Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Italian drive to build up a political and economic bloc in central Europe in the period 1927-1934 was both anti-German and anti-Little Entente. This was an impossible combination, for the division of Europe into revisionist and antirevisionist Powers made it impossible for Italy to create a new alignment cutting through this line of conflict. By following an anti-Little Entente and pro-Hungarian policy, Mussolini was anti-French and thus inevitably pro-German, something which Mussolini never was and never wished to be. It took him seven years, however, to realize the illogic of his position.

In these seven years, 1927-1934, Hungary rather than Germany was the most active revisionist force in Europe. By working with Hungary, with the reactionary elements in Austria and Bulgaria, and with dissident Croatian elements in Yugoslavia, Mussolini sought to weaken the Little Entente (especially Yugoslavia) and to create troubled waters for Fascist fishing. He insisted that Italy was a dissatisfied Power because of disappointment over its lack of colonial gains at Versailles in 1919, and the refusal of the League to accede to Tommaso Tittoni’s request for a redistribution of the world’s resources in accordance with population needs made in 1920. It is true that Italy’s population and raw-material problems were acute, but the steps taken by Mussolini offered no hope of alleviating them.

Italy’s Danube policy culminated in a treaty of friendship with Austria in 1930 and a series of political and economic agreements with Austria and Hungary known as the “Rome Protocols” in 1934. The Austrian government under Engelbert Dollfuss destroyed the democratic institutions of Austria, wiped out all Socialist and Working-class organizations, and established a one-party, dictatorial, corporative state at Mussolini’s behest in February—April 1934. Hitler took advantage of this to attempt a Nazi coup in Austria, murdering Dollfuss in July 1934, but he was prevented from moving into the country by a hurried mobilization of Italian troops on the Brenner frontier and a stern warning from Mussolini. This significant event revealed that Italy was the only major Power prepared to fight for Austria’s independence and that Mussolini’s seven years of work for the revisionist cause had been a mistake. It was, however, a mistake from which the Duce learned nothing. Instead, he condoned an assassination plot by extreme revisionist elements, including the Bulgarian IMRO, Croation separatists, and Hungarian extremists. This resulted in the murder of Alexander, the centralist Serb King of Yugoslavia, and Jean Louis Barthou, the foreign minister of France, at Marseilles in October 1934.

Hitler’s ascension to office in Germany in January 1933 found French foreign policy paralyzed by British opposition to any efforts to support collective security or to enforce German observation of its treaty obligations by force. As a result, a suggestion from Poland in April 1933 for joint armed intervention in Germany to remove Hitler from office was rejected by France. Poland at once made a nonaggression pact with Germany and extended a previous nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union (January-May, 1934). This inaugurated a policy of balancing between these two Great Powers which left Poland ripe for the Fourth Partition, which came in 1939.

After the advent to office in France of a new conservative coalition government with Jean Louis Bathou as foreign minister in February 1934, France began to adopt a more active policy against Hitler. This policy sought to encircle Germany by bringing the Soviet Union and Italy into a revived alignment of France, Poland, the Little Entente, Greece, and Turkey. A Balkan Pact of Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey was concluded as early as February 1934; French relations with the Little Entente were tightened as a consequence of visits by Barthou to the various capitals. Russia was brought into the League of Nations in September 1934; a French-Italian agreement was signed in January 1935; a common front against German rearmament (which had been announced in March) was made by France, Italy, and Britain at the Stresa Conference in April 1935, and Germany’s action was denounced by the League of Nations the same week; a French-Soviet alliance and a Czech-Soviet alliance were made in May 1935, the latter to be binding on Russia only after the earlier French-Czech alliance went into effect. In the course of building this united front against Germany, but before Italy had been brought into it, Barthou and King Alexander were assassinated at Marseilles, as we have indicated (October 1934). This did not stop the project, for Pierre Laval took Barthou’s place and carried out his predecessor’s plans, although much less effectively. It was, accordingly, Pierre Laval who brought Italy into this arrangement in January 1935 and the Soviet Union in May 1935.

Laval was convinced that Italy could be brought into the anti-German front only if its long-standing grievances and unfulfilled ambitions in Africa could be met. Accordingly, Laval gave Mussolini seven percent of the stock of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa Railway (which ran from French Somaliland on the Red Sea to the capital of Ethiopia), a stretch of desert 114,000 square miles in extent but containing only a few hundred persons (sixty-two, according to Mussolini himself) on the border of Libya, a small wedge of territory between French Somaliland and Italian Eritrea, a settlement of the citizenship and education status of Italian immigrants in French Tunisia, and “the right to ask for concessions throughout Ethiopia.”

This last point was an important one because, while Laval insisted that he had made no agreement which jeopardized Ethiopia’s independence or territorial integrity, he made it equally clear that Italian support against Germany was more important than the integrity of Ethiopia in his eyes. France had been Ethiopia’s only real friend for many years. It had engineered a Triparite agreement of Britain, Italy, and France to permit no change in Ethiopia’s status without Tripartite consent in 1906, and had brought Ethiopia into the League of Nations over British objections in 1923. Italy, on the other hand, had been prevented from conquering Ethiopia in 1896 only by a decisive defeat of her invading force at the hands of the Ethiopians themselves, while in 1925 Britain and Italy had cut Ethiopia up into economic spheres by an agreement which was annulled by a French appeal to the League of Nations. Laval’s renunciation of France’s traditional support of Ethiopian independence and integrity was thus of great importance, and brought the three governments concerned (Italy, Britain, and France) into agreement on this issue.

This point of view, however, was not shared by public opinion in these three countries. In France, opinion was too divided to allow us to make any categorical statements about its nature, but it is probable that a majority was in favor of extending collective security to Ethiopia, while an overwhelming majority was convinced that Germany should be the primary object of this instrument of international action. In Italy, it is likely that a majority opposed both Mussolini’s war on Ethiopia and the League’s efforts to stop this by economic sanctions.

In England, an overwhelming majority was in support of the League of Nations and sanctions against Italy. This was clear from the so-called Peace Ballot of 1935 which, on the basis of a privately conducted straw vote of the English electorate, showed that, of 11 1/2 million polled, over 11 million supported membership in the League, over 10 million supported economic sanctions, and over 6.7 million supported (while only 2.3 million opposed) military sanctions against aggressors. This point of view was opposed by the pacifist Left wing of the Labour Party and by the imperialist Right wing of the Conservative Party. It was also opposed by the British government itself. Sir John Simon (the foreign secretary), Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell (the first lord of the Admiralty), and Stanley Baldwin (leader of the party and prime minister) denounced the Peace Ballot and its collective-security basis while the polling was in process, but hastened to give their verbal support as soon as the results became evident. Baldwin, who in November, 1934, had declared that a “collective peace system” was “perfectly impracticable,” assured the organizers of the ballot that “the foreign policy of the Government is founded upon the League of Nations,” when the results were revealed in July 1935. On this basis was erected one of the most astonishing examples of British “dual” policy in the appeasement period. While publicly supporting collective security and sanctions against Italian aggression, the government privately negotiated to destroy the League and to yield Ethiopia to Italy. They were completely successful in this secret policy.