576 Chapter 29
The Long Armistice and the Origins
of World War II
The two world wars of the twentieth century were
closely related to each other, with the second originat-
ing in the disputed outcome of the first. Winston
Churchill, whose history of World War II won him the
Nobel Prize in literature, saw the wars as a new Thirty
Years’ War, interrupted by a long armistice in which
weary and devastated countries rebuilt their capacity to
fight. The peace settlements that ended World War I,
and the bitter nationalism that these treaties produced,
linked the two wars. Opposition to the peace treaties
was especially strong in the dictatorships that emerged
during the 1920s and the 1930s, and in some cases the
treaties were a significant factor in the rise of dictator-
ship. Defeat gave German territory to France, Belgium,
Denmark, and Poland (see map 28.1); moreover, Ger-
man nationalists were outraged by the war guilt clause,
reparations payments, military restrictions, and the de-
militarization of the Rhineland. Defeat similarly cost
Russia Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, and Bessarabia;
the loss of these buffers on Russia’s western frontier
produced anxiety in the Kremlin because neighboring
states were vehemently anti-Communist. Victory failed
to satisfy Italian nationalists because the treaties had
denied Italy some of the territory that the Allies had
promised as compensation for Italian participation in
the war. Even in victorious Britain and France, many
asked if World War I had been worth the cost; many
British and American critics of the treaties opposed
French efforts to enforce the treaty, making the cam-
paign of German and Italian critics easier.
Battles over the peace treaties began as the ink on
them dried. In 1919 alone, six armed disputes broke out
over territorial settlements in Europe. The new state of
Czechoslovakia and the reborn state of Poland fought
over a frontier district, as did Austria and Hungary,
both now small remnants of the once vast Habsburg
Empire. Italian nationalists occupied the town of Fiume
on the Yugoslavian border, which had been denied to
Italy in the peace treaty. Thus, when the League of Na-
tions was formally organized in January 1920, it inher-
ited a host of problems spawned by the Peace of Paris.
The gravest issue of the early 1920s was the Ver-
sailles Treaty’s provision for reparations payments by
Germany to fund the reconstruction of war-torn Bel-
gium and France. A series of Allied conferences labored
to refine this question, but repeated German failures to
make payments produced the first severe postwar crisis
in 1923 when the Weimar government did not deliver
in-kind payments of timber. The frustrated Poincaré
government in France, supported by the Belgians but
not by the British or the Americans, insisted upon en-
forcing the treaty to occupy part of western Germany
and extract in-kind payments (especially coal) directly.
This led to a Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr val-
ley in January 1923, to a rupture of cooperation among
the former western allies, and to a German campaign of
noncooperation. To encourage noncooperation, the
Weimar government paid striking workers by simply
printing new money, therefore fueling the devastating
inflation of 1923. The occupation of the Ruhr failed to
provide France with reparations and cost the French
hostile international opinion; Britain and America orga-
nized to save the German economy through the Dawes
Plan and the French retreated.
A more optimistic mood characterized Franco-
German relations during the later 1920s, the result of
good relations between Briand and Stresemann. This
short-lived period of hope produced its most notewor-
thy success in the Locarno Treaty of 1925 in which
France, Belgium, Germany, Britain, and Italy guaranteed
the western borders of Germany (thereby gaining
German acceptance of the retrocession of Alsace and
Lorraine to France) and established arbitration treaties
to resolve future disputes. In the same spirit, Briand and
Stresemann collaborated to secure German admission
to the League of Nations in 1926. At its most idealistic
moment, the “spirit of Locarno” stretched to create the
idealistic Kellogg-Briand Pact (or the Pact of Paris) of
1928, in which the powers accepted a proposal by U.S.
secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg for the renunciation
of aggressive war. Although ratified by many states and
embraced by the League of Nations, this toothless
treaty contained no means of enforcement, not even
trade sanctions. Dawes received the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1925, Briand and Stresemann shared the prize for
1926, and Kellogg received it in 1929, but these awards
were a measure of the world’s hopes for peace in Eu-
rope, not a measure of success.
The most insistent challenge to the peace treaties of
1919 initially came from Italy. Mussolini was in power
for less than a year when he attempted to annex the is-
land of Corfu (off the coast of Albania and Greece) in
mid-1923, only to be forced to back down by British
pressure. He had better fortune in advancing Italian ir-
rendentist nationalism by resolving the Fiume question
in a 1924 treaty with Yugoslavia, which recognized the
Italian annexation of the town. An Italo-Albanian agree-
ment of 1926 made the small Balkan state a virtual pro-
tectorate of Fascist Italy, a preliminary step in the
annexation of Albania in early 1939. In 1928 Mussolini