How the Research Is Empirically Examined 95
but failed. Then, on August 23, 1939, the fascist Hitler and the communist
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin amazed the world by signing a nonaggression
pact in which they promised not to attack each other. Now, that Hitler was
sure that Britain and France would not intervene, he invaded Poland. Brit-
ain and France, which honored their promise to defend Poland, declared
war on Germany two days later. The Second World War had broken out.
The war quickly spread. Hitler turned his forces to the Balkans, North
Africa, and westward, and German forces invaded Norway and crossed
Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The German army
overwhelmed the Maginot Line.^88 In six weeks, France surrendered. The
ominous German victory forced the British to evacuate an expeditionary
force that consisted of some 340,000 troops and their equipment that were
stranded on France’s beaches. Paris itself fell in June 1940. At the same
time, to make sure that the United States would not participate in the war,
in September 1940 a tripartite agreement was signed between Japan, Ger-
many, and Italy, which required each of the three axis countries to help the
others if it were attacked by an unallied great power, such as the United
States.
In the ensuing months, the German Luftwaffe bombarded Britain in an
attempt to force it to surrender. Instead of invading Britain, Germany’s
forces launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, their former ally, in
June 1941. On December 7, 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the
United States at Pearl Harbor. Almost immediately, Germany also declared
war on the United States. The Japanese attack on the United States, which
was carried out without any provocation like the German challenged, put
an end to American isolationism and allowed U.S. President Franklin Roo-
sevelt to form a coalition with Britain and the Soviet Union against the
fascists.
The chain of events that led to the outbreak of the Second World War
and its expansion to the global world described above stemmed from the
multipolarity in the distribution of global power that occurred in the world
in the years preceding the war, which was characterized by three aspects:
(1) Atomization of the international system. After the First World War, sover-
eign countries, which were divided into smaller components, became too
many and of unequal power, particularly after 1919, when the number of
great powers decreased and the number of countries formed on their ruins
increased. Thus, in 1914, there were just 22 key countries in Europe, and
in 1921 the number was nearly doubled; (2) The absence of global leadership.
The decline of Great Britain as leader of the global economic system and
the global economic crisis of the 1930s, combined with the reluctance of
its heir, the United States, to lead the system, also catalyzed the war;^89 and
(3) The weakness of institutional barriers. The failure of the League of Nations
to respond collectively to aggressive actions underlined the weakness of
the institutional barriers to preventing war. When Germany withdrew from