European History: The Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Fascism, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Storia Contemporanea

Scarica European History: The Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Fascism e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Storia Contemporanea solo su Docsity! Contemporary History Prof. Bruno Bonomo LESSO = introduction to the course LESSON 2 The Beginning of the 20% Century 1) INTRODUCTION Let’s begin our study of 20" century Europe by analysing world population in different periods of history, trying to understand different sets of pattems, highlighting both similarities and differences: On the one hand, we can see a generally positive trend, but we also perceive that in the last years (generally referring to the 20! and the first two decades ofthe 21° centuries) the population ofthe world skyrocketed, growing with extreme rates and showing impressive numbers. On the other hand, a question may be naturally risen why is the population growth so relevant in the study of history? We could broadly say that demographic indexes are extremely connected to the economic factors shaping the social world humans live in, and this makes them extremely relevant, almost vital for historians: population grows when enough resources are available to sustain it. Let’s now look more closely to percentage distributions all around the globe; if we look at the share of European population, we may notice that it tends to grow rapidly during the course of the 19° century (at the beginning ofthe century, European population counted more or less 1/5 ofthe ofthe world one, while at the end of it, Europe accounted of more than % of the global amount of human beings). So, Europe experienced a great demographic growth during the 19" century, mainly because of an extremely important, meaningful and stable economic development, which stroke the continent with the advent ofthe Second Industrial Revolution = The Great Divergence: e It happened between the mid-19" and the beginning ofthe 20! centuries; e Adivergenceineconomic measures originated between North/Western Europe and East Asia; this divergence was mainly caused by the different natural and economic factors affecting the availability ofresources in different parts of the world (in this period, we are used to generally refer to coal as the most vital mineral for the economy, usually employed in the production of electricity), but also more crucial external factors, as trade and diplomatic relations (the crucial aspect posing Europe in advantage was its own open and direct relationship withthe American continent, mostly grounded on the import of primary resources, ranging between food and cloths, but also precious minerals. What we should consider here is not, for instance, China’s stagnation, which was itself ordinary for that period, but, on the other hand, we should focus on the enormous growth experienced by the UK and other Westem European states in the highlighted timeframe. The period that we are taking into consideration (the end of the 19" and the beginning of the 20" century) was interested by our huge technological, economic and industrial growth, mainly recognized with the name of the Industrial Revolution (roughly ranging between the 1860s and the first years of the 19008). In this case, we are tempted to just consider the United Kingdom into the picture, but we are not just talking about that: we need to still take into account other powers, also non-European ones, which were growing with rapid relevance in that (as France, Germany, but also Japan and the United States, which was slowly conquering the position of biggest economy in the world). It is in this time frame that the assembly line was introduced in factories all over Europe and northern America, granting the possibility to the creation of a new kind of capitalist economic model: the Fordism (a method based on mass production and mass consumption) In the European context, the first years of the 20th century where usually recognized with the name of “La Belle Epoque”, a period of strong economic and social prosperity, in which vivid faith in progress and a general optimism were dominant. The main symbol of this brand-new era came to be the universal exposition (one ofthe most famous ones was hold in Paris in 1900): it was a planetary event which was organized with the main intent of displaying both industrial and cultural aspects, while also showing the achievements the European “civilized” society was crafting and obtaining. The beginning pg. 1 Germany Germany after 1900 was the dominant power on the continent and Great Britain's leading rival in the world. having industrialized much later than Great Britain, German industry was able to take advantage of new sources of power and new techniques. hence, its electrical and chemical industries flourished. Nonetheless, Germany was far from being a liberal democratic country in the same mold of Great Britain and France. Political liberalism was defeated in Germany in the revolutions of 1848. After that, German liberals expended their energies on developing economic liberalism. The task of achieving national unity was carried out by conservatives with the enthusiastic support of the masses. Consequently, Germany emeiged from the nineteenth century as one of the world's great industrial powers but with a governmental system that one might best describe as a pseudo-constitutional absolutism. outwardly, Germany appeared to be a liberal constitutional monarchy, but this was only an illusion based upon the fact that the Reichstag, or parliament, was elected on the basis of universal man- hood suffrage of all citizens over the age of 25. in fact, the Reichstag possessed little real power other than to refuse to pass the federal budget. The German Reich was in fact a federal union of individual German states in which real power was divided between Prussia, the largest state, and the Bundesrat, or federal parliament. Sovereignty was vested by the constitution in the Bundesrat, which was presided over by the Reich chancellor who was appointed by, and accountable to, the Kaiser (the King of Prussia). The delegates were appointed by the individual state governments and voted en bloc as directed by their governments. All really significant measures required approval by Prussia. Any attempt to amend the constitution could be defeated by 14 votes in the Bundesrat—and Prussia had 17 votes. The period from 1890 until Germany”s defeat in 1918 is referred to as the “Wilhelmian era,” for it was the Kaiser who determined the course of events in Germany, Wilhelm II of Hoenzollem (1859- 1941). As in Austria-Hungary and Russia, in Germany, the emperor possessed real power. Whatever the constitutional trappings, Wilhelm ii ruled Germany. Two important differences that completely separate the German Empire from the two previously analysed are the presence of colonies (which Germany held in Afîica in the first half of the century) and the direct confrontation with the United Kingdom for naval supremacy. Ottoman Empire The Ottoman was a vast country, stretching from North Africa, passing through the Middle East and Anatolia (its core) and finally also controlling some paits of the Balkan peninsula. Nonetheless, at the beginning of the 20° century the Ottomans were not enjoying the Golden Age that characterized them in the modern era; the Empire found itself in the so-called “Eastern Question”, seeing itself deturpated by independence movements in the Balkan region, which finally ended up with the loss of many oftheir European territory. Subsequently, the weakening of the Ottomans in the South-Eastern Europe ignited a kind of race, almost a contest, between the major Central European powers for the control of the region. Anyways, many independent countries were formed and claimed sovereignty over those pasticular lands. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire happened gradually; towards the end of the 19% century, the territorial dominion of the Empire started to “retreat” to its Anatolian core. Many countries begun to claim independence, whereas in many cases these new nations allied/were put under the spheres ofinfluence of several European already existing powers (i.e., Serbia with Russia). A further explanation regarding the analysis of other important global and regional powers (United Kingdom, France, The US and Japan) can be found in our textbook (“Twentieth Century Europe”), pp. 21-27. 3) THE PREMISES AND THE FEATURES OF THE GREAT WARù The war that Bismarck predicted did result from an event in the Balkans, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. it was known as the “Great War” until the beginning of Woild War II in 1939, after which it was called World War I. indeed, some historians suggest that the Great War was only the first round of a truly great war that began in 1914 and did not end until 1945, with a ceasefire between 1918 and 1939 (generally regarded as a second “ Thirty Years Wal”). Unlike many may believe, the war did have multiple and differentiated causes; in the first 20 years of the 20! century, Europe was divided between two military alliances; the Central Powers, also called pg.4 The military alliances the Triple Alliance, (which originated by the creation ofthe so-called Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary concluded in 1879) primarily composed by the Kingdom of Italy and the aforementioned Austro-Hungarian and German Empires, and the Triple Entente, made up by the alliance between the French Republic, the United Kingdom and the Russian Empire. The long-term causes of the war included the economic and imperial rivalry between the great powers and the armaments race, especially the naval race between Germany and Great Britain. The holding of two peace conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 belied the fact that the participants were arming for war. Many of the tensions between the great powers resulted from the loss of a balance of power in Europe following the Franco-Prussian War and unification of Germany in 1871. We still needto stress the race for militarization a strong conflict for controlling the sea a really instable political situation in the Balkans: Just as the continent was polarizing into two hostile camps, the Balkans emerged as the new “hot spot” in Europe. in 1908, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it had been administering since 1878 on behalf of Turkey. Austria’s action, sup- ported by Germany, inflamed Serbian nationalism. The Serbs had hoped to create a Great Serbia in the Balkans, and they regarded Bosnia, with its large Serbian population, as a necessary part of such an independent state. Serbian nationalism was encouraged by the Russians, who, following their defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), tumed their attention once again to their opportunity in the Balkans, over which region Turkish power and influence was disintegrating. The Balkans was fast becoming the focus of European great-power diplomacy. Fwithermore, at the beginning of the 19008, two wars stroked in the Balkans, during which the Ottoman Empire severely almost the totality of its European territories. As we previously mentioned, the sparked that blowed the conflict was an incident occurred in the Balkans, The event that served as the impetus for war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914), heirto the throne of Austria-hungary, by a 19-year-old Serb named Gavrilo Princip (1894-1918). Serbia generally aimed to enlarge its borders creating a Greater Serbia, encapsulating the territory principally belonging to Bosnia. If Austria had acted promptly to punish Serbia for its pait in the assassination, the rest of the world would no doubt have accepted its decision. But Austria hesitated. Austrian prestige demanded some military action against Serbia, but prudence, or perhaps fear, demanded that Germany’s backing be secured first. The delay allowed time for Russia to conclude that Russian prestige could not allow Austria to crush Serbia. Similar crises had occurred in the past but were resolved through diplomacy. in the final analysis, what transformed the July crisis into the cause célèbre for the Great War was a breakdown of diplomacy. On July 5, Austria obtained assurance of German suppoit for whatever action it chose to take against Serbia. Germany believed that the so-called blank check was justified, in part, because it feared for its own position in Europe should Austria decline as a power. Germany did, however, expect Austria to act while world opinion was still favorable. But Austria delayed further, first to win over Count Istvàn Tisza (1861-1918), Prime Minister of Hungary, and then to launch an investigation into Serbia”s actual role inthe assassination. In the meantime, Russia’s position had begun to harden, and it warned Austria that it would not tolerate the humiliation of Serbia. Austria ignored the waming and presented an ultimatum to Serbia on July 23. Most ofthe demands called for the Serbian govemment to suppress all public criticism, or other activity, that might incite the Serbs against Austria- hungary. Serbia accepted all but one ortwo clauses that would have allowed the Austrians to take part in the Serbian investigation of the assassination plot; this, Serbia contended, would infringe on its sovereignty. Serbia’s reply was seen by all the powers, Germany and Austria included, as remarkably conciliatory. Yet Austria went ahead with mobilization and a dedaration of war on July 28. Although Germany was by this time already beginning to have second thoughts, it did not effectively apply pressure to halt Austrian preparations for war. Also on July 28, the russians ordered a partial mobilization and then, for technical reasons, on July 30, ordered full mobilization, otherwise, Russia had concluded, it would have no chance of influencing Austria. Full mobilization by Russia made it imperative that Germany put the Schlieffen Plan into effect. Since this plan called for Germany to deal with France first, then quickly tum back to the east, each day that the russians spent mobilizing before the Germans launched their drive to the west further jeopardized the success of the plan. now, it was all ‘a matter of railroad timetables. Germany attacked France, violating Belgian neutrality in the process. pg. 5 The political situation in the Balkans The impetus of the war Austrian delay The Austrian ultimatum to Serbia The first declaration of war Britain came into the war to aid the French and to defend the principle of neutrality. of all the great powers, only italy remained, for the time being, out of the conflict. MAIN FEATURES OF THE WAR It was primarily a European war = it involved the major European powers, even if it was fought also outside of the continent, generally in the colonies held by the same powers which were massacring each other in Europe. The European imperial powers based a lot of their war efforts on their colonies, mainly deploying colonial troops (who found themselves in the middle of a double-faced contest, being greed for their efforts in the war, but also discriminated on the base of negative racial assumptions) and providing material and edible resources to their European motherlands. Colonial powers contributed to the war effort not only with war force, ‘material resources and food, but also with workforce; people from colonial territories in other paits of the woild started to replace those European workers that, because of military conscription, were almost obliged to take an active part on the fronts; It was primarily a war of attrition = it involved immense slaughter of soldiers between the tranches, in which life was severely harmed by a mixture of differentiated dangers: boredom, low health conditions and mass-murders were just some ofthese unhuman threats. Furthermore, life in the trenches developed a general sense of exacerbating alienation that continued to develop long after the end ofthe war. Trenches usually were arranged in three roughly parallel lines: first came the frontline trench; several hundred yards behind which lay the support trench; and, finally, another few hundred yards behind the support trench ran the reserve trench. in addition to the three parallel lines of trenches, the firing trenches from which attacks were launched and enemy attacks repulsed, there were various trenches running perpendicular to some or all ofthe firing trenches. Behind the front, there were communication trenches through which ammunition, reinforcements, and food were brought up to the front. running out from the front line into “No Man’s Land” (the space between the front lines ofthe opposing armies) were “saps,” shallow ditches leading to forward posts for observation, listening, grenade throw- ing, and machine-gun placements. Dimensions of firing trenches varied, but they would almost always be deeper than a man was tall, with, on the enemy side, a parapet of earth or sandbags rising another 2 or 3 feet off the ground. Trenches were built in a zigzag fashion to minimize damage from shelling and to make it difficult for an attacking enemy to clear a trench. in the sides of the trenches were one- or two-man holes, “funk holes,” and deeper dugouts. There was something of a national style in trenches: German trenches tended to be deeper, drier, and more elaborate than British or French systems; the British systems seemed the most provisional and least carefully worked out. With the digging ofthe trenches, the war of motion, the tradi- tional war the generals understood, ended. Throughout the Great War, the generals on both sides oped to break the stalemate on the Westem Front and tum the conflict back into a war of motion. The strategy for the great breakthrough was the same on both sides. Large numbers of troops were massed at some spot along the front. Aitillery bombarded the enemy trenches unceasingly (for seven days and nights at the Battle of the Somme) to “soften up” the enemy’s position. Then, the artillery fell silent, and the command was given for the infantry to “go over the top” and across the no Man’s Land of 100-500 yards before meeting the first line of the enemy”s trenches. Trudging through a barren waste of barbed wire, shell holes, and rot- ting bodies from previous failed assaults, the advancing infantrymen typically were cut down by enemy machine guns. Perhaps the first line of trenches would be taken, but eventually, the assault failed, and the advancing columns, or what was left of them, fell back to their own trenches to await counterattack. And so it continued, without significantly altering the line of the opposing trenches. It involved a deep and devastating psychological effect = the psychological situation of soldiers was severely affected by the actions and events developed during the conflict. The new view of reality destroyed the foundational premise of classical liberalism and democracy, as well as humanitarianism. The experiences ofthe Great War together with the economic crises and social dislocations that followed, and in part resulted from, it fiuther deepened anxiety over the future. The war provoked a general dehumanization of the generation that experienced it. pg. 6 Trench warfare over 2 periods of time: the so-called February Revolution and the October Revolution (which, following the Gregorian calendar, developed respectively in early March and early November). the Tsarist government, led by Tzar Nicholas II Romanov showed unable to face the effects of the war, so, in February 1917 a liberal revolution, mainly composed of civil manifesters and soldiers, who joined the strike after rebelling against the orders of the Tzar, whose decision of moving the army against the revolting population was not respected, brought to the end the rule of the Tsars and established a provisional liberal government, which was later created by some deputies of the Duma and led by the liberal prince Georgij L’vov. That there was a revolution in Russia at all was due to the failure of the Tsar’s government to deal adequately with the demands of the war. This in turn was the result of a number of factors. Russia was the most effectively blockaded of the belligerents. At the same time, it was unable to exploit its vast natural resources due to its general economic backwardness and the govemment’s unwillingness to organize the economy and society for a total war effort. Facing the problems that were ramping up in Russia, Nicholas II decided to abdicate, leaving the throne to his brother, who, nonetheless, refused it; on March 3, 1917, the Romanov’s power of the state ended and with it the Russian imperial asset. In short, it was an abdication of authority by the Tsar’s government that led to the creation of the Provisional Govermment and the Petrograd Soviet, established by the insurgents. There were three different coalition governments during the period of the Provisional Govemment from March 18 to november 7, 1917. The first consisted of middle- and upper-middle- class liberals from the Kadets (Liberal Constitutional Party) and Octobrists (moderate constitutionalists) and Aleksandr Kerensky (1881-1970), a member of a moderate Labor Paity, the lone socialist. in May, several Mensheviks (the moderate wing of the Social democratic Labor Paity) and Socialist Revolutionaries (a radical party with a peasant base) joined the coalition. Kerensky became minister of war and began preparation of an attack intended to contribute to the allied war effort. After the July offensive failed, Kerensky took the post of minister-president and formed a second coalition govemment on August 6. Kerensky also led the third and final coalition cabinet that lasted From october 8 to november 7, when the Bolsheviks seized power. As previously mentioned, another faction started to emerge from below: the Soviets (councils of people aiming to establish a direct type of democracy in Russia). The most important Soviet was the one created in Petrograd, which acted as a sort of shadow government against the liberal one established in early March. The October Revolution developed inthe aftermath of Lenin’s retum to Russia; the Bolshevik paity, leaded directly by Lenin, separated from the Socialist Party and started to propose more radical Marxist policies. When Lenin came back from Switzerland (also helped by the Germans, who recognized in the Bolsheviks the only way through which Russia could have been effectively excluded from the war), he issued his famous April Thesis, stating that the revolution was ready to encounter its second phase: governmental authority should have been transferred to the Soviets. He also advocated for an immediate peace, ending World War One, and for the implementation of a radical territorial and law reformation, with the aim of contrasting the bad harvests and the terrible famines provoked by the Tsarist policies of food distribution during the conflict. The Bolsheviks mainly aimed to gather the necessary power to grant authority to the Soviets, as for them these latter were the only councils able to effectively represent the popular will. The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks took place on November 7 (october 25), 1917, when the so-called “strike of the Winter Palace” occurred, led by Leon Trotsky, while Lenin fled to Finland. Actually, “seizure of power” is too glorious a phrase to convey the reality of the confused situation in Petrograd. It would be more accurate to say that once the Provisional Govemment failed in its attempt to destroy the Bolsheviks and the Military Revolutionary Committee, power was dumped into the lap of the Bolshevik faction. Trotsky”s preparations made it appear that power had been seized in the name of the Soviet movement. not all members of the Second Congress of Soviets, meeting at that time in Petrograd, accepted that notion, but the delegates who remained at the meeting, although a minotity voted to accept a Bolshevik government. For the time being, it was also accepted in Moscow and other important cities. Perhaps more important, it was accepted in most areas at the front. in the provinces, distant from central authority in any case, a watchful attitude was adopted. At the same time, centers of resistance sprang up, but the Bolsheviks managed to retain power without great difficulty in the last months of 1917. The situation became much graver in 1918; the pg. 9 The February Revolution The October Revolution and Lenin's rise to power revolutionary government faced several difficult situations. First, it had to contend with the Constituent Assembly, elected in november after the revolution. The Bolsheviks were badly outnumbered, notably by the Socialist Revolutionaries who had received strong peasant support. At the initial meeting of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, delegates began immediately to criticize the government sharply. The govemment responded by dispersing the Assembly at the end of the first day; there was not even enough organized support for parliamentary rule to counter this move. The second problem could not be dealt with so easily. Itinvolved ending the war with Germany. Trotsky led the russian delegation in negotiations with Germany and Austria beginning in december, but he was not able to moderate the harsh demands laid down by the German general staff. Lenin, as he had so often in the past, used his powers of persuasion and prestige to persuade the Bolsheviks to accept the German terms, harsh as they were. From the moment Bolsheviks obtained power, they started enacting their own policies, like animmediate armistice signed with Germany, with a following the peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Russia on March 3, 1918, which costed Russia the loss ofEuropean territory (Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, the Baltic provinces, Finland and Transcaucasia), and the implementation of the already anticipated land reform, accompanied by the abolition of private property and the redistribution of confiscated land to peasants and farmers. This was an essential moment in the 20° century: the first communist state had been fully established. The Bolsheviks imposed what they themselves called the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, a radical alternative to the traditional capitalist political, social and economic order represented by the United States and its allies. Another relevant aspect in this framework is represented by Lenin's idea of a “world revolution”: in Lenin’s view the Russian Revolution had to be just the beginning, the catalyst for worldwide glorious event, of which the so-called Third International (or the Comintem Congress) was just the first instance. LESSON 5 The end of the war and the Inter-War period (1918-1939) 7) THERUSSIAN CIVIL WAR AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE USSR Revolutionary forces and counterrevolutions were a basic element ofthe inter-war period; the Bolshevik Revolution developed in Russia in October/November 1917 came to be a major event, as it resulted in the formation of a new political, economic and social order, a substantial alternative to the liberal capitalist system that was being implemented in the West. 1919 saw the organization of the famous commumist assembly, the TVuîrd International, successor of the previous two which took place during the second part ofthe 19" century and were mainly composed of socialist and revolutionary exponents. Nonetheless, this congress was substantially different from its predecessors, being drafted and constitute in the very first socialist state ever existed. Despite the monstrous results saw by the Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolution in Russia was not unopposed: for many Russians, communism did not represent an effective response to the problems suffered by the population during the Tsarist era and its implementation was regarded as a further asphyxiation of the glorious Mother Russia and its Christian and traditional values. After the October Revolution, a great Civil War stroked the country; Bolsheviks (also recognized as “the Reds”) begun to be contrasted by a broader coalition, encapsulating exponents of diverse political creeds, but retaining a strong anti-Bolshevik sentiment (also known as “the Whites”), which was internationally sustained by Tsarist Russia’s allies in WWI (France and Britain). The Reds enjoyed certain advantages over the Whites. The Reds were unified geographically, as well as ideologically. They controlled the most impoitant provinces of the former russian empire, which gave them control of the economic resources, including the railroads, and internal lines of supply and defense. To insure that the Red Army received the necessary supplies and manpower, the government introduced a set of policies commonly referred to as “War Communism.” Factories and lands were nationalized; strikes were prohibited; vital resources, including food, were rationed; and the peasants pg. 10 The resistance in the Constituent Assembly Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the foundations of the USSR The Third International The Civil War: Reds vs Whites Reds” advantages War Communism were forced to fulfill quotas for the production of grain and other agricultural products. Throughout the areas controlled by the new government, what amounted to a military discipline was implemented. These measures enabled Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s associate, to raise a Red Army that totaled around five million soldiers by the end ofthe civil war. In contrast, the Whites were never unified ideologically or with regard to military strategy. They attacked the reds from the north, east, and south with armies that never totaled more than a quarter million. They lacked leadership, both military and ideological. Whereas the reds were able to unify their armies as well as the civilian population in the areas under their control, the Whites were never able to do so. They lost the struggle for the hearts of the peo- ple, who came to fear a White victory more than a red victory. The final battle of the civil war was fought in the Crimea, around the town of Perekop, between november 7 and 15, 1920. The Russian Civil War ended in a victory for the Red Army, but at the expense of an estimated 10 million lives (8 millions perished during the actual Civil War, plus 2 millions which died in the last instances of the world conflict. It is notewoithy that the Whites lost the civil war despite assistance from impetrial russia’s allies during the Great War. Great Britain, France, Japan, and the United States all became embroiled in the civil war. Allied involvement was, however, never coordi- nated and largely limited to material suppoit for the White Armies. The British and French governments decided on intervention with three goals in mind. The first was to safeguard stockpiles of military supplies provided to the Tsarist government and stored at Archangel. Second was a desire to use the Czech Legion located along the Trans-Siberian railroad against the Bolsheviks. Finally, they hoped to revive an Eastern Front against Germany and Austria- hungary. At the end the Civil War in 1921, War Communism was abandoned, and a different economic pattern was adopted, the New Economic Policy (the NEP), which broadly allowed farmers and producers a certain amount of liberty in the sale of their products (partial return of capitalist elements in the first communist state). The NEP also reintroduced some level of trade, which made it possible for two new social classes to rise; first, the so-called NEPmen, people who managed to make their own fortunes thanks to the new policies introduced by Lenin’s govemment, and the Am/aks, wealthy landowners and farmers in rural parts of the country. As a result of that, many old-fashioned socialists inside the communist party statted to feel a general preoccupation, associated with a possible retum of capitalism in Russia. Back in 1919, Lenin took the initiative to set up a new International, the Communist International or Comintern. In its second congress held in 1920, the structure, tasks, and objectives of the Third Intemnational were set. To all socialists aimed to join was imposed the change of the name of the party, from socialist to communist, the expulsion of reformist currents and the assumption of the Bolshevik party model. Between 1920 and 1921, adherence to the International caused in all European countries the division of socialist forces and the birth of communist parties, not at all willing to establish relations with their respective governments, but only interested in pursuing the goal achieved by the Russian Bolsheviks. Since December 30, 1922, the territory within the borders of the former Russian Empire was officially renamed as the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR): the Russian Socialist Republic was joined by other socialist nations (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Caucasus and Siberia) in a gigantic federal state; even if the state consecrated itselfto a democratic republican system, based on territoriality and direct democracy, the political power was very much laid in the hands of the Communist Party, in particular the leadership ofit. 8) THERISE OF FASCISM IN ITALY The Communist Revolution was feared in many states, as in Germany and Hungary, where a revolution led to the creation of a communist short-lived govermment in 1919, which was overthrown by the military. This counterrevolution, also sustained by forces allied with the Romanovs, led to the military conservative dictatorship of one of his exponents, Admiral Horthy. Meanwhile, in Italy the situation developing inthe aftermath of the Great War was not at all reassuring. Although Italy was on the winning side in the Great War, its military performance was less than impressive. The peace conference awarded Italy much less than it felt entitled to by the Treaty of London between the Triple Entente and Italy (1915). The secret treaty promised italy territory along the pg. 11 Whites” difficulties Battle of Perekop The NEP The Communist International The creation of the USSR The end of WWI in Italy * Britain, represented by David Lloyd George; ® Italy, represented by Premier Vittorio Orlando; e The United States, represented by President Woodrow Wilson. The president’s idealism clashed with the realism of his European counterparts, especially that of Clemenceau. The extent to which his unwillingness to make the treaty a bipartisan political issue at home resulted in the US Senate’s, and the people’s, ultimate rejection of it also has been examined at length. ‘What remains indisputable is Wilson®s sincere commitment to a just peace as a basis for building a new world order. he believed that the League of nations was the essential cornerstone of that new order, but its existence required the postwar cooperation of the victors. To see the League become a reality, Wilson was forced to compromise, often at Germany”s expense. he justified this compromise in the sincere belief that whatever defects the treaty contained could be repaired in later years by international cooperation through the League. Had the Treaty of Versailles been the only product of the Paris Peace Conference, Europe might have maintained political stability in the 1920s and 1930s. There were, however, four additional treaties and the League of Nations Covenant. The failure of several ofthese agreements, combined with the limited success of the Treaty of Versailles, created an extremely volatile situation in the 1930s. of the four treaties, two can be disregarded: the Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey never went into effect; the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria had no important repercussions. The other two, the Treaty of St. Germain with Austria and the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary, created problems that were never fully resolved between the two world wars. instead, two different problems were created. First, Austria and Hungary, before the war semiautonomous paits of the habsburg Empire and each dominant in its own sphere, became small, relatively weak states. Austria particularly was an anomaly, a landlocked state of over six million, of whom two million lived in Vienna. The state was lopsided in every imaginable way, but espe- cially economically. Unfortunately, Austria was not allowed to join with Germany for fear that this would unduly strengthen the latter. 1. No more secret agreements (“open covenants openly arrived Even if in theory these pacts tried to be in line a) with the principle of self-determination put 2. Freenavigation of all seas forwardin Wilson’s “14 points” (see them inthe 3. Anendtoall economic barrers between countries table onthe left), in effect this latter was difficult 4 Countries to reduce weapon numbers to apply; the problem involved the creation of a 5. All decisions regarding the colonies should be impartial È 1 . series of new or reconstituted states in Eastem 6. The German army is to be removed from russia. russia should LOT Ì be left to develop her own political setup and Central Europe and conflicting claims over 7. Belgium should be independent like before the war territory and population. The idea of national 8 Franceshould be fully liberated and allowedto recover Alsace- | self-determination was extremely difficult to Lorraine apply in this area with any fairness. 9. All'italians areto be allowed to live in Italy. Italy”s borders are ; . 1 « vo Mtay S00 Czechoslovakia, for example, included areas in to be “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality 10. Self-determination should be allowed for all those living in | Which the majority of the population was Austria-Hungary German or Polish; these areas had been included 11. Selfedetermination and guarantees of independence should be | for strategic reasons, as was the Sudetenland allowed for the Balkan states with its majority of Germans, or for historic 12. The Turkish people should be governed by the Turkish Ia . Ito govemment. non-Turks in the old Turkish Empire should | 10250NS, as was Teschen with its Polish majority. govem themselves Poland included areas with German majotities. 13. An independent Poland should be created which should have | Romania and Yugoslavia had large access to the sea concentrations of Magyars. Numerous other examples could be cited of the impossibility of a simple, completely fair division of territory according to the principle of national self-determination. Going back to the Treaty of Versailles, France imposed Germany to pay war reparations, almost as a form of punishment, which produced a lot of resentment between the Germans in its aftermath. Let's now analyze the main points of the concordat, Germany lost vast portions of its territory (Alsace and Lorraine to France, Eastern Lands to Poland and Czechoslovakia, etc.). Furthermore, it was forced to pay war reparations, take responsibility for the war, and undergo a complete disarm, involving limitations both in the quantity of soldiers, navy and air forces. pg. 14 Four additional treaties and the League of Nations Covenant Wilson's “14 points” and the principle of self determination Even if rejected or partially implemented, Wilson's 14 points had some important repercussions, as the creation of the so-called League of Nations; it represented the first intemational organization created with the aim of maintaining peace and preventing the outbreak of another conflict like WWI. However, the League has been labelled as an international failure: first of all, it was a “league of victors”, which did not encompass neither the Soviet Union (which joined in 1934) nor Germany (which did join in 1926, but later on, with Hitler" s rise to power, decided to leave). (See page 8, for a detailed explanation) LESSON 6 Europe and the world during the Great Depression (1918-1939) 10) THE BIRTH OF THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC The political situation in Germany during the last instances of the war and in its aftermath was surely dominated by the creation of a republican asset; since September 1918 it was clear that the German army had lost the war, however the high military command, directed by generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff did not want to take responsibility for the defeat and decided to hand back to the political class the leadership of the government they had in fact assumed in 1917 when, in a last attempt, the military leadership had imposed as chancellors men close to the army. It was the prince Maximilian von Baden who, having taken the chancellorship, engaged in the management of the difficult transition, starting with communicating to the emperor the need to leave the throne, which emerged from the peace negotiations with the Allied forces, these latter demanding a formal commitment from Germany to democratization before reaching the armistice. It was at this point that the German situation precipitated. There were several riots by different political groups, especially by soldiers and communists. Everywhere the insurgents created, onthe model ofthe Bolshevik Revolution, “councils of soldiers and workers”. The prospect ofarevolution, even more than von Baden's invitation, convinced Wilhelm II ofthe need to abdicate and on November 9 he left Germany. The Republic was immediately proclaimed by the socialist Philipp Scheidemann and a provisional government under the SDP exponent, Friedrich Ebert, was created. In January 1919, while Berlin was in revolution, German voters elected a National Assembly to draft a constitution. Because the delegates to the constitutional convention met in the town of Weimar, the German republic created by the new constitution became known as the Weimar Republic. The National Assembly confirmed as president Friedrich Ebert, former chancellor of the provisional government. The constitution drafted at Weimar was the very model of a democtratic constitution. Two aspects of the constitution were to prove fatal for the republic, however. Article 48 allowed the president to rule by decree during times of national emergency. Also, the lower house ofthe Reichstag was to be elected by universal suffrage but according to a system of proportional representation that made it virtually impossible for any party to achieve a majority. Indeed, during the life of the republic, no patty ever achieved a majority. The survival of the republic became dependent upon the cooperation of the so- called Weimar pasties - Social Democratic Patty (SPD), Catholic Center Patty (Z, or Zentrum), and German Democratic Party (DDP). These paities were ideologically incompatible but willing to collaborate because the alternative was too frightening to contemplate. important differences of opinion on both economic and political questions were merely papered over. Most Germans did not prefer the republic and even associated it with defeat and betrayal. The traditional elites of army, judiciary, bureaucracy, church, and landed and industrial wealth remained openly hostile to it. The decision of holding the Constitutional Assembly deliberations in a minor provincial city instead of the capital, Berlin, was drawn by the previously mentioned fact for which the situation in major urban conglomerates was still really tense and riots majorly perpetuated by the Spartacus League (a paramilitary organization aiming to install a Soviet-like system in Germany) were still going on. From this core of asserted commumist exponents originated the KPD, the German Communist Party, which invoked to free Germany from the strict oppression of liberal democracy. The riots of the Spartacus pg. 15 The League of Nations An obvious defeat Max Von Baden's chancellorship Ebert's provisional government The National Assembly in Weimar and the confirmation of Ebert as President Ebert's provisional government The Spartacus League, the KPD and the “Spartakist Revolt” League came up to their apex in 1919, in what is remembered as the “ Spartakist Revolt”. Despite the great efforts put in the riots, the revolt was not successful; the aim was, of course, creating and establishing a Soviet-like system in Germany, but this idea was strongly opposed by both the conservative right-wing elites and the Social Democratic Party, led by President Ebert. To succeed in being right of the insurgents, Ebeit availed himself not only of the army, but also of the Freikorps, voluntary troops of nationalist inspiration mainly composed of war veterans who, after the general demobilization, had remained in command oftheir officers. The leaders ofthe Spartacus League, Rosa Luxembourg, and Karl Liebknecht were murdered during the repressions in Berlin. As we triedto introduce before, the Weimar Republic was, at least apparently, a democratic regime, but it came to the general understanding that great instabilities were tormenting the ideal political equilibrium proposed by the Constitution. Firs of all, let's try to frame the constitutional asset proposed by the document: if the constitutional text was innovative under certain respects, it was pretty much ambiguous under some others: in fact, it maintained some ties with the past, not only in the federal form, but also in the use ofthe term Reich, used to define the two parliamentary assemblies: Reichstag for the Elective Chamber and Reichstrat for the Federal one. A President of the Republic was elected by universal suffrage by both men and women. The Chancellor and government ministers were appointed by the President of the Republic, but they had to receive the trust ofthe Reichstag. Only this latter, elected by universal suffrage with proportional representation, had legislative power. The Federal Chamber (Reichsrat) was made up of representatives of individual state governments. Moreover, the President was awarded with special powers by article 48 of the Constitution, ensuring to him the ability of legislating without the consent of the Diet (even if these powers needed parliamentary approval and ministerial or gubernatorial countersign). Let’s now analyze the main difficulties fronted by the Republic in its first moments: e Ithadto face the hostilities ofthe more traditional part of the German society; ® The Republic was seen as the most relevant output ofthe German failure in the Great war, e Itwas perceived as a symbol of betrayal; the leaders of the Republic betrayed the motherland by accepting the victory of the allied forces; e Ithadto confront with the issue of substantial war reparations (mainly to France). A greater threat to the stability of the republic was the hyperinflation caused by the Franco-Belgian occupation of the heartland of German industry, the Ruhr. War reparations were the main sticking point in Franco-German relations and the foremost issue in German domestic politics in the early 1920s. France believed that Germany could pay enough in reparations to finance the reconstruction of France and other costs related to the war. The Germans doubted this. In January 1923, the French and the Belgians occupied the Ruhrin orderto force Germany to pay. The German government encouraged a program of passive resistance, which it tried to finance by printing more and more money. Currency quickly lost all value other than the value of the paper for pulping. in July 1914, one US dollar was worth 4.2 marks. In January 1919, one US dollar would purchase 8.9 marks. When the Ruhr occupation began in January 1923, the figure had risento 17,972 marks, an unbelievable sum, but nothing compared to the 4.2 trillion marks that a single US dollar would bring on November 15, 1923. ® The amountof war reparations had to increase as long as the German economy was recovering. Moreover, the Republic started to become more and more dependent on the United States: the govemment reorganized under the leadership of Gustav Stresemann (who, by the way, served as Chancellor only for few months in 1923) from the German People’s Party (DVP). A new mark, the Rentenmark, was issued at the rate ofone new mark for one trillion ofthe old inflated marks. Soon the mark stabilized at its old prewar value of 4.2 marks to the dollar. Stresemann, who later served as foreign minister from 1923 until his death in 1929, carried through a policy of “fulfillment” with regard to reparations. “Fulfillment” was based on the assumption that the surest route to revision of the Versailles Treaty was to avoid open confrontation and to work with existing possibilities. Positive results were not long in coming. in 1924, the Dawes Plan provided a realistic scale for the payment ofreparations and a foreign loan (largely provided by Ametican banks) of 800 million gold marks. These measures, together with the end ofthe Ruhr pg. 16 The Constitutional asset of the Weimar Republic The difficulties of the Republic after the War economic situation was mitigated by large American loans that began in 1924, as noted earlier. The Ametican investment programme, however, ended up linking the US economy even more closely to the European one; American capital was used by Germany to pay off the European creditor powers and was used by them to pay off war debts to the United States. The situation then went to create a vicious cycle, which will be confirmed as destructive following the crisis of 1929. Let’s now analyse the main effects developed in the aftermath of the crisis: e Unemployment. ® Protectionism = generally referred to be nationalism in economic policies. The rise of custom barriers to protect the domestic economy was the recipe adopted by most European govemments to cope with the emergency. The result, however, broke the world economic unity achieved in the first two decades of the twentieth century and damaged above all the country that had been its engine. In fact, just when, between 1932 and 1933, the American economy was beginning to show signs of recovery, it found itself heavily affected by the effects of the protectionist and anti-cyclical measures launched by European countries; ® Differentiated economic policies = at first, most countries managed to adopt very traditional and orthodox liberal economic policies; the basic role covered by national governments was bringing the national budget in balance again. This road caused an extreme reduction in public expenditure, associated with what will later be called austerity measures. The rampant idea between economists at that time was that for which the only way to actually get a better economic situation was to reduce expenditure, so cutting worker”s revenues and rising the costs of imported products; the main countereffect was an even higher degree of unemployment. By the way, the main response to the depression did not come from traditional forms of economic recovery: what the classic liberals feared was just what others, who saw underconsumption as the root problem, believed necessary in order to save capitalism by making it work. Unlike the liberals, these advocates of a “middle road” saw the necessity of some public management and planning of the economy. In addition, they advocated what economists call “ deficit spending,” that is, the use of public funds raised by borrowing. Unlike the socialists, they were committed to preserve private property. Like the economic policymakers of the post-World War II era, theirs was a program that would allow as much planning as necessary and as much freedom as possible. The leading advocate of this new consumer-based economic theory was the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, who expressed his ideas in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Keynes” primal goal was to reach full employment by deploying interactions focused on demand: for Keynes, it was essential to boost consumption in order to make the economic system work properly. But how could this be achieved? In Keynes” opinion the only actor that may have effectively stimulated demand and, subsequently, consumption, was the state; governments had to rise funds by borrowing and then employ them in the so-called “deficit spending” mentioned before. By doing this the state would have effectively revived the economic system. Immediately after the crisis developed in 1929, the American President Herbert Hoover, exponent of the Republican party, believing that the State intervention would have further aggravated the crisis, given that this was a limited and temporary phenomenon, simply called for cooperation between entrepreneurs and local authorities. Following this assumption, he didn't set up any federal intervention to assist the unemployed and boost productivity. The effects of the collapse of the Wall Street stock exchange were, therefore, disastrous for the American economy both because they lacked incisive interventions by the government and the monetary authorities, and because the recession reached the peak of an unprecedented expansion cycle. Protests, riots, hunger marches, barricades and violence of all kinds deeply disturbed American public opinion, creating the conditions for the success, in the November 1932 presidential elections, ofthe Democratic candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which whom began a long season of political domination perpetuated by the Democratic Party, ending only in the early 1950s. Roosevelt immediately set to work on the so-called New Deal, reorganizing banking and stock markets to increase transparency and reliability, providing soft loans to households, and implementing a number of measures, such as strengthening controls on credit institutions and devaluing pg. 19 The developments in the aftermath of the crisis Traditional economics vs Keynesian economics President Hoover®s failure The election of FD. Roosevelt as President ‘and the New Deal the dollar, to contain inflation were just some of the points envisaged by the plan. In addition, it introduced important reforms in the field of agriculture and, with the introduction of new manoeuvres in 1935 which took the name of “second New Deal”, the President introduced the so-called “democratic capitalisni’ that proposed itself as a winning alternative with respect to both the dirigisme of fascist dictatorships and Soviet collectivism. New laws were introduced conceming the rights of trade unions to organize and bargain collectively with employers and the establishment of a system of cooperation between states and the federal authority to provide unemployment benefits and pensions. Although the New Deal was strongly opposed by the Republican party, Roosevelt achieved an overwhelming victory in the November 1936 presidential election, which saw the highest-class polarization in American history. The New Liberalism of the 1930s succeeded in giving, despite the actual limits of the measures of the New Deal and the opposition it encountered, a “social-democratic touch” to American politics, making the Democratic Paity also a sort of labour party. 12) THE RISE OF ADOLF HITLER IN GERMANY AND RACIAL HATE In Germany, the Great Depression is usually recognized to have represented one ofthe most important factors in the political rise of Adolf Hitler, It was the effects ofthe 1929 crisis that, as we will see, hit Germany more than any other European country because of the dependence of the German economy on American loans and investments, that caused the progressive collapse of the republican institutions. ‘With a decline in the occupation that almost brought back Germany tragic post-war scenarios, the Germans' confidence in the Republic and its ruling class went into crisis while the rhetoric ofthe “stab in the back” attributing to socialists, Catholics, liberals and Jews the responsibility of the defeat in the World War, was expertly brought back to the fore by the right; the whole public opinion seemed eager to get rid ofthe punitive clauses that were established in Versailles. The Young Plan, launchedin 1929 to further pay in instalments war reparations, was also strongly opposed by the NSDAP, with a propaganda campaign that eventually increased the popularity of the party among the Germans. For all these reasons, Hitlers Pasty was able to obtain, during the 1930 general elections, 107 representatives, thus becoming the second party of the Republic after the SPD. The KPD also took a big leap forward and went from 54 to 77 MPs. The situation quickly precipitated after presidential elections were held in March 1932. In the fear that the traditional political fragmentation might favour Hitler’s victory, the Social Democrats and the central parties decided to suppoit the outgoing President, Paul Von Hindenburg, although they did not agree with its previous political management. After a turbulent period, during which the president failed to create an executive generally supported by a real pailiamentary majority (this latter being able to operate mainly thanks to the massive use of Article 48 of the Constitution and its continued use as a legislative instrument), in 1932 Chancellor Franz Von Papen decided to hold two elections: In July, Hitler" s party won 37.4% of the vote, and in November, despite a decline, it was confirmed as a relative majority patty. The political forces finally understood that it was not possible to create a goveming coalition without the Nazi party. Article 48 ofthe Weimar Constitution gave the president, the constitutional head of the state, the power to rule by decree during a national emergency. From the chancellorship of Heinrich Briining to the end ofthe republic in 1933, each chancellor (appointed by, and responsible to, the President, not the Reichstag) govemed through emergency decrees issued by President Hindenbuwg. Since neither Brining, Papen, Schleicher, nor Hitler was able to command a majority in the Reichstag, the Weimar republic became a presidential dictatorship after March 1930. As already stated before, the growing strength of the Nazi movement was evident also in the presidential elections of March and April 1932. In March, Hitler came in second behind President Hindenbwg in a campaign featuring four candidates from the extreme right to the extreme left. in the runoff election in April, Hitler again came in second. Hindenburg's re-election was credited to his having received the support of the left-of-center voters (mainly from Z and the SPD), who saw him as the only means of preventing Hitler's election. Later on, having failed to include the Nazis in a coalition executive without granting Hitler the presidency, on January 30, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor, entrusting the fate of Germany to the new government formed by National socialists, National Popular and Popular. pg. 20 The rise of Nazism as effect of the Great Depression The Young Plan The 1930 General elections and the 1932 Presidential election The 1932 General elections Hitler®s ‘appointment as Chancellor On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was mysteriously set on fire, destroying the central chamberin which the parliament met. Claiming that there was sufficient evidence that communists were responsible and intended that the fire should be a signal for a communist uprising, Hitler convinced President Hindenbug to issue the decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State. Civil liberties, including freedom of the press and speech, were suspended. The law was aimed at silencing opposition to the Nazis, especially from commumists and social democrats. The Communist Party (KPD) was suppressed and some 4,000 ofits members arrested. On March 5, against a backdrop of fear and violence, Germans again went to the polls once again. Despite efforts to suppress the communist and social democratic vote, the Nazis failed to win a majority. They received 43.9 percent of the votes cast, winning 288 seats. With support from the German National Peoples’ Party (DNVP), the Nazis were able to command a majority but less than the two-thirds needed to effectively amend constitutional laws and subsequently, legally establish a dictatorship. The inglorious end of the Weimar republic came on March 23, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act granting Hitler dictatorial powers for four years. The necessary two-thirds majority was achieved by preventing the Communists and 21 Social democrats from attending. Also, the Catholic Center Party voted for the Enabling Act. With Hitler assuming dictatorial powers, the regime started suppressing civil liberties, abolishing all independent organizations and declaring the NSDAP as the only legal one in Germany on July 14, 1933. Germany was to become a Volksgemeinschaft, a national or racial community in which traditional social classes would be replaced by a mass of “folk (i.e., racial) comrades”, following a strict hierarchical order. During the cowse of 1933, all independent organizations were abolished and/or absorbed into nazi-led organizations. Thus, for example, all labor unions were abolished and workers required to jointhe German Labor Front. A reich Chamber of Culture under Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightment, was established to oversee all aspects of media production and dissemination. in January 1934, the Reichsrat, the upper house representing the state govemments, and all state legislatures themselves were abolished. For the first time in its history, Germany became a centralized national state. These acts were accompanied by the so-called “coordination” (Gleichschaltung, or coordination of society), a political ideology based on the assumption for which the members of the pasty enjoyed a special statute, taking them away from the workings of ordinary cowts, and the political-organizational leaders of the party and the head of the Nazi assault teams, the SA, became by right members of govemment. The policy of synchronization, therefore, established an ever-greater interpenetration between State and Party. With the abolition of the federal system, the progressive occupation of institutions by members of the NSDAP or by trustees of the Fihrer, synchronisation allowed the creation of an authoritarian one-patty regime without formally repealing the present constitutional system. With the systematic introduction of this principle into the policies of the German Republic, the Weimar Constitution was in fact eliminated. New kinds of associations, organizations, pacts and doctrines were created in different fields, rigorously following the directives of the party ideology: e TheSA (orstormtroopers), led by Emst Rohm, were replaced by the SS, captained by Heinrich Himmler: In order to reassure the Conservatives and the army, Hitler purged the SA, which, although they played a fundamental role during the clashes of the early 1930s, showed excessive ambitions of autonomy. On the night of June 30, 1934, known as the "Night of the Long Knives", the SA leadership, beginning with Rohm, were eliminated by another Nazi militia, destined from that moment on to grow enormously, the SS security teams; e The “coordination” of the churches proved more difficult. Attempts to establish a national Reich Church under Ludwig Miiller as Reich Bishop were less than successful. Evangelical Cluistians, including Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Niemoller, formed the Confessing Church in opposition to the Reich Church. Many of the Confessing pastors, including Bonhoeffer, subsequently suffered martyrdom at the hands of the state. Hitler was somewhat more successful in neutralizing the Catholic Church as a center of organized opposition. In what was one of his most spectacular foreign policy successes, Hitler signed the Reich Concordat with the papacy on July 20, 1933. By the terms ofthe concordat, the Catholic Center Party was disbanded, and the Catholic clergy were required to give up all political activity. henceforth, Catholics who opposed the Nazi state and its policies (e.g., the holocaust) had to do so as individuals. Although there were courageous individuals among both Catholics pg. 21 Hitler assumes dictatorial powers The political asset of Nazi Germany New organizations, pacts and ideologies Portugal back in those days, was the role covered by the colonial empire, which represented an important resource of national pride for the Portuguese, most of all for the more traditional and conservative elites. Talking about colonies and colonial possessions, we may try to introduce a relevant topic that will be further analyzed after the study of Woild War II: the peak of European colonial empires and the beginning of decolonization processes. One example that can be made refers. To the acquisition of big portions, the Middle East by both France and the United Kingdom, which respectively acquired Syria and Lebanon (French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon), and Palestine (British mandate for Palestine) ‘under the scrutiny of the League of Nations after the capitulation and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Nonetheless, both during this and future periods, counternarratives emerged: antiimperialist exhibitions begun to be organized (with the aim to showing the “real face” ofthe colonial rule: political violent oppression), while nationalistic sentiments started to develop between colonized peoples. As a subsequent result, anticolonialism started to blossom in the inter-war period. Migration to Europe of extra-European colonials was instrumental for the emergence ofthese new movements, even ifit was pretty much limited to students and elites. Let's analyze two examples that will be fiuther explained later: * Firstofall, an example could be the important role covered by Hò Chi Minh, pseudonym of Nguyén Sinh Cung, a Vietnamese writer originally from the French colony of Indochina, who, after moving to France, became first of all one ofthe founders of the French Communist Party and then, an important advocate for decolonization, specifically for the Vietnamese one, desire expressed in his pamphlet “Procès de la colonisation Frangaise ”, e Not so different was the situation within the British Empire, in which nationalists in India (called the “British Raj” and considered to be the most precious “Jewel of the Crown”) started to foment the political scenario and create instability during the inter-war period. Starting from these years, India begun rooting for independent, mainly led by the charismatic personality of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known with the Sanskrit honorific title of Mahatma (literally translated into English as “Big Soul”), who initiated a sort of pacific disobedience. In this framework, the British ruling class, especially the conservative party, was still pro-impetrial, suppo:ting the idea for which Britain was superior to other European forces because of its colonies and territories outside the Old Continent. 14) THE CONSTITUTION OF THE USSR AND STALIN’S RISE TO POWER Let’s begin this part devoted to the study of Russia after Lenin’s death with an event that actually occurred in the same year of this latter: the approval of the Constitution of the Soviet Union and the political and institutional asset that emerged from that: in 1924 the Constitution of the USSR was approved by the constituent assembly, even if the Union had been instituted on December 30, 1922. The main organs of the new federal state were the Congress of People's Deputies and the Central Executive Committee. The Congress was elected by limited and indirect suffrage, according to a pyramidal system in which each soviet elected delegates who went to set up the higher-level soviet. From the right to vote remained excluded all those belonging to categories deemed potentially hostile to the new political order, like old landowners, merchants, clergymen, former members of the tsarist police. The congress met every two years and delegated its powers to the Central Executive Committee, consisting oftwo assemblies: the Soviet of the Union, composed of about 400 representatives elected by the Congress in proportion to the population ofthe various republics, and the Soviet of Nationalities, whose members were appointed by the representatives ofthe republics. The Executive Committee met three times a year and, at all other times, the management of the country was up to the Presidium and the Council of People's Commissars, the real executive body that was at the top ofthe administrative apparatus. The institutional structure of the union constitutionally guaranteed a certain autonomy to the individual republics, but control over the vast territory of the union was not so much ensured by the institutional structures, as by the Communist Union Party of which the national communist paities formed sections. From the very beginning the Supreme Leader of the Union became the Secretary of the Communist Party, so that the choices of the party became central. pg. 24 The peak of colonial empires and the beginning of nationalist The approval of the USSR's constitution The institutional structures The control exercised by the Communist Party Let’s now tum to the development ofthe Stalinist dictatorship, constructed between 1928 and 1938. Lenin, who died on January 24, 1924, had written a kind of political testament in the last years of his life, in which he expressed his own assessments and concems about those who would have contested for the succession to the leadership of the Communist Patty. Regarding Joseph Stalin, at that time General Secretary of the Central Committee, he feared that he had accumulated too much power in his hands and denounced his tendency to put his personal interests before those of the party; Trotsky was reproached with an ill-concealed self-confidence, while about Bukharin, considered the party’s finest theoretician, Lenin doubted the Marxist coherence of ideas. Lenin’s death unleashed a bitter struggle for succession within the Bolshevik leadership, which mainly concerned the lines of economic development that the country should have adopted. The Zeft of the party, led by Trotsky, pressed for a maximum stimulation of industrial production through investments derived from a strong taxation on the agricultural sector, The right instead, that referred mainly to Bukharin, feared that in this way the peasant-workers alliance could be broken and proposed, on the contrary, a strong support for agriculture. Stalin, along with other Bolshevik leaders, such as Kamenev and Zinoviev, did not take a clear position on the economic development project and, instead, decided to move carefully, according to what he could achieve in terms of personal power. Eventually, however, in this first phase everyone chose the solution coming from the right. In 1925, Stalin launched his ownideology, based on the iconic expression "Socialism in one country", with which he set aside the immediate prospect of a world revolution inthe name of the priority of the development of the USSR commumnist system. Trotsky's opposition, now supported by Kamenev and Zinoviev, was defeated by Stalin himself, decreeing the former’s exile in Central Asia and a humiliating retraction for the latter. Having eliminated the leftist opposition and firmly held the reins of the party, Stalin decided to deal with the problem, which manifested itself in 1927, concerning the crisis of grain storage by resorting to forced requisitions and coercive methods. This resultedin a total abandonment of the NEP, which was replaced by another type of economic plan based on quinquennial programs. Before analyzing the economic structure introduced by Stalin, it is useful to remember that the latter, fearing a possible convergence of the oppositions against him, expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union. Therefore, eliminated all the possible antagonists, Stalin could become the sole architect of the construction ofthe already mentioned “socialism in one country”, according to the formula he himself coined to point out that the affirmation of socialism in Russia would have been possible even without a revolution inthe most economically advanced countries. So, at the end, the true successor of Lenin was Joseph Stalin, who became the effective de facto Leader of the Union. Let’s not vert to the analysis of the economic procedures that Stalin implemented stasting from 1928 and their main effects: from 1928 to 1933, the emphasis was on economic development. Stalin’s aim was to make the Soviet Union a major industrial power within 10 years through rapid industrialization. In 1928, Lenin's strategic retreat from socialism (NEP) was abandoned in favor of economic planning. The first Five-Year Plan, begun in 1928, aimed at developing heavy industry (mainly for the military effort), most of all the one dedicated to steal, used for the building of new infrastructures, but also weapons and machines (idea of shock-workers = people that worked more thanthe expected. Workers were asked to participate in what was believed to be a material effort through their work. That resulted in a socialist competition, bases ofthe modem idea of Stakhanovism, word referred to a miner named Stakhanov, who managed to extract more coal that all his coworkers). Backed by a mixture of dedicated enthusiasm and physical and psychological coercion, the results were impressive. Capitalism was eliminated, a socialist economy established, and agriculture collectivized. The brutal process of collectivization of agriculture was meant to destroy the independence of the peasants while assuring the food supply necessary for industrialization. The peasants were forced into collective farms, where they were given production quotas to meet, which were often greater than the farmers could produce, while the Kw/aks, now considered as actual enemies ofthe nation, became object of a true liquidation. ‘When they resisted by burning their crops and farm buildings and slaughtering their livestock, they experienced severe repression (process of dekulakization). Estimates of the number who died as a result ofthe collectivization and the famine in the Ukraine (1932-1933) vary widely. Around 15 million forthe period 1929-1930 is a likely figure. Many died when planning failed to produce expected results. pg. 25 The problem ‘with Lenin's succession Socialism in one country The conflict between Stalin and Trotsky Stalin's victory The first Aive- Year Plan The development of heavy industry The collectivization of the agricultural sector Dekulakization Some deaths may have been intended. Many believe that Stalin deliber- ately caused the great famine of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine, during which millions perished. Millions more were sent to labor camps in Siberia, which were governed by a General administration (the GULAG system) and became a significant component of the Soviet economy most of all regarding the production of timber and the extraction of metals and fuel, andthe Arctic regions ofthe Soviet Union. During the 1930s, the regime of terror, accompanied by the construction of a true cult of Stalin’s personality, also struck the party that was subjected to drastic purges. These measures reached their peak in 1936-38, period of the so- called "Great Terror" and "farcical trials", during which many opponents, including Kamenev and Zinoviev, were accused of deviating from Stalin’s political ideology and executed. In 1940, Trotsky, who was in exile in Mexico, was killed by a assassin sent by Stalin. A second Five-Year Plan was launched between 1932 and 1937, while the third was introduced in 1938 but had to be suspended due to the German invasion ofthe Soviet Unionin 1941. The basis fora modern industrial economy was createdinthe period of the first Five-Year Plan. At the same time, the basis for the Stalinist state was formed. By 1933, Stalin could not be seriously questioned without also calling into question the right ofthe Communist Party to rule. Those who challenged Stalin in any fashion had to be eliminated. LESSON 8 The Spanish Civil War and the premises of the Second World Conflict (1934-1945) 15) THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Having left the international scene after the defeat of 1898 in the war with the United States, Spain came back to the European political scenario during the 1930s. The civil war that swept the country from 1936 to 1939 was interpreted by many contemporaries as the first major clash between fascism and anti-fascism. In reality, the causes ofthe Spanish Civil War were predominantly internal and only the ambiguous interference ofthe European states in the confrontation led it to assume a supranationa dimension. The climate of turmoil began in 1923 with a coup d'état approved by the sovereign, il which the military governor of Barcelona, Miguel Primo de Rivera, established a military dictatorshi} with the aim of guaranteeing order after the upheavals of the so-called Bolshevik Triennium, betweei 1918 and 1921. The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera failed to appease the discontent and finally ended ‘up accentuating the democratic aspirations of the intellectual classes and parts of the armed forces. In 1930, after the resignation of Primo de Rivera and the electoral collapse of the monarchical parties in the 1931 local elections, King Alfonso XIII also decided to abdicate. A Constituent Assembly was elected and concluded its works in December 1931, with the promulgation of the republican constitution. The beginning of the Republic did not happen, however, in a peaceful way and rather bittered the tensions always present between, on one hand, the strong powers of the Spanish tradition, like the Church, the army and the big landowners, and the political forces of the secular, reformist and even more revolutionary left on the other. Topics of burning tension were a proposed reform of education, which was ascertained by Catholic organizations and principles and entrusted to public institutions, a process of renewal ofthe army aimed at striking at the traditional autonomy ofthe armed forces and bringing them back under the control of political power (strongly faced by the so-called Africanistas, the Spanish officers deployed in Spanish Morocco, who managed to maintain their traditional positions of strength and began to harbor resentment towards the Republic) and an inconclusive agrarian reform, which aimed to initiate a mechanism of land redistribution and to introduce obligations on the landowners. To aggravate the political situation in the early years of the Republic were also the major changes in the political framework: on the left, in fact, the different forces were divided on the objectives to be pursued, while the different groups on the right of the political spectrum, caught unprepared by the advent of the Republic, embarked on a process of unification in the belief that their traditional fragmentation had been the cause ofthe 1930-31 defeat; resulting from this, moderate and conservative forces gave birth to the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (CEDA), while, at the same pg. 26 The GULAGS The other two Five Years plans and Stalin*s power in the 19308 Miguel Primo de Rivera”s coup King Alfonso's abdication and the promulgation of the republican constitution The first tensions Political polarization The CEDA, the Falange and the Spanish Popular Front Germans were allowed to decide their own fate. On the following day, Konrad Henlein called for annexation with Germany. As war appeared increasingly likely, Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), flew to Berchtesgaden on September 15, and to Bad Godesberg one week later, in order to assess Hitler's demands and find a way to satisfy them without risking a war. When the Czechs refused Hitler°s terms, and war seemed inevitable, Mussolini proposed a conference at Munich. Britain, France (represented by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier), and Germany were invited, but not Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union. This latter urged the Allies to resist Hitler's demands and offered military assistance to Czechoslovakia in the event of war. The Munich Conference convened on September 29-30; Hitler presented the Westemn Allies with a choice between sacrificing Czechoslovakia or an almost certain war. As pinnacle of the appeasement policy, they chose to sacrifice Czechoslovakia; the only democracy in Eastern Europe, had been sold out. Hitler once again triumphed over the Westem democrats and his opponents at home, the generals and the resistance, who were urging the appeasers to reject hitler's demand. Several key developments followed the Munich Conference. in mid-March 1939, Hitler destroyed what was left of Czechoslovakia, Bohemia and Moravia were annexed, while Slovakia became a separate satellite of Germany. It was the first time Hitler had taken territory not containing a German population. Another important factor in this discourse can be recognized in the aggressive foreign policy adopted by Fascist Italy: the Italian attack against Ethiopia in October 1935 played a decisive role in worsening the framework of European relations, not least because only a few months earlier, in April, Mussolini had participated with France and Great Britain at the Stresa Conference, reaffirming its intention to defend the 1919 Treaties by rejecting any threat to the European peace. The attack on Ethiopia was in pat an attempt by Italy to avenge its defeat at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. It was also meant to connect italian Somaliland and Eritrea. In attempting to understand why Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, one must not overlook his megalomaniacal dreams of rebirthing the Roman Empire; no doubt he felt Ethiopia was an easy kill. Ethiopia’s air force consisted of a mere 12 outdated fighter planes; the Ethiopian army included tribal warriors armed with spears and shields. Still, they bravely resisted the Italians. Although France and Great Britain unsuccessfully attempted to follow a diplomatic path, Mussolini attacked Ethiopia and managed to subdue the resistance ofthe Negus Haile Selassie’s troops in less than a year; the conflict reflected the standards of what is currently defined as a total war, with massive involvement of the civilian population, which was bombed, depoited and attacked with asphyxiating gases. At the end of the conflict, Mussolini was able to offer, in May 1936, the crown of Emperor of Ethiopia to Vittorio Emanuele III and exploit, at an internal propagandistic level, the controversy against the “unfair sanctions” imposed by the international community. In fact, both Italy and Ethiopia were members of the League of Nations. Despite that fact, and Italy°s use of outlawed chemical weapons, the League limited its action to condemning Italy's aggression and imposing some minor economic sanctions. It stopped shoit of placing an embargo on oil to Italy. Only by cutting off Italy's source of the oil it needed to prosecute its invasion could the League have saved Ethiopia. By taking only a weak-willed stand, the League merely offended Mussolini, pushing him into an alliance with Hitler, while effectively ending the League”s role as an agent for collective security. The war in Ethiopia changed the European political balance; Mussolini, in fact, obtained immediate solidarity from Germany and, in November 1936, he began to talk about a "Rome-Berlin axis" that was looming in Europe. As previously analyzed, Mussolini and Hitler found an opportunity for cooperation when civil war broke out in Spain in July 1936. Nationalist forces led by Francisco Franco reacted against increasing bloodshed at the hands of the republicans and political chaos following the election of a left-wing Popular Front government in February. The nationalists were aided by materiel and some military forces from Italy and Germany. The two dictators used the war in Spain to refine military techniques, strengthen national pride, and test the resolve of the democratic powers. The republicans were aided by volunteers, including the International Brigades, but the bulk ofthe assistance they received came from the Soviet Union. For its part, the Soviet Union hoped to divert Hitler and Mussolini from a possible thrust into Eastem Europe and to rally the democratic powers to a strong antifascist position. Britain and France chose to remain neutral. The subsequent victory of Spain’s nationalists was seen as a victory for Mussolini and Hitler and as a defeat for the Western democracies. pg. 29 The Italian War in Ethiopia The Rome-Berlin axis Relationships between the two dictatorships continued to get better, up to the point in which, first, Italy issued its first racial laws in a September 1938 (promoted by the periodic “La difesa della Razza”, which truly symbolized the first instance of racial ideology in Italy; the purity ofthe white race should have been protected against the contamination apported by other races, mainly Jews and blacks. These tendencies started to develop in the aftermath of Ethiopia's conquest and the political approach to Germany. The fascist ideology in Italy was not based on racism at its origins, but following the victory in Ethiopia, concerns about what were called “mixed-race unions” stated to develop and formed a perceived threat that the regime could not accept) and secondly, in April 1939, Italy and Germany signed the “Pact of Steal”, a military alliance aimed at uniting the two powers in the case ofthe outbreak of a conflict. These new developments progressively hardened the position of Great Britain, which offered a guarantee for the independence of Poland, When Hitler then began making demands on the free city Gdansk and the Polish Corridor, Chamberlain reacted by writing out in his own hand a guarantee of Polish sovereignty. Britain's pledge of military assistance for Poland if attacked by Germany was endorsed by France (this move completely ended the appeasement policies and opened up a very new attitude called resistance). But Hitler, reckless in the glow of his string of successes, did not take the warning seriously. Another important role was taken up by Stalin's USSR: France and Britain undertook a rearmament plan and entered into timid negotiations for a diplomatic and military agreement with the Soviet Union. To be effective, in fact, an anti-Hitlerian strategy should have been based on the alliance between ‘Western democracies and the Soviet Union, creating a compact anti-fascist front that would drop the prejudicial ideologies and mutual distrust. Stalin, who would have hoped for an intervention of France and Great Britain to convince the Poles to militarily cooperate with the Soviet troops in the case of a German aggression, had reacted negatively to the Soviet exclusion from the Munich Conference. In fact, Stalin feared that the Westem governments would have diverted the German pressures against the USSR, to wear out the two totalitarian regimes in the east. At the same time, he was aspiring to gain advantages that the Soviet Union could possibly obtain from a clash between two groups of capitalist powers, in the event that a German attack on Poland would have triggered a military intervention of France and Great Britain. For his part, Hitler, determined to attack Poland but also eager to avoid a war ontwo fronts, offered Stalin the opportunity to reach an agreement with Germany after years of open propagandistic and diplomatic opposition. Stalin valued the offer positively, considering it little more than a tactical and momentary truce in the wait for “an inevitable war” between the country of socialism and the imperialist powers. On August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact (named like that in honor of the two foreign ministers who signed it) was signed. An additional secret protocol to the pact foresaw a true division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, establishing Germany”s line of expansion at the northern frontier with Lithuania and the western part of Poland. The Soviet Union was guaranteed the occupation of all eastem Poland up to the Vistula, the occupation of Romanian Bessarabia and to be able to extend its hegemony over Finland and the remaining Baltic states. Inthe face ofthis sudden change in the alliances’ framework, London and Paris hastened to sign a defensive agreement with Poland. On September 1, 1939, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to cross the Polish border; Two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. LESSON 9 World War Two: part 1 (1939-1945) 17) THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR First of all, it is impoitant to say that World War II was a tuming point in contemporary history for different reasons. The years of war and diplomacy that began after the invasion of Poland in September 1939 completely changed Europe’s position in the world; from apparent dominance before World War II Europe fell in 1945 to a position of near impotence before the two great world powers, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Futhermore 1945 marked the beginnings of a process by which the pg. 30 The racial laws in Italy The Pact of Steal Stalin's diplomatic relations with other European Molotov- Ribbentrop pact German invasion of Poland The characteristics of WWII European colonial empires were gradually and painfully dismantled. Of course, part of the explanation for this startling reversal of fortune lies in the realities that prevailed in 1939: World War I and the Depression in the 1930s had hollowed out European civilization. Wolld War II in many ways only confirmed what some had already noticed; the world was rapidly changing and Europe’s easy dominance of it had effectively ended. Other important developments in this arena were dominant on both the political and economic scenarios: first of all, withthe end ofthe conflict and the decisive defeat of the axis powers, we have the final demise and eclipse of fascism as dominant ideology able to become a statal one; second of all, we have the introduction of a new international order aimed at preventing any similar conflict to break out (symbolic ofthis development is the institution ofthe United Nations); third of all, there were be strong feelings for which considerable reforms in the economy and social policy was needed in order to provide better living standards for everybody and, thus, preventing the masses from joining extremist movements, as it had happened in the aftermath of WWI. Finally, closing this introductory paragraph, we need to remember that WWII came to be known as the most famous example of total war; it was a conflict in which aerial bombardments and terror bombing were widespread and targeted not only military objectives, but also civil ones, as major urban conglomerates (they tumed the enemy’s population as their own targets). The German invasion of Poland, which began on September 1, 1939, made brilliant use of the strategy of Blitzkrieg (lightning war = Guerra lampo). This involved combining mechanized spearheads of troops, motorized artillery, tanks massed in groups, and close tactical support by fighters and divebombers, all closely controlled by radio. It was a strategy that emphasized surprise and the use of overwhelming force. It both demanded and usually resulted in a rapid, decisive victory. Easy victories in 1939 and again in 1940 led Germany to believe it need not prepare for a protracted war. This failure to grasp the fundamental reality of modern warfare proved fatal over the next few years. In the meantime, however, Germany was encouraged by its own military prowess. Blitzkrieg tactics resulted in the rapid defeat of Poland. By September 8, the German forces were outside Warsaw. Soviet forces invaded Poland from the East on September 17. Caught between two massive armies, Poland surrendered on September 28, less than a month after the beginning of the German offensive. The lightning conquest of Polish territory was accompanied by mass executions by both invading armies; the SS security forces, following the Nazi troops, initiated mass deportations and killings of thousands of civilians belonging to the political and financial leadership of the country or of Jewish descent; on their part, the Soviets, activating a real "class cleaning", eliminated more than 20,000 Polish officers previously taken as prisoners. Once Poland was dismembered, on November 3 the Soviet Union demanded several small areas from Finlandto enhance the defenses of Leningrad. When the Finns refused, Soviet forces invaded Finland, beginning what came to be called the “Winter War,” November 1939-March 1940. The Finns did surprisingly well against their much larger opponent, but the massive resources of the Soviet Union eventually prevailed. After beating the Finns, the Soviet Union moved to incorporate the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania. On the other hand, A strange interlude known as the “Phony War” occurred during the eight months following the fall of Poland. Technically, a state of war existed between Germany and the two Westem democracies of Britain and France, yet no military engagements took place. hitler expected Britain and France to accept his offers of peace. While Britain and France did not pursue these offers, they had few ideas about how to respond to Germany”s recent conquest. Germany returned to the offensive in April 1940. Once again, Blitzkrieg tactics brought swift results as Denmark and Norway fell victim this time; the first one fell right after the invasion, whereas the second resisted up to the beginning of June, when King Haakon VII, who until then had led the resistance, was obliged to flew to London, reconstructing there his government in exile. In Oslo, the Third Reich imposed a puppet regime which collaborated with the occupants until Norway's liberation. in May, a massive German effort was launched against the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The Netherlands and Belgium were quickly beaten. On May 14, rotterdam’s center was flattened by German bombers and 40,000 civilians died, an early indication the new war would be even more senselessly brutal than the previous one. pg.31 The Winter War The Phony War The invasion of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium of the Soviet Union must be counted as one of Hitler's major miscalculations. Inthe meantime, Stalin had been wamed repeatedly of plans for a German invasion. Richard Sorge, a German Communist working in Japan, provided the date of the invasion. Stalin finally decided to send an alert message, which came too late to do any good, early on the same day on which the invasion began, June 22, 1941. Initially, Operation Barbarossa was even more successful than German strategists had hoped it would be. The Russian military, kept from making adequate preparations for a possible invasion by Stalin’s fearful insistence on adhering fully to the terms of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression Pact, was caught off guard. Whole armies collapsed and were cut off. Attempts to retreat and regroup tumed into routs. Much of the Russian air force was lost in the first days of the invasion. Stalin fell apart and sank into depression. Within weeks, Leningrad was under siege, German troops were advancing rapidly toward Moscow, and most of the rich croplands and impostant industrial complexes of the Ukraine had been conquered. Yet the Soviet Union did not surrender; Stalin created the State Defense Committee (GKO), which he chaired. The general headquarters ofthe Soviet Supreme Command reported to the GKO. It oversaw basic strategy while the army general staff developed operational plans. Perhaps even more important, the Soviet Union tumed to the old traditions and, in particular, to the experience of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, giving ground but slowly bringing to bear its enormous resources. Now, Stalin called on the patriotism of the masses. The Russian Orthodox Church was pressed into service. During the war against Germany, Stalin made more use of patriotic sentiment, rather than communism or social internationalism. Able young leaders emerged in the military and also in the party and government. The resilience of the Russian people found an unexpected ally in the weather. First came the rains, a time the russians called rasputitsa (the time when the roads dissolve into mud). Then, winter came early and caught the German military totally unprepared. As before, they had counted on a quick victory and therefore were not provisioned for a winter campaign. They had come close to gaining it, but had failed largely because Hitler insisted on mounting three major campaigns simultaneously: against Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the center, and the Ukraine in the south. The campaign in the South was particularly important as the efforts to take the city of Kiev used men and resources badly needed in the campaign to conquer Moscow. Strategic errors were compounded by tactical errors. rather than regroup and establish winter quarters, Hitler demanded the army to push on until, in some cases, major units were cut off and lost. By the end of 1941, ifthe Soviet Union had only a precarious lease on life, at least it could claim to have stopped the German army short of victory. in fact, on december 6, it launched a major counterattack. Blocked onthe Russian front, the war widened to the Pacific because of Japan’s initiative. The Japanese military class had long decided to challenge the Anglo-American maritime power and the Japanese govemment aimed, not unlike Germany in Europe, to conquer its “vital space” in Asia, getting rid of both the European colonial empires and the American presence in the Pacific. Japan had already occupied independent territories in Asia before the war started, as portions of mainland China and Manchuria, while in 1939 Japan, in line with Hitler®s expansionist policies in Europe, started to invade and occupy several European colonial territories in South-East Asia, taking advantage of the difficult situation in which major European forces found themselves (Malaysia and Burma, under British control and the Dutch East Indies). In July 1941, Japan occupied French Indochina, by an act which marked the point of no retum of this aggressive strategy. After concluding a reciprocal neutrality agreement with the Soviet Union, which the latter would then violate onthe eve ofthe conclusion ofthe war, Japan attacked the American Pearl Harbor’s naval base, in the Hawaii archipelago, on December 7, 1941. The attack catapulted the United States into the war. In response to President Roosevelt’s request, Congress declared war on Japan on December 8. On December 11, Hitler made what many historians regard as one of his greatest mistakes ofthe war. In a speech to the Reichstag, he declared war on the United States. Germany was under no obligation to do this; in fact, Japan had not informed Germany beforehand of its plans. By declaring war on the United States when Germany was already involved in a massive campaign against the Soviet Union, Hitler committed an act of lubris of gigantic proportions. When also Italy declared war on the US on the same day, the war assumed a true global dimension and the two theatres of war, the European and the Asian, ended up by bind indissolubly. Right after the operation in Pearl Harbor, the Japanese, taking advantage of the American fleet’s weakening, invaded the Philippines, Honk Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. pg. 34 The Japanese enter into the conflict: the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Pacific Theatre of war If, therefore, the powers of the anti-communist pact were to give a world character to the ongoing war, without setting up a close coordination between their respective strategies, they were The Nazi attack on the USSR and the Japanese one on the United States which gave birth to a “strange anti-fascist alliance” based on cooperation between Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union (the so- called "Great Alliance"). Perceived by several scholars and intellectuals as the second stage of a European civil war that began in 1914, the Second World War assumed, from 1941, a complex ideological dimension. A first aspect of this ideological-political confrontation was the clash between the two major totalitarian systems of the time, Nazism and Stalinist Communism which, although linked by relations of imitation and the common rejection of the liberal system, were radically opposed at the level of ideals and political projects. Even more important from the ideological point of view was the anti-fascist welding that was created between the Westem liberal-democracies and the Soviet Union. Essentially produced by the moves of the Nazi-fascist opponents, the anti-fascist front was always vazied and anticulated, combining national interests and more general ideals. Ideology, then, became a dominant aspect of the ongoing conflict that, grafting itself on the military competition, radicalized it until it took on a real and less and less negotiable religious dimension. Therefore, the new total war between fascism and anti-fascism was fought to annihilate the enemy. In addition, for the ideological andtotalizing character ofthe clash, as well as forthe mass dimension of the conflict and forthe practice of carpet bombings on the cities, the civilian populations were massively involved, and political propaganda and all the various forms of patriotic mobilization put in place by different governments assumed great importance. Despite mutual mistrust, the anti-fascist front began to take shape in the aftermath of the United States' War intervention. The latter, in fact, extended its economic cooperation also to the Soviet Union and Stalin agreed to sign the Atlantic Charter, previously signed by Churchill and Roosevelt; it designed the future post-war arrangements according to the old Wilsonian tradition, including the principle of self-determination of peoples, freedom of needs, freedom of trade, free movement in the seas and the rejection of territorial annexations. The acceptance of the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the common political and military commitment against Nazi-fascism were formalized onJanuary 1, 1942, inthe United Nations Dedlaration. Signed jointly by the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and other countries, including Canada, China, Belgium and Australia, the Declaration enshrined the cooperation of all the adherents in the fight against the savage and brutal forces of the tripartite pact and the commitment of the signatories to renounce to sign any separate armistice or peace. On the military level, while the intervention of the United States sealed the end of the lightning war conducted until then by the German army, The anti-fascist front decided to give absolute priority to the war against the Germans and to maintain a predominantly defensive strategy in the Pacific. Therefore, Great Britain and the United States arranged themselves in order to massively support the Soviet resistance. For its part, especially from 1943 onwards, Germany carried out a brutal and systematic exploitation of the conquered countries’ resources, extorting from France huge contributions of occupation and requisitioning raw materials and labor from the controlled Soviet territories. In all the occupied countries a planned production system was organized; it had to be functional to the economic and military needs of Germany. Within these countries Hitler made extensive use of forced labor of prisoners of war. On the other hand, Hitler®s ability to gain acceptance among the persecuted politicians and the oppressed minorities of the Soviet regime was. From this point of view, the Japanese in Asia achieved a better result and, with their successes in the first half of 1942, launched the idea of a Japanese-led Asian sphere of prosperity, directed both against European imperialism and the American control over important territories; the Japanese called nationalist movements in those lands to suppoit them in the war, promising eventual independence from European domination (when Japan surendered in 1945, this situation opened up ‘a political vacuum in these territories, which was filled up by nationalist forces, mainly during the summer of that same year, in both French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) nationalist leaders, as we will se better later on, proclaimed independence). 19) COLLABORATION AND RESISTENCE The Third Reich made little attempt to use the situations they had created to construct a “new order” in Europe. Even those among the occupied nations who wanted to collaborate with Germany were forced pg. 35 The ideological side of the war and the antifascist alliance to do so under disadvantageous conditions. Some groups, Ukrainian nationalists, for example, who were eager to help in the destruction of the Soviet regime, were treated so badly that they had little choice but to resist the Nazis. In 1942, Hitler's new order seemed to be almost complete in a Europe where old authoritarian regimes sought their own space through formal collaboration with the German govemment. The so-called collaborationist regimes, the first was formed in Norway by the pro-fascist officer Vidkun Quisling during the German invasion of 1940, were totally subservient to the German war needs. The characteristics of governments and collaborationist movements differed, however, from country to country, being influenced by both the specific national political traditions and the modalities and time passed under German occupation. Even for this reason, instead of Hitler’s aspiration for continental hegemony, the Nazi government failed to construct stable and planned collaboration with various European authoritarianisms, being content to just impose the superiority of its army and to exploit the most of the occupied countries” human and economic resources. In Norway and the Netherlands, collaborationist govemments were founded on full adherence to Hitler's ideologies and racial and anti-Semitic prejudices; in Slovakia the govemment was characterised by a mixture of nationalist and Catholic ideals with openly fascist aspects, Croatia, which became independent after the German invasion of Yugoslavia, achieved a singular union of nationalism, Catholicism, anti- Semitism, and fascism. Collaborationist were also the governments of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, which nevertheless limited themselves to militarily support the axis powers. A behaviour only partially analogous, although we cannot speak of real collaborationism, was that assumed by the Franco's regime after the outbreak of the world war. Although formally neutral, in fact, Spain was sympathetic to Germany and Italys war effort, from which the nationalist forces had received substantial aid during the civil war. In occupied Europe, it was frequently difficult to draw a clear dis- tinction between resistance and collaboration. For instance, how should a state functionary see his position? What he did was largely for the welfare of the people in his country, but some of what he did might aid the German war effort. This was the essential dilemma of those governing Vichy France. In the case of the Vichy regime, Marshal Pétain initiated an authoritarian government experiment that sought to hold together all the different elements of the conservative French right, from anti-democratic Catholicism to nationalism tc anti-Semitism. Seeking his own legitimacy in the references to a mythical rural past and the popularity acquired during the Great War, Pétain aspired to present himself as the guarantor of the national ordei and to preserve some margin of autonomy for France with respect to the Nazi government. However, when in 1942 Pétain was replaced as head of the government by Pierre Laval, the spaces of autonomy ceased altogether: The anti-Semitic legislation enacted since 1940 was tightened and applied with extreme rigour and at the end ofthe year the German military occupation was extended to Southern France. Laval argued after the fact that his policies were necessary in order to keep the German occupation at a distance. it was better for Vichy authorities to supervise the reciuit- ing of workers for labor in the German war industry thanto turn this task over to the Germans themselves. Similarly, Laval argued, it was important for the French police to function as fully as possible, even if this meant cooperating with the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police) in tracking down Jews or in dealing with the resistance. Not many ofthose involved in the Vichy government could be accurately labeled as fascists. Most were conservatives who practiced collaboration because it seemed unavoidable and also because it appeared to offerthe chance to carry out a “national revolution.” Between June 1940 and April 1942, members of the Vichy government believed they were working to replace the shopworn values and insti- tutions of the Third Republic with something far better. By 1943, however, Henii- Philippe Pétain, Laval, and the rest ofthe Vichy government found it possible to do only what Germany allowed or required them to do. What may have been a sensible policy in the shock of defeat in 1940 had become, through a series of almost imperceptible changes, no longer justifiable by 1943 and 1944. As for the resistance, in France the signing of the armistice with Germany in June 1940 gave rise not only to the construction of the collaborationist Vichy regime, but also to a partisan network of resistance. On June 18, General Charles de Gaulle appealedto the French to continue the war against the Germans in the name and on behalf of the govemment of "Free France", which he presided in London, where he had fled. This act earned him the recognition of "representative of free France" by the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Initially poorly structured and marked by the division pg. 36 Collaborationist regimes Vichy France Free France and Charles de Gaulle blocked a German convoy headed for the Swiss frontier on which Mussolini travelled along with some hierarchs and ministers of the Italian Social Republic. They were all shot, and their bodies were hung in Piazzale Loreto, in Milan, where on August 10, sx1944, a similar fate reached 15 anti-fascists, executed by a militia ofthe Social Republic. At the end, the final liberation took place in April 1945. LESSON 10 World War Two: part 2 (1939-1945) 20) THE SHOA 1 ‘While some Germans had been involved in one capacity or another in the resistance, many more had The situation been active in planning an unprec- edented program of genocide. Anti-Semitism had long been a major before the war point in the nazi program. in the 1930s, this had been expressed mostly through quasilegal measures designed to exclude German Jews (less than 1 percent ofthe population) from public life and force them to emigrate. With KristalInacht (“the night of Broken Glass”), november 9, 1938, the regime seemed to head in a more violent direction. The SA used the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew as a pretext for a night that included beatings, rapes, killings, the torching of synagogues, and the breaking of Jewish shop windows (hence the “night of Broken Glass”). The event is often seen as marking the beginning of the holocaust. once the war began, the nazis gained control over millions ofJews. They also realized that actions could be taken in wastime that would be publicized and criticized in times of peace. 1. At first, emigration, perhaps to some far-off place such as the French colony of Madagascar or, pe three after the defeat ofthe Soviet Union, some corner of Siberia, was suggested. Large numbers of solutions Jews were placed in ghettos. in the meantime, the euthanasia campaign in Germany in the 1930s, designed to eliminate mentally and physically disabled people, so-called worthless life, provided the occasion for some experiments in killing people efficiently, 2. The tuming point in Nazi efforts to deal with what they termed “The Jewish Problem” came with preparations for the campaign against the Soviet Union. First, the SS created task forces, the Einsatzgruppen, which followed the German army as it moved across the Soviet Union. The task forces were instructed to round up com- munist officials and Jews and to kill them. Thousands of people were forced to dig their own graves and then killed by machine guns. Although more than a million Jews were killed in this fashion, it was an inefficient process and difficult for some ofthe perpetrators to stomach; 3. Latein 1941, plans began to be made for a more organized and coordinated process of slaughter. The Wannsee Conference in January 1942, held in a suburb of Berlin, was partly an effort to me wannsee resolve remaining logistical problems and other issues, but more importantly it was meant to conference establish collective responsibility. The decision to eliminate European Jews had already been made. No direct order from Hitler reflects this decision, but it is highly unlikely that he did not know and approve of the plans. himmler took the lead in carrying out what he described as the Fihrer's wishes. The actual paper trail to hitler only goes as high as a memorandum from Goering authorizing Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942), an official in the SS, to take steps necessary “for the Total Solution of the Jewish Question within the realm of German influence in Europe.” (The so-called Final Solution) The Nazis established six killing centers pe nai in Poland, the largest at Auschwitz (oswiecim). Trains came from all over Europe to Auschwitz, solution which was actually a complex of camps and contained industrial enterprises as well as the death camp. After leaving the trains, people were separated into those headed for the gas cham- bers and those headed for the labor camp. The nazis ran the opera- tion with a kind of grotesque efficiency, a terrible parody of a rationalized industrial enterprise. They instructed those intended for the gas chambers first to go to the showers, after which they would receive new clothing and fiuther instructions. Though the gas chambers were constructed in such a way as to resemble showers, it did not take long for people to understand what was hap- pening. death pg. 39 came quickly, but people nonetheless experienced panic and intense agony during the few minutes the process took. The Germans made efforts to run the killing centers as productive enterprises. They collected anything of value—mounds of human hair, warehouses full of shoes, handbags, and dresses. They removed gold crowns from the corpses before wheeling them into the crema- toria. The economic irrationality of this enterprise was all too apparent. in the middle of a war beginning to go badly for Germany, vital resources were being squandered for the purposes of the slaughter. From the perspective of the nazis who shared hitler°s racial beliefs, however, the extermination of Jews and other so-called undesirables (gypsies, homosexuals, and others) was precisely the point of the war. 21) THE END OFTHE WAR In the first half of 1942 the axis forces seemed to be able to win the war. Germany and Italy, together with other minor allies, controlled much of the European continent, while the Japanese, dominating the Pacific, threatenedto move against India and Australia. However, at the height of the military successes of the tripartite pact’s countries, the fate of the conflict gradually began to change. In June, the United States, ina major naval-air battle off the Midway Islands defeated the Japanese fleet, ending Japanese expansionism in the Pacific. In October, Rommel’s German-Italian troops suffered a massive British defeat at the Battle of El Alamein, near Alexandria, in Egypt. The following month, after an Anglo- Ametican landing in Morocco and Algeria, the axis forces were surrounded by two enemy’s armies, the Ametican army of General Dwight Eisenhower and the English army of General Bernard Law Montgomery. After leaving Libya, the Italo-Germans settled in Tunisia and managed to resist the overwhelming allied forces until May 1943. Also, on the eastern front a decisive turning point occurred during the autumn/winter of 1942. Hitler pressed the German military to capture Stalingrad at any cost, while the Russian military was determined to resist the German assault with all the resources it could muster. The struggle, which began on July 17, 1942, was an intense one waged block by block, house by house, and, in some cases, room by room. German soldiers referred to the vicious struggle for Stalingrad as a “Rat War (Rattenkrieg).” Snipers, both men and women on the Soviet side, were also closely associated with Stalingrad. While one part of the russian army held the bulk of the German forces in front of it, other poitions of the Russian military massed to the North and to the South of Stalingrad. On November 19, 1942, the Russians launched a gigantic pincers movement, cutting off a large German force in the now-ruined city. The German military could neither break through and reestablish contact with the surrounded troops nor adequately supply them. Hitler refused to give the cutoff troops permission to try to fight their way out of the encirclement. He also gave orders not to surrender. Nevertheless, on February 2, 1943, the remaining German forces, perhaps one-third of the original force, did surrender. Hitler felt he had been betrayed. German soldiers, he said, rather than surrender, should have fought to the death or ended their own lives. From the beginning of 1943, when it became clear that the fate of the war was evolving in favor of the anti-fascist coalition, the so-called “Big Three”, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, grew in need of defining in advance the future arrangements ofthe liberated world, especially in order to not repeat the mistakes done in 1918. In the first inter-allied conference, that took place in Casablanca in January 1943, still prevailed the discussions on the strategy to be adopted to finally defeat the forces ofthe axis. The United States and the United Kingdom established the principle of unconditional surrender, with the exclusion of any separate settlement with Germany and its allies and decided that the next step would be the invasion of Sicily. The landing of Eisenhower”s troops on the island took place on July 10, 1943, and its conquest was rapid. As we saw earlier, on July 25, Mussolini was forced to resign and was arrested by Victor Emmanuel III; the armistice signed in early September between the new Italian govemment and the Anglo-Americans deprived the Germans of their main ally on the European continent. The Allies, landed in Salerno in conjunction with the announcement ofthe Italian surrender, that occurred on September 8, began a bloody and slow conquest of the peninsula that would last 18 months and immediately found a difficult obstacle in the Gustav line, the system of foitifications set up by the Germans between Gaeta and Ortona. From these positions the Germans managed to stop the Anglo-American advance towards Rome until June 1944. Precisely because of the need to break the pg. 40 The battle of the Midways and the battle of EI Alamein The battle of Stalingrad The Casablanca Conference and the Allied invasion of Italy Nazi hegemony in Western Europe, and especially under the strong pressure of Stalin, the Big Three met at the Conference in Tehran in November 1943, during which they decided to open a second front in Europe. Continuously in 1942 and 1943, the Soviet Union pressed their Allies to open a second, Western, front in Europe as a means of easing the enormous burden they were shouldering in fighting offthe Germans. The United States was largely preoccupied in that period with the war in the Pacific. Forits pait, Britain spent most of 1942 dealing with General Erwin Rommel, the “desert Fox,” in Libya and Egypt. The closest thing to a second front in 1942 was the occupation of French north Africa. This was as much a diplomatic as a military maneuver in that the area was nominally controlled by Vichy France. The Allies risked the possibility that Germany would sweep the Vichy government aside or force it to join Germany as an active combatant in retaliation for the invasion. on the plus side, the successful takeover of French North Africa helped the now-General Charles de Gaulle emerge as undisputed leader of the Free French, a military organization created after the French government had signed the armistice with Germany. Only with D-day, June 6, 1944, did the Soviet Union get what it had wanted all along. Operation Overlord, the landings on the beaches of normandy by American, British, and Canadian forces, was as much a feat of logistics as anything else. Simply to amass and coordinate the equipment and men needed for the cross-Channel invasion was a tremendous achievement. Waiting for the right combination of weather and tides, and preventing German intelligence from discerning the nature of preparations, constituted addi- tional formidable tasks. The weather was the first great question mark. Overlord was originally scheduled for June 5. US General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, ordered a 24-hour postponement until June 6. Although, in theory, he could have postponed the invasion one more day, the reality was either June 6 or wait until June 19. As it tumed out, June 19 saw the worst summer storm in the Channel in 40 years. By nightfall on D-day, more than one hundred thousand troops had come ashore. Many more came ashore in the following days, as did an avalanche of materiel. The German response was hampered by hitler’s insistence that the real invasion would come far to the east along the French coast, at the Pas de Calais, and by his refusal to order a timely relocation of Panzer divisions. nonetheless, German resistance was surprisingly effective and delayed the “breakout” from the linked beachheads south and east into central France by approximately a month. once the allies achieved breakout, they moved rapidly. The French Forces of the interior were the first troops to enter Paris. General de Gaulle gave a speech at the Hotel de Ville (town hall) on August 25, the day the Germans surrendered. Meanwhile, the Soviets had launched a gigantic offensive in Belarus, soon amriving at the gates of Warsaw. After the liberation of France and the Soviet advance in the East, the German army attempted a final offensive on the Western Front in December 1944, attacking by surprise the American troops of the Ardennes Mountain region in Belgium. The Germans were forced to abandon all their territories in Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. While Germany was subjected to constant bombardment by the Anglo- American air force, the most dramatic of which completely destroyed the city of Dresden in February 1945, Hitler ordered his troops to resist. However, between April and May, after Italy and Austria had been liberated and the Red Army had besieged Berlin, the collapse of the Reich came to an end. Hitler, who had been locked up for weeks in the chancellery bunker, took his own life on April 30, while on May 7, the unconditional surrender of Germany that would enter into force the next day, was signed by Admiral Karl Donitz. At the same time, also in Asia the war was in favor of the Anglo-Americans since 1943 and in the winter of 1944-45 the conquest of the Philippines came to an end. During the first half of 1945, all the archipelagos of the Central and South Pacific, occupied by the Japanese, were freed. It remained, however, to subdue the resistance of Japan, which determination to continue the war drove the new American President Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt who died on April 12, 1945, to use the new nuclear fission weapon that had been finalized in those months by a group of scientists of various nationalities led by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi on Japan. On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, razing it to the ground and causing over 90,000 deaths. On August 9, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Overall, the number of victims of these two explosions counted between 130,000 and 160,000, while tens of thousands of people died in the following years for the effects of injuries and radiations. On pg. 41 The Tehran Conference Operatic Overlord /D-day The end of the war in Europe The atomic bomb, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki e The Situation in Poland = The Soviet Union saw no reason to tolerate a Polish government unrecep- tive to its ideas about the reordering of Eastem Europe. Therefore, the Soviet Union contended that if it were to install in Poland a government it sponsored, and largely excluded one backed by Britain, this would be the same thing the Soviet Union believed the United States was doing in Italy and Britain was doing in Greece; e Germany and war reparations = in occupied Germany, now divided into a Soviet, an Ametican, a British, and a French zone, the Soviet Union had begun a policy of wholesale confiscation of materiel and facilities in its zone and in the other three zones. In particular, the USSR, which bared the highest costs over a human and economic level, expected precise safeguards both for its western border”s security and due reparations. The United States feared this would lead to the economic collapse of Germany and require greatly expanded American aid. The American government could see no point in American taxpayers subsidizing German reparations to the Soviet Union. Potsdam, together with Yalta, had created a volatile situation but not one fated to lead to confrontation. After all, the details of treaties with Germany and its allies were yet to be worked out. Whatever problems might appear could be resolved in the various forums now available. The main forum for discussion was the newly created United Nations, in pasticular, the Security Council, on which both the Soviet Union and the United States had permanent seats.In front ofthis rapid deterioration of diplomatic relationships between the US and the USSR, on March 5, 1946, Churchill decided to give a speech at little Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, President Truman’s home state. Init, he famously stated, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent”. Developments were taking shape that would rapidly move Europe toward the grimness of the Cold War. The two main problem areas, occupied Germany and the new Poland, had become even more intractable. in occupied Germany, there were already signs that a common occupation policy was not going to be established. in 1946, the United States and Britain no longer allowed the Soviet Union to take reparations from their zones. The introduction in the political language of the expression “Iron Curtain” made it obvious for every political system in Europe the beginning of a new kind of conflict: a permanent state of international tension, which, laterin 1947, will be called “Cold War”, term coined by ajoumalist named Walter Lippman. The Churchill’s discourse, united with the so-called “Long Telegram”, an 8.000 words telegram sent to the US by George F. Kennan, an American diplomat stationed in the Soviet Union, detailing his sense of how Russians viewed their history and the present moment, almost obliged the American administration to develop the containment strategy, remembered with the popularized name of “Truman Doctrine”. Kennan believed russia’s historic sense of insecurity, exacerbated by communism’s idea of the inevitability of war with capitalism, led Stalin always to seek to improve the country's situation. The Soviet Union, however, did respect strength. A firm response would force Stalin and the Soviet Union to back down. the idea of containment (of communism) was based on meeting every Soviet move with a countermove and, later, anticipating possible Soviet moves in order to preempt them. Contain communism within its territorial borders and limit its spread all over the world was two of the most important targets in the American foreign policy of those times and it was put into practice by sustaining and sponsoring non-communist nations, preventing them from falling in the hands of the Soviets. On the other hand, the Soviet Union’s main objective was the of maintaining a strong national security, most of all by securing and preventing any other threats to originate on its Western border. Mainly for this reason, the USSR managed to impose communism on the previously occupied countries in Eastern Europe; In Poland, Stalin had been sustaining since 1944 the National Liberation Committee, which, after Poland passed under Soviet occupation, assumed the government leadership; Yugoslavia and Albania communist paties assumed power without the Red Army’s support, while Bulgaria and Romania saw communism reaching the national leadership thanks to Soviet support. The “Sovietization” of Eastem Europe was completed in February 1948, with a commumist coup in Prague. The Czechoslovak Communist Party forced the President ofthe Republic to eliminate all the non-commumist ministers from the government, threatening to rise a general strike. Within few months, a pro-Soviet communist regime was formed in Czechoslovakia. pg. 44 The Iron Curtain The beginning of the Cold War The Long Telegram, containment, and the Truman Doctrine 23) THE MARSHALL PLAN AND THE DIVISION OF GERMANY Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the war, a serious economic problem remained: the economic collapse in whichthe whole Europe was plunged. in the months after Truman’s speech, Secretary of State George C. Marshall and others in the State department concerned themselves with the economic and social problems of Europe. George Kennan, by then the head of the new Policy Planning Staff at the State department, quickly put together a report on the European situation recommending American aid. it would, he thought, be up to the Europeans to draw up the plans. Aid should be offered to all of Europe. Any decision leading to a division of Europe should stem from the russian response to the American offer rather than the offer itself. in large pat, the aid would be directed at German economic recovery, which Kennan saw as “a vital component of the recovery of Europe as a whole.” Although Marshall had planned to attend the harvard com- mencement ceremonies in the spring of 1947, where he was to be awarded an honorary degree, and had been invited to give a speech, it was virtually at the last minute that he decided to use the occasion to launch what became known as the Marshall Plan. Later seen as the economic counterpait to the Truman doctrine, the Marshall Plan (or the European Recovery Program as it was formally known) was viewed by Marshall as a means of speeding European economic recovery. he saw, of course, the political implications of social and economic stability in Europe. he was also aware of the importance to American business of an economically viable Europe. The plan provided for the allocation of substantial resources over a period of four years to finance reconstruction and development projects independently proposed by European nations. From an Ametican point of view, this would not only have helped to reduce social conflict through the expansion of consumption and prosperity, at the same time helping to consolidate democratic institutions, but it would also have had undeniable positive effects on the reconversion of the US economy and productive system, due to the inevitable increase in exports sustained by the increase in demand for goods by European countries. The plan was also intended to promote the strengthening of integration of the entirety of Europe, which is why many were those who begun to talk about the need to also support Germany’s economic reconstruction. Although the Marshall Plan was not an American maneuver in the rapidly emerging Cold War, the Soviet Union saw it that way. It walked out of the conference the British and French had called to discuss the initiative and pressured the Poles and Czechs to drop their interest in the plan as well. A sustaining program was approved with the name of Molotov Plans; Stalin saw the plan simply as a means whereby the United States could gain control of the European economies. In particular, he had no intention of revealing the extent to which the war had damaged the Soviet economy. By the end of 1947, many of the major elements ofthe Cold War had fallen into place. In May, the communist parties in France and italy had been forced out of the coalition govemments. In September, the Cominform (Communist information Bureau), the successor to the Comintern, was established with head- quarters in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. This was seen in the West as evidence of the existence of a monolithic communist movement, controlled by Moscow and dedicated to the subversion of democratic govemments everywhere. Actually, the main task ofthe Cominform was to tighten Soviet control over Eastem Europe and in particular to try to gain a greater measure of control over communist Yugoslavia. Let’s now come back.to the political situationin Germany; during all this time, the Allied Powers found themselves growing father apart in their ideas about the administration of occupied Germany. The status of Germany was the most important issue in relations between the Soviet Union and the other Allied Powers. The Soviet Union wanted to make sure Germany could not threaten it again in the twentieth century. The United States was more concemed about feeding Germany and the connection between its economic recovery and the recovery ofthe rest ofEurope. neither side seemed to understand very fully the position of the other side. Each side had apparently learned different lessons from the peace- making process after World War I. As mentioned, the Soviet Union set out first to strip its zone of Germany ofraw materials and factories. it also exercised its rights to take reparations in kind from the other zones. This was in line both with its concerns about security issues and its concerns about its own economic recovery. initially, the French also followed a policy of extracting reparations from their zone. They began to see, however, as the pg. 45 ‘The Marshall Plan The Soviet response: Molotov Plans The Cominform The situation in Germany and the Allies inability of finding a common path British and Americans already had, that it was not to their advantage to destroy the German economy if this meant later they would have to send food, goods, and money back into Germany to prevent social ‘unrest and instability. In the American and the British zones, an effort was made to carry out a program of de-Nazification, demilitarization, democratization, and decartelization (the so-called “Four Ds”) but the programs were only partially successful. The Allied powers soon proved to read with different lenses the principles that had been established by common agreement at the Potsdam conference, until they came to apply autonomous policies within their own controlled zones. A clear example of the difficulties of taking a common line of interpretation was perceived in the occasion ofthe Nuremberg Trials that should have been the example of how to implement the principle of de-Nazification. Already in that place, when the final judgment was reached, the Soviets placed on it a reserve with both a political and legal nature; Political because the judgment recognized as criminal organizations only the National Socialist Party, the SS, the SA, and the Gestapo, thus excluding the government and the military elite; Legal for the absolution of several Nazi political and military figures. Even more drastic was the difference between the occupying powers about the way the reconstruction of the four areas had to be started. Recalling the mistakes made at Versailles, the British did not want to weaken the spirit ofthe German people and promoted the formation of self- govemmental structures to encourage the resumption of political confrontation and the formation of paities. The Americans supported the publication of several newspapers and were active in real activities of political re-education, in many occasions entrusting them to those same Germans who had left Germany and had emigrated to the United States at the time of Hitler®s accession to power. More limited was the work of de-Nazification of society, which the Americans had also begun in a capillary way but which soon was slowed down both for the operational needs of the country and in anti- communist function. Common political and economic intentions together with the need of the British Govermment to manage the difficult situation of turmoil in the Mediterranean area and the Commonwealth, led in November 1946 to the ratification of an agreement between the British Foreign Minister and the US Secretary of State, according to which the two respective zones were united giving birth to the so-called Bizonia. As said earlier, although France was more sensitive to the issues of security and repairs, also supported by the Soviet Union, as months passed and tensions between East and West intensified, France decidedto approach Anglo-Ametrican policies. The point of arrival of this process was a conference held in London in February 1948 between the allied powers and the Benelux countries, which would have led to the formation of the Trizonia. At that time, the adherence of the western parts of Germany to the Marshall Plan was approved and the possibility of an autonomous govemment for West Germany was envisaged. Russian practices differed considerably. in 1946, the Soviet Union virtually eliminated political parties in its zone and put intense pressure on the old Social democratic Patty (SPD) to unite with the Commumnists (KPD) to become the Socialist Unity Patty (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands or SED). The Soviets also carried out an extensive program of land reform and nationalization of industry. This was based in part on the idea that destruction of capitalism would eliminate the basis for fascism since fascism was a product of“monopoly capitalism.” ‘When, in 1948, the three Western powers announced the introduction of currency reforms, a necessary prelude to economic recovery and the functioning of the zones as an economic unit, the Soviet Union closed down rail, road, and water traffic between Berlin and the west. The Berlin blockade, which lasted from June 23, 1948, to May 12, 1949, and the Berlin airlift countering it were the most visible signs ofincreasing Cold Wartension. On June 26, the United States and Britain responded to the Soviet blockade by starting an airlift to supply the city. A proposed plan to break the blockade by sending an armored column down the autobahn to Berlin was ruled out as too confrontational. Although Soviet pilots sometimes harassed incoming transport planes, the Soviet Union did not attempt to counter the airlift by shooting down the supply-laden Allied aircraft. After the airlift was reorganized by General William h. Tunner, it was successful in supplying the more than two million residents of the allied sectors of Berlin for the 1 1months during which the Soviet blockade remained in effect. Even after the Soviets ended the blockade, the airlift continued until September 30, 1949. The airlift supplied Berlin with 2,323,738tons of food, fuel, and other supplies. The successful response to the Soviet challenge contributed greatly to the growth of West European suppoit for American efforts in the Cold War duel with the Soviet Union. In 1949, the division between Western Germany, which became known as the pg. 46 The Four Ds The Nuremberg Trials The birth of Bizonia and Trizonia The currency reforms, the Soviet blockade, and the Berlin airlift Generally speaking, after WWII we see the retum of democracies in Europe, after years of dominion of authoritarian regimes, France resettled itself under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. At the end of World War II, General Charles de Gaulle was recognized as the French national hero, the symbol of resistance and enjoyed great international prestige. His contribution to the fight against Nazi-fascism and the recognition by the allies of the government of Free France allowed him, as early as August 1944, after the liberation of Paris, to declare the non-existence ofthe Vichy regime. Appointed head of the provisional government, the General called for a referendum in October 1945 on the possibility of the adoption of a new constitution for the country and the proposal was accepted by most of the French population. The elections for the Constituent Assembly saw the triumph of the Communist Party and the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP), a new party of Catholic inspiration born clandestinely in 1944. Shocked by the success ofthe left and especially by the impossibility of finding a common programmatic platform among the winning pasties, de Gaulle resigned in January 1946. Later, The Constituent Assembly adopted a text based on the principle of absolute parliamentarianism and a one-chamber parliamentary system, but it was rejected in the subsequent referendum. in June 1946 second Constituent Assembly was then elected and drafted a new text, this time approved by the electorate on October 13, 1946. Thus, the Fourth Republic was bom. Founded on a bicameral Parliament which held the monopoly oflegislative initiative, with a President elected every seven years by the assembled Chambers and endowed only with powers of representation and with a government which was to have the confidence ofthe majority ofParliament, the new French Republic would present the same characteristics of government instability that had accompanied the Third Republic. Thus, a long phase of political instability began, during which the major parties, divided ideologically, did not know how to produce stable aggregations and lasting governments. In 1947 de Gaulle founded in Strasbourg the Rassemblement du peuple francais (RPF), a party aimed at proposing a constitutional reform and hopedto subtract votes from the MRP. Despite the strong conflict between parties, important results were achieved in economic reconstruction, especially thanks to the reform plan launched by Jean Monnet. Monnet himself, together with Foreign Minister Robert Shuman, proposed, as we will see later, the overcome of the historical rivalries between France and Germany, laying the foundations for subsequent economic wnification of Western Europe. The defeat in Indochina in 1954 was accompanied by the outbreak ofthe nationalist insurrectionin Algeria that assumed increasingly radical accents. Let's now tum to Italy; After the resignation of Ferruccio Pami as head ofthe Italian government, the new executive, still composed of six parties forming part of the anti-fascist coalition, was entrusted to the leader of the Christian Democracy, Alcide De Gasperi. De Gasperi approved a decree which, on the one hand, fixed the tasks of the Constituent Assembly, limiting them to the drafting of the constitutional text, the approval of the peace treaties and the drafting of the electoral law, while on the other hand, it decided to transfer the institutional choice from the Assembly to the electorate by means of a referendum to be held on the same day as the Constituent Assembly”s elections. On June 2, 1946, with the decree convening the electoral rallies, also women were granted the right to stand for election, while a previous decree, approved in February 1945, had already granted them the right to vote. Meanwhile, on May 9, King Vittorio Emanuele III abdicated in favor of his son Umberto, who from 1944, held the post of lieutenant of the Kingdom; this was an extreme attempt to safeguard the monarchical institution, leaving the Crown in the hands of a Savoy exponent who had not directly compromised himself with the fascist regime. Inthe referendum of June 2, 1946, the Republic obtained about two more million votes than the monarchy and Umberto II was forced to leave Italy. While the result of the referendum highlighted the presence of a clear split between a North-Central republican Italy and a Southern pro-monarchist one, the elections forthe Constituent Assembly saw the affirmation of three large mass parties: The Christian Democrats, confirmed by far as the strongest party, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. The work of the Constituent Assembly lasted for about a year and a half, and the new Republican constitution came into force on January 1, 1948. Meeting point between the different political cultures of the Italian tradition, the Constituent Assembly managed to gather through a constant work of mediation that resulted in a real “constitutional compromise”, embracing the main cultural and ideological issues of the major panties. From the institutional point of view, the Constituent Assembly developed a fully parliamentary system, with a responsible pg. 49 France in the aftermath of the war; from the fourth republic to the end of Gaullism Italy: from the 1946 Referendum to the establishment of a new institutional asset govemument in front ofthe two chambers, holders of the legislative power and the faculty to elect every 7 years, together with the representatives of the regions, the President ofthe Republic. The Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, with identical legislative functions, differed only forthe different requirements ofthe active and passive electorate and for the methodology used forthe representatives’ elections. The constitution also provided for a High Council of the Judiciary, which would ensure the full independence of the judiciary, a Constitutional Cowt, to verify the conformity of laws with constitutional provisions, a strong administrative decentralization through the establishment of the regions and the institution of the abrogative referendum. Yugoslavia, formally a communist state under the leadership of Tito, managed to separate itself from the soviet subjugation and achieve some degrees of autonomy (the so-called “Schism from Moscow”, mainly due to the tensions developed between Stalin and Tito), Yugoslavia became a non-aligned country (also having a really important role in the non-aligned countries movement’s first conference held in Bandung in 1955, also in the presence of the Indian prime minister Nelru and the Egyptian president Nasser), while Tito managed to develop an economic program which featured certain degrees of private investments accompanied by established government controls. LESSON 11 Decolonization processes after the war: part 1 Great Britain and France (1945-1975) 26) GREAT BRITAIN, THE COMMONWEALTH AND INDIA After the war, decolonization processes started to take up the global scenario. The situation begun to change profoundly in a small number of years; very vast colonial empires begun disappearing or being severely reduced, up to the point, in the 70s, to which almost every single European controlled territory outside the Old Continent was fully independent. This chain of events that brought to a general wave of decolonization in the second half ofthe century has been seen as the result oftwo sets of actions and ideologies; on one hand it is generally recognized that decolonization can be actually seen as the direct outcome of anticolonial and nationalist struggles by the colonized peoples, while, on the other hand, it is also important to take into consideration the general change in the attitudes of the colonial powers, which, after the war, started to balance the costs ofthe colonial empires with their actual benefits. The new international post-war order also retained a relevant role in the capitulation of imperial systems of power: in theory, both the two superpowers emerged from the ashes of the conflict, the USSR, and the US, were not in favour of European colonial empires and the same can be said by the main international organizations (for instance the UN, which still advocated for the Wilsonian principle of self-determination). On a general level, the processes of decolonization developed in this period led to independence and an overall political, economic, and social reconfiguration of Africa, South and South- Eastem Asia. The Second World War, in additionto mark the definitive end of the primacy of Europe on the international scene, gave a decisive turning point in the processes of decolonization. These were the result of the combination of decisions taken at the international level, during and after the conflict and the autonomist claims of movements already present within the colonies to which the war had given an evident acceleration. First of all, it isimpossible for us not to mention the famous principle of people's self-determination that led the decolonization discowse at least in the first half ofthe century: dear to the US president Wilson, the principle had given to many colonized the hope that it would have been also employed in the future global geopolitical assets; when Churchill and United States President Roosevelt jointly issued the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 outlying common national priorities, their claim to respect pg. 50 The non-aligned power of Tito's Yugoslavia Decolonization processes after the war Imperial powers in the Cold War The impact of WWII Self determination ‘and the Atlantic Charter the right of all peoples to choose the form ofgovernment under which they will live antheir wish to see sovereign rights and self-govemment restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them came high on the list. Yet no longer after that, Churchill stressed that the declaration was not meant to apply to India or other British imperial territories; it concerned European nations that had fallen under Nazi occupation. But let's now go back to the origins; the postwar dismantling of the colonial empires took place in two large waves. Most of Asia gained independence in the initial wave of national liberation movements in the first several years after the war, with difficulties that many times led to direct conflict, whereas by the mid-1950s, in what might be seen as the second wave of independence movements, the British and the French both began moving to grant their African colonies independence. Regarding Great Britain, we may say that, differing from France, which maintained a solid closed position with respect to the autonomy requests of colonial peoples, the UK assumed a generally open and conciliatory attitude, based on planned, voluntary and benevolent initiative. Britain's history of decolonisation began in 1947 ‘under a labour government headed by Clement Attlee, elected in July 1945 and remaining in office ‘until 1951. In 1926, the Imperial Conference held in London recognized, through the constitution of the British Commonwealth, the status of “autonomous and equal communities within the empire” to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; all countries which had previously obtained dominion status and therefore enjoyed relative autonomy (dominion = former colonies, usually white settlers colonies, which gained self-government and sovereignty, but were still part of the Commonwealth and still recognising the British monarch as their head of state). The only nation that, in the years between the wars, had struggled hard to gain independence from Britain was India. Administered by the British since the mid-nineteenth century, India was the flagship of the vast British colonial empire. But why did India represent the so-called jewel of the British crown? First of all, for economic reasons; Britain had the “duty” to act in the interests of India and protect the masses, untouchables, Muslims, princes, Europeans, and others from the threat of “Hindu despotism”, as Churchill described nationalistic aims perpetuated by the Indian National Congress (INC), established in 1929 and aimed at achieving the so-called purna swaraj (a new political order framed in the ideal of independence and republicanism). With these duties came legitimate “rights and interests” ofits own, including the interest of Lancashire that Churchill repeatedly invoked in the early 1930s. India's effect on this northwest English county became a prime example of India's impact on the British nation. Nor was he alone in his assessment given the historic importance of the region’s cotton industry within the British economy, a sector highly dependent upon global, and especially Indian, trade. Textiles, especially cotton clothes from Lancashire, remained Britain’s largest export and India its largest overall market during the 19305, but both had declined precipitously since the First World War. It was precisely for these reasons that, in the aftermath of World War I, the British government, considering the contribution made by the Indian soldiers, made important steps on the road to self- govemment. The Government of India Act of 1919 instituted a diarchic regime in the provinces, entrusting broad areas of administration to the natives. These powers were further extended in 1935, with a subsequent Government of India Act constituting an almost complete autonomy regime. It was precisely because of the conflicts that the Indian independence movement had radicalised itself and started to consider these concessions to be insufficient. Since 1919, at the head of the Indian independence movement was Mohandas Gandhi, the ma/tatma (great soul) who, with his preaching based on nonviolence and the practice of passive resistance against the British, obtained a large following especially among the Hindu population. Gandhi’s political battle’s message was aimed not only at achieving independence from Britain, but also at fighting against religious extremism, the untouchability system and all the archaic aspects of social life and customs. In the aftermath of WWII, the British finally and reluctantly agreed to Indian independence, enshrined by the Indian Independence Act which received royal assent on July 18, 1947, only being enforced on the following August 15. The major problem concerned whether a separate state should be established for the Muslim population of India. Despite Gandhi’s efforts to keep India intact, the British carved Pakistan out of pg. 51 The British Commonwealth The concept of dominion The situation of India The INC and the situation in Lancashire The 1919°s and 1935°s Government of India Acts Gandhi The Indian Independence Act and the separation between India and Pakistan by proclamations of multiracial equality within Britain®s empire and Commonwealth ‘family’ — whom could they trust? Many settlers believed their Kikuyu employees to have taken Mau Mau oaths, seeing it as ‘a revolt ofthe domestic staff... as though Jeeves had taken to the jungle”, in the words of Graham Greene. The fact that some Africans remained loyal to their masters counted among Mau Maw s many uncertainties and complexities. Killed alongside the Rucks was another African ‘houseboy” who died trying to help them during the attack; some commentators in the British press played up such evidence of Kikuyu loyalty, but most considered it an exception that proved the satanic rule. As the Illustrated London News concluded, ‘[a]n unusual aspect of the crime was the heroism of the African houseboy. Epitomizing the contradictions of Britains multiracial empire in microcosm, the Ruck home was not the tranquil idyll inhabited by a symbolic multiracial family of equals so proudly celebrated within British post-war rhetoric. Instead, it was one in which vulnerable white kith and kin could never be sure which of their ‘childlike’ African subordinates might faithfully protect them, and which were ‘savages’ bent on murder who needed to be identified and crushed. Settler demands that the Rucks” killers be brought to justice were swiftly met, and within months seven Kikuyu had been convicted and hanged. Death sentences for the Kikuyu found guilty of the Ruck murders formed part of an intense British counterinsurgency campaign in which colonial authorities oftenturned to execution as a first resort ratherthan a last, regardless ofthe strength of evidence against the accused. Moreover, tens of thousands suspected or convicted of Mau Mau-related activity were subjected to attempted ‘rehabilitation’ in detention camps, where they suffered long-term internment (often without trial), hard labour, habitual beatings, torture and sexual violence, and collective punishments that achieved international notoriety among critics of colonialism. Over time, the often indiscriminate brutality of Britain’s methods to defeat the Mau Mau movement — officially labelled an ‘Emergency’, not a ‘colonial war° — came under fire within Britain. Metropolitan opposition had initially been limited to a small segment of the political left spearheaded by, among others, the MP Fenner Brockway. Reports of abuses perpetrated by British troops, colonial administrators, and settlers (along with attempted cover-ups) gradually grew familiar to readers of many British newspapers, however, and were increasingly aired within the House of Commons by the mid-1950s. Mau Mau became one of the main issues that caused anti-colonial activists linked to a number of pre-existing organizations to form the Brockway-led Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF) in 1954. The MCF quickly became the most influential metropolitan pressure group challenging the colonial status quo with a formal membership exceeding three million. It may have taken little to convince British audiences of Mau Mauw's barbaric inhumanity given the stereotypes about African primitivism long prevalent within Western cultures, but stories of British atrocities publicized by Labour politicians affiliated with the MCF and reported in the press caused increasing unease about counterinsurgency tactics. The idea of Britain restoring the peace in Kenya was acceptable; draconian repression by security forces, however, compromised Britain’s good name and moral reputation as a benevolent colonial ruler. Particularly damning indictments of British methods compared counterinsurgency techniques to ‘Gestapo tactics” and the collective persecution of the Jews by the Nazis — an analogy that also arose to question Dutch and French campaigns in the East Indies and Algeria, as will be discussed later on. Likening British actions in Africa to the Nazism against which Britain had recently fought a war and celebrated its own racial tolerance revealed dangerous cracks weakening the foundations of multiracial colonial and Commonwealth proclamations. In Southern Rhodesia the white minority at that time led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, proclaimed independence on November 11, 1965. Britain did not recognise the independence, but it failed to take effective measures to topple this regime. Britain did not opt for a direct intervention because it was not seen suitable to send British troops to fight white settlers, which were considered peers and keens. ‘Within the British intemal politics, the conservatives and, in general, the right supported Ian Smith, whereas the left staged protests and demonstrations, sustaining that independence should have been accompanied by a black majority rule. At the end, after more than a decade of struggle, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980 and power was handed over to the black majority. The Union of South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1961 and became the Republic of South Africa, a state characterized by an elaborate system of apartheid or state-mandated segregation. Only after adopting a new constitution in 1993 and holding free elections in 1994 did South Africa leave behind pg. 54 Gestapo Tactics Rhodesia and South Africa the destructive system—in which the white minority lived vastly better than the black majority it controlledt—that had shaped its society and economy for most of the twentieth century. 27) THE SUEZ CANAL CRISIS The mid-1950s not only subjected Britain’s conduct in Kenyato critical scrutiny. Like nothing else, the Suez Crisis of November 1956 revealed that ‘Britain could not act independently of the United States, nor did the British state possessed the economic or military strength to be ranked as a great power anymore’, Roger Louis summarizes. Maintaining Britains international prestige and world power standing depended on the ability to assert authority in the strategically vital Middle East, considerable swathes of which counted as past of Britains “informal empire’. Assured use of the Suez Canal Zone was essential if Britain”s military presence in the Middle East and Asia and access to oil supplies were to remain secure. Gamal Abdel Nasser's rise to power in Egypt during a 1952 coup and his nationalization of the Canal (formerly under British and French control) in July 1956 placed these interests in jeopardy. The announcement of Nasser’s intention to nationalize the Suez Canal company was implemented by the Egyptian dictator in retaliation for the missed Ametican financial investments intended to be used in order to build the Aswan Dam; this prospect, however, directly conflicted with the interests of Great Britain, that saw its traditional primacy over the Mediterranean and above all the possibility of controlling the important trade route on the Red Sea questioned. Prime Minister Anthony Eden (who had succeeded Churchill the previous year) became hell-bent on toppling him. Britain secretly forged an agreement with France and Israel whereby Israel would invade Egypt and pave the way for an Anglo-French intervention that would remove Nasser and reoccupy the Canal. But the Anglo-French assault on Egypt ground to a screeching halt thanks to the United States’ furious opposition to the invasion that provoked a ceasefire followed by military withdrawal. Eden’s covert machinations leading up to the invasion incurred the wrath of the Eisenhower administration with devastating and immediate consequences: Washington threatened to withhold support for a loan Britain sought from the Intemational Monetary Fund, placing the value ofthe pound sterling at risk and leaving Britain no alternative but to toe the American line. The Suez Crisis has rightly merited the inglorious distinction of a fiasco ever since. It forced Britain to leam a humiliating lesson like no other event in post-war history: that it could hold no hope of acting unilaterally without American acquiescence to its global aims. In Egypt in 1956, Washington®s view that the Suez invasion ran counter to the struggle against communism decisively nipped Britain’s attempt to reassett its interests by force in the bud. Britain’s display of a style of colonialism the United States wanted consigned to history risked driving African, Middle Eastern, and Asian peoples into the arms of the Soviet Union. (Tellingly, the Eisenhower administration compared Britain’s actions in Egypt with the Soviet invasion of Hungary that same year.) Like never before, Britain’s status as a global power was exposed as a relic and its position as the manifestly junior partner in the Anglo- Ametican special relationship visibly confirmed. 28) FRANCE, INDOCHINA, AND ALGERIA As we have seen before, in France the question of decolonization suddenly and dramatically imposed itselfin the aftermath ofthe World War. In contrast to the gradualist model embraced by Great Britain, France had not been able or willing to pursue a policy of progressive integration of local elites into the administration of overseas territories, preferring instead the practice of assimilation, in which the French authorities continued to hold firmly the political power of the colonies.The French dream of assimilation, of transforming the inhabitants of colonial areas into people whose culture and heritage were French, had not prepared the former colonies well for independence. Only a tiny elite had been able to follow the path opened up by French education. Most of the population of the new nations was simply unprepared for life in the modem world. France’s failure to fend off Nazi Germany”s invasion in May 1940 set in train a cascade of national lumiliations with long-term consequences for metropole and empire alike. Upon France’s surrender in June, the remnants of its govemment under Marshal Pétain relocated to the southern town of Vichy, pg. 55 French concept of assimilation A Franco-French conflict during WWI whereupon France became split between German-occupied regions in the north and territory controlled by the ultraconservative Vichy regime that owed its survival to collaboration. In 1940, the Third Republic bom in 1870 came to an end, and collaboration with and resistance to the Nazis and Vichy began. Never homogeneous, France’s wartime resistance movement operated both within and outside the Hexagon. General Charles de Gaulle fled to London, and with Churchill’s backing this largely unknown figure assumed the mantle of self-designated leader of the emergent ‘Free French” forces, at first minuscule in number. De Gaulle’ s ‘Appel’ broadcast from London on June 18 refusedto recognize France either as defeated or alone, because the wider battle was not confined to Europe. This was a world war, de Gaulle proclaimed, and France still ‘has a vast empire behind her.” At first, however, most of the empire stood behind Pétain rather than de Gaulle. With few exceptions (most impoitantly French Equatorial Africa), French colonial governors and their administrations from North and West Africa to Syria and Lebanon to Indochina were ardent Vichyites. So too were most white settlers in Algeria and elsewhere, who fully supported administrations which seized the opportunity to roll back the paltry reforms enacted in the 1930s and further disenfranchise colonized populations. If metropolitan France was divided between the German-occupied territory, the Vichy- controlled zone, and a disparate resistance struggle, in the empire the Franco-French split took the form of Vichy loyalism and Free French republicanism, with the balance gradually shifting from the former to the latter. One by one, between 1940 and 1944 every French colonial administration apait from Indochina’s transferred allegiance to the Free French, often following invasions in which Free French units operated together with other Allied military forces. Radically different though they were in goals and ideology, Vichy and the Free French nonetheless concurred on the empire’s fundamental importance to France. After the American and British ‘Operation Torch’ landings in Algeria and Morocco in November 1942, Vichy forces succumbed to Free French control and de Gaulle shifted his base of operations from London to Algiers. French Algeria’s capital city thus turned from the symbolic lub of overseas France under Vichy into the seat of his provisional government until mainland France itself was liberated — with considerable assistance from Free French troops from the colonies. In shott, the empire (especially French Africa) had enabled de Gaulle’ s movement both to form its army and reassert French sovereignty. In Indochina, meanwhile, Vichy-affiliated colonial authorities were toppled not by the Free French or the Allies, but the Japanese. Although Japan had allowed the French to remain in place (under sufferance) after gaining effective control of the region and subsuming the colonial economy within its own war effoit, in March 1945 Japan moved to a direct occupation and imprisoned French administrators. By the time Japan surrendered in August, French authority in Indochina had disintegrated and colonial unrest and political demands escalated, providing crucial space for the Viet Minh to consolidate its own standing as a nationalist liberation front and for Ho Chi Minh to declare Vietnam’s independence. After important revolts and reprisals in Algeria through 1943, de Gaulle decided to respond with diplomacy to the claims mainly issued by Muslim Algerians, which demanded effective political rights and representation. De Gaulle responded in March 1944 with an offer to bestow citizenship on 65,000 Algerian Muslims — a gesture as hated by resident Europeans as its actual scope was minimal, applying as it did to less than 1 per cent of Algeria’s non-European population. Intended in part to appease Algerians at a time when many were fighting in Italy together with Allies, his greater purpose was to enhance Free France’s authority in a North Africa dominated by British and American forces and assuage American anti-colonial pressures. Algerians dismissed such proposals, their insufficiency acting as a spur to further political activism. For his past, when he left Algiers in August 1944 upon the liberation of Paris after the fall of Vichy, de Gaulle ordered the colonial army and police forces to keep a close watch on nationalist activity and quell opposition by force if necessary. De Gaulle’s approach to Algeria was entirely consistent with the outcomes of the conference convened to discuss plans for the post-war, post-metropolitan liberation empire held in Brazzaville, the capital of French Equatorial Africa, in January and February. While reforms were promised, many were vaguely defined at best; other proposals merely replaced one form of subordination of the colonized (such as forced labour, which was to be phased out over a five-year period) with another (a ‘service obligatoire du travail’, ot mandatory labour service). Wider French citizenship for colonial subjects was also promised, as was colonial representation in France’ s Constituent Assembly — although in only a handful of seats. The pg. 56 Brazzaville, a new French Citizenship, and the French union Thoroughly disgusted by what he saw, Martin finally received permission to return to the metropole after two years in Indochina. Stationed at the Toulon dockyard, he attempted to politicize new army recruits about to be sent overseas by distributing leaflets calling onthem to oppose the war, and in 1950 he was arrested on charges of demoralizing the army and given a five-year prison sentence. His case generated sufficient public notoriety and controversy to merit the sublimely French distinction of an affaire after communists and prominent intellectuals embarked on a battle to defend his actions and secure his release and pardon by the summer of 1953. In a collection of testimonials edited by the leading existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Maitin’s supporters commended him for struggling to uphold the principles of the French Revolution and the anti-Nazi resistance alike in contesting French injustices in Indochina deemed comparable to those France itself had recently suffered. One champion, Marc Beigbeder, alluded to ‘barbaric behaviour” meted out in Indochina “which, inthe manner of Hitler, was unleashed on civilian populations by bombing villages with napalm and by collective massacres comparable to those at Oradour, and by arbitrary executions’. In this, he referred to the events of June 10, 1944, when Oradour-sur-Glane became France’s equivalent to the Dutch village of Putten when Waffen-SS troops rounded up and killed 642 French women, children, and men and bumt the village to the ground. By the time of ‘L ‘Affire Henri Martin’ in the early 19508, Oradour was so deeply entrenched in the French national consciousness as the archetypal ‘matyred village’ where innocent French civilians had been slaughtered by Nazis trying to crack down on resistance activity that drawing a parallel between its fate and that ofthe Vietnamese at the hands ofthe French made for a uniquely powerful indictment of French conduct in Indochina. Invoking Oradour- sur-Glane, as a number of French detractors did, worked to condemn French actions and, relatedly, ‘inscribe the Viet Minh into French national history and into the resistance mythology”, Sylvain Pons has written. At a stroke, this turned the Viet Minh into ‘brothers in arms’ of the anti-Nazi French and the French expeditionary forces who had so recently liberated France into forces of occupation akin to Nazis. Viet Minh leaders freely deployed similar rhetoric. ‘We’re resisters too’, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed, making reference to the Viet Minh's recent struggle against the Japanese. Let's now turn to another conflict that broke out right after the end of the Indochinese conflict: the Algerian Independence War, fought between France and the armed forces ofthe National Liberation Front (FLN - a revolutionary national organization, which fought for independence with violence, seen as the only meanto achieve liberation from the French oppressor) mainly on North African soil between 1954 and 1962; in North Africa, the French faced a major challenge in Algeria when the National Liberation Front began a revolution with a series of planned attacks in 1954. The November 1 proclamation issued by the FLN leadership accordingly declared that theirs was a revolutionary struggle to be carried forward ‘by all means until our goal is achieved’, demanding Algerian national independence predicated on ‘the respect of all fundamental liberties without racial or confessional distinction’ but within the ‘framework of Islamic principles’. The campaign fought inside Algeria itself needed to involve an (politics of sanitation, or purification) by ‘placing the national revolutionary movement on its true path and the annihilation ofall traces of comuption and reformism’. Curing Algeria of the sickness which was colonialism required ‘gathering and organizing all the healthy energies [toutes les énergies saines] of the Algerian people in order to liquidate the colonial system’. This involved terrorist acts including bombings, assassinations, and brutal physical attacks on European settlers, soldiers, and police as well as Muslims perceived to support the colonial order — or simply Muslims who had not subscribed to the FLN’s programme. Indeed, the Algerian War was more than a struggle against the French for national independence: it was a in which the FLN successfully deployed violence and intimidation on a massive scale to absorb, neutralize, or eliminate Algerians who supported rival nationalist movements (such as the latest incarnation of Messali Hadj's organization). To take a prominent example, Ferhat Abbas switched allegiance to the FLN and became the head of'its provisional government after having lost faith in the ability of political moderation to achieve change (going so far as to assert that ‘there is no other solution but the machine- gun’) and because the FLN executed his nephew, another moderate, as one ofthe many condemned as traitors whose fate was meant to serve as a lesson to others not yet committed to their cause. pg. 59 The Algerian War 1954 - 1962 Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and political theorist from Martinique who gained first-hand exposure to colonial racism at home, as a student in France, and as a doctor at a hospital in Algeria, joined the FLN in 1956 and quickly became one of its most renowned and eloquent political advocates. His succinct encapsulation of the colonial situation accurately summed up the FLN’s core ethos, which dismissed non-violent tactics as ineffectual — ‘an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed”. Faith in non-violence was inherently misguided, Fanon argued, as it went against the entire nature of the colonial system in which untold amounts of blood had always been shed: ‘colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence’ (he resumed his own political ideas in his masterpiece “/es donnes de la terre”. Again, Jean-Paul Sastre, one of the leading figures of the French intellectuals against the war in Algeria, was one of the advocates of the analogy between Nazi Germany and France, respectively in World War Two and the colonization wars. Although the French had considerable success militarily against the FLN, they steadily lost ground in the cowt of world opinion. The revolution grew increasingly brutal in the methods used by the two sides. For the French, it was particularly troubling since they could not help but note they were using many of the same methods the Gestapo had used in World War II against the French resistance. Both Tunisia and Morocco gained independence in 1956, but a similar move for Algeria was out of the question, first of all because the one million Europeans, or colons, living in Algeria controlled its economy and government and considered it a pat of France. Algeria lay directly across the Mediterranean and was reachable from mainland France by ship in under two days. Algeria had long been far more than a colony, or a protectorate like its Tunisian and Moroccan neighbours: since 1848, it had been constitutionally part of France itself and divided into three départements, falling under the jurisdiction of France’s Ministry of the Interior as opposed to the Ministry of Colonies. France had insistently tried to corral Indochina, like other overseas territories, into the French Union; Algeria, however, was France. ‘Algérie, c’est la France”, its defenders continually insisted; or, as General Raoul Salan proclaimed in 1958 while acting as the French army’s commander-in-chief in Algeria, ‘[t]he Mediterranean runs through France as the Seine runs through Paris’. So conceptually integral was Algeria to France, so large (and politi- cized) was its white settler population, and so geographically proximate was it to the hexagon that the war of decolonization which erupted on 1 November 1954 readily spilled across the Mediterranean. Over the next eight years, it was to engulf French politics and society in ways Indochina never did. For the French army, holding on to Algeria had become a question of honor, of redeeming itself after humiliating defeats in 1940 by the Germans and in 1954 by the Vietnamese. One of the most intense, focused, and protracted bouts of counter-insurgency activity lasted from January to September 1957, when the army under the command of General Jacques Massu fought the Battle of Algiers that concentrated on killing off the FLN on the narrow, winding, densely-populated streets of the Casbah. The Battle of Algiers qualified as a military success that achieved the objective of ridding the capital of an FLN presence but came with adverse political repercussions, the magnitude of which would only become clear during and after May 1958. It was only after this battle and a close brush with civil war (in 1956 the French army was given emergency powers by the government; A state of emergency was declared), which brought Charles de Gaulle to power in 1958 (he was appointed as head of an emergency government by the president ofthe republic) that away was found to extricate France from Algeria in 1962. By 1958, France was on the verge of civil war over Algeria. In Algiers, the French army, and the colons (European settlers in Algeria) seized power. Next, the army and colons seized Corsica and made plans to attack metropolitan France, intending to bring to power a government that would keep Algeria French (A/gérie Frangaise). In 1958 the advocates of the French Algeria created the so-called “National Security Committee”; many were those in France who feared that the military takeover could have spread from Algeria to mainland France. Charles de Gaulle, then in self- imposed political exile, appeared the only national figure acceptable to all groups. In France, the retum of De Gaulle was seen as the only solution that would have discarded the power ofthe generals; In the spring of 1958 he was elected president ofthe Republic. The French army officers and colons willingly accepted de Gaulle as the one person who could keep the country united and Algeria French. At the pg. 60 Franz Fanon ‘and the use of violence Tunisia and Morocco's independence The Battle of Algiers, Charles de Gaulle comes back to power and the NSC time, de Gaulle hoped to keep Algeria attached to France, although not necessarily in the same manner as the army and colons wished. After his election, he went directly to Algeria and declared in public “Je vous ai compris”, phrase that was perceived as an acceptance of the agenda of the settlers who aimed to maintain Algeria French. De Gaulle was successful in the next several years both in constructing the type of government he had wanted earlier and in resolving the Algerian crisis. In large past, success in creating a Fifth Republic dominated by a powerful executive allowed him to deal successfully with the colonial impasse. Working quickly in 1958 and 1959, de Gaulle supervised the writing of a new constitution and the referendum approving it on September 28, 1958. From an institutional point ofview, the central role ofthe President ofthe Republic was guaranteed by his power to call a referendum, dissolve Parliament and appoint ministers, on the advice of the Prime Minister. The system was semi-presidential in nature and the government depended on the President of the Republic. A subsequent 1962 reform established that the President would have been elected by direct universal suffrage. Subsequently, de Gaulle was elected President of the Republic in December 1958 by an electoral college composed of parliamentarians and representatives of local bodies. His prestige and force of personality allowed him over the next several years to pursue several goals. In foreign policy, the General granted France independent nuclear potential, which was achieved in 1960 with the construction of the first French atomic bomb. Subsequently, de Gaulle tried to make his country the pivot of a great Europe as much as possible detached from the American protection. It was for this reason that in 1963 de Gaulle vetoed the entry of Great Britain into the ECC, because of the “special relationship” Great Britain had with the United States and the potential threat this could signify for French dominance on the continent (a decision that was also noted in 1967). Absolutely vital was bringing the Algerian crisis to a close. Initially, de Gaulle tried to keep Algeria attached to France in some way, but when he saw this would not work, he pushed through Algerian independence. For some in the French military, this was completely unacceptable. Although some officers resoited to revolt and assassination attempts, de Gaulle prevailed. France by the early 19608 enjoyed both a strong, rapidly developing economy and a stable, confident government. Despite the tensions, especially with the generals of the colony, Algeria gained full independence in 1962, after a war that had cost about halfa million deaths. Not wanting that what was happening in Algeria replicated elsewhere, de Gaulle, since 1958, put the remaining French colonies of Africa before the choice of whether or not to remain part of the new Communauté Francaise, thought as a kind of federation between the overseas territories and Paris. Inthis case the former colonies would continue to receive economic and military aid from France. Submitted to referendums in all African territories, the de Gaulle project was accepted by all countries, with the sole exception of Guinea-Conakry. The path towards African countries’ independence had a decisive turning point in 1960, defined not by chance as the “Year of Africa”. In 1960 17 African countries obtained independence. The process was piloted by the European powers according to not always consistent criteria. In countries where white interests were a priority, such as in Kenya, as we have seen before, that became independent in 1963, Europeans were reluctant to grant independence. The war in Algeria did not even spare women: Two victims of torture became French causes célèbres, both of whom were young Algerian Muslim women: Djamila Bouhired, tortured dur- ing the Battle of Algiers after having been apprehended for acting as a mes- senger liaising between leading FLN militants and given a death sentence for planting a bomb, and Djamila Boupacha, captured in early 1960 for having thrown a bomb into a café, hidden FLN insurgents, and done other work to aid the revolt. Their cases illustrate both the significant roles played by Muslim women in Algeria’s independence struggle and their importance in the pub- licity war waged by French intellectuals protesting against torture. Like the white French men subjected to torture or who were killed or disappeared while in custody (a mere handful of victims when compared with the thousands of Algerians who suffered the same fate), Algerian women became favoured subjects of metropolitan exposés which often focused in depth on the sexual violations meted out by their French captors. Djamila Boupacha's case achieved its notoriety largely through the efforts of two influential women who came out in her defence and galvanized other critics to follow suit: Tunisian lawyer Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir, who published widely about the injustices Boupacha endured after her amrest. Her ordeals involving rape with a bottle, torture with electrodes, beatings, and the arrest and brutalization of family members illustrated that de Gaulle’s retum to political leadership had not ended abuses and in fact further pg. 61 The Fifth French Republic Baudouin’s visit also continued to resonate among the Congolese after his departure. Congolese responses to the king revealed resistant understandings ofa racialized ‘natural’ colonial hierarchy that destabilized the image ofthe white colonizer as a paternal authority figure and the black colonized as a child too immature to rule itself without parental guidance. Significantly, although the Belgians involved in publicizing the king's tour eagerly circulated the story that the Congolese had greeted Baudouin as ‘Bwana Kitoko’, they had initially called him ‘Mwana Kitoko” (‘beautiful child’, or ‘handsome boy”). As ‘Mwana Kitoko” highlighted the king's youth and inexperience in Congolese eyes, it compromised his grandeur; affectionate though it was, its seeming lack of deference led to its suppression in official accounts ofthe visit. From the Belgian point of view, in 1956 there appeared to be no end to colonial rule in sight. A survey taken within the metropole that year showed that over 80 per cent of the 3,000 polled believed Belgium’s presence in the Congo to be legitimate and beneficial to the Congolese and to Belgium alike -Many justified their beliefs, and Belgium’s ongoing presence in Central Africa, on the grounds of all Belgium had achieved to the good of the colony. Deep-seated attitudes about Belgian colonialism and the Congolese people appeared unshaken two years later when Brussels hosted the 1958 World's Fair (Expo ’58), which conveniently served as an occasion to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1908 takeover when Léopold Il’s territory became a Belgian colony. Belgium’s own exhibitions included a mumber of pavilions applauding its colonial endeavous, honouring the role played by Léopold II, and portraying the Congolese as backward, primitive, and unchanging, fit for display in a ‘native village’, which reminded the old-fashioned belle époque’s colonial pavilions, the so-called “human zoos”, which were a common feature between the endo of the 19" and the beginning of the 20" century, or as loyal soldiers of the Force publique, well trained and tightly controlled by an exclusively white officer corps. (the village represented a theme ofhigh controversy and it was closed before the end ofthe exposition). Like the narratives circulated about King Baudouin’s 1955 visit, Expo ’58 became yet another platform for ‘showing off the Congo with all its wealth and its happy colonized people’, as Thomas Kanza sarcastically phrased it, to Belgians and millions of international visitors. Expo ’58 also enabled more Congolese évolués to visit the metropole than ever before as participants or spectators. Unlike neighbouring colonial powers with well-established traditions of educating their colonized elites at British and French wniversities, Belgium had actively restricted the Congolese pre- sence in the metropole, fearing that time in Europe would provide exposure to radical ideas that would destabilize the colonial order and its hierarchy Congo’s évolués expanded their political horizons in many ways in 1958. Nationalism galvanized wider swathes of the Congolese population as political parties emerged that year with specific political platforms now demanding far more than a stake forindigenous elites in the colonial system or slow and paitial Belgian concessions. Most parties grew out of new or pre-existing ethnic associations and as such attracted adherents who shared a ‘tribal’, linguistic, or regional origin, such as Kasavubu's Abako or Moise Tshombe’s Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga (Conakat). By contrast, Patrice Lumumba was a leading founder of the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), which rapidly won mass support with an explicitly multi-ethnic plat- form that emphasized the need for national unity and denounced ethnic and regional separatism. As nationalism gained further momentum between 1958 and 1960 and decolonization arrived at a speed unimaginable just two years before, these competing variants proved decisive in debates concerning the shape a postcolonial Congo would take — debates in which Belgium proved keenly self-interested. Events occurring within as well as outside the Congo were responsible for what Jean Stengers termed its ‘precipitous decolonization’ and independence on June 30 1960. Congolese nationalists like Lumumba drew inspiration from signs that colonial rule was drawing to a close elsewhere in Africa, with Ghana's independence from Britain in 1957 and de Gaulle’s announcement in 1958 that France’s sub-Saharan African territories could choose between outright indepen- dence or membership within the French Community being key turning points. Belgium acknowledged in a positive way the independence of the Congo: the Belgian govemment initiated the printing of some postage stamps pointing out a soit of portrayal of modernity and progress that Belgian had brought to the Congo; they stand to represent the positive narrative of the Belgian colonization. pg. 64 Belgian efforts to secure anindependence settlement in 1960 that favoured federalist Congolese paities at the MNCs expense did not initially succeed. Elections held in the run-up to 30 June saw Lumumba”s MNC emerge as the leading party, and although it failed to secure a majority of seats in assemblies at either the national or regional level it was able to form a coalition govem- ment together with allied paities. Lumumba was to become prime minister upon independence — precisely the scenario Belgium had hoped to avoid at all costs and one with which its resident minister tried to tamper by appointing Kasavubu, Abako”s leader, as the head of state. “Even though Belgium publicly came out in favor of the independence of the Congo, its intention nonetheless was to set up a government that would be ‘under its thumb”, Lumumba complained. For Lumumba, independence had to be a real one, meaning full political and economic autonomy from Belgium; This was an important point in his political narrative, as the Belgian men continued to maintain a really high degree of economic and political control over the Congo also after the issue of the independence (most of all in the mining sector). Right after the independence, we see a general crisis in the Congo that will affect the country statting from 1960; Lumumba was opposed by several forces, mainly because of ethnic divisions fermented by the Belgian authorities still present inthe country, who favored the succession of the Katanga province from newly independent Congo: Lumumba insisted upon ‘our complete and sovereign independence”, ‘our eco- nomic independence”, and described Belgium and the Congo as ‘two equal and independent countries’ — all of which generated immense applause, both from his audience in the room and among those listening to radios across the country. Lumumba’s speech turning the conventional version of colonialism on its head caused grave insult to the king and to Belgium, leading to tremendous media outcry in Brussels. Belgian authorities involved in coordinating the transfer of power already considered Lumumba the worst possible leader of the Congo precisely because he demanded full independence, which placed Belgian and other Western economic interests in danger. His pronouncements on 30 June simply confirmed what many firmly believed before, namely that Lumumba would have to be removed from the scene for Belgium’s ongoing stake in and control over an ‘independent’ Congo to be guaranteed. As Lumumba’s government tried to restore order and introduce Africanization, General Janssens was dismissed and sent back to Brussels, taking his dramatic flair with him. To publicly express his disapproval at the Belgian govemment’s decision to grant independence to a ‘still savage’ people — a savagery to which the Congo’s rapid descent into chaos during the mutiny supposedly attested — he promptly made a pilgrimage to the statue of Léopold II on Brussels Place du Thròne, before which he proclaimed that the former monarch and his colonial legacy had been defiled. Lumumba’s verbal assault on Belgium’s colonial record in front of Baudouin opened the floodgates to physical attacks on whites, he argued in books written as part of his subsequent campaign to absolve himself of responsibility. Like others, Janssens eagerly attributed the soldiers’ seditious violence to Lumumba’s provocation rather than his own. The Force publique mutiny gave Belgium the pretext to launch a military intervention to ensure the safety of Belgian nationals. This effectively resulted in a neo-colonial reconquest (Neocolonialism = new form of colonialism which persisted also after colonies’ independencies. European powers were not usually keen on cutting completely the bounds they had with their former colonial empires. For this reason, they usually established what they called economic necessary relationships, but also strong political bounds) less thantwo weeks after the official transfer of power. Belgium'’s military invasion immediately became crucial to propping up the province’s secession orchestrated by Moise Tshombe’s party, Conakat, on 11 July. Although technically an African organization, in reality Conakat and its leader were puppets manipulated by Katanga's white settler population together with the Union Minière de Haut Katanga (UMHK, the region’s most powerful mining company), and their Belgian political backers. Under cover of this breakaway govemment, Katanga became Belgium”s ‘bridgehead ... to fight Congolese nationalism’ and ‘the prime weapon in its fight against Lumumba’s government’, Ludo De Witte has written. Seeing it as the most promising way to realize its federalist agenda at the expense of an independent and wnified nation state, ‘Brussels had amputated Katanga from the body of the Congo in the hope that L éopoldville would not survive the operation.’ By casting Tshombe and Kasavubu as loyal moderates and Lumumba as ‘irra- tional’, ‘extreme’, and ‘commumist’, Belgium thus brought its collective mili- tary, political, and economic weight to bear on the Congo”s political landscape and thereby ensured Lumumba’s elimination. It was aided by a United Nations intervention coupled with American involvement that pg. 65 extended to the White House and the CIA as Cold War anxieties about the possibility of Soviet influence over mineral-rich Central Africa came to the fore. Using Kasavubu as the intermediary, Lumumba was removed from office within weeks and soon imprisoned; he was ultimately transferred to Katanga and into the hands of his political enemies headed by Tshombe and his white backers, where he was beaten, tortured, and murdered in early 1961. 30) THE ‘ESTADO NOVO’ AND THE PORTUGUESE DECOLONIZATION By the mid-1960s, the second wave of independence movements had ended. only a few white settler regimes and the Portuguese colonies remained in Africa. Portugal’s insistent colonial propaganda ofthe 1930s came at a critical historic juncture as the Estado Novo, or ‘New State’, consolidated itself after a military coup in 1926 had ended a republic and ushered in nearly fifty years of dictatorship, mainly under the rule of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. This half century started with European overseas empires at their peak but gradually witnessed the intensification of international pressures that ledto a protracted decolonization process after 1945. During that period, Poitugal’s experience attested to imperialism’s fundamental impact not only on colonized peoples but also within Europe’s colonizing nations themselves. In Portugal’s case, the importance of overseas engagement to national identity dated back nearly five hundred years to the time when Prince Henry the Navigator and explorers like Vasco da Gama launched the era of the ‘Discoveries’ that made Portugal the pioneering maritime power it became inthe early modern era. Assertions of the longevity of its history outside Europe were far more than mere statements of historical fact in the twentieth century: rather, they were politically-motivated pronouncements predicated upon at least as much myth as reality. Defending its global heritage and right to remain overseas was a crucial dimension of Portugal’s national identity and culture, particularly inthe face of growing challenges that both stemmed from and followed the Second World War. Portugal was not only the first European imperial power; it also became the last, holding steadfastly to its far- flung territories and its rationale for main- taining them long after Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium had embarked upon decolonization and gradually adopted new national priorities and ideologies. Portugal used a specific and well-defined justification in order to reassure its continuing presence outside of the European continent, which was based on a completely different approach, a Portuguese exceptionalism; to those insisting on an end to Portuguese colonial rule that had sparked a series of violent nationalist liberation struggles in Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique, Portugal categorically refused to ‘accept the charge of colonialism’ inthe first place. Its ‘overseas provinces’ were not colonies but rather “an integral, inseparable pait of Portugal’, a model multiracial society ‘based on the equal dignity ofthe human person within a single national family, regardless of ethnic or geographical origin’. Those living in European Portugal or Portuguese Africa all counted as Portuguese citizens who, ‘whatever their colour or place of origin, enjoy the same juridical and political rights and opportunities”. In sum, ‘the Portuguese provinces in Africa are not under Portuguese sovereignty: they are constituent paits of that sovereignty’. Defending Portuguese Africa meant nothing less than preserving Portugal’s ‘national unity" and respecting ‘the fundamental values which constitute its moral and spiritual heritage’. Beyond southwest Europe, Portugal also encompassed Guinea- Bissau in West Africa and the islands of Cape Verde and Sào Tomé and Principe offits coast, Angola, and Mozambique on each side of southem Africa, and small enclave territories in Asia (Goa, Damfo, and Diu flanked by India, the trading port of Macau engulfed by China, and Timor in the Indonesian archi- pelago). Geographically dispersed and ‘deterritorialized’, Portugal’s constitu- tive parts scattered across the globe were nonetheless cohesive, unified, and sustained by the sea. Although this conceptualization of the nation had deep roots, it became further entrenched in the 1950s and 1960s in response to wider global trends pushing Westem European empires to set their colonies on the road to inde- pendence. In line with the constitutional amendment recasting ‘colonies’ as ‘overseas provinces’ in 1951, the dictatorship that was controlled by Salazar until 1968 consolidated its defensive stance in the face of mounting interna- tional opposition (particularly from the United Nations) and anti-colonial nationalism. Recurrent public proclamations reinforced the constitution’s assertion that Portugal’s destiny entailed a ‘historic mission’ to bring civilization to the lands its great seafaring explorers had pg. 66 fixated on lusotropical ideals and a conception ofthe nation that extended beyond Europe and into other continents. Expressions of national pride in overseas Portugal and its illustrious centuries-long history so assiduously cultivated by the state were indeed evident, but in time the wars in Africa took a heavy toll. Such as they were, ideals foregrounding Portugal’s destiny as a pluricontinental nation increasingly appeared ill-founded or unsustainable, particularly to those risking their lives to little avail in African conflicts with seemingly no end in sight. By the beginning of 1974, signs of discontent among army officers had become impossible to ignore, emanating from among the most junior con- scripted officers in Africa (who often exhibited even less enthusiasm for war than the troops under their command) and from the highest cadres alike. On 25 Apiil, discontented officers who had formed the Movimento das Forgas Armadas (the Armed Forces Movement, or MFA) descended upon Lisbon with tanks and rapidly overthiew the Caetano regime. Long the Estado Novo’s mainstay, the armed forces ultimately proved its undoing. An ecstatic public reception greeted this virtually bloodless ‘Carnation Revolution’ (so- called on account of the flowers inserted into soldiers’ guns) which signalled the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Military anger that finally spilled over to form the MFA and led to the 25 April coup ranged from professional grievances over promotion and status that divided officers among themselves to a complete unwillingness for war to continue in Africa. The revolution took a moderate course at first, with Caetano relinquishing power to General Spinola, who was initially supported by the MFA. Yet differing agendas within the military proved fundamentally irreconcilable. Once in office, Spinola persisted with his dream for a Lusitanian federation and remained wedded to the ideas contained within Portugal and the Future, envisioning independence coming to Portuguese Africa only ‘in a generation or so’ — an unfeasible path that boded nothing but ongoing violent conflict with nationalist guertilla forces. Determined to avoid this prospect at all costs, in September 1974 MFA officers secured Spinola’s resignation, after which Portugal’s revolution moved leftwards under the influence of socialists and communists who favoured immediate decolonization. LESSON 13 The Golden Age and European Integration (1940s-1980s) 31) THE GOLDEN AGE AND THE ECONOMIC BOOM Certain factors worked to make the post-World War II reconstruction easier than was initially expected. First, war damage had sometimes been exaggerated. in addition, in some cases, the wartime demolition had a “positive” side. A factory destroyed in the war became an advantage ifthe factory was replaced by a more efficient plant. in other situations, the economies of the belligerent nations had expanded during the war and were nearly as large, or even larger, than their prewar versions, even after wartime damages had been taken into account. A largely intact productive capacity that could be modernized where damaged, together with a great shoitage of goods ofall kinds, created a basis for a rapid recovery. The crucial missing factor was the capital needed to finance economic growth. The United States provided much ofthe capital needed for recovery through the Marshall Plan (1947) and other smaller programs. Before the Marshall Plan, America had already made available to postwar Europe nearly $15.5 billion in aid, about $7 billion of that in outright gifts. From 1947 to 1952, the United States provided Europe with about $13 billionin aid under the European recovery Program. After that, Europe financed recovery largely through the expansion of exports. The Marshall Plan was based on national plans that the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) helped to coordinate. These national plans gave Americans some assur- ances as to how their money would be spent as well as encouraged paiticipants to use all resources in the most constructive manner. In many ways, the Marshall Plan’s main contribution was a psychological one. it demonstrated American faith that European economies could be successfully reconstructed and gave Europeans reason to cooperate with one another in the process. other factors involved in the recovery included an increase in trade worldwide and several demographic factors in Europe. First, there was a rising birthrate. Additionally, the influx of refugees and, later, the arrival of large numbers of foreign “guest workers” added to the capacity to produce goods relatively cheaply. heavy consumer demand, especially in areas of housing pg. 69 Reconstruction after the war The OEEC and automobiles, was vitally impor- tant in maintaining a long-term economic growth. A new kind of capitalism, one characterized by extensive state intervention in national economies through the use of devices such as planning and nationalization, also played an impoitant role in recovery. Govemments often used their control of central banks and government investment to determine both the rate ofgrowth of an economy and the direction of that growth. Govemments extended their activities beyond areas having to do with welfare—unemployment, retirement, working conditions, public health, and housing—to the workings of the economy itself. in some cases, housing, for instance, welfare and economic expansion went hand in hand. E fforts to make the economy function effectively and equitably followed patterns that had developed in each of the two world wars. All the factors taken together enabled most Western European countries not simply to recover but also to develop at a rapid rate through the first two decades after World War II. In along span of time, more or less identified to be the so-called “glorious thirties” spanning between the second half ofthe 1940s and the end ofthe 1970s, many scholars recognize a true economic miracle, with extremely high growth rates; this time span is also known with the expressions “Golden Age” or “Post-World War II economic boom” and has been a period in which Europe, and not only, experienced a positive economic situation; this has been mainly caused by a necessary shift to a more industrial and service-based economy, even in those countries in which, up to 1945, the agricultural sector still was at the base ofthe economic system (the Mediterranean area and Eastem Europe). Surely, GDP was an important economic index which help us to understand the rates of financial growth involving the period, but it was not the only indicator: the agricultural sector stagnated, while a new wave of industrialization hit the continent. This of course did not bring only economic implications, but also social ones, especially in Southem and Eastern Europe, where the process of industrialization ignited enormous movements of people, who started to move from rural areas to cities (this also impacted the Italian society and economy, that saw a high rate of urbanization); in this period wban development lead to the construction of new residing areas around the centers of the most important cities. Regarding social changes, Europe saw the rise of consumer societies; thanks to the economic development that interested the European population, mostly in the West, people were granted the possibility to retain more income disposable and, subsequently, higher level of consumption, not just on a quantitative level, but also on a qualitative one, most of all regarding non-essential goods and services. It is in these years that the idea of Americanization starts to take the lead in the economic and social vocabulary; inthe most advanced regions of Europe andthe world, a consumetist society already developed in the inter-war period. Most of the products, being material or cultural, that characterized the golden age were American, in the 50s and 60s, many European scholars asked themselves if European societies were losing their identity's and they were becoming Americanized. 32) EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: FROM THE ECSC TO THE 19805 The division of Europe into two great blocs was both unexpected and unfortunate inthe postwar period. ‘Within each bloc, however, there existed considerable interest in European unity. in the East Bloc, the Soviet Union limited and distorted any expression of interest in unity. It also repressed expressions of nationalism. in the West, movement toward unity built on ideas and concepts coming from the experience of World War II and followed three parallel paths, two of which reached dead ends by the mid-1950s (political union and military matters, as we will see after). In the aftermath of the war, Western Europe was living the first years of the so-called process of European Integration; European unity was seen by many as the only valuable idea to recover after the conflict that had destroyed the continent. For European federalists, only the creation of'a federal political union could have been the final solution in order to prevent subsequent conflicts to rise in the Old Continent. At the end no political union was achieved in these first years, but what was created was something different. Let°s now analyze in detail the events that developed the economic integration and mification of the continent in these years. pg. 70 The Golden Age ‘While in May 1948, a Congress of Europe proposed the political and economic unification of the continent and established the Council of Europe to that end, with the power of decision laying in the hands of the foreign ministers of the member states, organized as the Committee of Ministers, but no political integration was in the cards, the first concrete impulse to the creation of a united Europe took place on May 9, 1950, and was the result ofthe Franco-German agreement. Ina speech to the foreign press, which later became known as the Schuman Declaration, the French Foreign Minister Robert Shuman, echoing the ideas ofthe plan drawn up by his close colleague Jean Mommet, proposed to share the production and trade of coal and steel, two raw materials at the basis of European industrial and military development, to the government of West Germany. The immediate positive response of German Chancellor Adenauer, in addition to the important economic repercussions, had a significant symbolic impact: the two European nations, which had repeatedly clashed militarily over the past 80 years, now decided not only to abandon any military dispute, but even to integrate one of the most strategically important industrial sectors and cause of bitter rivalry in the past. A few months later the proposal to share coal and steal production was extended to other European states and in April 1951 the Treaty of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was signed in Paris. The plan went into operation in 1952 with France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembowg) joining the community. The ECSC was a great success. its members pressed onto further economic integration in pait because ofthe obvious potential economic advantage. They were also painfully aware oftheir vulnerability and weakness as individual states. The failure ofthe French and British to regain control ofthe Suez Canal in 1956 only served to underline this. A second effort at integration concentrated on military matters, specifically the reammament of West Germany. In favour of strengthening the economic recovery of West Germany, European countries clashed when, at the outbreak of the war in Korea, the fear that the East-West conflict might have extended to Europe posed the problem of Germany’s rearmament. A possible solution was advanced by France itself, with the Pleven plan; 1950, the French proposed to create a European army as means of circumventing the problem of German rearmament and enhancing the defensive capabilities of ‘Western Europe while the United States was embroiled in the Korean War. The Treaty establishing the European Defense Community (EDC) was signed in May 1952, which also provided for the creation of a genuine European Political Community, clause strongly desired by the Italian Prime Minister De Gasperi. The slow ratification process confirmed the impression that the road to genuine political unity was still fraught with obstacles. Before the EDC could be organized, however, events passed it by. Stalin’s death, the end of the Korean War, and the easing of Cold War tensions in the mid-1950s all worked to remove some of the more pressing reasons for the EDC. The French themselves had second thoughts about such a drastic tum toward supranationalism when the French Parliament itself refused to approve the project in August 1954. The British finished the plan off by declining to participate. instead, a German military force was created and made pat of NATO in 1955. NATO remained a collection of armies with some provision for an integrated command structure. Despite the failure of the EDC, the excellent results achieved by the ECSC prompted the signatory govemments to continue along the path of an agreement that did not only concem the production of steel and coal, but more generally involving national economic policies and the possibility of creating a common free trade area. The resumption of the pro-European project was due in this new phase, especially by the work of diplomatic and political mediation of the Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henry Spaak. Thanks to Italian and German support, he convened the Messina Conference in June 1955, where the six ECSC countries laid the foundations for the creation of a common economic market and aa European atomic energy management community. This project was completed two years later, with the signing on March 25, 1957, ofthe Treaty of Rome between Italy, France, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, which established the European Economic Community (EEC) and EURATOM. The agreement provided for the creation of a customs union for agricultural and industrial products, through a gradual reduction in tariffs and a progressive liberalization of people and capital’s movement. Among the main bodies of the EEC were the Commission, with technical and implementing powers, the Council of Ministers formed by the Member States represented by the competent ministers relating to the tasks that were on the agenda, the Cowt of Justice and the European Parliament. pg. 71 The Council of Europe The Franco- German agreement The ECSC The EDC The Treaty of Rome, the EEC and Euratom ofthe South ofthe world. In 1956, Khrushchev also faced difficult situations with Poland and hungary. ironically, the Soviet Union was trying not only to reestablish a good working relationship with Tito and Yugoslavia but also to treat countries in the East Bloc as sovereign states. Thus, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO, commonly called the Warsaw Pact) came into being in 1955, partly in response to West Germany joining NATO but additionally as a way of establishing proper relationships between the Soviet military and the armed forces of the East European states. in the case of Poland, the Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka convinced the Soviets of the loyalty of the Polish Communists and the stability of the political situation in Poland. hungary, for its part, appeared about to leave the WTO, and the Russians resorted to force to end the lungarian revolution (later explained better). From 1957 until Khrushchev was successfully deposed in 1964, he tried many schemes to create conditions for a more productive, efficient, and technologically sophisticated economy in the Soviet Union. in some respects, he was remarkably successful. The Soviet Union took an early lead in space exploration with the launching of Spwwtk I, the first orbiting satellite, in 1957, and with Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space (1961). On the other hand, the Virgin Lands campaign, an effort to put into culti- vation vast new areas that were fertile but lacked sufficient rainfall, was initially successful but disastrous over the long run. Simila1ly, efforts to reorganize the bureaucracies of the Soviet Union were well meaning but not sufficiently thought out. Ultimately, Khrushchev®s downfall came from a streak of adventurism in foreign policy. in particular, the Cuban Missile Crisis betweenthe Soviet Union and the United States in 1962, during which the world ventured to the edge of a nuclear holocaust, prompted his col- leagues to bring in someone less erratic 34) 1956: UNREST IN POLAND AND HUNGARY 1956 was an important year for the Eastern bloc controlled by the USSR: Poland was one of the countries in Eastern Europe about which the Soviet Union worried most. By 1948, Poland was on its way to becoming a carbon copy of the Soviet Union. People like Wladyslaw Gomulka, who emphasized a national approach to communism, were arrested, imprisoned, and in some cases even executed. By June 1956, Poles began to believe the situation was improving and things could be somewhat different. At the end of June, riots began in Poznan, protesting the low standards of life experienced by workers and farmers; The former were dissatisfied with the disappointing outcome of the first five-year plan, while the latter protested the vexatious policy to which the agricultural sector was subjected in favour of heavy industry. The Polish United Workers” Party (PUWP), the official name for the Communist Party, split between the Stalinists and those who wanted to improve the lot of the workers. Neither the police nor the army would attempt to stop the riots. The government promised the end of collectivization and reforms for the workers. The strike ofthe workers of Poznan was repressed by the police and the Soviet troops of stance in the country, but the demonstrations continued until October when a new wave of protests called for free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the national territory. While some sections of the pasty, most of all the traditionalist bound to the old Stalinist model, would have wanted a severe repression, the younger leaders were convinced that, in order to emerge from the crisis, a “Polish path” to socialism had to be promoted, while not putting the alliance with the USSR in question. Gomulka was, therefore, appointed at the head of the party; he was an old communist, imprisoned during the Stalinist period on the charge of sympathizing with Tito’s autonomy’s claims, but then freed and reintegrated into the party after the turning point impressed by Khrushchev. Gomulka”s leadership was appreciated by both the communist leadership, for his past as a paity-loyal man, and Polish workers and farmers, who were not willing to renounce to the socialist system but claimed greater autonomy from Moscow. The same Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev who went to Warsaw in the height of the revolt, joined this solution and agreed to the election of Gomulka as secretary ofthe Polish Communist Party. He immediately recognized the need for Poland to remain united to the Soviet Union within the Warsaw Pact, but in retum he obtained from Moscow one of the most important demands that had emerged from the demonstrations ofthe previous months: the definitive abandonment of the Polish territories by the Red Army. While Gomulka managed to take, (although partially) the road of reformism without compromising the collaboration with Russia and the presence of Poland within the Soviet system, very different were the characteristics and the outcome of pg. 74 The WTO The first space missions The Cuban Missile Crisis Poland the insumrection in Hungary. Aside from abolishing collectivization and de-emphasizing heavy industry, relatively little changed in Poland and the Poles were able to avoid the fate of the Hungarians who, in October and November of 1956, became involved in revolution. Hungary became a Peoples republic in 1949 and followed the Stalinist path of economic development over the next four years to the point of economic collapse. The Hungarians had never completely metabolized the forced submission to the USSR and the monopoly exercised in the country by the Communist Party. The impatience had grown, at the end of the 1940s, both for the condemnation expressed by the regime against Cardinal Mindszenty, and for the drastic purges carried out by the party against suspected Titoists. Months after Stalin’s death, Imre Nagy, seen as a moderate, was appointed premier in July 1953. His policies mirrored Malenkov’s new course and included diversion of resources to light industry and an end to forced collectivization. Malenkov”s fall from power in the Soviet Union in 1955 ledto his protégé, Nagy, being ousted from the premiership. However, the following year, the Hungarian govemment ran into trouble. In the summer of 1956, coinciding with the first Polish demonstrations, the streets of Budapest began to fill with demonstratoss, initially mainly students and men of culture, but later also workers. In July it was the same Khrushchev who asked the then leader of the Hungarian Communist Paity Rakosi to resign from the secretariat of the party and replaced him with Emo Gero, giving this latter the task of putting an endto the revolts. Nonetheless, In october 1956, the government made a fundamental error in calling in the Soviet Army to deal with Hungarian demonstrators. Throughout Hungary, councils were formed demanding free elections, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and an end to the security police. At first, it appeared the Hungarians had won the day. Nagy established a new govemment on October 28, and Soviet troops began to leave. This created an unstable dualism between Gero, leader of the party, and Nagy, who not only led the government but had become the reference point of a populationin revolt that advanced demands for true democratization and liberalization of the country. On October 31, Nagy went too far by declaring Hungary"s neutrality. Afterthat, Soviet leaders believed they had to crush the revolution by force. The Soviet Union smashed the Nagy government and installed Janos Kadar as the new leader. This action had several far-reaching consequences. For one, it played animportant role in the Stalinists” attempt to oust Khrushchev in 1957. It complicated efforts by the Soviet Union to establish relations with countries in the East Bloc that provided for autonomy and national sovereignty. Communist movements elsewhere in Europe reassessed Soviet Communism and in some cases moved to more independent positions. The West reacted very unfavorably, but involved inthe Suez Crisis and in no case wishing to challenge the Soviet Union directly, it could only criticize and find places for the large mumbers of former hungarian freedom fighters now refugees. Throughout the 1950s, the Soviet Union dominated the affairs of East and Central European countries with the exception of Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union not only shaped the political systems but also the social and economic systems. This meant, leaving aside Czechoslovakia and the Gdr, an emphasis on industrialization and urbanization in what had been countries with large peasant populations and small industrial bases before the war. in each nation, the pattem was roughly the same: centralized planning, rapid economic growth, and the development of heavy industry at the expense of the production of consumer goods. 35) THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE BERLIN WALL Crucial events for the later evolution of the GDR took place in 1953. It was a classic case of mixed signals. The SED (Socialist Unity, or Government Party), with Walter Ulbricht. as its most influential figure, agreed to follow a Soviet line emphasizing social and economic concessions. Coupled with the concessions, however, were increases in some work norms, which led construction workers in Berlin to begin protesting on June 16, 1953. The following day the protests spread to all the major cities and towns. it was a large-scale protest but probably should not be seen as an uprising. Only toward the end of the day did the Soviets send in tanks to help restore order. The irony of 1953 is that it reinforced Ulbricht’s position. over the next few years, he triumphed over a variety of voices within the SED, closing off discussion. The SED became a neo-Stalinist party at precisely the time Khrushchev was launching his de-Stalinization campaign. For the Soviet Union, however, particularly after 1956, it seemed more important to have a strong figure in charge in the GDR than to advance the cause of pg. 75 Hungary political reform. By the late 1950s, the Gdr was suffering from the effects of a massive depopulation process. Hundreds of thousands of people each year were flowing out across the border. Almost all the border was sealed off by the end of the decade, but there remained the problem of Berlin, where thousands of people each day crossed from East to West or vice versa to go to work, to shop, or to visit friends. West Berlin was a hole in the dike threatening to drain the GDR, particularly of young, talented, and well-educated people. Khrushchev attempted to resolve the Berlin issue in the late 1950s on several occasions. He threatened to conclude a treaty with the GDR, leaving it responsible for all of Berlin, if the United States, Britain, and France were not willing to renegotiate the status of the city. The East German leaders finally came up with a crude but workable solution to the problem: the Berlin Wall. Construction of the wall, under the supervision of Ulbricht’s eventual successor, Erich Honecker, began on August 13, 1961. Well into the fall of that year, Berlin threatened to become a flash point with, for example, American tanks driving full speed right up to the border to face their Russian counterparts only a few feet away. The crisis passed, however, and East Germans resigned themselves to life behind the wall. LESSON 14 The Golden Age and Migration (1940s-1970s) 36) GUEST WORKERS AND INTERNATIONAL MIGRANTS One ofthe most important factors within the economic development that interested the Golden Age in the aftermath of World War II can be recognized in migration patterns, most of all labor migration and flows of people coming from former colonies outside Europe. practically everywhere in Western Europe the working class started to have sufficient income to participate in the consumer economy. Advertising and the mass media between them created a lifestyle that most of the population, workers or middle class, desired. A common, mass culture began to take shape. With some reservations and criticisms, workers accepted industrial capitalism by the 1960s in Western Europe. They were increasingly interested in gaining an equitable share ofthe national income together with better working conditions, expanded fringe benefits, and an extension of the welfare state. The generally more comparative attitude was most fully developed in Sweden and Germany. In Britain, expectations were similar, but relations between workers and employers remained somewhat antagonistic. While in France and Italy unions became more reformist in the 1960s, they achieved fewer improvements for workers than unions in Britain, Germany, and Sweden. In part, working-class satisfaction with its situation had to do with the role played in the economy by guest workers, laborers brought in from Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and North Africa to take the lowest-paying, least-desirable jobs. These groups, especially important in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands and present in large numbers in Sweden and France, provided European economies with greater flexibility. In good times, they were available to work cheaply. In bad times, they could in theory be shipped back home. Neither for the indigenous working class nor for the other elements ofthe population was the situation of the guestworkers a source of much concern in the 19608. In general, the expansion of the European economy during this period almost required workers from foreign countries to keep fashioning. People moved from relatively underdeveloped and poor regions to more economically advanced and politically stable ones (both internally, for example between South and noith Italy, and extemally). migrants could decide to move themselves mainly because of economic (push and pull) factors, but also considering political realities, both at home and outside of it. We can identify the main cause of this mass migrations with two impoitant factors: first, economic growth economic brought imbalances and differences within the European framework; second, decolonization processes leading to the independence of new countries opened new migration flows involving both European colonizers living in former colonies and native peoples looking for better opportunities in the continental motherland. In the 1960s, for example, many Italians traveled to Germany to work. Italy was one ofthe countries whose migrants participatedinthis subsistent migration pg. 76 largest numbers of migrants to Britain, although Trinidad, Barbados, British Guiana, and other territories were also well represented. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Britain’s post-war labour shoitage and expanding economy meant that policymakers and employers actively recruited workers from the colonies, the Commonwealth, and Europe. Like West Indians, South Asians arriving in Britain often hailed from regions and social sectors long decisively shaped by mobility within an imperial political econ- omy which became reworked upon decolonization. Britain's South Asian population largely claims its origins in Punjab, Azad Kashmir (‘free Kashmir”, controlled by Pakistan), Gujarat, Sylhet (in Bengal, now part of Bangladesh), and East Africa, the latter effectively having become ‘twice migrants’ after having first left India for Africa and then relocating to Britain. Although significant numbers of South Asians, Africans, and others did migrate to Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s, until the early 1960s West Indians constituted the vast majority of Britain's new arrivals from the colonies and Commonwealth and thus dominated public discussions of ‘immigration’. One study published in 1960 estimated that the non-white population then living in Britain totalled approximately 210,000, including 115,000 West Indians, 25,000 West Africans, 55,000 Indians and Pakistanis, and 15,000 from other territories. Of highly diverse social and regional origins, most colonial and Commonwealth citizens arrived as blue-collar workers, but a minority were middle or upper class. During the post-war decades, colonial and Commonwealth students became a growing presence at British universities and other higher education institutions, and in the mid-1950s they already numbered about 11,000. Most students intended to retum home once they completed their studies, but some stayed to embark upon careers. Others arrived having completed degrees overseas and entered the professions, with Indian doctors staffing the National Health Service being a prime example ofthe cross-class nature of migration and settlement. Equally important, while men initially dominated colonial and Commonwealth migration in numerical terms, women were present among the ‘coloured’ population throughout this period. Prior to family reunification when wives (and children) came in larger numbers to join men who had previously settled, women also came independently or with family members to study or to work in their own right. West Indian nurses and other hospital staff, for example, played central roles in running the National Health Service alongside Indian doctors. On a discriminatory point of view, ‘coloured’ men tended to be viewed not as individuals but as a generic category. Some distinctions were drawn between blacks and Asians (but often not within these broad groupings), but racial discrimination and stereotyping crossed ethnic lines. White British attitudes towards ‘coloured’ peoples settling among them were strongly marked by deeply-entrenched colonial ideologies and prejudices, mindsets that outlived the end of empire to survive well into the postcolonial period. These collided head-on with distinct self-understandings and precon- ceptions about Britain brought by colonized and formerly colonized newcomers. Even though they were formally British citizens, native speakers of English, Christian, and possessed other cultural similarities, West Indians were thus largely denied belonging on account of racial difference. The lack of reciprocity Bastien highlighted also extended to the forms of knowledge common among migrants and those amongst whom they settled. West Indians’ prior exposure to British culture at home was met with Britons” ignorance about the West Indies. AIl of this reinforces the idea for which the British society was not ready; Britons considered newcomers as different and foreigners, mainly on the term of proper racial difference (the difference in color was perceived as more influent and important than the historical and political common situation colonial people had with British citizens in the motherland). A recurrent feature of the preconceptions many white Britons had about the colonies and former colonies linked blackness with inferiority and primitive- ness (and, conversely, whiteness with superiority). “Coloured immigration” for some commentators was tantamount to an “unarmed invasion’, as Lord Elton provocatively entitled a study he published in 1965. Elton was one of many observers to focus on ‘invaded urban areas’ that had attracted substantial black and Asian settlement, such as Birmingham, Bradford, and areas of London like Paddington, Notting Hill, Southall, and Brixton. The impact on these neighbourhoods, streets, homes, and ‘native’ residents was described as a breaching of domestic boundaries. pg. 79 Two were the most important problems, mainly connected to the intimate realms of private life; housing and sex (The association of ethnic minorities with crime, while not absent, was less pronounced than it later became in the 1970s and 19805). Housing = Britain’ s severe housing shortage after the Second World War — stemming from the long-term decay of the existing housing stock coupled with extensive wartime destruction through aerial bombing and increased demand upon demobilization — meant the supply of accommodation in urban areas was inadequate and rents were high. Housing became a heavily racialized issue and an arena where blacks and Asians were most likely to encounter discrimination. Working-class migrants earning relatively low wages competed with working- class whites for accom- modation in neighbowrhoods that had become increasingly derelict and stig- matized ‘twilight areas’. ‘coloured residents° were ‘unable to choose freely where they will live and find themselves virtually obliged to reside in a recognized “black area” which is oftena slum area’. Many British landlords and landladies refused them as tenants, while others took advantage and charged higher rents for poor-quality accommodation. Encountering peivasive racial discrimination in the housing market, not to mention at work, did much to burst the bubble of optimism about life in Britain for the newly-arived. A few years after composing ‘London is the Place for Me’, Lord Kitchener's calypso ‘My Landlady” immortalized the rude and condescending behaviour from those who charged extortionately for squa- lid rooms that marred the British experiences of so many. Inthe slum-like suroundings to which many blacks and Asians were largely relegated, white resentment of ‘coloureds’ took many forms of expression. West Indians, Africans, Indians, and Pakistanis alike were condemned for inhabiting dirty, unsanitary, and overcrowded rooms and houses and for failing to keep windows, doorsteps, and gardens clean and well-tended — all of which constituted significant liminal areas where private and public spaces coincided. At the same time, specific ethnic groups became singled out as the main culprits for other forms of ‘un-English’ behaviour that went beyond those deemed unsightly. Within a discourse of sensory assault on the white population, West Indians attracted continual complaints for offending local ears, while South Asians cooked spicy foods reprehensible to many noses. That Indians and Pakistanis ‘stank of cunry’ whose smells travelled through doors and windows to plague their neighbours and West Indians shouted in the street, played loud music, and threw rowdy parties that lasted through the night and attracted undesirables became staple accusations; Sex = West Indians, moreover, were deemed the worst offenders of white British sexual morality. Contemporary writers stressed that nuclear family life and marriage was often not the norm in the West Indies, particularly amongst the working classes, with casual sex, unstable unions, and illegitimate children being common. When contemplating a migrant group mumetrically dominated by young men, many white Britons considered West Indians (along with Africanmen) as oversexed and coveting relationships with white women. This was another example of beliefs with deep roots in colonial mentalities, this time linked to the unsubstantiated sexual ‘Black Peril’ that supposedly threatened white women with rape in the empire. Inthe 1940s and 1950s, sex across racial lines was greeted with a level of white hostility out of all proportion to the numbers of men and women actually involved in relationships that ranged from casual encounters to cohabitationto marriage. Black mentypically met with racism at work and elsewhere in public life, but interracial sexuality, private life, and mixed-race children showed more than anything else that blacks had come ‘too close to home” Sex and family life involving black men and white women suggested, on the one hand, a degree of British tolerance and acceptance of black settlers. On the other hand, however, white women entering into such intimacies were repeatedly condemned as deviants and moral outcasts from mainstream British society, being labelled as prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, or merely “loose”. But which was the root of all of this? we have to go back to the colonial attitudes over the past; Blacks were unable to control their sexual instincts, white women were at risk. Sexual intercourse is between black men and white women were seen in the vision of “misgenation”. All of this influenced the ways in which this new presence was seen. Again, we are speaking of continuity, an old but persistent mentality within a new context. pg. 80 The political arena was notimmune from concerns about the effects of unrestricted ‘coloured’ migration from the colonies and Commonwealth on Britain. The 1958 riots, for example, generated calls to ‘Keep Britain White” and for an end to the prevailing open-door policy, but these bore no fiuit until the passing of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act placed limits on the numbers permitted to enter the country each year. Demands for further restric- tions became more vocal by the mid-1960s and racism grew increasingly apparent within party politics. Such expressions were particularly evident in areas like the West Midlands that had experienced large influxes of ‘coloured’ settlement. A political turning point came with the 1964 general election when Patrick Gordon Walker, the Labour Member of Parliament for the Smethwick borough outside Birmingham, lost his seat to the Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths. During the course of a local campaign that achieved national notoriety, Griffiths” supporters tumed to the racist slogan ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Labour.” Griffiths himself declined to take personal credit for this form of campaigning but never condemned those chanting such phrases, saying they represented a common attitude in Smethwick and deserved to be taken seriously. Gordon Walker faced local ire for having opposed the 1962 Act; Griffiths, meanwhile, wanted a complete ban on further immigration. In this account of the 1964 Smethwick campaign, West Indians figured as the main cause ofconcern. Yet the mid-1960s witnessed a shift in discussions of immigration that reflected the sharp increase in migration from the Indian subcontinent. Whereas public discussion had centred on Caribbeans in the 1950s, in the 1960s Indians and Pakistanis often became the focus of attention, often for quite distinct reasons. The 1960s also saw women and children enter into contemporary discussions about ‘immigration’ far more regularly. While in the 1940s and 1950s male migrants were the main focus of concern, commentary later shifted to their dependants once growing numbers of wives and children joined men who had already put down roots. Alongside family reunification the emergence of a second, British- born genera- tion (or alternatively a British-raised one) was, as much as anything else, a sign that Commonwealth citizens were in Britain to stay. Once the 1962 Act had reduced the numbers permitted to arrive from the Commonwealth each year, Britons opposed to immigration campaigned for ever more stringent restrictions. Conservative Member of Parliament Enoch Powell was, and remains, among the best-known advocates of halting further primary Commonwealth migration. Furthermore, Powell, like others, targeted unrestricted family reunification as a dangerous loophole that threatened to increase Britains coloured population exponentially despite the numerical curbs already in place. Like Griffiths, he underscored the problems posed by high birth rates among immigrant families and the pressure this placed on social services and schools. In his infamous “Rivers of Blood’ speech deliv-ered in Birmingham in 1968, Powell claimed that ‘[i]t can be no part of any policy that existing families should be kept divided’, but they should ‘be re- united in their countries of origin’ rather than in Britain — one of his many calls for encouraging repatriation alongside fiuther restrictions on settlement. Allowing the ‘annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended popu- lation’, Powell argued, “is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own fumeral pyre”. National identity, yet again, was pronounced as endan- gered by immigration, a threat that the second generation only enhanced. While Powell's views were widely condemned even within his own paity, further immigration restrictions were implemented in 1968 and againin 1971. Not coincidentally, the 1971 Immigration Act saw dependants’ automatic right of entry cutailed. Immigration legislation in both 1968 and 1971 reconfigured the parameters of British citizenship. Afterwards, Commonwealth citizens only retained the right to unrestricted entry ifthey could claim British birth or British ancestry. Let's now tum to the situation in FRANCE; France’s history of migration from its colonies and overseas dependencies predated the era of decolonization and evolved continually over time. France’s status as a nation of immigration developed in the nineteenth century With a low birth rate that failed to keep pace with its need for manual workers, France had long attracted foreign labour and, to a lesser degree, more affluent classes. Since the 19305, the percentage of foreigners within France’s overall population has remained fairly constant, varying from between 4 and 7 per cent (and exceeding 6 per cent between the 1960s and 19905), but their geographical origins changed markedly. Historically most immigrants hailed from within Europe, pasticularly from neighbouring countries such as Belgium, Italy, and Spain but also from Poland and Eastern Europe (from which France’s pre-war Jewish population pg. 81 Public commentators frequently invoked the concept of the seni/ de tolérance — ‘threshold of tolerance” — to describe the percentage of foreigners that specific localities needed to reach to provoke hostility amongst the native population. While normally applied to housing complexes or neighbour- hoods, the threshold worked as a domestic metaphor and boundary marker that readily extended to encompass the nation as a whole invaded by ‘too many immigrants’. As the Front National’s leader Jean-Marie Le Pen told an interviewer in 1993, ‘flourishing’ nations were “a bit like an apartment . . . one doesn't just let anyone in’. Metaphotical depictions ofthe nation as a house became common in political discourse not only within but beyond the extreme right, as did the analogy between immigrant and guest. Mireille Rosello astutely notes that this ‘ideological logic . . . can welcome or reject: political leaders can either ‘urge the French to be more hospitable and to greet the Guest, that is, the immigrants, with open arms, or construct images of the bad Guest who overstays his or her welcome, pockets the silver, or ransacks the fridge’. More often than not they opted for the latter course, with immigrants/guests represented as equivalent to ‘undesirable parasites”. Pieds-noîrs = Like Belgians and Britons, not all French residing overseas retumed to the metropole when colonial rule ended, since French decolonizations created a variety of possibilities. The French community in many newly independent West African nations like Senegal remained and indeed expanded in decades following independence. French officials formed only a minute proportion of the total number of overseas French who entered the metropole when a succession of territories became independent. Between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s approximately 1.5 million people were ‘repatriated’, a term used to refer not only to French bom in France, but also to those born overseas who only arrived in the metropole when empire ended. Repatriates thus constituted over 3 per cent of the 44 million French citizens within the ‘hexagon’, or metropolitan territory. As many ex- colonies had only a few thousand Europeans residing in them, most decoloniza- tion episodes resulted in a comparative trickle of retums home. Noith African territories with large white settler communities provide the exception: over 230,000 Europeans left Morocco, 170,000 left Tunisia, and close to a million left Algeria. Departures from Algeria were the most dramatic by far and have correspondingly been the subject of most historical studies due to the large size ofthe French community and the circumstances that led to its departure, en masse, mainly during the summer of 1962. In just a few months, about half a million fled across the Mediterranean to disembark in port cities of southern France. While Tunisia and Morocco had been French protectorates whose indepen- dence was not preceded by lengthy anti- colonial insurgencies, Algeria only freed itself of French control following nearly eight years of brutal violence waged between the Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, and France. The war in Algeria divided the French at home like no other colonial struggle. Indeed, Algeria had not techmically been construed as a colony at all, but rather as an integral part (or more precisely as three départements) of the French nation. The drama, and trauma, of the departure from Algeria stemmed in part from the conflicts that preceded and produced it, and in part from the nature of settler society. Unlike better-off colonial officials residing overseas on a temporary basis, close to 80 per cent of Algeria’s Europeans had been born in North Africa, reflecting the history of settlement that dated back to France’s conquest in 1830. The atmosphere of suspicion and hostility that greeted them provided solid foundations for an ongoing pied noir identity. Many sought to preserve what aspects they could of their former way of life and social world, and chose to remain in the south of France after disembarking. France’s Mediterranean provinces, known as the Midi, offered a warmer climate and a culture that bore a stronger resemblance to that of Noith Africa than elsewhere in the hexagon, helping explain why at least 60 per cent of pieds noirs (along with repatriates from Tunisia and Morocco) opted to resettle there rather than spread throughout France. Although the government was anxious that a geographi- cally concentrated pied noir community could pose political dangers and actively tried to encourage them to go north, new anrivals overwhelmingly opted for southern cities despite the relative lack of employment opportunities in the region. In places like Marseille, Avignon, Toulon, Nîmes, Toulouse, Nice, and particularly in a new town they established on their own, Carnoux- en-Provence, French repatriates made a deep mark, comprising up to 10 per cent of the population (and close to 100 per cent in Carnoux). Most of those who did move north headed for the Paris region, where they formed a less visible and concentrated presence. Clustering together allowed pieds noirs who felt isolated within the metro- pole to perpetuate familiar social circles and cultural practices. Living near family and friends had obvious attractions for pg. 84 those lacking any pre-existing network of acquaintances in France. Daily proximity was further enhanced by more occasional contacts maintained with those living further afield through numerous pied noir associations, several hundred of which had been formed in France since 1962 LESSON 15 1968, Neo-Liberal politics and the end of the Golden Age (1960s-1980s) 37) 1968: THE VIETNAM WAR, RESPONSES IN THE US, FRANCE IN MAY AND DE GAULLE’S RESPONSE The revolutionary years of 1968 and 1989 were bookends for a period of consolidation and attempted reform in response to dissatisfaction with the political, economic, social, and cultural arrangements in both Eastern and Western Europe. The period also featured efforts to deal with rapidly changing geopolitical, economic, and technological realities on a global scale. in the aftermath of the Cold War inthe 1990s, Europe worked with considerable success to overcome the divisions that had characterized it for the first four decades after World War ii and to build on previous accom- plishments. it also experienced new and unexpected difficulties, discovering once again that human history is full of surprises. In the year 1968, at the onset of which everything seemed possible, the radicalism of the 1960s peaked, both in Europe and in the United States. in Western Europe, radicalism reached a high tide in the events of May 1968 in France. For a brief moment, it seemed students and workers would unite to defeat the government of Charles de Gaulle. not surprisingly, style and youthful enthusiasm were not enough, and de Gaulle and the Fifth republic prevailed. in Czechoslovakia, Alexander dubtek attempted to renew communism in a reform movement known as the “Prague Spring.” Widespread national support and earnest attempts by the Czechs to mollify other members of the Warsaw Treaty organization failed to prevent the Soviet Union, strongly backed by East Germany and Poland, from crushing the movement in August. The global social movement arose in1968 was first and foremost a student movement; students started to manifest against the university system that perpetrated inequalities and traditional academic cultures. This year of revolution did not however affect only the educational system: the most important point was a radical critique to the bougeoise capitalist society, a social system criticized on economic, social, and cultural levels. This critique went hand in hand with anti-imperialism: the most important issue was the Vietnam War, seeing as the epitome of American imperialism: American imperial stances in Vietnam developed during the Indochina war in the 1950s, suppoiting France in the conflict in order to avoid the spread ofcommunism in Southeast Asia. The US supported the Democratic Republic of South Vietnam, fighting against the communist north led by Ho-Chi Min, which was supported by Mao’s China and the USSR, but also the Vietcong, an armed communist organization that fought a guerrilla war to overthrow the pro-western government in the South, to reunite Vietnam under the power of Northem communist authorities. It was a very difficult word for the US and many protests all around the world stroke out. In fact, the prodrome of the protest movement that exploded largely in the world in 1968 occurred a few years earlier in the United States. The occupation of Berkeley University in California in 1964, as well as marking the trait d'union between student claims and the pacifist protest for Vietnam, experienced self-management techniques of university life for the first time ever, which then spread throughout the world. In the United States, where overall it maintained a less politically violent character than what it assumed in Europe, the protest movement was aimed mainly against the Vietnam War and in favor ofthe defense of blacks and minotities’ civil rights. ‘What happened in France in May 1968 can scarcely be understood unless the influence of Charles de Gaulle in French affairs between May 1958 and May 1968 is taken into account. The structure of the Fifth republic gave de Gaulle a position of considerable power. in addition to his constitutional powers, and somewhat like Adenauer in West Germany, de Gaulle overstepped the boundaries, taking actions that no politician without his force of personality and moral stature would have been allowed to carry pg. 85 out. While de Gaulle was preoccupied with foreign affairs and contacts with communist bloc and Third World leaders, domestic problems began to surface. one was the odd contrast between the sophistication of French technology and science and the backwardness of some aspects of life in France, two prime examples being the telephone system and housing. Second, society, ifincreasingly democratic, was still stratified. The different strata were determined in large pat by educational achievement, but the way to ‘an appropriate education was paved with money, family background, and connections. The very bright were co-opted into the system, but the system worked here as in other areas mostly to perpetuate the elites. The 1965 presidential elections furnished one glaring indication of the level of domestic dissatisfaction. Frangois Mitterrand (1916— 1996), leader of the leftist coalition of socialists and commumists, forced de Gaulle into a runoff. After prevailing in that contest, de Gaulle continued to govern virtually unchecked, seemingly deaf to the rising clamor of opposition. The events of May 1968, although based on widespread dissatisfaction and on student grievances, began as a spontaneous reaction to a specific event oflittle significance: the arrest of a number of students demonstrating against the involvement of the United States in Vietnam. on March 22, a meeting to protest the arrests took place at the University of nanterre, one of the new uni- versities in the French system. A radical movement called the March 22 Movement came out of the meeting. on May 2, “Anti-imperialist day,” members of the March 22 Movement, finding themselves locked out of nanterre, went to the Sorbonne, the best-known part ofthe University of Paris. The following day, the police violated traditions of academic freedom by coming into the Sorbonne and arresting hundreds of students. This was the beginning of a series of demonstrations and confrontations between students and police in the Latin Quarter of Paris. A climax of sorts came on May 10, the “night of the Barricades,” when events in the streets were described minute-by-minute on national radio. on May 13, more than a million people demonstrated in Paris ‘against the government. Toward the end of May, the government, which had been almost completely ineffective up to that point, dissolved the National Assembly and set a date for elections. De Gaulle, who had been mysteriously out of the country for several hows and had gained the backing of the French military, appealed for “civic action” against a “totalitarian plot.” Many French began to worry about the possibility of anarchy or a commumnist takeover. Even in Paris, where sympathy for the students had been widespread, people were tired ofthe confusion andthe disruptions caused by the ongoing demonstrations and strikes. There was, meanwhile, no consensus among the student radicals as to specific aims and goals. Workers generally wanted only moderate changes, in particular a substantial pay hike. Still, almost no one in the general public liked the idea ofa genuine revolution. France, closer to revolutionin 1968 than any other ‘Western European country, was not, actually, all that close. Govemment inactivity, coupled with some blunders, had resulted in a situation in which the overthrow of the government seemed possible. nevertheless, the government still maintained a strong position. It had capable leadership in de Gaulle and, especially, in the premier, Georges Pompidou. In the military and the police, it had an overwhelming monopoly of force. Even the social and economic strains were not as severe as they appeared at first. Despite the drama and color of events, the government could only fail by losing its nerve. As mentioned before, de Gaulle reacted to the demonstrations in a firm and decisive way, calling the French to new elections with an appeal to orderto moderation. The success ofthe Gaullist party and the defeat of the left effectively put an end to 1968 in France. The major results of the radical movement were changes in the education system, principally possibilities for revised curricula, less elitist student bodies, and less authoritarian structures of university administration. In concrete terms students managed to obtain educational system reforms, but also, they managed to create a true socio-cultural transformation: introduction of new forms of activism from below, a very strong emphasis on participation and a direct action and democracy were just few of the elements that the revolts in 1968 managed to introduce in France. So, in the end, the 1968 movement managed to innovate the ways and the forms politics was managed and organized. In the meantime, in the 1960s and early 19708, Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) ruled the Soviet Union as president and first secretary of the Communist Party in tandem with the premier, Alexei Kosygin pg. 86 Stagflation was the ungainly term some used to describe the situation of an economic downtun combined with spiking inflation; The recession was accompanied by an inflationary surge that produced a price increase of between 10% and 20% per annum. On the one hand, if inflation had been the result ofarise in prices, its level had remained steadily increasing for the wage protection system, which were progressively adjusted to the price increase in order to maintain real purchasing power, On the other hand, given that the demand for certain goods was elastic, that is inversely proportional to their weight, it followed that, in the face of a decline in demand, the production of certain goods slowed down resulting in stagnation in those particular sectors. Finally, if the situation were not complicated enough, Europe and other parts of the urbanized, industrialized world experienced a technological revolution in the 1970s and 19805, which by the end ofthe period had created an economy radically different from the postwar industrial economy based on heavy industry. 39) 19805: TATCHERISM AND THE CRISIS OF WELFARE STATE ‘While the economic and social problems of Western Europe were genuine and serious, the political problems were more apparent than real. Looked at another way, however, politics seemed to offer a solution to economic and social problems. Certain issues, the welfare state in particular, required rethinking. There was the clear impression among many conservatives that a government willing to divest itself of government-owned operations and to reduce controls and regulations could help create a climate favorable to business. US President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) became the person most closely identified with this political position through his uncanny ability to project an image that matched what large numbers of Americans believed they wanted. it was the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, however, who most successfully translated this approach into national policy. The 1970s represented a turning point in economic and political terms: the serious economic and financial crisis which, aggravated by the 1973 oil shock, led to the complete dismantling of the Bretton Woods system, for the first time since 1945. Some governments therefore decided to make a drastic change to their economic policy: a change in the neoliberal sense, which aimed at containing inflation by reducing public debt, in the medium term would bring a reduction in expenditure to finance the welfare state. On the one hand, this strategy would have led to a decrease in consumption, but on the other hand it would have limited price growth through strict control over inflation. Moreover, the lower taxation resulting from the reduction in public expenditure should have left more financial resources to private individuals, the initiative of which should also have been supported by the gradual privatization of public companies. Margaret Thatcher, probably the most influential woman in Europe inthe last half ofthe century, inside or outside of politics, served as British prime minister between 1979 and 1990, transforming the Conservative Party and Great Britain in the process. As a young woman, she had studied at Oxford and worked as a research chemist. After her marriage in 1951, she studied law and in 1959 entered the House of Commons. Thatcher rose rapidly in the ranks of the Conservative Party and in 1975, at the age of 50, became its leader. Four years later, she led the party to victory in the elections of 1979. Over the next 1lyears, “Maggie” Thatcher became very popular with the public but much disliked by her political opponents. She quickly came to be seen as the “Iron Lady,” tough, decisive, strong- willed, and no-nonsense. Her main contribution to British recovery came in the area of economic policy. That policy had three main components: “privatization,” reduction of inflation, and weakening of trade union power. The “privatization” of nationalized industries and national utilities received a great deal of press, but it is difficult to say whether it contributed much to overall economic recovery. Probably more important were the largely successful efforts to reduce the power ofthe trade unions. Trade unions in Britain had contributed to the lack of competitiveness ofthe economy by a series of regulations regarding work and seniority that made it difficult for companies to reorganize production for greater efficiency. The new political climate favoring business and trade and the greatly weakened trade unions allowed many British firms to take maximum advantage of opportunities to secure profits. The reduction of inflation, which stood at nearly 22 percent in 1979 but had fallen dramatically to 3.7 percent in 1983, created pg. 89 favorable conditions for investment and economic growth. The Thatcher government was also blessed by the discovery of oil deposits in the north Sea. The Thatcher government abolished price and wage controls or cut public spending by £1.4 billion. The most affected services were the pension system and unemployment and poverty benefits; overall, however, the pillars of English Welfare State such as public education and the National Health Service were not dismantled and, in the decade between 1979 and 1989, healthcare spending on education rose by 34% and 9% respectively. For many British, the 1980s was a period ofnew prosperity. in most respects, the economy was stronger than it had been since the early years of the century. one major downside, however, was the rate of unemployment. At 6.1 percent in 1980, it rose to 11.6 percent in 1985 and then returned in 1989 to about the same level it had been in 1980, 5.3percent. however, some sections of the country, the noth in pasticular, did not share in the general prosperity. Generally, the Thatcher years had created a class of big winners, a large group of people who were doing somewhat better or at least okay, and “everyone else,” a layer of people who were doing very badly with little prospects of improvement. Part of Margaret Thatchers popularity early in her tenure as prime minister and vital to her reelection in 1983 was Britain’s successful defense of the Falkland islands, an archipelago of islands near the coast of Argentina that was a contested British territory, from invasion by the Argentines. The Argentine regime that launched the minor engagement that became known as the Falkland War (between Argentina and Britain) had few friends. Many observers focused on what was, in retrospect, Britains last imperial humrah. The spectacle of Britain successfully conducting a long-distance war against Argentina caught the imagination of many Europeans and north Americans. South Americans and Third World countries, not surprisingly, tended to disapprove of British efforts to defend a new world territory of little value to them. Finally, in the realm of international relations, Thatcher could count on friends in high places. in addition to President reagan, her ideological twin, she enjoyed good relations with prominent European leaders such as helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand. She also became, despite her reflexive anti-Communism, an early champion of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she recognized as “someone she could do business with.” All in all, Margaret Thatcher put her stamp on the last quarter of the twentieth century in a way no other European leader other than Gorbachev could match. 40) SOLIDARITY IN POLAND Also, thanks to the media attention following the appointment of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope of the Catholic Church, the Communist Party in Poland decided to open negotiations with the leaders of workers' movements and in September 1980 the historic decision was reached to grant Polish workers the right to found free trade union organizations. On November 19, the first free trade union, Solidarnosc, among whose ranks immediately distinguished himself the one who would become the main leader ofthe opposition to the communist regime, Lech Walesa, constituted. The contribution of Poland’s Solidarity (Solidarnosé) movement to the unraveling of the Cold War can hardly be exaggerated. it grew out of the politics of the 1970s. First, in 1970, strikes protesting increases in food prices led to the replacement of Wladyslaw Gomulka by Edward Gierek. Gierek pushed a policy of economic growth based on foreign loans. By 1976, however, it was apparent that unfortunate choices had been made in pursuit of economic growth (e.g., construction of huge steelworks at a time when demand for steel products was declining). Again, attempts to increase food prices led to strikes. In the next few years, two developments helped to change the terms of confrontation between workers and the government. in one development, an organized intellectual opposition, Kor (Committee for the defense of the Workers), made contact with workers” groups. Jacek Kuron, the leader of Kor, was a product of student movements in the 1960s. it had, however, been isolated from the workers. Worker protests in the early 1970s suffered from their isolation from students and intellectuals. Coming together in 1980 made a substantial difference in the possibility of resisting government pressure. In the other development, the Catholic Church in Poland gained enormously in prestige from the election of a Pole, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla as Pope John Paul ii in 1978. The following year, Pope John pg. 90 Paul ii made a triumphant tour of Poland and was welcomed by millions of the faithful. in 1980, for the third time in a decade, the govemment tried to raise food prices. The strikes this time had a center in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk and a leader in Lech Walesa, an electrician at the shipyards and a paiticipant in the events of 1976. In the negotiations between the workers and the government, the workers pressed for and won the right to organize an independent trade union movement, Solidarity. It began to take on a life of its own in 1981, becoming an enormously large and powerful trade union movement. Although there was no place for Solidarity inthe communist system, it began to exercise a kind of de facto power, challenging the authority of the Polish Communist Party (technically the Polish United Workers’ Party or PUWP). The upshot of this was the appointment of General Wojciech Jaruzelski as prime minister and the proclamation of martial law. Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were imprisoned and Solidarity was outlawed in the same year. Walesa, who won the nobel Peace Prize in 1983, was eventually released from prison. he was able to maintain Solidarity’s existence as an organization throughout the 1980s, first as an underground organization and later as an organization unofficially tolerated by the government. As problems mounted for the Polish government and PUWP, the power and influence of Solidarity began to increase. Finally, in 1989, talks between Solidarity and the govemment began, leading to events that formed one of the most important triggers of the revolutions of 1989. LESSON 17 A new kind of racism: difficulties in France and Britain (1960s-1980s) 41) RACISM, INTEGRATION, AND ISLAMOPHOBIA By the late twentieth century France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal were already home to ethnically-diverse citizenries, but the extent to which they accorded legitimacy and official recognition to minority cultures varied considerably and fluctuated markedly over time. Albeit multicultural in reality, they often fell far short of espousing multi culturalism as part of their national imaginary. Multiculturalism emerged starting in the 1970s as “a broad set of mutually reinforcing ‘approaches or methodologies conceming the incor- poration and participation of immigrants and ethnic minorities and their modes of cultural/religious difference’, as Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf have written. At times, its champions have celebrated selected cultural attri- butes and practices as positive and enriching both for minorities themselves and for wider national populations alike. More often than not, however, multi- culturalism has been constmed either as a ‘problem’ in and of itself, or at best as a worthy attempt at tackling a problem — namely, that of purported minority non- integration and a lack of social cohesion. Not only have backlashes against multiculturalism proved recurrent: multi- culturalism remained contentious even in societies where it had secured a relatively strong foothold and where a tolerance of difference was proudly extolled as a national trait. What is more, multiculturalism readily coexisted with widespread racism, particularly with what scholars have termed ‘new’ or ‘neo-racism’. Based primarily on assumptions about rigid cultural distinctiveness, new racism nonetheless retained countless traces of the ‘old’ racism predicated upon supposed genetic inferiority: the demarcations between peo- ples continued to be treated as insistently permanent and absolute. Neo-racism’s ‘dominant theme’, Étienne Balibar notes, ‘is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiotity of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but “only” the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions’. Raspail’s arguments exemplified this tendency by collapsing France’s ‘traditional cultural values’ together with the French nation and indigenous people (‘the Gauls’/Frangais de souche’) alike — all of which, he insisted, risked being ‘swept away” by the relentless onslaught of ‘Maghrebi or African’ peoples seemingly destined to remain exclusively conjoined with ‘Islamic culture or religion’. As Paul Gilroy emphasizes, new racist ideology commonly pg. 91 coast, all areas with high concentrations of non-European immigrants, high levels of unemployment, and often significant pied noir settlement (as is the case in the Mediterranean region). Although the Front National was known for slogans like “Two million unemployed is two million immigrants too many”, the extreme right’s antip- athy found its strongest expression in discussions revolving around culture, family, and nation. Overtly eugenic in tone, the Front National’s anti- abortion and pro-natalist agenda saw in the family the source of France’s strength and equally its weakness. It espoused demographic ideas and fears nearly identical to those Jean Raspail contributed to Le Figaro Magazine. A low birth rate among native French families meant that “The nation is disappearing. Nature abhors a vacuum and this vacuum will be filled’, Le Pen stated: The influx oftraditionally prolific immigrant families inthe name of family reunifica tionis a precursor of the demographic submersion of France and the substitution of a population originating in the Third World for the French population, which is doomed to become a minotity in its own country . . . Make no mistake: it is the very existence of the French people which is at stake. The Front National’s conception of the French nation and French culture was thus distinctly at odds with republican ideology. Frenchness was envisioned as deriving from ancestry, blood, and heritage; rather than being theoretically open to all comers who ascribed to republican values, France needed protection from those Le Pen termed illegitimate ‘stowaways’ who should be forcibly repatriated. Moreover, in contrast to the emphasis upon secularism within republican discourse, Le Pen’s party has included many supporters who might be described as “Catholic fundamentalists” — persons who might well share Raspail’s feeling that ‘darkness was falling on the old Cluistian country’. Evidence of anti- Semitism is also not difficult to find within its rhetoric.Significant though the differences may be, however, views espoused by the Front National overlap with mainstream republican philosophy in revealing ways, for example in the intense hostility to Muslims in France and the adamant refusal to accommodate multiculturalism. French cultural homogeneity is assumed in the case of the former (for whom ethnic minorities of different cultures fall permanently outside the nation) and demanded by the latter (whose champions argue that immigrants must integrate and take up France’s purport- edly universal culture). While republicanism insists upon integration yet repeatedly accuses postcolonial immigrants and their children of failing to achieve it, the Front National suggests that cultural differences can never be overcome. The Front National’s ascent after 1983 does much to explain a number of critical shifts in France’s stance towards immigrants, ethnic minorities, Muslims, and cultural pluralism, along with the resurgence of republican ideologies concerning integration, citizenship, and secularism.From the mid- 1980s until the present, the Socialists and especially the centre-right parties have responded defensively to the growth in popular suppoit for the Front National. Fearing even fuither desertion by voters discontented with mainstream party policies, left and right alike altered their positions in response to extreme-right platforms, resulting in what some commentators have termed a Zepénisation of French politics. Center right parties and politicians stated to adopt tougher approaches to migration, with the idea of seeking white peoples votes. This also involved one ofthe most important center right politician at that time, Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist mayor of Paris (member of the Gaullist party Rassemblé ment pour la République), which also served as a Prime Minister during Mitterrand’s 2"! term, and then elected in the mid 90s as president of the French Republic. In June 1991, he told an important and infamous speech; the French worker living in an area like Goutte d’Or or in an HLM ‘looks across the landing to see . .. a family with a father, three or four wives, twenty or so children, who gets 50,000 francs worth of welfare benefits without working, and if you add to that the noise and the smell, the French worker goes crazy .161 Unemployed, welfare dependent, polygamous, and overly fecund, stereotyped families breached the domestic barriers of French homes and the French nation alike, just as immigrants in Britain attracted criticism for their loud music and cooking odours. In efforts to appear tougher on immigration, between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s successive govemments made family reunification more difficult and enacted new regulations concerning illegal immigrants and conditions of residency. Socialist nods in the direction of le droit à la différence came to an end, in part because of resilient scepticism conceming sub-national group identities and in part pg. 94 because the Front National appropriated the idea for themselves. All nations, they agreed, had the right to maintain and protect their own ethnic culture and identity (assumed as singular, fixed, and mirroring the nation’s geographical limits) — the French just as much as those supposedly destined to remain North African wherever they happened to live. Le droit à la différence was a laudable objective, in other words, if it was achieved by repatriating ‘foreigners’ to enjoy their much-vaunted difference in their coun- tries of origin while preserving France for the ‘true’ French — a subconscious delayed reaction, perhaps, to the pieds noirs° mass repatriation when the dream of Algérie francaise died and the territorial confines of France receded. Crucially, many protested that they were not in fact ‘oppressed’ by their parents but had freely chosen their attire as an expression of their liberté, drawing upon a republican idiom in asserting their status as individual agents and not helpless victims. In short, they considered themselves French and North African-descended and Muslim, rejecting the either/or identities offered to them by the state. Theirs was a hybrid identity of which they were proud, one they insisted was compatible with belonging in France — but belonging on their own terms. Integration in France was possible while retaining cultural and religious distinctiveness, they claimed, and should not require abandoning their ‘particularity’ as a precondition for national inclusion. Controversies surrounding Islamic headscarves first erupted at the end of a decade when, in the wake ofincreased family reunification, a sizable second generation raised and educated in France came of age and asserted new forms of cultural affiliation. North African- descended youth in their teens and early twenties known as beurs (word created from the term “arabe” inorderto reiterate their own cultural, but also political identity) became the most recognizable segment of a group that received wide public attention starting in the early 1980s. Maghrebi youth reversed the syllables of Arabe, a ubiquitous form ofinsult, to make a new word, beur, indicating not simply a protest against racism but also the assertion of an identity different from that of their parents and from other ethnic groups in France alike. Beurs achieved a high level of visibility through a combination of anti- racist activism and cultural expression, not to mention through their involvement in riots that have periodically recurred since the early 1980s. Second-generation Maghrebis, sometimes working alongside other ethnic minority youth, became involved in organizations such as SOS-Racisme and were core participants in the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism (often referred to as the Marche des Beurs). The so-called ‘beur movement’ also encompassed the emergence of beur radio, filmmaking, and fiction, with two of the best-known novels being Mehdi Charef's Le thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed (later translated as Tea in the Harem) and Azouz Begag's Le Gone du Chaàba (Shantytown Kid). Beur cultural creativity that blossomed in the 1980s, although not ignoring religion, largely foregrounded generational distinctiveness and experiences of racism, violence, poverty, lack of opportunity, and social exclusion. These often derived from growing up in shantytowns and later in the banlieues (most of all in Paris and Marseille, but also Lyon, where the migrant communities usually resided), the deprived outskirts of large French cities. Alongside youth from other postco- lonial ethnic minority backgrounds, beurs turned to forms of expression ran- ging from music to writing to rioting to make themselves heard. They contested dominant representations that reduced a complex range of social, economic, and cultural issues to demonized ideas about Islam, responding with critiques of France”s treatment of low-income banlieue residents and a new set of cultural formations alike. These reflect the common ground they shared with others of their generation across ethnic lines. In talking back to those who insisted on a centralized, monolithic model of French national identity to which they allegedly failedto adhere, banlieue youth offered alternative forms ofaffiliation at once locally specific within France and global/transnational beyond France. In the process, they claimed new ways of belonging to France that testified to their integration, rather than the reverse. Rejecting binary forms of belonging that restricted one to being either French or Noith African/Muslim/black, they, like so many Muslim girls who wanted to wear headscarves to school, protested not only that multiple identities were possible but that multiculturalism was positive. Multiculturalism has long been a fact of life in Frances banlieues, which have never been analogous to African-American ‘ghettoes’ pervaded by ethnic segregation. As Loic Wacquant insists, the very notion that French suburbs are akin to areas of Chicago or Harlem is ‘a sociological absurdity’ given their pg. 95 multi-ethnic populations that included many working-class whites (of French and other European backgrounds) alongside those of Maghrebi, sub-Saharan African or Antillean origin.93 Socio- economic marginality, however, com- bined with spatial marginality to produce resiliently racialized portrayals of banlieue residents whatever their backgronnd.5* Recurrent youth-focused moral panics surrounding banlieues as sites combining poverty, crime, and cultural alienation largely ignore whites in the rush to attribute most problems to cultural and ethnic difference and the non-assimilation of les jeunes issus de l’immigration — for example in repeated allusions to the banlieues de l’islam. Alternative portrayals illustrate how diverse neighbourhoods have produced youth cultures and friendship networks united by age, circumstances, and locality but not ethnicity. The highly acclaimed 1995 film La haine (Hatred) provides only one of many illustrations, fictional and factual alike, of a ‘black blanc be” (black white beur) group of male friends living on the same housing estate whose diverse parental origins proved less relevant than the common social exclusion, unemployment, police harassment, and leisure inter- ests that brought them together. Popular music exemplifies banlieue hybridity. (resume) Unlike the right, Francois Mitterrand implemented atme fight against racism: as stated before, Frangois Mitterrand served as president from 1981 to 1995. He spent much of the 1960s and 1970s rebuilding and strengthening the Socialist Party. When he and the Socialist Party came to power in 1981, he set in motion an ambitious wave of nationalization involving nine industrial groups including steel, aerospace, armaments, elec- tronics, banking, and insurance. in an era when governments and businesses increasingly strived to become both leaner and meaner, Mitterrand was something of an anachronism. Within two years, the government quietly abandoned the socialist policies. Thereafter, a more conventional approach, one paying more than merely lip ser- vice to Thatcher®s ideas, came to the fore. After the 1986 elections, Mitterrand remained as president of France but had to share power with Jacques Chirac (1932—), a Gaullist, as prime minister. Chirac reflected the new rightist majority in the national Assembly. Mitterrand returned in 1988 to win one more term as president. Over the 19805, the power and appeal of the French Communist Pasty declined considerably. it gained only 9.7 percent of the vote in 1986, in contrast to the past when it regularly won 20-25 percent of the vote. A less powerful Communist Party on his flank allowed Mitterrand to moderate his positions to some extent, even if he and Chirac could not reach full agreement on domestic policies. To some extent, the decline of the Communist Party was reflected in the growth of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s (1928—) Front National in the 1980s. The Front national is a political movement based to a large extent on hatred and fear. it is racist, chauvinistic, and well to the right in terms of French politics. it is possibly more dangerous than neo-nazi movements in Germany or Austria, but people do not automatically connect it with hitler and the nazis. Le Pen, an astute and charismatic political leader, knows how to play on the fears of ordinary French men and women. Persistent high rates of unemployment in the 1980s nonetheless helped to convince many that Le Pen’s perspective was woith taking seriously. By the end ofthe 19805, which saw the celebration of the bicentennial of the French revolution, the French were doing well, despite the ongoing political controversy and nagging unemployment. For the majority, the standard of living had greatly improved since the 1960s. France also was characterized at the time by a greater degree of egalitarianism, especially in terms of equality of opportu- nity as reflected in such areas as education and health care. 43) GREAT BRITAIN: THE NATIONAL FRONT AND TATCHERISM New types of racial movements arose in Great Britain between the 70s and the 808 of the 20°" century, as the racist, neo-fascist parties of the extreme right such as the National Front following its establishment in 1967 and, later, the British National Paity as they promoted visions of a nation and culture freed from the pernicious influence of non-white immigrants and their descendants Having ‘first declared itself multicultural in the mid 19608’, John Solomos observes, Britain ‘still faces the dilemma of what kind of multicultural society it should become”; moreover, it has failed to reach any consensus concerning the extent to which multiculturalism should be acknowledged or promoted at all. To what extent have Britain®s ethnic minorities been expected to conform to an imagined, uniform, “British way of life’, and to what extent have cultural differences configured along ethnic lines been pg. 96