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Regicide at Marseille |
DIPLOMACY AND BLACKMAIL
"Am I therefore become your enemy,
because I tell You the truth?"
Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians
Adolf Hitler's appointment in January, 1933, by Reichs-President von Hindenburg as the Chancellor of Germany was the death blow to the remnants of the European order which had survived the political and moral ravages of the first World War and the Paris Peace Conference. Gone was the "spirit of Locarno" which had helped Briand and Stresemann, in October 1925, to lay the foundations of a system for the general pacification of Europe. That inspiring trend was reversed. The agreements between Germany and her neighbors to submit their controversies to arbitration were cast aside by Nazi arrogance. France, twice invaded within the last fifty years by the German Army, felt particularly affected by the renewed menace from East of the Rhine. Security became a national obsession in France. A downward trend was also started in the life of the Reich's small neighbors, a growing tragedy which, alas, to the present day has not come to an end.
By 1934, when German rearmament admittedly was begun, the balance of power was already shifting away from the Western Democracies, for will-power and determination are just as potent factors as effective physical power in the shaping of the destinies of nations. And Hitler had what Nietzsche termed the "Wille zur Macht" (the will to attain power); in fact, it was the only qualification he had, which impressed me in my several discussions with the Fuehrer. That persuasive, almost mystic superiority complex however, he possessed to an exaggerated degree. It assured for this uneducated fanatic mastery over his highly educated nation. It determined both his ascendance and his doom.
The nineteenth century Concert of Europe, which had maintained relative peace in the world during 100 years, was gone for good, and the wartime division of the European powers into the victorious Entente and the defeated Central Powers had also disappeared by 1934. But no new balance of power or guiding influence had developed on the Continent. Particularly, in the heart of Europe all stability and cohesion were destroyed, which fact did not escape Hitler's attention. On the ruins of the venerable Austro-Hungarian Monarchy various small people endowed and stricken with a keen sense of independence
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were busy setting up their separate miniature national autarchies. Many of them were wary of the threat looming in the East in the shape of the giant Bolshevik Russia imbued with world-revolutionary ambitions. From then on, they also had to struggle against Hitler's schemes, whose drive for "living space" they could never halt in the disintegrated Valley of the Danube. Their situation became increasingly uncomfortable, when to Hitler's stepped up subversive actions the Western Democracies reacted with another menace, rapprochement to the Soviets. Wedged in between two brutal totalitarian dictatorships, the internal good order of these small states was exposed to infiltration and subversion by both the Nazi and the Communist ideologies and by the concomitant apparatuses at their command. Indeed, they were living dangerously.
Victory in the first World War had not benefited the Western European Democracies either. Britain relaxed in the post-war years and enjoyed the reduced amenities of a bygone Victorian age without accepting, however, the corresponding sacrifices. Her foreign policy was equally antiquated. In the shade of an imaginary "splendid isolation," British overall policy concerning Europe remained based on the centuries-old maxim: keep the Continent divided. Temporarily, this approach proved successful, since both Hitler and Stalin were pursuing a similar policy. The British position seemed quite comfortable with competition crippled and political cohesion disrupted on the Continent. To counterbalance France, at that time the strongest Continental power, the British Foreign Office had favored the creation of a stable German government led by Hitler to replace tottering democracy. It will be remembered that for more than a year after Hitler's take-over of the government the British still approved of him, while refractory France was being annoyed by the arrogant Nazis. The British believed that their respectability would not suffer from these manoevres-after all, Hitler had observed all the formalities of the game and had obtained power through democratic processes. Even Mr. Eden who disapproved of Prime Minister Neville ChambeHain's policy of "getting together" with the dictators, seemed to believe that Litvinov, although a Communist, "was a good European."1
While dark clouds of the approaching tempest were forming over complacent Britain, the waste of years-never to return-was even
1 Facing the Dictators, p. 182.
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more appalling in the course followed by the Third French Republic. The dynamism of the bourgeois French Revolution had been exhausted by time, by party strife and intrigue; worn out cliches no longer generated in the masses the courage and determination to stand up with eighteenth century slogans against the Proletarian Revolution of the twentieth century, whichever brand - Nazi or Bolshevik - it may have been. Unable to find the long overdue solutions to her pressing internal problems, or to develop a constructive European policy aimed at unification, France had become grievously decadent. In a rapidly changing world, with vast, novel tasks to perform, she fell back on outmoded, rigid diplomatic and legal formulas which did not fit her needs, but prevented reconciliation. Thoughtlessly, her leaders did not appraise properly the destructive aims of the Soviets, the difference between the weak Tsar Nicholas II, and the successor of Genghis Khan, the cunning Stalin, whom French political leaders of all shades - Barthou Laval, Herriot, and Leon Blum - were prepared to accept as an ally and even to trust. By habit, France reintroduced the quarantined Russians into the midst of their prospective victims. In her quest for security through restoration of the Franco-Russian alliance, France took a downhill road which was to lead her first into the morass of the Popular Front infected by the inclusion of the Communist Party and from there on, after Hitler and Stalin joined hands for the spoliation of Europe, down to the bottom, to defeat and surrender to the Nazis.
Nothing is more relative in the life of nations than power. The self-satisfied lethargy of France and Britain following the First World War automatically brought into prominence their junior partner in the victorious Entente: frustrated, yet upcoming Italy. Indeed, it was Mussolini, and Mussolini alone, who saved Austria from Hitler in July, 1934. At that time, Italy was the only major power which was fully rearmed and the Duce intended to make use of that investment before it became obsolete. But he was hesitant, as yet, to commit Italy either to her wartime Allies, who had disregarded her interests in the past, or to her traditional foe, Germany, who might mistreat her again in the future. To the dismayed Mr. de Kanya, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Duce confided in the autumn of 1934, shortly before starting his adventure in Abyssinia, that the "Mare Nostro," the sea so romantically coveted by D'Annunzio, was no more the Adriatic Sea but the Mediterranean, in which Basin Italy would replace the decadent
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British rule. That Empire was crumbling - said Mussolini - it would soon come to an end, for their armed establishment, even the British Navy, had been neglected to the point where they could no longer discharge their extended responsibilities.2 The Duce's firm logic was coupled, however, with short term wishful thinking. He did not live to see the anticipated end of the British Empire realized.
Following the murder of Dollfuss, which became a milestone in the history of European decline, the shocked French leaders hoped that Mussolini and Hitler would stay divided, that in French-Italian relations new combinations would become possible and that perhaps Italy could be won over into an alliance with France. But Yugoslavia remained unalterably hostile to Italy. Her opposition became a stumbling block to the French policy of rapprochement with Italy which could not be disregarded. For by antagonizing Yugoslavia, the French-Little Entente Alliance might have been loosened, even upset. French strategic thinking had been overrating grossly the value of the Little Entente insofar as the defense of France against eventual German aggression was concerned, for the Little Entente, as such, was operative practically only against Hungary. Even the Yugoslav mobilization in 1934, in support of the Nazis, did not modify this mistaken French evaluation.
While in Western Europe conditions remained unstable because of lack of political organization and leadership by the Great Powers, Central Europe and the Balkans grew shaky and confused as a result of overorganization of those small states. In February, 1933, under the impact of the Nazi take-over of Germany, the Yugoslav-Rumanian-Czechoslovak loosely knit alliance, the Little Entente, transformed itself into a permament international organization, while retaining its close ties with France and its good relations with Poland. One year later, in February, 1934, the Balkan Pact was signed combining Yugoslavia-Rumania-Greece-Turkey, but omitting Czechoslavakia, the third member of the Little Entente, and also Bulgaria, an indispensable link in any Balkan system. The reason for the latter omission was discovered one month later: the Balkan Pact was accompanied by a secret protocol, guaranteeing the territory of the signatories which caused friction between revisionist Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia defending her territorial
2 Mussolini spoke with disdain of the British to Prime Minister Gombos in 1935. The Mediterranean Fleet of the British had not been properly provided with armmunition and Mussolini believed that his navy could have destroyed that of Great Britain.
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status quo. Moreover, the policies of Greece and Turkey - both friendly to Hungary - did not coincide with those of the other two Balkan Fact partners opposed to Hungary. So, they held several meetings in 1934 to coordinate their divergent interests. Besides face-saving, very little was accomplished, for according to their geographical location these small states had to seek defense against different pressures weighing on their borders. Czechoslovakia, for instance, felt endangered mainly by Nazi Germany, whereas Yugoslavia, still out of Hitler's reach, was leaning on Germany against the expanding Italian influence on the shores of the Adriatic Sea.
At a meeting of the Balkan Entente (October 31, 1934), Greece, quite reasonably, refused to accept any responsibility outside of the Balkans in view of her limited resources. The ambitious Dr. Tevfik Rouchdy bey, Foreign Minister of Turkey, who liked to poke a finger into every pie, then launched the plan of merging the Little and the Balkan Ententes, since each of them was too weak to stand up alone against any aggressive great power. But Titulescu, the Foreign Minister of Rumania, a country not yet endangered by either the Soviets or the Nazis, wished to avoid all added obligations. Endowed with the Byzantine gift of pleasantly phrasing unpleasant decisions, he praised in flowery terms the ideal of both Ententes, which was identical: "the maintenance of peace, but in spheres so distinctly separated that it. would be absurd to ask the signatories of one pact to blindly shoulder the responsibilities of the other." The validity of this reasoning could not be doubted and therewith the move toward unity of the small Central European and Balkan states came to an end.
Thus, in autumn, 1934, when the Marseille murders suddenly inflamed the smouldering embers on the Continent, there existed no established authority to uphold the rule of law and justice, except the League of Nations, which was already wasting away. In March, 1933, Japan politely had given notice of her decision to withdraw from the League and the same year, in October, the Nazis suddenly quit with a bang. A medicine was then selected as a remedy which was to hasten the death of the patient: in September, 1934, prodded by France, in agreement with Britain and Italy, the Assembly admitted the Soviets to membership in the League of Nations. The always respectable Journal de Geneve reported (September 9), that it was the grand idea of Barthou, recommended also by Benes and Titulescu. "Like all men they
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are subject to error." To what an error! On January 27, 1934, Kaganovitch, at that time second in rank to Stalin, had declared: "Our task is precise: to use in every manner the divergencies among the capitalist countries and not allow them the possibility of resolving their own internal contradictions." Five years later Stalin, "the bulwark against Hitler," became the trigger man of the Second World War which knocked out France and brought under Soviet domination his sponsors, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. The argument proffered in Geneva, In the summer of 1934, in favor of the Soviets, had a ghastly resemblance to the motivation voiced nowadays to promote the admission of Red China to the United Nations: the requirement of universality, which, with America absent, was actually non-existent in the League from the very beginning. Within a few months, during the Abyssinian crisis, the world witnessed the fact that devoid of physical power, even the highest international authority of the world becomes worthless, unless it maintains a high moral standard. The Ribbentrop-Molotov pact gave the coup de grace to the League of Nations which, on December 14, 1939, still gathered enough energy to reach the eminently logical conclusion that "by its own actions the Soviet Union has expelled itself from the League of Nations."
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Regicide at Marseille |