War Roared Into Vacuum Formed by a Sidestepping of Statesmanship

Fifty years ago, on Sept. 1, 1939, the German training ship Schleswig-Holstein shelled Polish positions near Gdansk--the beginning of World War II.

Conventional wisdom holds that appeasement--a pervasive failure to stand up to Adolf Hitler--rendered war inevitable. This is both true and superficial. Hitler started the war. But the international order found itself at the mercy of a single maniacal leader because of an abdication of statesmanship spanning two decades following the Versailles settlement of 1919.

To have stability, an international system must have two components: a balance of power and a generally accepted principle of legitimacy. A balance of power makes the overthrow of international order physically difficult, deterring a challenge before it occurs. A broadly based principle of legitimacy produces reluctance to assault the international order. A stable peace testifies to a combination of physical and moral restraints.

Both these principles were ignored by the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain that ended World War I. Before 1914, European policy was conducted by five great powers--Britain, France, Germany plus the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. The continental nations were contiguous and intertwined by complex alliances. But the Treaty of St. Germain dissolved one of the major countries--the Austro-Hungarian Empire--into constituent nationalities, producing a plethora of small states. The Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany and gave it no stake in the international order. Concurrently, the Russian Empire was first wracked by revolution and then ostracized because of its outcome.

Thus the European balance of power was in effect two countries: France and Britain. But Britain had rarely engaged itself on the Continent--especially not on the side of the strongest nation which, at least on paper, appeared to be France. France, on the other hand, had suffered the heaviest wartime casualties in relation to population. She lacked the means and will to be the arbiter of Europe, unable to face the prospect of maintaining the European balance alone. Hence France’s idea of balance was to weaken the feared neighbor. Germany had to give up Alsace-Lorraine to France and territories in the East to Poland; the Rhineland was demilitarized and the German army severely limited in size and equipment. Finally, large and eventually unpayable reparations were imposed on Germany.

So long as Germany remained disarmed, there was a conceivable balance. But there was no precedent of a major country remaining permanently disarmed. Contrary to the victors’ intentions, once arms limitations were jettisoned, the Treaty of Versailles left Germany stronger geopolitically than before 1914 when its eastern neighbors had been Russia and Austria-Hungary. After 1919 Germany bordered only much weaker countries in the East: on Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria, and behind them Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia.

The Treaty of Versailles was too severe to be accepted by Germany but not severe enough to prevent Germany from challenging it. World War I, fought to prevent German hegemony over Europe, ended by leaving Germany in a better strategic position to achieve its eastern ambitions than it had been before.

Germany was not the only irredentist country. The Soviet Union, excluded from European diplomacy, was always prepared to play the capitalists off against each other. In the ‘20s, it facilitated secret German army training on Soviet soil in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. In the ‘30s, Stalin made overtures to Hitler; when rebuffed, he made an alliance with France, only to return to his first option in the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact.

Finally, when the borders of the Austro-Hungarian successor states were drawn, it became apparent that the principle of self-determination frequently clashed with the requirements of security. In the name of defense, Germans, Poles and Hungarians were incorporated into Czechoslovakia, Hungarians into Romania and still other minorities into Yugoslavia. In the end nearly as many people were living under foreign rule as had in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and most of the successor states had revisionist aims of their own.

In retrospect it is strange that no statesman at the time addressed the question of whether it was possible to maintain a settlement that excluded the two most populous continental countries: Russia and Germany. Britain probably would have preferred to placate Germany but could not get French support. France wanted to keep Germany impotent but could not obtain British support. The result was indecisiveness and evasion--a built-in policy of too little too late.

The faraway United States had championed the principle of self-determination while advancing the concept of collective security. A world community assembled in the League of Nations would deal with threats to peace and modify imperfect arrangements by consensus. This doctrine assumed that threats to peace were always unambiguous, that all nations had an identical vested interest in opposing them and that they would agree on appropriate measures. History, however, offers no support for any of these propositions. Nor did the subsequent history of either the League of Nations or the United Nations. In any event, the United States chose not to join its own creation.

Thus World War I, advertised as the war to end all wars, produced a peace treaty without either a balance of power or an agreed sense of legitimacy. The Versailles settlement was fated to collapse--either into war or into German hegemony over Eastern Europe.

Of all the countries, France was in the most tragic position. Drained by the bloodletting, caught between memory and premonitions, France tried a diplomacy that sought to extract German assurances without quite believing them. One result was the Treaty of Locarno in 1923, hailed at the time as a breakthrough toward peace: Germany guaranteed its western frontier with France but refused to give the same guarantee to its eastern neighbors. In other words, in what seemed an act of reconciliation, Germany was actually underscoring its challenge to the postwar system by implying that the Treaty of Versailles was not valid unless reaffirmed, and establishing, with the acquiescence of Britain and France, two kinds of frontiers in Europe--some guaranteed by Germany, some not.

Then came another step on the road to substituting verbal assurance for strategic balance: The statesmen of the world conceived the Kellogg-Briand Pact, this time with U.S. participation. In it all nations abjured recourse to war, which, unfortunately, their actions had made structurally more likely.

Eastern Europe was being left to its own devices--in fact if not yet in theory--as evidenced by France’s building of the Maginot Line. For the mentality behind the Maginot Line consigned Eastern Europe to German domination once Germany rearmed. France could prevent Germany from implementing a revisionist policy in the East only if it had a credible option of invading Germany. But the Maginot Line signaled the opposite--that France would resist, if at all, by conducting a war of attrition from behind its fortifications. Strategy and foreign policy had fallen totally out of phase.

Hitler relentlessly exploited the weaknesses and guilt feelings of his opponents. A succession of Western politicians returned from meetings with Hitler repeating his professed desire for peace. Within two years of coming to power in 1933, Hitler had abrogated the Versailles limitations on German arms, arguing that other nations had not kept their promises to follow Germany on the road to disarmament. Europe took false refuge in the belief that Hitler’s challenges resulted from specific grievances rather than from structural defects of the system and the Nazi commitment to aggression.

In my mind the turning point--making war inevitable--was not Munich in 1938 but 1936 German reoccupation of the Rhineland. So long as the Rhine’s west bank was demilitarized, Germany ran the risk that a move east might lead to French occupation of the Rhineland, Maginot Line notwithstanding. But once Germany was in a position to construct fortifications on its western frontier, Britain and France could protect East European nations only by the threat of a long war during which France’s allies in Eastern Europe were certain to be overrun.

One reason for the fecklessness of Western response was that the balance of power principle clashed with the democracies’ moral convictions. The former counseled resistance; the latter produced restraint and reliance on Hitler’s assertions of good will. From the perspective of equilibrium, this was the time for France to act, alone if necessary, since German rearmament had not yet progressed very far. From the perspective of legitimacy--which dominated British thinking--Germany was only exercising rights to defend its national territory accorded to every other state. Since France refused to act without Britain, it had to be satisfied with a strengthened British commitment to resist a German attack on France. This was, of course, no solace to France’s allies in Eastern Europe.

The shambles of the balance of power was accompanied by the collapse of the doctrine of collective security. When Mussolini attacked Abyssinia in 1935, the League of Nations dithered. It applied sanctions, but so half-heartedly as to demonstrate impotence rather than determination. The only lasting result was a rapprochement between Italy and Germany, which increased the freedom of maneuver of the Nazis.

These events sealed Eastern Europe’s fate. Only one issue remained: Would Hitler be patient enough to dominate Eastern Europe without war? Hitler was not patient--nor anxious to avoid war. On the contrary, he sought it.

In March, 1938, Austria was annexed. The democracies did not resist. Once again considerations of equilibrium counseled one course, legitimacy another. The so-called Anschluss further undermined the balance of power by extending Germany’s frontiers toward the Balkans and encircling Czechoslovakia, a French ally. On the other hand, Austria’s population spoke German and the vast majority favored joining the Third Reich.

A few months later it was Czechoslovakia’s turn. Munich has gone down into history as a term of special opprobrium. But in fact it applied the premises of foreign policy established for nearly two decades. Once again the principle of self-determination--the desire of 3.5 million Germans inside Czechoslovakia to join their compatriots across the border--overrode the principle of equilibrium. A democratic ally was sacrificed.

In fairness, even strong and disillusioned leaders might have calculated by then that they needed time to rearm. The fatuous words of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain upon his return from Munich--”peace in our time”--obscured the reality that he did not act on them. Instead, he spurred rearmament, especially in air power. When Hitler dismembered the remnant of Czechoslovakia six months later, Britain did not flinch. With both the balance of power and the principle of legitimacy under assault, Britain reverted to its tradition of opposing continental hegemony.

Within a week of the German annexation of Bohemia and Moravia, Britain gave a guarantee to Poland. No further German expansion without major war.

But by then the evasions of two decades had condemned the Western democracies to facing such a war alone. For Stalin saw no difference between the Western democracies and Hitler, and he had no stake in the existing system. His nightmare was that the democracies would deflect toward the east what he considered the inevitable imperialist civil war. For a while he feared that Munich had opened the gate for such a course. But he must have been relieved by the British guarantee to Poland. For Germany could not attack the Soviet Union without crossing Poland. Hence Stalin needed pay no price for bringing Britain and France into a war to prevent German expansion eastward--the only war in which Stalin was prepared to engage himself. The Hitler-Stalin pact sealed the fate of the precarious peace for which more than 20 million had died two decades before. Two countries ignored in the Versailles settlement made common cause to destroy it.

History is the only experience on which statesmen can draw. But it does not teach automatically. It demonstrates the consequences of comparable situations; each generation has to determine what situations are in fact comparable. Yet it is possible to say our generation faces a problem similar to the one that engaged statesmen 70 years ago--how to construct a stable international order.

Most of the postwar period has been characterized by a relatively stable European equilibrium. Now that two-power world is disintegrating--more in the East than the West. If history is any guide, such a process cannot be left to chance, even less to protestations of good will. Leaders need a concept to relate structure to intentions, equilibrium to legitimacy.

One can only hope that the conventional wisdom of our period will not appear as shortsighted 50 years from now as that of the generation that managed the period between the two wars.