the mountainous Ruthenia by Hungary becomes unimportant in the light of Germany’s new strategic position.⁴¹⁵

Henceforward the Small Powers might join the German column or they might seek help in undischargeable guarantees from the anti-German Great Powers; but the illusion of an Eastern European neutral bloc, which had survived the first partition of Czechoslovakia, was finally dead. Thus the Polish–Hungarian common frontier was deprived of its main purpose by the very circumstances of its achievements.⁴¹⁶ It was the mark of Hitler’s tactical genius that the laying aside of his long-term Ukrainian plans brought such immense immediate advantages; or it was an illustration of how, when a Great Power is on the spring-tide of aggrandizement, the defensive manoeuvres of Small Powers are likely to turn back upon themselves and become tributaries of the common flood; “for the nature of Power is, in this point, like to Fame, increasing as it proceeds; or like the motion of heavy bodies, which the further they go, make still the more haste.”⁴¹⁷ Twice in the past Bohemia had been the protagonist in a European crisis. The Hussite Revolution in the fifteenth century was not only the revolt of nascent Czech nationalism against German ascendancy; it was also the first in the series of national revolutions conceived in terms of moral or intellectual ideals of freedom, which ran through Western history and culminated in the national movements and Wilsonian doctrines of 1918; and in the international effect of its extreme religious and social manifestations it played the same part in relation to the Conciliar Movement that Bolshevism afterwards played in relation to the League of Nations.⁴¹⁸ Bohemia defied German Catholicism once again in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, when by dissolving its connexion with the Habsburg Monarchy and electing a Protestant prince as king it precipitated the Thirty Years War. In the Hussite War the Bohemians maintained their ⁴¹⁵ Report of the U.S. military attaché in Berlin, 20 March 1939 (N.C.A. vi. 396 (3618-PS)). The position was described in remarkably similar words by the diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, 16 March 1939. ⁴¹⁶ One of the last people to deceive himself about its value as a reinsurance against Germany was Mussolini. When German plans for the final partition of Czechoslovakia became known belatedly in Rome on 14 March, “he sought a recompense in the advantages which Hungary will have by achieving a common frontier with the Poles, and he instructed me to tell Budapest to move boldly. But to me this seems very little” (Ciano: Diario (1939–43), 14 March 1939). ⁴¹⁷ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter x. ⁴¹⁸ The identification of Hussitism with Bolshevism was a favourite theme of Nazi propaganda. “Once, indeed, during the Hussite wars the Czechs had gained a temporary independence. They used it like the Bolsheviks, burning and ravaging, until the Germans rose and crushed them,” Hitler’s interview with G. Ward Price on 17 September 1938 (Hitler, Speeches (Baynes), ii. 1503; cf. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), p. 46, and Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, p. 278).

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independence and indeed their military superiority against Europe for seventeen years, and at last negotiated a compromise with the Council of Basel, the Compacts of 1436, by which their religious autonomy was recognized. At the beginning of the Thirty Years War they asserted their independence against the forces of the Counter-Reformation for only two years, and then in the catastrophic defeat of the White Mountain forfeited it for three centuries. The third time the Czechs became the centre of a European crisis, in the prologue to the Second World War in the twentieth century, they were victims rather than protagonists, and their part was acquiescence not resistance: in September 1938 they obstructed the will of the Great Powers for only a week, and in March 1939 they submitted without a blow. So decisive had become the disparity between Great Powers and Small through the growth since the fifteenth century in the power and organization of the modern state, and so hard was it now for the lesser peoples to preserve their independence. But the liquidation of small states, which Hitler advocated,⁴¹⁹ sharpened the rivalry between Great Powers in a way he could not control. Sixty years earlier Bismarck had said that if the Habsburg Monarchy broke up, Russia would try to get possession not only of Galicia but of all the Austrian Slavs. As to Bohemia, the eternal battle-field of Europe, the great plateau whence come all the rivers that water us, the vast natural fortress erected by God in the centre of our continent—Bohemia in the hands of Russia would mean our enslavement, Bohemia in our hands would mean war without mercy or truce against the Empire of the Tsars. You see that the survival of Austria is necessary for our own existence.⁴²⁰

Hitler’s statecraft knew none of the limited aims and the moderation of his predecessor’s, for it was indeed the fulfilment of the deeper moral qualities, the violence, deceit, and arrogance of Bismarck’s policy; and the triumph of 15 March 1939 carried within itself all the consequences that Bismarck had foreseen.

⁴¹⁹ For Hitler’s impatience with “all the rubbish of small nations [Kleinstaaten-Geru¨mpel]” see The Goebbels Diaries, trans. and ed. Louis P. Lochner (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), p. 279; cf. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 46, 128, and the same author’s Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Heinemann, 1939), pp. 208–10. ⁴²⁰ Bismarck to Saint-Vallier, the French Ambassador, on 14 November 1879 (Documents diplomatiques français (1871–1914), 1st series, vol. ii (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1930), no. 476, p. 583). This is apparently the source of two sayings widely attributed to Bismarck during the Czechoslovak crises of 1938–9: “Bohemia is a fortress erected by God in the centre of Europe”, and “the master of Bohemia is the master of Europe.”

12 Spain and Portugal in The World in March 1939 (a) Nationalist Spain The German destruction of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 coincided with the end of the Civil War in Spain.∗ Barcelona had fallen to the Nationalists on 26 January, the Germans entered Prague on 15 March, the Nationalists took Madrid on 28 March.¹ “After three centuries of inactivity”, wrote Ciano, “Spain thus again becomes a living and dynamic factor.”² It was a wishfully rhetorical exaggeration of the truth that, after a century and a half as a small and weak Power, Spain now had a government with expansionist ambitions and the desire to play a part in international politics.³ The Spanish Civil War ended the era of “the generation of ’98”—the period of profound intellectual and moral debate concerning the renovation of Spain and her place in European society, which followed her defeat in the Spanish–American War and her loss of the last remnants of the old Spanish Empire. The Spanish writer, Angel Ganivet, had said in 1897 that, though the loss of Gibraltar was a standing offence, Spain should acquiesce in it; for England as a purely maritime Power was less dangerous to the liberties of other countries than continental Powers, and being now satisfied and defensive had the same interests in international order as a weak state like Spain.⁴ But the Nationalist movement, like the Fascist ∗ This chapter was first published in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 138–51.

¹ See Survey of International Affairs for 1938, i. 277, 306. Franco’s ceremonial entrance into Madrid took place on 19 May. [Ed. Subsequent references to this annual survey published by Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs are indicated simply by Survey and the year covered.] ² Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1939 (–1943), 2 vols., 4th edition (Milan: Rizzoli, 1947), 22 February 1939. [An English version in one volume with the title Ciano’s Diary 1939–1943, edited by Malcolm Muggeridge, was published in 1947 (London: Heinemann). This work will be referred to hereafter as Ciano, Diario (1939–43).] ³ Though the great Spanish Monarchy was partitioned as a result of the general war of 1702–13, Spain sustained the role of a Great Power under a Bourbon dynasty throughout the eighteenth century. Her loss of Great Power status may be dated from her defeat by the French Republic in the War of the First Coalition (1793–5) and the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1796 which reduced her to a French satellite; and she subsequently failed to obtain recognition as a Great Power at the Congress of Vienna (see C. K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (London: Bell, 1934), pp. 61, 75). ⁴ Angel Ganivet, Idearium Español (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1943) trans. as Spain: an Interpretation (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1946), pp. 87–90: “Amongst all the nations of Europe,

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0013

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Revolution in Italy and the Nazi Revolution in Germany, brought a renewal of foreign claims and ambitions. Since 1815 Britain and France had had a common interest in the weakness of Spain; the new Spanish Government intended to repudiate this servitude. On the eve of his victory Franco said that Spain held the keys of the Mediterranean and that henceforward Mediterranean affairs would not be settled without her.⁵ But the rejection of foreign interference and international isolation was inseparable from the desire for expansion. From the earliest days of the rebellion Franco had claimed that he was come to restore the lost imperial mission of Spain. The third point of the Falangist programme declared: “We have a will to empire. We affirm that the full history of Spain implies an empire. We demand for Spain a pre-eminent place in Europe.”⁶ With the victory of the Nationalist Government, Spain’s will to empire, her imperial and Catholic mission, became the constant theme of propaganda.⁷ There was a war party among the Falangists and the army, and the new Government intended a policy of territorial aggrandizement as circumstances might allow. When Suñer visited Italy in June 1939 he told Ciano that Spain meant to recover Gibraltar, for so long as the British flag flew there she would not be a completely free and sovereign nation, and also to square accounts with France, by expansion in Morocco.⁸ The ambitions of Nationalist Spain were not confined to the Mediterranean. The imperial and Catholic mission pointed to the former empire that Spain had found and ruled for two centuries in the New World and the Pacific. Ibero-American cultural unity had attracted intellectuals and scholars and been the subject of institutes and conferences ever since the Spanish American countries had joined with Spain is, after Italy, the one most interested in England’s naval supremacy being maintained for a long time to come. . . It seems absurd, no doubt, that our own interests are linked up with those of the one nation with whom we have genuine grounds for ill-feelings, but in the recognition and acceptance of such anomalies lies at times the highest political wisdom.” Cf. E. Allison Peers, Spain in Eclipse, 1937–1943 (London: Methuen, 1943), pp. 165–6. ⁵ Declaraciones a Manuel Aznar, 31 December 1938 (Palabras del Caudillo (Barcelona: FE, editado por la Delegación Nacional de Falange Española Traditionalista y de las JONS, 1939), p. 312). Cf. Camilo Barcia Trelles, Puntos cardinales de la politica internacional española (Barcelona, FE, 1939), pp. 474–6. ⁶ Official translation of the 26 Points of Falange, reproduced in Arthur F. Loveday, World War in Spain (London: Murray, 1939), appendix iii, p. 184. There is another version in Allan Chase, Falange: the Axis Secret Army in the Americas (New York: Putnam, 1943), p. 14. ⁷ See Peers, Spain in Eclipse, pp. 98–100. ⁸ Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 5 June 1939. In a memorandum to Hitler of June 1940, Franco defined his territorial demands as Gibraltar, French Morocco, the Oran zone of Algeria, and the enlargement of Rio de Oro and Spanish Guinea. (See memorandum by the German Ambassador in Madrid, 8 August 1940, in The Spanish Government and the Axis: Documents, Department of State Publication 2483 (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1946), p. 3. [This collection will be referred to hereafter as Spanish Government.]) In the same month Franco began his occupation of Tangier. The last serious attempt by a Spanish Government to recover Gibraltar had been the great siege of 1779–83 during the American War of Independence. From the British point of view in 1939, if command of the sea was unable to prevent the loss of Gibraltar, it could at any time occupy the Canary Islands in exchange, from which control of the Atlantic routes and the western entrance to the Mediterranean could be maintained. (See Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. ii: Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949), pp. 492, 519, 522–523).

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Spain to celebrate the fourth centenary of the discovery of America, and PanHispanism was one of the ideals canvassed by the generation of ’98. The word “Hispanity” was coined before the Civil War, on the model of “Christianity,” to comprise and characterize the whole of the Hispanic peoples.⁹ Its first meaning was conservative and cultural: the ideal of Spain and her daughters being moved by the same Catholic, nationalist, and authoritarian spirit and unanimously repudiating the doctrines of the French Revolution and Yankee materialism. But irredentism does not remain confined to the literary plane. Hispanidad, like Deutschtum and romanità, was a concept whose political value lay in its elasticity of content and purpose. If Spain could replace France as the intellectual leader, and perhaps even the United States as the political leader, of the Latin American countries, she would not only be redeeming them spiritually but also strengthening her own international position; and Falangist writers hoped that Spanish aggrandizement in Africa might be backed by a political, economic, and cultural alinement with the great Hispanic bloc of America.¹⁰ “With regard to the HispanoAmerican countries,” said the third point of the Falangist programme, “we will aim at unification of culture, of economic interests and of power. Spain claims a preeminent place in all common tasks, because of her position as the spiritual cradle of the Spanish world.”¹¹ But at the moment of Franco’s victory, Hispanity still had no existence outside the sphere of Nationalist propaganda, except for the obscure and impalpable influence of the Falange Exterior as an auxiliary to the Nazi fifth column in Latin America.¹² But the foreign ambitions of the Nationalist Government, when its authority was at last established throughout the territory of Spain, were limited by physical exhaustion and political instability. The country was economically devastated. Suñer told Ciano in June 1939 that Spain was at the end of her resources, that in certain regions there was famine, and that she needed two or preferably three years of recovery before she could enter a war at the side of the Axis.¹³ Franco told Ciano in the following month that at least five years’ peace were necessary, and that many observers considered this an optimistic estimate.¹⁴ Spain ⁹ By Ramiro de Maeztu, a political philosopher who was the precursor of Falangism, in his Difensa de la Hispanidad (Madrid, Fax, 1934). The terms Ibero-American, Hispano-American, and Pan-Hispanic were for the most part interchangeable, giving the advantages of imprecision. “Hispano-American” illustrated the ambiguity on both sides of the hyphen. On the one side, did Hispanity include Portugal and Brazil? According to Maeztu it did (ibid. pp. 19–20), and it was often thus used in Falangist propaganda. “Ibero-American” avoided this ambiguity. On the other side, Hispanic America was normally used for convenience to cover the Philippines as well (cf. Trelles, Puntos cardinales, pp. 165–6, 184–5). ¹⁰ See Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, Discurso a las juventudes de España (Madrid: La Conquista del Estado, 1935), p. 72. ¹¹ Loveday: World War in Spain, appendix iii, p. 184. ¹² The only published account of the Falange overseas is Chase: Falange, of which the reliability is questionable. ¹³ Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 5 June 1939. ¹⁴ See conversation between Ciano and Franco at San Sebastian, 19 July 1939 (Galeazzo Ciano, L’Europa verso la catastrofe (Milan: Mondadori, 1948), p. 440; Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, ed. Malcolm

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was as much divided, beneath the hardening crust of the totalitarian state, as she had been when the Civil War began. The proletariat and large parts of the peasantry remained potentially hostile to the new régime. Catalonia and the Three Basque Provinces were punished by the abolition of their autonomy. The Government instituted reprisals against the defeated Republicans which became a secular heresy-hunt against Reds. The Nationalist movement itself was deeply divided. The Falangists, themselves a collection of radicals and arrivistes, soon came near to ousting the conservative Traditionalists from power in the Government and the Party. The monarchists were dissatisfied. The army despised the Falange. Business men opposed the doctrinaire economic policy of the Falangist Radicals. The Church was suspicious of the Government’s association with Nazism. The Government was split by personal and inter-departmental feuds, and quickly became bogged in graft and inefficiency. Like the classic dictators of history and unlike his contemporary patrons and exemplars, Franco had arrived at civil power by way of military command, and if he showed a talent in the new and unfamiliar field it was perhaps that of balancing upon the rivalries of politicians and generals, of adjusting their antagonisms and playing them off against one another. But for positive reasons also domestic reconstruction took precedence of foreign adventures. The Government prided itself on plans for national unity and social reform: Franco “wishes—to use Mussolini’s formula—to go out to the people.”¹⁵ And at the same time Spaniards individually were absorbed in scraping a living, in black-marketing, in obstructing or adapting themselves to Falangist innovations, in seeking revenge, or escaping it. The single common wish was that there should be no renewal of fighting.¹⁶

Muggeridge, trans. Stuart Hood (London: Odhams Press, 1948), p. 291. [This work and the English translation will be referred to hereafter as “Ciano, Europa” and “Eng. Version”.]). Ciano used the argument of the Spanish need for recuperation in his vain attempt, at Obersalzberg on 12 August 1939, to dissuade Hitler from immediate war (see memorandum of conversation between Hitler and Ciano: I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxix. 49 (1871-PS); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 178; cf. N.C.A. iv. 515, viii. 523). [Ed. I.M.T. Nuremberg stands for Trials of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945–1946, Proceedings and Documents in Evidence, 42 volumes (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947–1949) here and in subsequent references. The Documents (R.I.I.A.) consist of Documents on International Affairs for 1928–38, 13 vols.; for 1939–46, in progress (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs. N.C.A. stands for Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (A collection of documentary evidence and guide materials prepared by the American and British prosecuting staffs for . . . the International Military Tribunal at Nu¨rnberg) 8 vols., with “Opinion and Judgement” and Supplements A and B (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1946–1947) here and in subsequent references.] ¹⁵ Conversation between Ciano and Franco, San Sebastian, 19 July 1939 (Ciano, Europa, p. 443; Eng. version, p. 293). ¹⁶ For varying pictures of Spain between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of the World War see Salvador de Madariaga, Spain, 2nd edition (London: Cape, 1942), pp. 421–9; Peers, Spain in Eclipse, pp. 123–37; Herbert Feis, The Spanish Story (New York: Knopf, 1948), chapter i.

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(b) Portugal and Spain Franco’s victory placed the two countries of the Iberian Peninsula in the middle of a diplomatic chain joining Germany and Italy on the one side with Great Britain on the other. The Nationalist cause established an unusual community of sentiment between Spain and Portugal; Franco was in close dependence upon the Axis; Portuguese policy was traditionally based upon a British alliance. Spain and Portugal possessed a tradition of mutual hostility like that of England and Scotland before the Union of 1707. The lesser Power was always conscious of a threat to its independence, the greater Power intermittently resumed the tendency to complete the political unification of a natural geographical whole.¹⁷ The only Hispano-Portuguese Union in history was effected by Philip II of Spain in 1580, and undone in the War of Secession of 1640–68. After this the ancient AngloPortuguese alliance, which had been first contracted in the fourteenth century, took on a new importance. For England, Portugal was a maritime buffer state and a bridgehead against Spain of the same kind as the Low Countries were against France. For Portugal, the English alliance was the guarantee of her independence.¹⁸ The Napoleonic Wars provided the classic example of the alliance in action; they also produced a Portuguese irredenta, for in the Hispano-Portuguese War of 1801 the Spaniards took the frontier town of Olivença, and in spite of a clause in the Treaty of Vienna of 1815 never restored it to Portugal.¹⁹ In the nineteenth century the ideal of Iberian unity was revived in new shapes, and canvassed in Portugal as well as in Spain; the Right thought of it in terms of dynastic union, the Left in terms of republican federation; and the English alliance was still the ultimate sanction of Portuguese independence.²⁰ Confidence between the two Peninsular states was only assured when there was a similarity of régimes, and partly for that very reason their political swings did not often synchronize. The triumph of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War created a harmony of this kind for the first time since the fall of the Portuguese monarchy in 1910. That event had made Portugal a demagogic republic while Spain remained a conservative monarchy. In 1926 Portugal moved to the right

¹⁷ See Survey for 1937, ii. 202. There was the difference that Portugal had an independent history in the world not less glorious than that of Spain, while Scotland only obtained her full influence on Western Civilization as a result of the Union with England. ¹⁸ See Edgar Prestage, “The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance”, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1934), xvii. 69 seqq. “Portugal must be either an autonomous limb of the Iberian body or a disguised and hardly more autonomous limb of the British Empire” (Madariaga: Spain, p. 195); it is to be noted that this is a Spaniard’s way of putting it. ¹⁹ Vienna Congress Treaty, 1815, article 105 (Sir Edward Hertslet, The Map of Europe by Treaty 1814–1891 (vols. i–iii, London: Butterworth, 1875, and vol. iv, London: H.M.S.O., 1891), i. 268). See also H. V. Livermore, A History of Portugal (Cambridge: University Press, 1947), pp. 390–1, 402. ²⁰ Cf. Granville’s conversation with the Spanish Minister on 19 February 1873 (British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914, ed. G. P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (London: H.M.S.O., 1926– 38), vol. i, no. 69 (enclosure no. 1). (This work will be referred to hereafter as Gooch and Temperley.)

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with the military revolution which inaugurated the authoritarian “New State,” but five years later the Spanish monarchy collapsed and was succeeded by a republic with Left-wing and Iberianist tendencies.²¹ From the beginning of the Spanish Civil War the Portuguese Government supported the Anti-Communist and Catholic cause of the Nationalists.²² This marked the ascendancy of ideological over traditional political considerations, for although a Spanish Republican victory perhaps carried the danger of a union of Iberian Soviet republics, Falangist propaganda also played with a unification of the Peninsula.²³ Salazar may have hoped for the position of precedence and patronage with Franco that Mussolini once possessed in relation to Hitler,²⁴ but as soon as the Nationalists had won the war the reversal of roles became probable. In the moment of victory, on 18 March 1939, Franco concluded with Portugal a treaty of friendship and non-aggression.²⁵ Outwardly it confirmed the solidarity of the two régimes; the Portuguese Government may have hoped that it could be regarded also as a measure of reassurance. The abolition of Catalonian and Basque autonomy by the Nationalists in the following month was not an encouraging example of their Iberian policies for a country that was on the eve of celebrating the tercentenary of its national rising against the Spanish yoke.

(c) Spain and the Axis Powers The success of Franco’s rebellion had been very largely due to Italian and German intervention on his side, and with his victory the main international question concerning Spain became the extent of her future dependence on the Axis.²⁶ In Spain itself there were different attitudes towards the two Axis Powers. Ciano noted, at his interview with Franco in July 1939, that although the Spaniards approved of the Rome–Berlin system they were anxious to “underline a distinct difference in their feelings towards Italy and towards Germany.”²⁷ There were two main reasons for this. Germany was suspect as being the more powerful and incalculable ally and the greater threat to Spanish independence.²⁸ And Catholic sentiment, ²¹ The following dates may be noted: Portugal: 1910, fall of the monarchy; 1926, military revolution establishing General Carmona’s dictatorship; 1928, Salazar appointed Finance Minister; 1932, Salazar became Premier; 1933, new Constitution. Spain: 1923, Primo de Rivera became dictator; 1929, fall of Primo; 1931, flight of Alfonso XIII and establishment of the republic; 1933, general election and swing to the Right: 1936, outbreak of the Civil War (see Survey for 1937, ii. 10–23). ²² Ibid. 208; Survey for 1938, i. 360, note 2. ²³ Cf. Ramos, Discurso a las juventudes de España, p. 72. ²⁴ See Survey for 1934, p. 328. ²⁵ Survey for 1938, i. 360–1; Peers, Spain in Eclipse, pp. 144–5. ²⁶ For the strategic anxieties of the French in view of a possible association of Spain with the Axis, see Survey for 1937, ii. 148–50, 188–9. ²⁷ Ciano, Europa, p. 440; Eng. version, p. 291. ²⁸ “Franco and his advisers know that the country is not in a position to go to war. At the same time they are afraid of Germany and very friendly with Italy”: letter from Sir Samuel Hoare to Lord Halifax, 11 June 1940 (Lord Templewood, Ambassador on Special Mission (London: Collins, 1946), p. 34).

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which was probably the strongest of all the several impulses within the Nationalist movement, was implicitly hostile to National Socialism. The Spanish hierarchy had vehemently supported the rebel cause, but once victory had restored it to its privileges the more prudent policy of the Vatican was likely to prevail.²⁹ Even a Falangist fanatic like Suñer had Catholic prejudices against the Nazis,³⁰ though he afterwards became their champion in Spanish politics. The Spanish policies of the Axis Powers themselves were correspondingly different in their scope and intensity. (It is possible indeed that they had originally expected a coup d’état and some street-fighting, not a three years’ civil war, but having once become committed could not draw back.) Italy had adopted Franco’s cause as a vital interest of her own; for Germany it was subordinate to wider ends. Italy had sent infantry and played the larger part at sea; Germany had sent air forces and specialist troops. Italian expenditure on the Civil War was probably greater than German,³¹ and Italian intervention was throughout the more ostentatious. For Germany the Civil War had appeared at first mainly as a new chapter in Italo-Franco-British rivalry. In his conference with his commanders on 5 November 1937 Hitler said that German interests lay, not in seeing a total victory won by Franco, but in prolonging the war and encouraging its extension into a conflict between Italy, France, and Britain, during which Germany could settle the Czech and Austrian questions.³² German help to Franco seems to have been prompted by a desire less for his victory than for technical war experience, and for the purposes of political warfare against the democracies by encouraging the frame of mind that accepted Hitler as Europe’s defender against Bolshevism. But there were important economic advantages to be had in Spain: the commercial treaty of 16 July 1937 between Germany and the Nationalists had a secret protocol providing for German collaboration in the economic reconstruction of Spain, especially in the

²⁹ See Survey for 1937, ii. 218–21. ³⁰ Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 9 June 1939. ³¹ At the time of Mussolini’s visit to Munich in September 1937 the Germans claimed to have spent quite as much on the Spanish War as the Italians (Compte rendu du troisième entretien de Mussolini avec Bu¨low-Schwante (September 1937) in Documents secrets du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères d’A llemagne, translated from the Russian by Madeleine and Michel Eristov [referred to hereafter as Documents secrets (Eristov)] (Paris: Éditions Paul Dupont, 1947), vol. iii (Espagne), no. 3, pp. 22–3). A month later, in his conversation with Ribbentrop at Rome on 6 November 1937, Mussolini said that Italian expenditure in Spain had been 4¼ milliard lire, and German expenditure, according to Go¨ring, about 3 1/2 milliards (Ciano: Europa, p. 221; Eng. version, p. 144). For general estimates of the final Spanish war debts to Italy and Germany see Thomas J. Hamilton, Appeasement’s Child (New York: Knopf, 1943), p. 140; Charles Foltz, The Masquerade in Spain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 140. ³² Hossbach Memorandum, 10 November 1937 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 411–12 (386-PS); D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 36–37; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 23); cf. N.C.A. iii. 303. [Ed. The full reference for “D.Ger.F.P. series D” is Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, published jointly by the British Foreign Office and the U.S. Department of State. Series D (1937–45) (Washington: U.S.G.P.O. and London: H.M.S.O., 1949).]

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development of minerals and raw materials,³³ and the Germans soon began getting what they wanted. The strategic advantages of a Fascist Spain became worth serious consideration a little later. In August 1938 the Luftwaffe Intelligence was planning to use the German Condor Legion in Spain to bomb Bordeaux and Marseilles if France went to war in defence of Czechoslovakia.³⁴ On 27 March 1939 the victorious Franco formally adhered to the Anti-Comintern Pact,³⁵ and on 31 March concluded a treaty of friendship with Germany. This committed each Power to the most benevolent neutrality if the other were engaged in war, expressed their desire to increase their economic relations, and was supplemented by secret pacts providing for naval co-operation and for a measure of German control over the Spanish police, press, and propaganda.³⁶ But Hitler had found the Spaniards tiresome and unreliable to deal with³⁷ until it became urgent to capture Gibraltar and shut the Mediterranean in the second half of 1940; he regarded Spain as a strategic sideshow and Germany’s Spanish policy remained empirical and without high expectations.³⁸ Italy had signed a secret treaty with the Nationalists as early as 28 November 1936, which assured the Nationalists of Italian support in preserving the integrity of Spain and her colonies and in re-establishing order in Spain, provided for co-operation between the two Powers in the Western Mediterranean, and pledged each to neutrality if the other went to war or became the victim of sanctions.³⁹ Mussolini had two main interests in Franco’s victory. Nationalist Spain would be an ally against France; he originally intended to retain a naval and air base in the Balearics as long as possible in order to cut French sea-communications

³³ Survey for 1937, ii. 193–4; Feis, Spanish Story, p. 22, note. ³⁴ Report on “extended Operation Green” by Intelligence Division of Luftwaffe General Staff, 25 August 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 390 (375-PS); N.C.A. iii. 287). In May 1939 Ribbentrop thought the Spaniards would be useful to pin down some French divisions in the Pyrenees (see conversation between Ciano and Ribbentrop, Milan, 6–7 May 1939, in Ciano: Europa, pp. 430–1; Eng. version, p. 285; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 166). ³⁵ Survey for 1938, i. 360. ³⁶ Feis, Spanish Story, pp. 19, 22. This treaty was not ratified until 29 November 1939. The reason for its not being published in Spanish Government is not apparent. ³⁷ “As concerned Spain, Germany, on the basis of the experiences gained during the Civil War, was clear about the fact that one could not make progress with the Spanish without quite concrete and detailed agreements. . . . In any case he [Hitler] was not convinced that Spain had ‘the same intensity of will for giving as for taking.’ . . . Economically Germany had given out many hundreds of millions for Spain. He (the Fu¨hrer) had taken the stand that the payment of this debt should be left alone during the war, however that it would have to be taken up again after the victory of Franco. Whenever the Germans demand the payment of the 400 million debt incurred during the Spanish Civil War, this is often interpreted by the Spanish as a tactless confusing of economic and idealistic considerations, and as a German, one feels toward the Spanish almost like a Jew, who wants to make business out of the holiest possessions of mankind” (see notes of the interview between Hitler and Ciano on 28 September 1940 in Spanish Government, pp. 17, 18–19). ³⁸ Cf. the reference to Spain in Hitler’s speech to his commanders of 22 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 339 (798-PS); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 444; cf. N.C.A. iii. 582). ³⁹ For text of treaty see Documents secrets (Eristov), vol. iii (Espagne), no. 1; Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 5–7.

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with North Africa.⁴⁰ But he planned to use Spain also for his “march to the Ocean”; Italy and Spain would partition North Africa, Italy taking Tunisia and Algeria, Spain taking Morocco and Gibraltar, and giving Italy permanent transit facilities across Morocco to the Atlantic.⁴¹ He was hoping to conclude an alliance with Franco as soon as the war was won.⁴² The Fascist Government urged the Germans to conclude a pact with Spain, but Ciano was anxious that if this were to be published the existence of the Italo-Spanish pact of 1936 should be announced first: “otherwise people will say that Italy makes war in Spain and Germany profits from it”.⁴³ There was latent jealousy between the two Axis Powers, but Mussolini was perhaps less afraid of German ascendancy in Spain than in the Balkans, and the conclusion of the Spanish War was a condition for his own annexation of Albania.⁴⁴ The Italians wanted Spain to be a member of the Axis, but connected more intimately with Rome than with Berlin; Italy’s position in the Axis would be enhanced if she became the indispensable mediator, the pivot on which the Axis swung.⁴⁵ Mussolini prided himself on messages from Franco that resembled the reports of a subordinate,⁴⁶ and early in 1939 it seemed to the still sanguine eyes of Ciano that the Spanish victory bore only Mussolini’s name, and that on the Ebro, at Barcelona, and at Malaga the foundations of a new Roman Mediterranean Empire had been laid.⁴⁷

(d) The Portuguese and Spanish Empires In the First World War Spain was weak and divided on the question of intervening against her ancient enemy and despoiler, and remained neutral. Portugal, ⁴⁰ Conversation between Mussolini and Ribbentrop, Rome, 6 November 1937 (Ciano: Europa, p. 222; Eng. version, pp. 144–5). In the event, however, Italian as well as German troops were all withdrawn from Spanish territory in May and June 1939, though the Italians left behind most of their heavy material (Survey for 1938, i. 356–60). ⁴¹ Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 14 June 1939: cf. Leonardo Simoni, pseud., Berlino, Ambasciata d’ltalia 1939–1943 (Rome: Migliaresi, 1946), pp. 140, 142. See Katharine Duff, “Italy,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 191–3. ⁴² Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 8 January 1939. When Suñer visited Italy in June it was agreed that “the alliance is a fact in our minds; it would be premature, for the moment, to put it in a protocol” (ibid. 5 June 1939). ⁴³ Ibid. 27 January and 8 February 1939. Ciano considered it important for Italian prestige that his own visit to Spain in the summer of 1939 should take place before Go¨ring’s (ibid. 21 April 1939). ⁴⁴ Ibid. 3 March 1939. ⁴⁵ During Suñer’s visit to Italy in June 1939 Ciano intervened to smooth Suñer’s relations with the German Ambassador in Rome (ibid. 10 June and 14 June 1939). ⁴⁶ Ibid. 8 January 1939. Mussolini’s desire for influence in Spanish affairs was seen in his repeated advice to Franco against restoring the monarchy (ibid. 5 March, 11 March, 5 June 1939; Ciano, Europa, p. 442; Eng. version, p. 292). ⁴⁷ Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 26 January and 22 February 1939. After his meeting with Franco at San Sebastian on 19 July 1939 Ciano recorded with enthusiasm that Franco was completely dominated by Mussolini, expected instruction and directives from him, and wanted him to visit Madrid, “whereby Spain would be definitely united to the destiny of the Roman Empire” (Ciano, Europa, p. 446; Eng. version, p. 295). However, what the Italians wanted was a treaty, and Franco did not concede it.

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however, was drawn into the struggle of the Great Powers by her British alliance. In 1930 Spain was even weaker than in 1914 through the ruin of the Civil War, but she desired to enter the impending Great Power conflict in the hope of territorial aggrandizement. Portugal, however, was to remain neutral. This change in the reaction of the two Peninsular states to a general war marked their swing away from the Britannocentric system of world order that was now collapsing into the orbit of the new revolutionary Powers. The swing reflected not only the interests of Spain and Portugal as European states but still more the position of their overseas empires. These two had first in Western Christendom discovered the transoceanic world and divided it between them. While Portugal had ruled the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, Spain had ruled the North Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.⁴⁸ But their empires had had contrary natures and suffered contrary fates. The Portuguese Empire was oceanic in character. It was the organization of Portuguese naval predominance in the Indian Ocean, where it came into contact (except along the east coast of Africa) with stable and populous civilizations that it could hope neither to conquer nor to subvert, the Islamic and the Hindu. It remained therefore a system of bridgeheads, fortresses, and trading-stations, like Hormuz and Goa, Malacca and Macao. The Spanish Empire by contrast was primarily continental in character. It was established in Central America and the Andes upon the ruins of the two feeblest non-Western civilizations which the West had encountered in the course of its expansion, the Aztec and the Inca. In due course the vice-royalties and audiencias, where Spanish colonists ruled an indigenous population, could transform themselves into independent states, for which the Portuguese Empire offered no counterpart except in the single case of Brazil. Both the Spanish and Portuguese Empires suffered severely from the depredations of their successors in the struggle for European hegemony. Both took part in the partition of Africa in the nineteenth century. But it was because of this contrast between them that by the beginning of the twentieth century a Spanish empire had ceased to exist except for a few insignificant territories acquired during the past century and a half along the west coast of Africa,⁴⁹ while the skeleton of the Portuguese thalassocracy sung ⁴⁸ It will be noted that the dividing line from pole to pole 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, agreed between the Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, corresponded unintentionally to the geopolitical conceptions of the twentieth century (see Arnold Toynbee, “The Western Hemisphere,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 12–14). It recognized the unity of the South Atlantic basin, a unity that received its classic illustration six years later when in 1500 the Portuguese Cabral accidentally discovered Brazil on his way to the Cape of Good Hope. The Treaty of Tordesillas modified Pope Alexander V’s bull of 4 May 1493. This had drawn a dividing line down the Atlantic 100 leagues west of the Azores, which was more in accordance with the distorted map of the world in Mercator’s projection. (J. Dumont, Corps universel diplomatique du Droit des gens (Amsterdam, 1726), vol. iii, part ii, pp. 302–3; Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes, English translation edited by F. I. Antrobus, vol. vi (London: Kegan Paul, 1898), pp. 160–1). ⁴⁹ In 1939 the Spanish Empire consisted of the Canary Islands, which were administratively part of Spain, and the following territories from north to south along the western coasts of Africa: (1) the

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by Camoens still stretched, recognizable though picked clean of flesh, from the Azores to the Malay Archipelago and the China Seas.⁵⁰ In 1939 Portugal had an empire to save, Spain had an empire to regain. Even after Spain had ceased to be a Great Power, Britain considered it necessary for her control of the Atlantic that Portuguese independence should be maintained under British protection.⁵¹ But outside Europe British and Portuguese interests clashed in the nineteenth century as they had in the sixteenth. The Portuguese desire to link Angola with Mozambique, across what is now Rhodesia, conflicted with the British desire for a Cape to Cairo territorial belt and occasioned the British ultimatum to Portugal of 1890.⁵² Not only the expansion, even the integrity of the Portuguese overseas possessions had to be weighed against British interests in the balance of colonial power throughout the world. In 1898 Britain concluded a secret convention with Germany dividing the Portuguese colonies into two spheres of influence as a prelude to the possibility of partition.⁵³ The consistency of British policy was not vindicated, nor were Portuguese fears allayed,

Spanish northern Zone of Morocco; (2) the Spanish south-western Zone of Morocco, or Ifni; (3) the colony, protectorate, and occupied territory of Rio de Oro and Adrar (sometimes collectively known as the Spanish Sahara); (4) Spanish Guinea, both continental and insular, with its capital at Fernando Po. These Spanish African possessions all dated from the later nineteenth century, with the exception of the islands of Fernando Po and Annobon, which had been ceded to Spain by Portugal in 1778, and the varying string of presidios along the Moroccan coast from Melilla in the east, occupied in 1597, to Ceuta in the west, originally Portuguese but retained by Spain after Portugal resumed her independence in 1668. (See Spanish and Italian Possessions: Independent States, Peace Handbooks issued by the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, vol. xx (London: H.M.S.O., 1920), nos. 122–5.) The original Spanish Empire had been finally liquidated when the United States compelled Spain to renounce her sovereignty over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines by the Treaty of Paris of 1898. This meagre “second Spanish Empire” ranked in 1939 eighth in area and ninth in population among the colonial empires of the world (see Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Colonial Problem (London: Oxford University Press for R.I.I.A., 1937), p. 9, table i). ⁵⁰ In 1939 the Portuguese Empire consisted of the Azores and Madeira, which were administratively part of Portugal, and the following territorial possessions along the oceanic route opened up by Vasco da Gama and his predecessors and successors: (1) In the South Atlantic: (a) the Cape Verde Islands, (b) Portuguese Guinea, (c) the islands of S. Tomi and Principe in the Gulf of Guinea, (d) Angola or Portuguese West Africa; (2) in the Indian Ocean: (a) Mozambique or Portuguese East Africa, (b) Portuguese India, consisting of the scattered territories of Goa, Damao, and Diu; (3) in the farther Indies: (a) Macao in China, at the mouth of the Canton River, the forerunner of Hongkong, (b) Portuguese Timor, the eastern part of the island of Timor in the Malay Archipelago. All these possessions dated from the sixteenth century, though Angola and Mozambique had been considerably extended during the partition of Africa in the later nineteenth century; and the Portuguese Empire had suffered no losses more recent than, in the Indian Ocean, the conquest of Thana, Basscin, and Chau on the Indian mainland by the Mahrattas between 1737 and 1740, and, in the South Atlantic, the establishment of Brazilian independence in 1822. (See Portuguese Possessions, Peace Handbooks issued by the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, vol. xix (London: H.M.S.O., 1920), and Persian Gulf: French and Portuguese Possessions, vol. xiii of the same series, nos. 79–81. The Portuguese Empire ranked in 1939 fifth in area and seventh in population among the colonial empires of the world (sec Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Colonial Problem, loc. cit.). ⁵¹ See Edgar Prestage, “The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance”, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1934), xvii. 95–97. ⁵² See R. I. Lovell, The Struggle for South Africa, 1875–1899: A Study in Economic Imperialism (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 216–18. ⁵³ Gooch and Temperley, vol. i, nos. 90–92.

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by Britain’s reaffirmation of the Ancient Treaties, including the guarantee of Portugal’s colonial possessions, in 1899.⁵⁴ The Revolution of 1910, which overthrew the Portuguese monarchy, weakened Portugal’s international position, and revived German pressure; and between 1912 and 1914 Britain and Germany were engaged in renewed negotiations for the prospective partition of the Portuguese Empire.⁵⁵ The outbreak of the First World War freed Portugal from these dangers, and she was drawn into the conflict on the side of her traditional protector. Her reward was three-quarters of one per cent. of the German war indemnity, and the return of the Kionga triangle in northern Mozambique which Germany had seized in 1894.⁵⁶ But the real advantage she gained from the victory of the Allied Powers was the expulsion of Germany from Africa. German East Africa, which had marched with Mozambique on the north, was transformed into a British mandated territory; German South-West Africa, which had marched with Angola on the south, was transformed into a South African mandated territory. The Portuguese Empire was thus relieved from the most dangerous pressure upon it for two and a half centuries, and the British alliance correspondingly declined in urgency. At the same time it became clear that if the alliance did not express a common interest there would be little sentiment to sustain it. The period of Portuguese national renaissance under Salazar naturally produced a reaction against dependence on a foreign Power, which happened to coincide with a decline in the international position of that Power. Salazar’s policy towards the Spanish Civil War and the Non-Intervention Agreement, approximating to that of Germany and Italy, was in some degree a declaration of independence from Britain.⁵⁷ Nevertheless Portugal had no common interest with the Axis. If as a Catholic and authoritarian Power she supported Franco, equally as a Catholic and a weak colonial Power she must fear the rise of Nazi Germany.⁵⁸ Germany indeed no longer had a foothold in Africa, but it was possible that some colonial settlement with Britain might reinstate her there—some arrangement involving Portugal’s interests arrived at without her full participation, that would resemble the AngloGerman negotiations before 1914.⁵⁹ This anxiety had receded by the time of the German seizure of Prague, but it was only replaced, when the Spanish Civil War ⁵⁴ Ibid. vol. i, no. 118,with editorial note (pp. 93–95). Sec also vol. viii, chapter lxii, and Harold Temperley and Lillian M. Penson (eds): Foundations of British Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902) (Cambridge: University Press, 1938), pp. 512–16. ⁵⁵ Gooch and Temperley, vol. x, part ii, chapter xcv. Sir Arthur Nicolson described these negotiations as “the most cynical business that I have come across in my whole experience of diplomacy” (Harold Nicolson, Sir Arthur Nicolson, Bart., First Lord Carnock (London: Constable, 1930), p. 393). Cf. Survey for 1929, pp. 277–8; Survey for 1937, ii. 203–4. ⁵⁶ See A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, ed. H. W. V. Temperley [referred to hereafter as H.P.C.] (London: Oxford University Press for British Institute of international Affairs, 1920), ii. 243–4. ⁵⁷ See Survey for 1937, ii. 208, 241–2, 244–5. ⁵⁸ Portugal had not failed to see the implications also of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia: see Survey for 1935, ii. 80, 86, 190. ⁵⁹ For the British proposal to Germany of a new colonial régime in the conventional zone of the Congo Basin Treaties, see Martin Wight, “Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia,” in Arnold

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ended, by the ambiguous and disturbing aspects of Franco’s dependence on the Axis. The Portuguese Government might suspect, if they could not know for certain, that the Spanish Nationalists considered it “fundamental to Spanish policy and to the Axis to take Portugal out of the sphere of British influence.”⁶⁰ Therefore, while signing the treaty of friendship with the victorious Franco, Portugal was concerned to emphasize discreetly her former ties.⁶¹ In March 1939 she was entering upon the difficult policy of balance between the new understanding with Spain and the ancient alliance with England that she was to maintain throughout the coming war, the only Small Power that remained in treaty relations with the two contending coalitions.

Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 164–5. ⁶⁰ Suñer’s words recorded by Ciano, Diario (1939–43), 5 June 1939. “Difficult as this may be, he intends to exert his efforts in this direction, and asks for our collaboration.” ⁶¹ Survey for 1938, i. 360, note 2.

13 Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia in The World in March 1939 Switzerland,∗ the three states of the Low Countries,¹ and the four states of Scandinavia² were in 1939 the West European neutrals par excellence. With the exceptions of Belgium and Luxembourg, whose neutrality had been violated by Germany, they had escaped involvement in the First World War. They were distinguished from Spain, who had also been a neutral, by their uniform success as parliamentary democracies,³ and by the pacific and internationalist character of their foreign policies, in which the elements of prestige and competition for power had perhaps a smaller part than in any other states in the world. It was neither innocence nor inexperience in international politics that separated them from the contemporary Great Powers and the repining ex-Great Powers like Spain. Four of these small states, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark (to which Norway and Iceland were then united), and Sweden, had approximated to Great Powers in the early centuries of modern history.⁴ Belgium and Luxembourg, whether as parts of the Spanish Empire, or of the Austrian Empire, or as independent states, had been the northern cockpit of every general war. If these eight countries appeared to stand out from the international struggle for power in attempting to base their ∗ This chapter was first published in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 151–65.

¹ The Netherlands, Belgium, and the grand duchy of Luxembourg. ² Geographically the word means Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; it is here used to include also Iceland, which was united with Denmark by a political bond, but not to include Finland, which is treated among the Eastern European states. See Martin Wight, “Eastern Europe,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 206–293; reprinted in the present volume. ³ It was noticeable to the political scientist that they were all constitutional monarchies except Switzerland, which was a federal republic. Denmark and Iceland shared the same monarch. ⁴ In so far as the term “Great Power” can be made relevant to the rudimentary international system of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Swiss Confederacy had been an expansionist Great Power from their defeat of Burgundy in the war of 1474–7 down to their defeat by the French at the battle of Marignano in 1515. The United Provinces had been a Great Power from the time of their successful war of independence against Spain, which ended in 1609, down to their exhaustion and eclipse by their overmighty ally England in the War of the Spanish Succession of 1702–13, though they had suffered a permanent diminution in power within this period as a consequence of the French invasion of 1672. Denmark had been a Great Power from her defeat of Lu¨beck in 1535, which destroyed the Hanseatic thalassocracy and gave Denmark command of the Baltic, down to her own defeat by the Catholic League at the battle of Lutter in 1626 and her consequent withdrawal from the Thirty Years War at the Peace of Lu¨beck in 1629. Sweden had been a Great Power from her intervention in the Thirty Years War in 1630 down to her defeat by Russia in the Great Northern War of 1699–1721.

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0014

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foreign policies on rational and co-operative principles, it was to no small extent because they had had an historical experience of the frustration of the strong and the despoliation of the weak. In two respects they had a common character and a common interest_ in the world of 1939. They were all buffer states precariously wedged between the flanks of Great Powers,⁵ and incapable of self-defence; and half of them had extensive territorial possessions outside Europe, which each individually would be incapable of protecting. Their traditional policy for maintaining their independence was one of neutrality; but after the First World War they had adopted another, based on the hope that the existing balance of power, on which their independence rested, might be permanently stabilized and grow into a system of collective security. The conflict between the two policies had been the theme of their foreign history as the League of Nations rose and fell.

(a) Guaranteed Neutrality: Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg Switzerland and the Low Countries were distant descendants of that Middle Kingdom of Lotharingia which had arisen in the ninth century A.D. to separate the Kingdoms of the Western and the Eastern Franks, and had remained in one form or another a permanent feature of European political geography between France and Germany.⁶ For a brief period in the fifteenth century this middle belt, which ⁵ The four Lilliputian states of Western Europe, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, and Liechtenstein, which were so small that their sovereignty was dubious and they were not commonly considered subjects of international relations, were also vestigial buffer states and owed their survival mainly to this character. The republic of Andorra was a buffer state between France and Spain, and had now become their joint protectorate (L. Oppenheim, International Law, 6th edition, ed. H. Lauterpacht (London: Longmans, Green, 1947), i. p. 176, 232). The principality of Monaco had originated as a buffer state between France, Savoy, and Genoa; since the cession of Savoy and Nice to France by Italy in 1860 it had been an enclave in French territory, and probably had the status of an independent state in close alliance with France (ibid. i. 175, note 4, 232). The republic of San Marino had originated as a buffer state between the duchy of Urbino and the lordship of Rimini; it had then become embalmed as an enclave, first within the States of the Church, and later within the kingdom of Italy, and was now an Italian protectorate (see W. Miller: “Democracy at San Marino”, History, April 1922, pp. 1–16; Oppenheim, op. cit. i. 176, 232). The principality of Liechtenstein had originated as a buffer state between Austria and Switzerland; it was probably a fully sovereign state, but had been refused admission to the League of Nations in 1921 apparently because of its small size, and had entered a customs union with Switzerland in 1923 whereby it entrusted Switzerland with its representation abroad (Oppenheim, op. cit. i. 232, note 2, 169, note 4). The fifth Western European state of a similar archaic minuteness was the Vatican City, which, however, had a different origin and character (see Survey for 1929, pp. 453–4). ⁶ See Toynbee, Study, i. 37–9, iii. 349, note 2. “The guaranteed neutrality of Belgium and the guaranteed neutrality of Switzerland are alike survivals or revivals—it is hard to say which they should be called—of the instinctive feeling which, in the ninth century, called the Lotharingian Kingdom into being” (E. A. Freeman, The Historical Geography of Europe, 3rd edition, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Longmans, Green, 1912), p. 304; cf. pp. 290–2). The demilitarization of the Rhineland under the Treaty of Versailles was the most recent expression, in 1939, of this persisting feature of the European political balance.

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was then represented by the Swiss Confederation and the Burgundian dominions, had been more powerful politically and militarily than the territories it divided. The Burgundian state had collapsed first, largely as a result of conflict with the Swiss, and the Swiss Power itself only survived another forty years.⁷ After that it sank into the position of a buffer state between France, Austria, and the Spanish Power in Italy; and developed a policy of neutrality which was proclaimed as a principle at the beginning of the General War of 1672–1713, when in 1674 the Confederation declared that it would regard itself as a neutral state and intervene on neither side.⁸ Since then the only substantial violations of Swiss neutrality had been during the General War of 1792–1815, at the hands both of France and of the Allies. In 1815 the neutrality of Switzerland and the inviolability of her territory were guaranteed by the Powers at Vienna, and for the first time the neutrality of a small state became part of the public law of Europe.⁹ Swiss neutrality survived the international revolutions of the nineteenth century and the First World War; it was reaffirmed in the Treaty of Versailles;¹⁰ and though the seat of the League of Nations was fixed at the Swiss city of Geneva,¹¹ and Switzerland became a member of the League, her peculiar status was recognized by a Council resolution in 1920 which exempted her from the necessity of taking part in military operations under the Covenant.¹² Switzerland and Belgium were both buffer states, but Switzerland had been a barrier while Belgium had been a corridor. Switzerland was the mountain fortress of Europe, seldom violated by foreign arms; Belgium was the principal battlefield of every war. Switzerland, from the beginning of modern times, was an independent state; Belgium was an outlying province of a distant empire, first the Spanish and then the Austrian.¹³ ⁷ Burgundy became a European Power through its dynastic union with Flanders in 1384. The Burgundian Power was at its height from the conclusion of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance in 1419, which enabled it to hold the balance between France and England in the last phase of the Hundred Years War, down to its defeats by the Swiss at Grandson and Morat in 1476, and by the Duke of Lorraine in alliance with the Swiss at Nancy in 1477. The Swiss Power was at its height from these victories over Burgundy down to its own defeat by the French at Marignano in 1515. ⁸ See Edgar Bonjour, Geschichte der schweizerischen Neutralita¨t (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1946), translated and abridged by M. Hottinger as Swiss Neutrality: its History and Meaning (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946). ⁹ C. K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (London: Bell, 1934), p. 134; Act of 20 November 1815 (Hertslet, Map of Europe by Treaty, i. 371–2). [The full reference is Sir Edward Hertslet, The Map of Europe by Treaty 1814–1891 (vols. i–iii, London, Butterworth, 1875, and vol. iv, London, H.M.S.O., 1891).] ¹⁰ Article 435 (see Survey for 1925, ii. 217). ¹¹ Covenant of the League, article 7. ¹² A. J. Toynbee, The World after the Peace Conference (London: Oxford University Press for British Institute of International Affairs, 1925), pp. 37–8; cf. Survey for 1935, ii. 87. ¹³ The growth of Switzerland as an independent state was identical with its growth as a political unit. Swiss statehood may be dated from 1389, when the Habsburgs were compelled to sign a treaty with the Confederation on an equal footing, and renounced feudal suzerainty over each of its members; though Swiss independence from the Empire was not effected until 1499 de facto, or 1648 de jure. The existence of Belgium as a political unit dates from 1579, when the union of Arras alined those provinces of the

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The neutrality of Switzerland was a traditional principle of Swiss policy which, after several centuries, received recognition from the Great Powers. The neutrality of Belgium was imposed by the Great Powers on a reluctant small state at the moment of its creation in 1831. It was finally guaranteed by three Treaties of London of 1839.¹⁴ But this status, which had originally been resented as a violation of sovereignty, and had later not altogether come to be accepted as an advantage, was destroyed by the German invasion of 1914, and was abrogated implicitly by the Treaty of Versailles.¹⁵ Belgium was the only one of the small Western Powers, apart from Denmark, to obtain territory at Germany’s expense, in the acquisition of Eupen-Malmédy.¹⁶ Like the other Small Powers, she now sought an alternative form of security by joining the League of Nations;¹⁷ but unlike them she was an Occupying Power in the Rhineland, and consequently needed to concert her policy with France in a military agreement of limited scope that was signed in 1920.¹⁸ An equivalent of Belgium’s old status was not found until the Treaty of Locarno in 1925 gave her the guarantees of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany for her frontiers under the Versailles Settlement.¹⁹ Luxembourg was the third of these small states to have gained an international guarantee. Like Belgium and Holland it had been part of the Burgundian inheritance,²⁰ and descended with the Belgian provinces from the Spanish to the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1815 it was created a grand duchy, to be within the German Confederation but joined to the Netherlands in a personal union. The Luxemburgers disliked Dutch rule as much as the Belgians, and revolted with them in 1830, desiring to be incorporated in the new Belgian state. The Great Powers, however, partitioned Luxembourg between Belgium and the Grand Duke, that is, the King of the Netherlands. In 1842 Luxembourg joined the Prussian Zollverein. When Prussia defeated Austria and dissolved the Germanic Confederation in 1866, the control of the grand duchy became a subject of contention between Prussia and France, and was the occasion manquée of the Franco-Prussian War. The Treaty of London of 1867, however, established Luxembourg as a perpetually neutral state under a collective guarantee of the Great Powers;²¹ but the customs union Netherlands that remained loyal to Spain against those that continued the struggle for independence as the Union of Utrecht, but 250 years elapsed before Belgium became a state in 1831. ¹⁴ Hertslet, Map of Europe by Treaty, vol. ii, nos. 153 and 183–5, article vii of the treaty or the annex in each case. See Survey for 1920–3, p. 65. ¹⁵ Ibid. pp. 65–67; H.P.C. ii. 189–90; Survey for 1925, ii. 170. ¹⁶ H.P.C. ii. 190–1. ¹⁷ Toynbee, World after the Peace Conference, p. 37. ¹⁸ Survey for 1920–3, p. 71; Survey for 1936, p. 353. ¹⁹ Article I of the Treaty of Locarno (see Survey for 1925, ii. 440–2); cf. ibid. pp. 56–57. ²⁰ The annexation of Luxembourg in 1441 marked the zenith of Burgundian power. Previously Luxembourg had been a not insignificant principality, which had given Bohemia a dynasty producing four Emperors between 1308 and 1437 and nearly anticipating the Habsburgs as the dynasty of the Empire. It had been raised from a county to a duchy in 1354. ²¹ Hertslet, Map of Europe by Treaty, iii. 1801–5. See C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World [referred to hereafter as Cruttwell: Peaceful Change] (London: Oxford

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with Germany remained. During the prosperity and industrial development of this régime, the city which had hitherto been a fortress of the Germanic Confederation acquired still greater importance as a centre of modern communications.²² The grand duchy was accordingly invaded by Germany two days before the invasion of Belgium in 1914 and remained in German occupation throughout the First World War.²³ But unlike Belgium, Luxembourg was incapable of being a belligerent, and was refused a place at the Peace Conference. Both France and Belgium hoped to annex it; the Luxemburgers wished for continued independence and neutrality. The Treaty of Versailles abrogated the customs union with Germany, and in 1922 Luxembourg entered a customs union with Belgium. But a political settlement was lacking. As with Belgium, so with Luxembourg, the Versailles Treaty compelled Germany to recognize the termination of the régime of neutrality and to adhere to whatever arrangements the Allied and Associated Powers might make to replace it;²⁴ but no such arrangements were made, and Luxembourg therefore claimed that the treaty of 1867 was still in force. In 1920 she entered the League of Nations, but her plea that her status as a neutral might exempt her from military obligations under the Covenant was rejected.²⁵ In 1926 Luxembourg asked to become a party to the Locarno settlement, but Britain decided that to guarantee the grand duchy was not a vital British interest. Luxembourg therefore fell back upon the claim to neutrality under the continued existence of the treaty of 1867, a neutrality which Britain regarded as terminated when Luxembourg joined the League. Like Switzerland, Luxembourg acted upon this policy when sanctions were applied against Italy in 1935.²⁶ The events of 1935–6, when the League failed to prevent the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and Germany destroyed the Locarno system by remilitarizing the Rhineland, removed the foundations on which Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg had based their post-war policies and drove them back upon their traditional neutrality. Belgium was particularly threatened by the resurgence of Germany. Geography had already once made her a victim of German aggression; University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1937), pp. 188–90. In 1890 the throne passed from the Ottonian branch of the Nassaus, who ruled the Netherlands, to the Walramian branch, represented by the Duke of Nassau Weilburg, in accordance with the Nassau Succession Agreement of 1783 and Article 71 of the Vienna Congress Treaty (see Hertslet, op. cit. i. 253 and iii. 2013–15). ²² “By the end of the nineteenth century five railways and nine main roads radiated from the capital towards the chief strategic points on the French, German, and Belgian frontiers. In French hands it secures the defence of the Moselle line and facilitates an advance down that river. In 1914 its possession by Germany was essential for the Schlieffen plan: it was the essential link between the offensive and defensive wings of her armies, and by opening the way to the gap of Stenay imperilled the whole of the Meuse from the north” (Cruttwell, Peaceful Change, pp. 184–5). Cf. H.P.C. ii. 188. ²³ See H.P.C. ii. 184–9. ²⁴ Article 40; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 68–71. For Luxembourg’s peculiar position, sovereign on the political plane but non-sovereign on the economic plane, cf. Survey for 1934, p. 404, note. ²⁵ Oppenheim, International Law, i. 224, note 3. ²⁶ Survey for 1935, ii. 231–2.

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she had profited territorially from the dismemberment of Germany in 1919; and the division between the Walloons and the Flemings, which gave her something of the character of a bi-national state, might seem to offer special advantages to German propaganda and penetration. It was perhaps a misfortune from the German point of view that while Flemish nationalism, with its Teutonic sentiments and pro-German sympathies, was the best lever to hand for disrupting the Belgian state, the most conspicuous and successful Fascist leader to arise in Belgium, Degrelle, was a Frenchman by birth, and his Rexist Party was almost entirely supported by lower middle class Walloons.²⁷ Nevertheless, the Belgians felt the danger of their position acutely, and in 1936 there was a revolution in Belgian policy, designed to reverse the developments of 1914 and to recover a guaranteed status.²⁸ It was so far successful that in 1937 Britain and France both declared that they considered Belgium relieved of her obligations under Locarno, but their own guarantees to Belgium as still binding upon themselves; and Germany countered with a guarantee of Belgian inviolability in different and more equivocal language.²⁹ It was on this uneasy three-legged stool that Belgium was balanced in 1939. The country as a whole clung to neutrality as the least imperfect protection against invasion that could be found. The Government knew that invasion was only to be feared from Germany and attached proportionate value to the British and French guarantee. But the desire not to endanger neutrality by offending Germany, which was emphasized particularly by King Leopold and his entourage, precluded Belgium from engaging in the staff talks with France and Britain which were essential for her military defence. Luxembourg, for her part, had in 1936 sought a defensive agreement with Belgium,³⁰ and in 1937 once more approached Britain and France for guarantees, which were refused. Switzerland was in a happier position. Her neutral status had remained without interruption part of the public law of Europe; it had been recognized by the League of Nations; and when the League collapsed it was necessary only to redefine it. In May 1938 the sessions of the League Council and Assembly that dealt with the de jure recognition of Italian sovereignty over Ethiopia recognized also the Swiss intention not to participate henceforth in any sanctions,³¹ which virtually released Switzerland from the obligations of the Covenant and acknowledged her return to her pre-existing status of perpetual neutrality. She seemed to have been peculiarly endangered by the Anschluss, which left her encircled on three sides (as Belgium and Luxembourg were not) by the Axis Powers. But it was in her geographical strength as a mountain island that her real security lay; this alone had guarded her ²⁷ For the zenith of the Rexist movement in 1936 see Survey for 1936, pp. 36–37. ²⁸ See ibid., pp. 351–60. The military agreement of 1920 with France had already become obsolete when the Allied occupation of the Rhineland ended in 1929. ²⁹ See Survey for 1937, i. 346–68. ³⁰ See Survey for 1936, p. 354, note 2. ³¹ Survey for 1938, i. 152; Bonjour, Swiss Neutrality, p. 118.

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neutrality in the First World War, and might do so again in the new dangers of 1939.³² Belgium and Luxembourg, in contrast, were facing a new European war in which they could scarcely hope to escape invasion, the one with renewed guarantees from the Great Powers, the other with nothing but her unsupported claim to the neutrality of 1867; but guarantees of neutrality were to prove again as worthless as they had in 1914, and the difference in status between Belgium and Luxembourg was not to prevent them from being overwhelmed in common.³³

(b) Neutrality without Guarantees: The Netherlands and Scandinavia The Scandinavian countries, like the Low Countries, had a long tradition of political unity. From 1397 to 1520 the three kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (of which Iceland was then a dependency) had been joined in the Union of Kalmar.³⁴ Denmark and Norway had remained united down to 1814, when as part of the Vienna settlement Norway had been transferred to Sweden, leaving Iceland, however, united to Denmark. It was not until 1905 that Norway seceded and became an independent state, and not until 1918 that Iceland obtained the equivalent of British Dominion status, becoming an independent kingdom joined to Denmark by a personal union.³⁵ The Scandinavian countries, like the Netherlands, had a traditional policy of neutrality which had never been written into the public law of Europe,³⁶ but consisted in the refusal to enter into alliances with Great ³² Hitler’s plans in 1939 do not seem to have provided for the invasion of Switzerland, though when he said that she would tenaciously defend her neutrality he was saying what he said also about the Low Countries. See minutes of conference between Hitler and Ciano, 12 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxix. 42 (1871-PS); N.C.A. iv. 509); also Hitler’s speech to his commanders-in-chief, 22 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxvi. 342 (798- PS); N.C.A. iii. 585). Cf. Directive no. 1 for the Conduct of the War, 31 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 457 (126-C); N.C.A. vi. 935). For these three texts see also Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 172, 443, and 499. [Ed. I.M.T. Nuremberg stands for Trials of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945–1946, Proceedings and Documents in Evidence, 42 volumes (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947–1949) here and in subsequent references. The Documents (R.I.I.A.) consist of Documents on International Affairs for 1928–38, 13 vols.; for 1939–46, in progress (London: Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs). N.C.A. stands for Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (A collection of documentary evidence and guide materials prepared by the American and British prosecuting staffs for . . . the International Military Tribunal at Nu¨rnberg) 8 vols., with “Opinion and Judgement” and Supplements A and B (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1946–1947) here and in subsequent references.] ³³ For a contemporary estimate of German interests in this connexion see Survey for 1937, 1. 350. ³⁴ On the historical significance of the Union of Kalmar, see Toynbee, Study, ii. 175–6. Iceland had been an independent republic from A.D. 930 to 1263, when the Scandinavian colonists swore allegiance to the King of Norway. ³⁵ See Cruttwell, Peaceful Change, pp. 91–95; Survey for 1920–3, pp. 232–3. ³⁶ At the time of obtaining her independence in 1918, Iceland made a declaration of perpetual neutrality, and in consequence never joined the League of Nations; but the declaration was unilateral and had no validity in international law (Oppenheim, International Law, i. 218, note 1; Cruttwell, Peaceful Change, p. 184). In 1855, during the Crimean War, Britain and France had guaranteed the integrity of Sweden and Norway; and in 1907 Britain, Germany, France, and Russia had guaranteed

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Powers. They had not taken part in any war between Great Powers since 1815, and in particular they had maintained their neutrality during the First World War.³⁷ Yet they were not without profit from that upheaval. It destroyed the two Great Powers from whom they had most to fear. For fifty years the Low Countries and Denmark had lived under the shadow of Germany; for 200 years Sweden had lived under the shadow of Russia; and in 1919 Germany and Russia were equally exhausted and diminished. The Scandinavian states even benefited territorially from a victory in which they had not participated. At the peace settlement the Great Powers awarded Spitsbergen to Norway,³⁸ and, as a result of a plebiscite in 1920, restored Northern Slesvig to Denmark.³⁹ By contrast Sweden failed to regain, from a newly independent Finland, the Aland Islands which she had ceded to Russia along with Finland in 1809.⁴⁰ But Sweden was in a different position from Norway, an Atlantic Power, and Denmark, who had a front on two seas: Sweden alone was a wholly Baltic Power, and faced wholly east; they had only a German problem, she had a Russian problem too. Thus her disappointment over the Aland Islands was far outweighed by the advantage of having the sister state of Finland interposed between herself and her hereditary enemy, and the Baltic no longer dominated by any Great Power, but ringed by the small and peaceful succession states of the Russian Empire.⁴¹ The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, except Iceland, became original members of the League of Nations, and were the most earnest supporters of the twin policies of collective security and disarmament.⁴² In Denmark, alone of all the states in the world, a principal issue of domestic politics in the 1920s was the the integrity of the newly independent Norway (Gooch & Temperley, vol. viii, chapter lxiii). These guarantees, however, had not imposed neutrality, and Norway had in 1922 denounced the treaty of 1907 (Survey for 1920–3, pp. 231–2). [Ed. The full reference is G. P. Gooch and Harold Temperley, eds., British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914, London: H.M.S.O., 1926–38).] ³⁷ Only one of them had been involved in any kind of European war since 1815: Denmark, in the war of 1864 against Prussia and Austria resulting in the loss of Schleswig-Holstein. The Netherlands, however, like Britain during the nineteenth century, had compensated for her abstention from European adventures by a number of colonial wars of which the most important was the conquest of northern Sumatra in the protracted Achinese War of 1873 to 1904. ³⁸ The settlement of the Spitsbergen question was not dealt with in the History of the Peace Conference. [Ed. The full reference is A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, ed. H. W. V. Temperley, often cited as simply H.P.C.] (London: Oxford University Press for British Institute of International Affairs, 1920).] For the statement of the Norwegian case to the Peace Conference, see David Hunter Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris (privately printed, 1924–6), xvii. pp. 479–83; cf. James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Macmillan, 1937), p. 181, note. The recognition of Norwegian sovereignty was effected by a treaty of 1920 (see Survey for 1920–3, p. 230; Survey for 1924, pp. 258, 462; Survey for 1925, ii. 226). The Soviet Union recognized Norwegian sovereignty over Spitsbergen in 1924, and voluntarily adhered to the treaty of 1920 in 1935. See The Norseman, March–April 1947, pp. 83–90. ³⁹ See H.P.C., vol. ii, chapter iv, part i. ⁴⁰ See Survey for 1920–3, pp. 234–8. ⁴¹ Ibid. pp. 229–30. Finland entered the Scandinavian group diplomatically in 1924 (Survey for 1924, p. 461). See also Wight, “Eastern Europe,” in Toynbee and Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939, p. 246. [Ed. This chapter is reprinted as Chapter 11 of the present volume where see note 151 and accompanying text).] ⁴² See Toynbee, World after the Peace Conference, p. 37; Survey for 1920–3, p. 231; Survey for 1935, ii. 79–81.

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reduction of her exiguous armed forces into a police force;⁴³ while Iceland, alone of all the states in the world, had neither army, navy, nor fortifications. In their habit of mutual discussion and co-operation the Scandinavian countries came to resemble the British Commonwealth of Nations; and there was a certain parallel between the Ottawa Conference of the British empire in 1932 and the Oslo Conference of the Scandinavian Powers in 1930, to which Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg also were parties. By the Oslo Convention these six states agreed not to increase their mutual tariffs without prior consultation.⁴⁴ But the convention had little economic importance, since the mutual trade of the group was only one-fifth of the aggregate of their foreign trade; and as the international tension increased after the Nazi Revolution in Germany, the existence of “the Oslo Powers” reflected no more than a consciousness of the desirability of co-operation between them in the face of common dangers which, in fact, made effective co-operation impossible.⁴⁵ When the League of Nations collapsed, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries had no traditional guaranteed neutrality to try to return to. They adopted a common policy concerning the raising of sanctions against Italy, reluctant to abandon the hope of collective security until the last;⁴⁶ they endeavoured to renovate the Oslo Convention;⁴⁷ but apart from that they had no alternative to the sauve-qui-peut of rearmament.⁴⁸ Holland, however, redefined her obligations under the Covenant, announcing in 1937 that she would not allow the passage of troops across her territory under Article 16 of the Covenant, since this would inevitably involve her in hostilities,⁴⁹ and hoping thus to approximate to the position which Switzerland had enjoyed, with the consent of the League, since 1920. She also took the lead in persuading the Oslo Powers to recognize the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.⁵⁰ When Hitler offered in 1937 to guarantee the integrity and neutrality of Holland as well as Belgium, the Dutch replied that the inviolability of their territory was an axiom which could not be made the subject of international agreement.⁵¹ Against the Swiss and Belgian policy of neutrality with guarantees, they asserted the alternative policy of neutrality without guarantees. Dutch policy sought neutrality more positively than did Scandinavian policy, because if a new conflict between Germany and the Western Powers had now to be taken for granted, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries varied in the degree of their vulnerability. The Netherlands was the most immediately exposed, ⁴³ See Survey for 1924, pp. 73–7; Survey for 1929, p. 32, note. ⁴⁴ See Survey for 1931, p. 154, note 2; Survey for 1932, p. 38. Finland joined them in 1932. ⁴⁵ See Survey for 1937, i. 99. ⁴⁶ See Survey for 1935, ii. 472–4. ⁴⁷ See Survey for 1937, i. 96–99. ⁴⁸ See Survey for 1936, p. 121, with further references there given. ⁴⁹ See Survey for 1937, i. 349, note. ⁵⁰ See Survey for 1938, i. 145–6. ⁵¹ See Survey for 1937, i. 353.

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and there was every reason to expect that in another general war she would resume her role of 1572 and 1672 and 1793 rather than that of 1914. In the First World War, German strategy had required the invasion of Belgium in order to turn the French left wing, and it had been difficult to distinguish between Belgium and the Low Countries as a whole because of the “Maastricht appendix,” a promontory of Dutch territory which ran south almost to Liège, halving the distance along which Belgium and Germany might otherwise have had a common frontier. Dutch neutrality had rested throughout, not on the strength of the Dutch army, but on the German calculation that it was better to keep Holland as “the last air-hole through which we can breathe.”⁵² In 1939, however, the strategic importance of the Low Countries had changed. Since 1919 Belgium had greatly strengthened the defences along her eastern or German frontier, which formed a continuation of the Maginot Line along the Franco-German frontier. As in 1914, therefore, Germany had been compelled to invade Belgium in order to turn the French left, so in a new conflict with France it might be expected that she would be compelled to invade the Netherlands in order to turn the Belgian left. But there was another possibility which the Netherlands had to consider. If it were German policy to wage a war of conquest only in the east, accompanied by a containing war against the Western Powers, the position of 1914 might be reversed, and German strategy might leave Belgium inviolate, but attack and occupy Holland, in order to establish air and naval bases against England along the Dutch coast. In fact, however, German war plans did not distinguish between the two countries, and assumed that they would jointly become a theatre of war. The Blomberg directive of 24 June 1937 used the assumption that their neutrality would be violated by France and Britain.⁵³ By August 1938 the Luftwaffe was urging that the Low Countries “would, in German hands, represent an extraordinary advantage in the prosecution of the air war against Great Britain as well as against France.”⁵⁴ At the military conference of 23 May 1939 Hitler declared that the Dutch and Belgian air bases must be occupied by force: “declarations of neutrality must be ignored.”⁵⁵ Denmark had been one of the first countries to be threatened by German revisionism after 1933, with regard to Northern Slesvig,⁵⁶ and her interests were

⁵² The words are Moltke’s, in a memorandum of December 1912; see C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p. 8. ⁵³ See I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 744 (175-C); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 13; cf. N.C.A. vi. 1011; cf. the Luftwaffe plan study of 2 June 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxviii. 415 (150-R); N.C.A. viii. 270). ⁵⁴ Report on “extended Operation Green” by Intelligence Division of Luftwaffe General Staff, 25 August 1938 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 391 (375-PS); N.C.A. iii. 287–8). ⁵⁵ Minutes of conference of 23 May 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii, 550 (079-L); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 274; cf. N.C.A. vii. 850. Hitler implicitly contradicted this for tactical purposes in his conference with Ciano of 12 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxix. 41–42 (1871-PS); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1939–46, i. 172–3; cf. N.C.A. iv. 508–9; and Peter de Mendelssohn, The Nuremberg Documents (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946), p. 115). ⁵⁶ See Survey for 1933, pp. 171–3; Survey for 1936, p. 43 and note.

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affected by the German denunciation of the Versailles regime for the Kiel Canal.⁵⁷ In the Netherlands, Mussert’s National Socialist movement had gained slight parliamentary successes between 1935 and 1937;⁵⁸ and the Norwegian eponym of all the quislings, who never obtained a single seat in the Storthing for his party, entered into close relationships with Rosenberg in 1939.⁵⁹ Denmark and Norway were scarcely less exposed than the Netherlands as a strategic position between the Great Powers. Together they flanked the North Sea over against Britain, resuming their historic political association with one another on the plane of modern naval and air strategy; Norway, moreover, from the viewpoint of an encircled continental Germany, was a coastline running northwards far beyond the Shetlands straits, and offering in Trondhjem and Narvik accessible and ice-free harbours on the open Atlantic.⁶⁰ Although it seems that German policy up to the outbreak of the Second World War preferred to plan for Scandinavian neutrality, it was clear that, once war began, the occupation of the desirable Danish and Norwegian bases might present itself either to Germany or Britain as a surer method than assuming their neutrality or denying them to the enemy.⁶¹ Sweden, by contrast, had some hope of profiting from the geographical exposure of her neighbours; for if war between Germany and France were to be waged across the Low Countries, and if war between Germany and Britain were to be waged along the coasts of the North Sea, over the bodies of Denmark and Norway, then war between Germany and Russia might also follow its historic path along the southern shores of the Baltic, over the bodies of Poland and the three continental Baltic states, and Sweden might become an immobilized buffer state, the still centre of the spinning northern world.⁶² As for Iceland, since she became independent in 1918 she had been happy, above all nations, in having practically no international relations, and only the keenest insight could have foretold that in 1939 she was on the verge of a ⁵⁷ See Survey for 1937, i. 376. ⁵⁸ See Bartholomew Landheer (ed.), The Netherlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), pp. 129–30. Mussert’s movement, like Degrelle’s, attained the zenith of its influence in 1936. ⁵⁹ Sec Rosenberg’s report on the political preparation of the Norway action, 15 June 1940 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 26–27 (004-PS); N.C.A. iii. 20). ⁶⁰ See memorandum by Doenitz on base in Norway, 9 October 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 159– 61 (005-C); N.C.A. vi. 815–16) and lecture by Jodl at Munich, 7 November 1943 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 636 (172–L); N.C.A. vii. 924–5). Hitler’s occupation of Denmark and Norway in 1940 has a resemblance to Napoleon’s forcing the Danish–Norwegian Kingdom to join the Continental System by the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1807; but Napoleon’s prime motive was economic, Hitler’s was strategic. ⁶¹ See minutes of conference between Hitler and Ciano, 12 August 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxix. 42 (1871-PS); trans. in Documents (R.I.I.A.) for 1936–46, i. 173; cf. N.C.A. iv. 509) and Rosenberg’s report on the political preparation of the Norway action, 15 June 1940 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxv. 28–29 (004PS); N.C.A. iii. 22. Hitler told Quisling on 16 and 18 December 1939 that he preferred Scandinavian neutrality). Cf. extract from Naval War Diary, questionnaire on Norway bases, 3 October 1939 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 422–5 (122-C); N.C.A. vi. 928) and sources given in preceding footnote. ⁶² See Survey for 1936, p. 533. The importance of Sweden to Germany was not as a strategic position but as a source of iron and nickel ore, and the safeguarding of this was to be one of the reasons for the occupation of Denmark and Norway; see directive for “Fall Weseru¨bung”, 1 March 1940 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxiv. 729–32 (174-C); N.C.A. vi. 1003–5) and lecture by Jodl at Munich, 7 November 1943 (I.M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 366 (172- L); N.C.A. vii. 924.

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strategic revolution that would make nonsense of her neutrality and place her in the most exposed position of all the Scandinavian countries, a pawn between continents, the prize not only of the giants of the past, Britain and Germany, but also of the giants of the future, the Soviet Union and the United States of America.⁶³

(c) The Overseas Empires The dependence of these small countries on the Western society of which they were part was equally apparent in the vulnerability of their colonial possessions. Those of them which possessed oceanic sea-boards, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Holland, and Belgium, had all taken part in that general expansion of Western Civilization which Ranke likened to the respiration of a single body.⁶⁴ Iceland as a political unit was itself the product of Scandinavian expansion in the Dark Ages before Western Civilization had become a coherent entity.⁶⁵ Switzerland and Luxembourg alone, because they were landlocked, had been precluded from sharing in this movement. By 1939 Sweden had abandoned her overseas possessions.⁶⁶ But Denmark still retained sovereignty over the vast North American island of Greenland.⁶⁷ The Netherlands still possessed a world empire stretching from Curaçao in the west to New Guinea in the east, which she had won from the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, which had not been cripplingly diminished by British depredations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which in the two ⁶³ For this revolution in Iceland’s position see two articles in Bulletin for International News (Royal Institute of International Affairs): “American Troops in Iceland”, 26 July 1941, xvii. 948–51, and “Iceland: a Political & Geographical Note”, 22 August 1942, xix. 742–6. Cf. the hypothetical position of Iceland if Western Civilization’s place in history had been taken by a Scandinavian civilization, as “the inevitable stepping-stone, in mid-ocean, between the European and American half ” (Toynbee, Study, ii. 441). ⁶⁴ Leopold von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514, revised translation by G. R. Dennis (London: Bell, 1909), p. 19. ⁶⁵ See Toynbee, Study, ii. 291–2, 354–60. ⁶⁶ In the seventeenth century Sweden took part in the Western colonization of North America: New Sweden flourished on the banks of the Delaware River from 1638 to 1655, when it was conquered by New Netherlands. In the eighteenth century Sweden had trading stations on the West Coast of Africa. In 1939 the most recent non-European possession of Sweden had been the West Indian island of St. Bartholomew, which was ceded to Sweden by France in 1784, and remained in Swedish hands until it was repurchased by France in 1877. ⁶⁷ In 1939 the Danish overseas possessions consisted of the Faroes, which were constitutionally an integral part of the kingdom with representation in the Rigsdag, and Greenland, a colonial possession. The Scandinavian colonists of Greenland formed a republic until 1261, when they swore allegiance to the King of Norway; at the dissolution of the Danish–Norwegian union in 1814, Greenland, like Iceland and the Faroes, was not mentioned and was consequently retained by Denmark (for the Norwegian claims arising out of this see Survey for 1920–3, p. 232, and Survey for 1924, pp. 461–2). Apart from Greenland the most recent extra-European possessions of Denmark had been the three West Indian islands of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John, which had been purchased by the United States in 1917. The Danish colonial possessions ranked in 1939 ninth in area but tenth in population among the colonial empires of the world (see Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Colonial Problem, p. 9, table i).

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generations before the First World War she had extended and consolidated.⁶⁸ Belgium possessed a great African empire as a result of her share in the partition of Africa in the late nineteenth century.⁶⁹ And Norway, the youngest of them as an independent state, had immediately shown the same Western tendency towards expansion by acquiring various unappropriated islands in the Arctic and Antarctic, and only a few weeks before Hitler’s entry into Prague and the ensuing transformation of Bohemia and Moravia into a German protectorate, had annexed a vast sector of the Antarctic Continent many times larger than the Greater Reich itself.⁷⁰ The Western Small Powers and the Western Great Powers were even more closely interdependent in the political geography of their overseas possessions than in that of their metropolitan territories on the continent of Europe.⁷¹ The colonial empires of the Small Powers were uniformly indefensible by their mother countries. The Dutch possessions in the East Indies, like those of Portugal,⁷² were impossible to protect against Britain, and Dutch policy was based on that premiss. The Belgian Congo was encircled on three sides by British and French territories and took for granted good relations with them.⁷³ Norwegian claims in the Antarctic had been developed in agreement with Britain. And the Netherlands West Indies, like Danish Greenland, were held at the good pleasure of the United States. ⁶⁸ In 1939 the Netherlands Empire consisted of (1) Netherlands India, comprising the islands of Java, Sumatra, Celebes, the Moluccas, the great part of Borneo, half New Guinea, the Timor archipelago, and a number of smaller islands; (2) Netherlands West Indies, comprising Surinam or Netherlands Guiana on the South American mainland, and the island of Curaçao with its dependent islands. The Netherlands Empire ranked in 1939 sixth in area but second in population among the colonial empires of the world (see The Colonial Problem, loc. cit.). ⁶⁹ In 1939 the Belgian Empire consisted of (1) the Belgian Congo, which had been annexed by Belgium from the King of the Belgians in 1908; (2) Ruanda-Urundi, formerly part of German East Africa, but acquired by Belgium as a mandated territory in 1920 and administratively united with the Congo. The Belgian Empire ranked in 1939 third in area but sixth in population among the colonial empires of the world (see The Colonial Problem, loc. cit.). ⁷⁰ In 1939 the Norwegian overseas possessions consisted of: (1) in the Arctic: (a) Svalbard, the archipelago comprising Spitsbergen, Bear Island, and adjacent islands, acquired by Norway in 1920 (see note 38 and accompanying text above), (b) Jan Mayen Island, annexed in 1929; (2) in the Antarctic: (a) Bouvet Island, occupied in 1928 and annexed in 1930 after a diplomatic dispute with Britain, (b) Peter I Island, annexed in 1931, (c) the sector of the Antarctic Continent lying between 20∘ W. and 45∘ E., known as Queen Maud Land, which was annexed on 14 January 1939 (see “Norwegian Claims in the Antarctic”, The Norseman, January–February 1947, pp. 1–4). The Norwegian overseas possessions (with the exception of Queen Maud Land) ranked in 1939 lowest among the colonial empires of the world, being eleventh both in area and in population (see The Colonial Problem, loc. cit.). [Ed. For an overview of the colonial possessions of Spain and Portugal, see Spain and Portugal,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 148, 149 and note 1. This chapter is reprinted as Chapter 12 of the present volume.] ⁷¹ See Arnold Toynbee, “The British Commonwealth,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. AshtonGwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 24–25. ⁷² See Martin Wight, “Spain and Portugal,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 148, 149, reprinted as Chapter 12 of the present volume. ⁷³ Unlike the Belgian Congo, the two great Portuguese colonies in Africa had extensive ocean frontiers. Angola was contiguous along half its continental frontiers with South African and British territory; along the other half it marched with the Belgian Congo itself. Mozambique was wholly bounded on its landward side by South African and British territory.

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These empires were not only as vulnerable as their mother countries; they were in several cases more valuable. The importance to a conqueror of the mother countries lay in their strategic position rather than in their wealth or industry, but the Netherlands Indies and the Belgian Congo, standing high among the world’s producers of strategic raw materials and foodstuffs, were worthy objects of cupidity in themselves. The small colonial Powers were inevitably in a more difficult and dangerous position than the great ones. The disproportion between their weight in the world and their possessions marked them down for attack.⁷⁴ On 15 March 1939 Germany was still occupied with the destruction of the Versailles Settlement in Europe, but her colonial claims had been a discreet accompaniment to her European policy,⁷⁵ and just as in Europe her aim was nothing so conservative as the recovery of the frontiers of 1914,⁷⁶ so it was clear that when the moment came to look overseas she would not be satisfied with a simple recovery of her former colonies. Italian ambitions outside Europe had been temporarily satisfied by the conquest of Ethiopia, and Japan was temporarily absorbed in the conquest of China, but these were steps that took the conquerors nearer to the defenceless European empires in Africa and East Asia. The Small Powers knew that their empires were held on sufferance from the Western Great Powers; and remembering the Anglo-German agreements about the Portuguese Empire before the First World War,⁷⁷ they might well wonder whether the policy that had abandoned Manchuria to Japan, Ethiopia to Italy, and Austria and Czechoslovakia to Germany, might not possibly lead towards the attempt to satisfy German colonial claims at the expense of the smaller colonial empires. It was rumoured that an Anglo-German colonial settlement involving the Small Powers had been discussed when Halifax visited Hitler in November 1937, and Spaak then declared that Belgium would defend the Belgian Congo by all the means at her disposal.⁷⁸ The rumour was not without foundation. Although Halifax talked of the colonial issue on that occasion only in general terms,⁷⁹ three months later Henderson presented Hitler with a written suggestion about ⁷⁴ Cf. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 2 vols. in 1, 305th–306th edition (Munich: NSDAP, 1938), pp. 152– 3; Mein Kampf (trans. James Murphy), 2 vols. in 1 (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939), p. 127. (Hereafter the original and translation will be referred to as Mein Kampf and “tr. Murphy”.) ⁷⁵ Cf. Survey for 1937, i. 33, 326, 340. ⁷⁶ “Die Grenzen des Jahres 1914 bedeuten fu¨r die Zukunft der deutschen Nation gar nichts” (Mein Kampf, p. 738; tr. Murphy, p. 530; cf. pp. 736 and 529 respectively). See Martin Wight, “Germany,” in Arnold Toynbee and Frank T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds), The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 335. [Ed. This chapter is reprinted as Chapter 10 of the present volume where see note 207 and accompanying text.] ⁷⁷ See note 72 above, pp. 149–50. ⁷⁸ Survey for 1937, i. 368, note 1. Cf. Erich Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit, 2nd edition (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche, 1948), pp. 90–91, who places Henderson’s proposals on the colonial question in the autumn of 1937. ⁷⁹ D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 55 seqq. [Ed. The full reference for “D.Ger.F.P. series D” is Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, published jointly by the British Foreign Office and the U.S. Department of State. Series D (1937–45). (Washington: U.S.G.P.O. and London: H.M.S.O., 1949).]

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it from the British Government, which was to be kept secret from Britain’s allies the French and still more from the Belgians, the Portuguese, and the Italians.⁸⁰ The suggestion was for a new colonial régime in an area of Africa roughly corresponding to the conventional zone of the Congo Basin Treaties. Each Power would remain solely concerned for the administration of its own territories there, though subscribing to certain principles for the promotion of civilization; but there would at the same time be a redistribution of colonies, and Germany would once more have African territory under her sovereignty.⁸¹ It was not clear whether the British Government had in mind simply the return to Germany of Tanganyika, under mandatory forms, or whether the territorial interests of other Powers would be affected. Hitler’s reply was that he wanted the restoration of Germany’s former colonies, not a complicated international system; he did not want to involve other countries, and anyway would Belgium and Portugal agree? “Sir Nevile Henderson declared that he believed that Portugal and Belgium, and presumably France and Italy too, would in the end co-operate in the settlement.”⁸² The British proposal does not seem to have been pursued after the German conquest of Austria, which occurred a week later. The Western neutrals had to trust that Britain, being traditionally more sensitive to disturbances of the balance of power in Africa and the Indian Ocean than in Central Europe, would thenceforward recognize in her policy that the great empires overseas were reciprocally dependent upon the security of the smaller.⁸³

⁸⁰ Ibid. pp. 240–9; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the U.S.S.R.: Documents and Materials relating to the Eve of the Second World War from the Archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948), vol. i, no. 3. (This collection will hereafter be referred to as Documents … from the Archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, publ. by the U.S.S.R.) ⁸¹ D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 242–3, 246. The conventional basin of the Congo, an enlargement upon the geographical basin, was defined by the Berlin General Act of 26 February 1885, article 1 (2) and (3), as extending on the Atlantic side between 2∘ 30′ South Latitude and the mouth of the river Logé in Angola, and on the Indian Ocean side between 5∘ North Latitude and the mouth of the Zambesi (British and Foreign State Papers (London: H.M.S.O.), lxxvi. 9; cf. S. E. Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference, 1884–1885 (London: Longmans, Green, 1942), 108 seqq.). Henderson mentioned the latter boundaries specifically in his talk with Hitler. The conventional basin of the Congo covered the Belgian Congo, the British territories of Uganda, Kenya, Nyasaland, and Northern Rhodesia, the British mandated territory (formerly German) of Tanganyika, half Indian Somaliland, and half the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, as well as fringes of French Equatorial Africa, Ethiopia, and Portuguese Angola. ⁸² D.Ger.F.P., series D, i. 247. ⁸³ Cf. A. J. Toynbee, “The Issues in British Foreign Policy”, International Affairs (May–June 1938), xvii. pp. 321–2.

14 Note on Partition At the end of his book on the Eastern Question, first published in 1878, Albert Sorel made a famous prophecy.∗ “For a century now,” he said, “we have been working to settle the Eastern Question. On the day when we think we have settled it, Europe will see, inevitably posing itself, the question of Austria.”¹ This has often been quoted as a perceptive insight into the logic of national disintegration, a forecast of what happened to Austria-Hungary as a result of the First World War. But it was an essay in a different kind of logic, the logic of partition. Sorel argued that the three Powers who made a nefarious alliance in 1772 to partition Poland, would be led by their jealousies and greed to find other fields of territorial expansion, other objects of partition. “After 1795, there was nothing left of Poland to partition: it became the turn of Turkey and of Germany.”² And in due course the three allies, like the ship-wrecked sailors on a raft who are at last driven to eat the weakest of their own number, would find among themselves the elements for new partitions. The course of events has borne out the prophecy, though in ways that Sorel did not dream of. The three allies were sundered by the First World War, and then destroyed in it: Russia by revolution, Germany by defeat, Austria by defeat and national disintegration. The belt of small successor-states that appeared in Eastern Europe, half of whom were the debris of Austria-Hungary, became a new field of partition between Germany and Russia once they had resumed their Great Power status. In 1939–1940 the partition, which included a fourth partition of Poland, was carried through. But the two allies went to war with one another. In consequence Russia has acquired suzerainty, if not territorial possession, of the greater part of Eastern Europe, including most of the former domain of Austria; and her one-time ally and later enemy Germany has herself been partitioned between Russia and the transatlantic ally with whose help Russia defeated Germany.

∗ Wight may have drafted this note for inclusion as an appendix in the second edition of Power Politics. He composed the manuscript on an envelope postmarked September 10, 1970.

¹ [Ed.] Albert Sorel, La Question d’Orient au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Librairie Plon, 2nd ed., 1889), p. 280, ad fin. “Voilà un siècle que l’on travaille à résoudre la question d’Orient. Le jour où l’on croira l’avoir résolue, l’Europe verra se poser inévitablement la question d’Autriche.” ² [Ed.] Sorel, La Question, pp. 279–80. “Dès 1795, il n’y avait plus de Pologne à partager; ce fut le tour de la Turquie et de l’A llemagne.”

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0015

15 Arnold Toynbee: An Appreciation There was a paradox about Arnold Toynbee’s career.∗ He was a scholar who abandoned brilliant academic prospects in order to fulfil his vocation. Two years of college routine and teaching at Balliol were enough to give him claustrophobia, and the First World War enabled him to escape. But he was equally ill-equipped for practical responsibilities. The Second World War gave him a more incongruous servitude, as Director of the Foreign Office Research Department, from which he escaped with still greater relief. In Chatham House he found the niche he needed, midway between university and civil service. There he was unencumbered with either pupils or administrative chores. He valued the contacts it offered with men of affairs and political life, but he could have had as many if he had remained an Oxford don. Indeed, though his friendships were deep and tenacious, he drew his inspiration from books and from contemplating nature rather than from social intercourse. But Chatham House was not an ivory tower. It was a base for travel—physical no less than of the mind. He was an inexhaustible sightseer, with a curiosity like Herodotus’s for visiting the varied monuments of civilisation. He had an acute eye for landscape and sense of place. Some of his noblest passages evoke the beauty of nature embroidered by the puny works of man. Places evoked associations: he always saw the depth of time in them. When he motored over the Carpathians, he was passing out of the Holy Roman Empire into the dominions of the Ottoman Sultan. He plunged into the Euphrates, “seized by an irresistible desire to swim from the Mamluk to the Mongol shore.” On favoured sites his imagination re-enacted historical dramas visually and aurally. His absorption in historical knowledge was in the last resort poetical and mystical. A Study of History culminates in the vision of the Communion of Saints of all religions—a deeply experienced identification with the spiritual longings of mankind. Perhaps none of his contemporaries was so close to Toynbee or gave him so much comfort (though they never met) as Jung. Traveller and poet, he was primarily a scholar. His erudition was almost sufficient for the giant task of universal history: only in knowledge of the Chinese sources, and perhaps in sociological reading, was it seriously weak. “The secret of his immense acquirements,” says Trevelyan of Macaulay, “lay in two invaluable

∗ Martin Wight’s draft tribute to Toynbee was published posthumously in International Affairs, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1976), pp. 10–12.

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gifts of nature—an unerring memory, and the capacity for taking in at a glance the contents of a printed page.” Toynbee possessed both. His youthful precocity resembled Macaulay’s and Mill’s. He read Paradise Lost in three days at the age of seven and found his vocation at the age of nine, when he chanced upon the Stories of the Nations volumes on Egypt, Babylonia and the Saracens. The fascination of the exotic and the Oriental which he shared with Gibbon, henceforward determined his interests. On that day was born the historian who was to teach the English-speaking world that there are other civilisations besides Western. Family and education established him firmly in the liberal classical culture of Victorian England. His whole system of history was a fugue upon his classical education at Winchester and Balliol, discovering the pattern of Graeco-Roman history in all other cultures. Only in Greek or Latin verses could he express his most intimate feelings. But his learning broadened out to embrace modern history and literature, and always yearned towards a deeper knowledge of the languages of Islam. His habit of quoting makes A Study of History not only an argument but a kind of anthology or commonplace book. If all other Western literature were destroyed and this alone remained, it would carry to survival huge fragments of history and literature in Greek, Latin, English, French, German. Will it rank with Herodotus, who first inquired into many civilizations and wove their stories together, or with Athenaeus, who compiled a lifeless hodgepodge of anecdotes and extracts from writers otherwise lost to us? Toynbee himself would have laughed over this choice of destinies. He always pitched his own estimate low. He had a joke with his friend Norman Baynes, the Byzantine historian, whose minute and intensive scholarship was the opposite of Toynbee’s fluent, voluminous and extensive learning, that he himself would survive simply because Baynes in some footnote had corrected his errors—as the pagan writer Celsus is known only from the book Origen wrote to confute him. But behind Toynbee’s charming personal modesty was the urgent ambition for artistic creation. The Study of History began as a spare-time occupation; his affectionate private name for it was “the nonsense book.” Yet it was the book for which all his other writings were sketches. In the end the man himself became inseparable from it, and the other sides of his life were sacrificed to its completion. His greatest weakness was an inability to learn from criticism of his premises or method. When he debated on the wireless with his Dutch critic, Geyl, or in university seminars from Mexico City to Beirut, his mind seemed impervious to argument behind a bland wall of metaphor and repetition. When the comments he invited on his drafts would have made any other writer scrap or modify what he had written, Toynbee simply embodied them verbatim in footnotes. His postwar role of prophet was based on a popular impression that he was a sage saying something important about the prospects of Western civilisation. It

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rested more securely on his remarkable power of foresight. As early as 1915, in his first book, he predicted that if Germany were deprived of the Polish Corridor it would occasion another war. In 1931 he prophesied that the solution of the Palestine question would be partition. In 1934 he foresaw America bestriding a prostrate Japan. Perhaps he never adapted himself to the circumstances of the cold war, and allowed his intuitive grasp of the logic of historical situations to be weakened by his natural optimism. For he combined political insight with political unsophistication. There was a moral directness about his approach to politics. Occasionally it produced political judgments of the highest order, like the splendid philippic against British policy in the volume of the Chatham House Survey on the Abyssinian War. Sometimes it led to an obtuse oversimplification, as when he could assert that Zionism and antisemitism were expressions of an identical point of view. His estimates of statesmen past and present had a copy-book simplicity—like the unfailing gentleness of his comments on other people. He suffered very deeply in his life, but he never lost his boyish simplicity. Those who heard him broadcast would say how young his voice was. I think of him as perennially the Winchester boy—with his intellectual enthusiasm, his buoyant temperament, his interest in his own mental processes, his naive illustrations to an argument, his unaffected deference towards others. And above all:— The Youth, who daily farther to the east Must travel, still is Nature’s priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended.¹

For Toynbee’s vision never faded.²

¹ [Ed.] William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” first published in 1807. ² [Ed.] Wight subtly referred to the following two lines of the poem: At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.]

16 Review of Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgment of Volumes I–VI by D. C. Somervell, under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1946) In a few hundred years time, if Professor Toynbee’s great enterprise survives among a representative selection of our literature, it will probably be regarded as the greatest historical work of the present century.∗ It is a natural history of civilisations. It identifies twenty-one of them, from the earliest we know, the Sumerian Civilisation from which Abraham was a refugee in its latter days, down to our own Western Civilisation whose present state is a matter of anxious conjecture. It pins them out on the table and examines their growth, collapse, common phases, differences, and inter-relations. The combined imagination and erudition for such a task, covering every field of history and archaeology, need not be emphasised. Probably no other living scholar could have attempted it. No other living scholar has. Professor Toynbee is no determinist, and in this lies his chief superiority over the morose Spengler, who saw societies growing and decaying with the fatality of vegetables. He shows that 20 of his 21 civilisations have broken down, most through internecine warfare but some through being conquered; and that the twenty-first, our own, has reached a stage analogous to the last convulsions of the Roman world before the dubious respite of the Augustan Peace. But this estimate cannot be final, because in the last analysis the fate of our civilisation rests in our own hands. For he takes us back to the tragic interpretation of history. Loss of selfdetermination is due neither to economic, racial or cyclic causes, but to spiritual inadequacy. “We are destroyed by what is false within.” It is true that in an ∗ [Ed.] Arnold J. Toynbee, the author of A Study of History, participated in the abridgment of Volumes I–VI by D. C. Somervell under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, published by Oxford University Press in New York and London in 1946. This review by Wight appeared under the title “The March Of History” in The Observer, January 5, 1947.

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incautious moment a Marxist once said, dazzled by the mastery with which the dialectic of challenge-and-response between man and his environment and the stratification of a declining society into hostile classes are worked out, that Toynbee’s was Marxist history as it ought to be written. In fact, it is the greatest Christian interpretation of history since St. Augustine. It starts from an independent standpoint as an empirical study of modern historical knowledge, but it comes to contribute that knowledge to the theme of “The City of God.” The conclusion, to be developed in the three unwritten volumes, is likely to affirm that the rhythm of civilisations acquires its final meaning in promoting the upward progress of religious consciousness. Sir James Frazer made his own abridgment of his master-work, “The Golden Bough.” Professor Toynbee was anticipated in such a task by Mr. D. C. Somervell, who has done it with consummate skill. He has reduced the six published volumes into 600 pages, using almost entirely the original words. Much inevitably is lost. It is like a photographic reproduction of a Titian: colour and tone and detail are sacrificed to composition and structure. But this is partly an independent edition, since Mr. Somervell has added important notes and clarifications, while he and Toynbee have together revised the text and brought it up to the atomic bomb. Possessors of the original may well buy this, too. But its real success will be in sending the reader to the “leisured amplitude” of those six large green volumes, where among the full literary graces, the illustrations and digressions, the quotations from every literature and the appendices on every historical problem, he will experience the rare excitement of seeing human history and culture for a moment sub specie aeternitatis.

17 Review of Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilisation on Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948) This collection of reprinted articles and lectures gives in a popular form the whole of Professor Toynbee’s system of history.∗ His work has become controversial because it raises again the question of what kind of a study history is. His unqualified appeal to scientific method is perhaps unfortunate. For history ultimately is less akin to science than to the activity or the trained judgment whereby the critic establishes canons in art or literature; and Toynbee’s achievement illustrates this. He always sees man as a free and tragic being, whose destiny eludes the prosaic techniques of the social scientist. Toynbee is not concerned with what Professor Butterfield, our most subtle student of the historical process, has called “the texture of history”—the interlacing of human wills with the human environment in particular cases. Toynbee explores the entire range of historical relevancy. Seeking “the intelligible field of historical study,” he widens his vision: first from the nation to the civilisation, and thence to the interaction between civilisations which produce higher religions. Civilisations, he says, seem to rise and fall (though he is no determinist about this); the true theme, the true progress, lies in the sequence and development of the higher religions. Thus history is only comprehensible as a whole, and “passes over into theology.” His philosophy shows unresolved tensions between liberalism and Christianity. His profound Biblical culture is literary, not theological. Sometimes he strikes the note that “our fate is in our own hands.” But the rigour of his historical analysis suggests that civilisations reach a stage of irreversible decline when human activity can only either accelerate the disintegration on the surface, or work in the subsoil of history where the fate of civilisation does not matter. Again, it is not unequivocally clear whether he regards Christianity as a unique and final revelation. The profoundest of these essays, the Burge Memorial Lecture of 1940, marks an approximation towards Catholicism, but there are other passages that sound like creative evolution. ∗ [Ed.] Arnold J. Toynbee’s Civilisation on Trial was published by Oxford University Press in New York in 1948. This review by Wight appeared under the title “Modern Prophet” in The Observer, January 2, 1949.

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He thinks geopolitically in historical terms. In a brilliant chapter (the 1947 Creighton Lecture at London University) he contrasts the Mogul Emperor Babur’s overland world, controlled by the Turkish peoples, with the new maritime world opened up by Vasco da Gama. “The revolutionary Western invention was the substitution of the Ocean for the Steppe as the principal medium of world communication.” Mackinder, the English founder of geopolitics, believed that the last word would lie with continental power, not sea power; and Soviet Russia has already redressed the balance in so far as she has unified the Eurasian continent—a development Toynbee does not touch upon. His logic is sometimes faulty: he does not define his terms, he uses false analogies, he argues in circles. (The least satisfactory essay here is called “Does History Repeat Itself ?” which seems to hover mistily above the problem without pouncing.) Indeed he never adequately defines the unit of his historical system—a civilisation. But civilisations, like nations, are facts of experience. Toynbee’s categories will be knocked about by his successors; their content will be changed; but they have already become part of the historian’s permanent equipment. In America this book has deservedly been a best-seller. English popular tastes are different, and Toynbee lacks the historical cosiness of Mr. Rowse and Dr. Bryant. His supreme gift is the insight that comes when the mind is freed from attachment to its own time and place. He has insisted, against the established tradition of academic specialisation, that a historian is implicitly concerned with the entirety of human history; and that the standpoints of other civilisations are as valid, and their influence in the long run as powerful, as those of our own. He has effected a revolution in historical perspective like the revolution the aeroplane has made in the map of the world.

18 Dame Veronica Wedgwood, O.M. Veronica Wedgwood made an important decision early in life, the choice of the right family for her purpose.∗ From her infancy she was surrounded by books, blocks of writing paper, pens and encouragement. She was already a prodigious writer, aged twelve, when her father said to her, “You should practice history. Even a bad writer may be a useful historian.” She has lived to know a few critics, sour Puritans of historiography, who can only complain that she is now too good a writer. She published her first book four years after leaving the university: a biography of Stafford, the great minister of King Charles I, pre-eminent in every talent that exalts or destroys a nation. Thus she raised her standard over the territory which she was later to work in. But first she widened her range. As the Thirty Years War of our own century was approaching its second paroxysm of violence, she wrote her history of the first Thirty Years War, when once before the German handling of the Czechs led Europe into a labyrinth of suffering. She went back in time, to translate from German the noblest of the lives of the Emperor Charles V. During the War, which turned her into a publicist, she wrote the life of William the Silent. A fitting guardian hero, you might think, for the new alliance comprising Dutch and British which once again freed Europe from a tyrant. But she once confessed revealingly that she was drawn to him, not for this reason, but because of the contemporary evidence for his beautiful manners, and his having said that it is a good thing to make friends of people. After the war she became a public woman, giving service on many national bodies from the Historical Manuscripts Commission to the Arts Council. And she now returned to the most exciting period of English history, and produced the first two volumes, long meditated, of her History of the Great Rebellion. All historians seek the truth about the past, but they disagree about the kind of truth they are looking for. Dame Veronica sees history as the school of moral judgment, an understanding of ourselves. For history shows every kind of person in every kind of situation, the variety of human achievement and suffering, the resilience and tenacity of the human mind. You notice that of her nearly twenty books, half are biographical. The history she writes captures something of the immediacy of the experience of those in the past, who did not know how it was ∗ Martin Wight prepared this address to present Dame Veronica Wedgwood for an honorary doctorate at the University of Sussex in 1971. O. M. refers to her membership in the Order of Merit, a British Commonwealth honor.

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going to turn out, as we here do not know how it will turn out. She treads a serene path through the idols of the academic market-place. The storm over the gentry does not confound her, neither does the general crisis of the seventeenth century swallow her up. She interprets the past, not to provide directives for the collective present, but as an education in the human heart. Wedgwood history is a gigantic Rubens canvas, full of detail harmoniously distributed. But when we decipher the great ceiling spread out above us, we have, as in reading all the best history, a dual and contradictory sensation. One the one hand, the past is a strange country, whose language is difficult to learn. When King Charles I reprieved seven Roman priests who were under sentence of death, the other condemned men in Newgate rioted, locked themselves in, and refused to be hanged unless the Fathers were hanged along with them. Has any strike in our own day been so remarkable as this? On the other hand, the past is a mirror in which we see our familiar features. The Great Rebellion begins as the archetypal conflict of English party politics: a small group of activists on each side; the majority unenthusiastic for either; two leaders, each with considerable merits, each making promises that cannot be relied on; the two parties leaning towards the centre, disagreeing in their interpretations of an agreed formula, the rules of a game already centuries old. Dame Veronica coined the phrase “the silent majority.” Whether current politicians who use it, get it from her, future historians will tell their readers. She uses it incidentally to describe an illusion. The silent majority was what King Charles I thought he had on his side, and could keep. He hadn’t, and didn’t. More prodigally than any living historian, Dame Veronica uses literature and the fine arts as ingredients of the necromancy by which she resurrects the dead. Rubens, Nicholas Briot and Dobson, Lovelace, Herrick, Cowley and Waller, satires and engravings, ballads and masques, smoulder like jewels in the texture of her work. Of those nearly twenty books, two if not three are literary criticism. She has been President of the English Association, and a Trustee of the National Gallery. On the ancient debate, whether history is an art or a science, she herself once said the decisive word: “History is an art, like all other sciences.” My Lord and Chancellor, I present to you Dame Veronica Wedgwood, O.M., as a writer who is herself artist, critic, historical scientist, and historian in one, for this degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.

19 Review of Charles Petrie, Diplomatic History 1713–1933 (London: Hollis & Carter, 1946) There has long been a need for a short general history of international politics since the beginning of modern times, a preliminary volume, as it might be, to the Survey of International Affairs.∗ There is nothing recent. The volumes of the Geschichte des Europa¨isches Staatensystems in von Below and Meinecke’s series, which are still the best text-books, range from Platzhoff ’s published in 1928 back to lmmich’s of 1905. The Manuel Historique of Bourgeois is older still. In English since then there have been only the painstaking but sterile diplomatic histories of the late Professor Mowat. Sir Charles Petrie has attempted what was wanted with partial success. Utrecht and the Nazi Revolution are termini as good or bad as any others, and the author of The Chamberlain Tradition prudently stops short of a re-examination of the ascendancy of Neville. Within these limits he has written an international history that falls into two contrasted sections. The first is interesting and useful, the second is the reverse. Sir Charles Petrie has the great merit of being perspicuous and readable. There is never too much detail, but complexity is not sacrificed to clarity. He has a sense of the ironies and limitations of international politics, and his observations and judgments are generally just and shrewd. The survey of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which makes the bulk of the book, is skilful and lucid. There are perhaps faults of arrangement and emphasis. The chapters on the French Revolution are the weakest and least well-arranged. The chapter on the Risorgimento in 1870, precedes that on Nicholas I, ending in 1856, so that the Crimean War comes three chapters after the War of 1859. The influence of Russia in the Austrian Succession War is mentioned but not explained; it would have been worth noting that this was the first time that an army marched from Moscow to the Rhine. Palmerston’s part in the establishment of Belgian independence is ignored. The account of the Schleswig-Holstein question lacks clarity, and does not state at the outset that the duchies were united with the Danish Crown. The chapter on the Far East omits any mention of the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway, an event which outflanked ∗ [Ed.] Sir Charles Petrie’s Diplomatic History 1713–1933 was published by Hollis & Carter in London in 1946. This review by Wight was published in International Affairs, vol. 23, no. 4 (October 1947), pp. 574–5.

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the British Empire as Drake’s circumnavigation of the world had once outflanked the Spanish Empire. But these are unimportant matters: in a work depending on compression and selection every critic will find particular faults, and every critic will find different ones. It is in the final chapters that the book goes to pieces. One of the tests of a historian is his judgment on contemporary affairs. Here Sir Charles Petrie fails. He is well known as a monarchist and as the biographer and apologist of the Chamberlains, but his loyalties seem to overthrow his judgment in dealing with the past two generations. So long as his predilections are shown in quietly deploring the July Revolution, in reasoned depreciation of Palmerston (“when Bismarck rose to power the star of Palmerston paled before him, as that of Olivares had done before Richelieu,” (p. 254)), or in taking the diplomatic role of Edward VII too seriously, they command respect. When a third of the chapter called “The Germany of William II, 1890–1914” is given to Joseph Chamberlain’s negotiations for an Anglo-German entente, the proportion between partiality and objectivity is becoming strained. When a quarter of the chapter on the first world war is taken up with the Sixte affair, the distortion is becoming grotesque—the more so in view of what is omitted. The entry of the United States is taken for granted without comment or explanation. The politics of the Central Powers, the Polish Question, Ludendorff ’s diplomacy which was to Hitler’s what Louis XIV’s was to Napoleon’s, the defeat of Russia, are ignored altogether. The Russian Revolution is mentioned in passing as having, along with the fall of the Briand Government, occasioned the failure of the Sixte negotiations. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty is hastily noted at the end, without any mention of the conference. There is no recognition that Trotsky and Wilson together inaugurated the era of mass diplomacy. Sir Charles dislikes the second, and omits the first; the Prince of Bourbon-Parma is more interesting. The succeeding chapter is equally a travesty. It contains no mention of the League of Nations as a new departure in diplomacy. It omits the Washington Conference of 1921–2 and the post-war settlement in the Pacific. It ignores Mussolini’s seizure of power, and the Corfu incident; we have little excuse now for not seeing that they were more important than the conferences on reparations. It assumes, without describing or explaining, the break-up of the Hapsburg and Russian Empires and the establishment of the Succession States; it neglects the settlement of Eastern Europe; it mentions neither Allied intervention in Russia, nor the Russo-Polish War, nor the Little Entente. If the Western statesmen of that age had been able to ignore the Russian Revolution as studiously as Sir Charles Petrie contrives to do, they would have been happier men. On an earlier page Sir Charles deplores a Europocentric view of international relations (p. 265), but in the final chapter, covering 1923 to 1933, he is once more culpable. His picture is Western Europe, and Locarno is the centre-piece. The Far East, the Civil War in China, is again ignored. The Washington Conference here receives a single sentence, as background to the naval disarmament negotiations.

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The curtain falls upon Hitler’s accession to power, without the Japanese conquest of Manchuria having been mentioned. These last chapters are not history, but a series of notes on aspects of the period which happen to interest Sir Charles Petrie. The book is seriously deficient in its apparatus of scholarship. Historians, writing above the text-book level, have no right to expect to be taken seriously if they do not give their sources. It is a volume rich in quotations but without a single footnote. The maps, the index and the bibliography are all inadequate. The bibliography follows the stultifying plan of arrangement by chapters instead of by subjects or regions, and makes no distinction between documentary sources and secondary works, or between major secondary works and unimportant ones, so that Temperley and Penson and Gooch and Temperley appear indiscriminately beside the works of Mr. Douglas Jerrold and Mr. Arthur Bryant. Of the many omissions Seton-Watson’s Britain in Europe is perhaps the most surprising, and the cumulative impression is of an erratic and eclectic scholarship.

20 Review of A. L. Rowse, The Use of History (London: Hodder and Stoughton for the English Universities Press, 1946), and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, edited by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946) There is much that is valuable in Mr. Rowse’s book.∗ He writes sensibly on the utilitarian value of history, whether it is an art or a science, the Marxist interpretation, and historical relativism. His argument is warmed and quickened by a passionate devotion to the embodiment of England’s history in her landscape, monuments and buildings, and to the great masters of English historical literature, Clarendon and Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle, Froude (especially Froude) and Green, Trevelyan and Churchill. It is Mr. Rowse’s strength that he is a man of letters as much as a historian, and he does not acquiesce in the divorce between history and literature. This is the introductory volume of a popular series, which has already become familiar. But unhappily Mr. Rowse is an ill-mannered writer. He constantly comes between the reader and the book with the assertion of personal grievances, vulgar prejudices, and opinionated irrelevancies about politics and religion. The egotistic pronoun abounds through his pages, and he is as much interested in the fact that he is saying it as in what he says. For example, he makes the astonishing claim to be the first to have shown that the determinist and free-will schools of thought are not mutually exclusive (p. 131). All the historical philosophers who have treated of this problem, from St. Augustine through Schelling and Hegel to Plekhanov, will rejoice to see Mr. Rowse’s day, and be glad. With more modesty, he says he is not sure whether the point has been made before that the sterile factor in Marxism is the dialectic (p. 135). It has, by persons as various as Messrs. Burnham and ∗ [Ed.] A. L. Rowse’s The Use of History was published by Hodder and Stoughton for the English Universities Press in London in 1946. R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History, edited by T. M. Knox, was published by Clarendon Press in Oxford in 1946. This review by Wight was published in International Affairs, vol. 23, no. 4 (October 1947), pp. 575–7.

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Koestler, Edmund Wilson and Lancelot Hogben. (Archbishop Temple, with perhaps profounder insight, suggested in his Gifford Lectures that the dialectic is the only fruitful factor in Marxism.) In great part the book seems to represent Mr. Rowse’s table-talk, and there is much careless and jerky writing. The historian may be excused the error of imagining that coral-insects are molluscs (p. 17), but there is an arrogant slovenliness in the reference to “Toynbee’s Survey of History” (pp. 83–4). This self-assertiveness has touched Mr. Rowse’s central theme. The argument that ignorance of history can be politically disastrous has an obvious truth. He seems to claim the converse as well, that the historian is politically wise, and illustrates it by assertion of personal foresight about Nazi Germany (e.g., pp. 138–9). But historical knowledge is an ingredient of political judgment, not a substitute. It does the common man little service to sell him history now, as in the nineteenth century he was sold natural science, for a means of solving all the problems of human affairs. Historians can be as silly as anybody else. Respected historians said that Britain should sympathize with Mussolini’s dictatorship because it was the Italian counterpart of the Tudor despotism. “I am prepared to draw the conclusion from my reading of history in the realm of practical affairs,” says Mr. Rowse, “and to say categorically that it went against the sense of history for this country to go on with the attempt to govern Ireland in the nineteenth century; we were right to quit and we ought to have quitted it before” (p. 101). But historians at the time by no means all saw this. To Lecky, Seeley, Froude, Goldwin Smith, it was Gladstone’s attempt to dissolve the Union that went against the sense of history. Every policy can be backed or opposed by readings from history. Why, says Mr. Rowse, did the Germans defy the lessons of history and try to unify Europe where France and Spain had failed? Because they had no historical understanding (p. 129). All he means is that they too failed. They came within an inch of succeeding, and it was lack not of historical but of political sense that ruined them. The Romans succeeded; the Russians may. It depends on the length of the historical view from which history’s lessons are deduced, and Mr. Rowse’s is mainly limited to the past four centuries. It is, moreover, difficult to see whether “the sense of history” means more to him than that what happens, happens. Whether what happens has sense is a deeper inquiry, on which he casts little light. Collingwood’s is a book of different quality. Collingwood was one of the major philosophical figures of our time, and the philosophy of history was his chosen field. This posthumous volume contains material for what he intended to be his chief work. Two-thirds of it consists of a brilliant and penetrating philosophical survey of historiography, from Sumerian chronicle and myth down to Bergson and Croce, Spengler and Toynbee. The remainder is essays on various aspects of historical thought, which round out a position familiar to those who know his Autobiography. The whole has been put together from disiecta membra and prefaced with admirable judgment by Professor T. M. Knox. It is a fine book, the torso

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of perhaps a great one. The central theme is the struggle which began with Vico and triumphed with Croce, the liberation of history from the bonds of natural science, the assertion of its autonomy as a form of thought with its own principles and its own methods. But Collingwood carried the argument too far, and developed on the philosophical level those extreme claims for history which are offered more prosaically by Mr. Rowse. Working historians themselves are perhaps least likely to accept the final Croce–Collingwood position, that “all reality is history and all knowledge is historical knowledge” (p. 197), with the relativism and scepticism to which it leads. But Collingwood’s powerful and exciting mind instructs not least by the disagreements that it provokes; this volume is read in a continual simmer of mental stimulation; and the student of international affairs who is ready to examine the foundations of his thinking will include it among obligatory books.

21 Review of Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition (London: Hutchinson, 1960) This is a lively, competent, serviceable introduction to the history of ideas from Leonardo and Machiavelli to Hegel and Robert Owen.∗ It takes great thinkers, or groups like the Royal Society and the Lunar Society of Birmingham, puts them in their historical setting and quotes liberally from their writings. The exposition is generally clear and fresh, and there are stimulating examples and juxtapositions of ideas. Each chapter has a useful critical bibliography; there are footnotes at the bottom of the page, and two good indexes. Despite a grandiose reference in the introduction to “the whole spectrum of the mind,” the history of ideas in this case means political and scientific ideas. The fine arts, classical scholarship, literary criticism, aesthetics, moral philosophy, historiography and the novel are among the concerns of the mind that are fortunately omitted. Perhaps a disproportionate amount of English social history is taken on board. The chapter on the Elizabethan Age touches upon the sexual constitution of the queen, and a rather incoherent account of the Puritan Revolution, one of the very few unclear chapters, gets caught up in what Professor Hexter has called the Storm over the Gentry. This will be no disadvantage for the undergraduate reader, to whom a certain amateurish enthusiasm about the book will probably appeal. But he may need to be warned that Socrates did not write dialogues, that the Middle Ages did not believe that “men cannot develop, and have nothing in them which is personal and creative,” that the Regno was not a citystate, that the Whig party under Walpole did not express the ascendancy of the middle classes, that there was virtually no serfdom in western Europe in the eighteenth century, that George III was not “determined to impose an absolute rule on America as on England,” that the prose of Samuel Johnson is not “decadent and out-moded,” nor did Wordsworth say it was; that it is insensitive to use the word “hedonism” of either Burke’s political empiricism or Owen’s belief in the social

∗ [Ed.] Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish’s The Western Intellectual Tradition was published by Hutchinson in London in 1960. This review by Wight appeared under the title “New History in Old Form” in The Economist, December 3, 1960. © The Economist Newspaper Limited, London (3 December 1960).

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plasticity of human nature, let alone both, and perhaps morally obtuse to find a modern counterpart for Bentham in—of all people—Gandhi. It would be sourness in a reviewer to note such blemishes if the book were offered as the piece of intelligent popularisation it is. But the publishers launch it with puffs from Cambridge, Eng., recommending it to the attention of statesmen, and in an introduction containing more self-praise than customary Dr Bronowski and Professor Mazlish claim that they are writing a new kind of intellectual history, that their collaboration enables them to present a deeper interpretation than could be expected of most single writers, and that they have experienced the study of history as liberation from accepted ideas. These claims are exaggerated. Their book, for all its merits, is old-fashioned in method, insular in outlook, and conventional in ideas. It is a product of the authors’ collaboration at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it may be guessed that the audience in mind is the American college student, though this will scarcely excuse the description of George III as a “dictator,” intervening in science like Hitler and Stalin. The book’s emphasis is on the Anglo-American contribution to civilisation. Thus it deals with the Royal Society and Locke before going back to Descartes. It fails to bring out the feeling of European unity among the leaders of the scientific revolution, and how much Newton’s culminating achievement owed to international intellectual cooperation. The most notable absentee from the Western intellectual tradition is the Netherlands. The reader is told incidentally that Galileo got the telescope from Holland, that Descartes was inspired by Beeckman, that Huygens formulated the inductive method, and implicitly that Holland invented the stock exchange; but the matrix of these achievements is a blank. The Dutch Revolt is not mentioned, nor are its links with the Huguenots. This is an intellectual history from which we learn nothing of the importance of the Jesuits, Hooker, Grotius, Spinoza, the Bollandists, Richard Simon, Leibniz, Vico, Swift, Lessing, Herder, Coleridge, and which neglects the Counter-Reformation, the transition from natural law as a norma agendi to natural right as a facultas agendi, the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, and the origins of the idea of progress. Authors are free to delimit their books, but they are not free in the claims they make for what they have delimited. The themes of the book are the development of human freedom, the rise of the scientific method, and the beginnings of a science of man. Admirable as they are, for the reader at least they scarcely represent a “liberation from accepted ideas,” and the political lessons with which the book concludes are the common ground between the campaign writers of Mr Nixon and Mr Kennedy. As Whitehead said of the scientific mentality of the modern world, “Men can be provincial in time as well as in place.” The Western intellectual tradition has produced another kind of history-writing, which does not judge the past by its contribution to the present, awarding marks to forward-looking minds, and which can extend the same sympathy to Pascal and Burke as to Bayle and Rousseau, because it regards

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every generation as equidistant from eternity. The student will gain much stimulus and information from this book, but when he wants historical understanding and philosophical depth he will go on to some of those “single writers”—to Hazard on the European conscience and Cassirer on the Enlightenment, to Becker’s “Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers” and Strauss on natural rights, to Whitehead and Butterfield on modern science.

22 Review of Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, translated from the French by Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954) Marc Bloch was one of the most original and influential of French historians between the wars.∗ For him, the object of historical research was to reconstruct a “total social situation”; specialised study was subordinate to this, and nondocumentary sources could be more important than documents. With Lucien Febvre he founded the review Annales d’histoire économique et sociale; together they presided over a new generation of young historians as Seignobos had presided over theirs; and Bloch’s canonisation among scholars was completed by his heroic death at German hands in 1944 for his Resistance activities. In Vichy France, exiled as a Jew from his chair at the Sorbonne, he wrote his last book, Métier d’Historien, of which this is a sensitive and distinguished American translation. It is his account of the vocation and techniques of the historian, “the memorandum of a craftsman who has always liked to reflect over his daily task.” He rejected a hard definition of history, since all growing sciences contradict the limits and methodologies laid down for them, and often find their “most successful craftsmen among the refugees from neighbouring areas.” The appearance of the human element in any field of study marks it as historical subject matter. History is the science of men in time. It is the study of human traces, whether documents, works of art, tools, bones, ruins, changes in the landscape, languages or customs; and it involves the historian in a range of ancillary disciplines as wide as the diversity of his evidence. Historical criticism is the cross-examination of these traces, above all for information they were not intended to give. But its scope is in general confined to establishing antecedent causes in the historical process; it does not affect the fundamental structure of the past. “Taken separately, there is scarcely a word in our modern version of Oresteia which we may be certain of reading as Aeschylus wrote ∗ [Ed.] Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft, translated from the French by Peter Putnam, was published posthumously by Manchester University Press in Manchester in 1954. This review by Wight appeared under the title “The Historical Vocation” in The Economist, July 24, 1954, p. 275. © The Economist Newspaper Limited, London (24 July 1954).

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it. In its entirety, however, we need have no misgivings that our Oresteia is really that of Aeschylus. There is more certainty in the whole than in its parts.” And if criticism begins with the rational conduct of doubt as an instrument of knowledge, its final goal is understanding. It excludes judgment, and distrusts both “the idol of origins” and “the fetish of the single cause” as insidious forms of attributing blame. In the last analysis, historical facts are psychological facts; it is human consciousness that is the subject-matter of history. History is the science of man par excellence. Thus much is perhaps the contemporary historiographical orthodoxy, and may be partially found in the writings of Collingwood and Butterfield and in Namier’s consummate essay in “Avenues of History.” What is it that distinguishes Bloch’s statement of it beyond these? First, his range of reference. He sees historical study in relation to modern physics and mathematical theory and psychology; in a crucial chapter he discusses the point at which historical criticism “intersects the royal highway of the theory of probabilities.” A medievalist and economic historian, he illustrates his argument from archaeology, Egyptology, classical philology, Biblical criticism, linguistics, hagiography, the geology of the Flemish coast-line, the beliefs of Montaigne, the lies in Marbot’s Memoirs, the February Days, the sociology of rumour in the trenches in the First World War. “The only true history, which can advance only through mutual aid, is universal history.” It follows that history deals with the living as well as the dead, and the study of contemporary history differs from that of the remote past only in degree. The second distinguishing feature of Bloch’s statement is his treatment of the personal, that is to say, the aesthetic element in historiography. Unlike other sciences, history takes its imprecise vocabulary (“century,” “freedom,” “serfdom,” “Renaissance,” “capitalism”) from its own subject-matter. To describe the delicate phenomena of human action, every historian uses to some extent a private language; his individuality is reflected in his choice of words, and he paints the past with the colours of his own experience. Unlike most historians, Bloch saw his own historical conditioning. “It is not inconceivable that our civilisation may, one day, turn away from history, and historians would do well to reflect upon this possibility.” The book begins with a question put by his son: “Daddy, what’s the use of history?” Does Bloch answer it? He distinguishes between the intellectual legitimacy of history, as an intrinsically fascinating study that gives a rational classification and a progressive intelligibility of human affairs, and a more pragmatic sense of the word “use.” Under the first head, he does not offer a “meaning” or “pattern” in history. That historical whole which is more certain than its parts remains undefined. The universal history he advocates is universal less in terms of the coherence of the entire human drama than of the coherence of every separate human situation. It means “civilisation” not in Toynbee’s sense but in Febvre’s. “To understand the attitude of the medieval vassal to his seigneur you must inform yourself about

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his attitude toward his God.” Under the more pragmatic head, he asserts that pure knowledge is not divorced from action, and historical criticism has pioneered for mankind a new path to truth and therefore to justice. One of his liveliest passages is in praise of the goddess Catastrophe, who helps historians by breaking open secret archives. We can add that she also compels them to write books they might not otherwise have written (Pirenne’s “History of Europe” and Perroy’s “Hundred Years War” are other examples) and to address a wider audience than their colleagues.¹ If she took Bloch’s life, she had first elicited from him this testament, which not only may prove to be the most influential writing of a great humanist, but is also the best explanation yet written of why, in the last century, history has become, and has deserved to become, the queen of the sciences.

¹ [Ed.] Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), a Belgian historian, was a prisoner of his country’s German military occupiers in 1916–1918. Denied books by his captors, he relied on memory to begin writing A History of Europe. Édouard Perroy (1901–1974), a French historian, wrote “the greater part” of his masterpiece “uninterruptedly, during the winter of 1943–4, thanks to the precarious leisure granted to me during an exciting game of hide-and-seek with the Gestapo.” He had “only a small stock of notes” and “had to recall many facts and episodes, solely with the aid of memory, which is always imperfect;” and he corrected errors and omissions after the war. Perroy, The Hundred Years War, translated by Warre Bradley Wells (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951), pp. xxvii–xxviii.

23 Review of Homer Carey Hockett, The Critical Method in Historical Research and Writing (New York and London: Macmillan Company, 1955), and Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955) The organisation of historical studies in the western world is based on a positivist assumption surviving from the nineteenth century.∗ The chief task of research students is to discover “new facts,” their chief exercise “historical criticism.” Of this Alexandrian phase of historical culture Professor Hockett’s book, first published in 1931 under the title “Introduction to Research in American History” and now much enlarged, is a humane and valuable monument. It is an American “Langlois and Seignobos”¹—a guide to the writing of a doctoral dissertation, containing much incidental information on American historiography, and written (despite the warning in the preface) in a lively and civilised manner. Professor Barraclough’s book assaults the premises of Professor Hockett’s, arguing that what is needed is not so much new knowledge as a new vision playing on old facts. “The failure of the historian to provide an interpretation of history, to say what it is all about, is another example of the notorious trahison des clercs, of the refusal of the specialist to live up to his work.”² ∗ [Ed.] Homer Carey Hockett’s The Critical Method in Historical Research and Writing was published by the Macmillan Company in New York and London in 1955, and Geoffrey Barraclough’s History in a Changing World by Blackwell in Oxford in 1955. This review by Wight appeared under the title “Interpreting History” in The Economist, February 4, 1956. © The Economist Newspaper Limited, London (4 February 1956).

¹ [Ed.] The French historians Charles-Victor Langlois (1863–1929) and Charles Seignobos (1854– 1942) co-authored a classic guide to methods of historical research, L’Introduction aux études historiques (1897). ² [Ed.] La trahison des clercs, Julien Benda’s renowned book, first published in 1927 (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset) and translated by Richard Aldington in 1928, has been published in English as The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: William Morrow, 1928), The Great Betrayal (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1928), The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), and The Treason of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006).

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Mr Barraclough discusses the big questions: is there a European civilisation?; how far are America and Russia part of it?; has modern Europe forfeited an international unity enjoyed by the Middle Ages?; what is a rational chronology of European history to replace this obsolete division into medieval and modern?; how have Europe and the non-European world reacted upon one another?; is federation the way to preserve the European inheritance?; and what is the observable rhythm of civilization—progressive and unilinear, or discontinuous and cyclic? With scholarly delicacy and circumspection, he maintains the cyclic view. He aptly observes that the transient fashionable novelty is not this theory, today wrongly attributed to Spengler and Toynbee, but the belief in progress which it is superseding. The main object of historical study is to work out a comparative time-sheet of civilisations, which will incidentally enable us to understand our own times: “we can see that we are nearing the end of a phase parallel to that in Classical civilisation which ran from Alexander to Caesar.” Historians’ criticism of Toynbee usually resembles a picture of Neanderthal men dancing round a trapped mammoth, barbarically intoxicated by a superiority of methodological equipment. Mr Barraclough is the first British historian to prove himself capable of rising to Mr Toynbee’s own level and discussing Mr Toynbee’s own theme. The knowledge is less universal, but the mind tougher and sharper. It is seen at its best in pungent comments on the social pretensions of science, the insoluble tension between European nationalism and “the European idea,” the manner in which we can reasonably hope Western values to survive, the supposed danger of a nuclear war destroying the human race, and the irrelevance of the word “pessimism” to the cyclic view of history. Professor Barraclough is a medievalist of high distinction, and the two best essays in the book are those on Frederick Barbarossa (a paragon of a commemorative lecture, placing a ruler in a broad historical context) and on the medieval Empire. In the modern period he treads less surely. It could be argued that, if Mr Toynbee imposes the rhythm of Greece and Rome upon all history, so Mr Barraclough reads medieval themes into modern history, especially when he argues that European development has been continuously dependent on external influences. Perhaps he exaggerates the deviation of American history from European, and the approximation thereto of Russian. His provocative thesis that the European balance of power was never transferred outside Europe, where the contrary principle of preponderance established itself, misconceives the system of the balance, which is no less apparent in Western dealings with Islam, China and Africa than in Europe itself. His suggested division of European history into four main periods, divided at the years 900, 1300, and 1789, does not quite square with his three revolutionary crises of the Investiture Contest, the Reformation and the French Revolution. On a deeper level, it seems unwise to argue that the Russian victory at Stalingrad made a total revision of European history necessary. If we alter our historical

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framework in accordance with political events, as continental peoples rename their streets, we exaggerate into principles of interpretation what should at best be stimuli, and chain ourselves more securely to the tyranny of relativism. The deepest impulse of the historical vocation is the desire to escape from the Zeitgeist, to give a picture of the past that will be more true, in colour, perspective and detail, than any that has been offered before. Into the nature of this truth Mr Barraclough is not concerned to probe. Nevertheless this is the most important volume of historical essays to appear in England since 1945. It restores the broken tissues between scholarship and life, history and politics, past and present. It is a book for the average intellectual man. The presentation is as good as the substance, and author and publisher are to be especially thanked for courtesies towards the reader that are becoming uncommon: we are told where and when each talk or essay was first delivered or published; footnotes are at the bottom of the page and not at the end of the book; they contain rich bibliographical references to recent continental literature; the index is excellent, and considers the reader who wants to trace the movement of ideas.

24 Review of Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: A Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954) In April, 1860, Garibaldi, a Piedmontese subject, invaded the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with a band of volunteers, and in six months had conquered it in the name of the Piedmontese king, who, meanwhile, remained in friendly diplomatic relations with the king of Naples.∗ It has usually been thought that the Piedmontese premier, Cavour, connived at and guided this adventure: a model of aggression by proxy. Mr. Mack Smith’s fascinating book shows that this is what Cavour in the end wanted to be believed, but that the truth is more complex. Cavour was a diplomat of genius, a virtuoso of the balance of power, which Garibaldi ignored. Cavour did not believe in unifying Italy in a single blaze of national enthusiasm; he followed the traditional Savoyard policy of aggrandisement, absorbing provinces one by one “like the leaves of an artichoke.” This required conciliating Britain and Prussia, paralysing Austria by co-operation with the Hungarian rebels, and alliance with the dominant Power in Europe, France. In the last analysis his aim was not the political revolution of Italian unity, but preventing the social revolution touched off by the Redshirts. Garibaldi was not Cavour’s instrument, but a dangerous rival whom it took all his skill to control. He thought the Expedition of the Thousand inexpedient: he obstructed it by every ∗ [Ed.] It has not been possible to identify the periodical or date of publication of this review by Martin Wight or to determine whether it was in fact published. Page proofs as well as handwritten and typescript drafts were found among his papers in the Archives of the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The digital archives of The Guardian, The Observer, and International Affairs—periodicals favored by Wight for book reviews—do not, however, include this review. On August 11, 2004 Mr. Mack Smith, who was one of Martin Wight’s students at Haileybury College (Wight was a senior history master there in 1938–1941), wrote: “Very sorry to say that I have no copy of that review by Martin Wight, nor any memory of it—and I feel sure I would have recalled something. Perhaps it was never printed.” On September 7, 2004 Mr. Mack Smith added: “Thank you very much indeed for sending me those pieces by Martin Wight. I have no memory at all of any published review and am delighted to know that Martin took so favourable a view. Perhaps it also shows how I must have taken on board some of his own attitudes and preferences in historical study. Your mention of Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] brings to mind what I was told by its translator Archie Colquhoun, who spent some time discussing the translation with the author. Lampedusa had explained that his original idea for the novel had come to him from reading my book. . . Martin was a remarkable man and a splendid teacher.”

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means; and its success forced him to assume the revolutionary role himself by conquering the Papal States, not to consummate Garibaldi’s achievement, but to steal his thunder. Mr. Mack Smith shows how the smokescreen of deceit and contradictory appearances with which Cavour confused his contemporaries makes certainty very difficult also for the historian. This is probably the best analysis in English of Cavour’s political greatness, of his deeply subtle methods, his keeping many alternative policies on hand until opportunity matured. It is the more cogent because it emphasizes the ingredients of indecision, bad judgment, ungenerosity, and failure with subordinates, which were transmuted into dazzling success. Whig history, like Dr. Trevelyan’s classic trilogy on Garibaldi, is history ennobled by a vision of all things working together for good to them that love freedom. The reaction against Whig history operates on several levels. Mr. A. J. P. Taylor has defined “Tory history” by the fashionable emphasis on administrative machinery. On a deeper level, the reaction will accentuate power and interests against ideals, as in Professor Syme’s reinterpretation of Augustus in “The Roman Revolution.” Or, as in this book, it may combine a realist critique of the Whig heroes with a more charitable estimate of the part played by the defeated and the unpractical. Mr. Mack Smith delicately adjusts the balance between the two architects of the Kingdom of Italy and has thereby caused some scandal among Italian historians. His judgment is perfectly poised, but his sympathy is with Garibaldi. Like T. E. Lawrence, Garibaldi was a great revolutionary soldier, and saw the mess the politicians made of his achievement; with purer motives than Lawrence, he withdrew into privacy. Stupid, simple, selfless, loyal, this splendid man is given by Mr. Mack Smith a new dimension of potentiality. He might have made a ruler. At least he would have done better than the Piedmontese administrators who replaced him, for he knew how to evoke the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the common people in the cause of united ltaly. This detailed work of historical scholarship has a threefold claim on the ordinary reader. It illuminates the present. For the Sicilians, heirs of six civilizations, the establishment of the House of Savoy was only the latest barbarian invasion from the north; for the Piedmontese (but not for Garibaldi) the wogs began at Naples. The harshness and bad faith with which the Piedmontese system was imposed on the Two Sicilies gave the Kingdom of Italy a fundamental instability, which is still perhaps the greatest problem of the Italian Republic. Again, the book illuminates the universal characteristics of international politics, seducing the mind into the region of comparison and generalisation: the equivocalness of “non-intervention,” the arrangement of spontaneous incidents to justify aggression, the unreliability of plebiscites, the influence of returned exiles, the conflict between realpolitik and what Mazzini called “revolutionism.” But history’s main function is that enlargement of the experience which Collingwood, perhaps too narrowly, defined as “re-enactment.” The reader of this book

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not only relives an acute political drama, entering in turn the minds of all its chief actors. “Wherever historians can spend longer studying a statesman’s reaction to a problem than that statesman once spent on the problem itself,” says Mr. Mack Smith, “it often occurs that events appear to have happened more unpredictably and with less conscious purpose behind them than had formerly been thought.” With the best critical history in fact (and this book is such) the historian comes to understand what happened better than the statesmen did, and communicates that understanding to his readers.

25 Review of A. J. P. Taylor, Rumours of Wars (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953) When Mr. Taylor is praised or disparaged for his brilliance, pungency, provocativeness and wit, it often means that the strength of his historical writing goes unrecognised.∗ With the exception of Sir Charles Webster, he is our most distinguished international historian, the one who offers the most creative interpretation of the European balance of power and of the tensions and limitations of diplomacy. The present book reprints essays on a score of international figures and events from Tocqueville and Louis Napoleon to Stalin and George Kennan; through them all runs a vivifying pragmatism. The captious critic can point out that Mr. Taylor on the one hand passes an admirably sympathetic judgement on Bismarck’s political principles and on the other hand makes plain his own adherence to the Gladstonian tradition of idealism, declaring indeed that the Bismarckian realpolitikers have always in the long run been defeated by the heirs of Gladstone. But this is not inconsistency on Mr. Taylor’s part; it is the capacity to evaluate by several standards that is demanded by the complex nature of international politics. Mr. Taylor never leaves his reader in doubt as to which he himself regards as the ultimate standard. “It is the idealist, not the so-called realist,” he says, “who has in the last resort the true sense of ‘the national interest’.” This is not to say that his pages are not peppered with half-truths and overstatements. It is the price of assiduous journalism; and so pugnacious a Radical, who endearingly begins a review of the history of The Times with the words, “Even a reader who believes that the greatest newspaper in England is not published in London . . .” cannot avoid being occasionally wrong-headed. In order to denigrate Tocqueville, he gets himself into the position of asserting that “the masses” (whose rise Tocqueville foresaw) are only an assembly of individuals, and thus evades the real question of the difference between politics of an aristocratic age and politics of a mass age. The region which engages his interest and understanding is bounded by the lines between Manchester, Paris, Trieste and Warsaw and what lies beyond is sometimes out of focus. He has an insular prejudice against the Americans, of whom he finds a final portrait in Martin Chuzzlewit. He has a warm feeling towards Russia mainly because Russia has been Britain’s traditional ally against Napoleon ∗ [Ed.] A. J. P. Taylor’s Rumours of Wars was published by Hamish Hamilton in London in 1953. This review by Wight appeared under the title “Contentious But Creative” in The Spectator, May 15, 1953.

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and the Germans. He is aware that the reasons for condemning the appeasement of Germany before the war may also support the Western policy of resistance to Russia since, and shows signs here of an unresolved conflict between his sympathies and his realism: “Munich supplies superficial parallels and superficial terms of abuse for the present day.” When he writes of Communism, “The answer to intolerance is tolerance; the answer to intransigence is compromise; the answer to unquestioning enthusiasm is scepticism; the answer to grievances is to redress them,” is he not reciting all the arguments that were adduced for being patient and sympathetic with National Socialism? In some places he says that Communists differ from Western political man because they believe what they say; elsewhere that the Soviet rulers “are very like the rulers of any other country, pushed along by events, making a good many blunders, and delighted to keep the show going at all.” Perhaps this is the difference between Stalin and Malenkov; anyway it is a singular good fortune for Mr. Taylor that events since his book was published make it look like being right about the Russians for the next phase of Russian policy. If Mr. Taylor excites his readers’ arguments and sometimes runs them off their mental legs, it is ultimately due to his conception of the historian’s job. History, he says, is “primarily communication, a form of literature.” Perhaps the most valuable essays in this book are the first three, which give something like a professional credo. “The historian does not only deal with men; he is a man himself, and nothing will turn him into a technician.” Thus he answers the Butterfield doctrine of an impartial technical history, and his own example illustrates his precept. A quarter of the book is taken up with two long articles from the English Historical Review on the conflict of interest between Britain and France at the end of the nineteenth century in the Nile Valley and Morocco. One imagines that Mr. Taylor may have undertaken them to show that he can do the hack-work of diplomatic history no less well than the academicians against whom he discharges an occasional arrow, and this of course he triumphantly can. But these essays are never mere technical exercises in handling diplomatic correspondence in the Foreign Office archives; like the rest, they coruscate with intellectual energy. For Mr. Taylor is distinguished from so many professional historians by possessing not only a trenchant style but also a historiographical personality. This is the reason why he is so readable and worth reading.

26 Review of A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) The Oxford History of Modern Europe, edited by Alan Bullock and F. W. D. Deakin, is launched without announcement of scope or parts, titles or authors.∗ Instead of a prospectus, the editors throw us this first-class volume by Mr Taylor. It is international history from the fall of Metternich to the defeat of the Central Powers, written from the original sources. One of the most valuable things in it is the 30-page essay on the sources, modestly called “Bibliography.” This is the classic era both of diplomatic history and of diplomatic archives. “It was the great age of writing. Even close colleagues wrote to each other, sometimes two or three times a day. Bismarck did all his thinking on paper, and he was not alone. Only Napoleon III kept his secrets to himself and thwarted posterity. Now the telephone and the personal meeting leave gaps in our knowledge which can never be filled.” Because of this very profusion of records there has not hitherto been a tolerable book on nineteenth-century diplomatic history as a whole. Historians have engaged in specialised studies; undergraduates have passed from Temperley to Sumner, and staggered from Langer to Schmitt; and the general reader has had nothing but histories of European “civilization,” whose treatment of international relations is a compound of diplomatic legend, overemphasis on the growth of international institutions, and Hobson’s doctrines of imperialism. Mr Taylor’s book is indispensable from the moment of its appearance, but not many indispensable books are so firm in construction, so clear and compelling in narrative. He makes short work of an economic interpretation of the great age of imperialism. Foreign policies have deep social and economic springs, but the antecedent causes are usually political and strategic. His theme is the Balance of Power. A brilliant introductory chapter describes the Great Powers, analysing the slow changes in their military and economic resources. (It is a criticism that he ignores the idea of the Concert of Europe, and does not discuss whether it meant anything ∗ [Ed.] A. J. P. Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 was published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford in 1954. This review by Wight appeared under the title “Balance of Power” in The Manchester Guardian, November 12, 1954.

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more to its advocates than a mode of preserving the Balance in their own favour.) His decisive and independent mind can be seen in his treatment of the causes of wars. The stake in the Crimean War was not Turkey or the route to India, but Central Europe. The war of 1859 was the only aggressive war in modern history (Hitler’s included) that had no element of prevention, yet it has been unanimously applauded. “The historian cannot be expected to explain this paradox; while himself approving of the war, he can only record that it was incompatible with any known system of international morality.” Bismarck promoted the Hohenzollern candidature in Spain, not to provoke the French into war, but to deter them. Grey could not have averted war in 1914 by defining his policy, because the German General Staff would not have abandoned the Schlieffen Plan for any British threat, and the French believed they and the Russians could defeat Germany without British assistance. There is not only a mastery of the documents behind these judgments, cutting through myth and propaganda, but a kind of inspired and dogged common sense. Presumably the editors rather than Mr Taylor decided that the book should begin in 1848, not 1815; but Mr Taylor makes too much of the argument that with his closing date Europe is dwarfed by America and Russia. American and Bolshevik intervention in Europe was only prefigured in 1918; in the age of Locarno and Munich Europe continued the centre of the world; and the war of 1939–1941 was a European war. Mr Taylor’s generalisations, like Macaulay’s, are sometimes made for effect, and he can draw striking contrasts at the expense of historical truth. But, like Macaulay, he has (among contemporary historians) a style of matchless lucidity, vigour, and wit. He knows how to clinch an exposition with a vivid anecdote. There are brief, biting character-sketches. OF HOLSTEIN: “There was nothing mysterious in his position. He was the one-eyed man in the country of the blind.” Rosebery “meant to maintain the continuity of foreign policy—a doctrine which he had himself invented. His main task was thus to deceive both his chief and his colleagues, a task which be discharged conscientiously. but only at the cost of aggravating his naturally nervous temperament to the point of insanity.” OF BETHMANN: “He was the first of a type common later in the century—’the good German.’ Impotent to arrest the march of German power, deploring its consequences, yet going along with it.” The apophthegms in this book will inspire examination papers for years to come. It will not, perhaps, supersede the last historical epic by Sir Arthur Bryant on the tables of young ladies, but it will delight, provoke, and fertilise a generation of serious students.

27 Review of A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955) Mr. Taylor is our chief authority on the Bismarckian era; it was in the order of things that he should at length write a life of Bismarck himself.∗ But it is disappointing to find that the book is not documented. A mastery of sixty years’ accumulation of Bismarck material is apparent on every page; but the would-be scholar who has hitherto had to resort to Mr. Taylor himself as the final court of appeal for help in tracking down one of Bismarck’s pregnant sayings will not be able to resort to his Life. Not only are footnote references excluded, but the bibliography is a bare list of titles, without the critical commentary that makes the bibliography of “The Struggle for Mastery in Europe” a thesaurus of scholarship and a work of art. A statesman’s biography must essentially trace the development of character as well as of policy; it must not lose the man in a welter of history. Better than any earlier biographer, Mr. Taylor surveys Bismarck’s personality. Half country squire, half revolutionary intellectual, a Byronic hero self-transformed into Frederick the Great, neurotic and decisive, pious but implacably resentful (he once announced, “I have spent the whole night hating”), glutton and literary genius, domineering and supple, with bewitching charm and melodious voice, we are persuaded to agree that “of all the great public figures of the past he is the one whom it would be most rewarding to recall from the dead for an hour’s conversation.” Mr Taylor draws a notable parallel with Disraeli, and shows recurrently how Bismarck’s career marches with that of Gladstone, the great opposite. The comparison with Cromwell is superficial. Their death-beds show the dissimilarity in religious depth, nor is the sociological analogy true. It is Richelieu whom, in character, circumstances and work, Bismarck most closely resembles. Mr. Taylor’s Bismarck is not the patient, systematic aggressor of tradition but an improviser of genius, showing greater moderation in victory than history elsewhere records. He did not plot the war of 1870: the Hohenzollern candidature in

∗ [Ed.] A. J. P. Taylor’s Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman was published by Hamish Hamilton in London in 1955. This review by Wight appeared under the title “Iron Chancellor” in the Glasgow Herald, July 6, 1955, and the Manchester Guardian, July 8, 1955.

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Spain was intended rather to distract France and make German unification possible without war, as Cavour conquered Southern Italy. Afterwards, protecting the European balance by a diplomacy of reinsurance, he became also the creator of social insurance. Mr. Taylor’s writing is deceptive. No historian has done more to restore history to literature, but for all that he is not easy. The dazzling arabesques of his exposition arise from a sharp sense of the windings of politics, as when a paragraph begins by saying that Bismarck in opposing the Social Democrats underrated the power of ideas, and ends by arguing that in the long run he was right because to-day men prefer security to freedom. He does not pass the old condemnations on the statesman who corrupted the politics of an entire people. He is concerned to elucidate the historical environment which Bismarck could manipulate with such incomparable skill. Yet the moral judgment is the more true for being withdrawn. Most people are content with a one-dimensional political philosophy; Mr. Taylor’s is two-dimensional, resonantly taut between radicalism and realism.

28 Review of A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, new edition (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948) in International Affairs With the present volume and his German History Mr Taylor has probably defined the interpretation of Central European history for a generation to come.∗ The first edition of this book was published in 1941. The new edition is rewritten and enlarged, and an additional chapter, “The Peoples without the Dynasty,” advances the story to Tito. It is a close-knit and intricate political narrative; and though in the present edition more space is given to foreign policy, this is still too compressed for lucidity. The reader for whom the pronunciatory footnotes are designed would perhaps have preferred greater chronological precision in the text. But Mr Taylor’s writing has its own excellences: he is a master of incisive analysis and illuminating analogies, and the bite and malice of his style are exhilarating. An almost intolerably anomalous and complicated history is here for the first time organized into a single theme. The mistake of describing Strossmayer, the glory of Djakovo, as bishop (sic) of Zagreb (p. 189) can be corrected in a reprinting. The French Wars made the English academic class Germanophil for a century; the German wars have made many of them Slavophil; and Mr Taylor, when he has written formerly about “the Slav peoples, with their deep sense of equality, their love of freedom, and their devotion to humanity,”¹ has sounded like Carlyle singing the virtues and misfortunes of poor Teutschland. In the present book these enthusiasms are mostly discarded, and he now makes no bones about the peasant democracies of Eastern Europe having become police States as soon as ∗ [Ed.] A new edition of A. J. P. Taylor’s The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary was published by Hamish Hamilton in London in 1948. This review by Wight was published in International Affairs, vol. 25, no. 3 (July 1949), pp. 369–70. The “German History” to which Wight referred was A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), reviewed by R. Birley in International Affairs, vol. 22, no. 1 (January 1946), pp. 136–7.

¹ [Ed.] A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), p. 222.

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they attained independence (p. 256). Nevertheless, although he has some brilliant and caustic passages on national movements in general (pp. 28–31, 173–5), there are signs of differential treatment. He calls the Ruthenians “Little Russians” throughout, and describes Ukrainian nationality as an “invention” (p. 149n), without telling the reader that there is more difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages than between Slovak and Czech, or applying to the Ukrainians a fortiori what he says of the Slovenes, that “their misfortune was to have arrived at consciousness too late in the day” (p. 202). Sentimental regret for Habsburg rule and the “Austrian mission” is still widespread; Mr Taylor strips away its last rags of intellectual respectability. But he goes too far. The argument of this edition is that the collapse of the Monarchy was inevitable, not a matter of lost opportunities, for there were no opportunities to be lost. Here appears the moral contradiction in Marxist and derivative interpretations. The contempt with which Mr Taylor treats almost all his characters except Masaryk and Michael Karolyi only makes sense if they could have in some degree modified the course of history. Like the woman in Thurber he is disenchanted with mankind,² but determinist assertions disqualify a historian from profound and subtle themes. Professor Butterfield remarked in his Inaugural how the development of historical understanding usually transforms a story from melodrama into tragedy.³ Mr Taylor reduces the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy from tragedy to a political theorem.

² [Ed.] It is not clear which Thurber drawing or story Wight had in mind, but one of Thurber’s cartoons depicts an annoyed woman telling a disconsolate man, “Well, I’m Disenchanted, Too. We’re All Disenchanted.” James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), p. 350; italics in the original. ³ [Ed.] Herbert Butterfield, The Study of Modern History: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Cambridge on 14 November 1944 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1944).

29 Review of Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951) Collections of essays, some of which have already appeared in print, do not often have the unity and coherence of this volume.∗ In appearance it might be chips from the workshop of Professor Butterfield’s two earlier books, “The Whig Interpretation” and “Christianity and History.” In substance it is more like the book for which they were preliminary sketches, a maturer and more balanced study of historical theory. It is a shock to-day to find so good a book so inexpensive. Human history is ultimately tragic in character, not melodramatic; compassion, not censure, is the right attitude towards it; these are the two central themes. One of the first two chapters propounds the Christian law of charity as the ultima ratio in politics as well as in historiography. The other is called “The Tragic Element in Modern International Conflicts,” and contains more wisdom than most books on international relations. Butterfield revives one of the suppressed questions of historical interpretation by asking whether the traditional British pursuit of the balance of power did not break down as early as 1914, when British policy became subservient to the Russian alliance; and he points out that (but for the Russian Revolution) Tsarist Russia would have emerged from the First World War with all the present Soviet sphere of influence in Europe, and Constantinople as well. Butterfield distinguishes two kinds of historiography: “heroic” history— polemical, partisan, engagé—and “technical” history. The latter term is misleading, since the real difference does not lie in techniques of documentary criticism so much as in moral purpose. Technical history unravels with compassionate comprehension the whole system of necessity within which past actions were framed, and seeks a reconciling synthesis. Technical history in this sense presupposes Christian conceptions of truth and personality, and general freedom of research; and consequently it is in considerable danger today from the erosion of beliefs and from subtle threats to the historian’s independence. Any historian who does not enjoy the seductions of Government patronage will like Butterfield’s urbane onslaught on “official history.” He just stops short of pointing out that the four most distinguished of our historians who are working on or writing about inter-war

∗ [Ed.] Herbert Butterfield’s History and Human Relations was published by Collins in London in 1951. Wight’s review, under the title “The Tragedy of History,” appeared in The Observer, September 2, 1951.

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diplomatic history at present are all animated by hatred of Germany, and gently asks if this is conducive to a comprehensive and durable historical interpretation. For Butterfield, technical history precludes moral judgment. It might be asked whether you can describe sin without implicitly denouncing it: whether moral judgment does not inhere in the act of understanding. Butterfield answers yes, and that this is the very reason why explicit moral judgment is arbitrary and inadequate. In the nineteenth century, when triumphant nationalism glorified its heroes— William III or William the Silent, Cavour or Bismarck—Acton insisted that great men are almost always bad men, and that history must inflict the undying penalty on wrong. In the century of the common man, who requires scapegoats—“guilty men” or “one man alone,” Chamberlain at Munich or Roosevelt at Yalta— Butterfield insists that all men are sinners, and that the function of history is to anatomise collective guilt. Thus the perennial debate about judgment in history can provide an essential moral corrective to each successive age. Butterfield is a perfectionist about the practice of history, and consequently a pessimist about its educational value—it is usually so badly taught and written. He does not think that technical history “has ever been taken up by a mind that I should call Shakespearean in its depth and scope, save possibly in the remarkable case of Ranke.” His last chapter on history as a branch of literature is an admirably original and detached contribution to an old controversy, which is still sustained today between Professor Galbraith, who says that history means the study of the sources, and Dr. Trevelyan, who has proved that it is an art. The reader is left wishing that in due course Butterfield would illustrate his own principles in the grand manner, redeem technical history from his own reproaches, and reunite it with literature, by undertaking a large-scale history of, let us say, the Reformation, for which this rich, judicious and sensitive book will be the programme notes.

30 Review of Edouard Perroy, The Hundred Years’ War, translated by W. B. Wells, with an introduction by David Douglas (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1951) The Hundred Years War is one of the heroic ages of English history, but it has been curiously neglected by historians.∗ Gibbon once thought of writing about it, before he found a greater theme; and no modern scientific historian has advanced beyond specialized work on the constitutional and administrative foundations. Thus there is neither predecessor nor rival for Professor Perroy’s book. When the original was published in France in 1945 it was recognised at once as something of a masterpiece. Few medievalists have an equal erudition in the history of both countries, or are so well equipped as Professor Perroy to exemplify Tout’s dictum that “English and French medieval history are one subject.” In the weight that Perroy allows to the influence of personality in the historical process he is in the great tradition of humane historiography. His character-sketches are exact and fascinating, and his discussion of Joan of Arc’s effect on the war is a model of critical piety. Moreover, the book acquires certain overtones of experience and interpretation from the circumstances of its origin. It was written, from a small bundle of notes, when Perroy had gone underground during the German occupation. “When a nation reaches the depths of the abyss,” he says, “as was the case at that time and in our own, certain ways of behavior in misfortune, certain reactions against fate, throw mutual light upon one another.” The outstanding quality of the book is its intellectual organisation. Like a Cotswold road, the controlled and lucid narrative follows the crests of powerpolitics, with continuous vistas into the valleys of domestic history on either side. The contrasts in national structure, the Black Death, social changes and popular discontent, the growth of administrative and financial organisation, the development of literature and architecture, are successively revealed and precisely photographed. But the road itself goes steadily forward from a quarrel about feudal relationships to a war that is backed by a new national sentiment. And the reader ∗ [Ed.] Edouard Perroy’s The Hundred Years’ War, translated by W. B. Wells, with an introduction by David Douglas, was published by Eyre and Spottiswode in London in 1951. This review by Wight appeared under the title “Two Nations in Travail” in The Observer, December 30, 1951.

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0031

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is always aware of wider horizons, the Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement, the growth of heresies, and the undying aim of the rulers on both sides to reunite Western Europe in a last crusade against the Turkish Power in the east. The two senior nation-States of Europe have forgotten the struggle in which they attained self-consciousness. France later recovered the hegemony of Europe; England later won an oceanic empire to replace her abortive continental dominion. What mutual mistrust survives today, says Perroy, does not go back further than Louis XIV, and that is far enough. This is a book for the lover of France and England, who may ask himself why it is St. Joan rather than St. Louis who has become la sainte de la Patrie as French power has declined in the past century, how far Shakespeare’s “little touch of Harry in the night” is true to the Machiavellian conqueror and what kind of war it was that glitters distortedly in the decadent chivalry of Froissart; or may be moved to reflect upon the little effigy of Du Guesclin lying like a child among the kings at Saint-Denis, the strange tomb of Chandos in the meadow beside the river Vienne, and the gigantic sword of state, standing by the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, which Edward III had borne before him in France.

31 Review of L. B. Namier, Avenues of History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1952) If a single book can illustrate the aims and achievement of contemporary historical writing, this is it.∗ Showing Professor Namier’s style and scope, it shows also how he represents the central tendency of modern historical studies. He is the great Cham of history because of a unique combination of technical accomplishment with span. Beside him, other historians seem either narrowly specialised (e.g. Neale, Rowse, Woodward) or eccentric in doctrine and method (e.g. Butterfield, Toynbee). Most of the essays here are reprinted reviews. One finds in Namier an extraordinary evenness of intellectual power. His writing is always terse, sinewy, exact; his mind’s edge never blunts, his argument never becomes inert or soggy, his judgment never wavers. He seems always working effortlessly within his own powers. “Analytic insight into the tangle of human affairs coupled with a consciousness of his own limitations,” he says, “is the mark of the real historian.” Two of these essays are jewels, in themselves worth the price of the book. “Nationality and Liberty” is a paper of magisterial sweep, a union, as it were, of Acton with Masaryk. The other, on “History,” speaks to perfection of analogy, method and art in history, and places the new technique which has already come to be known as “namierisation”—detailed comparative biography of parliamentary figures within their institutional setting. “The great historian is like the great artist or doctor: after he has done his work, others should not be able to practise within its sphere in terms of the preceding era.” What are the springs that move this most powerful intellectual engine? There are several answers, for there are several Namiers. Half this book consists of essays on European history since 1789. These are by the Namier who is our supreme authority both on the revolutions of 1848 and on the diplomatic prelude to the Second World War. And since he, alone of our historians, has Eastern Europe in his bones, it is proper that these essays should be informed by a judicial severity towards the monstrous history of German nationalism. The other half of the book is by the Namier who is the English conservative— who is, in a deep and serious sense, the most insular of living British historians. ∗ [Ed.] L. B. Namier’s Avenues of History was published by Hamish Hamilton in London in 1952. This review by Wight appeared under the title “The Great Cham of History” in The Observer, June 1, 1952.

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0032

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This is the master of parliamentary history, who reviews with equal penetration Neale’s book on the Elizabethan Parliament and the Nuffield College books on the elections of 1945 and 1950. Three sketches of Jos Wedgwood, Wyndham Deedes, and Orde Wingate reveal elements in English life for which Namier has a peculiar understanding and affection—the knights-errant of Englishry, the defenders of the oppressed, the soldiers of missionary stock. But there is a third and ultimate spring, which becomes explicit in a just and sympathetic essay on Toynbee. As the great Swiss historian Burckhardt, though not formally a believer, worked within the pattern of his Christian inheritance, so Namier stands to Judaism. “If revealed truth is the core of religion, the history of the Jewish people acquires peculiar significance; so does perhaps what that fervent Catholic, Léon Bloy, calls ‘the Jewish Mystery,’ and refuses to call ‘the Jewish Question’: and so does the Return.” It is from this source, beside which most other modern inspirations seem parvenu, strident and jejune, that this regal and rhadamanthine writer draws his central strength.

32 Review of Sir Lewis Namier, In the Nazi Era (London: Macmillan, 1952) The kernel of Sir Lewis Namier’s Europe in Decay was provided by the French “Memoirs Born of Defeat.”∗ The kernel of this companion volume of reprinted articles is provided by the corresponding memoirs born of the German defeat, especially Dirksen, Weizsa¨cker, Kordt, and Schmidt, together with essays on the German Army and Hitler and on Halder’s pamphlet about Hitler. The collective mental isolation of German political writers, their egotism, their subjectivity in thought, willfulness in morals and incapacity for self-condemnation, has never been more scathingly exhibited than here. “Mussolini once said about the Germans that they are dangerous because they dream collectively. More than that: they remember collectively; they invent collectively; they are unsurpassed in mental gregariousness.” These writers, building a new legend upon long-discredited but unrepudiated German falsehoods about the treatment of Germany in 1919 and the policy of the entente before 1914, are concerned to make out that while they served Hitler they opposed him in their hearts, and that the democracies are more to blame than the German people for Hitler’s coming to power and remaining there. Sir Lewis analyses their inconsistencies and dishonesties with relentless severity and a rabbinical minuteness, and he shows how neither the civilians nor the army disagreed with the ultimate aims of Hitler’s foreign policy. The second part of the book contains essays on the German and British documents for 1937– 8, with a review of Coulondre, one of the few actors in the drama of the Nazi Era who earns respect, and a final annihilating attack on Bonnet “as statesman and historian.” In Europe in Decay, Sir Lewis riddled Bonnet with gunfire; here he should have sunk him for good. Sir Lewis’ punitory erudition in this field is valuable and disinfectant, yet it leaves an unpleasant taste. If one feels disinclined to judge it on its technical merits alone, it is not for the reason which Professor Butterfield has made fashionable. The doctrine that the historian has no concern with moral judgments, and ought not to feel as intensely as Sir Lewis feels against the Germans and their appeasers, is something of an intellectual counterpart to the abdication of political responsibility which was the democracies’ guilt for the war. The greatest historical writing has ∗ [Ed.] Sir Lewis Namier’s In the Nazi Era was published by Macmillan in London in 1952. This review by Wight appeared in The Listener, January 29, 1953.

History and International Relations. Martin Wight, Oxford University Press. © The Estate of Martin Wight (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192867476.003.0033

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often been inspired by anger and disgust, but only when these have been controlled and refined. It is perhaps significant that among Sir Lewis’ glittering intellectual and literary equipment the weapon of irony does not appear. In the present book, he sometimes seems tinged with the qualities of the men he prosecutes; the writing is sometimes strident, the conclusions to the essays (as to those on the German army, Halder, Schmidt, Coulondre) sometimes lack the accustomed pungency and are trite or heavy; the judicial verges on the vindictive. A failing in temper produces a deficiency in art. The book does not escape the danger, run by all collections of reprinted articles, of being scrappy and repetitive (the second time we are told how Weizsa¨cker records satisfaction that Lord Cecil was irked by the German–Russian rapprochement at Rapallo, our interest in the cross-examination flags rather than rises). It does not claim to be more than a critical analysis of some new publications, but it causes an admissible regret that we have not been given a considered and tranquil judgment; which now, with Sir Lewis Namier’s return to the field of British parliamentary history, may be, alas, among those of his unwritten works that Mr. Taylor has called the lost masterpieces of the twentieth century.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52-53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

A Abadan crisis 117 Abadan, nationalisation of 112 Abbott, G. F. 253n.177 Abbott, William Cortez 153n.71 aberration 13, 77, 94, 113, 119 abolition of Catalonian and Basque autonomy 298, 300 of Reich 172n.188 of Versailles Treaty 178 Abyssinian conflict 201–2, 326 Abyssinian War 326 Achinese War 315n.37 Acton, Lord 22, 45, 57, 133–4, 231, 360, 363 Adams, Henry 3, 29 Adenauer, Konrad 84, 85, 89n.6, 90 administration 34, 87, 104n.11, 126, 168, 221n.49, 322 administrative absorption 213n.21 administrative amalgamation 212 administrative autonomy 270 administrative chores 324 administrative class of Ottoman Empire 223 administrative machinery 349 administrative order 103 administrative unions 304n.49, 305n.50, 320n.69 Adolphus, Gustavus 146 Adriatic region 212n.16, 220, 221, 222n.50, 251–2, 253, 266–7, 269, 292 Africa 7, 12, 72, 73, 133, 135, 255n.194, 258, 297, 303, 304, 305n.50, 306, 320, 320n.73, 321–2, 322n.81, 346 see also East Africa; South Africa; West Africa Afro–Asian nationalism 133 aggrandisement 348 aggression arrangement of spontaneous incidents to justify 349 Balkan 256 Bolshevik 235 German 107, 193, 240n.116, 241, 273, 312 Hitler’s plan for 187

Italian 253n.177 model by proxy 348 Polish 248 of Powers 186, 198, 256, 266 and Ruhr resources 88 Russian 44, 261n.231 Voltaire on 70 Western 267 aggressive statecraft 10, 181 aggressors 10, 99, 111, 274, 355 Aland Islands 239, 248, 315 Albania 169, 173, 209n.3, 210n.4, 211, 214, 218, 220, 221n.47, 223n.53, 225, 226n.62, 227n.67, 230n.73, 233nn.91–2, 243n.122, 252–3, 254, 255, 256, 259, 261, 285–6, 303 Albanian independence 211n.11, 252, 253, 255 Alexander I 266 Alexander, King 261n.232 Alexander V, Pope 304n.48 Algeria 98, 134, 296n.8, 303 allegiance 69–70, 134, 213n.21, 240, 241, 314n.34 Allen, W. E. D. 179n.211, 179n.214, 213n.21, 219n.33, 222n.51, 283n.360, 288n.392 Allies 87, 89, 101, 139, 147n.38, 190, 199, 228n.69, 230, 233n.90, 243, 245, 246, 248, 269, 310 allies 323 Arab state’s reliability as 120 of Britain 322 Britain’s betrayal of 100 British, as uncooperative 93 Czechoslovakian 275 French 93, 170, 237, 238, 258, 260n.222, 263 German 91, 104, 168, 192, 200, 201 Hungary and Bulgaria as 239 Poland deserted by 277 Rumanian 243 Alps 198n.335, 218 Alsace 89, 168 Alsace–Lorraine 89, 101, 169 Altmark, Treaty of 211n.10 Altmark, Truce of 210n.7

376

INDE X

“Altreich” 157 ambassadors 70, 77, 94, 160, 202, 272, 282, 294n.420, 296n.8, 303n.45 ambiguity of buffer zones 209 in European civilisation 72–84 Hispano–American 297n.9 of Hitler’s combination of realism and fanaticism 163 of international relations 25–6, 38 of justice 231n.81 America anti–American 107 aversion of conflict with China 129 and Bolshevik intervention in Europe 354 and Commonwealth alliance 123 as “conquered in Germany” 78 coordinating Anglo–French supplies from 86, 108 doctrinal perversion of terms 132 foreign policy 48 France and Britain–America as rivals 95, 110 and George III 339 historiography 345 Ibero–American cultural unity 296–7 and Iceland 319 impact of anti–Bolshevik sentiments 193 intervention in Korea 48 power 96 setting up International Ruhr Authority 88 Spanish–American War 295 in study of contemporary history 27, 29, 30 terminology 297n.9 Toynbee’s prophesy 326 see also United States American Constitution 24 American Consul–General 182n.228 American Indians 80 American revolution 46, 140 American–Russian relations 42 Americans 39, 75, 93n.17, 134, 167, 291n.408, 351 American structure 104 American War of Independence 140, 296n.8 Anatolia 103, 233n.90, 246, 247n.142, 250, 251, 255 Anatolian War 220n.38, 233n.90 Ancient Rome vii, viii Andorra 289, 309n.5 Andrusovo, Treaty of 213n.21, 217n.24 Angevin dynasty 278 Anglo–American alliance 135 Anglo–American contribution to civilisation 340

Anglo–American policy 126 Anglo–American power 104 Anglo–American relations 132–3 Anglo–Burgundian alliance 310 Anglo–Egyptian agreements 125 Anglo–European relations 133 Anglo–Franco–Turkish treaty of alliance 247n.142 Anglo–French discussions 271n.290 Anglo–French interests 201 Anglo–French–Italian war 187 Anglo–French plan 275 Anglo–French supplies, coordinating 86, 108 Anglo–French ultimatum 277 Anglo–French union 86, 108 Anglo–French weakness 205 Anglo–German agreements 321 Anglo–German colonial settlement 321 Anglo–German entente 334 Anglo–German naval agreement 160n.109, 182, 263 Anglo–German negotiations 306 Anglo–German rapprochement 201 Anglo–German relations 203 Anglo–German war 241 Anglo–Iranian Oil Company 117n.11 Anglo–Jordanian Treaty 131 Anglo Persian Oil Company 9, 116 Anglo–Persian oil transaction 117 Anglo–Portuguese alliance 299 Anglo–Saxons 96, 110 Angola 305, 306, 320n.73, 322n.81 Anjou, Charles of 278 annexation of Albania 285, 303 Arab world escaping 131 of Austria 258, 268 of Austria and Czechoslovakia 203 of Baltic States 102 of Bessarabia 243n.43 of Bohemia and Moravia 137, 207, 232 of Czechoslovakia 281 of Danzig 234n.94 German Great Powers 173n.188 grossdeutsch Reich coming into existence with 143 increasing state size by 215 of Luxembourg 311 of Polish territory 217n.24 of Ruthenia 290 of Slovakia 277, 292 of South Tyrol 198 of Sudetenland 209n.2 of Teschen 279

INDE X Anschluss 137, 159, 173, 177, 183, 198, 202, 209n.2, 230, 258, 260, 268–71, 273, 282, 313 anti–Bolshevism 193, 202, 243, 260 anti–colonialism 80, 134 Anti–Comintern Pact 183, 186, 187, 203–4, 283, 285, 286, 302 anti–Communism 183, 185, 187, 193, 204, 260, 300 antiquity vi, 33, 60, 196 anti–Semitism 9, 121, 145, 166–7, 166n.157, 220, 226n.62, 282, 286 apartheid 34n.25 appeasement between Arabs and Jews 119–20, 122 British policy of 13, 34n.27, 77, 94, 205 British years of 112 Hitler on 164, 206 “insidious appeal of ” 10, 128 “never pays” 48 opponents of 127 Taylor on reasons for condemning 352 appeasers 15, 365 Arab declarations of exterminating Israel, toleration of 121 hostility, British response to seizure of Suez Company invoking 123 pro–Arab biases of British Foreign Office 9, 121 Arab good will 120 Arabian campaign 241n.120 Arab independence 118 Arab League 122 Arab Legion 114n.6 Arab nationalism 10, 117, 131, 133 Arabs 9, 118–19, 120, 121, 123 Arab states 118, 119–20, 122, 124, 131–2 Arab world 9, 118, 121n.20, 130, 131, 134 ARAMCO 130 Aristotle 21, 25, 68 armaments/arms/weapons 4, 37, 76, 97, 107, 121, 130, 132, 133, 134, 144n.27, 155, 157, 164, 166, 170, 182, 185, 254, 257, 258n.212, 270, 277, 310 armistice Korean 127 Mudania 246 Western 283n.360 Aron, Raymond 24n.9 Ashton–Gwatkin, Frank T. (co-editor) see Toynbee, Arnold J.: The World in March 1939 Asia 7, 72, 73, 75, 78, 127, 133, 135, 213, 216, 268, 321

377

Asia Minor 223n.54, 250n.159, 251n.166 Asquith Government 9, 116 assassination 129, 134, 191n.283, 226n.62, 259 Atatu¨rk, Kemal 220, 227n.62 Athenaeus 325 Athenians vii Athens 68, 82, 214 Atlantic Community 69 Atlantic meeting 181n.226 Atlantic Ocean 12, 107, 217, 296n.8, 303, 304, 305, 318, 322n.81 Atlee, Clement 113n.2 attachment 6, 51, 52, 54, 58–9, 61, 66, 330 Augustan Peace 327 Auslandsdeutschtum 158–9 Auslands–Organisation (AO) 158–9 Australia 5, 42, 114n.7 Austria 26, 74, 89, 95–6, 110, 111, 137, 138, 154, 157, 159, 161, 168–9, 172, 173n.188, 174, 177–8, 183, 184, 187, 197, 198, 201–2, 203, 209, 211nn.13–14, 212, 215n.22, 217, 219n.33, 220, 226n.61, 228, 229n.70, 230, 233, 235, 237, 239, 242, 252, 254, 257–9, 260, 264, 268–9, 275, 282, 287, 294, 301, 309n.5, 310, 315n.37, 321, 322, 323, 348 see also Habsburgs Austria–German Pact 264 Austria–Hungary 138, 168, 173n.188, 177, 179, 197, 210, 212n.18, 218, 223, 228, 244, 250, 251–2, 253, 323 Austrian Empire 99, 172, 176, 210, 212n.18, 231n.82, 244, 308, 310, 357–8 Austrian–Germans 143, 177 Austrian independence 202, 258 Austrian mission 142, 358 Austrian putsch 182 Austrian Republic 173, 252, 268 Austrian Succession War 333 Austria/Prussia–Denmark war 315n.37 Austria–Russia–Germany alliance 323 Austro–Prussian, Treaty of Prague 173n.188 authoritarianism 8, 12, 82, 84, 203, 226n.62, 282, 297, 300, 306 Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic 175, 176n.195 avoidance of war xi, 77, 94, 109n.22 Axis Powers ix, 11–12, 15, 86n.2, 101, 104, 120, 186, 187, 196n.313, 204, 207, 267, 273–4, 277, 281, 284, 285, 297, 299, 300–3, 306–7, 313 Azores 304n.48, 305 Aztec 304

378

INDE X

B Baden 173n.188 Baghdad–Berlin Railway 176 Baghdad Pact 130, 131 Bahrein 131 Bain, William xiiin.3, xvii balance of power ix, 2, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 54, 66, 70, 72, 74, 104, 105, 106, 107–8, 112–13, 128–30, 133, 170, 181, 228, 234, 239–40, 241–2, 245, 263, 268, 269, 270, 309, 322, 346, 348, 351, 353, 359 Baldwin, Stanley 183, 205n.379 Balfour Declaration 118–19 Balkan Christendom 223 Balkan Conference 256 Balkan Entente 237–8, 239, 250, 256–7, 265, 267, 270, 285 Balkan federation 218, 250, 256 Balkanization 135, 241, 289 Balkan League 238 Balkan nationalism 74 Balkan Pact 231, 256, 259, 260, 267 Balkan politics 11, 250, 254 Balkan Powers 254, 256 Balkans 95, 99, 110, 178, 210, 216, 218, 224, 225, 227, 240, 250, 252, 254n.183, 255, 256–7, 259, 267, 268, 284, 303 Balkan vortex 250 Balkan Wars 210–11, 213, 230n.79, 252 Baltic ascendancy 211n.10 Baltic Barons 173 Baltic Entente 238 Baltic peoples 216, 221 Baltic Power 315 Baltic region 102, 171, 216–17, 224, 234, 235, 240, 247–9, 259, 260, 263, 308n.4, 315, 318 Baltic Republics 170, 239 Baltic Sea 102, 210 Baltic States 102, 131, 169, 221, 230, 235, 239, 243, 248, 250, 260, 318 Balticum 166n.155, 170, 177 Bangkok 131 barbarian invasions 143–5, 349 barbarians 146–7, 147n.39, 211nn.8–10, 224 barbarian tradition 145 barbarian world 99n.1 Barcelona 159, 295, 303 Barker, Elizabeth 218n.30, 250n.161 Barker, Sir Ernest 41, 153n.71 Barraclough, Geoffrey History in a Changing World 17n.33, 18, 47n.16, 345–7 The Mediaeval Empire: Idea and Reality 138n.8

The Origins of Modern Germany 171n.180 Wight on 47, 171n.181, 345–7 Barrès, Philippe 153n.72 bashy-bozuks 241n.119 Basque Provinces 298, 300 battlefields viii, 13, 51, 62, 274, 310 Battle of Blenheim 100n.3 Battle of Kosovo 212n.16 Battle of Lutter 308n.4 Battle of Marignano 308n.4, 310n.7 Battle of Mohács 212n.18 Battle of Tannenberg 210n.7 Battle of Warsaw 237 Battle of White Mountain 211n.14, 224–5, 294 battles ancient German eagerness for 146 of First World War 166n.155 in and out of Europe 78 substitute of creeping paralysis 241n.120 words as 152 Bavaria 173n.188 Baynes, N. H. 17, 325 Byzantium 156n.87, 212n.17, 216n.23 National Socialism before 1933 152n.65, 154n.74, 156n.87, 164n.136 Speeches of Adolf Hitler 137nn.2–3, 138n.4, 139nn.12–13, 142n.25, 147n.37, 148n.41, 150n.53, 150n.55, 153n.70, 153n.72, 154nn.75–8, 156nn.86–7, 157n.88, 158n.96, 158nn.98–9, 166n.155, 173n.189, 178n.205, 179n.215, 186n.258, 190n.281, 195n.308, 197n.322, 197n.324, 198n.328, 198n.333, 202n.354, 206n.380, 207n.381, 229n.71, 232n.85, 235n.102, 291n.408, 293n.418 Bay of Valona 252 Beaverbrook Press 112n.1 Beck, Józef 226n.62, 263n.241, 266, 272, 276, 278, 282 Beck, Ludwig 162 Beeley, Harold 121 Beirut 131 Belgian Congo 320–1, 322n.81 Belgian frontiers 13, 77n.19, 170, 312 Belgian independence 333 Belgium 12, 71, 84n.32, 87n.4, 88n.5, 89, 91n.11, 105, 109, 173n.188, 216, 240n.116, 245n.132, 249, 252, 308, 309n.6, 310–14, 316–17, 319–22 Belgrade 104, 214, 285, 292 Belisarius 147n.38 Bell, Coral xv–xvi, xvin.20, xvii Belloc, Hilaire 52, 63

INDE X Beloff, Max 14, 179n.212, 193nn.296– 7, 258n.209, 260n.222, 260n.226, 261nn.231–2, 274n.306, 274n.308 Belvedere Award 286 Belvedere Palace 280 Belvedere settlement 282 Benes, E. 177n.202, 236, 237n.111, 264, 265, 270, 275–7, 278n.330, 281, 282, 288 Ben-Gurion, David 119n.15, 122 Berlin 89n.6, 91, 107, 108, 149, 160, 167, 171, 177, 186, 189n.276, 198, 212, 214, 220, 234n.95, 239, 273, 280n.341, 282, 285n.372, 286n.375, 289–90, 292, 293n.415, 303 Berlin–Baghdad Railway 176 Berlin Congress 26 Berlin General Act 322n.81 Berlin, Treaty of 212nn.15–16, 213n.19, 215, 244n.129 Berlin Wall 105 Bessarabia 102, 169, 175, 214, 218, 227, 240, 243, 244, 261n.232, 274 Bevan, Aneurin 116n.9 Bevin, Ernest 78, 87, 94, 104, 113, 120–1, 127 Bismarck, Otto von 2, 16, 85, 95–6, 110–11, 126, 138, 141, 143, 146, 168, 177, 181, 199, 294, 351, 353, 354, 355–6, 360 blackmail 159 Black Sea 178n.209, 210, 216, 218, 221, 240, 243–6, 286 Black Sea Powers 244, 268 Black Sea Straits 244–6, 267–8, 269, 286 Black Sea Straits Convention 246 Bled Agreement 270, 271n.287 Bloch, Marc 18–19, 53, 62, 64 The Historian’s Craft 18n.37, 53n.6, 56n.1, 58, 64n.23, 342–4 L’Étrange Défaite: Témoignage écrit en 1940 19n.40 Blomberg directive 184n.249, 196, 202n.355, 203, 204, 205n.375, 317 Blomberg, Werner von 159n.105, 161, 204 Boer War 105, 113 Bohemia 10, 137, 138, 168, 169, 174, 207, 211n.14, 214, 217, 223–4, 232, 233n.90, 279, 281, 287, 289, 290n.402, 292, 293–4, 311n.20, 320 “Bohemian corporal” 221 Bohemian independence 211n.14, 224, 293–4 Bolshevik aggression 235 Bolshevik intervention 354 Bolshevik Power 277 Bolshevik regime 261n.232 Bolshevik Russia 97, 242–3, 247

379

Bolsheviks 81, 148, 167, 188, 237, 243, 277, 283n.360, 293n.418 Bolshevism 148, 165, 191, 203, 293, 301 see also anti–Bolshevism Bonaparte, Napoleon see Napoleon Bonar Law 220n.40 Bonjour, Edgar 310n.8 Bordeaux 302 Borgia, Cesare 163, 190 Boris III, King 226n.62, 257 Borkenau, Franz 148n.41, 149n.45, 166n.156, 200n.345, 220n.39, 230n.75, 231n.32, 269n.276 Borneo 320n.68 Bosnia 214, 222 Boswell, James 76 Bourbon aggrandizement 178 Bourbon dynasty 295n.3 Bourbon-Parma, Prince of 334 bourgeois 33, 153n.72, 164, 165, 226, 333 bourgeoisie Austrian 220 German 174, 219 “bourgeois nationalism” 38n.35 Bouvet Island 320n.70 Brailsford, H. N. 218n.30, 225n.59 Brandenburg 234n.96 Brand, Lord 77, 94 Bratislava 102, 214, 288 Braudel, F. 64 Brazil 297n.9, 304, 305n.50 Brest–Litovsk 188n.273, 237 Brest–Litovsk settlement 169 Brest–Litovsk, Treaty of 167, 213n.21, 244n.129, 283, 334 Brest, Synod of 221n.48 Britain after Second World War 100, 104, 106, 109–11, 113 concept of 68–70 in concept of Europe 8, 77, 78–9 and Eastern Europe 11, 239–40, 244–7, 249, 251, 252n.171, 253n.177, 257, 262, 263, 267–8, 274–5, 278, 279n.334, 280 in historical background to united Europe 86–7, 86n.2, 88, 89n.6, 91–4, 95–6 in historical literature reviews 6, 335, 337, 348, 351–2 and Hitler’s foreign policy 160, 167, 170, 192, 196–8, 200–7 in memoirs of Eden 129, 130, 131, 132–3 and Spain and Portugal 12, 296, 299, 301, 305–7

380

INDE X

Britain (Continued) and Switzerland, Low Countries, Scandinavia 12, 13, 311, 312, 313, 314n.36, 315n.37, 317, 318–19, 320, 322 see also United Kingdom Britain–Eastern Europe alliance 197 Britain–France alliance 87 Britain–Japan alliance 78 Britain–Portugal alliance 11–12, 299, 303–6, 307 Britannocentric system of world order 304 British civil service viin.5 British colonialism 1, 6, 122, 204, 205, 306n.59, 315n.37 British Committee on the Theory of International Politics xiii, xiv, xvii British Commonwealth 9, 58, 78, 86n.2, 316, 331n.* British Constitution 24 British convention with Germany 305 British Dominion status 314 British–Dutch alliance 331 British Empire 76, 86n.2, 113n.4, 131, 201, 253n.174, 290n.402, 299n.18, 316, 334 British flag 296 British forces 120n.18, 132 British Foreign Office 274 British–Franco–Italo rivalry 301 British governing class 121 British government 93, 182, 322 British historians 13, 47n.18, 50, 346, 363 British hostility 205 British imperialism 113n.3 British interests 114n.7, 117n.12, 122–3, 132, 204, 312 British interventions 91, 117n.11, 120n.18, 275 British Isles 97, 99 British/Italian–German alliance 196, 197–8 British mandates 119n.15, 238n.112, 306, 322n.81 British naval alliance with Japan 78 British neutrality 203 British opinion 78, 82, 94, 154, 197, 275n.311, 296n.8 British Opposition 206 British Parliament 58n.7 British people 39, 93n.17, 114, 134 British policy aberration in history of 13, 77, 94, 113, 119 appeasement policy 13, 34n.27, 77, 94, 205 becoming subservient to Russian alliance 359 conflict with France 203 and Eastern European policies 225 in Middle East 9, 15–16, 112–24, 131–2

overseas empires 12, 322 in relation to Portugal 305 Toynbee on 326 British power 135 British protectorate 210n.5 British statemanship 116 British territories 320, 322n.81 Bronowski, Jacob, The Western Intellectual Tradition 18, 339–41 Brussels 85 Brussels, Treaty of 8, 87, 92, 104n.12, 109n.23 Brussels Treaty Organization 109n.23 Brussels Western Union 90 Brutus 10, 127n.4, 135 Bryce, James 215n.22 Buchan, John 77, 94 Bucharest 214, 272, 284–5 Bucharest, Treaty of 212n.16, 243, 244n.129 Buckingham Palace 131 Budapest 174, 214, 286n.376, 290, 293 buffer states 234, 252, 253, 268, 299, 309n.5, 310, 318 independence 268, 309, 310n.13 Buganda 58 Bukovina–Transylvania railway 265, 274 Bulganin 92 Bulgaria 101–2, 104, 105, 175, 209n.3, 210n.4, 212–13, 213nn.19–20, 214, 215, 222, 225, 226n.62, 227, 227n.67, 230–1, 233n.91, 239, 240, 244, 250, 254, 255n.188, 256–7, 259, 261, 267, 270, 284, 285, 290 Bulgaria–Italy entente 255n.188 Bulgarian alliance 239 Bulgarian atrocities 114 Bulgarian Empire 211n.11 Bulgarian independence 213n.19 Bulgarian revisionism 230, 239, 250, 256 Bulgarians 218, 233n.92 Bulgarian Treaty 228n.69 Bulgaria–Yugoslavia pact of friendship 267 Bulgaria–Yugoslavia rapprochement 257 Bulgars 222, 223n.53, 233n.92 Bull, Hedley ixn.13, xiin.2, xiii, xiv, xv, xviii, 31n.20, 75n.14, 77n.17, 105n.15 Bullock, Alan 120, 353 bunker 167 Burckhardt, Jacob 29, 60n.11, 144, 364 bureaucrats 86, 109 Burgenland 230, 251n.19 Burgundian inheritance 311 Burgundian Power 310n.7, 311n.20 Burgundian state 310 Burgundy 74, 308n.4, 310n.7 Burke, Edmund viii, 7, 70, 71n.4, 83, 339, 340

INDE X Burton, Montague 28 Butler, Nicholas Murray 23n.7 Butler, Rohan 277 Butterfield, Herbert 14, 18, 36, 55, 58, 66, 329, 341, 343, 352, 363, 365 Christianity and History 359 contribution to British Committee on the Theory of International Politics xiii Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics viin.2, xivnn.10–11, xvn.13, 2n.4, 24n.9, 47n.18, 71n.5 History and Human Relations 359–60 Man on His Past 14n.22 Napoleon 190n.280 The Peace Tactics of Napoleon, 1806–1808 186n.256 Reflections on the Predicament of Our Time 143n.26 The Statecraft of Machiavelli 163n.134 The Study of Modern History: an Inaugural Lecture 358n.3 The Teaching of English History 36n.32 The Whig Interpretation of History 14, 359 Byrnes, James F. 104 Byzantine Empire 211n.11, 212n.17, 216n.23, 223n.54 Byzantine Italy 222 Byzantine Orthodox Christendom 223n.54 Byzantine Power 212n.18 Byzantine Slavs 267 Byzantine studies 17 Byzantinium 221, 278

C Caesar Augustus 54 Caesarism 144 Cairo 132, 134 Calcutta 81 Calvinism 32, 79–80, 221n.48 capitalism 116, 180, 188 capitalists 170 Carlyle, Thomas 51, 54, 61, 66, 80, 336, 357 Carpathians 101–2, 172, 177, 210, 216–17, 218, 236, 239, 242, 248–9, 269, 273, 280, 283, 288, 290, 324 Carpathian Ukraine 291n.407 Carpathian watershed 172n.184, 218 Carpatho–Ruthenia 102, 174, 218–19, 222, 236 Carpatho–Ukraine 283, 284, 288, 289n.392, 291nn.407–8 Carpatho–Ukraine independence 288 Carr, E.H. 23, 35, 44, 45n.8, 47, 148n.41 Caspian Sea 178n.209

381

Catalonia 298, 300 Catherine the Great 175 Catholic Church vii, viin.3, 39n.38, 82, 97, 143, 221n.48 Catholicism 11–12, 141, 221–2, 293, 296–7, 300–1, 306, 329 Catholicization 224 Catholic League 308n.4 Catholic mission 11, 172, 296 Catholic Poland 213 Catholics 241n.119 causes antecedent 342, 353 of disorder, misery, and evil 35 of international conflict 220 of Third World War 4, 25 of war ix, 80, 128, 354 Cavour, Camillo Benso, Count of 229, 348–9, 356, 360 Cecil, Lady Gwendolen 77n.18, 94n.18 Cecil, Lord Robert 34, 366 Celebes 320n.68 Celsus 325 Central America 304 cession 169, 204, 247n.142, 252n.171, 275, 282, 309n.5 Chamberlain, H. S. 14, 171 Chamberlain, Joseph 334 Chamberlain, Neville 34n.27, 77–8, 94, 119, 155n.81, 162, 163, 205n.379, 206, 232n.86, 271n.290, 275, 360 Charlemagne 85, 171 Charles I, King 33n.23, 331, 332 Charles of Anjou 278n.333 Charles V, Emperor 146, 331 Chiaruzzi, Michele xvi, 123n.23 China 42–3, 69, 75, 79, 80, 81, 106, 129, 132, 172n.185, 207, 305n.50, 321, 346 see also Indo–China War China Seas 305 Chinese affairs 29 Chinese–American conflict 129 Chinese Civil War 334 Chinese government 42 Chinese interests 127 Chinese threat to Russia 96, 110 Christendom viii, 7, 53, 64, 70, 79, 171, 213n.21, 216, 223, 223n.54, 224 see also Eastern Christendom; Western Christendom Christian Empire 156n.87 Christian Europe 70, 71, 82, 97, 146 Christianity viii, 7, 8, 17, 79, 82, 97, 146, 170–1, 211n.12, 216, 297, 329, 359, 364

382

INDE X

Christian revelation 8 Christian Social Party 166n.156 Christian world 76 Churchill, Winston vi, 28, 33, 38n.35, 47, 86, 93, 107, 108, 113, 114, 117, 119, 125–7, 131n.10, 133, 152n.62, 165n.153, 178n.209, 179n.209, 181, 201n.348, 206n.381, 274, 336 The Aftermath 169n.169, 237n.110 The Second World War 33n.24, 126n.2, 159n.103, 183n.244, 263n.242, 278n.330, 296n.8 Ciano, G. 101, 152, 185n.253, 186, 187n.267, 187nn.262–3, 194n.305, 195–6, 198n.332, 199n.338, 199n.340, 200n.345, 202–3, 204n.368, 206n.383, 207n.384, 207n.386, 273n.300, 276, 280, 284, 285, 286, 292n.411, 293n.416, 295, 296, 297–8, 300, 301nn.30–1, 302n.34, 302n.37, 303, 307n.60, 314n.32, 317n.55, 318n.61 Cicero viiin.8, x, 25, 68 Cimbrian War 147n.39 Civilians 27 civilization viii, 16, 25, 31, 53, 55, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 75n.13, 143, 144n.27, 144n.29, 146, 166, 216, 226, 304, 322, 324–5, 327, 328, 329–30, 340, 343, 346 see also European civilization; Western civilization civil war Austrian 258 in China 334 Eden’s horror of 136 European 120 in France 184, 196 Guerrilla warfare rising into 240 Russia torn by 105, 168 see also Spanish Civil War Clark, Colin 228n.68 Clark, R. T. 141n.21, 149n.44, 150n.49 Clark, Sir George Norman 57n.5 Clausewitz, Carl von 18n.39 Clemenceau, G. 195 Clement IV, Pope 278n.333 Clerc Du Tremblay, François Le 121n.20 Cliveden set 77, 94 coal and steel industry 8, 89, 90, 92, 109 Codreanu (Zilinsky) 220–1 coercion 128, 159 Cold War 3, 23, 92, 93, 326 collective action 274 collective apprehension of unique significance 39 collective economic sanctions 262 collective guarantee of Great Powers 311

collective guilt 360 collective independence 237–8 collective pacts 203 collective principle 16 collective security 12, 106n.16, 113, 128, 276, 309, 315, 316 collectivity of German political writers 365 Collingwood, R. G. 17, 43, 52, 62, 343, 349–50 An Autobiography 43n.2, 43n.4 The Idea of History 336n.*, 337–8 colonialism anti–colonialism 80, 134 British 1, 6, 122, 204, 205, 306n.59, 315n.37 and Common Market 83 Eden’s refutation of 133 France dependent on colonial troops 195 German 321–2 Hitler putting stop to 178 Netherlands 315n.37 and overseas empires 319–22 Portuguese 305–6 Small Powers 12, 320–1 colonialization 289 colonial possessions 306, 319, 319n.67, 320n.70 Colonial Studies 22, 26 colonies 21, 78, 83, 94, 174, 180, 197n.318, 204, 205, 289, 302, 305, 320n.73, 321, 322 colonists 174–5, 217, 223, 304, 314n.34, 319n.67 Cominform 104 Comitadji 241 committee 241 Common Market 8, 69, 70, 83, 84, 85, 86, 92, 95, 108 Commonwealth–American alliance 123 Communism 8, 32, 35, 81, 87, 100, 129–30, 132, 144, 148, 352 see also anti–Communism Communist–Nazi alliance 149 Communist parties 82, 107, 148 Communist Party of the Soviet Union 34n.27, 291n.407 Communists 39n.38, 130, 147n.39, 261n.231 concealed theory 6, 54, 65 concentration camps 100 Concert of Europe 7, 71, 353 Concert of the Powers 238, 258 Confederation of the Rhine 169, 215 Confessional Wars viii Congo Basin Treaties 306n.59, 322 “Congress” kingdom of Poland 211n.13 Congress of Vienna see Vienna, Congress of Constantinople 245 Constantinople, Treaty of 213n.20 constitutional government 32–3, 226–7

INDE X constitutional history and civilization 52 having inherent architecture 65 Constitutional History (study of ) 1, 6, 27, 36, 361 constitutionalism 279n.334, 290n.402, 319n.67 constitutional monarchy 226, 227n.62, 308n.3 constitutional revolution 281 contemporary history see history: contemporary Convention of 1866 132 Corfu 253, 255, 334 Cossacks 213n.21 Coulondre, Robert 208n.391, 282, 365, 366 Counter–Reformation 13, 32, 221n.48, 294, 340 counter–revolutionary propaganda 227 Courland 211n.10 Cracow 210n.5, 211n.13, 289 creed of historians 50, 58–9 of Hitler 163 nationalist 216 Nazi 180, 200 of Soviet Russia 249 universal 81 Cremona, Paul 197n.325 Crimean War 314n.36, 333, 354 Croatia 174, 212n.16, 212n.18, 214, 220, 222, 255, 292 Croats 209n.2, 218, 222, 223n.53, 224n.56, 225, 233n.91, 259n.220, 271, 284 Croce, Benedetto 47, 49, 337–8 Cromwell, Oliver ix, 80, 81, 150, 153n.71, 156, 190, 355 Crusades 8, 67, 79, 171, 173, 212n.17 Crutwell, C. R. M. F. 253n.177, 311n.21, 312n.22, 314nn.35–36, 317n.52 Csáky, I. 138, 188, 232n.86, 280n.341, 280n.344, 286, 287 Cuba 305n.49 Cuba Crisis 2 Curaçao 319, 320n.68 Curtis, Lionel 77, 94 Curzon Line 102, 103, 214, 218, 221, 243, 250 Cyprus 251 Czech affair 207 Czech conflicts 292 Czech government 289–90 Czech Lands 223–4, 279, 281–2 Czech literary tradition 224 Czech nationalism 293 Czechoslovak crises 294n.420 Czechoslovak crisis 271, 273 Czechoslovak foreign policy 270 Czechoslovak fortifications 161

383

Czechoslovak–France alliance 249 Czechoslovak–Franco alliance 271 Czechoslovak–Franco–Soviet alliance 274 Czechoslovak–Franco treaties 249, 276 Czechoslovak frontiers 275 Czechoslovak general election 264 Czechoslovak–German frontiers 170 Czechoslovak–German protocol 279 Czechoslovak–German treaty 264 Czechoslovak–German vortex 265–6 Czechoslovak Government 277, 280, 281 Czechoslovak–Hungarian frontiers 276 Czechoslovak–Hungarian war 280 Czechoslovak–Hungaro conflict 273 Czechoslovak–Hungaro frontier 280 Czecho–Slovakia 229n.71, 281, 289 Czechoslovakia 11, 38, 78, 91, 94, 102, 103, 107, 154, 159, 161–2, 165, 170, 174, 177, 184, 187–90, 196, 203, 204n.369, 206–7, 209, 211, 218, 219, 226, 227–8, 230, 232nn.85–86, 233nn.90–2, 235–6, 240, 241, 242, 245n.132, 248, 250, 257, 259–61, 263, 264–6, 269–70, 295, 302, 321 first partition of 175n.195, 183, 218n.31, 226n.62, 232n.86, 233n.91, 271–81, 293 from Munich and Vienna 281–4 second partition of 287–94 Czechoslovak independence 38n.35, 293n.418 and union 211n.14 Czechoslovak legislation 271 Czechoslovak mobilization 182n.229 Czechoslovak Parliament 283n.359 Czechoslovak plan of defence 275 Czechoslovak policy 235, 257 Czechoslovak–Polish minorities treaty 275 Czechoslovak provocation 273 Czechoslovak question 271 Czechoslovak Republic 288 Czechoslovak–Rumanian alliance 265 Czechoslovak–Russian alliance 265, 275 Czechoslovak–Russian entente 265 Czechoslovak sovereignty 233 Czechoslovak–Soviet Pact 265 Czechoslovak State 242, 264, 288 Czech populations 175n.195, 209n.2, 217, 218n.31, 226n.61, 227n.67, 233nn.91–2, 279, 280n.343 Czech provinces 269 Czech question 187, 301 Czechs 187, 189, 206, 216, 217, 223n.53, 224, 232n.85, 248, 276, 277, 288, 289, 292n.410, 293n.418, 294, 331 Czech salient 287 Czech state 232, 281n.347, 282n.356

384

INDE X

D Daladier, É. 162, 163 Dalberg-Acton, J. E. E. 45n.9 Dalmatia 222 Dalmatian coast 222, 252, 253 Danish Crown 333 Danish Greenland 320 Danish–Norwegian Kingdom 318n.60 Danish–Norwegian union 319n.67 Danish overseas possessions 319n.67 d’Annunzio 254 Dante viiin.8, 68 Danube region 95, 101–2, 110, 176, 178, 210, 216–18, 220, 228, 236, 239–40, 244–5, 248, 249, 250, 257, 258, 259, 264, 269, 284–5, 286–7 Danubian customs preference plan 257 Danubian politics 11, 254 Danubian Powers 243–4, 245 Danubian states 257 Danubian trade 228 Danzig 102, 158n.99, 159, 169, 173n.188, 173n.190, 180, 207n.385, 209n.3, 210n.5, 214, 219–20, 233, 234, 234n.94, 254, 260, 282, 283n.356, 289 Davies, Joseph E. 270n.284 Davis, H. W. C. 63 Dawson, Geoffrey 77, 94 Declaration of Establishment of State of Israel 119n.15 declaration of international principle 71 Declaration of the Rights of Man 80 declaration of war 115, 189n.275, 240 Declaration relating to Albania 253n.174 declarations of independence 12, 211n.13, 288, 306 declarations of neutrality 12, 314n.36, 317 Deedes, Wyndham 364 Definitive Statute of the Danube 245 de Gaulle, Charles 6, 7, 8, 9, 16, 83, 84, 85, 86, 93, 95–6, 97, 108, 109, 110–11 Degrelle 313, 318n.58 de Maistre, Joseph 141n.19 De Mendelssohn, Peter 185n.253, 202n.356, 317n.55 democracy 8, 35, 38n.34, 51, 58, 68, 81–2, 84, 86, 97, 98, 108–9, 135, 141, 153, 191n.283, 226n.62, 265, 279n.334 Denmark 12, 101, 211n.9, 245n.132, 308nn.2–4, 311, 314–15, 317–18, 319 Denmark–Prussia/Austria war 315n.37 despotism 32, 73, 75, 151n.58, 337 destiny 19, 39–40, 49, 54, 123n.25, 147, 176, 178, 190, 194, 227, 236, 282n.355, 286, 303n.47, 329

determinism 15–16, 358 determinist assertions 16, 358 determinist school of thought 336 determinists 16, 327, 329 Deutsch–Bo¨hmen 231n.81 Deutsche–amerikanische Volksbund 159 Deutsche Bund 159 Deutscher, Isaac 81n.28 Deutschtum 297 Dien Bien Phu 125 Dilthey, Wilhelm 48–9 diplomacy Bismarck’s 95, 110 in Eden’s memoirs 127–9, 131 era of mass 334 habitual behaviour crystallized in 31 Hitler’s 186, 188 of postwar years in Europe 87 preoccupations of 2 of reassurance 356 secret 259n.221 tensions and limitations of 13, 351 true function of 127 Diplomatic History (study of ) 26, 27–8, 29 diplomatic revolution 193, 260, 261 disarmament 12, 89, 315, 334 Disarmament Conference 182, 186n.258 Disraeli, Benjamin 9, 113–14, 116, 172n.185, 355 Dnieper 213n.21 Dobrudja 101–2, 214 Doenitz, Karl 201, 318n.60 Dolci, Danilo 98n.23 Dollfuss, Engelbert 157, 198, 226n.62, 258, 271 dominant Power 99, 138, 175, 212n.16, 213n.19, 237, 240, 244, 247, 254, 268, 348 Don 178, 283 Dorpat, Treaty of 211n.9, 239n.115 du Bellay, Joachim 73–4 Duce of Fascism 222n.50 Dulles, J. F. 38n.35, 91, 133 Dunkirk, Treaty of 87 Dushan, Stephen 212n.16 Dutch air base 12, 317 Dutch–British alliance 331 Dutch, Europe as democracy of 68 Dutch neutrality 317 Dutch people 134 Dutch policy 316, 320 Dutch Revolt 340 Dutch rule 311 Dutch war of independence 78, 140 dynasticism 13, 229

INDE X dynastic unions 210n.7, 299, 310 dynasties 138, 172, 181, 212n.18, 278, 295n.3, 311n.20

E Earle, Edward Mead 176n.199 East Africa 305n.50, 306, 320n.69 Eastern Christendom 212nn.15–17, 213n.19, 221, 223, 289 Eastern Europe 1, 7, 11, 12–13, 32, 138, 142, 159, 323, 334, 357–8, 363 after Second World War 102–3, 104–5, 107, 108 Anschluss 268–71 ascendancy of France 247–9 ascendancy of Germany 170–6, 259–68 ascendancy of Italy 249–59 delimitation of, against Soviet Russia 242–7 desire for alliance 240 first partition of Czechoslovakia 271–81 and Hitler’s foreign policy 167, 168, 169, 170, 179, 188, 189–90, 195, 196–7 international politics of 236–42 map of 214 from Munich and Vienna to Prague 281–7 national conflicts 215–22 second partition of Czechoslovakia 287–94 situation in March 1939209–14 social conflicts 222–8 Versailles Settlement 228–36 Eastern European diplomacy 243, 246, 247n.142, 248–9, 254, 266 Eastern European empire 241 Eastern European pact 259 Eastern European politics 237, 240, 242, 291 Eastern European Powers 241, 256n.196, 285 Eastern Europeans 11, 13, 165 Eastern European states/countries 173, 176, 209n.2, 210, 223, 225, 226, 233n.91, 237, 238–9, 242, 244, 246–7, 261, 262, 267, 272, 293, 308n.2 Eastern Question 323 East Galicia 219, 236, 243 East Indies 320 “East of Suez” 114n.7 Ebro 303 Eden, Sir Anthony 78, 92, 95, 108, 114, 115n.8, 116n.9, 120, 123, 201n.348, 205n.379, 206n.381 memoirs 6–7, 9–10, 91n.12, 93nn.16–17, 122n.22, 125–36 Edward III 362 Edward VII 334 Egypt 10, 21, 46, 119n.13, 122, 123, 130–2, 134–5, 325

385

Egyptian–Anglo agreements 125 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 113, 117n.11, 129, 130 élan vital 16 Elbe 78, 166n.155, 171, 245n.132 Elizabeth II, Queen 2 éminence grise 121 encirclement 195, 207, 235, 237, 240, 259, 260–1, 265, 269, 282, 284, 292, 313, 318 England 12, 35, 36, 51, 61, 70, 74, 114, 116, 130, 153n.73, 160n.108, 163, 165, 184, 187, 196n.317, 196nn.313–14, 197, 197n.318, 198n.332, 200–4, 205, 206, 207, 295, 296n.4, 299, 307, 308n.4, 310n.7, 317, 325, 336, 339, 347, 351, 362 “English School” xiii, 19 Enlightenment 82, 341 entente cordiale d’acier 89 Erasmus, Desiderius 53, 64, 68 espionage 38n.35, 39n.38, 158, 159 Estonia 171, 173, 175n.195, 209n.3, 211, 214, 225, 226n.62, 227n.67, 229n.71, 233n.91, 239, 248, 260 Estonian independence 211n.9, 248 Estonian–Latvian Pact 261 Estonians 8, 103, 223n.53 Ethiopia 184, 322n.81 Ethiopian–Italian War 201, 261n.235, 264, 266, 306n.58, 312, 313, 316, 321 Étienne de Tournai viiin.8 Europe absence of peace settlement 9, 101, 103–5, 111 after Second World War 8–9, 99–111 concept of 7–8, 68–84 defining 68 preoccupation organizing separate halves of (1950–1960) 108–11 preoccupation with new balance of power in (1945–1950) 107–8 see also united Europe European–Anglo relations 133 European balance of power 13, 107–8, 346, 351 European civilization ambiguity in 72–84 France as mother of 98 German aloofness from 145 global extension 144 libertarian and egalitarian ideal in 97 as by–product of Byzantine Empire’s will to survive 216n.23 question over existence 346 and Ukraine and Russia 222n.51 “universalist claims” of 8 European Coal and Steel Community 8, 90, 92, 109

386

INDE X

European Commission 86, 108, 244–5, 287 European Commission of the Danube 245, 286–7 European Commonwealth 70 European Communities 84n.32 European Community 32, 95, 96 European conscience 341 European crises 242, 293, 294 European cultural tradition x, 25 European Defence Community (EDC) 8, 91–2, 93, 95, 127 European demographic change 172 European Economic Community 6, 9, 84n.33, 85, 88, 92, 108, 109, 111 European empires 321 European federation 90 European forces 184 European frontier 213, 228 European hegemony 184, 304, 362 European history 6, 7–8, 47n.17, 74, 80, 97, 103, 140, 188, 346, 357, 363 European idea 85, 346 European inheritance 8, 81, 346 European integration vi, 6, 8, 16, 82–3, 92 Europeanisation 88 “Europeanising” 101 European nationalism 346 European neutral states 12 European peninsula 216 European political geography 309 European political literature 73 European politics 145, 179, 250–1 European powers 77, 93–4, 106, 111, 138, 172n.187, 194, 254, 310n.7 European pre-eminence 73 European religion 82 Europeans vii, viii, 7, 73, 75, 82, 93, 133 European situation 184, 185, 263n.241 European states 99, 304 European state-system 9, 105–6, 108, 111 European unification 96, 100, 110 European Union viin.3, 70, 92, 95, 96–7, 109, 111 see also Western European Union (WEU) European unity 1, 110, 340 European wars 7, 72, 254, 271n.290, 314, 315n.37, 354 evil 35, 164, 166 expansion 97, 131, 160, 177, 191, 193, 210, 216, 219, 232–3, 243, 245, 249–50, 254, 255, 285, 289, 295, 296, 304, 305, 319, 320, 323 see also German expansion

F Fabricius 82 Faisal, King 118, 131

Falangist innovations 298 Falangist programme 296, 297 Falangist propaganda 297n.9, 300 Falangists 296, 298, 301 fanaticism 81, 142, 163, 167, 186, 188, 204, 225, 241n.119 Farouk, King 46n.12, 134 Fascism 35, 143, 145, 145n.31, 147, 200, 253 Fascist Era 63 Fascist Governments 252, 253, 254, 303 Fascist movements 145n.31, 226n.62 Fascist oligarchies 33 Fascist propaganda 167 Fascist régime 148, 282 Fascist revolutionary policy 255 Fascist revolutions 140n.16, 147–8, 295–6 Fascists 97, 140, 148, 313 Fascist states 198, 258, 302 Fascist system 281 fate 39, 83, 154, 192, 271, 275, 289, 290, 304, 327, 329, 361 fear 8, 12, 15, 35, 39, 85, 87, 91, 107, 123, 203, 206n.380, 222, 240, 248, 260, 265, 272, 280, 283, 284n.361, 290, 306, 315 Febvre, Lucien 53, 64, 65, 342, 343–4 federation potential European 90, 93 question around European 346 republican 299 Feis, Herbert 298n.16, 302n.33, 302n.36 Festival of Britain 117n.12 Festival of the Federation 229 feudal relationships 361 feudal suzerainty 310n.13 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 146n.34 Figgis, John Neville 45n.9 Finland 102, 104, 169, 173, 189n.275, 209n.3, 210, 211, 215, 224, 225, 226, 227n.67, 229n.71, 230, 233n.91, 239, 247, 248, 264, 308n.2, 315, 316n.44 Finnish independence 211n.8, 248 Finns 211n.8, 216, 223n.53, 225 First World War vi, vii, viii, 3, 9, 10, 11, 35, 71–2, 75, 77, 86, 94, 108, 117, 119n.17, 139, 140–1, 143, 144, 150, 152, 158, 166n.155, 167, 169, 176, 177, 178, 179, 194, 196–7, 210, 220n.38, 226, 230n.74, 241, 242, 249, 250n.161, 251, 252, 253n.177, 303–4, 306, 308, 309, 310, 312, 314, 315, 317, 320, 321, 323, 324, 343, 359 Fisher, H. A. L. 48, 171n.181 Fiume 214, 219–20, 253–4, 292 Flemings 313 Fontainebleau, Treaty of 318n.60 forecasts 116n.9, 188n.268, 323 forecasting 15, 16

INDE X foreign policy 2, 5, 15, 29, 42–3, 45, 47n.18, 48, 77, 94, 139n.12, 142, 157n.88, 160–1, 164, 212n.18, 230, 236, 257, 260, 265, 270, 284, 286, 354, 357, 365 Brutus in 9–10, 125–36 character of Hitler’s 181–92 combinations of Hitler’s 192–208 direction of Hitler’s 167–81 fundamental principles of 128 see also British policy: in Middle East fortifications 143, 155, 161, 170, 247n.145, 281, 316 fortresses 156n.85, 194, 265, 278n.330, 294, 304, 310, 312 fortuna 191 fortune(s) xvi, 156, 163, 191, 352 Founding Fathers 2 Four-Power Pact 257–8 Four Powers 26, 89n.6, 103n.7, 257–8, 276 France after Second World War 101, 103n.7, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110–11, 121 in concept of Europe 74, 78–9, 84 dependence on United States 16, 110 and Eastern Europe 11, 210n.5, 215, 217, 223n.54, 236, 237, 238, 243, 244–5, 246, 247–9, 251, 253n.174, 253n.177, 254, 255, 257–8, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264–5, 266n.263, 267, 271n.290, 272, 274–5, 276n.319, 278n.330, 280, 282n.355 and Germany 161–2, 163, 167–8, 169, 170, 183, 184, 185, 190, 192, 193–8, 198n.332, 201n.351, 203, 205, 207, 240n.116, 301 in historical background to united Europe 86, 87, 88–91, 91n.11, 93, 95–6, 98 in historical literature reviews 337, 342, 348, 352, 356, 362 in Middle East 123 and Netherlands and Scandinavia 314n.36, 317, 318, 319n.66, 322 populations 172n.187 and Spain 296, 297, 302, 356 and Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg 309–13, 309n.5, 310n.7 writings on causes of defeat 19 France–Czechoslovakia alliance 249 France–Eastern Europe alliance 195, 237, 249, 260, 263, 278 France–Italy alliance 303, 348 France–Italy rapprochement 258 France–Italy–Yugoslavia treaty 255 France–Poland alliance 249, 266 France–Russia alliance 193 France–Soviet Russia pact of mutual assistance 261

387

France–Spain War of the First Coalition 295n.3 Francis I–Grand Signoir entente 278 Franco–Anglo–Turkish treaty of alliance 247n.142 Franco–Czechoslovak alliance 271 Franco–Czechoslovak–Soviet alliance 274 Franco–Czechoslovak treaties 249n.156, 276 Franco, Francisco 7, 11–12, 82, 183, 184, 295n.1, 296, 296n.8, 297–8, 299, 300–1, 302–3, 306–7 Franco–German conflict 96, 195 Franco–German frontier 170, 317 Franco–German hostility 96, 110 Franco–German relationship 195 Franco–Italian competition 258 Franco–Italo–British rivalry 301 Franco–Prussian War 311, 355–6 Franco–Rumanian alliance 249 Franco–Soviet agreement 260n.222 Franco–Soviet Pact 170, 261 Franco–Turkish declaration 247n.142 Franco–Yugoslav alliance 249 Frank, Hans 202 Franks 171n.181, 309 Frazer, Sir James 328 Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor 346 Frederick II 7 Frederick of Brandenburg 210n.6 Frederick the Great 181, 355 Frederick William IV 141 Frederikshamn, Treaty of 211n.8 free-will school of thought 336 freedom 13, 16, 82, 100, 139n.12, 142, 225, 229n.71, 230, 231, 245–6, 263n.241, 267, 268, 293, 340, 343, 349, 356 Free French 86, 109 Freeman, E. A. 53, 63, 114, 309n.6 Free Traders 77, 94 French and Belgian frontiers 13, 77n.19 French and Italian systems 256, 257 French–Anglo discussions 271n.290 French–Anglo interests 201 French–Anglo–Italian war 187 French–Anglo plan 275 French–Anglo ultimatum 277 French–Anglo union 86, 108 French–Anglo weakness 205 French colonies in Africa 83 French Directory 103 French Equatorial Africa 322n.81 French hegemony 100, 194, 195n.309, 257 French historians 51, 53, 61, 64, 342, 344n.1, 345n.1

388

INDE X

French invasion of Italy 269 Frenchmen 44, 80, 82, 194n.305 French opinion 154, 197 French Parliament 91 French policy 258–9, 263 French proposal of tripartite treaty 255 French protection 234n.96 French Republic 295n.3 French Revolution viii, 8, 46, 70, 78, 80, 139–40, 142, 145, 150, 297, 333, 346 French Revolutionary Wars viin.3, 32 French security 170 French system of alliances 249, 260, 262, 263, 272, 278 French territories 247n.142, 309n.5, 320 French treaty 263 French Wars 357 Fritsch, Werner von 159n.105, 161 Fuller, J. F. C. 235n.98 Funk, W. 161, 284 Fursdon, Edward 91n.11

G Gafencu, Grigore 285n.367 Gaitskell, Hugh 113 Galicia Austrian 172n.184, 174 Eastern 218–19, 227, 236, 243, 265 Polish 221n.48 Red Russia 213n.21 Russia wishing for possession of 294 Ruthenian principality of 288 Gandhi, Mahatma 4, 34, 340 Ganivet, Angel 295 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 348–9 Gathorne–Hardy, G. M. 49 general war 101, 191, 229, 232, 235, 236, 304, 308, 317 General War (1672–1713) 310 General War (1702–13) 295n.3 General War (1792–1815) 139, 310 General War (1939–45) 139 Geneva 68, 106, 131, 221n.47, 276, 310 Geneva Conference 127, 129 Genoa 309n.5 Gentiles 121 Georgiev, K. 226n.62, 257 German–Anglo agreements 321 German–Anglo colonial settlement 321 German–Anglo entente 334 German–Anglo naval agreement 160n.109, 182, 263 German–Anglo negotiations 306 German–Anglo rapprochement 201 German–Anglo relations 203

German–Anglo war 241 German–Austrians 143, 177 German–Austria Pact 264 German–Britain alliance 205 German–Britain/Italy alliance 196, 197–8 German Catholicism 293 German Condor Legion 302 German Confederation 168, 172n.188, 173, 176, 311–12 see also North German Confederation German conquests 8, 10, 11, 85–6, 100, 102, 137, 138, 143, 173n.188, 177, 180, 187, 192, 205, 207n.388, 213, 228, 237, 242, 262, 266n.258, 268–9, 282, 287, 292n.412, 322 German–Czechoslovak frontiers 170 German–Czechoslovakia alliance 187 German–Czechoslovak protocol 279 German–Czechoslovak treaty 264 German–Czechoslovak vortex 265–6 German Democratic Republic (East Germany) 100n.2, 103n.7, 105n.14, 107 German diplomacy 197, 232n.86, 262, 284–5 German expansion 11, 169, 180, 192, 195, 196–7, 204, 216, 237, 249, 259, 263, 282 German–Franco conflict 96, 195 German–Franco frontier 170, 317 German–Franco hostility 96, 110 German–Franco relationship 195 German–Hungary alliance 242 German–Italian entente 264 German–Italian frontier 198n.335 German–Italy alliance 198–200 German–Italy entente 186 German–Japanese pact 186, 203 German nationalism 95, 138, 142, 166n.156, 363 German occupation 199, 279, 286, 312, 361 German–Polish entente 263 German–Polish frontiers 170 German–Polish Pact 182, 260–1 German–Polish question 207 German–Polish rapprochement 260 German–Polish treaty 267 German Reich 95, 110, 137–8, 164, 169, 173n.188, 177, 221, 230, 235n.102, 247n.145, 289, 290n.403 German revisionism 230, 239, 284, 317 German Revolution 139, 145, 146n.34, 147–8, 149, 151, 168 German–Rumanian frontier 291 German–Russia alliance 166n.155, 241 German–Russia–Austria alliance 323 German–Russian rapprochement 191, 291, 366 German–Soviet entente 268 German–Soviet Pact 187, 193, 261 Germany 1, 7, 10–11, 15, 16, 47n.19, 137–8

INDE X after Second World War 8–9, 100–8, 109–11 ascendancy in Eastern Europe 170–6, 259–68 and British policy in Middle East 113n.2, 120n.18 character of Hitler’s foreign policy 181–92 combinations of Hitler’s foreign policy 192–208 in concept of Europe 74, 79, 84 direction of Hitler’s foreign policy 167–81 and Eastern Europe 11, 209–10, 211n.12, 213, 215, 226, 227, 228n.69, 229–30, 232n.86, 233–5, 237, 238, 239–42, 244–5, 247–9, 250, 251–2, 254, 257–94 in historical background to united Europe 8, 85, 86–92, 95–6, 98 in historical literature reviews 326, 331, 334, 337, 342, 344n.1, 352, 354, 356, 357, 360, 361, 363, 365–6 Hitler 149–67 National Socialist Revolution 139–49 and overseas empires 320, 321–2 and partition 323 and Spain and Portugal 12, 295, 296, 299, 300–3, 305–6 and Switzerland, Low Countries, Scandinavia 308, 309, 311–13, 315–19 Ghana 83n.30 Gibbon, Edward 52, 57, 63, 65, 143–4, 145, 325, 336, 361 Gibraltar 295, 296, 302 Gisevius, H. B. 161n.119, 162n.122 Gladstone, William Ewart 337, 351, 355 Gladstonian liberalism 113 Gladstonian theme 154 Gladstonian tradition of idealism 351 Gleichberechtigung 89, 139, 155 glory 21, 206 Glubb, Sir John Bagot (Glubb Pasha) 112, 114n.6, 132 Goa 304, 305n.50 Godesberg demands 275, 277, 279 Goebbels, Joseph 150n.54, 171n.182, 189, 199n.341, 289n.394, 294n.419 Gold Coast 83n.30 Golden Square coup 120n.18 Goldsmith, Oliver 83 Gooch, G.P. 65, 355 see also Temperley, H. W. V.: British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914 Go¨ring, Hermann 151, 157, 158, 160, 193, 198, 201, 202, 203, 301n.31, 303n.43 Goschen, Sir Edward 170n.176 “Gothic Line” 147n.38 Grand Alliance 100

389

Grand Signoir–Francis I entente 278 Greater Reich 142, 320 Great Hungary 232 Great Northern War 210n.7, 308n.4 Great Powers 9, 12, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 114, 121, 130, 135, 143, 158, 172, 172n.187, 181, 182, 192, 198, 209, 210, 212n.15, 215, 219, 226, 227, 228, 230, 233, 236–9, 241, 242, 243, 244–5, 247, 249, 252, 253, 256, 257, 261, 263, 266, 267, 268–9, 271, 272, 277–8, 280, 286n.377, 293, 294, 295n.3, 304, 305, 308, 308n.4, 309, 311, 314, 315, 318, 320, 321, 323, 353 Great Russians 218–19 Greece viii, 8, 82, 97, 107, 173, 209n.3, 210n.4, 212, 214, 217, 218, 221n.47, 223, 223n.54, 226n.62, 227n.67, 230, 233nn.91–2, 239, 245, 246, 249–51, 252, 253, 255–6, 267, 269, 278, 285 Greek barbarians 147 Greek Catholic Church 221n.48 Greek city states vii, 41, 106 Greek civilization 75 Greek colonies 21 Greek faith 213n.21 Greek minority 233n.90 Greek national consciousness 212n.17 Greek nationalism 223n.54 Greeks 22, 82, 103, 218, 220n.38, 223, 223n.53, 253 Greek sovereignty 245 Greek temple 52, 65 Greek territory 254n.183 Greek–Turkish rapprochement 255–6 Greek–Turkish War 230 Greek War of Independence 212n.17 Greene, Graham 36, 82 Greenland 319, 320 Grey, Sir Edward 72, 113n.3, 120, 354 grossdeutsch 138, 143, 169, 178, 197 Grossdeutschland 173 grossdeutsch Reich 143 Grotian tradition xv, 127n.5 Grotius, Hugo ix, xv, 27, 128 Guam 305n.49 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden 146, 210n.7

H Habsburg dominions 211n.14, 212n.18 Habsburg Empire 11, 169, 177, 197, 210, 228n.68, 230 Habsburg Monarchy 142, 168, 177, 220, 224, 229n.70, 235, 293–4, 357–8 Habsburgs 138, 172, 174, 176, 178, 197, 212n.18, 221n.48, 237, 249, 289, 310n.13, 311

390

INDE X

Habsburg tradition 177–8 Hácha, E. 191n.285, 214, 282, 289–90 Haigh, John George 26 Halifax, Lord 186, 204, 279n.335, 300n.28, 321 Hall, Ian xii, xiv, xvi Hamilton, Thomas J. 301n.31 Hammond, John Lawrence 37n.33 Hancock, W. K. 5–6, 18, 50–1, 52–3, 54, 57–9, 61, 62, 63, 65 British War Economy 54, 65 Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs 50, 54, 59, 65 Hanover 166n.155, 173n.188 Harding, Neil 81n.29 Harris, James, Earl of Malmesbury 123n.24 Hashemite kingdoms 130 Hay, Denys 73n.9 Hazard, Paul 341 Headlam-Morley, J. W. 241, 242n.121 Heath, Neville 26 Hegel, Georg W. F. 65, 68, 336, 339 Hegelian tradition 54, 62 hegemony 106, 111, 122, 184, 194, 248, 251, 257, 258, 304, 362 Heiden, Konrad 140n.17, 149n.48, 149nn.45–6, 150n.54, 151n.56, 151n.60, 153n.70, 154n.76, 164n.136, 166n.157, 169n.170, 171n.183, 191n.286, 193n.296, 195n.306, 198n.330 Heimwehr 254, 258, 264 Hellenic world vii Hellenistic cities 220 Helsinki–Bucharest axis 272 Henderson, Alexander 276n.322, 280n.340, 283n.358 Henderson, Sir Nevile 156n.87, 160n.110, 185n.254, 191, 205, 321–2 Henlein 264 Henry the Fowler 137n.1 hereditary monarchy 212n.18 Herodotus 21–2, 50, 52, 55, 57, 65, 67, 324, 325 Hertslet, Sir Edward 173n.188, 253n.177, 299n.19, 310n.9, 311n.14, 311n.21, 312n.21 Hertz, Frederick 228n.68 Hesse 173n.188 Hesse–Cassel 173n.188, 215n.22 Hesse, grand duchy of 173n.188 Hesse, Prince Philip of 202n.356 Heuser, Beatrice viin.3 Hinsley, F. H. 103n.8 Hispanidad 297 Hispano–Portuguese Union 299 Hispano–Portuguese War 299 historians

as “backward–looking prophet” 52, 63 definition of function 44–5 durable merits of 50–2 and history 12–14 old and new virtues of 5–6 as systematiser of past 52–5, 63 Historical Architecture 6, 51, 52, 53, 59, 63–6 Historical Imagination 6, 51–2, 53, 61–3, 65 historical interpretation 2, 359–60 historical necessity 49, 54, 66, 146, 359 Historical Reflection 6, 51, 53–5, 65–7 see also Philosophical Depth historical scholarship 2, 6–7, 349 historical study 18, 62, 64, 329, 343, 346, 348 historiographical criticism 5–6, 56–67 history contemporary 5n.8, 19, 26–7, 28–9, 30, 47, 49, 343 as defined by subject matter 26 definition 21 function as enlargement of the experience 17–18, 349–50 and historians 12–14, 50–5 modern 1, 31, 32, 72, 244, 247, 308, 325, 346, 354 and nature of international relations 20, 21 philosophy of 37, 38, 48–9, 53–4, 337 as queen of the sciences 19, 344 and reconstruction of past 46–7 rejection of hard definition of 342, 343 relating to international relations 18–19, 20, 39–40, 49 social sciences, and international relations 1, 3, 4, 5, 21–3, 25, 36–8, 42 and study of international relations 2, 3–5, 37, 41–9 technical 14, 38, 352, 359–60 and understanding international relations 2–3 universal 19, 27–8, 324, 343–4 see also historiographical criticism history–writing 55, 66, 341–2 Hitchcock, William I. 86n.2 Hitler, Adolf 7, 10–11, 12, 14, 15, 32, 35, 38n.34, 59, 78, 87, 89, 100, 101, 112, 115, 119, 122, 130, 137–8, 232, 234, 235n.102, 260, 264, 265n.258, 268n.271, 269–70, 271n.287, 272n.293, 273, 275–6, 277, 279, 280n.341, 281n.347, 285, 286, 287, 288–91, 292n.412, 293, 294, 296n.8, 298n.14, 300, 301–2, 314n.32, 316, 318nn.60–1, 320, 321–2, 340, 365 anti–Semitism 166–7, 220 as ‘Bohemian corporal’ 221n.46

INDE X character of foreign policy 181–92 conferences 33, 161, 179–80, 184–5, 191n.285, 196, 205, 287nn.383–4, 301, 317, 318n.61 direction of foreign policy 167–81 foreign policy combinations 192–208 Mein Kampf 14, 24, 138n.9, 139nn.10–11, 146n.36, 148n.43, 150n.51, 152n.65, 152n.68, 153n.69, 161n.112, 162n.126, 162n.128, 163–6, 167n.164, 177n.203, 178n.205, 178n.207, 178n.209, 179, 180, 181, 182n.227, 190n.282, 191n.283, 192–3, 194, 195n.307, 195n.309, 196, 197nn.318–25, 198n.326, 198nn.329–30, 199n.342, 260n.224, 289n.398, 321n.74, 321n.76 and National Socialist Revolution 139–43, 146–9, 229n.71 phenomenon of 149–67 see also Baynes, N. H.: Speeches of Adolf Hitler Hlinka Guard 282 Hoare, Sir Samuel 300n.28 Hobbes, Thomas viii, 23n.8, 49, 293n.417 Hockett, Homer C., The Critical Method in Historical Research and Writing 17n.33, 18, 345–7 Hohenzollern candidature in Spain 354, 355–6 Hohenzollern Emperor 168 Hohenzollern Empire 11, 210 Hohenzollern tradition 178 Holland 311, 316–17, 319, 340 Holstein 173n.188 Holstein, Adolf of 171 Holy Roman Empire viin.3, 137, 138, 168, 215, 324 Holy See 221n.48 Honig, Jan Willem ixn.14 Hoover, Herbert 117 Horace 68, 124n.26 House of Austria 51, 58 House of Savoy 51, 58, 349 Howell, David 118n.12 Hudson, G. F. 2, 78n.24 Huguenots 340 Huizinga, Johan 7, 50, 55, 59n.9, 75, 109n.22 Hume, Brian Donald 26 Hundred Years War 217n.24, 310n.7, 361–2 Hungarian Communists 39n.38 Hungarian–Czechoslovak conflict 273 Hungarian–Czechoslovak frontiers 276, 280 Hungarian–Czechoslovak war 280 Hungarian diplomacy 266 Hungarian–German combination 291 Hungarian independence 286

391

Hungarian National Socialism 271 Hungarian Nazis 221, 271, 286 Hungarian–Polish action 292 Hungarian–Polish frontier 275, 280–1, 291, 293 Hungarian revisionism 230, 239, 249, 254, 266, 274, 280 Hungarian–Russian relations 286n.377 Hungarians 13, 138, 209n.2, 231, 242, 273, 275, 279, 289n.392, 290, 348 Hungarian–Slovak frontier 290n.404 Hungarian treaty 228n.69 Hungary 74, 76, 101–2, 103, 104, 138, 174, 175n.195, 177, 188, 207, 209n.3, 211n.14, 212, 212n.18, 217, 218n.31, 219n.33, 220–1, 223–4, 225–6, 227n.67, 228n.69, 229–30, 231n.82, 232n.86, 233, 235–6, 239, 240, 249, 250, 254–5, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261, 265, 270–1, 273–7, 278, 279–82, 283, 284, 286, 288, 289–90, 292–3 see also Austria–Hungary; Great Hungary Hungary–Croatia frontiers 214 Hungary–Italy treaty 255 Hungary–Little Entente rapprochement 271n.287 Hungary–Rumania frontier 222 Hungary–Yugoslav frontier 266, 269 Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca 119n.13 Hussein of Jordan, King 114n.6 Hussite Revolution 293 Hussite songs 225 Hussite Wars 293–4 Hussitism 293n.418

I Iberian Soviet republics 300 Iceland 12, 308, 314, 316, 318–19, 319n.63 idealism 13, 77, 84, 87, 94, 113, 302n.37, 351 idealists 40n.41, 62, 92 Imperial Appeasement 119–20 Imperial Germany 158 imperialism 32, 35, 113n.3, 116, 165, 177, 221n.48, 230, 239, 255, 259, 284, 291, 353 imperialists 30, 113 Imperial Resentment 120–1 Imperial Romanticism 118–19 Inca 304 independence balance of power to preserve 106 Catholic Church weakened on achievement of 221n.48 collective 237–8 in domestic affairs 284 of Eastern European states in general 227, 237–8, 357–8

392

INDE X

independence (Continued) of historian 359 Hitler’s 187, 200 in policy 186 policy of 109n.22 India 35, 69, 78, 81, 113, 114n.5 Indian Ocean 12, 304, 305n.50, 322 Indo–China War 98, 127, 129 Indonesia 134 Industrial Revolution 27, 32, 97 integration, European vi, 6, 8, 16, 82–3, 92 interdependence 135, 256, 320 Interimsethik 193 Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) 250, 254–5, 257, 259 international anarchy 27, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37, 97 internationalism 77, 94, 113, 198 international law 7, 9, 20n.1, 27, 44n.6, 70, 128, 134, 135, 314n.36 international politics axiom of 104 comparison with domestic 128 complex nature of 351 crisis endemic in 133 of Eastern Europe 236–42 history of ideas about xvi of Hitler 159, 167 paradoxes and ironies as essence of 15, 91 quality communicated in historical writings 2 seeking principles of 45 Spain’s desire to play part in 295 international relations ambiguity and inclusiveness 38 assessment of prospects for learning in 4 concern with public affairs at their worst 34–6, 38 content of 25–34 continuities versus innovations xiv difficulties of defining as academic subject 20 Eden as champion of rule of law in 123 European “civilization’s” treatment of 353 Europocentric view of 334 future research avenues 49 integral character of 36, 38 international theory as political philosophy of xviii lack of, in Iceland 318 Lilliputian states as not considered subjects of 309n.5 nature of 3–4, 20–40 as new and transient subject 3, 23–4 as no longer pragmatic 3–4, 24–5 relating history to 18–19, 20, 39–40, 49

and revolutionary unrest 189 social sciences, and history 1, 3, 4, 5, 21–3, 25, 36–8, 42 state decision–makers as principal actors in xi study of 2, 3–5, 15, 37, 41–9 three traditions of thought on ix–x understanding 2–3 International Ruhr Authority 8, 88, 90, 109 international society 7, 10, 32, 44n.6, 72, 133, 135, 136, 172n.188 intervention 11, 48, 122, 190, 205–6, 210n.7, 238, 252, 254, 259, 277, 288, 300, 301, 308n.4, 334, 354 Iran 117, 127, 130 Iraq 118, 120n.18, 131, 132, 134, 238n.112, 246 Ireland 74, 240, 241n.119, 337 irony 9, 15, 123, 205, 366 irredentism 158, 242, 250, 251, 260, 283, 297 Islam 32, 69, 289, 304, 325, 346 Ismail, Khedive of Egypt 116 isolationism 34n.27, 86n.2, 95, 96, 110, 181, 254, 256, 264, 268, 284, 296 Israel 9, 119n.15, 121–3, 124, 132, 134 Italian and French systems 256, 257 Italian–Anglo–French war 187 Italian Communist Party 107 Italian conquest 306n.58, 312, 316, 321 Italian Fascist Revolution 295–6 Italian policy 251–2, 254–5, 258–9 Italian protection 264 Italian regime 63, 148 Italian Republic 349 Italians 91, 140n.16, 186, 199n.338, 200, 201, 223n.53, 250, 273, 292, 301n.31, 303, 322 Italy after Second World War 101, 104, 106, 107, 109 ascendancy in Eastern Europe 249–59 in concept of Europe 74, 84n.32 and Eastern Europe 11, 209, 215, 222n.50, 234, 239, 243n.122, 244, 245, 246, 250–9, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266–7, 268–9, 273–4, 278, 280–1, 285 and Germany 143, 147n.38, 161, 184, 185n.253, 186–7, 188, 192, 196, 197–9, 200, 201–4, 205 in historical background to united Europe 8, 87, 87n.4, 90–1, 91n.11, 92 in historical literature reviews 348, 349, 356 and Middle East 120n.18 populations 172n.187, 209n.2 Renaissance 73 and Spain and Portugal 296, 299, 300–1, 302–3

INDE X and Switzerland, Low Countries, Scandinavia 309n.5, 310, 311, 312, 316, 322 Italy–Albania alliance 255 Italy–Albanian agreement 252 Italy–Austria frontier 258 Italy/Britain–German alliance 196, 197–8 Italy–Bulgaria entente 255n.188 Italy–Ethiopia War 201, 261n.235, 264, 266, 306n.58, 312, 313, 316, 321 Italy–France alliance 303, 348 Italy–France rapprochement 258 Italy–France–Yugoslavia treaty 255 Italy–Franco–British rivalry 301 Italy–Franco competition 258 Italy–German agreement 198n.332 Italy–German alliance 198–200 Italy–German entente 186, 264 Italy–German front 198 Italy–Hungary treaty 255 Italy–Spanish Pact 303 Italy–Turkey pact of friendship 247n.142 Italy–Turkish War 251 Italy–Yugoslav alliance 285–6 Italy–Yugoslav Pact 267n.265 Italy–Yugoslav relations 266 Italy–Yugoslav Treaty 253

J Jacobins 81 Jan Mayen Island 320n.70 Japan 75, 78, 183, 186–7, 187n.267, 197n.317, 202, 204, 205, 206–7, 246, 253n.174, 286n.377, 321, 326, 335 Japanese conquests 321, 335 Japanese–German pact 186, 203 Japanese War Office 207n.384 Jaspers, Karl 68n.1 Java 320n.68 Jesuits 32, 81, 166, 340 Jewish conquest, imminent 165 Jewish–Marxist menace 163–4 Jewish minorities 226n.61 Jewish National Home 9, 118, 119 Jewish spirit 197n.317 Jewish world-hydra of freemasonry 198 Jews 9, 100, 118–21, 123, 155, 165–7, 166n.157, 195, 219–20, 223, 225–6, 280, 302n.37, 364 Joan of Arc 361, 362 Jodl, Alfred 161, 269n.276, 270n.282, 292n.412, 318n.60, 318n.62 Joliot-Curie, F. 107 Joly, Maurice 166n.157 Jordan 114, 118, 119n.15, 131, 132, 134, 135

393

Jordan, Wilhelm 142 judgment discrimination in 19 Eden’s 126, 130, 131 of historians 19, 28, 329, 333, 334, 337, 343, 349, 354 political 326, 337 see also moral judgment Julius Caesar 346 Jung, Carl 324 justice 6, 51, 54, 58, 59, 66, 344 just war viin.3

K Kantians 127n.5, 146 Kantian tradition xv Kant, Immanuel ix, 68, 146n.34 Karlowitz, Treaty of 212n.18 Karmasin, Franz 282 Kellogg–Briand Pact 23n.7 Kemalist revival/renaissance 245, 251 Kemal, Mustafa 252 Kennan, G. F. 48, 351 Kennedy, John F. 2, 340 Kenya 322n.81 Kerner, R. J. 225n.57 Keynes, John Maynard 24 Khartoum 130, 135 Khrushchev, Nikita 92 Kiev 213n.21, 214, 217, 243, 283n.360, 288 Kingdom of Italy 147n.38, 349 Kingdom of Lotharingia 309 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 222n.50, 348, 349 Kipling, Rudyard 114 kleindeutsch 110, 111, 168 kleindeutsch Reich 143, 178 Kleinstaaterei 135, 236 Knickerbocker, H. R. 38n.34, 153n.69, 154n.75 Koestler, Arthur 36, 337 Korea 42, 48, 75 North 48n.20 South 48n.20 Korean armistice 127 Korean War 92, 99, 107n.18 Kosovo 13, 212n.16, 224 Kremlin 33, 204n.372 Kun, Bela 226n.62, 236 Kuwait 131

L la Fontaine, Jean de 123n.25 Landheer, Bartholomew 318n.58 Langlois, Charles-Victor 345n.1 Latin America 46, 158, 159, 297

394

INDE X

Latin Christendom 53, 64 Latvia 8, 173, 175n.195, 209n.3, 211, 219n.34, 225, 226n.62, 227n.67, 229n.71, 233n.91, 239, 240n.116, 248, 260 Latvian–Estonian alliance 260 Latvian–Estonian Pact 261 Latvian independence 211n.10, 248 Laurence, Reginald Vere 45n.9 Lausanne Conference 246 Lausanne, Treaty of 213n.20, 228n.69, 230n.74, 246, 250, 267 Laval, Pierre 194n.305 “law of nations” viii Lawrence, D. H. 146 Lawrence, T. E. 229n.71, 241n.120, 349 laws of libration 241 League of Nations 3, 8, 24–5, 26, 29n.17, 32, 34nn.26–7, 48, 78, 94, 119n.15, 161, 170, 182, 186, 234, 238, 252, 253, 256, 259n.221, 261, 274, 293, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314n.36, 315, 316, 334 League of Nations Covenant 119n.17, 310n.11 Lebanon 120n.18, 134, 135 Lebensraum (“living space”) 10, 178–81, 192 legitimacy 100n.2, 107, 133n.12, 229n.70, 343 Lend-Lease programme 86n.2 Leningrad 100, 102, 240n.116, 247 Lenin, Vladimir 24, 81, 150, 151n.58, 156n.85 Leopold, King 313 Lewis, Sinclair 164n.137 liberal arts 3, 7, 73 liberal education 25, 71 Liberal Imperialists 113n.3 liberalism 51, 58, 82, 113, 329 liberty 35, 82, 135 Libya 134, 251 Liddell Hart, B. H. 155n.84, 162n.121, 241n.120 Liechtenstein 173n.188, 309n.5 Lipski, J. 207n.385, 282 List, Friedrich 176 literary criticism 50, 56, 332, 339 Lithuanian independence 211n.12, 224 Lithuanian–Polish rapprochement 266 Lithuanian–Polish rule 222n.51 Lithuanian–Polish Union 218n.28 Lithunia 102n.6, 173, 175n.195, 209n.3, 210, 211, 211n.12, 213n.21, 214, 217, 219, 226n.62, 227n.67, 233n.91, 234–5, 248, 261, 263, 266, 270, 282n.356, 292 Lithunians 8, 103, 171, 174n.190, 216, 217, 219, 220, 223n.53, 224 Little Entente 231, 236, 237, 239, 242, 249, 250, 255, 256, 257–8, 261n.232, 263, 265–6, 267, 270, 271, 273, 274, 275, 276–7, 280, 334

Little Entente alliance 257 Little Entente–Czechoslovakia alliance 275 Little Entente–Hungary rapprochement 271n.287 Little Entente Pact of Organization 257, 260 “little European” 96, 110, 111 Litvinov, Maxim 265, 274, 276 Livermore, H. V. 299n.19 Livonia 211n.10, 224 Livonian War 217n.24 Lloyd George, David 151–2, 167n.163, 220n.40 Locarno Pact 170, 249, 264 Locarno Treaties 47n.19, 112, 186, 261, 311, 312–13 Locke, John 340 Logical Positivism 36 London 8, 9, 24, 50, 58, 76, 81, 85–6, 88n.5, 101n.4, 104, 106, 107, 108–9, 117n.12, 119n.15, 125, 160n.109, 187, 202, 203, 204n.372, 351 London Conference 71, 132 London Convention of 1840 245 London Inns of Court 27 London Round Table Conferences 119 London School of Economics vi, xiii, xv, 1, 3, 22n.5, 25n.14, 27, 35n.28, 348n.* London, Treaties of 212n.17, 251, 252, 252n.170, 253–4, 253n.177, 311 Lorraine 2, 89, 90, 109, 168 see also Alsace–Lorraine Lorraine, Duke of 310n.7 Lothian, Lord 77, 94 Louis Philippe, King 133 Louis XIV, King 70, 85, 100, 103, 146, 169, 181, 237, 334 Low Countries 12, 169, 252, 299, 309, 314, 315, 317, 318 see also Belgium; Luxembourg; Netherlands Lu¨beck 171, 308n.4 Lublin 219n.37, 292 luck 191n.287 Ludendorff, Erich 152n.67, 158n.95, 165, 224, 334 Luther, Martin 53, 64, 151 Luxembourg 12, 44, 84n.32, 87n.4, 88n.5, 89, 109, 173n.188, 308, 311–14, 316, 319

M “Maastricht appendix” 317 Macao 304, 305n.50

INDE X Macartney, C. A. Hungary and her Successors 174nn.192–3, 217n.25, 219n.33, 220n.43, 236n.103, 236n.106, 237n.111, 255n.185 National States and National Minorities 176n.195, 218n.31, 221n.47, 238n.112 Problems of the Danube Basin 228n.68, 230n.72 Macartney, Maxwell H. H. 197n.325 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 50, 57, 144n.29, 324–5, 336, 354 Frederick the Great 77n.17 History 54, 66 MacDonald, Ramsay 197n.320, 220n.40 Macedonia 101, 214, 218, 220, 230n.73, 240, 241n.119, 254–5 Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) 226n.62, 250, 254–5, 257, 259 Macedonians 233n.92, 259n.220 Macedonian Terrorist Organization 227, 254–5 Machiavellianism ix, xv, 7, 32, 127n.5, 191 Machiavelli, N. viii, 21, 72, 75, 160, 163, 186n.255, 339 Machtergreifung 139 Machtu¨berernahme 39, 143, 175 MacIver, Robert Morrison 40 Mackinder, Halford J. 237, 330 Mack Smith, Denis, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: A Study in Political Conflict 17–18, 18n.36, 348–50 Macmillan, Harold 116n.9, 126 Madrid 295, 296n.8, 297n.9, 303n.47 Maeztu, Ramiro de 297n.9 Magyar allies 168 Magyar imperialism 291 Magyar irredente 273 Magyarization 174, 219, 221n.48, 223 Magyar racial purity 221 Magyars 177, 211n.14, 216, 217, 219, 220n.43, 223, 223n.53, 224, 226, 233, 239, 276, 280 Mahometan world 76 Mahommedans 76 Mahrattas conquest 305n.50 Maine, River 166n.155 Main, River 173n.188 Maisky, Ivan 274 Maitland, F. W. 52, 55, 62, 67 Malacca 304 Malaga 303 Malenkov, Georgy 352 Manchester 38, 351

395

Manchester Guardian 115, 227n.64, 240n.116, 269n.274, 279n.334, 283n.359, 286n.377, 293n.415, 353n.*, 355n.* Manchester school 77, 94 Manchuria 321, 335 Manning, C. A. W. 25–7, 40 Marcus Junius Brutus see Brutus Marignano 308n.4, 310n.7 Marseilles 259, 302 Marvell, Andrew 130 Marxism 149, 166–7, 198, 336–7 Marxist analysis of social conflicts 241 Marxist–Jewish menace 163–4 Marxist literature 163–4 Marxist party 148 Marxist philosophy of history 5, 49, 328, 336, 358 Marxists 35–6, 165 Marx, Karl 27 Masarik, Hubert 277n.327 Masaryk, Jan 91 Masaryk, T. G. 7, 226, 229–30, 236n.103, 237n.109, 239n.113, 264, 269n.278, 271, 277, 288, 358, 363 Mastery of the Sources 6, 51, 59–61 Matsuoka, Y. 138 Mattingly, Garrett 2 Mazlish, Bruce (co–author) see Bronowski, Jacob: The Western Intellectual Tradition Mazzini, Giuseppe 7, 63, 74, 229, 349 McCormick, Anne O’Hare 289n.392 McCormick, Robert R. 34n.27 McMahon promises 118, 119n.13 McNeill, William Hardy 104 medieval agricultural colonies 174 medieval Catholic Church 97 medieval Christendom 79, 224 medieval division of history 53, 64, 346 medieval history 79 medievalists 28, 343, 346, 361 medieval memories 138 medieval new era 145 medieval Papacy 79 medieval Reich 223 medieval Respublica Christiana 32 meditation 41–2 Mediterranean 64, 115, 184, 216, 217, 240, 244, 246, 253, 255, 268, 296, 302, 303 Melians vii melodrama 358, 359 Memel 173, 174n.190, 175n.195, 207, 214, 219–20, 233–5, 247n.145, 248, 261, 282n.356, 290, 292 Menzies mission to Cairo 131, 132

396

INDE X

Messersmith, George S. 182n.228, 184n.246, 189 messianism 139, 167 Messina Conference 78, 92–3, 95, 109 Metternich, Klemens von 353 Mexican expedition 135 Michelet, Jules 50, 51, 53, 61, 64 Middle Ages viin.3, viii, 31, 53, 64, 79, 225, 247n.145, 339, 346 Middle East 6, 9, 15–16, 112–24, 130–2, 135 Midlothian campaign 114 Mikhaylov, N. 176n.195 Miller, David Hunter 315n.38 Miller, William 212n.17, 309n.5 Millis, Walter ix Mill, John Stuart 144 Milner’s kindergarten 77, 94 Milton, John ix, 79–80 Mindszenty, Cardinal József 39n.38 minorities 11, 142, 159, 173–5, 177, 188, 189, 209n.2, 217, 218n.29, 221n.47, 226, 230n.73, 231–3, 238, 240–1, 242, 252, 257, 264, 273–4, 275, 282, 284 misfortune(s) 313, 357, 358, 361 Mohács 13, 212n.18, 224 Moldavia 212n.15, 214 Molotov, Vyacheslav 104, 129, 268n.271 Moluccas 320n.68 Monaco 289, 309n.5 Monckton, Sir Walter 126 Mongol 288 Mongolia 216 Mongolian invasion 174, 223–4, 288 Mongol Khan 32, 79 Mongols 79, 213n.21, 216 Monnet, Jean 7, 8, 9, 16, 86, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 108–9 Monroe, Elizabeth 223n.54, 253n.178 Montenegrins 218 Montenegro 210n.4, 210nn.4–5, 214 independence 212n.16 Montesquieu 24, 75 Montreux Conference 267–8, 287 Montreux Convention 268 moral balance 166 moral Balkanisation 241 moral break-down of enemy 10, 189–90 moral debate 295 moral dilemma of Eden 10, 135 moral directness 326 moral effort 49 moral ideals of freedom 293 moral involvement of nation 141 morality 31, 191, 354

moral judgment 15, 331, 356, 360, 365 moral philosopher 38 moral philosophy 159, 339 moral practice 98 moral predicaments xvi, 17 moral prestige 267 moral purposes 149 moral qualities 294 moral resistance 275 moral right 154 morals 68, 365 moral stature 150 moral strength 163 moral ties 134 moral traditions of government 226 moral universe of politics 10, 136 moral virtue, sword as symbol of 224n.55 Moravia 10, 137, 174, 207, 211n.14, 214, 217, 223–4, 232, 233n.90, 287, 289, 290n.402, 292, 320 Moravian independence 224 More 365 Morgenthau, Hans J. viii, ixn.14, xvii, 32, 49, 88 Morocco 296, 303, 305n.49, 352 Morrison, Herbert Stanley 117, 118n.12 Morrow, Ian F. D. 224n.55, 234n.93, 234nn.96–7 Moscow 100, 104, 111n.25, 171, 194, 210, 213n.21, 217n.24, 246, 274, 333 Moscow, Treaty of 211n.12, 239n.115 Mossadegh, Mohammed 117, 126, 130, 132 Moss, L. B. 156n.87, 212n.17, 216n.23 Mozambique 305n.50, 306, 320n.73, 322n.81 Munich 117, 129, 162, 163, 183, 184, 188, 205–6, 207, 232, 241, 249n.156, 258, 272n.296, 277, 279, 280n.344, 281–3, 287, 291, 301n.31, 352, 354, 360 Munich Agreement 38n.35, 232, 280 Munich Conference 11, 242, 278, 282 Munich crisis 153n.73, 198, 272n.293 “Munichite” 109n.22 Munich putsch 156, 157, 194, 198 Munich settlement 278, 279n.335, 282, 283 Murray, Gilbert 23n.6 Musaddiq see Mossadegh, Mohammed Muscovite Time of Troubles 217n.24 Mussert, Anton 318 Mussolini, Benito 10, 14, 63, 101, 115, 130, 143, 147, 150, 152, 156, 163, 164, 182n.229, 185n.253, 187n.262, 198–204, 206–7, 250–1, 254–5, 257–8, 266–7, 273–4, 278, 285–6, 293n.416, 298, 301n.31, 302–3, 337, 365 mutual defense pact 87n.4 Myres, Sir John 52, 65

INDE X N Naguib, Mohammed 46n.12 Namier, Lewis B. 14, 15, 18, 29 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals 142n.24, 232n.87 Avenues of History 58n.8, 343, 363–4 Conflicts 240n.117, 269n.278 Diplomatic Prelude 1938–1939 164n.140, 234n.93, 234n.95, 260n.226, 263nn.240–1, 272n.293, 281n.346, 282n.355, 290n.401, 292n.412, 292n.414 Europe in Decay: A Study in Disintegration, 1936–1940 159n.106, 177n.202, 186n.259, 275n.315, 276n.319, 276n.321, 279n.337, 365 Facing East 221n.49 in A History of the Peace Conference of Paris 148n.41, 177n.201, 229n.70 In the Margin of History 148n.41, 269n.274, 283n.358 In the Nazi Era 15n.25, 365–6 Nancy 310n.7 Naples 222n.50, 278n.333, 348, 349 Napoleon 71, 78, 85, 99–100, 126, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160, 169, 178, 181, 186, 190, 194, 215n.22, 220, 234nn.95–6, 318n.60, 334, 353 Napoleonic Empire 137 Napoleonic grand duchy of Warsaw 211n.13 Napoleonic interregnum 172n.188 Napoleonic Wars vi, vii, 32, 99, 101, 145, 299 Napoleon III 135, 156, 229, 251, 351 Nassau 173n.188 Nassau Succession Agreement 312n.21 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 7, 10, 46n.12, 112, 114–15, 117, 121, 122, 130–2, 134, 135 national conflicts Eastern Europe 215–22 of Europe, insoluble 13, 77, 94 national interest 113, 121, 246, 351 nationalism 148, 231, 241 Afro-Asian 133 Albanian 252 archaistic 225n.60 “bourgeois” 38n.35 Czech 293 delusions of 35 democratic 229 disease of extreme 143 European 346 evils of economic 228n.68 Flemish 313 linguistic 216 modern Greek 223n.54

397

of nineteenth century 360 residual 95 Rumanian 220 Ukrainian 222, 273 see also Arab nationalism; German nationalism; residual nationalism National Socialism 100, 139, 141, 143, 147, 148, 154, 156, 158, 160, 164, 167, 178, 180n.219, 271, 301, 352 National Socialist exponent 171 National Socialist foreign relations 196 National Socialist German Worker’s Party see Nazi Party National Socialist March 198 National Socialist movement 10, 140, 148, 318 National Socialist organisation 156 National Socialist régime 148 National Socialist representation in Reichstag 141n.18 National Socialist Revolution 139–49, 154, 175, 188, 194, 229n.71, 258, 259–60, 296, 316, 333 National Socialists see Nazis natural law viii, 340 Nazi annexation of Bohemia and Moravia 137 Nazi anti-Semitism 166–7 Nazi creed 180n.219 Nazi diplomacy 188n.269, 189n.275, 190 Nazi élite 143 Nazi Era 365–6 Nazi expansion 160, 193 Nazi exploitation 288 Nazi fifth column in Latin America 297 Nazi foreign policy 177–8, 179 Nazi Germany 11, 12, 103, 139, 143, 160, 200, 229, 254, 277, 278, 306, 337 Nazi Government 189, 234n.94 Nazi hostility 194 Nazi imperialism 165 Nazi leaders 87, 147n.39, 154, 200 Nazi Machtu¨berernahme 39, 143, 175 Nazi menace 86 Nazi movement 10, 139, 146, 164, 185 Nazi Party 34n.27, 141, 142n.25, 154, 159, 160, 286 Nazi propaganda 141, 142, 172, 195, 277, 293n.418 Nazi putsch 258 Nazi régime 184, 260, 270 Nazi Revolution see National Socialist Revolution Nazis 99, 140n.16, 141n.20, 148–9, 151n.58, 165, 171n.181, 175, 178, 181, 184, 193n.298, 200, 201, 221, 258, 260, 264, 269, 271, 301

398

INDE X

Nazi salute 156 Nazism 14, 29, 87, 260, 298 Nazi–Soviet Pact 149 Nazi state 159–60 Nazi system of government 159 Netherlands 12, 84n.32, 87n.4, 88n.5, 91n.11, 106, 109, 134, 308, 311, 312n.21, 314–19, 320–1, 340, 359 Netherlands conquest 315n.37 Netherlands Empire 320n.68 Netherlands West Indies 320n.70, 321 Neuilly–sur–Seine, Treaty of 228n.69, 250 neutrality 12, 109n.22, 202, 203, 207, 246, 253n.177, 272, 273, 276n.319, 277, 302, 308 guaranteed: Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg 309–14 without guarantee, Netherlands, Scandinavia 314–19 Neutrality Acts 86n.2 New Guinea 134, 319, 320n.68 New Testament 166 New World 137–8, 296 Nice 309n.5 Nicholas I 32, 333 Nicholas II 237 Nicolson, Sir Harold 128 Niebuhr, Reinhold 49 Nkrumah, Kwame 83 non–aggression pacts 43, 177n.202, 189n.275, 260, 270, 276, 283, 300 non–aggressive states 181, 274 non-European powers 78–9, 106 non-intervention 203, 349 Non-Intervention Agreement 12, 306 non-interventionist policies 86n.2 Normandy 225 North America 144, 319n.66 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 8, 69, 87n.4, 91n.11, 92, 104n.12 North German Confederation 168, 173n.188 Norway 12, 102, 159, 239n.115, 308, 314–15, 318, 319, 319nn.59–62, 320, 320n.70 nuclear war 96, 130, 346 nuclear warheads 111n.25 nuclear weapons 97 nuclear weapon states 89n.6 Nuremberg 87, 137 Nuremberg Documents 185n.253, 193, 202n.356, 265n.258, 317n.55 Nuremberg speeches 138n.4, 153n.73, 173n.189, 179n.215, 272n.293 Nuremberg Tribunal 38, 184n.246, 189 Nuri es-Said 120n.18, 131 Nyasaland 322n.81

Nyerere, Julius 83 Nymwegen 103 Nystadt, Treaty of 211nn.9–10

O Oakeshott, Michael 45, 140n.16 Obersalzberg 199n.340, 298n.14 October Revolution 39n.39 Oder-Neisse line 102 oil 9, 116–18, 120–1, 122, 123, 127, 130, 131 Old Testament 167 Operation “Green” 190n.278, 205n.375, 270n.279, 270n.282, 302n.34, 317n.54 Oppenheim, L. 189n.275, 252n.272, 289n.396, 309n.5, 312n.25, 314n.36 Ordnungsdienst 158 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 32n.21, 104n.11 Origen 325 Ortega y Gasset, José 144–5, 145n.30 Oslo 214 Oslo Conference 316 Oslo Convention 316 Oslo Powers 316 Ottawa Conference 316 Ottoman Empire 11, 32, 210, 212n.15, 212n.17, 213, 223, 238, 240, 244, 249, 324 Ottoman territories 119n.13, 119n.15 Ottoman Turkish nationality 220n.40 overseas empires 12, 304, 319–22

P pagan barbarians 211nn.8–10, 224 pagan Empire 156n.87 pagan Germans 146n.36 pagan writer 325 Painter, David S. 117n.11 Palestine 9, 112, 119nn.13, 120, 226n.61, 326 Palestine Mandate 119n.15 Palestine Royal Commission 119n.14 Palmerston see Temple, Henry John, 3rd Viscount Palmerston Papacy 51, 58, 79 Papacy–Mongol Khans alliance 79 Papal autocracy 32 Papal claims of authority 79 Papal claims of supremacy 79 Papal fief 278n.333 Papal policy, revolution in 278 Papal Rome 145 Papal sovereignty 133 Papal States 222n.50, 349 Paris 9, 81, 86, 107, 109, 123, 125, 134, 243, 246, 351

INDE X Paris Congress 244 Paris Peace Conference 24, 103, 104, 118, 219, 229, 233, 235–6, 251, 252, 253, 312, 314n.32, 315n.38 Paris, Treaty of 212n.15, 239n.115, 244n.129, 305n.49 Parthia 334 partition 101, 168, 254, 326 of Africa 304, 305n.50, 320 of Albania 252, 285 of Anschluss, as veiled 268 of Austria–Hungary 197, 323 of Bohemia 279, 281 of buffer states 268 of Eastern Europe 210 of Europe 104 of Germany 9, 108, 111, 119, 323 of Great Hungary 232 of Hungary 212n.18 of North Africa 303 of Ottoman Empire 238 of Portuguese Empire 305–6 of Ruthenia 280 of Teschen 248 of Trieste 119 of Turkey 251 of Ukraine 213n.21 Wight’s note on 323 see also Czechoslovakia: first partition of; Czechoslovakia: second partition of; Poland: partition of Pastor, Ludwig 304n.48 Peace Conference see Paris Peace Conference Peace Handbooks 244n.131, 251n.165, 305nn.49–50 Peace of Brest-Litovsk 237 Peace of Lu¨beck 308n.4 Peace of Westphalia 215 peace settlements 131, 210, 254, 259n.221, 264, 270, 315 absence of, in Europe 9, 101, 103–5, 111 Peace Treaties 254, 257 peace treaties 96 Pear, Tom Hatherley 38 Peel Commission 119 Peers, E. Allison 296n.4, 296n.7, 298n.16, 300n.25 Peking 81 Peloponnese 278 Peloponnesian War vii, viii, 22, 99n.1 Penson, Lillian M. 306n.54, 335 Permanent Mandates Commission 119n.17 Perroy, Edouard, The Hundred Years’ War 344n.1, 361–2

399

Persia 75 see also Anglo Persian Oil Company Persian Empire 21, 33, 75 Persian Wars 33 Peter I Island 320n.70 Peter the Great 29, 32, 156n.85, 210n.6 Petrie, C., Diplomatic History 1713–1933 18, 333–5 Philip II, King 188, 299 Philippines 297n.9, 305n.49 Philosophical Depth 6, 59, 61, 341 see also Historical Reflection Piedmont 215, 283, 291 Piedmontese 348, 349 Pilsudski, J. 217, 220, 226n.62, 260 Pitt, Harry G. xiin.2 Pitt, William 78 Plato 68, 82, 97 plebiscites 279, 349 Plekhanov, G. V. 336 Pleven plan 91 Poland after Second World War 102, 103, 104 in concept of Europe 74, 79 in Eastern Europe 209n.3, 210, 211, 213n.21, 216–17, 218–19, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226n.62, 227, 231, 233–6, 237, 239, 241–2, 243, 245n.132, 247–9, 254, 257–8, 259, 260–1, 263, 265–6, 270, 271–3, 274–6, 278, 279, 280, 282–4, 288, 290, 291n.408, 292–3 and Germany 169, 170, 172n.184, 173–4, 175n.195, 177, 179, 185, 187, 188, 207 and Middle East 113n.2 partition of 168, 210, 211n.10, 211nn.12–13, 213n.21, 217n.24, 218n.28, 234n.96, 235n.99, 242, 323 populations 209n.2, 219n.34, 226n.61, 227n.67, 233n.91, 247n.143, 279n.338 Poland–France alliance 272 Poles 8, 87, 102, 103, 142, 168n.168, 171, 216, 217, 219, 223n.53, 224, 234, 235n.99, 241n.119, 243, 248, 272, 277, 279, 293 Polish conquest 236, 243 Polish corridor 102, 169, 234, 282, 326 Polish–Czechoslovak minorities treaty 275 Polish diplomacy 266 Polish–France alliance 249, 266 Polish–German entente 263 Polish–German frontiers 170 Polish–German Pact 182, 260–1 Polish–German question 207 Polish–German rapprochement 260 Polish–German treaty 267 Polish–Hungarian action 292

400

INDE X

Polish–Hungarian frontier 275, 280–1, 291, 293 Polish imperialism 221n.48, 259 Polish independence 211n.13, 248, 271–2 Polish–Lithuanian rapprochement 266 Polish–Lithuanian rule 222n.51 Polish–Lithuanian Union 213n.21, 218n.28 Polish Opposition 272n.293 Polish policy 234–5, 238, 248, 263, 271–2, 276 Polish Power 169 Polish problem 179, 207n.385, 292, 334 Polish provinces of Prussia 168–9 Polish republic 211n.13, 225 Polish–Rumanian alliance 238, 243, 248–9, 266, 274, 276 Polish–Rumanian boundary 276 Polish–Rumanian project 242 Polish–Rumanian relations 266 Polish–Russian borderlands 218–19 Polish–Russian dialectic 217n.24 Polish–Russian war 237, 248–9, 334 Polish sovereignty 265 Polish–Soviet non-aggression pact 276 Polish–Soviet Ukraine war 243 Polish–Soviet War 217 Polish suzerainty 211n.10, 234n.96 Polish–Sweden War 210n.7 political science 30, 41–2, 45, 54 political theory 2, 24, 41, 54, 65 Polybius vi, 28 Pomerania 102, 103 Pomeranian grenadier 95, 110 Pomorze 102, 235 Poole, De Witt C. 187n.267, 200n.347, 201n.351, 202n.357, 204n.369, 205 Popper, Karl 40 Portugal 11–12, 99, 297n.9, 299–300, 303–7, 320, 322 Portugal–Britain alliance 11–12, 299, 303–4, 306, 307 Portuguese colonies 319, 320n.73, 322n.81 Portuguese Empire 303–7, 321 Portuguese Government 300, 307 Portuguese–Hispano Union 299 Portuguese–Hispano War 299 Portuguese independence 12, 299, 305, 306 Portuguese monarchy 299, 306 Portuguese national renaissance 306 Portuguese policy 11–12, 299 Portuguese thalassocracy 304–5 Portuguese War of Secession 299 Posen 169, 174 positivism viin.3, 36, 59–60, 345 Potsdam Conference 9, 103, 113

power accession to 119, 149, 257, 335 becoming opportunist in expression 191–2 colonial 12, 83, 305, 306, 321 competition for 12, 87, 308 constellation of 242 and corruption 45 development of 79 economic 88, 89, 109 expansion of 191 of Hitler 149–60, 162, 184 identifying agents and ministers of 54, 66 literary 5, 56 littoral 246 military 88, 141, 167, 194, 269 nature of 293 passion for 35 persuasive 16, 152 “pinnacle of ” 10, 184 of politicians 151n.57 propaganda 141, 165 riparian 102 sea-power 223, 244, 268, 330 seizure of 46, 148, 157n.89, 158–9, 334 struggle for 41–2, 160, 308, 353–4 study of 30–1 unique 175 see also balance of power power relationships 5, 30–1, 42, 238 Powers see Axis Powers; dominant Power; Four Powers; Great Powers; non-European powers; Small Powers; three Powers; Western Powers Powicke, F. M. 7 Poznan 102 Prague 38n.35, 142, 155, 163, 174, 189n.275, 206, 207, 214, 242, 271, 276, 282, 286, 288–90, 291, 295, 306, 320 Prague, Austro-Prussian Treaty of 173n.188 principle of aggressive statescraft 10, 181 of balance of power 112 collective 16 declaration of international 71 of economy of immediate objectives 181 of freedom of passage for merchant vessels 268 for Imperial Germany 158 of international obligation 10, 133 of Monnet 90 national 215, 229, 232, 236, 239, 284 of Nazi diplomacy 190 neutrality as 310, 311 of preponderance 346 regarding big lies 161, 165

INDE X of self-determination 108, 233, 284n.362 supranational 8, 92 of Withdrawal-and-Return 156n.85 principles of diplomacy 128 of Europe 81, 103 of Hancock 51 of historiographical criticism 5–6, 56–67 of Hitler 153, 184–5, 186, 187–8, 191 of international law 70 of international politics 45 of interpretation 17, 347 of irredentism and of political alliance 242 of legitimacy 100n.2, 107 political 10, 128, 351 of race 146 rational and co-operative 309 of Suez expedition 127 supra-national 92 for treatment of Germany 104 propaganda 10, 11, 32, 33, 130, 141, 142, 152, 158, 159, 165, 167, 172, 181, 188–90, 193, 195, 204n.369, 227, 230, 235, 271, 277, 293n.418, 296, 297, 297n.9, 300, 302, 313, 354 Protestants 173, 221, 293 Protocols of Zion 14, 166n.157 Providence 190–1 Prussia 76, 95, 96, 102–3, 110–11, 141, 142–3, 145, 149, 168–9, 170, 172, 172n.184, 174, 179, 180n.219, 184–5, 191n.287, 210, 211n.13, 214, 215, 217, 224, 231n.81, 233–4, 237, 284n.361, 311, 315n.37, 348 Prussia/Austria–Denmark war 315n.37 Prussian–Austrian, Treaty of Prague 173n.188 Prussian corridor 234n.96 Prussian Diet 149 Prussian–Franco War 311, 355–6 Prussian tradition 171, 177, 178 Prussian Zollverein 176, 311 Puerto Rico 305n.49 Purchas, Samuel 73 Puritanism 197n.318 Puritan Revolution 339 Puritans 79, 81, 150 Pyrenees 302n.34 Pyrrhus of Epirus 225

Q Queen Maud Land 320n.70

R radicalism 281, 356 Ranke, Leopold von 2, 6, 7, 14, 47, 55, 60, 66, 74, 319, 360

401

Rapallo 193, 253–4, 399 Rapallo, Treaty of 253–4 Rashid Ali coup 120 Rathenau, Walter 140, 144, 145n.30 rational conduct of doubt 18, 343 Rationalist thinking ix, xvi Rationalist tradition ix, xv Rauschning, Hermann 140n.15 Germany’s Revolution 147n.39, 152n.62, 152n.64, 158n.97, 160n.111, 163n.130, 193n.296, 196n.316, 197n.317, 199n.337 Hitler Speaks 139n.15, 146n.36, 147n.37, 149n.46, 151n.61, 152n.66, 155n.83, 157n.88, 159n.104, 160n.108, 162nn.126–7, 163n.131, 163nn.129, 166n.157, 167nn.160– 1, 179n.212, 181n.224, 189n.277, 192n.289, 192n.291, 195n.310, 198n.330, 199n.338, 199n.340, 200nn.345–6, 293n.418, 294n.419 Raven, Daniel 26 Realism vii, ix realism viii, xiii, 23n.8, 96, 110, 163, 356 Realist behaviour viii Realist perception x Realist thinking ix, xvi Realist tradition xv realpolitik 139 Red Army 107, 217, 260n.222, 277 Reed, John 39n.39 Reformation 8, 79, 346, 360 see also Counter–Reformation Reich 158, 160, 168, 169, 172n.188, 173, 178, 180, 185, 199n.336, 201, 207, 223, 231n.81, 235, 270, 279, 282, 290 see also German Reich; Greater Reich; Second Reich; Third Reich Reich Defence Law 157 Reich Government 161 Reichsbank 161 Reichsdeutsch 175 Reichsmark 262 Reichstag 141n.18, 141n.20, 142, 154 Reichstag speech 137n.2, 154, 155n.80, 157, 166n.155, 192n.289, 202n.354, 206n.380, 235n.102, 291n.408 religion, wars of 7–8, 32, 70, 79, 188 Rengger, Nicholas xvii residual nationalism 8, 95 revealed religions 82, 97 revolutionary movements 42–3, 156, 198, 213n.19 revolutionary theory 133–4 “revolution,” category 46 revolutionism 349 Revolutionist thinking xvi Revolutionist tradition ix, xv

402

INDE X

Revolutions see French Revolution; German Revolution; Industrial Revolution; National Socialist Revolution; Russian Revolution Reynolds, Philip Alan 29n.17 Rhine 168, 169, 215, 216, 217, 242, 333 Rhineland 122, 143, 161, 170, 183–4, 201–2, 261, 263, 264, 267, 275, 287, 309n.6, 311, 312, 313n.28 Rhinelanders 174n.193 Rhodes 251 Rhodesia 305, 322n.81 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 101, 138, 160, 161, 187, 188n.269, 194n.305, 200–7, 268n.271, 271n.287, 280, 282, 284, 285n.372, 301n.31, 302n.34, 303n.40 Ricasoli 63 Richelieu, Cardinal 2, 121n.20, 237, 334 Riga 214 Riga Line 217 Riga, Treaty of 211n.10, 211n.13, 221n.49, 236, 243, 248 Rights of Man 80 Rimini 309 Ripka, Hubert 277n.325, 277n.327, 280n.340, 281n.346, 283nn.359–60, 285n.368, 290n.400 Risorgimento 51, 58, 63, 222n.50, 233, 333 Robespierre 81, 151n.58 Robinson, Jacob 238n.112 Robinson, Vandeleur 221n.47, 225n.59, 252n.172, 253n.175, 255n.187 Roman Empire see Holy Roman Empire romanità 297 Romanov Empire 11, 210 Roman Republic 10, 136, 147n.39 Romans 337 Rome 68, 73, 97, 107, 145, 147, 187, 199n.342, 202, 203, 204, 206, 214, 223n.54, 254, 258, 266, 273, 276, 280, 284, 293n.416, 301n.31, 303, 346 Rome–Berlin Axis 14, 183, 268, 280n.344 Rome, Treaty of 8, 92, 99, 109 Roosevelt, Franklin D 39, 86, 86n.2, 109n.21, 159, 181n.226, 191n.287, 360 Rosenberg, Alfred 160, 171, 177, 179, 318 Rothschild, Walter 118n.13 Rowse, A. L. 330, 363 The Use of History 18, 336–8 Ruanda-Urundi 320n.69 Ruhr 88–9, 90–1, 146, 166n.155, 194, 196–7, 263 see also International Ruhr Authority Ruhr–Lorraine–Saar– Luxembourg coal and steel industry 89, 109

Rumania 101–3, 104, 174, 175n.195, 207, 209n.3, 210n.4, 212, 215, 218, 222, 223, 225–6, 226n.62, 227, 230, 236, 239, 240, 243–5, 248–9, 250, 256, 257, 260, 261, 262, 265–6, 267, 273–5, 276, 278, 280, 283, 284, 285, 286–7, 290, 291 Rumanian–Czechoslovakia alliance 265 Rumanian–Franco alliance 249 Rumanian–German frontier 291 Rumanian independence 212n.15, 215, 244, 274, 287 Rumanian–Polish alliance 238, 243, 248–9, 266, 274, 276 Rumanian–Polish boundary 236 Rumanian–Polish project 242 Rumanian–Polish relations 266 Rumanian populations 209n.2, 217n.26, 218n.31, 221n.221, 226n.61, 233nn.91–2, 247n.143 Rumanian principalities 212n.15, 217, 218, 223 Rumanian provinces 218 Rumanians 209n.2, 216, 217, 223, 247n.143 Rumanian sovereignty 233, 265, 287 Russell, Bertrand 82 Russia after Second World War 102–3, 105, 106, 107, 110 in concept of Europe 70, 81 and Eastern Europe 11, 209, 210, 211nn.8–10, 211nn.11–12, 213n.21, 215, 216, 217n.24, 219, 221, 229n.71, 230, 235–6, 237, 239–40, 241, 242–7, 249, 250, 251n.166, 253n.177, 256, 257, 260–1, 263, 265, 266n.263, 267–8, 269, 270, 272–3, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278–9, 283, 283n.359, 284n.361, 286, 287, 294 and Germany 143, 147, 148, 166n.155, 168, 169, 175, 178–9, 191, 192–4, 196, 197n.318, 198n.332, 201, 204, 207 in historical background to united Europe 85, 91, 96, 97 in historical literature reviews 333, 334, 346, 351–2, 354 in memoirs of Eden 130, 132 and nature of international relations 23 in note on partition 323 studies on 2, 39n.39, 43, 54, 66, 104n.9, 179n.212, 258n.209 and Switzerland, Low Countries, Scandinavia 308n.4, 315, 318 see also Soviet Russia Russian–American relations 42 Russian Christendom 213n.21, 221 Russian civil war 105, 168 Russian Communism 35, 148

INDE X Russian conquest 235 Russian–Czechoslovak alliance 265 Russian–Czechoslovak entente 265 Russian Empire 167, 168, 169, 173, 178, 213, 223n.53, 228, 230, 243, 244, 315, 334 Russian entente 193 Russian–France alliance 193 Russian–German–Austrian alliance 323 Russian–German rapprochement 191, 291, 366 Russian Government 213n.21, 225 Russian–Hungarian relations 286n.377 Russian–Polish borderlands 218–19 Russian–Polish dialectic 217n.24 Russian–Polish war 237, 248–9, 334 Russian populations 168n.168 Russian Power 11, 213 Russian Revolution 147, 149n.46, 150, 171, 334, 359 Russians 39, 44, 87, 96, 107, 110, 127, 172, 218–19, 223n.53, 243, 337, 352, 354, 358 Russian–Turkish Treaties 244n.129, 246, 256 Russian–Turkish War 213 Ruthenes 218–19, 223, 230n.72, 280n.343, 288 Ruthenia 102, 214, 221n.48, 236, 273, 275n.311, 280–3, 286, 288, 289–90, 292, 293 see also Carpatho–Ruthenia Ruthenian autonomy 284 Ruthenian corridor 291 Ruthenian Government 283n.359 Ruthenians 219, 358 Ruthenia–Slovakia war 279, 280n.340

S Saar 89, 101, 109, 182 Salazar, António de Oliveira 12, 300, 306 Salisbury, Lord 77, 94, 113 Salonika 214, 250, 255, 270, 285 Salvador de Madariaga 298n.16 San Ildefonso, Treaty of 295n.3 Sarajevo 10, 129, 214 Sasseno 252 Saudi Arabia 130, 131, 134 Saud, King 130, 134 Savoy 51, 58, 181, 309n.5, 349 Savoyard policy 348 Saxons 137, 171, 174 Saxony 171 Scandinavia 12, 74, 99, 216, 239, 247n.145, 248, 308n.2, 314–19 see also Denmark; Iceland; Norway; Sweden Scandinavian alliance 314–15 Scandinavian civilization 319n.63 scapegoat 164, 167, 360

403

Schacht, Hjalmar 151, 157, 159n.106, 161, 206, 262, 284 Schlegel, Friedrich von 52, 63 Schleswig 101 Schleswig–Holstein 315n.37, 333 Schlieffen Plan 312n.22, 354 Schuman plan 78, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 109 Schuschnigg, Kurt von 183n.243, 226n.62 Schwarzenberger, Georg 20, 30–1, 33, 40 Scotland 70, 299 Scott, Michael 34 Second Reich 137, 168, 173n.188, 178, 196n.317 Second World War viii, 241, 243, 247n.142, 256n.196, 294, 324, 363 beginning of 79 as cause of movement towards united Europe 85 Czechoslovakia after 233, 294 Europe after 8–9, 13, 99–111 as greatest and worst war ever 99–101 as historical topic 26 Jews fighting with Britain in 123 and Munich settlement 278 outcome as concern to Jews 120 Poland and Yugoslavia fracturing in 222 wrecking of Europe in 83 security 16, 129, 133–4, 170, 180, 181, 245, 246, 255, 267, 268, 283, 311, 313, 322, 356 see also collective security Seeley, John Robert 2, 47n.18, 337 Seignobos, Charles 342, 345n.1 self-determination 74, 108, 134, 212, 215, 226, 228, 233, 242 Sellar, W. C. vin.1 Serbia 174, 210n.4, 212n.16, 214, 215, 218, 222, 230n.79, 250, 252, 253, 267n.265 Serbian Empire 211n.11 Serbian independence 212n.16, 215 Serbian Radical Party 226n.62 Serbian War of Independence 212n.16 Serbs 13, 209n.2, 218, 222, 223n.53, 224–5, 233n.91, 271, 285, 292 Seton-Watson, Hugh 154n.77, 175n.195, 218n.30, 219n.32, 220n.41, 220n.43, 225n.60, 227nn.64–5, 230n.79, 236nn.103– 4, 237n.109, 239n.113, 240n.118, 250n.161, 254n.183, 255n.187, 257n.204, 258n.212, 259n.221, 265n.256, 265n.258, 267n.268, 271n.288, 285n.371, 335 Seton-Watson, R. W. 174n.193, 221n.48, 224n.56, 243n.124 Seven Years War 179 Sèvres, Treaty of 228n.69, 230n.74, 233n.90, 245–6, 251

404

INDE X

Shakespearean mind 55, 66, 360 Shakespeare, William 39, 362 Shaw, George Bernard 35n.28 Shetland straits 318 Siberia 103, 175, 216, 229n.71, 333 Sicilians 349 Sicily 84, 87, 92, 97, 98n.23, 108, 214, 234, 278 Siennese 73 Silesia 102, 103, 169, 172n.184, 174, 211n.14, 219, 235, 241n.119, 287 Simoni, Leonardo 303n.41 Sinaia Conference 287 Skoropadski, P. 179 slaves 33, 100, 170 Slav interests 110 Slavs 142, 145, 170–1, 197, 225, 267, 294, 357 see also South Slav(s) Slav sea 224n.55 Slovakia 174, 209, 211n.14, 218, 222, 233, 236, 273, 275n.311, 276–7, 281–2, 284, 288, 289–90, 291n.408, 292 Slovakia–Ruthenia war 279, 280n.340 Slovak independence 288, 289 Slovaks 216, 217, 220n.43, 223, 233n.91, 279, 280n.343, 288, 292n.410 Slovenes 209, 218, 223n.53, 225, 233n.91, 358 Slovenia 174, 222 Slovenian hinterland 219 Small Powers 12, 135, 244, 245, 249, 266, 270–1, 280, 286, 286n.377, 293, 294, 307, 311, 320, 321 Smith, Adam 24, 27, 144n.27 Smith, Chris viii Smyrna 220n.38, 233n.90 social conflicts 220, 222–8, 241 Social Darwinism ix Socialism 159 see also National Socialism socialism 81, 82, 148 social sciences definition 21 differing from international relations 44 history, and international relations 1, 3, 4, 5, 21–3, 25, 36–8, 42 pragmatism of 24 Socrates 339 Somaliland 322n.81 Somervell, D.C. 327n*, 328 Somme 178 Sorel, Albert 2, 29, 181n.225, 215n.22, 323 South Africa 34n.25, 35, 77, 83, 94, 158, 306, 320n.73 South America 203, 320

Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) Conference 131 Southern, R. W. 53, 64 Southey, Robert 61, 100 South Slav(s) 131, 218, 222, 250 South Slav Union 231 sovereign states vii, viii, 31, 43, 210–11, 212n.18, 215, 238, 283n.360, 309n.5 sovereignty viiin.8, 8, 90, 91, 95, 110, 122, 133, 172n.188, 174n.190, 233, 234n.97, 235, 238, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 251, 263, 265, 270, 286–7, 305n.49, 309n.5, 311, 315n.38, 319, 322 Soviet army 272, 274 Soviet control over Iran 130 Soviet–Czechoslovak–Franco alliance 274 Soviet–Czechoslovak Pact 265 Soviet diplomacy 189n.275 Soviet Empire 96, 110 Soviet–Franco agreement 260n.222 Soviet–Franco Pact 170, 261 Soviet–German entente 268 Soviet–German Pact 187, 193, 261 Soviet Government 175, 245, 246n.141, 276n.318 Soviet invasion of Finland 189n.275 Soviet–Nazi Pact 149 Soviet policy 81, 130, 274 Soviet–Polish non-aggression pact 276 Soviet–Polish War 217 Soviet régime 148 Soviet Republic 188 Soviet rulers 352 Soviet Russia 193, 219, 236, 240n.116, 248, 249, 262, 330 delimitation of Eastern Europe against 242–7 and independence in Eastern Europe 211nn.8–13 remolding of past 38 studies on 54, 179n.212 Soviet Russia entente 260 Soviet Russia–France pact of mutual assistance 261 Soviet seizure of Czechoslovakia 91 Soviet sphere of influence 359 Soviet structure 104 Soviet territory 108 Soviet troops 274, 276 Soviet Ukraine 236, 283, 291n.407, 292 Soviet Ukraine–Polish war 243 Soviet Union ix, 8–9, 10, 11, 34n.27, 86n.2, 89n.6, 102–3, 107n.19, 111n.25, 113n.2, 193, 204n.372, 207, 213, 219n.34, 226n.61,

INDE X 243, 248, 255, 261, 265, 269, 277, 286n.377, 315n.38, 319 Spaak, Paul–Henri 7, 9, 92, 97–8, 108, 109, 321 Spaak Report 8, 92 Spain 11–12, 295–307 after Second World War 99 and Axis Powers 300–3 in concept of Europe 74, 76, 78, 80 Dutch war of independence against 78 and Eastern Europe 215 and Germany 183, 203 in historical literature reviews 337, 354, 356 manifesto against 79–80 nationalist 295–8 and nature of international relations 26–7, 29 and Portugal 299–300 and Switzerland, Low Countries, Scandinavia 308, 311n.13, 320n.70 span 6, 51, 52–3, 58, 59, 63, 64–5, 363 Spaniards 80, 298, 299, 300, 302 Spanish aggrandizement in Africa 297 Spanish American countries 296–7 Spanish–American War 295 Spanish Civil War 12, 13, 159, 164, 184, 295–6, 297, 298, 299–300, 301, 301n.31, 302n.37, 303, 304, 306–7 Spanish colonists 304 Spanish conquest of America 27 Spanish Empire 63, 295, 303–7, 308, 310, 334 Spanish–French War of the First Coalition 295n.3 Spanish Government 159, 296 Spanish Guinea 305n.49 Spanish hierarchy 301 Spanish independence 300 Spanish–Italy Pact 303 Spanish jurists 27 Spanish Monarchy 295n.3, 300 Spanish Nationalists 307 Spanish need for recuperation 298n.14 Spanish police, press, and propaganda 302 Spanish–Portuguese Union 299 Spanish–Portuguese War 299 Spanish régime 82 Spanish Sahara 305n.49 Spanish Succession War 100, 308n.4 Spanish Zones of Morocco 305n.49 Spartacus 147n.39 Speer, Albert 151, 201 Spengler, Oswald 69, 327, 337, 346 Stalin, Joseph 7, 24, 32, 87, 100n.2, 107–8, 113n.2, 115, 130, 149, 151nn.57–8, 163, 240n.116, 291n.407, 340 Stamboliski, A. 226n.62, 230–1, 250, 267

405

Starhemberg, E. R. 258 statesmanship 116, 163 Steed, Henry Wickham 179n.211 steel see coal and steel industry Stephens, W. R. W. 114 Stettin 102 St. Germain–en–Laye, Treaty of 228n.69 St Germain, Treaty of 229n.71 Stockholm 62, 214 Stockholm Peace Appeal 107–8 Stojadinovic, M. 239, 265n.258, 266–7, 271, 273, 276, 285 Strachey, Lytton 57, 60 Straits see Black Sea Straits Straits of Otranto 252 Strasser, Otto 149, 150n.49 Strauss, Leo 341 Stubbs, William 52 Sudan 125, 132, 134 Sudenten Germans 78, 94, 103, 155, 159, 264, 265n.258, 275, 279n.356 Sudenten German territory 287 Sudeten controversy 273 Sudetendeutsche Partei 264 Sudetenland 78n.21, 94n.20, 103, 162, 168, 209n.2, 275, 277, 279 Sudeten problem 242 Suez Canal Company 112, 113, 114–15, 116 Suez Canal crisis 6, 9–10, 112–17, 122–3, 126–7, 129, 132, 134–5 Suez Emergency Committee 114 Sulla 147n.39 Sumatra 315n.37, 320n.68 Sumerian Civilization 147 Sumner, B. H. 2, 175n.194, 353 Suñer, R. S. 296, 297, 301, 303n.42, 303n.45, 307n.60 Surinam 320n.68 Svalbard 320n.70 Swabians 174–5 Sweden 12, 99, 210, 211nn.8–10, 234, 237, 245n.132, 248, 308, 314–15, 318, 319 Sweden–Polish War 210n.7 Swedes 224, 311n.8 Swedish Empire 217 Swiss Confederation 308n.4, 310 Swiss Confederation independence 215 Swiss–French wars 308n.4 Swiss independence 310n.13 Swiss neutrality 309n.6, 310, 311, 312, 313–14, 316 Swiss statehood 310n.13 Switzerland 1, 12, 99, 173n.188, 209, 216, 217, 308, 309–11, 312, 313–14, 316, 319

406

INDE X

Syme, Ronald 54, 66 Syria 120n.18, 131, 247n.142 Szálasi, Ferenc 219

T Taborsky, Edward 38n.35 Tacitus 54, 60, 62n.19, 66 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de 71, 130 Tanganyika 322n.81 Tannenberg 13, 210n.7, 224 Tanzania 83n.30 Tatars of the Crimea 222n.51 Tawney, R. H. 24 Taylor, A. J. P. 13, 18, 45, 54, 65–6, 114, 349, 366 Beaverbrook 112n.1 Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman 355–6 The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815 142n.22, 168n.167, 171n.177, 176n.196, 178n.206, 197n.318, 357n.1 The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria– Hungary 14n.20, 16n.29, 172n.186, 235n.100, 357–8 Rumours of Wars 13n.18, 351–2 The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 54n.9, 66n.27, 353–4 technical history 14, 38, 352, 359–60 Temperley, H. W. V. 335, 353 British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914 171n.176, 252n.170, 299n.20, 305n.53, 306n.55, 315n.36 Foundations of British Policy 306n.54 A History of the Peace Conference of Paris 101n.5, 148n.41, 211n.8, 306n.56, 315n.38 Temple, Henry John, 3rd Viscount Palmerston 2, 40n.41, 71, 333, 334 Temple of Jupiter 52, 63 Templewood, Lord 300 territorial access 236 territorial accession 118 territorial acquisition 232n.85, 243, 282 territorial advantage 243, 272 territorial aggrandizement 232n.85, 296, 304 territorial arrangements 242 territorial claims 154, 155, 232n.87, 251n.166, 256, 266 territorial commitment 266 territorial contiguity 235, 239, 240 territorial demands 296n.8 territorial expansion 323 territorial frontiers 253

territorial gainers 230 territorial gain(s) 8, 102–3, 266, 291 territorial guarantee 292n.410 territorial integrity 283 territorial interests 322 territorial organization 101 territorial policy 178 territorial possession(s) 305n.50, 309, 323 territorial principle 232n.85 territorial rearrangement 237 territorial revolutions 215 territorial settlement 102–3, 105 territorial unity 234 Teschen 235, 248, 273, 276n.319, 279 Test Ban Treaty 111 Teutonic Knights 170–1, 193, 210, 217 Teutonic mind 143 Teutonic Order 174n.191, 210n.7, 211nn.9–10, 224, 234nn.96–7 Teutonic peoples 178n.209, 180n.219 Teutonic sentiments 313 Third Reich 11, 137, 138n.4, 141–3, 180n.219, 192, 193, 268 Third World War x, 4, 25, 39n.38 Thirty Years War 210n.7, 224, 293–4, 308n.4, 331 Thompson, Dorothy 149n.47 Thompson, Kenneth W. xiin.2, 45 Thomson, James 135n.14 Thorn, Treaty of 234n.96 three Powers 135, 286, 323 Thucydides vi, vii–viii, viin.4, xvi, 2, 6, 22, 28, 33, 55, 57, 60, 66, 99n.1 Thurber, James 358n.2 Tilsit, Treaty of 234n.96 Timor 305n.50, 320n.68 Tito 357 “Titoism” 38n.35 Tito, Josip Broz 39n.38 Tittoni, T. 251 Tocqueville, Alexis de 55, 67, 144, 351 Tokyo 186 Tordesillas, Treaty of 304n.48 totalitarian consolidation 148 totalitarian form 143 totalitarian German campaign 188 totalitarian government 141 totalitarian party 141 totalitarian régime 147, 270, 282 totalitarian state 141, 298 Tout, T. F. 361 Toynbee, Arnold J. 16, 19, 29, 37, 53, 64, 69, 104 appreciation of 324–6 Civilisation on Trial 16n.30

INDE X The Issues in British Foreign Policy 322n.83 Nationality and the War 234n.95, 245n.135, 247n.144 principle of Withdrawal–and– Return 156n.85 A Study of History 53, 64, 69n.2, 143n.25, 145n.31, 167n.159, 168n.166, 171n.182, 222n.50, 288n.392, 309n.6, 314n.34, 319n.63, 319n.65, 324, 325, 327–8 Survey of International Affairs 24n.10, 139n.14, 211n.9, 242, 295n.1, 333 The Western Question in Greece and Turkey 220n.38, 241n.119 The World after the Peace Conference 222n.52, 230n.72, 247n.143, 310n.12, 311n.17, 315n.42 The World in March 1939 ixn.13, xivn.13, 1n.3, 38n.34, 140nn.16–17, 166n.156, 172nn.187–8, 176n.198, 209n.1, 233n.92, 248n.151, 291n.407, 303n.41, 304n.48, 307n.59, 308n.2, 315n.41, 320nn.70–2, 321n.76 trade union movement 165 tragedy 33, 66, 85, 225, 358 Transjordan 119n.15 Transylvania 101, 174, 212n.18, 214, 217, 221n.48, 233, 240, 280, 290, 291n.409 see also Bukovina–Transylvania railway treason 38n.35, 220n.43 Treaty of Versailles see Versailles, Treaty of (Versailles Settlement) Trelles, Camilo Barcia 296n.5, 297n.9 Trent 251 Trevelyan, G. M. 51–2, 57, 336, 349, 360 Trevor-Roper, H. R. 140n.15, 146n.36, 151n.56, 151n.59, 151n.61, 160n.107, 162n.124, 167n.132, 180n.219, 191n.287, 192n.290 Trianon Hungary 225, 233n.92 Trianon, Treaty of 174, 228n.69, 229n.71 Trieste 127, 176, 214, 219, 251, 253, 273, 292, 351 tripartite alliance 207n.384 Tripartite Declaration 121, 123 tripartite military pact 206 tripartite treaty 255 Triple Alliance 197–8 Trotsky, Leon 28, 39, 66n.28, 81, 188n.273, 229n.71, 334 Truman, Harry S. 48, 113n.2 Tunisia 303 Turkey 64, 75, 76, 124, 176, 209n.3, 210, 210n.4, 211n.11, 213, 227n.62, 227n.67, 228n.69, 229n.71, 230n.74, 230n.79, 233nn.91–2,

407

237, 238n.112, 239, 244, 245–7, 247n.142, 249, 251, 255–6, 267–8, 278, 285, 286, 323, 354 Turkish–Anglo–Franco treaty of alliance 247n.142 Turkish conquests 13, 172, 174, 223–5 Turkish diplomacy 267, 287 Turkish Empire 75, 222, 223 Turkish–Franco declaration of mutual assistance 247n.142 Turkish–Greek rapprochement 255–6 Turkish–Greek War 230 Turkish hinterland 220n.38 Turkish invasion 216 Turkish–Iraqi frontier 246 Turkish–Iraqi Pact 132 Turkish–Italian pact of friendship 247n.142 Turkish–Italian War 251 Turkish menace 172 Turkish Power 212n.18, 362 Turkish–Russian alliance 246 Turkish–Russian Treaties 244n.129, 246, 256 Turkish–Russian War 213 Turkish security 246, 267 Turkish sovereignty 245 Turkish suzerainty 212n.15, 212n.18 Turkish treaties 228n.69 Turks 13, 79, 174, 211n.11, 212nn.15–18, 213n.19, 216, 220n.38, 223n.53, 224, 233n.90, 233n.92, 241n.120, 246, 256n.200, 330 Tuscany 51, 133

U Uganda 58n.7, 322n.81 Ukraine 11, 21, 100, 169, 178n.209, 179, 180n.219, 197n.318, 200n.343, 213, 218, 222n.51, 236, 243, 283, 283n.360, 284n.361, 289n.392, 291n.406, 291n.408, 293 see also Carpatho–Ukraine; Soviet Ukraine Ukrainian Government 283n.360 Ukrainian guerrillas 290 Ukrainian independence 11, 213n.21 Ukrainian national consciousness 213n.21, 218 Ukrainian National Democratic Party 284 Ukrainian nationalism 221n.48, 222, 236, 273, 282, 283, 358 Ukrainian question 207, 227n.64 Ukrainians 102, 209n.2, 216, 218–19, 220, 223n.53, 283, 284, 358 Ukrainian territory 236, 265 Ukrainian Soviet Republic 102, 213n.21 Union of Soviet Republics 229n.71

408

INDE X

united Europe and British Government 93 and development of supranational principle 92 emergence of free 96, 110 faith in x historical background 8, 85–98 immediate causation 85 notion of belonging to one larger civilization viii–ix as product of three forces 8 values of 8 United Kingdom 34n.27, 84n.33, 87n.4, 88n.5, 93n.17, 103n.7, 109n.23, 111n.25, 113n.2, 114n.6, 172n.187, 226n.61 see also Britain United Nations (UN) xviii, 1, 23, 41n.*, 44n.5, 45, 48, 80, 87, 92n.14, 106, 106n.16, 107, 123, 134 United Provinces 215, 308n.4 United States 16, 23, 70, 75, 87, 88n.5, 89n.6, 96, 103n.7, 110, 111n.25, 113n.2, 116, 121, 124, 131, 133, 159, 163, 171, 189nn.275–6, 226n.61, 245, 292, 297, 305n.49, 319, 319n.67, 320 see also America universal mission 8, 79–80 universalist claims 8, 79–80, 82–3 Unknown Soldier 150 Urals 79, 106, 110, 216 Urbino 309 USSR 29n.17, 43, 102 see also Soviet Union Ustasa–IMRO alliance 255 utopianism xiii, 81 Utrecht 333 Utrecht, Treaty of 103 Utrecht, Union of 311n.13 Uzhorod 281

V Valois 237 Valona 252, 253 values of European civilization 82 international society based on common 7 uncertain, in Europe 84 of united Europe 8, 96 Western 8, 81, 346 van Creveld, Martin viin.3 Velchev, D. 226n.62, 231, 250, 257, 267 Venetian domains 99 Venetians 223n.54

Venezia Giulia 101 Venice 199 Venizelos, E. 220n.40, 226, 250n.159, 265 Venizelos–Tittoni agreement 251 Verdun 179n.209 Versailles 139, 155, 157, 183, 186n.259, 201, 247n.145, 263, 318 Versailles frontiers 8, 101–3, 104, 218 Versailles system 238, 242, 249 Versailles, Treaty of (Versailles Settlement) 89, 102–3, 105, 170, 178, 183, 228–36, 229n.71, 235, 236, 244, 245n.132, 247, 271, 287, 309n.6, 310, 311, 312, 321 Vienna 106, 107, 130, 137, 150, 153n.69, 157, 166, 178, 182n.228, 197, 214, 220, 221, 223n.53, 269, 280, 290, 310 Vienna Award 101, 138, 242, 280, 291nn.408–9 Vienna Conference 281 Vienna, Congress of 103, 108, 128n.7, 168, 295n.3 Treaty 299n.19, 312n.21 Vienna settlement 283, 314 Vilna 102n.6, 214, 219, 248, 253, 261, 292 Viner, Jacob 54, 65 virtù 191 Voegelin, Eric xvii Voigt, F. A. 164n.136, 195n.310 Voivodina 174, 233, 240 Volga 175, 177n.195 Volksbund fu¨r das Deutschtum in Ausland (VDA) 158 Voltaire 7, 68, 70, 72

W Wallachia 212n.15, 214 Wallas, Graham 35n.28 Wallenstein, Albrecht von 32, 190 Walloons 313 war characteristics of, in Eastern Europe 240–1 danger of 96–7, 162 declaration of 115, 189n.275, 240 just causes of 80, 128–9 of the masses 150 and peace, dividing line between 188 and peace, problem of 35 politics of 33 “as reasonable price to pay” 75 undeclared 188 “unfettered right of resort to” viii unfought 271 Warsaw 211n.13, 214, 217, 237, 243, 272, 273, 275, 351

INDE X Warsaw Pact 105 Washington 77, 86, 94, 95, 108, 109, 110 Washington Conference 334 weapons see armaments/arms/weapons Webb, Sidney and Beatrice 24, 35, 175n.194 Webster, C. K. 71n.5, 295n.3, 310n.9 Webster, Sir Charles 13, 40, 77n.19, 351 Wedgwood, Cicely Veronica, Dame 18, 61n.16, 331–2 The King’s Peace, 1637–1641 52n.4 The Thirty Years War 145n.32, 331 Wedgwood, Jos 364 Wehrmacht 201 Wehrmacht, war of 184n.249, 204 Weimar foreign policy 260 Weimar Republic 89–90, 141, 143, 149, 156, 159, 192 Weir, Michael 121n.20 West Africa 134, 304, 305n.50, 306, 319n.66 Western alliance 69 Western Christendom 69, 172, 211nn.13–14, 212n.16, 212n.18, 219, 221, 223, 224, 304 Western civilization ix, 7, 8, 97, 143, 147n.39, 149, 162, 163, 299n.17, 319, 325, 327 Western European civilization 222n.51 Western European creed 216 Western European Union (WEU) 88n.4, 92, 93, 104n.12, 127, 133 Western New Guinea 134 Western Powers ix, 89–90, 99, 102, 107, 161, 164, 176, 181, 182, 182n.229, 193, 197n.318, 204, 243, 244, 246, 260, 261n.255, 262, 267, 271, 275–8, 280n.344, 281, 289, 311, 316, 317, 320, 321 Western Union 87n.4, 90, 109 Western Union alliance 109n.23 Western Union Defence Organization (WUDO) 87n.4 West European community 92 West European heavy industry 89 West European neutrals 308 West European states 47n.19, 83, 309n.5 Westphalia, Congress of 103 Westphalian settlement 215 Westphalia, Peace of 215 West, Rebecca 225n.58, 229n.71, 259n.220, 267n.265 Wheeler-Bennett, John W. 2, 14, 139n.10, 188n.273, 206n.380, 221n.46, 263n.240, 277n.328, 289n.394 Wheeler, Nicholas J. xvii Whitehall 95, 110 Whitehead, Alfred North 340–1

409

White Mountain see Battle of White Mountain White Paper 119 White Russia 102, 214, 243 White Russians 216, 219, 223n.53 White Terror 62, 226n.62 Wight, Martin The Balance of Power viin.2, ix, xivn.13, xvn.13, xvii, 1n.3, 291n.407 Fortune’s Banter 15, 123 Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory xiin.*, xv, 1n.1, 31n.19, 74n.12 historical scholarship 6–7 on history and international relations 1–19 International Relations and Political Philosophy ixnn.9–10, ixn.12, 1n.3, 2n.4, 15n.23, 23n.8, 24n.9, 31n.19, 34n.25, 47n.18, 71n.5, 100n.3, 123n.23, 133n.12, 229n.70, 291n.407 International Theory: The Three Traditions ixn.11, xiin.1, xv, xvn.14, xvn.17, xvin.21, xviii, 17n.34, 23n.8, 31n.19, 44n.6, 71n.5, 106n.16, 127n.5 Power Politics ixn.13, xivn.13, xv, 77n.17, 323n.* scholarly stature xii–xviii Systems of States xiin.2, xv, 31n.20, 75n.14, 105n.15 see also Butterfield, Herbert: Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics; The World in March 1939 Wilhelm III, Kaiser 251 William II, Emperor 141, 170n.176, 334 William III, King (William of Orange) 360 Williams, Basil 78n.22 William the Silent (William I, Prince of Orange) 331, 360 Wilson, Arnold 119 Wilson, Edward 337 Wilson, Woodrow 38n.35, 101, 102, 245, 265, 293, 334 Winch, Michael 281n.346, 283n.358, 288n.391, 289n.392 Wingate, Orde 364 Wiskemann, Elizabeth Czechs and Germans 231n.81, 235n.100, 264nn.250–2, 293n.418 The Rome–Berlin Axis 14, 147n.38, 152n.63, 184n.251, 198n.335, 199n.336, 199n.341, 271n.287

410

INDE X

Wiskemann, Elizabeth (Continued) Undeclared War 179n.211, 188n.274, 220n.42, 221nn.44–5, 227n.66, 262n.236, 267n.265, 271n.268, 285n.371, 286n.378, 290n.400, 292n.410 Wolf, K. H. 166n.156 Woodward, Sir Ernest Llewellyn 28, 126, 277n.145, 363 Woolf, Leonard 35 Wordsworth, William 326n.1, 339 The World in March 1939 Eastern Europe in ixn.13, ixn.17, xivn.13, xvii, 1, 7, 11, 12–13, 166n.156, 172nn.187–8, 173n.188, 173n.190, 176n.197, 178n.208, 182n.229, 183n.239, 183n.241, 183n.243, 188nn.271–2, 193n.294, 207n.385, 209–94, 308n.2, 315n.41 Germany in ixn.13, xin.17, xivn.13, xvii, 1, 7, 10–11, 38n.34, 137–208, 233n.92 Spain and Portugal in xin.17, 1, 11–12, 295–307, 320n.72 Switzerland, the Low Countries and Scandinavia in xin.17, 1, 12, 173n.188, 205n.378, 209n.1, 210n.5, 210n.7, 248n.151, 289n.396, 306n.59, 308–22 see also Toynbee, Arnold J.: The World in March 1939 World Peace Movement 107–8 world state 27, 41, 196 Wright, Quincy 253n.177 Wroclaw Conference 107 Wu¨rttemberg 173n.188

Y Yalta 278, 360 Yeatman, R. J. vin.1

Yost, David S. ixnn.9–10, xiin.*, xvn.15, xviiin.27, 1n.3, 23n.8, 24n.9, 31n.19, 34n.25, 47n.18, 100n.3, 123n.23, 133n.12, 229n.70, 291n.407 Young, G. M. 55, 60, 67 Yugoslav army/forces 259, 292n.411 Yugoslav–Bulgaria pact of friendship 267 Yugoslav–Bulgaria rapprochement 257 Yugoslav Communist leader 39n.38 Yugoslav–Franco alliance 249 Yugoslav Government 276 Yugoslav–Hungary frontier 266, 269 Yugoslavia 101, 174, 175n.195, 207, 209nn.2–3, 212, 218, 222, 225, 226n.62, 227n.67, 229n.71, 230–1, 233nn.91–2, 235–6, 240, 249, 250, 253, 254–7, 258–9, 260, 261, 262, 265–7, 269, 273–4, 276n.322, 284, 285–6, 292 Yugoslavia–Italy–France treaty 255 Yugoslavian conquest 285 Yugoslav–Italy alliance 285–6 Yugoslav–Italy Pact 267n.265 Yugoslav–Italy relations 266 Yugoslav–Italy Treaty 253 Yugoslav Macedonia 218n.29, 230n.73 Yugoslav prestige over Trieste 127 Yugoslavs 101, 209n.2, 216, 247n.143, 253, 271

Z Zilinsky (Codreanu) 220–1 Zimmern, Sir Alfred 40 Zionism 326 Zionist aspirations 9 Zionist claim 121 Zionist policy 120 Zog, King 226n.62 Zogu, Ahmed Bey 226n.62, 252