the League was weakened by the fact that the United States— whose president Wood-
row Wilson had been the League’s principal architect— itself refused to join, retreat-
ing instead to an isolationist foreign policy. Nor did Rus sia join, nor were any of the
vanquished states of the war permitted to participate. The League’s legal authority was
weak, and the instruments it had for enforcing the peace proved in effec tive.
Fourth, the blueprint for a peaceful international order enshrined in Wilson’s Four-
teen Points failed. Wilson had called for open diplomacy— “open covenants of peace,
openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of
any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in public view.”^7 Point three
was a reaffirmation of economic liberalism, the removal of economic barriers among
all the nations consenting to the peace. The League, a “general association of nations”
that would ensure war never occurred again, would maintain order. But these
princi ples were not adopted. In the words of historian E. H. Carr, “The characteristic
feature of the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 was the abrupt descent from the
visionary hopes of the first de cade to the grim despair of the second, from a utopia
which took little account of real ity to a real ity from which every ele ment of utopia was
rigorously excluded.”^8 Liberalism and its utopian and idealist ele ments were replaced
by realism as the dominant international- relations theory— a fundamentally divergent
theoretical perspective. (See Chapter 3.)
The world from which these realists emerged was a turbulent one. The German
economy imploded; the U.S. stock market plummeted; and the world economy sput-
tered, and then collapsed. Japan marched into Manchuria in 1931 and into the rest
of China in 1937; Italy overran Ethiopia in 1935; fascism, liberalism, and communism
clashed.Key Developments
in the interwar years■ Three empires collapse: Rus sia by
revolution, the Austro- Hungarian
Empire by dismemberment, and the
Ottoman Empire by external wars
and internal turmoil. These collapses
lead to a resurgence of nationalisms.
■ German dissatisfaction with the
World War I settlement (VersaillesTreaty) leads to the rise of Fascism
in Germany. Germany finds allies in
Italy and Japan.
■ A weak League of Nations is unable
to respond to Japa nese, Italian, and
German aggression. Nor can it
prevent or reverse widespread
economic depression.i n Focus
40 CHAPTER TWO ■ h istorical context oF international relationsESSIR7_CH02_020_069_11P.indd 40 6/14/16 10:02 AM