Isolation and co-existence

For salvation from the security crisis, some Europeans looked to either the United States or Russia. Anthony Eden, Britain's foreign secretary, for instance, hoped to enlist American support to deter the aggression in Europe and the Pacific, while Pierre Cot, the French air force minister, dreamed of a formidable Franco-Soviet alliance based on air power to enforce the peace.

Before 1940, there was no prospect that the United States would be willing to save Europe anyway. The slump reinforced the American desire for home-grown solutions to their problems. ‘Each nation', American officials told the World Economic Conference, ‘must set its own house in order.' In one of his first speeches, President Roosevelt announced that ‘our greatest primary task is to put people to work'. Most of his listeners believed that the rest of the world, above all the decadent and untrustworthy Europeans, could look after themselves. This sentiment ran against Roosevelt's own inclinations. Previously, as an assistant secretary of the navy, he had served under Woodrow Wilson, and was imbued with his hero's ideals. Roosevelt was certain that the distinct American values of freedom, justice and enterprise could transform the globe, and that the Depression did not relieve Americans of their moral duty to make the world a better place. Yet Roosevelt had learned from Wilson's mistakes. ‘It's a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead', he reflected, ‘and to find no one there.' During his first two terms, public opinion was the chief constraint on policy.

Apart from the domestic constraints, officials in Washington could not turn to deterrence to make American policy felt abroad simply because of a scarcity of credible means. Granted, the United States navy, the world's second largest, exercised the minds of Japanese admirals. Yet, for force projection into Europe, the American army and air force were negligible. Before 1939, Hitler took no notice of Roosevelt's high-sounding admonitions for peace. Stormy relations with Europe's democracies also limited Washington's capacity to shape events. This was particularly true of Anglo-American relations. On the naval question, both sides buried their long-standing differences over fleet parity and cruiser strength to conclude the London Naval Treaty in March 1936. However, the chief obstacle to wider co-operation was trade. Americans saw Imperial Preference as ‘economic aggression' at least as harmful to world peace and prosperity as the autarkic practices of the dictatorships. Cordell Hull, Roosevelt's secretary of state, called for an easing of the Ottawa agreements to improve Anglo-American relations.

In October 1937, Roosevelt delivered a speech in Chicago in which he spoke of ‘the epidemic of world lawlessness' and of the need to ‘quarantine' aggression. The speech provoked an isolationist backlash and subsequently he denied that he had a programme of action in mind when he called for quarantine. In November, Washington shied away from talk of economic sanctions and fleet movements at a conference convened in Brussels to mediate in the Sino-Japanese War. In December, a Japanese air attack on British and American Yangtze gunboats paved the way for secret Anglo-American naval talks — but nothing out in the open. There was now only one option available to the president, the so-called Welles Plan. Sumner Welles, the under-secretary of state and a close confidant of Roosevelt, first proposed in 1936 a conference to work out the world's political, armament, financial and economic problems and to establish worldwide unanimity on the ‘fundamental norms' to ‘govern international conduct'. In January 1938, Roosevelt suggested the Welles Plan to Chamberlain. From London's viewpoint, the idea of one big conference to discuss the world's problems was a recipe for a spectacular row that would leave Britain exposed to the wrath of the dictators. Chamberlain asked Roosevelt to wait. Roosevelt had little choice but to do so. As war over Czechoslovakia loomed large, the prime minister sought to defuse the crisis through bilateral talks with Hitler. Washington greeted the Munich Accords with misapplied moral outrage directed at London as well as relief that European war had been averted. In 1939, as the Munich settlement unravelled and war appeared imminent, Roosevelt and his top military and diplomatic officials began to turn the president's concept of ‘quarantine' into an operative policy of political and military deterrence through allies and air power.

In contrast to the United States, Soviet Russia appeared eager to enter the European states system. In 1934, the Soviets joined the League of Nations and, in the following year, signed mutual security guarantees with France and Czechoslovakia. These treaties committed the Soviet Union to coming to the aid of the Czechs, if they fell victim to aggression, so long as France did so first. In 1935, communists across Western Europe were instructed to form Popular Front coalitions with democratic parties to bolster resistance to fascism. This sudden 180-degree reorientation away from vociferous hostility to the status quo to outspoken enthusiasm for collective security and the ‘indivisibility of peace' was championed by Maxim Litvinov, commissar for foreign affairs since 1930, who strove tirelessly to dispel the image of Russia as a malign agent bent on world revolution.

Many historians blame the Western Powers for squandering the opportunity presented by Litvinov's exertions to forge an anti-Nazi coalition. To be sure, abhorrence of the Bolsheviks ran deep in Europe. Indeed, Hitler exploited the ‘Red' bogey to mask his own revolutionary machinations. The British worked to prevent any connection between the planned eastern and western Locarno-type systems and to weaken the security guarantees negotiated between Paris, Prague and Moscow. The French high command resisted Russian invitations to begin detailed staff planning on how to enforce the 1935 guarantees. The Eastern Europeans, especially the Poles, were at least as wary of the Soviets as they were of the Nazis. In fact, Polish (and obviously German) hostility to the Soviet Union made the whole scheme for an ‘eastern Locarno' unworkable. Despite Moscow's search for a way out of isolation, this arm's-length treatment of Russia by everyone else rendered the Soviet Union until 1939 in effect a non-Power. (No state could act like a Great Power, after all, so long as the Great Powers did not treat it as one.) Litvinov's dilemma was painfully exposed by the coming of the Spanish Civil War.

Thus, the view that France and Britain ‘failed' to exploit the opportunity presented by the shift in Soviet policy can only be sustained if one ignores the interactive nature of international politics. Ultimately, the ‘failure' was the product of mutual hostility, divergent security interests and, to a large degree, adverse timing. When collective security appeared attractive to Moscow, Paris and London preferred to negotiate an agreement with Berlin; when Paris and London were ready to negotiate a deal with Moscow, Stalin preferred peaceful co-existence with Hitler. Finally, as we have seen, the reluctance of the Great Powers to commit to binding security alliances was typical of the international system of the period, and not unique to relations between the democratic Powers and the Soviet Union.

The Soviet approach to external security was shaped by Russia's history and ideology, and by internal debates over policy. In the early 1920s, the Russian economy lay devastated by war, revolution and foreign military intervention. Because the wave of workers' revolutions that Lenin had predicted would transform the world had failed to materialize, the Soviet leadership was compelled

after 1919 to defend socialism with the resources of Russia alone. As the Red Army's defeat by Poland in 1920 had underscored, this could be achieved only if Russia industrialized to wage machine-age warfare. Joseph Stalin, who had out­manoeuvred his internal rivals to become sole leader of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, recognized the need for an internal revolution before socialism could be exported abroad.

By the early 1930s, conspicuous progress had been made in equipping the Red Army with advanced weapons and readying the Soviet economy for total war. The timing appeared close indeed. The onset of the Depression, the growth of fascism and Japan's conquest of Manchuria, which menaced Russia's vulnerable Asian territories, all appeared to portend the long-expected capitalist onslaught. Moscow's initial response was to conclude non-aggression pacts with the Baltic States, France and Poland. Despite Hitler's brutal suppression of the German communists, the Soviets likewise hoped to co-exist peacefully with the Nazis. However, the Führer rebuffed Soviet feelers and trumpeted himself as Europe's saviour from Bolshevism. One German delegate to the World Economic Conference openly called for the dismemberment of Russia for the benefit of ‘people without Lebensraum. It was under these foreboding circumstances, not to mention a lack of alternatives, that the Soviets turned to collective security.

Manchuria

The three north-eastern provinces of China and home of the Manchu people. From 1932 to 1945, with the addition of Jehol province, it became the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

The Spanish Civil War, the alignment of Germany, Japan and Italy under the Anti-Comintern Pact and Russia's exclusion from Munich did not bode well for Soviet security through either multilateralism or bilateralism. While Litvinov spoke of collective security at Geneva, proposals for a rapprochement were offered to Berlin behind the scenes via a Soviet trade delegation. All of this was to no avail. Worse, the mass internal violence of the Great Terror and the purge of the Red Army in 1937—38, which accounted for about half of the officer corps, crippled the Red Army. In Western eyes, the terror confirmed Russia's status as an uncertain ally. The situation did not change until war appeared imminent in the summer of 1939, when suddenly Germany, France and Britain courted the Soviet Union. In May, to signal that all bids would be welcome, Stalin replaced Litvinov with the latter's most vocal internal critic, Vyacheslav M. Molotov. As the diplomacy reached a climax in August, the choice for Stalin was between a deal with Hitler, which promised to isolate Russia from the impending inter-capitalist conflict, or a triple alliance with Paris and London, which would ensure Russia's early entry into the ‘second imperialist war'. Accordingly, on 23 August, Molotov and Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, concluded a non-aggression treaty.

Spheres of influence between the two totalitarian empires were defined and Poland was partitioned. The Nazi-Soviet embrace was consistent with Bolshevik ideology and diplomatic practice. The Soviet Union had no love for the status quo nor any faith in perpetual peace. Stalin knew that the revolution at home was not yet complete, but the opportunity to expand the socialist system into Europe was irresistible.