A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe (14 page)

Meanwhile, Europe sizzled with tension and numerous incidents only served to heighten that tension. War twice broke out in the Balkans in 1912–13. The Balkan League, consisting of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia, conquered Ottoman-held Macedonia, Albania and Thrace in the First Balkan War;
the Second Balkan War saw Serbia, Greece and Romania arguing with Bulgaria over the division of the spoils from the first war. Both Austria-Hungary and Germany looked on in alarm as Serbia emerged from these conflicts, its power and status greatly enhanced. War was not far off. It just needed one spark to ignite it.

Gavrilo Princip, born in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1894, provided
that spark. In Belgrade to study, he joined the clandestine Serbian nationalist organisation, the Black Hand, a group that sought union between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On 28 June 1914 he assassinated the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo.

When the government in Vienna demanded
that investigators be given complete access to the murder scene, the Serbians replied less than enthusiastically. The Austrians seized the opportunity to declare war, starting a domino effect. Towards the end of July, the Russians, having assured the Serbians of their support, declared war on Austria and Germany. Germany responded by declaring war on Russia and then, at the beginning of August,
on Russia’s ally, France. When German troops invaded neutral Belgium on 4 August, Britain had no alternative but to enter the fray, declaring war on Germany. Turkey and Bulgaria would add their weight to the Central Powers – Turkey in 1914 and Bulgaria in 1916. In 1915, Italy reneged on its membership of the Triple Alliance and sided with the forces of the Entente, the Allies. In 1917, the United
States would rally to the Allied side. The conflict was truly a world war and it proved to be the bloodiest so far in Europe’s already bloody history.

The principal theatres were in northern and eastern France and western Russia and it was a war unlike any other that had been fought before. Modern weapons of destruction produced casualties on an unheard-of scale, and a great deal of the fighting
was conducted from trenches that faced each other across a few hundred metres of cratered and muddy no-man’s land. The weapons were nightmarish and powerful – long-range artillery, poison gas, hand grenades, machine guns, tanks, planes and submarines, not to mention the new battleships, fitted with huge guns. And the casualty numbers resulting from the use of such weaponry were staggering. At
Verdun in eastern France, for example, a battle fought from 21 February to 18 December 1916 resulted in more than 250,000 dead and more than a million wounded. At the Battle of Passchendaele, fought between 11 July and 10 November 1917, more than half a million men died.

The war impacted on the civilian population at home, too. Women had to replace men in factories and there were food shortages
as German submarines became effective against British merchant ships bringing in supplies. The entry of the United States into the war was decisive and, by autumn 1918, the Germans were retreating and the collapse had begun. Bulgaria surrendered on 29 September, the Turks on 30 October and Austria on 3 November. Meanwhile, in Germany, civil unrest resulted in Kaiser Wilhelm II (ruled 1888–1918)
abdicating on 9 November and a republic being declared. The war ended two days later on 11 November. Eight million had died and twice that number had been wounded.

Subject peoples throughout Europe had seized the opportunity provided by the distraction of war to exploit the situation. In 1916, the Irish rebelled against British rule, but were bloodily put down. The southern
part of Ireland would have to wait until 1921 to achieve self-determination, the six counties of the north remaining part of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Croats all used the gradual weakening of the Central Powers to push for independence.

In Russia, the peasants finally revolted against the draconian rule of the Tsars, in February 1917. Tsar Nicholas II (ruled
1894–1917) abdicated, bringing to an end more than 300 years of Romanov rule. He and his family were shot the following year. The government attempted to establish a republic in place of the monarchy, but Russia remained at war with the Central Powers and conditions worsened with severe food shortages and little success in battle.

In October 1917, the Bolsheviks, who ultimately became the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, grabbed power under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924), better known as Lenin. A disciple of Marx and Engels, Lenin believed that revolution by the workers could only be possible if they were led by a disciplined, well-organised party. The estates of the wealthy Russian landowners were confiscated and banks and industry nationalised. Anxious to
deal with internal matters, Lenin made peace with the Central Powers in March 1918, but for several years the country was ravaged by a bitterly contested civil war, won in the end by the communist Red Army. In 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was founded with Moscow as its capital.

It was almost impossible to make a peace
that would please everyone on the Allied side and not penalise the Central Powers to such an extent that the only possible outcome would be further warfare. While the British wished to re-establish a balance of power in Europe, the French were determined to negate the German threat against them once and for all. US President Woodrow Wilson, on the other hand, aimed at achieving a just peace settlement.
His ‘Fourteen Points’ laid out the major issues and formed the basis of discussion, but were greeted cynically in some places merely as ‘Wilson idealism’. Amongst them was the desire to allow people self-determination, the need for disarmament and the establishment of ‘A general association of nations… under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence
and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.’ This would become the League of Nations, which would meet for the first time in Paris in 1920, just six days after the Treaty of Versailles came into force. Its powers would be limited, however, by the fact that its creator, the United States, never became a member.

With hindsight, a lasting peace for Europe was always likely to be a
near-impossibility. After all, it was a peace settlement arrived at by the Allies, with little input from the Central Powers, and resentment burned in German minds for many years at a treaty that was especially punitive to them and appeared to blame them solely for the outbreak of war.

The map of Europe was vastly different at the start of the 1920s to what it had been just a decade previously.
Austria-Hungary was no more, the old empire having been torn asunder, and two separate nations, Austria and Hungary, had been established. Poland, having disappeared from the map at another great peace conference, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, was reborn. Romania had declared its neutrality at the outbreak of war but joined in on the Allied side in 1916. Now it was enlarged with the addition
of the territories of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania. A single state, known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created for the South Slavic people. In 1929, King Alexander I (ruled 1921–34) would rename it Yugoslavia. However, the problems of this part of the world were far from solved by the redrawing of borders. Just as the nations of which it was made up had provided the catalyst
for the First World War, they would also be the venue for more violent conflict towards the end of the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, in northern Europe, Finland’s autonomy was confirmed. It had been ruled by Sweden from the thirteenth century until the Swedish-Russian War of 1809 when it became a Grand-Duchy within the Russian Empire. Following the October Revolution in Russia and a period of
civil war, it had become a republic. Across the Baltic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were granted independence.

Europe remained troubled for some years, despite the Versailles Treaty. In Germany, after the abdication of the Kaiser, the Weimar Republic was established but suffered numerous attempts to overthrow it. Between 1919 and 1921, Poland and Russia fought each other until the Poles confirmed
their independent status and their borders with victory. Disarmament seemed to have been forgotten and the proud claims of self-determination for subject peoples often seemed no more than empty rhetoric.

The problems of nationality remained prevalent in Europe after the First World War and different nationalities shared countries, sometimes incongruously. Czechoslovakia,
for instance, was a racial mélange – Czechs and Slovaks, of course, but also Ukrainians, Poles, Germans and Hungarians. The same could be said of Yugoslavia. The potential for trouble was great and it often flared up over the slightest misunderstanding.

Europe was also in a precarious financial state. The cost of the war had crippled everyone – the victors owed the United States huge amounts
that the Americans wanted repaid quickly – and the massive reparations piled on to the defeated Central Powers only served to increase their economic burden and heighten social unrest. The Germans defaulted in their payments in 1923 and the French, ever eager to punish their neighbour to the fullest extent, occupied the Ruhr, supported by the Belgians.

Around this time, the first stirrings of
a united Europe could be heard as some suggested that customs barriers served only to impede the transport of goods and harmed industry. The nations of Europe, however, were far from that point. Nonetheless, tensions eased when it was agreed, under American influence, to reduce the reparations that the impoverished Germans should be made to pay. (The Germans would unilaterally stop the payments in
1932.) The French left the Ruhr in 1925 and, in October of that same year, Britain, France, Poland, Italy, Belgium and Germany signed the Locarno Treaties in an attempt to secure the territorial provisions of the Versailles Treaty as well as to normalise relations with the Weimar Republic. Germany became a member of the League of Nations in 1926. Amongst the conciliatory voices of the time was Socialist
French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand (1862–1932), who, in 1930, proposed a federal European union that would establish a ‘common market’. But the European states were not yet ready for such a step and it would take another great war and 27 years before his vision would become a reality.

In a number of countries across Europe, the vacuum left
by the disappearance or weakness of monarchies would be filled by a new political entity – the dictator.

Italy had been disappointed by the post-war settlement and amongst the country’s wealthy elite there was also a fear of communism. Many of them threw their weight behind the new Fascist party, led by a squat, bald-headed, former political journalist and soldier, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945).
In 1922, Mussolini seized power. Nationalistic propaganda and the preaching of the fascist values of order and discipline as well as the creation of jobs and social programmes, persuaded many Italians that fascism was the right thing for the country, and those who thought differently were soon silenced. Parliamentary democracy was an inevitable casualty and soon like-minded European politicians
on the right were casting envious glances at Italy.

In 1929, the United States Stock Exchange collapsed with huge implications for the whole world, but especially Europe with its close business and economic ties with America. As the Depression sank in, it was particularly catastrophic in Germany. By 1932, there were six million German unemployed.

In 1919, a Berlin railway locksmith and poet,
Anton Drexler (1884–1942), and six others founded the German Workers’ Party. In September that year, Corporal Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), sent to investigate the party by German security services, was invited to join, becoming the party’s head of propaganda. By 1933, the German Workers’ Party had become the National Socialist Party and Hitler, promising food and jobs, was Chancellor of Germany. He
blamed the Jews, the communists and the Treaty of Versailles for Germany’s troubles and immediately set about dismantling the democratic process, calling himself
Der Führer
(Leader) and claiming that he alone could make Germany great once more. The Weimar Republic made way for the Third Reich.

Authoritarian dictatorships appeared in other countries. In Bulgaria, a right-wing faction led by Aleksandar
Tsankov (1879–1959) assassinated the democratically elected Prime Minister and seized power; in 1929, the king of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Alexander I, banned political parties and assumed executive power, renaming the country Yugoslavia; in Austria, civil war broke out in 1933 when Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934) dissolved parliament and established an autocratic regime
in imitation of the Italian model; in Poland, the 1935 death of the popular centrist leader, Józef Pilsudski (1867–1935), was followed by authoritarian government; in Portugal in 1932, a military coup installed the pro-Fascist António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) as dictator, a position he would retain for the next 38 years; in Hungary, István Bethlen (1874–1946), a Transylvanian aristocrat, and
Miklós Horthy (1868–1957), the extreme right-wing former commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, ruled from 1920 until 1944, allying with Hitler.

The fight to prevent Spain from becoming a dictatorship became a European
cause célèbre
in 1936 following the revolt of General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) against the incumbent republican government. With arms supplied by the Soviet Union
and France, volunteers from many European nations fought in the International Brigades against Franco and his allies, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Half a million lives were lost in a savage war that devastated Spain and presaged the global conflict to follow a few years later. Franco won in 1939 and remained in power until his death in 1975.