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

Constant efforts by Portugal, Italy, and Germany to win recognition for the rebels as “belligerents” under international law were blocked by Britain, France, and Russia, Such recognition would have allowed the rebel forces those rights on the high seas which the recognized government of Madrid was in practice being denied. Russia wished to extend belligerent rights to Franco only if all foreign volunteers were withdrawn first. While debating and quibbling went on about issues like belligerency, supervision by patrols, withdrawal of volunteers, and such before the Nonintervention Committee in London, the Franco rebel forces, with their foreign contingents of Moors, Italians, and Germans, slowly crushed the Loyalist forces.

As a result of the nonintervention policy, the military preponderance of the rebels was very large except in respect to morale. The rebels generally had about 500 or even more planes while the government had at one time as many as 150. It has been estimated that the greatest concentration of Loyalist artillery was 180 pieces at the Battle of Teruel in December 1937, while the greatest concentration of rebel artillery was 1,400 pieces against 120 on the Loyalist side at the battle on the Ebro in July 1938. The Italian Air Force was very active, with 1,000 planes making over 86,000 flights in 5,318 separate operations during which it dropped 11,584 tons of bombs during the war. With this advantage the “Nationalist” forces were able to join their southwestern and northwestern contingents during 1936, to crush the Basques and form a continuous territory between Galicia and Navarre across northern Spain in 1937, to drive eastward across Spain to the east coast in 1938, thus cutting Loyalist Spain in two; to capture most of Catalonia, including Barcelona, in January 1939; and to close in on Madrid in 1939. The Loyalist capital surrendered on March 28th. England and France recognized the Franco government on February 27, 1939, and the Axis troops were evacuated from Spain after a triumphal march through Madrid in June 1939.

When the war ended, much of Spain was wrecked, at least 450,000 Spaniards had been killed (of which 130,000 were rebels, the rest Loyalists), and an unpopular military dictatorship had been imposed on Spain as a result of the actions of non-Spanish forces. About 400,000 Spaniards were in prisons, and large numbers were hungry and destitute. Germany recognized this problem, and tried to get France to follow a path of conciliation, humanitarian reform, and social, agricultural, and economic reform. This advice was rejected, with the result that Spain has remained weak, apathetic, war-weary, and discontented ever since.

XIII THE DISRUPTION OF EUROPE, 1937-1939

Austria Infelix ,1933-1938

The Czechoslovak Crisis, 1937-193$

The Year of Dupes, 1939

Austria Infelix, 1933-1938

The Austria which was left after the Treaty of Saint-Germain was so weak economically that its life was maintained only by financial aid from the League of Nations and the Western democratic states. Its area of population had been so reduced that it consisted of little more than the great city of “Vienna surrounded by a huge but inadequate suburb. The city, with a population of two millions in a country whose population had been reduced from 52 to 6.6 millions, had been the center of a great empire, and now was a burden on a small principality. Moreover, the economic nationalism of the Succession States like Czechoslovakia cut this area off from the lower Danube and the Balkans whence it had drawn its food supply in the prewar period.

Worse than this, the city and the surrounding countryside were antithetical in their outlooks on every political, social, or ideological issue. The city was Socialist, democratic, anticlerical if not antireligious, pacifist, and progressive in the nineteenth-century meaning of the word “progress”; the country was Catholic if not clerical, ignorant, intolerant, belligerent, and backward.

Each area had its own political party, the Christian Socialists in the country and the Social Democrats in the city. These were so evenly balanced that in none of the five elections from 1919 to 1930 did the vote polled for either party fall below 35 percent or rise above 49 percent of the total vote cast. This meant that the balance of power in Parliament fell to the insignificant minor parties like the Pan-Germans or the Agrarian League. Since these minor groups threw in their lot with the Christian Socialists from 1920 onward, the dichotomy between the city and the country was transformed into a division between the government of the capital city (dominated by the Social Democrats) and that of the federal government (dominated by the Christian Socialists).

The Social Democrats, although very radical and Marxist in word, were very democratic and moderate in deed. In control of the whole country from 1918 to 1920, they were able to make peace, to crush out the threat of Bolshevism from Hungary to the east or from Bavaria to the north, to establish an effective democratic constitution with considerable autonomy for the local states (formerly provinces), and to give the new country a good impetus toward becoming a twentieth-century welfare state. The measure of their success may be seen in the fact that the Communists never were able to get established after 1919 or to elect a member to Parliament. On the other hand, the Social Democrats were unable to reconcile their desire for union with Germany (called Anschluss) with the need for financial aid from the Entente Powers who opposed this.

An agreement between the Pan-Germans and the Christian Socialists to put Anschluss on the shelf and concentrate on getting financial aid from the victorious Entente made it possible to overthrow the coalition Cabinet of Michael Mayr in June 1921, and replace it by a Pan-German-Christian Socialist alliance under the Pan-German Johann Schober. In May 1922, this alliance was reversed when the Christian Socialist leader, Monsignor Ignaz Seipel, a Catholic priest, became chancellor. Seipel dominated the federal government of Austria until his death in August 1932, and his policies were carried on after that by his disciples, Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. Seipel was able to achieve a certain amount of financial reconstruction by wringing international loans from the victorious Powers of 1918. He achieved this, in spite of Austria’s poor credit status, by insisting that he would be unable to prevent Anschluss if Austria reached a stage of financial collapse.

In the meantime the Social Democrats in control of the city and state of Vienna embarked upon an amazing program of social welfare. The old monarchical system of indirect taxes was replaced by a system of direct taxes which bore heavily on the well-to-do. With an honest, efficient administration and a balanced budget, the living conditions of the poor were transformed. This was especially notable in regard to housing. Before 1914 this had been deplorable. A census of 1917 showed that 73 percent of all apartments were “one room” (with over 90 percent of workers’ apartments in this class), and of these, 92 percent had no sanitary facilities, 95 percent had no running water, and 77 percent had no electricity or gas; many had no outside ventilation. Although this one room was smaller than 12 feet by 15 feet in size, 17 percent had a lodger, usually sharing a bed. As a result of the housing shortage, disease (especially tuberculosis) and crime were rampant, and real-estate values rose over 2,500 percent in the fifteen years 1885-1900. These economic conditions had been maintained by a very undemocratic political system under which only 83,000 persons, on a property basis, were allowed to vote and 5,500 of the richest were allowed to choose one-third of all seats on the city council.