Tension in Europe in the 1930s

The 1930s: From Crisis to Crisis

The 1930s saw the international order constructed at Paris and developed through the Locarno agreements come under sustained assault. Each successive crisis — Manchuria, Abyssinia, the Rhineland, Anschluss, the Sudetenland — tested the League and the policy of appeasement, and each test revealed further weaknesses. Keep the time-frames straight. Manchuria and Abyssinia are 1930s crises; do not mix them with 1920s events such as Corfu or Vilna.

The Abyssinian Crisis 1935–1936

In October 1935, Mussolini’s Italy invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), one of only two independent African nations. The League responded by imposing economic sanctions on Italy — a significant step, the first time sanctions had been applied against a major power. However, the sanctions excluded oil, coal, and steel, the resources Italy most needed to sustain military operations. Britain and France also negotiated the secret Hoare-Laval Pact, which proposed giving Mussolini most of the territory he sought in exchange for peace; the plan leaked and caused a political scandal, forcing both foreign ministers to resign.

Italy completed its conquest of Abyssinia by May 1936. The League lifted its sanctions two months later, on 15 July 1936. The crisis had multiple consequences: it demonstrated that the League could impose sanctions but not make them effective without full participation; it pushed Mussolini towards closer alignment with Hitler; and it revealed the lengths to which Britain and France would go to avoid confrontation with a major power.

Hitler’s Challenges to Versailles

Adolf Hitler came to power explicitly committed to overturning the Versailles settlement. He moved methodically through a series of unilateral actions, each one testing whether Britain and France would respond with force. In March 1935, he publicly announced the existence of a German air force (forbidden at Versailles) and reintroduced conscription. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935, under which Britain allowed Germany a navy up to 35 per cent of the Royal Navy’s tonnage, appeared to accept German rearmament without demanding equivalent concessions.

In March 1936, German troops remilitarised the Rhineland — a direct violation of both the Versailles Treaty and the Locarno Treaties, which Germany had voluntarily signed in 1925. France had the legal right to respond militarily. However, neither France nor Britain took action. French military commanders argued they needed full mobilisation to respond, which the government was unwilling to order; British leaders believed Germany had legitimate grievances and that a remilitarised Rhineland was not a cause for war. The failure to respond encouraged Hitler to believe that bolder moves would also go unchallenged.

The Policy of Appeasement

Appeasement has been assessed in sharply contrasting ways by historians. The traditional “Guilty Men” view, popularised in 1940 by a pamphlet written by Michael Foot and others, presented Chamberlain and his colleagues as naive fools who fed a crocodile hoping to be eaten last. This interpretation dominated British political memory for a generation.

From the 1960s, revisionist historians such as A.J.P. Taylor have offered more nuanced readings. Taylor argued in The Origins of the Second World War (1961) that Hitler was an opportunist rather than a long-term planner, and that Western statesmen made reasonable decisions given their information. Later revisionists added that British public opinion was strongly against another war in the 1930s, that rearmament was not yet complete, and that Chamberlain’s options were more limited than his critics allowed. R.A.C. Parker then challenged that defence, arguing Chamberlain had real alternatives, such as an alliance with the Soviet Union, and chose not to take them. Most contemporary historians present appeasement as a defensible policy in 1936–37 that became increasingly untenable as Hitler’s aggression escalated beyond revisionist demands into outright conquest.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Outbreak of War

The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939 shocked Western governments. The ideological enemies of fascism and communism had concluded a non-aggression agreement, and its secret protocol divided Eastern Europe between them. Stalin had been negotiating with Britain and France for a mutual security agreement through the summer of 1939, but grew frustrated at the slow pace of talks and the absence of a genuine military commitment. His decision to align with Germany eliminated the threat of a two-front war for Hitler.

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France, having given Poland a guarantee in March 1939, declared war on 3 September. The Second World War had begun — though historians continue to debate how far the Versailles settlement, the Depression, the failures of appeasement, or Hitler’s personal ideology were the decisive causes.