Brief History of Tripartite Alliance Earth
"I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death."
First World War, Interregnum, and Second World War (1914-1944)
Although long-standing Franco-German colonial tensions in central Africa had briefly threatened to erupt into general war in February of 1914, the First World War was actually triggered by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austrian Empire, by a Serbian nationalist in the Austrian city of Sarajevo on the 20th of June, 1914. Afraid that this assassination might lead to the collapse of the Hapsburg empire, over the next month the Hapsburgs -- encouraged by Germany -- made increasingly more stringent demands to the Serbian government. The system of alliances made what might have otherwise been a brief Austro-Serbian war a worldwide conflict: In Russia, there was general sympathy for Serbia as a fellow Orthodox Slav nation, and the Imperial government began to mobilize its troops to warn Austria against an invasion of Serbia. Through Russia's alliances with Britain and France, the two Atlantic powers were drawn into the growing militarization.
On the eve of the conflict, to Germany's government it seemed that Germany was entirely surrounded by enemies. The Imperial German High Command feared that if the German army diverted its forces to launch an offensive towards Russia, the French would advance through Alsace-Lorraine into the German heartland, while if Germany focused on breaking through the French defenses in Lorraine, the German army would be bled dry and the Russian army could penetrate deep into eastern Germany. In 1906, the Schlieffen Plan had been adopted by Germany, calling for a reduced German force to hold the German frontier against the Russians while a larger force would sweep through neutral Belgium towards Paris, seizing the French capital and forcing France out of the war, leaving Germany to deal unopposed with Russia. Although some Germans feared that an invasion of a neutral country would turn world opinion against Germany, to the uppermost echelons of the German government the world's condemnation would mean nothing next to the reality of a German victory.
The German invasion of Belgium that began on the 3rd of August was halted in a short period of time by a combined Franco-British force. By the end of the month, a static front had formed, stretching from east-central Belgium through to the Franco-German frontier on the Rhine. This was a new kind of war, one where the sophisticated artillery and machine guns of both the German and the Western Allies (France, Britain, Belgium) armies prevented either side from any lasting advance despite repeated assaults. The French and British dug defensive trenches on the Dyle Line and mounted a static defense, watching in horror as the Germans through hundreds of thousands of soldiers against the Western Allies' lines at exceeding high human cost and without any visible gains. Even the introduction of poison gas by Germany in 1915 didn't break the Allies lines, and by the end of 1915 it was clear that both sides faced a war of exhaustion on the so-called Western Front. The only question was which side would collapse first under the immense strains of the conflict.
In the Eastern (eastern European) and Southern (Middle East/Balkan) fronts of the war, conflict was more mobile. On the Southern Front, the French, British, and their local allies began to make steady progress against the vast Ottoman Empire. On the Eastern Front, however, the Russian armies were quickly thrown back into the Russian heartland, and the war combined with the unpopular autocracy of the monarchy to make the whole effort unpopular.
As the armies of Europe and Europe's overseas colonies fought with tremendous loss of life, the First World War necessarily remade the entire world. The Franco-British blockade of the Central Powers ended German exports, while France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom were all forced to turn over much of their industry towards the production of war materiel. This massive diversion of western Europe's industry and exports to war aim left non-combatant countries free to develop their own prosperous industrial economies without European competition. The United States, the liberal republics of South America, and Japan all enjoyed decidedly rapid industrial growth; Italy, Spain, Mexico, and British India experienced more moderate but still significant industrial growth. The end of Russian and German grain exports also led to rapid increases in food prices in western and southern Europe, and proved a decided boost to the economies of such major agricultural exporters as Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Thailand. Thus, the power shift that had begun in la belle époque was accelerated. Moreover, as time passed this conflict spread to encompass the entire world. At the beginning of the conflict, various Allies occupied the isolated German colonies -- France in Samoa and Cameroon, Britain in Tanganyika, Japan in Shandong. By mid-1915, attempts by German naval raiders and submarines to cut off the Allies' extra-European supply lines by attacking merchant vessels -- even merchant vessels flagged under neutral countries -- alienated many countries. In particular, the republics of South America depended upon their agricultural and industrial trade with the Allies and were alienated by the seeming senselessness of the German attacks.
From 1916, the civilian populations and economies of both sides were mobilized to an unprecedented degree. In central and eastern Europe, conditions deteriorated both for the Central Powers and Russia. In all three countries, pre-war autocracies were reinforced by the needs of mobilizing their societies for total war, while public opinion gradually shifted away from support of government policies as the First World War continued. Further, the isolation of all three countries from international trade and the diversion of industry to meet war needs brought about a significant decline in the region's living standards, particularly in agrarian and only partly-industrialized Russia. Liberals and socialists in Germany, nationalists in the Hapsburg empire, and a vast array of opponents in the Russian Empire quietly began to challenge their regimes. In the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire was being progressively dissected by Egyptian and Anglo-Indian advances into its Turkish heartland and by the rebellions of non-Turks -- Greeks, Kurds, and Arabs, and Armenians. (In 1915, the Ottoman government initiated a policy of systematic slaughter of the Empire's two million Armenians; by the time that the Armenian homeland was liberated, more than one million Armenians had died horribly, in the killing fields of Anatolia and in the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. This discovery horrified the entire world and provided a source of effective propaganda for the Allies, who as early as mid-1915 had sought to portray the war as their effort to bring freedom to the entire world. It also ensured a particularly harsh post-war policy towards Turkey.)
The year 1917 was a revolutionary year, as the First World War was brought to an end by the advances of the Allies -- bolstered by the expeditionary forces sent from newly-belligerent South America and the Balkans -- through the Rhineland and Hungary towards the German and Austrian heartlands. Almost as soon news of the end of the war arrived in Berlin and Vienna, the imperial governments were overthrown by radicalized street mobs and disaffected state bureaucracies. In Prague, Zagreb, and Budapest, anti-Hapsburg nationalists proclaimed the independence of new Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, and Hungarian states, while both the tottering Bavarian monarchy and the Saxon provisional government announced their independence from Germany. In Turkey, the Ottoman Empire simply collapsed; in its Anatolian wreckage, Turkish nationalists, Islamic radicals, and Allied-supported Ottomans fought for supremacy.
It was in the Russian Empire, though, that the most dramatic collapse occurred. Even before the First World War, the Tsarist government was renowned for its brutal incompetency. Three years of constant defeats at the hands of Austro-German forces and civilian privation completely discredited the regime. Even as Germany and Austria surrendered, revolution broke out in Petrograd as desperate workers, frustrated soldiers, and assorted radical (and radicalized) intellectuals and bureaucrats combined to overthrow the Romanov monarchy. In its place, they proceeded to try to create a new democratic Russian republic under a Provisional Government. This regime never had a chance. Not only were the various non-Russian peoples -- Poles, Finns, Balts, and Ukrainians in the west, Georgians, Azeris, Caucasians, and Turkestanis in the south, even Slavic Far Easterners on the Pacific and Tatars on the Volga -- organizing separatist governments, but the few remaining loyalists to the Tsarist empire fought ferociously against any attempts at reform, whether through the distribution of land to the peasants who farmed it, the extension of full civil rights to the entire population, or federalization of Russia. Worse, the republicans themselves were divided between a fractious coalition of Communalists, liberals, and the Marxist Mensheviks and the radical Marxist Bolsheviks. Compromise between these ferociously opposed factions and separatists were impossible, while the collapse of the Russian armies managed to distribute large quantities of arms throughout the empire.
The Peace of Versailles, completed and signed by all of the forty-odd Allied governments in Paris in November 1918, was an attempt by the Allies to build a durable international system organized along principles of democracy and national self-determination. Europe's frontiers were reorganized to bring them in conformance with ethnic distributions. The Hapsburg empire was dissolved along ethnic lines, as Czechs and Slovaks were united into Czechoslovakia, Slovenes, Croatians, and Dalmatians were united into Yugoslavia, and the Hungarians not only gained recognition of their separatist kingdom but were allowed to annexed the Magyar-populated northeastern half of Transylvania. In the Balkans, Serbia gained parts of the Banat and Bosnia-Herzegovina, while Greece acquired Thrace and Ionia and Romania almost doubled its land area through the acquisition of the Romanian-populated territories of ex-Russian Bessarabia and ex-Hapsburg southwestern Transylvania. Other hitherto-stateless ethnicities were also recognized as having independent states, like the Pontic Greeks of Trebizond, the Armenians of eastern Anatolia, the Finns and Balts on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, and -- most spectacularly -- the Poles, who found themselves the dominant nation in an eastern European federation that stretched from German Silesia east to the formerly Russian Donetsk Basin. (Turkey suffered massive territorial losses to non-Turkish nations, and was effectively reduced to a Franco-British satellite state.)
Germany suffered great territorial and economic losses. Under the terms of Versailles, Germany was prohibited from annexing Austria in any circumstance, while the newly-independent Bavarian and Saxon states had their independence from Germany given similar guarantees. Non-Germans on the fringes of Germany -- the French-identified Alsatians, the Schleswig Danes, and the Poles of Poznán and West Prussia -- were allowed to join their nation-states of choice. Most importantly, Germany was almost completely demilitarized and forced to pay a huge reparations burden to its Allied neighbours. These immense burdens made life for the new Germany -- known as the Weimar Republic, after the Thuringian town where the post-war German constitution was written -- quite difficult.
The Versailles Conference also saw the birth of the League of Nations. United States President Woodrow Wilson, representing the leading neutral power at the conference, proposed the creation of a permanent international body charged with maintaining the peace in Europe and the wider world. This idea appealed to many of the Allies, who hoped that such a permanent body could prevent another global conflict. Eventually, it was decided that the city of Genève (English Geneva), located in the neutral Swiss Confederation, would be a suitable site for the permanent institutions of this body, to be named as the League of Nations. From the time that it began functioning in 1920, the League of Nations helped coordinate the various multinational institutions and pacts that already existed -- the World Court in The Hague, for instance, was given a direct link to the League Secretariat in Genève, while the League provided a framework for the establishment of the aid organizations that were so sorely needed in post-war Europe.
The decade of the 1920's was a complex decade worldwide, marked equally by the progress of democracy and the formation of the first totalitarian dictatorships, by economic prosperity and economic catastrophe, by cultural innovation and by general conservatism. These contradictory trends were perhaps best-evidenced by events in Russia. The Russian Civil War that began in October of 1918 was a confusing and protracted conflict fought by Tsarists, Republicans, Bolsheviks, and dozens of other provincial and ethnic factions, complicated still more by foreign interventions on the part of a half-dozen different countries. After almost three million dead (most in the catastrophic famine of 1921) and four years, the Bolsheviks emerged supreme in Russia proper. Although to some self-styled radicals the Soviet Union's success in reunifying the vast Russian spaces and ostensibly liberal social policies (including the full legal emancipation of women and ethnic minorities and the development of the exciting artistic movement of socialist realism), others were worried by the growth of dictatorship. Indeed, following the 1924 death of the Soviet leader V.I. Lenin, the Georgian Josef Stalin became Soviet head of state and Under Stalin's rule, political conditions in the Soviet Union deteriorated sharply as the feared KGB secret police began to consolidate its power. Hermetically sealed from the outside world, the Soviet Union existed apart as a looming and threatening presence, girded by its Marxist-Leninist ideology and its growing aspirations for world revolution.
The situation elsewhere in Europe was mixed. Where Spain and Italy enjoyed rapid economic growth and finally established stable democratic regimes, the vast troubled Polish Federation slowly slid towards civil war. Where the non-Austrian successor states of the Austrian Empire managed to reestablish a kind of regional unity, the Balkan successor states of the Ottoman Empire remained quite hostile to one another. Though the United Kingdom fostered the development of a whole gamut of commercially viable technologies ranging from radio communications to automobiles, high unemployment and the collapse of many older industrial areas limited overall economic success. Some of the smaller states of northern Europe like the Scandinavian kingdoms, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Finland began to adopt elements of socialist and communalist ideologies wholesale; perhaps not uncoincidentally, these countries managed to combine economic prosperity with political stability to produce reasonably enlightened societies. Throughout this decade, Germany and the other successor states to the Second Reich suffered repeated catastrophes -- collapsing national governments, bouts of hyperinflation, stagnant economies, incessant political violence, even a brief Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr -- that sealed the future of the Weimar experiment. Conversely, during this period France experienced nothing short of a golden age, complete with rapid economic growth, impressive technological modernization, a rapid growth of French prestige in Europe and the wider world, and in Paris the renewed cultural fluorescence of the belle époque. Almost uniquely in Europe, France by the end of the 1920's seemed to be on the verge of rejoining the ranks of the advanced industrial democracies of the world.
Outside Europe, the West emulated the prosperous liberalism exemplified by France. In the United States, South America, and Australia, easy credit, technological ingenuity, and Europe's war-related industrial decline drove a long economic boom in which ownership of the new consumer goods -- automobiles, phones, radios -- became democratized. In South America, Canada, and Australia, the experiences of soldiers in Belgian battlefields contributed to a certain malaise that did not exist in the cheerily neutral United States. These countries, too, shared in the changes that beset France -- rising living standards, growing participation by women in all areas of public life, new gender roles, and the increasing popularity of Socialist, Communalist, and even Communist ideologies. However, unlike France few of these countries accepted any substantial number of immigrants or took an active part in world politics. For the United States, new waves of immigrants or active participation in world affairs was never necessary in the first place; for other countries, they were no longer need if not outright harmful to the integrity of national societies. Thus, as Buenos Aires, New York, and Rio de Janerio emerged as cities with popular entertainments and mass cultures just as exciting as anything offered by London or Paris, and even as Brazil began to emerge as a major world power, the entrancement of Europe's offshoots with their progress and Europe's chaos discouraged foreign involvements outside of the comforting aegis of the League of Nations.
In the non-Western world, rising new powers and growing anti-colonial movements began to change the traditional patterns of Westerns trength and non-Western weakness. Japan continued the patterns of rapid econoic growth and gradual democratization that had begun a half-century earlier; even after the devastation wrought upon Tôkyô in the 1923 earthquake, the Japanese middle class continued to prosper and to grow in numbers, while Japan's great cities fostered a radically new and cosmopolitan mass culture and Japanese exports continued to make inroads in Asia. Japan even acquired recognition as a Great Power almost equal in stature to France. In the Middle East, Egypt continued the industrialization begun under Mehmet Ali even as Egypt's war victories created a viable Franco-Egyptian protectorate over most of the Ottoman Empire's non-Turkish lands, and Iran -- strengthened by the 1920 acquisition of most of Russian Azerbaijan -- began to evolve into a modern state following the 1921 coup of Reza Shah against the incompetent Qajar dynasty. In East Asia, Thailand and China continued the slow modernization that had allowed both countries a modicum of prosperity and continued independence, though China was troubled by the collapse of the Chinese Republic's authority in the provincial hinterlands and by the beginnings of Japanese expansion. In short, the period of gradual Western expansion into the non-Western world had come to a halt, and was not at all likely to begin again.
Moreover, in the colonized non-Western world anti-colonial movements gained increasing strength. British India led the West's colonies in developing an articulate nationalist ideology in two dissimilar though convergent strains of thought. The first, championed by the members of the Indian National Congress, was heavily inspired by Communalism and the ideal of social egalitarianism so popular in the West. Owing to its close association with British imperial rule, Indian nationalists (for instance, the Nehrus) were firmly opposed to capitalism. These people eagerly embraced the idea of Indian villagers (catalyzed by the Indian state, to be sure) building their own economic enterprises independently of rapacious foreign corporations, while state funding for local schools and health clinics was seen as only just compensation for long generations of suffering. At the same time, the Gujarati-born Mahatma Gandhi led a campaign of non-violent resistance against the British government, leading his followers in principled resistance to British colonial laws seen as unjust based in part on the pacifistic ideals of the Jain sect. When these two ideologies converged, as they did in India by the late 1920's, they produced not only a powerful anti-colonialist ideology but a plausible model for social and economic development. The Indian example was copied elsewhere in the world, particularly in French West Africa and the Indian-settled colonies of the British Empire. Confronted with the unshakable moral certainty of their subjects, the liberal colonial powers were faced with no choice but to initiate the slow transition to independence.
The cultural and scientific innovation begun in the belle époque was accelerated still further in the 1920's. The innumerable horrors of the First World War -- in particular, the senseless brutality of trench warfare on the Western Front and the Ottoman Empire's genocide of the Armenians -- shattered whatever hold traditional ideologies still had on the creative classes. The most radical break appeared in the Soviet Union, where radical philosophies (Marxism-Leninism), writers (Gorky), and art forms (the bold streamlined and ideologically correct images of Socialist Realism) were sponsored for reasons of state ideology. Many of these Soviet cultural innovations were echoed in self-consciously radical circles elsewhere in the world, but with particular strength in Germany where the discrediting of the old Prussian value system unleashed new radical art styles (the caricatures of Carl Grosz, the outright decadence of Berlin's musical cabarets as symbolized by Kurt Weill, Brecht's drama) upon an unsuspecting populace.
Though events in the Soviet Union and Germany were exceptional in their innovation, even in more settled areas of the world nearly all bounds of subject matter, style, and attitude were broken. For instance, abstract art began by taking inspiration from natural forms or narrative themes (as did Kandinsky) and then worked free of any representational aims (Malevich's suprematism, Mondrian's geometricism). The Dada movement of Paris mocked artistic pretension with absurd collages and constructions (Arp, Tzara, from 1916) and spawned the surrealists of the 1920's, who exploited paradox, illusion, and psychological taboos in the graphic arts (Dali, Magritte). Architecture shed ornate decorations or physical complexity in favour of the machined, streamlined Bauhaus style, which was most famously adopted in post-1923 Tôkyô. In literature, prose writers explored revolutionary narrative modes related to dreams (Kafka's 1925 Trial), internal monologue (James Joyce's 1922 Ulysses), and word play (Marvalho's 1924 Making of Brazil). The themes of modern alienation and despair were also present in poetry (the works of the Anglo-American T.S. Eliot standing out) and aimlessness (the American 'Lost Generation' in Paris). To compensate, some turned to new ideologies, for instance to the elitism and pessimism of the belle époque German philosopher Nietzche, to Communalism, Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism, or even to the psychoanalytic theories of the Austrian Sigmund Freud. (Traditional Christianity in the West was unable to compete, despite the success of missionaries in Africa, although the early development of liberation theology in the Roman Catholic Church and some Protestant churches did signal future events.) In the 1930's, the general simplification of cultural forms and rejection of realism was continued, in the streamlined geometric design motifs of Art Deco, in the growing popularity of abstract art, and in alongside a new realism concerned with social and political wrongs that was present both in the graphic arts (Soviet socialist realism, Brazilian naturalism, Mexican muralism) and in literature (the American Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the French Bissot's Nos manques). Further, the 1927 introduction of sound to motion pictures allowed major French, American, British, and Argentine studios to attract a world audience nubering in the millions with larger-than-life fantasies of happiness in an idealized past.
The 1920's and 1930's also saw the culmination of a previous half-century of scientific research into the fundamental principles of the universe. Unavoidable complexity robbed these discoveries of the easy comprehensibility of the principles discovered by Newton three centuries previously. Indeed, the new discoveries made -- in particular, the Franco-Swiss Einstein's 1915 publication of the general theory of relativity and the Danish Bohr's 1911 development of quantum mechanics -- challenged common-sense views of causality, observation, and a mechanistic universe, and put science far beyond popular grasp. The universe, far from being the simple, regular, and comprehensible unit imagined by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, was revealed to be a complicated, paradoxical, and perhaps incomprehensible entity, and the public was disturbed. These scientific discoveries even contributed to the West's prevailing sense of malaise.
In the wake of so much suffering and instability, Europeans -- and to an extent, non-Europeans -- were thoroughly tired of warfare and conflict. Post-war populations slowly began to place their faith in supranational institutions that could prevent future devastating wars, such as the League of Nations and the proposed European union. Pacifism -- before the war a minority creed -- gained enormous popularity after the war, and resulted in such notable achievements as the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing aggressive war, and to the naval disarmament pacts of Rio de Janerio (1922) and Rome (1929). The League of Nations even began to acquire some of the features of a government, with the Secretariat and Secretary-General (executive body), the General Assembly and Supreme Council (legislative bodies), the World Court (legal body), and even a bit of military power in the form of League military interventions. In Europe, the first formal proposals for European unification were made in the late 1920's and soon attracted substantial official responses from across the continent. However, this early movement towards effective world and European governments was hobbled by the fact that the League of Nations could resolve only those problems that it was allowed to: border disputes between minor states such as Peru and Ecuador (1922) or Canada and Newfoundland (1929) were eagerly submitted to League arbitration by governments conscious of their dependence on foreign powers, while major democratic states inclined to the new world order were also willing to risk League arbitration (best evidenced by the League's 1928 arbitration over the disputed maritime boundaries of France and Australia in the Coral Sea), but countries that rejected the whole philosophy of internationalism could do so without suffering any penalties. This major flaw in the League of Nations' structures, and the substantial problems that many countries had with the Peace of Versailles, ensured trouble.
The economic boom that much of the world had enjoyed over the 1920's came to an abrupt end in 1929, when the United States stock market collapsed in October of that year. Even after the effects of the United States collapse spread to bourses worldwide, economists had expected that the world economy would swiftly recover. As time passed, it became apparent that the collapse of the stock market devastated financial institutions that had invested heavily in stock markets, and as banks and financial cooperatives fell worldwide (the May 1931 failure of the Austrian Credit-Anstalt bringing not only Austria but most of central and eastern Europe to ruin) national economies were brought low by an unprecedented string of bankruptcies and catastrophic unemployment, reaching 35% of Germany's labour force in 1933 and 20% of the labour forces of the United States, Argentina, and the United Kingdom in that same year.
By some estimates, the GNP of the entire industrial world (Europe, Japan, Australasia, littoral South America, the United States, and Canada) declined by one third between 1929 and 1933, while living standards for the bulk of the industrial world's population declined still further. (In the non-industrial world, attempts by colonial powers or by urban bourgeoisies to maintain their living standards by increasing taxes and conscripting labourers made life for the peasantry even more difficult than before. In India, this encouraged the political mobilization of the British Raj's vast peasantry behind the nationalism exemplified by the Indian National Congress.) Overnight, populations that had expected life to become easier with the passage of time were faced with catastrophically declining living standards.
This deterioration had major political consequences worldwide. The stable industrial democracies -- namely, those in western, northern, and southern Europe, Australasia, the littoral republics of South America, South Africa, the United States, and Canada -- were barely able to adapt to their straightened circumstances. The scapegoating of suspect ethnic (Jewish) and racial (non-white) minorities was thankfully rare, while these stable countries failed to provide fertile soil for political demagogues. Indeed, the North American states aside, these countries were blessed by remarkably charismatic and farsighted leaders -- Joao Giorgio Antabuste in Brazil, Henry Spencer in Australia, Marcel Rossi and Léon Blum in France -- who were able to create a consensus, among the democratic states, for some kind of coordinated economic recovery.
The theories of the British economist J.M. Keynes gained a limited popularity worldwide over the 1920's; in the harsh world of the 1930's, Keynes' recommendation that the governments of countries trapped in economic recession should direct government spending towards core sectors of national economies in order to hasten recovery began to seem like the only way out of global recession. However, after the failure of Chilean efforts in 1931, it became apparent that only by coordinating government spending on a global scale could sufficient momentum be built up, and the only global institution in existence that could conceivably serve these purposes was the League of Nations. Thus, beginning with the London Conference of April 1932, the participant economies in the so-called Reflation Program embarked on a vast series of government public works programs intended both to employ the unemployed and to inject needed capital into the construction and manufacturing industries. A precondition for participation in this program was an agreement to halt further increases in tariffs in order to avoid choking off international trade. Further, most of the participant economies consistently ran public-sector deficits, in defiance of accepted wisdom, into order to avoid price deflation that could slow down the economic recovery, and also began to build rudimentary welfare states on the Scandinavian model. The initial results of the Reflation Program were mixed, but beginning as early as the summer of 1933 the economic collapse of the participant countries had halted and began to reverse. By 1936, all but the most vulnerable countries had managed to regain almost all of its previous losses, and the democratic world congratulated itself for its success. (The United States and Canada, each suffering from extreme political paralysis, not only were unable to participate in the Reflation Program but could not engage in their own reflation programs. Consequently, they continued to stagnate.)
Elsewhere, other countries chose far more dubious methods to reverse patterns of economic decline. Japan, for instance, as a low-cost industrial power, was the first major economy to be hit by foreign tariffs, and this accelerated Japanese economic decline, while the piecemeal Japanese interventions in China created a Sino-Japanese crisis. With the failure of any of Japan's major political parties to offer any change, the Japanese military stepped into the breach and engineered a Keynesian reflation based largely upon spending on military goods. As time passed, militaristic attitudes favouring Japanese imperial expansion at the expense of China and the European colonial powers in Southeast Asia began to pervade Japanese society, and an anti-Western Japan began to evolve, like the German Empire in the belle époque, into a power opposed to the status quo. Once, Japan had been closely allied with France and Britain; by the end of the 1930's, both countries began to plan for war with Japan.
Since the Soviet Union did not participate in world trade, it was not directly affected by the sufferings of the capitalist world. However, under dictator Joseph Stalin the Soviet Union was subjected to unprecedented programs of forced industrialization. By the end of the 1930's, impressive industrial complexes had been built across the Russian republic while the institution of programs of mass education had created a skilled labour force. These achievements came at tremendous cost: not only was the industrialization (centrally directed through "5-year-plans") achieved through brutal labour discipline and forced labor, but the new industries were financed equally by declining living standards and the unsustainable exploitation of agriculture. The Russian peasantry was subjected to an ill-thought program of state confiscation and organization of agricultural land; this program, along with Stalin's desire to eliminate any ideologically-suspect elements from the Russian peasantry, created mass famines in 1932-33 that killed an estimated eight million peasants. More, Stalin's paranoia culminated in a series of brutal purges of Communist Party membership that saw mass deportations of loyal Communists, their families, and their associates to the infamous brutality of the northern Siberian labour camps, or gulags. As the 1930's came to a close, Stalin conducted devastating purges of the officer corps of the Soviet army that left the country dangerously exposed by events to its west.
Even before the Great Depression, the Polish Federation was struggling; after, Ukrainian discontent worsened to the point of revolt. The War of Ukrainian Independence that began in 1933 following Pilsudski's attempt to abolish the last remnants of Ukrainian autonomy pitted an ill-organized Polish army against vast congeries of hostile Ukrainian peasants. Although there were more than twice as many Ukrainians as Poles, the initial organizational and technological superiority of the Polish forces in Ukraine had allowed the Polish dictatorship to convince itself that it could defeat the peasants. As time passed, the inhabitants of Ukraine's cities began to resent Polish misrule and to support the Ukrainian separatists, who by 1935 were proposing the creation of a Ukrainian state that would engage in the sorts of radical political and economic reform that Poland could not dare to take. As time passed, Poland found itself pressured on all sides -- from its fellow member-states of the League of Nations, who were appalled by Polish military brutalities in Ukraine; by the Soviet Union, which took advantage of the Federation's instability to ship arms and provide advisers and volunteers to the Ukrainian militias; and by Nazi Greater Germany, which came to threaten Poland's western frontier. In 1937, an exhausted Poland voluntarily withdrew from Ukrainian territory, taking with it the remnants of its military forces and Ukraine's Polish and Jewish populations. Both Poland and post-1937 Ukraine were politically unstable, marked by repressive regimes that fought for survival against an active (if fragmented) opposition of liberals, socialists, communists, and peasant radicals. Although both Poland and Ukraine were aware of foreign threats, the bitter legacies of the Ukrainian War of Independence doomed the few feeble attempts to build joint fronts against Germany or Russia, while economic conditions in both countries remained depressed. Poland's 1939 withdrawal from the League of Nations further isolated that state, while Ukraine's neighbours remained reluctant to begin relations with such a radical young state.
The most worrying events were those in Germany. Germany's profound opposition to the Peace of Versailles and its post-war sufferings doomed the valiant attempts of the German Republic to establish a stable federal democracy, which indeed became discredited by Versailles. Economic collapse in 1930 and 1931 destroyed the minimal political consensus of the Weimar Republic in the 1920's, and mass political movements from the extremes of the right and the left quickly attained disturbing popularity. Perhaps the most successful of these extremist movements was the Nazi, or National Socialist, movement, which called for the destruction of the Versailles settlement and the transformation of most of central and eastern Europe into German protectorates and colonies. Following the violent German national elections of 1933, the Nazi Party -- led by the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler -- came to supreme power.
At first, Hitler successfully manipulated the western European democracies with claims that he sought only to overturn only those clauses of the Versailles settlement which treated the German nation unjustly. Thus, Nazi Germany's reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhineland district in 1936 was accepted by even the French. Questions were raised in some minds about the true intent of Nazi Germany when Saxony voted in favour of unification with Germany in 1937, but it was only in 1938 -- when in a single week the governments of the Bavarian and Austrian kingdoms were overthrown by Nazis who proceeded to annex these countries to Germany -- that the member-states of the League of Nations began to doubt the wisdom of allowing the Nazis to have their way in Germanophone central Europe. By this time, though, Nazi Greater Germany had regained the position of potential European dominance lost by Kaiserine Germany, with 70 million inhabitants and Europe's single largest industrial economy. The roughly persecution of Greater Germany's Jews -- culminating in the pogroms in August of 1938 -- managed to scandalize world opinion. Greater Germany's program of rearmament only began in 1934, but by the time of the August Pogroms it had transformed its weak national militia of 150 thousand volunteer soldiers, making it a technologically advanced force of two million conscripts with a sophisticated tactical doctrine that called for the integration of land, air, and sea forces in wartime.
In September of 1939, the League of Nations held an emergency session to consider the German question. All of the permanent voting members of the Supreme Council, and most of the other League members -- excluding Czechoslovakia, which feared a possible German invasion -- voted to condemn Greater Germany's actions. At this time, though, the League's member-states were simply unwilling to risk the lives and moneys of their citizens in a war against Greater Germany. Indeed, some governments -- most notably the British government of Chamberlain -- hoped to divert Nazi attentions to eastern Europe, in the hopes of neutralizing both Greater Germany and the Soviet Union while allowing this governments to begin rearming their militaries. Few realized that Nazi Greater Germany threatened the entire world.
The Second World War began in Europe on the 14th of July, 1940, with Greater Germany's invasion of Poland. The German invasion was devastatingly effective -- although Poland had developed a modern air force in the 1920's and 1930's, and the Polish army had extensive battle experience in Ukraine, the Polish military was far outclassed. One week after the Greater German invasion began, the Soviet Union invaded Poland's Belarusian provinces in keeping with a pre-war deal that partitioned the entire former Polish Federation. In Ukraine and the Belarusian provinces, significant armed resistance to the clumsy Soviet invaders continued until November, but in Poland the terrifyingly well-integrated air and land attacks of the German invaders led to the collapse of the country's military by the beginning of August. Refugees fleeing Poland for neutral Czechoslovakia in the weeks and months following the German conquest of Poland told stories of the gratuitous German massacre of prisoners of war and of civilian populations. These early reports, significantly, included reports of unprecedented massacres of Jewish civilians by the German invaders; this was the first news that the rest of the world received about the Holocaust.
For another nine months after the Greater German conquest of Poland, there was relatively little fighting. In Ukraine and Belarus, armed resistance to the Soviet invaders was progressively crushed through the application of overwhelming armed force. In Poland, the Greater German forces embarked on a series of massacres unprecedented in European history, with general massacres of the Polish elites, the expulsion of Polish peasants from western Poland in order to open up new lands for German colonization, and the preliminary organization of concentration camps to which Greater German and Polish Jews would be expelled. Elsewhere in Europe, the neutral countries looked to their defenses as the League of Nations quietly coordinated the rapid rearmament of European military forces and the strengthening of alliances with the League's member-states in the Southern Hemisphere in order to deal with a German threat.
Greater Germany ended this period of relative peace by declaring war upon the Soviet Union and launching a massive invasion of the Soviet Union from occupied Poland. Surprisingly, none of Greater Germany's neighbours tried to take advantage of Germany's eastern preoccupation to destroy the Reich, even though by now most people suspected that Greater Germany hoped to create a vast eastern European colonial empire under German control. The smaller League member-states in central Europe were quite hostile to any League action, since the considerable Greater German forces stationed in southern Germany and Poland could easily overrun their countries before they could defend themselves, while outside central Europe many governments and populations identified Soviet Communism as equivalent to Greater German Nazism and saw no reason to intervene militarily on behalf of either ideology. As the rest of the world watch, by the end of the summer of 1941 the invaders had broken through the Soviet defense lines in Ukraine and southwestern Russia and had taken almost all of European Russia west of the Volga -- even Moscow fell, in October of 1941. Greater Germany had failed to destroy the Soviet Union by the time that the winter of 1941 began, but it had dealt the Soviets a major blow. During this period, Stalin mysterious died and was replaced by the KGB chief Lavrenti Beria, who frantically tried to reassemble a viable military and war industry to hold off the Greater Germans.
The European situation deteriorated further in 1942. Many elements of the Greater German military were disturbed by the strategic insanity of the Nazi treatment of the conquered Ukrainians and Russians: rather than trying to draft Soviets for an anti-Communist crusade, Nazi ideologues subjected even the Germanophile Ukrainians to horrific atrocities that had created ferocious armed Ukrainian resistance forces. Further, the unprecedented massacres of Jews -- by May of 1942, almost one million eastern European Jews had been murdered by the Einsatzgrüppen even as plans for genocide of the Polish Jews continued -- worried some. Accordingly, conservative elements of the Greater German officer corps attempted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb on the 9th of June. This effort failed to kill either Hitler or his lieutenants, who immediately conducted a series of brutal purges of the Greater German military in order to ensure its loyalty to Nazi ideological aims. In the face of the military's weakness, the paramilitary SS -- staffed and enthusiastically run by strong proponents of Nazi policies of mass murder and genocide -- gained the upper hand in determining domestic and foreign policy. Under the influence of the SS, counterproductive plans were made for the preemptive invasions of western and southern Europe in order to destroy "anti-Aryan bases controlled by plutocratic Jews" such as France, Italy, and the central European states.
Further, in February of 1942 worsening relations between the League of Nations and Japan over the Japanese occupation finally degenerated into all-out war with Japan's successful invasion of the Spanish Phillippines and attacks on other European colonies in Southeast Asia. Most unlike their German counterparts in eastern Europe, the Japanese invaders conducted their war in civilized fashion, with decent treatment for all but a few local civilians and captured Europeans and soldiers, and legitimate efforts to encourage the growth of Indonesian and Filipino nationalism in the conquered areas. Japanese efforts to expand the occupied zone beyond the islands of Southeast Asia, to mainland Southeast Asia or to Melanesia, were halted by superior Western (British, French, Australian) naval strength.
The German invasions of western and southern Europe in February of 1943 at first terrified people worldwide. In order to avoid the obliteration of its capital city, Czechslovakia surrendered in the first week of the German invasion, while Denmark, most of the Low Countries, parts of northeastern France, and areas of Italy and Hungary bordering upon Greater Germany fell by the end of spring. However, the Greater German armies failed to break the well-armed League armies in northern France and Italy, and were moreover preoccupied by the desperate struggle to hold back the Soviet Union. At first slowly, then more rapidly, the League coordinated a massive counteroffensive into Germany from all sides, drawing upon soldiers from all its member-states as well as from French Africa. By the end of 1943 Greater Germany had lost vast swathes of territories to its west and east and most of its conquests, while from the east the Red Army swept over Ukraine. Contemporaneously, the navies of Britain, France, and Chile began to concentrate their forces in the South Pacific for an offensive against Japanese-held islands in the Anglo-Australian East Indies even as the British Indian Army prepared for an offensive against the Japanese and their Indonesian allies on Java.
Finally, in 1944 the Second World War ended in the Pacific and Europe. In the latter theatre, following the successful League landings on Java and the Soviet invasion of the Far Eastern Republic a newly-elected Japanese coalition government sued for peace and demobilized its forces and withdrew from Korea and China, in exchange for retaining its remaining pre-war territories and its independence. The end of the Second World War in Europe was far bloodier, as the Nazi regime enacted a whole range of barbarities in its dying months that included human sacrifices, the use of chemical weapons against Soviet troops in Poland, and a fanatical last stand in Berlin in April of 1944 that only wrecked the city at a cost of a half-million lives.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the world was stunned. Even neutral countries like the United States and Canada were shocked by Nazi Greater Germany's infinite barbarism. Combatant countries far from the war like those in the Southern Hemisphere were equally appalled by the massive destruction visited upon vast areas of Europe and Asia. In those two continents, the reaction was nothing short of unmitigated horror for, in the space of a decade, Greater Germany (and to a much lesser extent Japan) had completely destroyed the world as it existed after Versailles. In Southeast Asia and Korea, the new nationalism of the colonized made it impossible for colonial powers to maintain their control and ushered in a new age of decolonization. In eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had reconquered the Ukraine and occupied Poland and the Baltic States, soon communized under puppet governments. And, throughout the area once held in thrall to Nazi Greater Germany, the legacies of an unprecedented slaughter of tens of millions of civilians -- Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, the politically suspect, the mentally and physically ill, Roma, and above all other groups the Jews -- poisoned the very physical landscape, never mind the people who lived in those landscapes..
In sum, so much had been destroyed in the Second World War -- and in the First World War, and in the chaotic period trapped between those titanic conflicts -- that it was impossible to rebuild the world as it once was. The peoples and the states of the world had to start anew.