1938: Cooperation

On November 25, 1937, a mass rally took place at Central Park of Dalian, a sea­port in northeastern China, attended by 20,000 people to celebrate the first anni­versary of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact and the accession of Italy to this treaty.^[2559] Similar celebrations were held throughout the Japanese Empire.

Despite all the contradictions and tensions that accompanied such festivities cel­ebrated in the colonial periphery at the end of the 1930s, the Axis powers had been moving toward each other throughout the decade and finally allied, not the least by way of their expanding empires. Furthermore, the months following the first anni­versary of the Anti-Comintern Pact would prove to be a short optimistic moment for the Axis, during which the new partners did not tire of celebrating the recently acquired “friendship.”

Not only was the Axis celebrated in the imperial context, the alliance was also significantly shaped, if not created, by it.

The first context for real rapprochement was the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1935-1936), which served as a catalyst for Italy's, Germany's, and Japan's diplo­matic and political convergence. Next, their cooperation was intensified by the context of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Ultimately, the war in China since mid-1937 drew and reinforced the battle lines. Each side admired the other for their empire, its (often imagined) strengths and future potential. Each recognized their own imperial ambitions in those of the other and valued the challenge these posed to the established order, as such a challenge presented possibilities for action in their own border regions. This was particularly true for Germany, whose territorial ex­pansion seemed at first to be little more than a future promise made by the regime.

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Finally, each empire liked to bask in the success of the other: Italy had asserted itself in 1935-1936 against the League of Nations and thus against a world of enemies; for a while, Japan's advances in China appeared unstoppable; Germany had prevailed over the Versailles peace order at the latest with the remilitarization of the Rhineland. This seemingly unending series of victories became a convincing argument for further expansion and simultaneously enhanced rapprochement.

What emerged around 1938 was a type of imperial axis, exemplarily heralded by the celebrations in Manchuria.^[2560] As this axis developed, the processes of learning and adopting from one another became more and more important. For example, Germany explained and legitimized Japan's imperial expansion within the context of its own ambitions in Eastern Europe. The rhetoric of the two countries began to sound very similar. At the end of 1938, the Japanese prime minister Konoe Fumimaro called for the “reordering of East Asia.” By this point, at the latest, two in­tellectual currents—German geopolitics and Japanese pan-Asianism—were heavily referencing each other, if not often coalescing.^[2561] From this constellation both coun­tries could derive meaning, each tailored to their specific regional circumstances. This went hand in hand with mutual radicalization. The formal recognition of Japan's expansionist politics by Hitler in the winter of 1938 and the defeat of the pro-Chinese faction in the Reich were part of the radical political changes in the army and the foreign ministry that ultimately paved Germany's way toward expan­sion and war.

The future enemies of the Axis were quite aware of the dangers posed by its ex­istence. The Committee of Imperial Defence, for example, described the situation facing the British Empire as follows:

The chief danger [... ] is that we are in the position of having threats at both ends of the Empire from strong military Powers, i.e., Germany and Japan, while in the centre we have lost our traditional security in the Mediterranean owing to the rise of an aggressive spirit in Italy accompanied by an increase in her military strength.^[2562]

In the context of the increased imperial competition of the late 1930s, many contemporaries thus did not think in terms of a separation between the two regions—Asia and Europe.

In this sense, appeasement politics emerged from the existence of the impe­rial Axis and, resulting from it, the impossible challenges confronting the British Empire.^[2565] The Europe-oriented politics of appeasement were supplemented by the possibility of pursuing a policy of colonial appeasement. These two policies mutu­ally conditioned, influenced, and permeated each other. The fact that leaders took a policy of colonial appeasement into consideration also shows how thoroughly accustomed European statesmen were to think in an imperial mindset. Now, on the brink of the Second World War, the unscrupulousness with which Western politicians were willing to bargain with the territories and peoples of non-European colonies was applied to Europe itself, as Munich and the fate of Czechoslovakia prove. This was truly the appropriate prelude to a war in which National Socialists would ultimately bring the brutal realities of colonialism onto European soil.

V.