Diplomacy

With pre-WWI Europe in a diplomatic deadlock, military doctrine made the problem vastly worse, and there was not nearly enough communication between military and political leaders about their respective problems. The General Staff of each Great Power on the continent believed that whoever mobilized first had the best chance of winning. Since mobilization required strict timetables to manage troops travelling by rail (especially for Germany and Russia), one state’s mobilization could prompt all others to follow suit. With Germany facing Russia and France in a potential war, the General Staff devised the Schlieffen Plan, a knockout blow against France (requiring an invasion of Belgium, around French fortifications) while holding the line against Russia’s slower mobilization. Barring a quick victory in the west, Germany would have to fight a brutal war of attrition on two fronts, as it later did. Russia continued to dream of expanding into the Balkans and toward the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, even as some of the tsar’s ministers acknowledged its potentially ruinous consequences for Russia’s economy and brittle social fabric.

The crisis began with the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, at the hands of a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Austria sought to punish Serbia, which had allegedly conspired with the assassins, and Germany gave Austria its full support right before the kaiser left on a long Norwegian cruise. Russia in turn promised support to Serbia, its key Balkan ally. Britain hung on the fence, reluctant to join a war over the distant Balkans and yet also fearful of leaving its allies unsupported and demoralized. When Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia attempted to split the difference with a partial mobilization, but the tsar’s generals convinced him this was untenable, and so he reluctantly ordered a general mobilization, prompting Germany to execute the Schlieffen Plan. Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality prompted a declaration of war from Britain. By the time the war ended in November 1918, millions were dead, and the Austrian, German, Ottoman, and Russian empires all lay in ruins. 

World War I began as a war between aristocratic elites seeking relative advantage and ended as one of masses seeking total victory. Victory for anyone only became possible after the entry of the United States in April 1917, under Wilson’s promise of “making the world safe for Democracy” (as quoted on p. 219). Wilson called for a League of Nations to represent a new system of collective security (as opposed to blocs of alliances), national self-determination (as opposed to multinational empires), and transparent diplomacy (as opposed to prewar secret treaties). The typically wary British embraced the League of Nations as a way to perpetuate a status quo in which Germany was contained. Wilson in turn believed that the Allies’ reliance on Wall Street to finance their debts would bring them around to his bolder ideological vision. However, if national self-determination applied to the Germans, it would be nearly impossible to prevent them from recuperating and becoming more powerful than France once again, given their demographic and economic advantages.

Wilson came to believe he could accommodate these and other objections in the expectation that once the League was underway, it would “straighten out later the ever-widening gap between Wilson’s moral claims and the actual terms of the settlement” (230). Neither Germany nor Russia (now under the rule of Lenin and the Bolsheviks) attended, practically guaranteeing their resistance to any outcomes. France demanded guarantees of aid against another German attack, but Wilson could not convince Congress to extend such guarantees, given American reluctance to establish a permanent presence beyond the Western Hemisphere. As it turned out, the United States did not even join the League, as a thin Republican majority in the Senate refused to ratify the treaty despite Wilson’s impassioned appeals to public opinion upon returning home. Rather than create a lasting postwar settlement, the victors imposed a harsh peace, which they were not quite strong enough to enforce and which Germany was not quite weak enough to endure without complaint and, later, plans for revenge.

The Versailles Treaty espoused the principle of collective security, that every state would pledge itself to the defense of every other against aggression, with the specific enforcers and methods of retaliation depending upon circumstances. It required a level of cooperation among states, along with a shared understanding of appropriate action, that is extremely rare in international politics. France was desperate for at least some measure of collective security, as it could not contain Germany on its own. Britain was no more desirous of French power than German power and so sought to balance the two against each other, but this meant conceding some of Germany’s grievances about the injustice of the Versailles system. The League attempted to institute plans for universal disarmament, with states eligible for assistance against aggression only after having pledged to disarm, but states were loath to mortgage their own security to the whims of others. The unwillingness of states to disarm made it difficult for them to enforce Versailles’s limits on German armaments.

The 1922 Genoa Conference, held to discuss the problem of Germany’s Versailles-imposed war debts, marked the first diplomatic appearance of the Soviet Union, which had seized power in Russia in November 1917 and triumphed in a long, brutal civil war. The Marxists now inhabiting the Kremlin were formally dedicated to fomenting worldwide revolution, but practical realities soon taught them to adjust their doctrine to justify the requirements of the Soviet national interest. These interests pointed to cooperation with Germany, the two major powers frozen out of the Versailles settlement, and the two reached an understanding at the Italian town of Rapallo during the Genoa negotiations. Soon, they were secretly providing military and economic cooperation to one another, foreshadowing the later and much more consequential pact between Hitler and Stalin.

In its desperation to keep Germany down, in 1932 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr Valley, a major center of industrial production, ostensibly to extract unpaid war debts. The move only left France further isolated, leaving an opening for Germany, especially when the talented Gustav Stresemann became foreign minister. His plan was to help ease the burdens of Versailles through conciliation with the allies, especially by playing Britain and France off of each other. Stresemann was able to negotiate a new repayment schedule for war debts, but without the right to rearm, Germany would never come to terms with Versailles, and France insisted on strict military limits. When Britain tried to revive an alliance among Germany’s western neighbors, Stresemann managed instead to secure a mutual guarantee of the borders between France, Belgium, and Germany. Locarno was welcomed at the time as a major breakthrough for peace, but, the text says, “Locarno had not so much pacified Europe as it had defined the next battlefield” (274), namely Germany’s eastern borders. The very idea of Locarno creating an “atmosphere” (276) is folly, as peace or war depends on geopolitical realities rather than vague feelings, Kissinger says.

A new prime minister in France, Aristide Briand, sought to build off Locarno and establish a more fruitful relationship with Stresemann, but nationalists on both sides undermined their efforts. France’s allies still pressed it to ease its enforcement of Versailles, as they saw a rebuilding Germany as an opportunity for capital investment. Despairing of its ability to contain a rearming Germany, France sought security in a ring of fortifications known as the Maginot Line. Briand also co-sponsored a treaty (with US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg) promising to renounce war as a means of resolving disputes, but Kellogg himself admitted he did not believe the treaty carried with it any binding obligations. The only way to avoid war was to assist Stresemann’s efforts to abide by the broad strokes of Versailles, giving Stresemann enormous diplomatic influence until his untimely death in 1929. Later records would show Stresemann to be a cunning politician eager to restore German prominence, but he almost certainly would have sought a more peaceful path than the Nazis who would soon take the reins of German foreign policy.

The rise of the Nazi party in 1933 marked the opening of open hostility between Germany and the Versailles order. For the first few years of the Third Reich, Hitler attempted to frame his objectives in terms of national self-determination, a hallmark Versailles principle. Once this tactic took him as far as it would go, he resorted to brutality, safe in the belief his singular genius would overwhelm any resistance. Britain and France struggled whether to take Hitler at his word or see his bellicose rhetoric as a negotiating tactic, and Hitler exploited their vacillations. The western powers did not consider that whoever was in power, a rearmed Germany “was bound to overturn the equilibrium unless it was either stopped or balanced” (295). France scrambled for allies to Germany’s east, demanding promises they had no intention of offering in return. In 1935, fascist Italy launched an invasion of Ethiopia, compelling France and Britain to jettison a potential ally on behalf of Versailles or jettison Versailles on behalf of a potential ally. They did neither, condemning Italy without using force or imposing lasting sanctions.

Soon thereafter, Hitler’s forced marched into the Rhineland, which Versailles ordered to be demilitarized, and not a shot was fired. Having succeeded in this gamble, Hitler decided he could continue to lead the Western powers along into doing his will, simply by insisting he wanted peace. Britain and France largely confirmed this view, especially given their unwillingness to make any commitments regarding Germany’s eastern borders. By 1937, both agreed on a policy of appeasement, satisfying Hitler’s territorial demands in the expectation that it would reduce his appetite for war. Hitler was therefore able to annex Austria in early 1938 and then make a claim on the Sudetenland, a largely German-speaking area of western Czechoslovakia, in the infamous Munich conference of September 1938, where France and Britain agreed to the dismemberment of a state that was ironically designed in the Versailles treaty to contain Germany. Once Hitler annexed all of Czechoslovakia six months later, the Western democracies finally appreciated the vast scope of Hitler’s ambitions, and Britain and France offered a security guarantee to Poland. Hitler nonetheless turned his eyes on Danzig, a historically German city situated in Poland. Before invading, he had one last shocking act of diplomacy to announce to Europe.