1. AN UNEASY PEACE: POST-WWI EUROPE
The World Between the Wars, 1919 to 1938
AN UNEASY PEACE: POST-WWI EUROPE

2. COVENANT is adopted, signed by 44 countries…
What is it? Goals, Role & Purpose
The League of Nations
“An INTERGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION founded as a result of the PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE to maintain WORLD PEACE” (
The League of Nations * * *
…was an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to “provide a forum for resolving international disputes.”
Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points plan for an equitable peace in Europe, the United States never became a member.
Speaking before the U.S. Congress on January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson enumerated the last of his Fourteen Points, which called for a “general association of nations… formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
Many of Wilson’s previous points would require regulation or enforcement. In calling for the formation of a "general association of nations," Wilson voiced the wartime opinions of many diplomats and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic who believed there was a need for a new type of standing international organization dedicated to fostering international cooperation, providing security for its members, and ensuring a lasting peace. With Europe’s population exhausted by four years of total war, and with many in the United States optimistic that a new organization would be able to solve the international disputes that had led to war in 1914, Wilson’s articulation of a League of Nations was wildly popular. However, it proved exceptionally difficult to create, and Wilson left office never having convinced the United States to join it.
The idea of the League was grounded in the broad, international revulsion against the unprecedented destruction of the First World War and the contemporary understanding of its origins. This was reflected in all of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which were themselves based on theories of collective security and international organization debated amongst academics, jurists, socialists and utopians before and during the war. After adopting many of these ideas, Wilson took up the cause with evangelical fervor, whipping up mass enthusiasm for the organization as he traveled to the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, the first President to travel abroad in an official capacity.
Wilson used his tremendous influence to attach the Covenant of the League, its charter, to the Treaty of Versailles. An effective League, he believed, would mitigate any inequities in the peace terms. He and the other members of the “Big Three,” Georges Clemenceau of France and David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, drafted the Covenant as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. The League’s main organs were an Assembly of all members, a Council made up of five permanent members and four rotating members, and an International Court of Justice. Most important for Wilson, the League would guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of member states, authorize the League to take “any action…to safeguard the peace,” establish procedures for arbitration, and create the mechanisms for economic and military sanctions.
The struggle to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant in the U.S. Congress helped define the most important political division over the role of the United States in the world for a generation. A triumphant Wilson returned to the United States in February 1919 to submit the Treaty and Covenant to Congress for its consent and ratification. Unfortunately for the President, while popular support for the League was still strong, opposition within Congress and the press had begun building even before he had left for Paris. Spearheading the challenge was the Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge.
Motivated by Republican concerns that the League would commit the United States to an expensive organization that would reduce the United States’ ability to defend its own interests, Lodge led the opposition to joining the League. Where Wilson and the League’s supporters saw merit in an international body that would work for peace and collective security for its members, Lodge and his supporters feared the consequences of involvement in Europe’s tangled politics, now even more complex because of the 1919 peace settlement. They adhered to a vision of the United States returning to its traditional aversion to commitments outside the Western Hemisphere. Wilson and Lodge’s personal dislike of each other poisoned any hopes for a compromise, and in March 1920, the Treaty and Covenant were defeated by a Senate vote. Nine months later, Warren Harding was elected President on a platform opposing the League.
The United States never joined the League.
Most historians hold that the League operated much less effectively without U.S. participation than it would have otherwise. However, even while rejecting membership, the Republican Presidents of the period, and their foreign policy architects, agreed with many of its goals. To the extent that Congress allowed, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations associated the United States with League efforts on several issues. Constant suspicion in Congress, however, that steady U.S. cooperation with the League would lead to de facto membership prevented a close relationship between Washington and Geneva. Additionally, growing disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles diminished support for the League in the United States and the international community. Wilson’s insistence that the Covenant be linked to the Treaty was a blunder; over time, the Treaty was discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions, and the League’s failure either to enforce or revise it only reinforced U.S. congressional opposition to working with the League under any circumstances. However, the coming of World War II once again demonstrated the need for an effective international organization to mediate disputes, and the United States public and the Roosevelt administration supported and became founding members of the new United Nations.
Introduction – Washington Naval Conference * * *
Between 1921 and 1922, the world’s largest naval powers gathered in Washington, D.C. for a conference to discuss naval disarmament and ways to relieve growing tensions in East Asia.
In the wake of World War I, leaders in the international community sought to prevent the possibility of another war. Rising Japanese militarism and an international arms race heightened these concerns. As a result, policymakers worked to reduce the rising threat. Senator William E. Borah (R–Idaho) led a congressional effort to demand that the United States engage its two principal competitors in the naval arms race, Japan and the United Kingdom, in negotiations for disarmament.
In 1921, U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes invited nine nations to Washington, D.C. to discuss naval reductions and the situation in the Far East. The United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy were invited to take part in talks on reducing naval capacity, while Belgium, China, Portugal, and the Netherlands were invited to join in discussions on the situation in the Far East. Three major treaties emerged out of the Washington Naval Conference: the Five-Power Treaty, the Four-Power Treaty, and the Nine-Power Treaty.
The Five-Power Treaty
The Five-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy was the cornerstone of the naval disarmament program. It called for each of the countries involved to maintain a set ratio of warship tonnage which allowed the United States and the United Kingdom 500,000 tons, Japan 300,000 tons, and France and Italy each 175,000 tons. Japan preferred that tonnage be allotted at a 10:10:7 ratio, while the U.S. Navy preferred a 10:10:5 ratio. The conference ultimately adopted the 5:5:3 ratio limits. Since the United States and the United Kingdom maintained navies in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to support their colonial territories, the Five-Power Treaty allotted both countries the highest tonnage allowances. The treaty also called on all five signatories to stop building capital ships and reduce the size of their navies by scrapping older ships.
Though the treaty was widely regarded as a success, the inclusion of Article XIX, which recognized the status quo of U.S., British, and Japanese bases in the Pacific but outlawed their expansion, created a controversy amongst U.S. policymakers. Many members of the U.S. Navy in particular worried that limiting the expansion of fortifications in the Pacific would endanger U.S. holdings in Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines.
Additionally, although the Five-Power Treaty controlled tonnage of each navy’s warships, some classes of ships were left unrestricted. As a result, a new race to build cruiser ships emerged after 1922, leading the five nations to return to the negotiating table in 1927 and 1930 in an effort to close the remaining loopholes in the Treaty.
The Four-Power Treaty
In the Four-Power Treaty, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan agreed to consult with each other in the event of a future crisis in East Asia before taking action. This treaty replaced the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, which had been a source of some concern for the United States. In the years following World War I, U.S. policymakers saw Japan as the greatest rising military threat. Heavily militarized and looking to expand its influence and territory, Japan had the potential to threaten U.S. colonial possessions in Asia and the profitable China trade. Because of the 1902 agreement between the United Kingdom and Japan, however, if the United States and Japan entered into a conflict, the United Kingdom might be obligated to join Japan against the United States. By ending that treaty and creating a Four-Power agreement, the countries involved ensured that none would be obligated to engage in a conflict, but a mechanism would exist for discussions if one emerged.
The Nine-Power Treaty
The final multilateral agreement made at the Washington Naval Conference, the Nine-Power Treaty, marked the internationalization of the U.S. Open Door Policy in China. The treaty promised that each of the signatories—the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and China—would respect the territorial integrity of China. The treaty recognized Japanese dominance in Manchuria but otherwise affirmed the importance of equal opportunity for all nations doing business in the country. For its part, China agreed not to discriminate against any country seeking to do business there. Like the Four-Power Treaty, this treaty on China called for further consultations amongst the signatories in the event of a violation. As a result, it lacked a method of enforcement to ensure that all powers abided by its terms.
In addition to the multilateral agreements, the participants completed several bilateral treaties at the conference. Japan and China signed a bilateral agreement, the Shangtung (Shandong) Treaty, which returned control of that province and its railroad to China. Japan had taken control of the area from the Germans during World War I and maintained control of it over the years that followed. The combination of the Shangtung Treaty and the Nine-Power Treaty was meant to reassure China that its territory would not be further compromised by Japanese expansion. Additionally, Japan agreed to withdraw its troops from Siberia and the United States and Japan formally agreed to equal access to cable and radio facilities on the Japanese-controlled island of Yap.
Together, the treaties signed at the Washington Naval Conference served to uphold the status quo in the Pacific: they recognized existing interests and did not make fundamental changes to them. At the same time, the United States secured agreements that reinforced its existing policy in the Pacific, including the Open Door Policy in China and the protection of the Philippines, while limiting the scope of Japanese imperial expansion as much as possible.
Introduction – Kellogg-Briand Pact * * *
The Kellogg-Briand Pact… was an “agreement to outlaw war” signed on August 27, 1928.
Sometimes called the Pact of Paris for the city in which it was signed, the pact was one of many international efforts to prevent another World War, but it had little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II.
U.S. Peace Advocates
In the wake of World War I, U.S. officials and private citizens made significant efforts to guarantee that the nation would not be drawn into another war. Some focused on disarmament, such as the series of naval conferences that began in Washington in 1921, and some focused on cooperation with the League of Nations and the newly formed World Court. Others initiated a movement to try to outlaw war outright. Peace advocates Nicholas Murray Butler and James T. Shotwell were part of this movement. Both men were affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organization dedicated to promoting internationalism that was established in 1910 by leading American industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
French Involvement
With the influence and assistance of Shotwell and Butler, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand proposed a peace pact as a bilateral agreement between the United States and France to outlaw war between them. Particularly hard hit by World War I, France faced continuing insecurity from its German neighbor and sought alliances to shore up its defenses. Briand published an open letter in April of 1927 containing the proposal. Though the suggestion had the enthusiastic support of some members of the American peace movement, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg were less eager than Briand to enter into a bilateral arrangement. They worried that the agreement against war could be interpreted as a bilateral alliance and require the United States to intervene if France was ever threatened. To avoid this, they suggested that the two nations take the lead in inviting all nations to join them in outlawing war.
The extension of the pact to include other nations was well-received internationally. After the severe losses of the First World War, the idea of declaring war to be illegal was immensely popular in international public opinion. Because the language of the pact established the important point that only wars of aggression – not military acts of self-defense – would be covered under the pact, many nations had no objections to signing it. If the pact served to limit conflicts, then everyone would benefit; if it did not, there were no legal consequences. In early 1928, negotiations over the agreement expanded to include all of the initial signatories. In the final version of the pact, they agreed upon two clauses: the first outlawed war as an instrument of national policy and the second called upon signatories to settle their disputes by peaceful means.
On August 27, 1928, fifteen nations signed the pact at Paris. Signatories included France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and Japan. Later, an additional forty-seven nations followed suit, so the pact was eventually signed by most of the established nations in the world. The U.S. Senate ratified the agreement by a vote of 85–1, though it did so only after making reservations to note that U.S. participation did not limit its right to self-defense or require it to act against signatories breaking the agreement.
Mukden Incident
The first major test of the pact came just a few years later in 1931, when the Mukden Incident led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Though Japan had signed the pact, the combination of the worldwide depression and a limited desire to go to war to preserve China prevented the League of Nations or the United States from taking any action to enforce it. Further threats to the Peace Agreement also came from fellow signatories Germany, Austria and Italy. It soon became clear that there was no way to enforce the pact or sanction those who broke it; it also never fully defined what constituted “self-defense,” so there were many ways around its terms. In the end, the Kellogg-Briand Pact did little to prevent World War II or any of the conflicts that followed. Its legacy remains as a statement of the idealism expressed by advocates for peace in the interwar period. Frank Kellogg earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for his work on the Peace Pact.
Treaty of Locarno
The agreements consisted of:
(1) a treaty of mutual guarantee between Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Italy;
(2) arbitration treaties between Germany and Belgium and between Germany and France;
(3) a note from the former Allies to Germany explaining the use of sanctions against a covenant-breaking state as outlined in article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant;
(4) arbitration treaties between Germany and Czechoslovakia and between Germany and Poland; and
(5) treaties of guarantee between France and Poland and between France and Czechoslovakia.
April to June 1919
COVENANT is adopted, signed by 44 countries…

3. What is it? Goals, Role & Purpose
The League of Nations
“An INTERGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION founded as a result of the PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE to maintain WORLD PEACE”
GOAL #1: “Prevent war … COLLECTIVE SECURITY; DISARMAMENT” (
The League of Nations * * *
…was an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to “provide a forum for resolving international disputes.”
Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points plan for an equitable peace in Europe, the United States never became a member.
Speaking before the U.S. Congress on January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson enumerated the last of his Fourteen Points, which called for a “general association of nations… formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
Many of Wilson’s previous points would require regulation or enforcement. In calling for the formation of a "general association of nations," Wilson voiced the wartime opinions of many diplomats and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic who believed there was a need for a new type of standing international organization dedicated to fostering international cooperation, providing security for its members, and ensuring a lasting peace. With Europe’s population exhausted by four years of total war, and with many in the United States optimistic that a new organization would be able to solve the international disputes that had led to war in 1914, Wilson’s articulation of a League of Nations was wildly popular. However, it proved exceptionally difficult to create, and Wilson left office never having convinced the United States to join it.
The idea of the League was grounded in the broad, international revulsion against the unprecedented destruction of the First World War and the contemporary understanding of its origins. This was reflected in all of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which were themselves based on theories of collective security and international organization debated amongst academics, jurists, socialists and utopians before and during the war. After adopting many of these ideas, Wilson took up the cause with evangelical fervor, whipping up mass enthusiasm for the organization as he traveled to the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, the first President to travel abroad in an official capacity.
Wilson used his tremendous influence to attach the Covenant of the League, its charter, to the Treaty of Versailles. An effective League, he believed, would mitigate any inequities in the peace terms. He and the other members of the “Big Three,” Georges Clemenceau of France and David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, drafted the Covenant as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. The League’s main organs were an Assembly of all members, a Council made up of five permanent members and four rotating members, and an International Court of Justice. Most important for Wilson, the League would guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of member states, authorize the League to take “any action…to safeguard the peace,” establish procedures for arbitration, and create the mechanisms for economic and military sanctions.
The struggle to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant in the U.S. Congress helped define the most important political division over the role of the United States in the world for a generation. A triumphant Wilson returned to the United States in February 1919 to submit the Treaty and Covenant to Congress for its consent and ratification. Unfortunately for the President, while popular support for the League was still strong, opposition within Congress and the press had begun building even before he had left for Paris. Spearheading the challenge was the Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge.
Motivated by Republican concerns that the League would commit the United States to an expensive organization that would reduce the United States’ ability to defend its own interests, Lodge led the opposition to joining the League. Where Wilson and the League’s supporters saw merit in an international body that would work for peace and collective security for its members, Lodge and his supporters feared the consequences of involvement in Europe’s tangled politics, now even more complex because of the 1919 peace settlement. They adhered to a vision of the United States returning to its traditional aversion to commitments outside the Western Hemisphere. Wilson and Lodge’s personal dislike of each other poisoned any hopes for a compromise, and in March 1920, the Treaty and Covenant were defeated by a Senate vote. Nine months later, Warren Harding was elected President on a platform opposing the League.
The United States never joined the League.
Most historians hold that the League operated much less effectively without U.S. participation than it would have otherwise. However, even while rejecting membership, the Republican Presidents of the period, and their foreign policy architects, agreed with many of its goals. To the extent that Congress allowed, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations associated the United States with League efforts on several issues. Constant suspicion in Congress, however, that steady U.S. cooperation with the League would lead to de facto membership prevented a close relationship between Washington and Geneva. Additionally, growing disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles diminished support for the League in the United States and the international community. Wilson’s insistence that the Covenant be linked to the Treaty was a blunder; over time, the Treaty was discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions, and the League’s failure either to enforce or revise it only reinforced U.S. congressional opposition to working with the League under any circumstances. However, the coming of World War II once again demonstrated the need for an effective international organization to mediate disputes, and the United States public and the Roosevelt administration supported and became founding members of the new United Nations.
Introduction – Washington Naval Conference * * *
Between 1921 and 1922, the world’s largest naval powers gathered in Washington, D.C. for a conference to discuss naval disarmament and ways to relieve growing tensions in East Asia.
In the wake of World War I, leaders in the international community sought to prevent the possibility of another war. Rising Japanese militarism and an international arms race heightened these concerns. As a result, policymakers worked to reduce the rising threat. Senator William E. Borah (R–Idaho) led a congressional effort to demand that the United States engage its two principal competitors in the naval arms race, Japan and the United Kingdom, in negotiations for disarmament.
In 1921, U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes invited nine nations to Washington, D.C. to discuss naval reductions and the situation in the Far East. The United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy were invited to take part in talks on reducing naval capacity, while Belgium, China, Portugal, and the Netherlands were invited to join in discussions on the situation in the Far East. Three major treaties emerged out of the Washington Naval Conference: the Five-Power Treaty, the Four-Power Treaty, and the Nine-Power Treaty.
The Five-Power Treaty
The Five-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy was the cornerstone of the naval disarmament program. It called for each of the countries involved to maintain a set ratio of warship tonnage which allowed the United States and the United Kingdom 500,000 tons, Japan 300,000 tons, and France and Italy each 175,000 tons. Japan preferred that tonnage be allotted at a 10:10:7 ratio, while the U.S. Navy preferred a 10:10:5 ratio. The conference ultimately adopted the 5:5:3 ratio limits. Since the United States and the United Kingdom maintained navies in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to support their colonial territories, the Five-Power Treaty allotted both countries the highest tonnage allowances. The treaty also called on all five signatories to stop building capital ships and reduce the size of their navies by scrapping older ships.
Though the treaty was widely regarded as a success, the inclusion of Article XIX, which recognized the status quo of U.S., British, and Japanese bases in the Pacific but outlawed their expansion, created a controversy amongst U.S. policymakers. Many members of the U.S. Navy in particular worried that limiting the expansion of fortifications in the Pacific would endanger U.S. holdings in Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines.
Additionally, although the Five-Power Treaty controlled tonnage of each navy’s warships, some classes of ships were left unrestricted. As a result, a new race to build cruiser ships emerged after 1922, leading the five nations to return to the negotiating table in 1927 and 1930 in an effort to close the remaining loopholes in the Treaty.
The Four-Power Treaty
In the Four-Power Treaty, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan agreed to consult with each other in the event of a future crisis in East Asia before taking action. This treaty replaced the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, which had been a source of some concern for the United States. In the years following World War I, U.S. policymakers saw Japan as the greatest rising military threat. Heavily militarized and looking to expand its influence and territory, Japan had the potential to threaten U.S. colonial possessions in Asia and the profitable China trade. Because of the 1902 agreement between the United Kingdom and Japan, however, if the United States and Japan entered into a conflict, the United Kingdom might be obligated to join Japan against the United States. By ending that treaty and creating a Four-Power agreement, the countries involved ensured that none would be obligated to engage in a conflict, but a mechanism would exist for discussions if one emerged.
The Nine-Power Treaty
The final multilateral agreement made at the Washington Naval Conference, the Nine-Power Treaty, marked the internationalization of the U.S. Open Door Policy in China. The treaty promised that each of the signatories—the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and China—would respect the territorial integrity of China. The treaty recognized Japanese dominance in Manchuria but otherwise affirmed the importance of equal opportunity for all nations doing business in the country. For its part, China agreed not to discriminate against any country seeking to do business there. Like the Four-Power Treaty, this treaty on China called for further consultations amongst the signatories in the event of a violation. As a result, it lacked a method of enforcement to ensure that all powers abided by its terms.
In addition to the multilateral agreements, the participants completed several bilateral treaties at the conference. Japan and China signed a bilateral agreement, the Shangtung (Shandong) Treaty, which returned control of that province and its railroad to China. Japan had taken control of the area from the Germans during World War I and maintained control of it over the years that followed. The combination of the Shangtung Treaty and the Nine-Power Treaty was meant to reassure China that its territory would not be further compromised by Japanese expansion. Additionally, Japan agreed to withdraw its troops from Siberia and the United States and Japan formally agreed to equal access to cable and radio facilities on the Japanese-controlled island of Yap.
Together, the treaties signed at the Washington Naval Conference served to uphold the status quo in the Pacific: they recognized existing interests and did not make fundamental changes to them. At the same time, the United States secured agreements that reinforced its existing policy in the Pacific, including the Open Door Policy in China and the protection of the Philippines, while limiting the scope of Japanese imperial expansion as much as possible.
Introduction – Kellogg-Briand Pact * * *
The Kellogg-Briand Pact… was an “agreement to outlaw war” signed on August 27, 1928.
Sometimes called the Pact of Paris for the city in which it was signed, the pact was one of many international efforts to prevent another World War, but it had little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II.
U.S. Peace Advocates
In the wake of World War I, U.S. officials and private citizens made significant efforts to guarantee that the nation would not be drawn into another war. Some focused on disarmament, such as the series of naval conferences that began in Washington in 1921, and some focused on cooperation with the League of Nations and the newly formed World Court. Others initiated a movement to try to outlaw war outright. Peace advocates Nicholas Murray Butler and James T. Shotwell were part of this movement. Both men were affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organization dedicated to promoting internationalism that was established in 1910 by leading American industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
French Involvement
With the influence and assistance of Shotwell and Butler, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand proposed a peace pact as a bilateral agreement between the United States and France to outlaw war between them. Particularly hard hit by World War I, France faced continuing insecurity from its German neighbor and sought alliances to shore up its defenses. Briand published an open letter in April of 1927 containing the proposal. Though the suggestion had the enthusiastic support of some members of the American peace movement, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg were less eager than Briand to enter into a bilateral arrangement. They worried that the agreement against war could be interpreted as a bilateral alliance and require the United States to intervene if France was ever threatened. To avoid this, they suggested that the two nations take the lead in inviting all nations to join them in outlawing war.
The extension of the pact to include other nations was well-received internationally. After the severe losses of the First World War, the idea of declaring war to be illegal was immensely popular in international public opinion. Because the language of the pact established the important point that only wars of aggression – not military acts of self-defense – would be covered under the pact, many nations had no objections to signing it. If the pact served to limit conflicts, then everyone would benefit; if it did not, there were no legal consequences. In early 1928, negotiations over the agreement expanded to include all of the initial signatories. In the final version of the pact, they agreed upon two clauses: the first outlawed war as an instrument of national policy and the second called upon signatories to settle their disputes by peaceful means.
On August 27, 1928, fifteen nations signed the pact at Paris. Signatories included France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and Japan. Later, an additional forty-seven nations followed suit, so the pact was eventually signed by most of the established nations in the world. The U.S. Senate ratified the agreement by a vote of 85–1, though it did so only after making reservations to note that U.S. participation did not limit its right to self-defense or require it to act against signatories breaking the agreement.
Mukden Incident
The first major test of the pact came just a few years later in 1931, when the Mukden Incident led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Though Japan had signed the pact, the combination of the worldwide depression and a limited desire to go to war to preserve China prevented the League of Nations or the United States from taking any action to enforce it. Further threats to the Peace Agreement also came from fellow signatories Germany, Austria and Italy. It soon became clear that there was no way to enforce the pact or sanction those who broke it; it also never fully defined what constituted “self-defense,” so there were many ways around its terms. In the end, the Kellogg-Briand Pact did little to prevent World War II or any of the conflicts that followed. Its legacy remains as a statement of the idealism expressed by advocates for peace in the interwar period. Frank Kellogg earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for his work on the Peace Pact.
Treaty of Locarno
The agreements consisted of:
(1) a treaty of mutual guarantee between Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Italy;
(2) arbitration treaties between Germany and Belgium and between Germany and France;
(3) a note from the former Allies to Germany explaining the use of sanctions against a covenant-breaking state as outlined in article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant;
(4) arbitration treaties between Germany and Czechoslovakia and between Germany and Poland; and
(5) treaties of guarantee between France and Poland and between France and Czechoslovakia.
GOAL #2: “…international cooperation in ECONOMIC & DIPLOMATIC issues.”

4. NO enforcement of decisions
What is it? Goals, Role & Purpose
The League of Nations
PROBLEMS?
U.S. creates, NEVER JOINS
THANKS, SENATE
PROBLEMS?
NO MILITARY (
The League of Nations * * *
…was an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to “provide a forum for resolving international disputes.”
Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points plan for an equitable peace in Europe, the United States never became a member.
Speaking before the U.S. Congress on January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson enumerated the last of his Fourteen Points, which called for a “general association of nations… formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
Many of Wilson’s previous points would require regulation or enforcement. In calling for the formation of a "general association of nations," Wilson voiced the wartime opinions of many diplomats and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic who believed there was a need for a new type of standing international organization dedicated to fostering international cooperation, providing security for its members, and ensuring a lasting peace. With Europe’s population exhausted by four years of total war, and with many in the United States optimistic that a new organization would be able to solve the international disputes that had led to war in 1914, Wilson’s articulation of a League of Nations was wildly popular. However, it proved exceptionally difficult to create, and Wilson left office never having convinced the United States to join it.
The idea of the League was grounded in the broad, international revulsion against the unprecedented destruction of the First World War and the contemporary understanding of its origins. This was reflected in all of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which were themselves based on theories of collective security and international organization debated amongst academics, jurists, socialists and utopians before and during the war. After adopting many of these ideas, Wilson took up the cause with evangelical fervor, whipping up mass enthusiasm for the organization as he traveled to the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, the first President to travel abroad in an official capacity.
Wilson used his tremendous influence to attach the Covenant of the League, its charter, to the Treaty of Versailles. An effective League, he believed, would mitigate any inequities in the peace terms. He and the other members of the “Big Three,” Georges Clemenceau of France and David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, drafted the Covenant as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. The League’s main organs were an Assembly of all members, a Council made up of five permanent members and four rotating members, and an International Court of Justice. Most important for Wilson, the League would guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of member states, authorize the League to take “any action…to safeguard the peace,” establish procedures for arbitration, and create the mechanisms for economic and military sanctions.
The struggle to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant in the U.S. Congress helped define the most important political division over the role of the United States in the world for a generation. A triumphant Wilson returned to the United States in February 1919 to submit the Treaty and Covenant to Congress for its consent and ratification. Unfortunately for the President, while popular support for the League was still strong, opposition within Congress and the press had begun building even before he had left for Paris. Spearheading the challenge was the Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge.
Motivated by Republican concerns that the League would commit the United States to an expensive organization that would reduce the United States’ ability to defend its own interests, Lodge led the opposition to joining the League. Where Wilson and the League’s supporters saw merit in an international body that would work for peace and collective security for its members, Lodge and his supporters feared the consequences of involvement in Europe’s tangled politics, now even more complex because of the 1919 peace settlement. They adhered to a vision of the United States returning to its traditional aversion to commitments outside the Western Hemisphere. Wilson and Lodge’s personal dislike of each other poisoned any hopes for a compromise, and in March 1920, the Treaty and Covenant were defeated by a Senate vote. Nine months later, Warren Harding was elected President on a platform opposing the League.
The United States never joined the League.
Most historians hold that the League operated much less effectively without U.S. participation than it would have otherwise. However, even while rejecting membership, the Republican Presidents of the period, and their foreign policy architects, agreed with many of its goals. To the extent that Congress allowed, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations associated the United States with League efforts on several issues. Constant suspicion in Congress, however, that steady U.S. cooperation with the League would lead to de facto membership prevented a close relationship between Washington and Geneva. Additionally, growing disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles diminished support for the League in the United States and the international community. Wilson’s insistence that the Covenant be linked to the Treaty was a blunder; over time, the Treaty was discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions, and the League’s failure either to enforce or revise it only reinforced U.S. congressional opposition to working with the League under any circumstances. However, the coming of World War II once again demonstrated the need for an effective international organization to mediate disputes, and the United States public and the Roosevelt administration supported and became founding members of the new United Nations.
Introduction – Washington Naval Conference * * *
Between 1921 and 1922, the world’s largest naval powers gathered in Washington, D.C. for a conference to discuss naval disarmament and ways to relieve growing tensions in East Asia.
In the wake of World War I, leaders in the international community sought to prevent the possibility of another war. Rising Japanese militarism and an international arms race heightened these concerns. As a result, policymakers worked to reduce the rising threat. Senator William E. Borah (R–Idaho) led a congressional effort to demand that the United States engage its two principal competitors in the naval arms race, Japan and the United Kingdom, in negotiations for disarmament.
In 1921, U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes invited nine nations to Washington, D.C. to discuss naval reductions and the situation in the Far East. The United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy were invited to take part in talks on reducing naval capacity, while Belgium, China, Portugal, and the Netherlands were invited to join in discussions on the situation in the Far East. Three major treaties emerged out of the Washington Naval Conference: the Five-Power Treaty, the Four-Power Treaty, and the Nine-Power Treaty.
The Five-Power Treaty
The Five-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy was the cornerstone of the naval disarmament program. It called for each of the countries involved to maintain a set ratio of warship tonnage which allowed the United States and the United Kingdom 500,000 tons, Japan 300,000 tons, and France and Italy each 175,000 tons. Japan preferred that tonnage be allotted at a 10:10:7 ratio, while the U.S. Navy preferred a 10:10:5 ratio. The conference ultimately adopted the 5:5:3 ratio limits. Since the United States and the United Kingdom maintained navies in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to support their colonial territories, the Five-Power Treaty allotted both countries the highest tonnage allowances. The treaty also called on all five signatories to stop building capital ships and reduce the size of their navies by scrapping older ships.
Though the treaty was widely regarded as a success, the inclusion of Article XIX, which recognized the status quo of U.S., British, and Japanese bases in the Pacific but outlawed their expansion, created a controversy amongst U.S. policymakers. Many members of the U.S. Navy in particular worried that limiting the expansion of fortifications in the Pacific would endanger U.S. holdings in Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines.
Additionally, although the Five-Power Treaty controlled tonnage of each navy’s warships, some classes of ships were left unrestricted. As a result, a new race to build cruiser ships emerged after 1922, leading the five nations to return to the negotiating table in 1927 and 1930 in an effort to close the remaining loopholes in the Treaty.
The Four-Power Treaty
In the Four-Power Treaty, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan agreed to consult with each other in the event of a future crisis in East Asia before taking action. This treaty replaced the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, which had been a source of some concern for the United States. In the years following World War I, U.S. policymakers saw Japan as the greatest rising military threat. Heavily militarized and looking to expand its influence and territory, Japan had the potential to threaten U.S. colonial possessions in Asia and the profitable China trade. Because of the 1902 agreement between the United Kingdom and Japan, however, if the United States and Japan entered into a conflict, the United Kingdom might be obligated to join Japan against the United States. By ending that treaty and creating a Four-Power agreement, the countries involved ensured that none would be obligated to engage in a conflict, but a mechanism would exist for discussions if one emerged.
The Nine-Power Treaty
The final multilateral agreement made at the Washington Naval Conference, the Nine-Power Treaty, marked the internationalization of the U.S. Open Door Policy in China. The treaty promised that each of the signatories—the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and China—would respect the territorial integrity of China. The treaty recognized Japanese dominance in Manchuria but otherwise affirmed the importance of equal opportunity for all nations doing business in the country. For its part, China agreed not to discriminate against any country seeking to do business there. Like the Four-Power Treaty, this treaty on China called for further consultations amongst the signatories in the event of a violation. As a result, it lacked a method of enforcement to ensure that all powers abided by its terms.
In addition to the multilateral agreements, the participants completed several bilateral treaties at the conference. Japan and China signed a bilateral agreement, the Shangtung (Shandong) Treaty, which returned control of that province and its railroad to China. Japan had taken control of the area from the Germans during World War I and maintained control of it over the years that followed. The combination of the Shangtung Treaty and the Nine-Power Treaty was meant to reassure China that its territory would not be further compromised by Japanese expansion. Additionally, Japan agreed to withdraw its troops from Siberia and the United States and Japan formally agreed to equal access to cable and radio facilities on the Japanese-controlled island of Yap.
Together, the treaties signed at the Washington Naval Conference served to uphold the status quo in the Pacific: they recognized existing interests and did not make fundamental changes to them. At the same time, the United States secured agreements that reinforced its existing policy in the Pacific, including the Open Door Policy in China and the protection of the Philippines, while limiting the scope of Japanese imperial expansion as much as possible.
Introduction – Kellogg-Briand Pact * * *
The Kellogg-Briand Pact… was an “agreement to outlaw war” signed on August 27, 1928.
Sometimes called the Pact of Paris for the city in which it was signed, the pact was one of many international efforts to prevent another World War, but it had little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II.
U.S. Peace Advocates
In the wake of World War I, U.S. officials and private citizens made significant efforts to guarantee that the nation would not be drawn into another war. Some focused on disarmament, such as the series of naval conferences that began in Washington in 1921, and some focused on cooperation with the League of Nations and the newly formed World Court. Others initiated a movement to try to outlaw war outright. Peace advocates Nicholas Murray Butler and James T. Shotwell were part of this movement. Both men were affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organization dedicated to promoting internationalism that was established in 1910 by leading American industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
French Involvement
With the influence and assistance of Shotwell and Butler, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand proposed a peace pact as a bilateral agreement between the United States and France to outlaw war between them. Particularly hard hit by World War I, France faced continuing insecurity from its German neighbor and sought alliances to shore up its defenses. Briand published an open letter in April of 1927 containing the proposal. Though the suggestion had the enthusiastic support of some members of the American peace movement, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg were less eager than Briand to enter into a bilateral arrangement. They worried that the agreement against war could be interpreted as a bilateral alliance and require the United States to intervene if France was ever threatened. To avoid this, they suggested that the two nations take the lead in inviting all nations to join them in outlawing war.
The extension of the pact to include other nations was well-received internationally. After the severe losses of the First World War, the idea of declaring war to be illegal was immensely popular in international public opinion. Because the language of the pact established the important point that only wars of aggression – not military acts of self-defense – would be covered under the pact, many nations had no objections to signing it. If the pact served to limit conflicts, then everyone would benefit; if it did not, there were no legal consequences. In early 1928, negotiations over the agreement expanded to include all of the initial signatories. In the final version of the pact, they agreed upon two clauses: the first outlawed war as an instrument of national policy and the second called upon signatories to settle their disputes by peaceful means.
On August 27, 1928, fifteen nations signed the pact at Paris. Signatories included France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and Japan. Later, an additional forty-seven nations followed suit, so the pact was eventually signed by most of the established nations in the world. The U.S. Senate ratified the agreement by a vote of 85–1, though it did so only after making reservations to note that U.S. participation did not limit its right to self-defense or require it to act against signatories breaking the agreement.
Mukden Incident
The first major test of the pact came just a few years later in 1931, when the Mukden Incident led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Though Japan had signed the pact, the combination of the worldwide depression and a limited desire to go to war to preserve China prevented the League of Nations or the United States from taking any action to enforce it. Further threats to the Peace Agreement also came from fellow signatories Germany, Austria and Italy. It soon became clear that there was no way to enforce the pact or sanction those who broke it; it also never fully defined what constituted “self-defense,” so there were many ways around its terms. In the end, the Kellogg-Briand Pact did little to prevent World War II or any of the conflicts that followed. Its legacy remains as a statement of the idealism expressed by advocates for peace in the interwar period. Frank Kellogg earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for his work on the Peace Pact.
LEADS TO…
NO enforcement of decisions

5. Attempts @ Peace Through the 1920s…
The League of Nations
Peace Through the 1920s…
WASHINGTON NAVAL CONFERENCE ( ) …naval DISARMAMENT conference …U.S., U.K., Japan, France, Italy, Belgium, China, Portugal & the Netherlands
TREATY OF LOCARNO (1925) – mutual peace agreement …settled Germany’s DISPUTED BORDERS with France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia & Poland. (
The League of Nations * * *
…was an international organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, created after the First World War to “provide a forum for resolving international disputes.”
Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points plan for an equitable peace in Europe, the United States never became a member.
Speaking before the U.S. Congress on January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson enumerated the last of his Fourteen Points, which called for a “general association of nations… formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
Many of Wilson’s previous points would require regulation or enforcement. In calling for the formation of a "general association of nations," Wilson voiced the wartime opinions of many diplomats and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic who believed there was a need for a new type of standing international organization dedicated to fostering international cooperation, providing security for its members, and ensuring a lasting peace. With Europe’s population exhausted by four years of total war, and with many in the United States optimistic that a new organization would be able to solve the international disputes that had led to war in 1914, Wilson’s articulation of a League of Nations was wildly popular. However, it proved exceptionally difficult to create, and Wilson left office never having convinced the United States to join it.
The idea of the League was grounded in the broad, international revulsion against the unprecedented destruction of the First World War and the contemporary understanding of its origins. This was reflected in all of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which were themselves based on theories of collective security and international organization debated amongst academics, jurists, socialists and utopians before and during the war. After adopting many of these ideas, Wilson took up the cause with evangelical fervor, whipping up mass enthusiasm for the organization as he traveled to the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, the first President to travel abroad in an official capacity.
Wilson used his tremendous influence to attach the Covenant of the League, its charter, to the Treaty of Versailles. An effective League, he believed, would mitigate any inequities in the peace terms. He and the other members of the “Big Three,” Georges Clemenceau of France and David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, drafted the Covenant as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. The League’s main organs were an Assembly of all members, a Council made up of five permanent members and four rotating members, and an International Court of Justice. Most important for Wilson, the League would guarantee the territorial integrity and political independence of member states, authorize the League to take “any action…to safeguard the peace,” establish procedures for arbitration, and create the mechanisms for economic and military sanctions.
The struggle to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant in the U.S. Congress helped define the most important political division over the role of the United States in the world for a generation. A triumphant Wilson returned to the United States in February 1919 to submit the Treaty and Covenant to Congress for its consent and ratification. Unfortunately for the President, while popular support for the League was still strong, opposition within Congress and the press had begun building even before he had left for Paris. Spearheading the challenge was the Senate majority leader and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge.
Motivated by Republican concerns that the League would commit the United States to an expensive organization that would reduce the United States’ ability to defend its own interests, Lodge led the opposition to joining the League. Where Wilson and the League’s supporters saw merit in an international body that would work for peace and collective security for its members, Lodge and his supporters feared the consequences of involvement in Europe’s tangled politics, now even more complex because of the 1919 peace settlement. They adhered to a vision of the United States returning to its traditional aversion to commitments outside the Western Hemisphere. Wilson and Lodge’s personal dislike of each other poisoned any hopes for a compromise, and in March 1920, the Treaty and Covenant were defeated by a Senate vote. Nine months later, Warren Harding was elected President on a platform opposing the League.
The United States never joined the League.
Most historians hold that the League operated much less effectively without U.S. participation than it would have otherwise. However, even while rejecting membership, the Republican Presidents of the period, and their foreign policy architects, agreed with many of its goals. To the extent that Congress allowed, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations associated the United States with League efforts on several issues. Constant suspicion in Congress, however, that steady U.S. cooperation with the League would lead to de facto membership prevented a close relationship between Washington and Geneva. Additionally, growing disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles diminished support for the League in the United States and the international community. Wilson’s insistence that the Covenant be linked to the Treaty was a blunder; over time, the Treaty was discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions, and the League’s failure either to enforce or revise it only reinforced U.S. congressional opposition to working with the League under any circumstances. However, the coming of World War II once again demonstrated the need for an effective international organization to mediate disputes, and the United States public and the Roosevelt administration supported and became founding members of the new United Nations.
Introduction – Washington Naval Conference * * *
Between 1921 and 1922, the world’s largest naval powers gathered in Washington, D.C. for a conference to discuss naval disarmament and ways to relieve growing tensions in East Asia.
In the wake of World War I, leaders in the international community sought to prevent the possibility of another war. Rising Japanese militarism and an international arms race heightened these concerns. As a result, policymakers worked to reduce the rising threat. Senator William E. Borah (R–Idaho) led a congressional effort to demand that the United States engage its two principal competitors in the naval arms race, Japan and the United Kingdom, in negotiations for disarmament.
In 1921, U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes invited nine nations to Washington, D.C. to discuss naval reductions and the situation in the Far East. The United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy were invited to take part in talks on reducing naval capacity, while Belgium, China, Portugal, and the Netherlands were invited to join in discussions on the situation in the Far East. Three major treaties emerged out of the Washington Naval Conference: the Five-Power Treaty, the Four-Power Treaty, and the Nine-Power Treaty.
The Five-Power Treaty
The Five-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Italy was the cornerstone of the naval disarmament program. It called for each of the countries involved to maintain a set ratio of warship tonnage which allowed the United States and the United Kingdom 500,000 tons, Japan 300,000 tons, and France and Italy each 175,000 tons. Japan preferred that tonnage be allotted at a 10:10:7 ratio, while the U.S. Navy preferred a 10:10:5 ratio. The conference ultimately adopted the 5:5:3 ratio limits. Since the United States and the United Kingdom maintained navies in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to support their colonial territories, the Five-Power Treaty allotted both countries the highest tonnage allowances. The treaty also called on all five signatories to stop building capital ships and reduce the size of their navies by scrapping older ships.
Though the treaty was widely regarded as a success, the inclusion of Article XIX, which recognized the status quo of U.S., British, and Japanese bases in the Pacific but outlawed their expansion, created a controversy amongst U.S. policymakers. Many members of the U.S. Navy in particular worried that limiting the expansion of fortifications in the Pacific would endanger U.S. holdings in Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines.
Additionally, although the Five-Power Treaty controlled tonnage of each navy’s warships, some classes of ships were left unrestricted. As a result, a new race to build cruiser ships emerged after 1922, leading the five nations to return to the negotiating table in 1927 and 1930 in an effort to close the remaining loopholes in the Treaty.
The Four-Power Treaty
In the Four-Power Treaty, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan agreed to consult with each other in the event of a future crisis in East Asia before taking action. This treaty replaced the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, which had been a source of some concern for the United States. In the years following World War I, U.S. policymakers saw Japan as the greatest rising military threat. Heavily militarized and looking to expand its influence and territory, Japan had the potential to threaten U.S. colonial possessions in Asia and the profitable China trade. Because of the 1902 agreement between the United Kingdom and Japan, however, if the United States and Japan entered into a conflict, the United Kingdom might be obligated to join Japan against the United States. By ending that treaty and creating a Four-Power agreement, the countries involved ensured that none would be obligated to engage in a conflict, but a mechanism would exist for discussions if one emerged.
The Nine-Power Treaty
The final multilateral agreement made at the Washington Naval Conference, the Nine-Power Treaty, marked the internationalization of the U.S. Open Door Policy in China. The treaty promised that each of the signatories—the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and China—would respect the territorial integrity of China. The treaty recognized Japanese dominance in Manchuria but otherwise affirmed the importance of equal opportunity for all nations doing business in the country. For its part, China agreed not to discriminate against any country seeking to do business there. Like the Four-Power Treaty, this treaty on China called for further consultations amongst the signatories in the event of a violation. As a result, it lacked a method of enforcement to ensure that all powers abided by its terms.
In addition to the multilateral agreements, the participants completed several bilateral treaties at the conference. Japan and China signed a bilateral agreement, the Shangtung (Shandong) Treaty, which returned control of that province and its railroad to China. Japan had taken control of the area from the Germans during World War I and maintained control of it over the years that followed. The combination of the Shangtung Treaty and the Nine-Power Treaty was meant to reassure China that its territory would not be further compromised by Japanese expansion. Additionally, Japan agreed to withdraw its troops from Siberia and the United States and Japan formally agreed to equal access to cable and radio facilities on the Japanese-controlled island of Yap.
Together, the treaties signed at the Washington Naval Conference served to uphold the status quo in the Pacific: they recognized existing interests and did not make fundamental changes to them. At the same time, the United States secured agreements that reinforced its existing policy in the Pacific, including the Open Door Policy in China and the protection of the Philippines, while limiting the scope of Japanese imperial expansion as much as possible.
Introduction – Kellogg-Briand Pact * * *
The Kellogg-Briand Pact… was an “agreement to outlaw war” signed on August 27, 1928.
Sometimes called the Pact of Paris for the city in which it was signed, the pact was one of many international efforts to prevent another World War, but it had little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II.
U.S. Peace Advocates
In the wake of World War I, U.S. officials and private citizens made significant efforts to guarantee that the nation would not be drawn into another war. Some focused on disarmament, such as the series of naval conferences that began in Washington in 1921, and some focused on cooperation with the League of Nations and the newly formed World Court. Others initiated a movement to try to outlaw war outright. Peace advocates Nicholas Murray Butler and James T. Shotwell were part of this movement. Both men were affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organization dedicated to promoting internationalism that was established in 1910 by leading American industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
French Involvement
With the influence and assistance of Shotwell and Butler, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand proposed a peace pact as a bilateral agreement between the United States and France to outlaw war between them. Particularly hard hit by World War I, France faced continuing insecurity from its German neighbor and sought alliances to shore up its defenses. Briand published an open letter in April of 1927 containing the proposal. Though the suggestion had the enthusiastic support of some members of the American peace movement, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg were less eager than Briand to enter into a bilateral arrangement. They worried that the agreement against war could be interpreted as a bilateral alliance and require the United States to intervene if France was ever threatened. To avoid this, they suggested that the two nations take the lead in inviting all nations to join them in outlawing war.
The extension of the pact to include other nations was well-received internationally. After the severe losses of the First World War, the idea of declaring war to be illegal was immensely popular in international public opinion. Because the language of the pact established the important point that only wars of aggression – not military acts of self-defense – would be covered under the pact, many nations had no objections to signing it. If the pact served to limit conflicts, then everyone would benefit; if it did not, there were no legal consequences. In early 1928, negotiations over the agreement expanded to include all of the initial signatories. In the final version of the pact, they agreed upon two clauses: the first outlawed war as an instrument of national policy and the second called upon signatories to settle their disputes by peaceful means.
On August 27, 1928, fifteen nations signed the pact at Paris. Signatories included France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and Japan. Later, an additional forty-seven nations followed suit, so the pact was eventually signed by most of the established nations in the world. The U.S. Senate ratified the agreement by a vote of 85–1, though it did so only after making reservations to note that U.S. participation did not limit its right to self-defense or require it to act against signatories breaking the agreement.
Mukden Incident
The first major test of the pact came just a few years later in 1931, when the Mukden Incident led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Though Japan had signed the pact, the combination of the worldwide depression and a limited desire to go to war to preserve China prevented the League of Nations or the United States from taking any action to enforce it. Further threats to the Peace Agreement also came from fellow signatories Germany, Austria and Italy. It soon became clear that there was no way to enforce the pact or sanction those who broke it; it also never fully defined what constituted “self-defense,” so there were many ways around its terms. In the end, the Kellogg-Briand Pact did little to prevent World War II or any of the conflicts that followed. Its legacy remains as a statement of the idealism expressed by advocates for peace in the interwar period. Frank Kellogg earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for his work on the Peace Pact.
Treaty of Locarno
The agreements consisted of:
(1) a treaty of mutual guarantee between Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Italy;
(2) arbitration treaties between Germany and Belgium and between Germany and France;
(3) a note from the former Allies to Germany explaining the use of sanctions against a covenant-breaking state as outlined in article 16 of the League of Nations Covenant;
(4) arbitration treaties between Germany and Czechoslovakia and between Germany and Poland; and
(5) treaties of guarantee between France and Poland and between France and Czechoslovakia.
*** KELLOGG-BRIAND PACT (1928) – WAR IS ILLEGAL! “…promise to renounce war as an instrument of national policy”

6. WHAT DOES EUROPE LOOK LIKE?
Post-WWI: Austria, Ottomans, Great Britain & France
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
* End of the war, the CENTRAL GOVT COLLAPSED! – HABSBURGS! (1918)
* Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia & Czechoslovakia (new)
* Poland, Italy & Romania (gained land)
Charles I was the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the last Emperor of Austria, the last King of Hungary (as Charles IV), and the last monarch belonging to the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.
After his uncle Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914 Charles became the designated successor of the Emperor Franz-Josef, Charles I reigned from 1916 until 1918 when he "renounced participation" in state affairs, but did not abdicate. He spent the remaining years of his life attempting to restore the monarchy until his death in Following his beatification by the Catholic Church in 2004, he has become commonly known as Blessed Charles of Austria.
Changes to Europe after World War I – The war officially ended when Germany agreed to lay down its weapons on November 11, In 1919, the victorious Allies, led by Britain, France, and the United States, met in Paris to decide the fate of the empires they had defeated. Their decisions transformed Europe's borders.
* The AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE was carved up into six new countries … One of these, the awkwardly named Czechoslovakia, would split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in The former Serbia was combined with territories annexed from Austria-Hungary to form Yugoslavia, a national home for South Slavic peoples. It, too, disintegrated in the early 1990s, producing several small nations that exist in the Balkans today. The Soviet Union lost some of the Russian Empire's former territory to the new Baltic states and to Poland. Poland, along with France, got chunks of Germany. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are gone, but the other new states persist today, so it's fair to say that World War I set the contours for the modern European state system.
* 1917 – Crisis in Austria-Hungary: With hunger and discontent spreading among the civilian and military populations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a crisis mounts within its government, as Hungarian Prime Minister Istvan Tisza resigns at the request of the Austrian emperor, Karl I, on May 22, 1917.
A great power in decline when World War I broke out in 1914, Austria-Hungary was a predominately agricultural society but was not agriculturally self-sufficient.
The war had cut off the empire’s two main sources of food, Russia and Romania, and the military effort cut domestic production significantly: by 1917, Austria’s output of wheat had fallen to less than half of its 1913 total, and that of rye and oats had fallen even more. To make matters worse, Hungary—Austria’s less powerful partner in the so-called Dual Monarchy—had closed its frontier with Austria in 1914 and ceased to consider its agricultural produce as a common resource, choosing instead to sell whatever surplus it had to the army and to Germany. Defeat on the battlefield against Russia in the first years of war forced Austria-Hungary to rely heavily on its ally, Germany, to keep them in the war effort, and the Italian entrance into the war in 1915 forced the Austrians to fight on yet another front, to the south.
* On November 21, 1916, Emperor Franz Josef died; he was succeeded by his great-nephew, Karl I, who assumed supreme command of the army, dismissing longtime chief of the general staff, Conrad von Hotzendorff. Though the new emperor promised to institute reforms and build consensus within the Dual Monarchy, his efforts led initially to disorder and dissent. Karl’s liberalism posed a direct challenge to the Hungarian government and its prime minister, Ivan Tisza. His reformist opposition within Hungary, Party of Independence, led by Mihaly Karolyi, favored a total break with Austria when the compromise between the two nations came up for renewal in 1917.
Socialists and revolutionaries supported Karolyi, who organized major demonstrations in Budapest on May 1, Meanwhile, though he had urged restraint in 1914, Tisza was by now associated in the mind of the Hungarian public with the aggressive prosecution of a war effort many had come to see as hopeless, and had begun to lose much-needed support. A t the emperor’s request, he tendered his resignation on May 22, He was succeeded by Moritz Esterhazy, who expressed his desire to build “Hungarian democracy”; the new deal between Austria and Hungary, signed in December, would last just two years, not the expected 20. Still blamed for the continued war effort, and its impending failure, Tisza was assassinated on October 31, 1918, by Magyar members of the Communist Red Guard.
* Meanwhile, barely a week after Tisza’s resignation in May 1917, Austria-Hungary experienced the first of a series of mutinies within its army. Led by nationalist groups, the first mutiny involved a group of Slovenes; no sooner had it been suppressed than others broke out, led by Serbs, Rusyns (or Ruthenians) and Czechs.
KARL I
( )

7. WHAT DOES EUROPE LOOK LIKE?
Post-WWI: Austria, Ottomans, Great Britain & France
GREAT-BRITAIN
* MASSIVE STRIKES: wages, hours, conditions (General Strike in 1926 – 2 million workers)
* ECONOMIC PROBLEMS in GB, too (unemployment, low production)
* COLONIAL PROBLEMS: IRELAND, Egypt, India
The 1926 general strike in the United Kingdom was a general strike that lasted 10 days, from 3 May 1926 to 13 May 1926.
It was called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the British government to act to prevent wage reduction and worsening conditions for 1.2 million locked-out coal miners.
Some 1.7 million workers went out, especially in transport and heavy industry.
The government was prepared and enlisted middle class volunteers to maintain essential services. There was little violence and the TUC gave up in defeat. In the long run, there was little impact on trade union activity or industrial relations.
CAUSES
The First World War: The heavy domestic use of coal in the war meant that rich seams were depleted. Britain exported less coal in the war than it would have done in peacetime, allowing other countries to fill the gap. The United States, Poland and Germany and their strong coal industries benefited, in particular.
Coal production was at its lowest ebb. Output per man had fallen to just 199 tonnes in 1920–1924, from 247 tonnes in the four years before the war, and a peak of 310 tons in the early 1880s. Total coal output had been falling since 1914.
The fall in coal prices resulting from the 1924 Dawes Plan. It alllowed Germany to re-enter the international coal market by exporting "free coal" to France and Italy, as part of their reparations for the First World War.
The reintroduction of the gold standard in 1925 by Winston Churchill, which made the British pound too strong for effective exporting to take place from Britain and (because of the economic processes involved in maintaining a strong currency) raised interest rates, hurting some businesses.
Mine owners wanted to maintain profits even during times of economic instability, which often took the form of wage reductions for miners in their employ. Coupled with the prospect of longer working hours, the industry was thrown into disarray.
Miners' pay had lowered from £6.00 to £3.90 over seven years.

8. WHAT DOES EUROPE LOOK LIKE?
Post-WWI: Austria, Ottomans, Great Britain & France
FRANCE
* INCOME TAX during WWI – came out of war relatively stable with a balanced economy – still relied on REPARATIONS!

9. EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR I
SOCIALLY CRIPPLED – entire generations killed, cities destroyed…
Approx. 58% of MOBILIZED MEN were KILLED or WOUNDED!
IN FRANCE – 36% of soldiers aged between 19 & 22 were killed.
Social, Political and Economic Effects of WWI
"Everywhere in the world was heard the sound of things breaking." Advanced European societies could not support long wars or so many thought prior to World War I. They were right in a way. The societies could not support a long war unchanged. The First World War left no aspect of European civilization untouched as pre-war governments were transformed to fight total war. The war metamorphed Europe socially, politicaly, economically, and intellectualy.
European countries channeled all of their resources into total war which resulted in enormous social change. The result of working together for a common goal seemed to be unifying European societies. Death knocked down all barriers between people. All belligerents had enacted some form of a selective service which levelled classes in many ways. Wartime scarcities made luxury an impossibility and unfavorable. Reflecting this, clothing became uniform and utilitarian. Europeans would never again dress in fancy, elaborate costumes. Uniforms led the way in clothing change. The bright blue-and-red prewar French infantry uniforms had been changed after the first few months of the war, since they made whoever wore them into excellent targets for machine guns. Women's skirts rose above the ankle permanently and women became more of a part of society than ever. They undertook a variety of jobs previously held by men. They were now a part of clerical, secretarial work, and teaching. They were also more widely employed in industrial jobs.
By 1918, 37.6 percent of the work force in the Krupp armaments firm in Germany was female. In England the proportion of women works rose strikingly in public transport (for example, from 18,000 to 117,000 bus conductors), banking (9,500 to 63,700), and commerce (505,000 to 934,000). Many restrictions on women disappeared during the war. It became acceptable for young, employed, single middle-class women to have their own apartments, to go out without chaperones, and to smoke in public. It was only a matter of time before women received the right to vote in many belligerent countries.
Strong forces were shaping the power and legal status of labor unions, too. The right of workers to organize was relatively new, about half a century. Employers fought to keep union organizers out of their plants and armed force was often used against striking workers. The universal rallying of workers towards their flag at the beginning of the war led to wider acceptance of unions. It was more of a bureaucratic route than a parliamentary route that integrated organized labor into government, however. A long war was not possible without complete cooperation of the workers with respect to putting in longers hours and increasing productivity.
Strike activity had reached its highest levels in history just before the war. There had been over 1,500 diffent work stoppages in France and 3,000 in Germany during More than a million British workers stopped at one time or another in In Britain, France, and Germany, deals were struck between unions and government to eliminate strikes and less favorable work conditions in exchange for immediate integration into the government process. This integration was at the cost of having to act more as managers of labor than as the voice of the labor. Suddenly, the strikes stopped during the first year of the war. Soon the enthusiasm died down, though. The revival of strike activity in 1916 shows that the social peace was already wearing thin. Work stoppages and the number of people on strike in France quadrupled in 1916 compared to In Germany, in May 1916, 50,000 Berlin works held a three-day walkout to protest the arrest of the pacifist Karl Liebknecht. By the end of the war most had rejected the government offer of being integrated in the beaurocracy, but not without playing an important public role and gaining some advantages such as collective bargaining. The war may have had a leveling effect in many ways, but it also sharpened some social differences and conflicts.
Soldiers were revolting just like workers:
They [soldiers] were no longer willing to sacrifice their lives when shirkers at home were earning all the money, taking the women around in cars, cornering all the best jobs, and while so many profiteers were waxing rich.
The draft was not completely fair since to all men were sent to the trenches. Skilled workers were more important to industry and some could secure safe assignments at home. Unskilled young males and junior officers paid with their lives the most. The generation conflict was also widened by the war as Veterens' disillusionment fed off of anger towards the older generation for sending them to the trenches.
Governments took on many new powers in order to fight the total war. War governments fought opposition by increasing police power. Authoritatian regimes like tsarist Russia had always depended on the threat of force, but now even parliamentary governments felt the necessity to expand police powers and control public opinion. Britain gave police powers wide scope in August 1914 by the Defence of the Realm Act which authorized the public authorities to arrest and punish dissidents under martial law if necessary. Through later acts polices powers grew to include suspending newspapers and the ability to intervene in a citizen's private life in the use of lights at home, food consumption, and bar hours. Police powers tended to grow as the war went on and public opposition increased as well. In France a sharp rise of strikes, mutinies, and talk of a negotiated peace raised doubts about whether France could really carry on the war in A group of French political leaders ! decided to carry out the war at the cost of less internal liberty. The government cracked down on anyone suspected of supporting a compromise peace. Many of the crackdowns and treason charges were just a result of war hysteria or calculated politcal opportunism. Expanded police powers also included control of public information and opinion. The censorship of newspapers and personal mail was already an established practice. Governments regularly used their power to prevent disclosure of military secrets and the airing of dangerous opinions considering war efforts. The other side of using police power on public opinion was the "organizing of enthusiasm," which could be thought of as:
Propaganda tries to force a doctrine on the whole people; the organization embraces within its scope only those who do not threaten on psychological grounds to become a brake on the further dissemination of the idea.
World War I provided a place for the birth of propaganda which countries used with even more frightening results during World War II. Governments used the media to influence people to enlist and to brainwash them war into supporting the war. The French prime minister used his power to draft journalists or defer them in exchange for favorable coverage. The German right created a new mass party, the Fatherland Party. It was backed by secret funds from the army and was devoted to propaganda for war discipline. By 1918, the Fatherland Party was larger than the Social Democratic Party. Germany had become quite effective at influencing the masses.
* The economic impact of the war was very disaproportioned. At one end there were those who profited from the war and at the other end were those who suffered under the effects of inflation. The opportunities to make enormous amounts of money in war manufacture were plentiful. War profiteers were a public scandal. Fictional new rich, like the manufacturer of shoddy boots in Jules Romains's Verdun had numerous real-life counterparts. However, government rarely intervened in major firms, as happened when the German military took over the Daimler motor car works for padding costs on war-production contracts.
* Governments tended to favor large, centralized industries over smaller ones. The war was a stimulus towards grouping companies into larger firms. When resources became scarce, nonessential firms, which tended to be small, were simply closed down. Inflation was the greatest single economic factor as war budges rose to astronomical figures and massive demand forced shor! tages of many consumer goods. Virtually ever able-bodied person was employed to keep up with the demand. This combination of high demand, scarcity, and full employment sent prices soaring, even in the best managed countries. In Britain, a pound sterling brought in 1919 about one-third of what it had bought in French prices approximately doubled during the war and it only got worse during the 1920's. Inflation rates were even higher in other belligerents The German currency ceased to have value in All of this had been forseen by John M. Keynes as a result of the Versailles Treaty:
The danger confonting us, therefore, is the rapid depression of the standard of life of the European populations to a point which will mean actual starvation for some (a point already reached in Russian and approximately reach in Austria).
Inflation affected different people quite differently. Skilled workers in strategic industries found that their wages kept pace with prices or even rose a little faster. Unskilled workers and workers in less important industries fell behind. Clerks, lesser civil servants, teachers, clergymen, and small shopkeepers earned less than many skilled labors. Those who suffered the most were those dependent on fixed incoming. The incomes of old people on pensions or middle class living on small dividends remained about the same while prices double or tripled. These dropped down into poverty. These "new poor" kept their pride by repairing old clothes, supplementing food budget with gardens, and giving up everything to appear as they had before the war. Inflation radically change the relative position of many in society. Conflicts arose over the differences in purchasing power. All wage earners had less real purchasing power at the end of the war than they had had at the beginning. To make matters worse some great fortunes were built during the wartime and postwar inflation. Those who were able to borrow large amounts of money could repay their debts in devalued currency from their war profit.
Four years of chaos and utter destruction had smashed the old world Europe. The most "advanced" quarter of the world had turned to violence and barbarism of its own accord. Progress and reason had been suppressed for destruction.
Moreover, it has brought to light an almost incredible phenomenon: the civilized nations know and understand one another so little that one can turn against the other with hate and loathing. Indeed, one of the great civilized nations is so universally unpopular that the attempt can actually be made to exclude it from the civilized community as "barbaric," although it has long proved its fitness by the magnificent contributions to that community which it has made.
The early part of the war satisfied the fascination with speed, violence, and the machine as manifested in the pre-war Futurists. Many movements shared a resolute "modernist" contempt for all academic styles in the arts, a hatred for bourgeois culture, and a commitment to the free expression of individuals. All these feelings were given an additional jolt of violence and anger by the horrors of the wartime experience. During the war there was a loss of illusions as described in All Quiet on the Western Front. Poets, like others, had gone to war in 1914 believing in heroism and nobility. Trench warfare hardened and embittered many.
Freud said of disillusionment: When I speak of disillusionment, everyone will know at once what i mean. One need not be a sentimentalist; one may perceive the biological and psychological necessity for surrering in the economy of human life, and yet condemn war both in its means and ends and long for the cessation of all wars.
British poet, Wilfred Own, who was killed in 1918 was transformed from a young romantic into a powerful denouncer of those who had sent young men off to war. In "Dulce et Decorum Est" he mocked "the old lie" that it was good to die for one's country, after giving a searing description of a gassed soldier coughing out his lungs. The anger of the soldier-poets was directed against those who had sent them to the war, not their enemy. The war experience did not produce new art forms or styles. It acted largely to make the harshest themes and the grimmest or most mocking forms of expression of prewar intellectual life seem more appropriate, and to fost experiments in opposition to the dominant values of contemporary europe. The Dada movement, which mocked old values and ridiculed stuffy bourgeois culture, was one of these movements. A mood of desolation and emptiness prevailed at the end of a war where great sacrifice had brought little gain. It was not clear where post-war anger would be focused, but it would definately be in antibourgeois politics.
The echoes of a world shattering were heard throughout the world as Europe collapsed into total war. These echoes were the sound of change as Europe was transformed socially, politicaly, economically, and intellectualy into a machine of complete destruction. Europe would never be the same again.
[imagine if 1/3 of all the boys at EVERY high school in America died]

10. Who bore the PHYSICAL brunt?
EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR I
ECONOMICALLY CRIPPLED *
What are we looking at?
____
Who won WWI?
_____
Who bore the PHYSICAL brunt?

11. This was all that remained of the Belgian town of Ypres in March 1919 after fierce fighting during WII reduced it to rubble.

12. An aerial view of Ypres under construction in 1930 which gives an idea of how the city looked before it was bombarded during WWI.

13. The Hotel de Ville in Arras, Northern France, looks more like a medieval ruins after it was heavily shelled during WWI.

14. A little girl is surrounded by the ruined buildings in the Belgian village of Neuve Eglise, also known as Nieuwkerke, which was heavily bombed during WWI.

15. EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR I
ECONOMICALLY CRIPPLED * – ‘TOV’ created DEBTOR NATIONS…
Loss of LAND & PROPERTY, Millions KILLED or WOUNDED, DEBT from the war…
ALLIED POWERS
Bore the brunt of the property damage…
CENTRAL POWERS
Paid most of the war’s REPARATIONS…

16. Is Germany going to be able to continue?
EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR I
ECONOMICALLY CRIPPLED ** – Germany lost its COLONIES, SHIPS & ability to PRODUCE… while paying REPARATIONS! ($33 B)
France OCCUPIES THE RUHR VALLEY, 1923
With all the economic and social problems Germany faced, it soon became impossible for her to keep paying reparations to the Allies. These payments had been set at an extremely high level, more than Germany, crippled by war, could afford.
In January 1923 France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr, an industrial area of German bordering their own countries. This region, full of factories and coalmines, contained resources the French and Belgians intended to use to make up for the unpaid reparations.
German workers refused to co-operate with the French and Belgian armies, and went on strike. The German government supported them. The French sent in their own workers, and arrested the leaders of the German strikers and the German police. This led to violence on both sides.
* Gold Standard:
The gold standard was a commitment by participating countries to fix the prices of their domestic currencies in terms of a specified amount of gold.
National money and other forms of money (bank deposits and notes) were freely converted into gold at the fixed price.
England adopted a de facto gold standard in 1717 after the master of the mint, Sir Isaac Newton, overvalued the guinea in terms of silver, and formally adopted the gold standard in 1819.
The United States, though formally on a bimetallic (gold and silver) standard, switched to gold de facto in 1834 and de jure in 1900 when Congress passed the Gold Standard Act. In 1834, the United States fixed the price of gold at $20.67 per ounce, where it remained until 1933.
Other major countries joined the gold standard in the 1870s. The period from 1880 to 1914 is known as the classical gold standard. During that time, the majority of countries adhered (in varying degrees) to gold. It was also a period of unprecedented economic growth with relatively free trade in goods, labor, and capital.
* The gold standard broke down during World War I, as major belligerents resorted to inflationary finance, and was briefly reinstated from 1925 to 1931 as the Gold Exchange Standard.
Under this standard, countries could hold gold or dollars or pounds as reserves, except for the United States and the United Kingdom, which held reserves only in gold.
This version broke down in 1931 following Britain’s departure from gold in the face of massive gold and capital outflows.
* In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nationalized gold owned by private citizens and abrogated contracts in which payment was specified in gold.
Between 1946 and 1971, countries operated under the Bretton Woods system. Under this further modification of the gold standard, most countries settled their international balances in U.S. dollars, but the U.S. government promised to redeem other central banks’ holdings of dollars for gold at a fixed rate of thirty-five dollars per ounce.
Persistent U.S. balance-of-payments deficits steadily reduced U.S. gold reserves, however, reducing confidence in the ability of the United States to redeem its currency in gold.
* Finally, on August 15, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon announced that the United States would no longer redeem currency for gold. This was the final step in abandoning the gold standard.
Widespread dissatisfaction with high inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s brought renewed interest in the gold standard. Although that interest is not strong today, it seems to strengthen every time inflation moves much above 5 percent. This makes sense: whatever other problems there were with the gold standard, persistent inflation was not one of them. Between 1880 and 1914, the period when the United States was on the “classical gold standard,” inflation averaged only 0.1 percent per year.
DAWES PLAN (1924)
Is Germany going to be able to continue?

17. EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR I
POLITICAL PROBLEMS – INSTABILITY… Struggle between who could solve problems – EXTREME LEFT vs. EXTREME RIGHT
…WHO WINS OUT?
LIBERALS, CONSERVATIVES & EXTREMISTS competed for political power!
‘RED SCARE’ in the U.S. (1920s)

18. ECONOMIC ISSUES & DEPRESSION IN EUROPE
Europe Between the Wars,

19. THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC Nov. 1918 – Nazi ‘take-over’ in 1933 DURING WWI:
* GERMAN REVOLUTION (Nov. 9, 1918)
AFTER WWI:
* 1919, NATIONAL ASSEMBLY convened in WEIMAR (new CONSTITUTION for Germany)
PROBLEMS?
1.) …had NO DEMOCRATIC TRADITION
2.) RIGHT-WING vs. LEFT-WING – LED TO INSTABILITY!
3.) Gov’t blamed for WWI LOSS & TREATY OF VERSAILLES * * * (“War Guilt” …national disgrace!)
Weimar Republic is an unofficial designation for the German state between 1919 and 1933.
The name derives from the city of Weimar, where its constitutional assembly first took place. The official name of the state was the German Reich, continuing the name from the pre-1918 German Empire.
The republic was a semi-presidential representative democracy, and emerged in the aftermath of the German Revolution of 1918–19.
* * * A national assembly was convened in Weimar, where a new constitution for the German Reich was written, and adopted on 11 August In its fourteen years, the Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremists (with paramilitaries – both left and right wing) and contentious relationships with the victors of the First World War.
The Weimar Republic successfully reformed the currency, and unified tax policies and the railway system. Germany eliminated most of the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles and never completely met its disarmament requirements, and eventually only paid a small portion of the war reparations by twice restructuring its debt through the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan.
Under the Locarno Treaties, Germany accepted the western borders of the republic, but the Eastern border remained debatable for the Weimar German governments.
From 1930 onwards President Hindenburg used emergency powers to back Chancellors Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher. The Great Depression, worsened by Brüning's policy of deflation, led to a surge in unemployment.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler became the new Chancellor of a coalition government, and Nazis held two out of remaining ten cabinet seats. Von Papen as Vice Chancellor was intended to be the "éminence grise" who would keep Hitler under control, using his close personal connection to Hindenburg. Within months, however, the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933 had brought about a state of emergency and wiped out constitutional civil liberties. Hitler's seizure of power allowed him to govern by decree without the involvement of the legislature. These events brought the Weimar Republic to an end, as democracy collapsed and a single-party state was created. The end of the Weimar Republic marked the beginning of Nazi Germany.
1.) Burden from the First World War - Treaty of Versailles
The growing post-war economic crisis was a result of lost pre-war industrial exports, the loss of supplies in raw materials and foodstuffs, and the loss of the colonies, along with worsening debt balances, but above all, the result of an exorbitant issue of promissory notes raising money to pay for the war.
Military-industrial activity had almost ceased, although controlled demobilisation kept unemployment at around one million. The fact that the Allies continued to blockade Germany until after the Treaty of Versailles did not help matters, either. The Allies permitted only low import levels of goods that most Germans could not afford.
After four years of war and famine, many German workers were exhausted, physically impaired and discouraged. Millions were disenchanted with capitalism and hoping for a new era. Meanwhile, the currency depreciated. The currency would continue to depreciate following the French invasion of the Ruhr.
* * * The German peace delegation in France signed the Treaty of Versailles, accepting mass reductions of the German military, the prospect of substantial war reparations payments to the victorious allies, and the controversial “War Guilt Clause.”
* * * Explaining the rise of extreme nationalist movements in Germany shortly after the war, British historian Ian Kershaw points to the "national disgrace" that was "felt throughout Germany at the humiliating terms imposed by the victorious Allies and reflected in the Versailles Treaty...with its confiscation of territory on the eastern border and even more so its 'guilt clause.'“
Adolf Hitler repeatedly blamed the republic and its democracy for accepting the oppressive terms of this treaty. The Republic's first Reichspräsident ("Reich President"), Friedrich Ebert of the SPD, signed the new German constitution into law on 11 August 1919.
* * * The new post-World War I Germany, stripped of all colonies, became 13.3% smaller in its European territory than its imperial predecessor. Of these losses, a large proportion consisted of provinces that were originally Polish, and Alsace-Lorraine, seized by Germany in 1870, where Germans constituted only part or a minority of local populations despite nationalist outrage at the fragmentation of Germany.
2.) Allied Rhineland occupation - Occupation of the Rhineland
The occupation of the Rhineland took place following the Armistice with Germany of 11 November The occupying armies consisted of American, Belgian, British and French forces.
In 1920, under massive French pressure, the Saar was separated from the Rhine Province and administered by the League of Nations until a plebiscite in 1935, when the region was returned to the German Reich. At the same time, in 1920, the districts of Eupen and Malmedy were transferred to Belgium. Shortly after, France completely occupied the Rhineland, strictly controlling all important industrial areas.
The actual amount of reparations that Germany was obliged to pay out was not the 132 billion marks decided in the London Schedule of 1921 but rather the 50 billion marks stipulated in the A and B Bonds.
Historian Sally Marks says the 112 billion marks in "C bonds" were entirely chimerical—a device to fool the public into thinking Germany would pay much more. The actual total payout from 1920 to 1931 (when payments were suspended indefinitely) was 20 billion German gold marks, worth about $5 billion US dollars or £1 billion British pounds billion was cash that came mostly from loans from New York bankers.
The rest was goods like coal and chemicals, or from assets like railway equipment. The reparations bill was fixed in 1921 on the basis of a German capacity to pay, not on the basis of Allied claims. The highly publicised rhetoric of 1919 about paying for all the damages and all the veterans' benefits was irrelevant for the total, but it did determine how the recipients spent their share. Germany owed reparations chiefly to France, Britain, Italy and Belgium; the US Treasury received $100 million.

20. THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC Nov. 1918 – Nazi ‘take-over’ in 1933 MISTAKES
‘HYPERINFLATION’
MISTAKES
…the Reich didn’t raise WAR-TIME TAXES! (unlike France – INCOME TAX)
* …abandoned the GOLD STANDARD (‘FIAT’)
…AFTER WWI
*** …then began to PRINT MONEY to PAY REPARATIONS!
3.) Hyperinflation - Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic
In the early post-war years, inflation was growing at an alarming rate, but the government simply printed more and more banknotes to pay the bills.
By 1923, the Republic claimed it could no longer afford the reparations payments required by the Versailles Treaty, and the government defaulted on some payments.
In response, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr region, Germany's most productive industrial region at the time, taking control of most mining and manufacturing companies in January Strikes were called, and passive resistance was encouraged. These strikes lasted eight months, further damaging the economy and the social life.
The strike prevented some goods from being produced, but one industrialist, Hugo Stinnes, was able to create a vast empire out of bankrupt companies. Because the production costs in Germany were falling almost hourly, the prices for German products were unbeatable. Stinnes made sure that he was paid in dollars, which meant that by mid-1923, his industrial empire was worth more than the entire German economy. By the end of the year, over two hundred factories were working full-time to produce paper for the spiralling bank note production. Stinnes' empire collapsed when the government-sponsored inflation was stopped in November 1923.
* * * In 1919, one loaf of bread cost 1 mark; by 1923, the same loaf of bread cost 100 billion marks.
Since striking workers were paid benefits by the state, much additional currency was printed, fuelling a period of hyperinflation. The 1920s German inflation started when Germany had no goods to trade.
The government printed money to deal with the crisis; this meant payments within Germany were made with worthless paper money, and helped formerly great industrialists to pay back their own loans. This also led to pay raises for workers and for businessmen who wanted to profit from it. Circulation of money rocketed, and soon banknotes were being overprinted to a thousand times their nominal value and every town produced its own promissory notes; many banks & industrial firms did the same.
The value of the Papiermark had declined from 4.2 Marks per U.S. dollar in 1914 to one million per dollar by August This led to further criticism of the Republic. On 15 November 1923, a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced at the rate of one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) Papiermark for one Rentenmark, an action known as redenomination. At that time, one U.S. dollar was equal to 4.2 Rentenmark. Reparation payments were resumed, and the Ruhr was returned to Germany under the Locarno Treaties, which defined the borders between Germany, France, and Belgium.[citation needed]
50-million mark banknote issued in 1923, worth approximately one US dollar when issued. Nine years earlier, 50 million marks would have been worth approximately 12 million US dollars. Within a few weeks, inflation made the banknote practically worthless.
The Republic was soon under attack from both left- and right-wing sources. The radical left accused the ruling Social Democrats of having betrayed the ideals of the workers' movement by preventing a communist revolution and sought to overthrow the Republic and do so themselves. Various right-wing sources opposed any democratic system, preferring an authoritarian, autocratic state like the 1871 Empire. To further undermine the Republic's credibility, some right-wingers (especially certain members of the former officer corps) also blamed an alleged conspiracy of Socialists and Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I.
In the next five years, the central government, assured of the support of the Reichswehr, dealt severely with the occasional outbreaks of violence in Germany's large cities. The left claimed that the Social Democrats had betrayed the ideals of the revolution, while the army and the government-financed Freikorps committed hundreds of acts of gratuitous violence against striking workers.
The first challenge to the Weimar Republic came when a group of communists and anarchists took over the Bavarian government in Munich and declared the creation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The uprising was brutally attacked by Freikorps, which consisted mainly of ex-soldiers dismissed from the army and who were well-paid to put down forces of the Far Left. The Freikorps was an army outside the control of the government, but they were in close contact with their allies in the Reichswehr.
On 13 March 1920, 12,000 Freikorps soldiers occupied Berlin and installed Wolfgang Kapp (a right-wing journalist) as chancellor (Kapp Putsch). The national government fled to Stuttgart and called for a general strike against the putsch. The strike meant that no "official" pronouncements could be published, and with the civil service out on strike, the Kapp government collapsed after only four days on 17 March.
Inspired by the general strikes, a workers' uprising began in the Ruhr region when 50,000 people formed a "Red Army" and took control of the province. The regular army and the Freikorps ended the uprising on their own authority. The rebels were campaigning for an extension of the plans to nationalise major industries and supported the national government, but the SPD leaders did not want to lend support to the growing USPD, who favoured the establishment of a socialist regime. The repression of an uprising of SPD supporters by the reactionary forces in the Freikorps on the instructions of the SPD ministers was to become a major source of conflict within the socialist movement and thus contributed to the weakening of the only group that could have withstood the National Socialist movement. Other rebellions were put down in March 1921 in Saxony and Hamburg.
In 1922, Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, which allowed Germany to train military personnel in exchange for giving Russia military technology. This was against the Treaty of Versailles, which limited Germany to 100,000 soldiers and no conscription, naval forces of 15,000 men, twelve destroyers, six battleships, and six cruisers, no submarines or aircraft. However, Russia had pulled out of World War I against the Germans as a result of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and was excluded from the League of Nations. Thus, Germany seized the chance to make an ally. Walther Rathenau, the Jewish Foreign Minister who signed the treaty, was assassinated two months later by two ultra-nationalist army officers.
Further pressure from the political right came in 1923 with the Beer Hall Putsch, also called the Munich Putsch, staged by the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler in Munich. In 1920, the German Workers' Party had become the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), or Nazi party, and would become a driving force in the collapse of Weimar. Hitler named himself as chairman of the party in July On 8 November 1923, the Kampfbund, in a pact with Erich Ludendorff, took over a meeting by Bavarian prime minister Gustav von Kahr at a beer hall in Munich.
Ludendorff and Hitler declared that the Weimar government was deposed and that they were planning to take control of Munich the following day. The 3,000 rebels were thwarted by the Bavarian authorities. Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for high treason, a minimum sentence for the charge. Hitler served less than eight months in a comfortable cell, receiving a daily stream of visitors before his release on 20 December While in jail, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf, which laid out his ideas and future policies. Hitler now decided to focus on legal methods of gaining power.
Some were skeptical about Germany’s government induced ‘hyperinflation’ …

21. 1925-1929: relative PEACE & STABILITY throughout Europe
REMEMBER THE DAWES PLAN?
Financial Relief… comes from the USA
BY 1922:
* …all of Europe had PRODUCTION & INFLATION problems – WHY?
* DEBTOR COUNTRIES couldn’t pay back debts...
: relative PEACE & STABILITY throughout Europe
DAWES PLAN, 1924
1.) Realistic REPARATIONS SCHEDULE
2.) Stabilize CURRENCY, strengthen ECONOMY, slow INFLATION

22. CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE U.S.
GREAT DEPRESSION GOES GLOBAL
Causes of the Great Depression in the U.S.
CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE U.S.
1.) OVER-PRODUCTION & UNDER-CONSUMPTION in the 1920s
* * Post-war production levels DOWN – TECHNOLOGY stayed up!
* * ECONOMIC ‘BUBBLE’ is created – farming & “Wall Street”

23. CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE U.S.
GREAT DEPRESSION GOES GLOBAL
Causes of the Great Depression in the U.S.
CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE U.S.
2.) 1929, U.S. STOCK MARKET CRASH
* Causes instability, insecurity

24. CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE U.S.
GREAT DEPRESSION GOES GLOBAL
Causes of the Great Depression in the U.S.
CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE U.S.
3.) 1930s – BANKS FAIL
* …instability & insecurity causes “BANK RUNS”

25. Why did the U.S. Depression spread globally?
GREAT DEPRESSION GOES GLOBAL
1930s – Instability Spreads
Why did the U.S. Depression spread globally?
1.) OVER-PRODUCTION & UNDER-CONSUMPTION – BUBBLE BURST!
* BANKRUPTCIES – FARMS & BUSINESSES
* MAJOR slow-down in agriculture: international trade SLOWS…
* PROTECTIONIST policies are used into the late 1920s/30s (TARIFFS)
2.) U.S. BANK FAILURES – credit dries up! STOP LENDING! * * *
* Post-WWI GLOBALIZATION becomes MAJOR PROBLEM!
* U.S. WAS ONLY CREDITOR – now they’re not…
Governments struggled with…
LAISSEZ-FAIRE vs. INTERVENTIONISM

26. GREAT DEPRESSION GOES GLOBAL
Causes of the Great Depression in the U.S.

29. EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR I
POLITICAL PROBLEMS
WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT?

30. * The gross domestic product (GDP) is one of the primary indicators used to gauge the health of a country's economy … It represents the total dollar value of all goods and services produced over a specific time period; you can think of it as the size of the economy … Usually, GDP is expressed as a comparison to the previous quarter or year. For example, if the year-to-year GDP is up 3%, this is thought to mean that the economy has grown by 3% over the last year.
Devastated European economies – the war devastated economies across continental Europe.
Not only did each country rack up significant amounts of war debt, they almost all suffered massive losses in gross domestic product over the course of the conflict.
France and Russia had each lost a third of their prewar output by the time they left the conflict.
The economic pain and massive debt load prompted the Allies to demand huge punitive damages from from the losing side after the war.
The burden of debt and reparation payments hobbled the Weimar Republic that governed Germany from the end of the war until Adolf Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s.
Germany stopped paying reparations in 1931, having paid only a small fraction of the sum the allies had demanded. The Allies also demanded that Austria, Hungary, and Turkey pay reparations, but their economies were so devastated by the war that they never made significant payments.
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (GDP) = primary indicator used to gauge the health of a country’s economy
…represents the total $ value of ALL goods & services produced over a year; think of it as the SIZE of the economy