In Italy, the crisis of the depression had undermined the carefully worked out compromises of the 1920s and once again radicalized Fascism. This took the form of a much more aggressive foreign policy. Convinced that he could fully forge a ‘fascistized’ nation in a war of external aggression, Mussolini believed that Italy had to break free of Anglo-French hegemony in the Mediterranean, turn it into an Italian lake, and then head for great power status in the oceans beyond. Between October 1935 and May 1936, his troops carried out the bloody conquest of Ethiopia, with the acquiescence of Anglo-French appeasement. There was little internal logic to the external aggression since it was a major drain on Italy’s already stretched domestic economy and the conquered territory did not attract settlers. It had the justification only of Mussolini’s craving for excitement. All this was to be even more true of Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. A senseless determination not to let Franco lose led Mussolini into committing ever greater resources to Spain, the social and economic costs of which began the process of the decline of the Duce’s popularity. Aware that the task of breaking Anglo-French power would require the assistance of Germany, in October 1936 Mussolini clinched the so-called Rome-Berlin Axis, the symbol of his fatal friendship with Hitler, and thus began the process of his own destruction which would be completed by the Second World War.
Hitler had begun a massive programme of rearmament from the earliest moments of his rule. By a skilful combination of daring and duplicity, Hitler avoided the preventive war which might have stopped his ambitions. He had undermined France’s network of eastern alliances by clinching a non-aggression pact with Poland in January 1934. A rhetoric of pacifism proved surprisingly effective, for the democracies were determined to avoid a general war at any cost. As Hitler flaunted his determination to ignore the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty, Britain implicitly supported him through the Anglo-German naval agreement of June 1935 which permitted Germany a fleet one-third the size of the Royal Navy. Nothing was done when, in March 1936, he reoccupied the Rhineland and strengthened his western frontiers. The balance of power had altered in the west for France was now in a far less favourable position from which to attack Germany following Belgium’s declaration of neutrality. This seriously diminished the value of France’s defensive fortifications, the Maginot line, since, should Germany invade Belgium, France’s north-eastern frontier, around which the line did not extend, would be exposed. Hitler’s military expenditure dramatically outstripped that of the democracies and he soon had armed forces that he meant to use in order to secure his ambitions of Lebensraum and world domination. Britain and France, traumatized still by the Great War and desperate to believe that war on such a scale was a thing of the past, were unable to grasp the conclusion that Hitler’s plans made a preventive war their only solution.
World History
