Department of Government

GT12A Introduction to International Relations

Lecturer: Ms. Diana Thorburn

Lecture Four

Topic: World War II and changes in the international system

Objectives

By the end of this lecture, students should:

1. Have a clear picture of the international political arena in the "Inter-War Period"
2. Be able to explain the causes of World War II
3. Understand the changes brought about in the international system as a result of WWII

ONE. THE INTER-WAR PERIOD 1919-1939

Eight main characteristics

1. New and unstable independent states in eastern Europe
2. World-wide economic depression after 1929
3. A dissatisfied and disgruntled Germany
4. An ambitious and unaccounted for Japan
5. Weak Britain and France (Britain because of its economy; France because of domestic political instability)
6. Withdrawal of the US and the USSR from the international system
7. The new international order envisioned by Wilson and embodied in the League of Nations (and the Fourteen Points) unfeasible and ineffective
8. The rise of fascism and the alliance of the three main fascistic powers (Italy, Japan and Germany)

Fascism

• Political attitude and mass movement that tended to dominate political life in central, southern, and eastern-central Europe between 1919 and 1944
• The word fascism was first used in 1919 by Benito Mussolini in Italy; in the following years the influence of fascism made itself felt in countries as far away as Japan, Argentina, Brazil, and the Union of South Africa, its specific aspects varying according to the country's political traditions, its social structure, and the personality of the leader.
• Common to all fascist movements of that time was an emphasis on the nation (race or state) as the centre and regulator of all history and life
• Authoritarian—usually one leader who had indisputable authority
• Universally anti-democratic
• Not necessarily totalitarian in that the state doesn’t have to control everything such as in China under Mao or Stalin’s USSR
• The state imposes rules and controls but doesn’t actively control all aspects of life; however, all aspects of life are supposed to move in order to achieve the fascistic goals laid out by the state
• Rejects individualism, rationalism, liberalism and modernity
• Ritualizes political participation
• Tries to co-opt all societal groups to conform to a single goal or aim
• Often organized in opposition to another ideology or group—eg Italian fascism in opposition to communism, German fascism in opposition to the Jews
• State-sponsored atrocities often condoned as means to an ultimate end (of the fascistic goal)

TWO. CAUSES OF THE WAR

Overview of the war

• Involved virtually every part of the world during the years 1939–45
• The principal belligerents were the "Axis powers" (Germany, Italy, and Japan) against the "Allies" (France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China.)
• The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes left unsettled by World War I
• The 40 to 50 million deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest conflict as well as the largest war in history.
• Along with World War I, World War II was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history.
• U.S entered after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941
• Russia had the greatest casualties—lost more than 20 million people (though some not on the battlefield but due to Stalin’s own misguided war strategies)

Important Names

Benito Mussolini

Fascist leader of Italy; joined the Axis forces; sooned proved himself and his movement incompetent and powerless; eventually deposed by internal political forces

Adolf Hitler

Leader of the Nazi movement in Germany. Came to power in January 1933. Germany was the main force of the Axis powers in WWII.

Winston Churchill

British Prime Minister who led the UK’s brave, unlikely, and eventually victorious defense against Germany

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

U.S. president during the war

Joseph Stalin

Soviet successor to Lenin; led Russia during the war and was the architect of the Soviet Union’s expansion into Eastern Europe. He is remembered for his atrocities against the Russian people in the name of socialism.

Causes of the War

• In the 1930s an aggressive new colonialism developed on the part of the Axis Powers
• Developed a new colonial doctrine aiming at the repartition of the world's colonial areas, justified by supposed racial superiority
• The three powers aimed at carving out for themselves vast, self-sufficient empires.
• Their alliance came about because of their similar intentions
• These ambitions were obviously resisted by those countries that would have been the objects of the aggressors’ intentions
• Thus they defended themselves via war

The Holocaust

• The systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.
• The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question."
• Anti-Semitism (Semite means Jew) was the basis for the desire to exterminate the Jewish people
• Nazi’s portrayed the Jews as a race and not as a religious group, and characterized them as an evil race struggling for world domination
• As soon as Hitler came to power in 1933 he began the attack on Jews, first by boycotting their businesses, then by expelling them from the civil service, and restricting their attendance in Germany schools
• Eventually only "racial" Germans were entitled to civil and political rights
• Persecution of the Jews led to an intensification of Zionism and a desperate search for countries of refuge; many went to Palestine, where the growing Jewish community was willing to receive refugees

Zionism

o Jewish nationalist movement that has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews

o In the historical region of Palestine there is a hill of ancient Jerusalem called Zion

o Movement began in the late 1800s in response to anti-Semitism in Europe and the argument that Jews could only lead a normal existence in their own territory

o In 1903 the British government offered a portion of land in uninhabited Uganda for settlement, but the Zionists held out for Palestine

o Jewish people began moving to Palestine in the early 1900s from Russia, in response to political unrest there; by 1914 there were 90,000 Jews there. They built up Jewish settlements in Palestine and solidified Jewish cultural life. By 1933 there were 238,000 Jews there, about 20% of the population

o At the end of WWI, when the League of Nations assigned to Britain the mandate over Palestine, the promise to create a Jewish national home had been included in the mandate

o The rise of the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews in Germany led to a surge in migration to Palestine and to much greater support for Zionism

o Zionism was finally solidified with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948

• Some Jews sought to go to the US, some to neighbouring European countries. Most countries, however, were unwilling to receive large numbers of refugees.
• The annihilation of the Jews was a complementary aspect of Hitler’s overall strategy for world domination and purification of the Aryan race
• By 1938 German Jews began to be sent to concentration camps—places where Jews were imprisoned, put to hard labour, and mostly executed in gas chambers and huge crematoria
• The Jews remaining in Germany had their civil liberties completely taken away, and their property confiscated
• There were also non-Jewish victims of Nazism—political dissidents, trade unionists, homosexuals, Roma (Gypsies), emotionally disturbed, mentally retarded and physically disabled people of any race, and children of mixed racial descent were also executed. Those who weren’t murdered were often sterilized so they couldn’t reproduce.
• As the Nazis began to invade other countries they subjected the Jewish people there to the same treatment
• The Nazis began to create ghettoes as temporary locations to house Jews in the countries they invaded (this is where the word originates)—they were densely populated (approximately 9.2 people per room), and disease, malnutrition, hunger and poverty took rapidly took hold.
• By 1942 the Nazis had built six large extermination camps throughout Poland and transported Jews there by train, often in cattle cars
• They developed efficient methods of mass murder, so that a few Germans (often assisted by collaborators and prisoners of war) could kill tens of thousands of prisoners each month. E.g. at Treblinka a a staff of 120, of whom only 30 were SS (Nazi paramilitary corps), killed some 750,000 to 900,000 Jews during the camp's 17 months of operation
• Some countries rescued their Jews, such as Denmark where the German presence was very small; in some cases Jewish families were hidden by non-Jews (such as Anne Frank and family)
• Jews could not defend themselves because they had to access to arms and they were surrounded by anti-Semitic populations
• As Allied armies closed in towards the end of the war, SS officials tried to evacuate the camps and conceal what had taken place
• During the war, while the Allies knew what was happening, they did not attempt to rescue the Jews or bomb the extermination camps or the railroads leading to them because they felt that the situation could only be dealt with after the war was won
• When the war ended there were seven to nine million displaced persons living outside their own countries.
• Many returned home, but the Jews had no home to return to, no land or property to reclaim, no communities waiting; most survivors had no family remaining after the Holocaust
• No country was willing to receive them; this increased pressure on the British who had the Palestinian mandate to give them a homeland there
• The defeat of Nazi Germany left a bitter legacy for the German leadership and people. In an effort to rehabilitate the good name of the German people, the post-War government of West Germany rewrote the constitution to protect the human rights of all its citizens and made financial reparations to the Jewish people
• The Holocaust remains an issue today, not only with relation to the Israel-Palestine issue, but also in the case of the Swiss government and its bankers who have now begun to make reparations for their role as bankers to the Nazis and in the recycling of gold and valuables taken from Jewish victims

THREE. OUTCOMES AND CHANGES IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

General Outcomes

• The extension of the Soviet Union's power to nations of eastern Europe
• Enabled a Communist movement eventually to achieve power in China
• Decisive shift of power in the world away from the states of western Europe and toward the United States and the Soviet Union
• Decolonization and hence the emergence of tens of new sovereign states as international actors
• Ultimately the Cold War

Yalta Conference

• Feb. 4–11, 1945
• Major World War II conference of the three chief Allied leaders: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin of the Soviet Union
• Met at Yalta in the Crimea to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany and to lay out their intentions for the post-War world
• The German military industry would be abolished or confiscated
• Major war criminals would be tried before an international court, which subsequently presided at Nürnberg.
• The determination of reparations was assigned to a commission.
• Defeated and liberated countries of eastern Europe were to be dealt with by "interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population . . . and the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people."
• I.e. they were to be guided to democracy by the victors
• This was the crucial matter at Yalta that later led to Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe
• Stalin failed to keep his promise that free elections would be held in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.
• Instead, communist governments were established in all those countries, noncommunist political parties were suppressed, and genuinely democratic elections were never held.
• At the time of the Yalta Conference, both Roosevelt and Churchill had trusted Stalin and believed that he would keep his word.
• By the end of the war, the Soviet Union was the military occupier of eastern Europe and there was little the Western democracies could do to enforce the promises made by Stalin at Yalta.

United Nations

• Established by charter on Oct. 24, 1945
• Had been agreed on at Yalta
• 51 original members – eight were Asian (China, India, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey) and four were African (the same as in the League).
• Main goal to maintain international peace and security.
• The successor to the League of Nations—absorbed much of the latter's administrative and physical apparatus when it was disbanded in 1946.
• However, the United Nations was very different from the League, especially with regard to the objective of maintaining international peace and security.
• Differences with the League were mainly due to changes in the nature of international relations.
• Incorporated in the UN were the Bretton Woods institutions—namely the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (originally called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development)—set up to guarantee that no one country’s financial problems should ever become world economic problems, and to facilitate a stable world economy as a means of preventing war

The Nuclear Age

• An atomic bomb is a weapon with great explosive power that results from the sudden release of energy upon the splitting, or fission, of the nuclei of such heavy elements as plutonium or uranium
• The first atomic bombs were built in the United States during World War II under a program called the Manhattan Project
• The first atomic bomb to be used in warfare was dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.
• The explosion, which had the force of more than 15,000 tons of TNT, instantly and completely devastated 10 square km (4 square miles) of the heart of this city of 343,000 inhabitants. Of this number, 66,000 were killed immediately and 69,000 were injured; more than 67 percent of the city's structures were destroyed or damaged.
• The next atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, 39,000 persons were killed and 25,000 injured; about 40 percent of the city's structures were destroyed or seriously damaged.
• The Japanese initiated surrender negotiations the next day.
• Other countries subsequently developed their own atomic weapons—the Soviet Union (1949), Great Britain (1952), France (1960), China (1964), India (1974), and Pakistan (1998)

The Marshall Plan

• April 1948–December 1951
• U.S.-sponsored programme designed to rehabilitate the economies of 17 western and southern European nations in order to create stable conditions in which democratic institutions could survive.
• The U.S. feared that the poverty, unemployment, and dislocation of the postwar period were reinforcing the appeal of communist parties to voters in western Europe.
• George Marshall was the U.S. Secretary of State
• Aid was originally offered to almost all the European countries, including those under military occupation by the USSR
• The USSR early on withdrew from participation in the plan, however, and was soon followed by the other eastern European nations under its influence.
• This action on the part of the U.S. formed the initial basis of Russian hostility against the U.S.
• The remaining countries in the plan: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and western Germany.
• The aid plan helped to restore industrial and agricultural production, establish financial stability, and expand trade.
• Direct grants accounted for the vast majority of the aid, with the remainder in the form of loans.
• The Marshall Plan was very successful; the several western European countries experienced a rise in their gross national products of 15 to 25 percent during this period.
• The plan contributed greatly to the rapid renewal of the western European chemical, engineering, and steel industries
• Proved to be crucial in the early stages of the Cold War

Japan

• Japan had aimed to control East Asia, including China, French Indochina, Thailand, and British Malaya and Dutch Indonesia as satellite states.
• Although Japan ultimately failed in its global strategy, it ended European colonial rule in Asia
• After their surrender, until 1952, Japan was under Allied military occupation, US in particular
• U.S. government policy dictated that Japan be demilitarized, be guided to a Western-style democracy, and be helped to build a strong economy
• The armed forces were demobilized and millions of Japanese troops and civilians abroad repatriated. The Japanese empire was disbanded and the entire country’s polity was reshuffled—from the education system to the police force to the industrial elite.
• The new, U.S. sanctioned constitution renounced forever "war as a sovereign right of the nation" and pledging that "land, sea and air forces" would "never be maintained."
• Japan has continued to pursue a policy of close cooperation with the United States
• Both nations remain committed to the Mutual Security Treaty, which keeps Japan under the U.S. nuclear weapons "umbrella" and permits thousands of American troops to be stationed there.

Decolonization

• India (and after Partition, Pakistan), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma, and Malaya (Malaysia) in Asia, and Ghana in Africa achieved independence peacefully from the British; so did the Philippines from the United States
• The French only gave up their colonies after brutal wars in which the French committed horrendous atrocities in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia—the origins of the US involvement in Vietnam) and in North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria)
• By the mid-1970s only a few small European colonial territories remained.

Three main reasons for decolonization

1. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had taken up positions opposed to colonialism (however paradoxical)
2. Colonial wars were expensive, bloody and it appeared impossible to win
3. The colonies began to prove themselves fiscal and administrative drains on war-weary European countries (especially the UK)—particularly where the colonies offered no special resources or strategic advantages

• Newly-independent former colonies were left with a heritage of retarded economic development and cultural confusion, as well as, in many cases, unstable polities
• The international community must also deal with minute states that are unable to be truly sovereign members, as well as with large states without a unified ethnic base