The Road to War
17.7.1 The Expansion of Totalitarianism: The Confrontation
Between Communism and Fascism
From the point of view of constitutional history the triumph of totalitarianism in Russia, Italy and Germany ushered in an era characterized by brutal repression through the development of state security forces that crushed any attempts at dissent.
Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini all killed or confined in concentration camps those who opposed their regimes. This system of terror was, however, “justified” by spectacular economic growth and concealed by propaganda touting the regimes’ achievements. Thus, liberal parliamentary government spiraled into crisis as attempted military coups and revolutionary uprisings spread, in both cases aimed at overthrowing the constitutional order to impose dictatorships which promised to more effectively solve the social and economic crisis plaguing the era.[1054]The same happened in Asia with Japan, a nation state that had emerged in 1853 from two and a half centuries of self-imposed peaceful isolation, but within a few decades, the country’s leaders embarked on a policy of aggressive territorial expansion. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the Western imperialist powers of England, France, and Germany established the model for acquisition of colonies in Asia and for the partition of China into spheres of influence. Near the end of the century, about the same time, Japan began to capture colonial territory, the United States and Russia also initiated their imperialistic expansion in Asia. Imperialism can be defined as direct or indirect domination of an industrialized country over a colonial territory or another country. Japan forcefully acquired three major foreign territories between 1894 and 1910: Taiwan in 1895 after the Sino- Japanese War of 1894-1895; Korea as a protectorate in 1905 after the Russo- Japanese War of 1904-1905, then as a colony when unilaterally annexed by Japan in 1910; and the Kwantung Leased Territories in 1905 in southern Manchuria when Japan succeeded to Russia’s leases after the Russo-Japanese War.
When Emperor Hirohito ascended to the throne in 1926, Japan was enveloped in a struggle between liberals and leftists on one side, and ultraconservatives on the other, and becomes a semi-democratic regime, according to Takenaka, that had broken down in 1932. Then, an authoritarian regime in which the military projected strong influences was established, and brought Japan to the Second World War (Takenaka 2014, 1).In line with this trend, in Spain on September 13, 1923 General Primo de Rivera imposed a dictatorship suspending the Constitution of 1876, less than a year after the March on Rome (October 27-29, 1922) which had placed Mussolini in power.
His dictatorship lasted until January of 1930, precipitating the fall of the Spanish Monarchy on April 14, 1931.
The Second Republic introduced universal suffrage for the first time in Spanish constitutional history, as the 1931 Constitution gave women the right to vote. However, the triumph of Spain’s right wing parties in the general elections of November 1933 was never accepted by the Left. From October 5-9, 1934, as a reaction to the Right’s victory in said elections the previous year, PSOE Secretary General Francisco Largo Caballero led a revolt throughout Spain (which succeeded, ephemerally, only in Asturias) through which he sought to establish a Soviet-style regime. In February of 1936, new elections were held, and this time the leftist coalition, the Popular Front, prevailed.[1055] This time, however, it was the right wing parties that refused to accept the outcome. The Army rebelled in July, sparking the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
There emerged, then, in non-democratic Europe two diametrically opposed camps: supporters of communist dictatorships and those who defended the triumph of the totalitarian, National Socialist or fascist models,[1056] which collided in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the immediate ideological and military prelude to World War II (1939-1945).[1057]
17.7.2 From the Spanish Civil War to World War II
The tension between communists and fascists swelled throughout Europe and ended up exploding in Spain, whose Civil War served as a brutal stage vividly illustrating the ideological clash in question, and the fierce commitment of the respective sides to their principles.
While the democratic nations adopted policies of non-intervention, the totalitarian regimes sent aid to support their ideologicalallies. Stalin defended the Popular Front, or republicanos (the Republic disappeared, de facto, in July of 1936) while Mussolini and Hitler supported the Espana Nacional, a term employed by those who perpetrated the military coup following the creation of the Junta de Defensa Nacional on July 24, 1936, which gave rise to the common term for the insurgent right-wing forces: nacionales.[1058]
The Spanish Civil War would prove to be only a prologue to a much greater global conflagration, World War II, whose origins may be traced to the imperialist policies through which Mussolini, and especially Hitler, strove to expand their nations’ territory, in Germany’s case in search of Lebensraum, or “vital space”.[1059] Both dictators had initiated widespread rearmament campaigns during the 1930s, portending the outbreak of a new worldwide conflict. In the final years of the decade Hitler moved audaciously to expand German territory, with the 1938 annexation of Austria (Anschluss), and the Sudetenland (a German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia), abided by England and France in the Munich Agreement (September 30, 1938)—a concession which would go down in history as a cowardly and imprudent act of appeasement. His next step was to occupy the Danzig corridor, imposed by the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which had divided Germany in two. Then, on August 23, 1939, Hitler shocked and appalled the world by signing a “Nonaggression Pact” with Stalin[1060] through which Germany and Russia effectively
‘tradition,' and without any preconceived notions, the movement must find the courage to organize our national forces and set them on the path which will lead them away from that territorial restriction which is the bane of our national life today, and win new territory for them. Thus the movement will save the German people from the danger of perishing or of being slaves in the service of any other people.
Our movement must seek to abolish the present disastrous proportion between our population and the area of our national territory, considering national territory as the source of our maintenance or as a basis of political power. And it ought to strive to abolish the contrast between past history and the hopelessly powerless situation in which we are today. [...] Today we are all convinced of the necessity of regulating our situation in regard to France; but our success here will be ineffective in its broad results if the general aims of our foreign policy will have to stop at that. It can have significance for us only if it serves to cover our flank in the struggle for that extension of territory which is necessary for the existence of our people in Europe. For colonial acquisitions will not solve that question. It can be solved only by the winning of such territory for the settlement of our people as will extend the area of the motherland and thereby will not only keep the new settlers in the closest communion with the land of their origin, but will guarantee to this territorial ensemble the advantages which arise from the fact that in their expansion over greater territory the people remain united as a political unit” (Hitler 2012, 525 and 531). The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1943. According to Barrett (2010, 35-54), he uses the word genocide broadly, not only to describe policies of outright extermination against Jews and Gypsies, but for less immediate Nazi goals as well. In Lemkin’s analysis, Nazi Germany had undertaken a policy for the demographic restructuring of the European continent. Therefore he also used the word genocide to describe a “coordinated plan of different actions” intended to promote such goals as an increase in the birthrate of the “Aryan” population, the physical destruction of the Slavic population over a period of years, and policies to bring about the destruction of the “culture, language, national feelings, religion” and separate economic existence (but not physical existence) of non-German “Aryan” nations thought to be “linked by blood” to Germany. In the Part III, Lemkin provides English translations of 334 statues, decrees, and laws from the 17 occupied countries and territories. Most of the documents are from the years 1940 and 1941, though the collection spans a five and half year period March 13, 1938 to November 13, 1942. The range of the dates underscores the fact that Axis Rule was a work of analysis of the enemy’s public documents written during wartime (and not those captured at the end of the war). These documents were available to Lemkin and others from sources in the neutral countries in Europe. This chapter has become one the most widely quoted (Lemkin 2008, 79-98). See also the book’s preface, dated November 15, 1943.101 A still highly controversial pact because, as Roberts (2006, 6) points out, on one side some historians argue that Stalin turned his back on an anti-German alliance with Britain and France, and that the price of this miscalculation was not only that he facilitated the takeover of most of continental Europe, but also suffered the devastating blow which began on June 22, 1941: the nearly successful German invasion of the Soviet Union. On the other side are those who maintain divided up Poland between them, and which, by removing Russia as a potential enemy in the impending conflict, spared Germany the daunting prospect of fighting a two-front war, as was the case in World War I.
On September 1, 1939, Wehrmacht troops crossed the Polish border, thereby igniting World War II, as the Allies declared war two days later.* [1061] [1062] On September 17, it was the Russians’ turn to invade Poland, which they did under the pretext of protecting the Ukrainians and Belarusians inhabiting the eastern part of the
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country.
For 21 months, the Wehrmacht seemed invincible—until June 22 when Hitler committed the colossal and fateful blunder of invading Russia (Operation Barbarossa), an offensive that would end in absolute failure, culminating in the Germans’ ultimate defeat at Stalingrad (June 1942-February 1943).
The surrender of Von Paulus (commanding 90,000 soldiers, surviving from his initial force of 250,000), marked the beginning of the end for Hitler.The paradox was that Stalinist Russia emerged on the side of the victors, and during the early post-war years the communists touted themselves, and were recognized by many in the west, as heroes and saviors. Celebrations of the Soviets’ feat, however, were short-lived as Stalin soon revealed his antagonism to any collaboration with the western democracies and his determination to subject territories gained during the War to the Russian yoke. Rejecting aid from the Marshall Plan (1947) for Eastern Europe, the Soviets occupied and laid claim to the region. The result was the dramatic geographical and ideological division of Europe: in the west capitalist democracies received massive aid from the United States, while in the east the Soviet Union took control over its recently seized satellite republics; what Churchill vividly termed the “Iron Curtain” had fallen with striking suddenness.[1063]
Soviet Russia would continue to control and support communist dictatorships until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which brought about the dramatic and unforeseen implosion of the Soviet Union by the end of 1991.[1064]
17.8