Europe in an Age of Dictatorship, 1919–39567youngest general in Europe (at thirty-three) in 1926.
His mixture of nationalism, military dictatorship,
Falangist fascism, monarchism, and clericalism did not
precisely fit the mold of fascist movements elsewhere,
but it won the military support of both Mussolini, who
sent Franco seventy-five thousand soldiers, and Hitler
during the civil war. The Soviet Union similarly aided
the republic. General Franco, proclaimed chief of the
Spanish state by the insurgents in late 1936, led the
Nationalist armies in the steady destruction of the re-
public and Basque and Catalan separatist regimes. The
civil war ended in 1939 after Barcelona fell to an assault
by allied Nationalist and Italian troops and Madrid sur-
rendered. Three years of fighting had killed more than
700,000 people in combat and at least 100,000 civil-
ians. General Franco replaced the republic with a dicta-
torship that lasted until his death in 1975.
The Global Struggle for Freedom
from Europe
The most ironic problem confronting the European
democracies was that they opposed self-government
outside of Europe. Native leaders, nationalist organiza-
tions, and armed uprisings already characterized the
global resistance to imperialism before 1914. The suc-
cess of Japanese arms in 1905 and Chinese revolutions
in 1900 and 1911 inspired Asian nationalists, just as the
Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and the Arab Revolt of
1916 stirred the Islamic world. By 1919 most regions of
the world heard voices such as that of the Bengali poet
Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in Lit-
erature for the simple force of lines such as his prayer,
“My father, let my country awake.”
World War I exposed the vulnerability of European
armies and eroded the moral position of Western pro-
paganda. The Allies had proclaimed that they were
fighting to make the world “safe for democracy.” They
had promised peace based upon principles such as “na-
tional self-determination” (in the words of Wilson’s
Fourteen Points), and they recruited millions of
Africans and Asians to serve Europe under these ban-
ners. India alone sent 1.3 million soldiers and replace-
ment laborers to aid Britain; Algeria, Indochina, and
West Africa sent 650,000 to France. A few colonial
voices had questioned the war, as John Chilembwe did
in East Africa. He simply asked why Africans were “in-
vited to shed our innocent blood in this world’s war.”
(Chilembwe wound up being shot by the police.) Most
nationalists, including Ghandi, stood by their wartime
governments until 1918, hoping that their loyalty
would be rewarded. But World War I did not bring
democracy or national self-determination to Africa and
Asia. Instead, it created new colonies (especially in the
Middle East) through the League of Nations mandate
system. Before the ink had dried on the peace settle-
ments, nationalists again challenged European imperial-
ism. An Egyptian nationalist party, the Wafd,led an
insurrection in 1919 and thereafter combined passive
resistance and terrorism until the British granted them
independence in 1922. A Syrian national congress pro-
claimed independence from France in 1920, and a simi-
lar congress at Nablus in 1922 called for the
independence of Transjordan and Palestine from
Britain. The French rejected Syrian independence and
took Damascus by force; they then faced a decade of
Druse rebellion and an all-out war in 1925–27. The
British granted Transjordan autonomy in 1923 and in-
dependence in 1928, but they kept control of Palestine,
where the question of a Jewish state was already an ex-
plosive issue. The British had promised “a national
home for the Jewish people” in the Balfour Declaration
of 1917, but immigration led to anti-Jewish riots in
1921 and 1929. The British backed down and curbed
immigration in 1930. A Pan-Arab Congress of 1937
called for Palestinian independence and condemned
the projected Jewish state, but neither Palestinians nor
Zionists would accept British compromises.
Anti-imperialism took a different form in India.
Ghandi began his civil disobedience movement in April
1919 and the noncooperation movement in 1920. He
was jailed in 1922 but still insisted upon nonviolence: “I
discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of the truth
did not admit of violence being inflicted upon one’s op-
ponent, but that he must be weaned from error by sym-
pathy and patience.” The Indian nationalist movement,
known as the Congress, grew increasingly radical yet
accepted Ghandi’s doctrines. By the 1930s Ghandi had
become such a revered leader that when he announced
a “fast unto death” the British capitulated to his de-
mands in six days.
Other patterns of anti-imperialism flourished in the
Far East. A scholarly Buddhist monk, U Ottama, led
Burmese resistance to Britain by blending religious re-
vival and nationalism. Islam similarly strengthened na-
tionalism in the East Indies; on the island of Java
(today, Indonesia), the Sarekat Islam had 2.5 million
members opposing the Dutch in 1919. When Asian na-
tionalist movements did not ally with such religious re-
vivals, they often found secular support in newly