Europe: A History (193 page)
The final collapse of the Ottoman Empire can hardly have come as a surprise. Yet the Western Powers held no contingency plans. They had once thought of installing their Russian allies on the Straits; but they were not going to grant such a favour to the Bolsheviks. So Greece, with Allied approval, moved into a vacuum.
In August 1920 the Treaty of Sévres was signed by a rump Ottoman government with little authority. An Allied fleet held Istanbul. The Italians occupied the southern coast; the French, Cilicia; separatist Kurds and Armenians held large regions in the east. The Greeks held both Thrace and Smyrna (Izmir). They had long memories of Constantinople, torn from Christendom in 1453; and they had genuine fears about the large Greek population of Asia Minor. So, when the last Ottoman parliament failed to ratify the Treaty, the Supreme Allied Council in Paris invited the Greeks ‘to restore order in Anatolia’. They had not counted on Kemal Pasha.
In the previous two years, Kemal had surfaced at the head of a Turkish national movement dedicated to the creation of a national republic based on a modern, secular society. His HQ was in Ankara, in the Turkish-speaking heartland. The hero of Gallipoli, he was the sworn enemy of the Sultan, the mosque, and the veil. A war against foreign invaders was exactly what he needed. In this light, the outcome of the Graeco-Turkish campaigns of 1920–2 was fairly predictable. The lonely Greek force marched up onto the Anatolian plateau, until held on the River Sakarya. Kemal roused the Turks to defend their native soil. In 1922 the Greek retreat turned into a rout: Smyrna fell; the Greek forces were driven into the sea.
The great majority of Greeks from Asia Minor, where their ancestors had lived for three millennia, together with the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea littoral, were expelled. For them, this was ‘the Great Catastrophe’. Most of them would be exchanged for the Turkish population of northern Greece, which was expelled at the same time. In the process, Kemal established himself as
Ghazi Pasha
or ‘Warrior Lord’, and eventually as
Atatürk
, the ‘Father of the Turks’; and the Sultan was deposed.
Allied intervention in Turkey offered a more blatant case of foreign interference than that in Russia. But the effect was the same. It stimulated what it was supposed to restrain. The Republic of Turkey established exclusive control of its national territory. The imposed Treaty of Sévres had to be replaced by the negotiated Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Greece and Turkey undertook to organize an extensive exchange of population; and the demilitarized Straits were handed over to yet another International Commission.
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At which point the chain of conflicts generated by the Great War finally ground to a temporary halt, [
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The Inter-War Period
In the inter-war period, which conventionally begins on Armistice Day in November 1918 and ends on 1 September 1939, Europe never escaped the shadow of war. The 1920s were passed amidst the after-shocks. The 1930s were passed in the growing conviction that a second quake was brewing. At the time there were statesmen and historians, including Churchill, who argued that lack of decisive action against the peace-breakers would inevitably lead to a renewal of conflict. In theory, their warnings proved to be correct; but they ignored both the political and the military realities. The Western democracies, horrified by the losses of 1914–18, could not be galvanized into action at the first sign of trouble. Also, their experiences with limited ‘fire-brigade’ operations were dispiriting. Allied intervention in Russia had shown that the West possessed neither the will nor the resources to control the Bolsheviks. French occupation of the Ruhr was to show that Germany could not be coerced by measured means. From then on, most military staffs were convinced that it had to be full-scale war or nothing. And full-scale war could not be prepared overnight.
What is more, if Russia and Germany could not be restrained separately, there was no chance of restraining them if they chose to work together. This nightmare was first glimpsed in April 1922, when German and Soviet delegates attending an Inter-Allied economic conference at Genoa decided to take an unscheduled train ride along the riviera to Rapallo, and to sign a German-Soviet trade treaty without reference to their outraged Allied hosts. In itself, the Rapallo incident was not crucial; but it revealed the central weakness of the Allies’ victory: it revealed that Moscow and Berlin in concert could defy the West with impunity. Often unspoken, it underlay all of Europe’s peacetime deliberations until the nightmare finally turned to reality.
Map 25.
The New Europe, 1917–1922
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the spring of 1920, the election results obliged the King of Sweden to I invite a socialist to head the government. But he did so reluctantly. He called in the leader of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, Karl Hjalmar Branting (1860–1925), and said that he could become prime minister so long as there was ‘no socialism, no disarmament, and no constitutional change’. For a socialist party which had demanded defence cuts to finance social welfare, and which had demanded a republic, these were tough conditions. But the deal was struck; and Branting formed a coalition cabinet. The first step had been taken in the governmental career of a party whose record of office was to be unequalled in the democratic world.
The
Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetarparti
had been founded over thirty years before, in 1889. Closely modelled on the German SPD, it forgot its initial flirtation with Marxism and moved instead towards the parliamentary path and to a programme of social reform, redistribution of wealth, and state intervention. Like the British Labour Party, it possessed strong links with the trades unions, including block membership by affiliation; and it was well organized at the local level in workers’ communes. Its electoral muscle consisted mainly of Sweden’s new class of industrial workers, with an important leaven of middle-class and intellectual support. It gained a foothold in the Riksdag in 1896, and scored a landslide electoral success in 1914. By 1920 Branting commanded the largest single party in both houses of parliament.
Sweden’s system of proportional representation, which had been introduced in 1909 together with universal male suffrage, made it difficult for any one party to win a clear majority. Four democratic parties—the Conservatives, Liberals, Peasants’, and Socialists—participated in the main forum, and coalition or caretaker ministries were a frequent occurrence. A small Communist Party was also represented. Prior to the constitutional reform of 1952, it was possible for parties to run electoral cartels to increase their representation.
The SSDA’s rise to power and influence passed through several phases. In the 1920s Branting headed three coalitions—in 1920, 1921–3, and 1924–5(6). He once lost out through an unemployment bill, and once through his drive for defence cuts. He never formed a majority government.
From 1932 Branting’s successor, Per Albin Hansson, began to give the SSDA the look of a permanent ruling party. With one brief interval, he was to control Swedish government for fourteen years. The ministry of 1936–9 was a ‘Red-Green Coalition’ with the Peasant Movement, and that of 1939–45 a multi-party wartime coalition of national unity.
After the war, the Social Democrats gained such a hold that they could transform Sweden in their own image. Tage Erlander held office for twenty-three years from 1946. Sweden’s prosperity was as high as its taxation and its standards of state-sponsored health, education, and social security.
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A brief period of conservative rule separated the two socialist ministries of Olaf Palme (1969–76, 1982–6). The SSDA fortress did not crumble until 1988—after an unparalleled run of over half a century. And despite the King’s fears in 1920, the Swedish monarchy outlasted the socialists.
As for Socialism sitting uneasily in one of Europe’s richest countries, the paradox was more apparent than real. Socialist ideas can only be effectively applied where there is a substantial -productive surplus to distribute and a democratic government to ensure equitable distribution. Indeed, they worked ever less efficiently in Sweden as the gap between available resources and popular aspirations narrowed. Yet in countries where the surplus is meagre, or the government dictatorial, or both, the workers in a collective economy are vulnerable to exploitation and the ruling elite hoards all the benefits. Such was the case in the Soviet Union, ‘the world’s first socialist state’, which was not truly socialist either in spirit or in practice.
The limitations of the Western Powers were also made apparent in the wider world beyond Europe. Major problems of the Pacific, of China, and of global maritime power had to be settled at the Washington Conference of 1921–2, not at the Peace Conference in Paris. The Washington Naval Agreement (1921) set limits to naval tonnage in the ratios of USA 5 : Britain 5 : Japan 3 : France 1.5 : Italy 1.5. In the Gondra Treaty of 1923, the USA made its dispositions in Latin America without involving its former European partners. The centre of gravity of world power was shifting. Europe was no longer the sole master of its fate.
The legacy of the Peace Conference was not what its organizers would have wanted. Germany was gravely wounded, but not reconciled. The infant German Republic was extremely fragile. Its National Assembly, which met in permanent session at Weimar throughout 1919, was run by a coalition dominated by social democrats. Its representatives only signed the Treaty of Versailles under the express threat of coercion. Emotional ceremonies were staged to bid farewell to the Germans excluded from the Reich. Berlin, which had already experienced the left-wing rising of January 1919, when Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, now saw the right-wing Kapp
Putsch
of March 1920, and in August the approach of the Red Army. One cannot say what would have happened if Tukhachevsky had reached his destination. But by driving the Poles from disputed towns and handing those towns over to local Germans, he had betrayed his intention of playing the German card and of overthrowing the Versailles settlement. Three-hundred thousand armed
Freikorps
members were still on the loose. ‘Red Saxony’ was held by
communists, Bavaria by ultra-conservatives talking of secession. Germany was one step from chaos.
The spectre of social upheaval stalked the land. The violent hostility of the German left and the German right was growing. In 1922 the Jewish Minister of Reconstruction, Walter Rathenau, was assassinated. Radical socialists fed on mass unemployment and the dire effects of hyperinflation. Radical nationalists fed on the humiliation of the war guilt clauses, on resistance to reparations, and on Allied occupation of the Rhineland. A new variety of desperado, seeking to fuse the grievances of both Left and Right, surfaced after 1920 in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Their leader, Adolf Hitler, reached the headlines on 8–9 November 1923, in the abortive fiasco of the ‘Beer-cellar
Putsch’
in Munich.
For a time, however, a modicum of confidence was restored in Germany by Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929), sometime Chancellor and, from 1923, Foreign Minister. Stresemann allowed the German military to evade the disarmament clauses through secret co-operation with the Soviets. But he won Western approval by suppressing the communist governments in Saxony and Thuringia, and by restoring reparation payments. He then persuaded the Allies that the battle over reparations was harming Europe’s economy. In 1924, under the Dawes Plan, he negotiated a loan from the USA of 800 million marks backed by gold, which assured the recovery of German industry. In 1925, at Locarno, in exchange for a guarantee of the Franco-German frontier, he obtained Germany’s rehabilitation as a member of the international community, and in 1926 her admission to the League of Nations. In 1927 the last Inter-Allied Commissions were withdrawn. In the glow of improved relations with the West, few people cared to notice that Germany’s eastern frontiers, and Germany’s eastern policy, had been left open to revision.
In the realm of international finance, confusion reigned for years. Thanks to the arrangements of the wartime
Entente
, Britain and France were owed colossal sums, principally by Russia, whilst they themselves owed still greater sums, principally to the USA. The reparations plan incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles sought to make Germany pay the entire costs of the war, so that Allied governments could then pay off their war debts. But the plan proved unworkable: the sums involved could not be properly calculated; Germany refused full payment; the Soviet Government refused to recognize the debts of the Tsar; and the USA refused to consider rescheduling. So alternative arrangements had to be made. Already at the Peace Conference a British delegate, J. M. Keynes, had published stringent criticism of the prevailing approach. In his
Economic Consequences of the Peace
(1919) he argued that support for the economic recovery of Germany was a precondition for the recovery of Europe as a whole, and that punitive reparations would harm the enforcers. His ideas met strong political opposition, partly because he seemed to be recommending preferential treatment for Germany over Germany’s alleged victims. But it gradually came to be realized that recovery must have priority.
