In the current climate of economic turmoil, resurgent nationalism and anti-global policies, people could be forgiven for looking to the distant past for suitable parallels that might offer guidance on where we are heading. With right-wing authoritarianism on the rise, the echoes of the early 1930s are difficult to ignore even if the parallels should not be over-stretched.
Paul Jankowski makes precisely this point in his engaging and thoroughly researched book, All Against All, which examines the dramatic changes that occurred in Europe and Asia during the long winter of 1932-33, when nationalist egoism triumphed over whatever was left of global cooperation for peace and prosperity. Jankowski, a history professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has previously written about pivotal moments in early 20th-century European history, notably in his critically acclaimed book on the Battle of Verdun, the longest military engagement of the first World War.
Books that focus on a single year or a single event in history have become fashionable again in recent years, particularly when they combine a narrow chronological focus with geographical breadth and conceptual depth. Jankowski’s book is a global history of events between November 1932 and April 1933, and he is right, of course, in arguing that these months constituted a critical moment in the world’s historical trajectory.
The political winds were clearly shifting in the winter of 1933: Hitler came to power in Germany while Japan consolidated its hold over Manchuria and left the League of Nations that winter. Benito Mussolini, the world’s first fascist prime minister and in power since 1922, began to move to a more aggressive foreign policy of empire-building, reviving earlier plans to invade Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia).
For Jankowski, these developments were intimately connected. Demagogues in all of these countries promised to restore national glory, often pointing to hostile neighbouring countries or undeserving minorities as the source of their plight. 1932-33 therefore marked what Jankowski calls “a moment of global fragmentation”, a time when people increasingly turned away from the spirit of international cooperation embodied by the League of Nations.
If, in 1918, many people endorsed democracy as the political order of the future, the Great Depression accelerated the reversal of that trend. Many of the states that had become democracies after 1918 took an authoritarian turn of one kind or another. Democracy fell out of fashion, and with it the policies of collective security and free trade that had become dominant before 1929. And the world started out on a course that led to a second, and even more devastating, global war.
Meanwhile, the victor states of the first World War were either unwilling or unable to stem the tide of authoritarian revisionism at a time when they were still reeling from the socioeconomic impact of the Great Depression. France’s government changed repeatedly and faced violent protests from far-right leagues, while Britain was concerned about the reluctance of its White Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Irish Free State, Newfoundland and South Africa), to support any future war in Europe.
Simultaneously, domestic support for an armed confrontation of any kind was at an all-time low, and even the Oxford Union student society, not exactly a hotbed of revolution, famously voted overwhelmingly against war of any kind in February 1933.
In the US, the newly elected president Franklin D Roosevelt also initially showed little interest in getting embroiled in another European conflict. His voters wanted national solutions to the ongoing economic crisis, not involvement in yet another European war. Where there had once been unity, dissent between France, Britain and the US, the Big Three of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, grew over war debts, disarmament and tariffs. There was no collective strategy to contain the mounting threat of authoritarian regimes and their increasingly bold attempts to undo the international system created in Paris in 1919.
Jankowski contends that many of these global trends date back to the first World War, arguing that widespread resentment in the defeated states against the Paris peace treaties helps to explain why, during the winter of 1932-33 in the midst of a world economic depression, nationalism triumphed over the spirit of international collaboration. While it is true that the Versailles Treaty was vilified in Germany in particular, the centrality of the Great Depression should not be underplayed.
Economics
The global economic depression clearly had a transformative effect in turning people against democracy. It is worth remembering that in 1928 few people in Germany would have expected Hitler to ever come even close to the halls of power. His Nazi Party won less than 3 per cent in the 1928 general election, in which the Social Democrats, the party most closely associated with Weimar democracy, returned to government with a landslide victory. It was the catastrophic economic crisis that unfolded in 1929, and its mismanagement by German elites, that opened up unforeseen opportunities for a demagogue like Hitler.
That point aside, All Against All does a fine job in integrating different national perspectives as it moves effortlessly from Shanghai to Rome, Tokyo to Washington, and London to Berlin. Weaving together stories from these different parts of the globe, Jankowski wears the immense scholarship behind the book lightly. And he offers a cautionary tale relevant for western democracies today.
Although, as a historian, he warns against over-simplifying comparisons between then and now, he acknowledges that the world in the past 10 years has become a more hostile place than it was at the turn of the century, one in which authoritarianism is on the rise again.
If, in 1990, free trade, globalisation, and democratisation appeared to be full of promise, the economic crisis 10 years ago triggered a gradual return to nationalist policies. While the challenges posed by communism and fascism in the 1930s were peculiar to that period, we are well advised to remember that democracies can fail and that international collaboration can quickly turn to confrontation – generally with terrible consequences.
