World Politics in The Interwar Years 1919-1939

The main goal of the Paris Peace Conference was to design the post-war international system and determine the fate of the defeated countries of the war.

The main decisions taken at the Paris Peace Conference included the establishment of the League of Nations, war reparations, overseas or colonial possessions of the Germans and Ottomans, the drawing of new national boundaries, and the preparation of five treaties imposed on the losers that later proved fatal to forging a lasting peaceful order.

The Soviet Union remained just beyond the capitalist world and was mostly immune to the effects of the Great Depression. They faced no unemployment problem and, due to the five year plans and massive industrialization between 1929 and 1940, their industrial production tripled. While the Soviets manufactured 5% of the world’s products in 1929, this increased to 18% in 1938. Indeed, Soviet manufacturing in 1938 exceeded that of the US, Germany, Britain, France and Italy combined. According to many, then, where capitalism failed, communism prospered.

Democratic governments over the world were forced to resign, while military coups in Latin America became an almost daily occurrence. With 13 million unemployed in 1932, it was not long before Germany succumbed to ultranationalist, populist, and aggressive promises of redemption. When the Nazi Party was founded, for example, 85% of its members were unemployed. Under the Nazi leadership, unemployment in Germany fell to 1.7 million by 1935 and to roughly zero in 1938. Meanwhile, the use of force and the imposition of faith became popular foreign policy practices, both at the expense of collective security and the League of Nations. Meanwhile, inward-looking Britain and France felt compelled to appease this German revisionism, a mistake that eventually resulted in the Second World War.

Revisionism is the desire to alter the international status quo in a significant way through the violation of treaties and the imposition of territorial change by coercion or the use of force. It is adopted by states that are dissatisfied with the prevailing status quo.

Irredentism is a territorial claim by one sovereign state against another, aimed at equalizing the boundaries of its ‘nation’ (or ethnicity) with the borders of the state. It carries a nationalist and populist agenda to liberate “brothers and sisters suffering under a foreign dominance” and claims the recovery of ethnic frontier groups lying outside the territory of the nation-state. It is a version of revisionism whose aim of expanding its territory comes under the pretext of liberating and reuniting with long-lost relatives.

Bandwagoning is to side with the rising revisionist power contrary to traditional notions of the balance of power, which counter-alliances historically try and prevent .Generally exercised by lesser powers for offensive or defensive purposes, one either joins an alliance with the expected winner to share in the spoils of victory or, in the case of defensive bandwagoning, to escape invasion oneself.

Appeasement is the policy of buying off a potential aggressor through negotiation and compromise in order to prevent an armed conflict, a policy Britain and France applied to both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

The Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938 is the most important example of appeasement. Agreed to by Germany, Italy, France, and Britain, it permitted Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in Western Czechoslovakia.

The invasion of Manchuria was the League of Nations’ first serious challenge, against which it clearly failed. Manchuria was under Chinese jurisdiction, but China did not have physical control over the territory. The lawlessness in Manchuria also hurt Japanese trade interests, which helped push Japan to take action. Whatever the case, the invasion marked the collapse of collective security, as there was no united action against Japanese aggression.

The political and economic factors clearing the path for World War II were

• the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, which was seen as unjust and humiliating by the Germans;

• the Great Depression, which challenged the world economic order and pushed nation- states to self-sufficiency and protectionism;

• the rise of Hitler and his revisionist policies;

• the unsuccessful French and British appeasement policy towards aggressors; and

• the failure of the League of Nations and the concept of collective security.

The Soviet-Nazi Non-Aggression Pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after the foreign ministers of the USSR and Germany, was an example of Soviet bandwagoning that included both offensive and defensive strategies. It was concluded on August 23, 1939. However, it was also an example of offensive bandwagoning because the USSR had its own revisionist motives and aimed at sharing the spoils of victory.

Collective Security refers to the principle of maintaining peace between states by mobilizing international opinion to condemn aggression. It is commonly seen as one of the chief purposes of international organizations such as the League of Nations.