My Amazon Review of Paul Jankowski's "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War"

 

From Postwar to Prewar

 

Brandeis University history professor has written a very dry academic book about the origins of World War II through the twin lenses of the 1932-34 League of Nations Geneva Disarmament Conference and 1933 London World Economic Conference. He spends most of the book on the disarmament conference. He not only covers the major powers, but he also covers Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

 

By mid-1932 the Versailles settlement was breaking down. Germany was given the right to rearm and reparations, for all practical purposes, were eliminated at the Lausanne Conference. Thus, before Hitler Germany was free to become a great power once again in Europe.

 

The lynchpins of the postwar era were the notion of collective security via the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaty which formalized borders in the west and the Kellogg-Briand Pact which in principle outlawed war. On the economic side the Dawes and Young plans of 1925 and 1929 established an orderly process, at least temporarily, for German reparations payments and the recycling of capital through American loans. This gives lie to the notion that the United States was isolationist in the 1920’s. Further the U.S. with observer status was an active participant in the disarmament talks in Geneva.

 

Nevertheless in 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League sat idly by and allowed it to happen, so much for collective security. With Mussolini’s Italy hellbent to seize Ethiopia and Stalin’s Russia beginning to develop a major armaments industry, the disarmament conference was in major trouble. A rearmed Russia and Germany force the states in between to rearm as well. Simply put everyone is going their own way.

 

The fatal conceit of the disarmament conference was that if Europe could not agree with a Locarno in the east that would confirm the borders there, how could it possibly agree on a general disarmament. The coup de grace, is of course Hitler coming to power with his very aggressive aims towards eastern Europe.

 

The World Economic Conference does not get the attention it deserves. Faced with a global depression the leading countries of the world got together in London in June 1933. Britain left the gold standard in 1931, the U.S. had just left it in May 1933, and under the weight of the economic collapse and worldwide protectionism international trade went into a tailspin. The goal of the conference was to restore trade and some form of the gold standard. It failed miserably when President Roosevelt blew up the conference with a telegram and sent the American delegation home. Keynes applauded Roosevelt’s decision because any return to gold, would have put the global economy into a straitjacket by preventing the needed reflation. From the point of view of economics Keynes was correct, but from the point of view of politics it sent a signal to Hitler and Mussolini that the U.S. had withdrawn from Europe. Collective security was done for with the U.S. withdrawing from the world. America’s true isolation was in the 1930’s, not the 1920’s. As a result, the world moved decisively from a postwar to prewar world.

 

Jankowski’s lessons for today are obvious. America’s withdrawal from the world and Britain’s from Europe contain the same seeds of destruction we witnessed in the early 1930s. An all against all world ends badly. I only wish Jankowski wrote with more drama.

For the full amazon URL see: From Postwar to Prewar (amazon.com)