Organization founded at Geneva in 1863 by Henri Dunant (1828-1910), a Swiss philanthropist whose concern for “succoring the wounded” had been strengthened by the work of Florence nightingale in the Crimean war and by the carnage that he himself had witnessed after the battle of Sol-ferino in the franco-austrian war of 1859. The work of the ICRC (whose membership, originally drawn from a select group of Dunant’s fellow-countrymen, would thereafter remain entirely Swiss) was soon complemented by parallel efforts from cognate national societies. Such was the combination that became informally known as the international Red Cross. its main emblem involved a simple reversal of the colors found on the Swiss flag (with an alternative Red Crescent eventually approved for use by Muslim countries, and a Red Crystal for Israel). The ICRC’s history is closely associated with that of the geneva conventions, the first of which Dunant helped to formulate in 1864. These developed into a series of international agreements (the most recent dating from 1977) about the protection due in times of WARFARE to non-combatants, including those who had ceased to fight after becoming prisoners. In that context, the ICRC assumed principal responsibility for the neutral, impartial, and expert monitoring of these Geneva accords. in WORLD WAR ii, for example, it established a central agency for information about prisoners of war, provided parcels for those held captive, made inspection visits, and negotiated many transfers of the sick and wounded. During that conflict the ICRC’s effectiveness was often limited by the fact that certain belligerents (most notably the Soviet
Union and Japan) had not subscribed to the current version of the Conventions, as well as by the undue politicization of some of the national Red Cross committees with whom its various delegations had to collaborate. The latter point was particularly significant in the case of Germany, where hitler denied access to his system of CONCENTRATION CAMPS while also seeking elsewhere to exploit the Red Cross for his own purposes (see katyn massacre). The ICRC won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1917, and again in 1944. By the early twenty-first century, when over 180 countries were affiliated to the humanitarian venture originally launched by Dunant, it was still using Geneva as the headquarters for its global operations.
Reichstag Fire Arson attack that severely damaged the German parliament building on February 27, 1933. hitler’s new regime prosecuted a mentally disturbed Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe for the crime. Although he was executed, three others (including the Bulgarian DiMiTROv) were acquitted. There remains strong suspicion that some leading promoters of NAZISM were complicit in the blaze. It certainly gave Hitler a pretext for demanding emergency powers from hindenburg, and for presenting the event as further evidence of the “Red Peril” facing Germany. The fire made a dramatic contribution to the context within which the Nazis completed their campaigning for the Reichstag elections of 5 March, before forcing through the enabling act and accelerating processes of gleichschaltung.
Reinsurance Treaty Agreement made in June 1887 between Germany and Russia, reflecting BISMARCK’S secret diplomacy designed to keep France isolated. The German chancellor’s policy had resulted in a series of compacts, among them the dual alliance (1879), the three emperors’ LEAGUE (as eventually formalized in 1881), and the TRIPLE ALLIANCE (1882). When Austro-Russian tensions over the Balkans prevented renewal of the Three Emperors’ League in 1887, Bismarck negotiated a separate agreement with Tsar Alexander iii, known as the Reinsurance Treaty. It stipulated that either empire would remain neutral if the other became involved in war with a third party, although this condition would not operate if Germany attacked France or Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary. To entice Alexander into this bargain, Germany recognized Russian interests in Bulgaria. It was largely Bismarck’s powers of persuasion that secured this deal and, with his fall from office in 1890, his successor caprivi chose not to renew the arrangement. The ensuing franco-russian alliance of 1892 signaled the development of two rival blocs and contributed to the tensions that preceded
WORLD WAR I.
Reparations Monetary or other compensation often demanded from a losing side in war. For instance, after the franco-prussian war the frankFURT TREATY of May 1871 required France to pay Germany an indemnity of 5 billion gold francs over a five-year period. Similarly, at brest-litovsk in March 1918, Russia agreed to recompense the CENTRAL POWERS. However, it was the reparations demanded of Germany in 1919 which are most frequently recalled, as many historians believe that these destabilized the international economy and undermined the weimar republic. At the end of WORLD WAR I, the Allies asserted their entitlement to “compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allied and Associated Powers and to their property.” In the event, the VERSAILLES TREATY did not fix a precise penalty, but simply specified the categories of payment - to cover, for example, material damage and war pensions. The job of calculating a figure was given over to the newly-established Reparations Commission, which reported in May 1921 setting a target of 132,000 million gold marks. Although 66 percent of that total was immediately postponed, until German’s ability to pay had been determined, reparations became part of the notion of a “dictated peace” and attracted international criticism, most influentially from the economist John Maynard keynes. He argued that the figure was vastly excessive, and that the strains placed on Germany would disrupt the international economy. undoubtedly reparations hampered wider reconstruction as they became ensnared in the question of war debts. While fighting, all the Allies had borrowed money from one another and most importantly from Britain and the usA. To the annoyance of the Washington administration, which had not signed the versailles Treaty and which viewed the financial penalties as morally dubious, the other Allies sought to repay war debts through reparations, even though this procedure exacerbated their balance of payments difficulties. When Germany defaulted on payment in 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the ruhr, thus precipitating hyperinflation and a political crisis within the WEIMAR REPUBLIC. The situation was defused by the DAWES PLAN of 1924 which stabilized the German currency and extended the repayment schedule. The new system worked well until the GREAT depression[2] sparked by the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The swift recall of loans by the USA affected Germany’s ability to pay. Accordingly, the YOUNG PLAN of 1929-30 reduced the total of reparations, but the worsening economic climate meant that in 1932 they were scrapped altogether. Historians have since been divided over their impact. contrary to what Keynes argued, it has been suggested that Germany was capable of meeting the sums, especially after 1924, but chose not to, investing elsewhere instead. Whatever the case, it is telling that at the end of world war ii reparations were demanded from her not in the shape of money but in the form of industrial machinery, largely to be handed over to the USSR. Only Japan and Germany’s other axis partners were required to pay cash sums, on a relatively modest scale.
Republicanism (see under monarchism)
Resista nce This term is most frequently encountered by historians within the context of world WAR II. There it chiefly denotes (in contradistinction to collaboration) the attempts made to resist authority under conditions of foreign occupation, whether imposed by the forces of the axis or by those of the soviet union. However, it may also be applied to the less frequent efforts made for example by some Germans and italians to frustrate the war aims espoused by their own dictators. in its predominant sense, resistance signaled refusal to accept military defeat and entailed rejection of the occupier. These sentiments were shared by many in occupied Europe, yet it did not necessarily follow that resistance was quick to emerge. To embark upon it was a brave decision, especially in the early stages of the war, when any kind of defiance often seemed futile.
Several variables influenced the emergence of resistance: government, time, place, and
Tradition. These factors were evident within the Greater Germany that hitler was building, and where resistance was slowest to evolve. Here, in Austria, Sudetenland, Memelland, and Eupen-Malmedy for instance, much of the population identified itself as ethnically German and welcomed the Nazis as liberators. Within Germany itself, Hitler had almost entirely eliminated dissent since coming to power in 1933. Resistance would only come to light towards the end of the war, when all seemed lost and, even then, most of it was a fragmented affair undertaken by students and the churches. However, it also found expression among certain senior soldiers who had once worked with Hitler, and who therefore came under the least suspicion, for instance those involved in the abortive july plot of 1944 to assassinate the Fuhrer.
Resistance was also slow to establish itself in northern Europe where the governments of Holland, Denmark and Norway, were permitted a large measure of self-rule. Rejection of the Nazis’ satraps, for instance quisling, came easily, yet the relative liberties permitted by the occupier undermined early attempts at protest. Only as the material deprivations of the war worsened, and the Nazis increasingly interfered in daily life, especially in the round-up of jews, did resistance mobilize. The French case is particularly interesting. it might have been thought that resistance would have been strongest and quickest to evolve in the northern zone occupied by the Germans. Yet this was the area directly patrolled by the Wehrmacht and other branches of the German security services, with the result that resistance found greatest expression in the southern zone even before its own eventual occupation in 1942. That said, many resisters in the latter region had difficulty in shaking off a loyalty to Marshal pEtain who was widely viewed as a supreme patriot and humane soldier.
Resistance began most quickly in those countries immediately subject to Nazi and Soviet barbarity, most obviously Poland. Partisan groups were forming throughout the 1939 Polish campaign, becoming part of the underground army, the Union for Armed Struggle, which later enjoyed close links with sikorski’s government-inexile in London. This development owed something to the existing tradition of protest within Poland which dated back to the partitions of the eighteenth century. Historians have also shown how, at a local level, similar traditions often informed resistance behavior elsewhere, for instance in the Cevennes region of France which had experienced the persecution of the Huguenots by Louis XIV.
Resistance activity took several forms. In the popular imagination, it is most commonly associated with military action, yet this was only really true of those countries with existing patterns of violent protest, notably Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Within western Europe, this form of resistance was less evident, partly because of the dangers involved and partly because of German reprisals directed at the civilian population. Military activity increased as Europe’s communists, freed from the moral dilemmas of the nazi-soviet PACT, began to coordinate activities, and as the Allies supplied greater weaponry in preparation for the NORMANDY LANDINGS. Other forms of resistance included industrial action, commonplace in Belgium, and in Italy before the collapse of Mussolini; the setting up of secret networks to ferry intelligence and to enable the escape of Allied airmen shot down over occupied Europe; the publication of clandestine newspapers, vital given the stranglehold which the Nazis enjoyed over the media, though BBC broadcasts to Europe did much to encourage internal dissent; and acts of “passive” resistance, for instance chalking V signs on the wall, being rude to German soldiers, and reading prohibited books and pamphlets. The manner in which Jews and others faced the Nazi and soviet labor camps - the refusal to sacrifice their beliefs before the barbarity of Hitlerism and stalinism - has also been deemed an additional form of “passive” or “spiritual” resistance. Often resistance activity was ambivalent. To retain their cover, resisters had sometimes to join the wider population in collaborating with the enemy. Few people welcomed the Germans or soviets, while many frequently engaged in silent or passive protest. Yet ultimately it was difficult to avoid the presence of the occupier and the pressure to cooperate in some way.
Owing to their need to maintain secrecy and to the ambiguities of conduct involved, it is difficult to establish the number of resisters in any one country. it seems clear, though, that participants came from all walks of life. Resistance organizations often sprang out of existing networks of friends and colleagues, for instance old soldiers’ associations and hunting clubs in the case of Norway. Within Axis-controlled Europe communist resisters were also in evidence, though after the war they deliberately exaggerated their importance. As already observed, a good deal depended on their response to the Nazi-Soviet pact. In Greece and Yugoslavia, communists rarely listened to Moscow and were quick to mobilize. In France, the Communist Party was hopelessly Stalinist, and did not agitate until after June 1941, though there were those who broke ranks to act on an individual basis. Additionally, historians are increasingly acknowledging the role of women (see gender). After the war, female resisters frequently retreated into civilian life and their contribution, especially to passive resistance, was conveniently ignored.
Although in France de gaulle facilitated a large measure of unity among resisters, most partisan groups were internally divided. Personal rivalries, demands of secrecy, ideological battles, gender conflicts, and fear of communist infiltration all stymied the emergence of united movements. This has led historians to question the overall significance of resistance. Admittedly, within the military domain, it accomplished little, always excepting Yugoslavia and Greece. This was understood by the Allied planners of D-Day who were reluctant to give resisters any sizeable role in such a critical operation, though after the Normandy landings greater care was taken to integrate partisan groups, especially in the liberation of southern France. However, historians have laid a greater stress on the moral role of resistance. This allowed Europeans, regardless of rank or status, to keep alive a dignity and sense of hope at one of the darkest epochs in the history of their continent.
Restoration (see under Vienna congress; monarchism)
Revolutions of 1830-2 These disrupted the relative calm enjoyed by “Restoration Europe” since the fall of napoleon i. Disorders began in France where, against a backdrop of widespread economic discontent, the reactionary Charles x invited trouble by publishing the Four ordinances, which dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, called new elections, reduced the franchise, and curtailed press freedom. On July 27, 1830 barricades appeared in Paris, and by August 2 Charles had abdicated. While radicals pressed for a republic, conservatives and moderates rallied behind Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans. His so-called JULY MONARCHY quickly dismantled many of the reactionary policies of the previous Restoration regime, even though only moderate enlargement of the franchise was permitted. Paris now became the example for others to follow. on August 25 a Brussels performance of Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici was the trigger for a rebellion of French-speaking Catholic Walloons against the Dutch Protestant hegemony hitherto operative within the United Kingdom of the NETHERLANDS. Crowds assembled and occupied key government buildings, to be joined by artisans who, as in France, were feeling the pinch of a generalized economic downturn. With the failure of Dutch troops to recapture Brussels, the great powers of Britain, France, and Prussia agreed in late 1830 to the creation of an independent Belgium. Such success for nationalism was not repeated in POLAND. There, from Warsaw in November, students and cadet officers launched an armed insurrection against the foreign and autocratic dominance of Tsar Nicholas i. They were soon joined by large sections of Polish society and the majority of the army. Power drifted into the hands of radical nationalists who, in January 1831, voted union with Lithuania and the end of tsarist governance. This spurred Russian military intervention. Though the bravery of the Poles’ campaign of guerrilla warfare won public sympathy in Britain and France, no effective foreign assistance was forthcoming and in September 1831 Warsaw was recaptured. The gains of the revolution were overthrown and a brutal policy of russification ensued. By contrast, the german confederation was relatively untroubled by revolution. The states most affected were Brunswick, Hesse-Cassel, HANOVER, and saxony. In each instance a constitution was promised and order restored, but only in Brunswick was there a change of ruler. In 1832 METTERNICH was particularly instrumental in ensuring that Austria (see habsburg empire) and PRUSSIA would together compel the confederal assembly to pass the so-called Six Acts, limiting the influence of press and parliament in a manner contrary to the aspirations of liberalism. The Vienna regime also reacted to risings that occurred during late 1830 and early 1831 in central Italy, spreading from Modena, Parma, and Bologna into the Romagna and the papal states. These were led by nationalists aiming to end Austrian rule within the peninsula. They hoped that France might come to their aid, yet Louis Philippe resisted embroilment in Italian revolutionary politics which he mistrusted as combining republican and Bonapartist (see Bonapartism) features. Thus by early 1832 Austria had re-established order with relative ease. The failure of the risings of 1830-2 to change the status quo in Italy and Germany has led some historians to write off the events as a mere dress rehearsal for the far more serious business involved in the revolutions OF 1848-9. That is, however, too dismissive. The map agreed by the Vienna congress had been redrawn in the case of Belgium, and the elder line of the Bourbon dynasty had once again been overthrown in France (see legitimism; orleanism). Moreover, the reactionary consensus proclaimed especially between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1815 was confirmed as being riddled not only with self-interest but also with self-doubt. Though nationalists and liberals were generally disappointed by the immediate outcomes, the events of 1830-2 suggested that the conservatism of Restoration Europe was likely to remain under constant challenge.
Revolutions of 1848-9 These were the most momentous of nineteenth-century Europe’s many insurrections, exceeding in scope the series of risings that had occurred at the beginning of the preceding decade (see revolutions of 1830-2). Though the 1847 civil war of the Swiss Sonder-bund is occasionally included within the process, most historians treat these revolutions as beginning in Palermo, Sicily, where in mid-January 1848 a patriotic rebellion spread to Naples forcing the king of the two sicilies to concede a constitution. Far more serious was the revolutionary eruption in Paris on February 22, when a reformist banqueting campaign turned into a popular rising and led to the erection of barricades. Louis Philippe’s abdication on the 24th marked the end of the JULY MONARCHY, and the second republic was proclaimed two days later. As the epicenter of European affairs and the wellspring of progressive ideas, Paris inspired others to follow. On March 3 KOSSUTH demanded a constitution for Hungary;
And next day crowds clashed with the authorities in Munich. Similar disturbances in Vienna on the 13th prompted the resignation of metternich, the arch-representative of conservatism in and beyond the habsburg empire. Mass demonstrations ensued in Budapest on the 15th, Krakow on the 17th, and Berlin and Milan on the 18th. on the 22nd venice declared itself independent of Austrian control. By April, the only regions remaining largely unaffected were those towards the European periphery: the Iberian peninsula; Scandinavia; the Russian and Ottoman empires; the NETHERLANDS and BELGIUM which had previously separated amid the upheavals of 1830; and Britain, where, even for the chartist movement, the spring of 1848 marked the collapse rather than the regeneration of its campaign of mass demonstration in favor of widened franchise.
Four traits characterized the early stages of the revolutions. First, the uprisings spread at astonishing speed, with news of events being carried by telegraph and railway (see communications). Second, the outbreaks were mainly short-lived. The authorities rapidly made concessions, usually promising some form of constitution and thus calming much of the initial violence. Such was the case in piedmont-sardinia, where charles albert also saw an opportunity to advance claims on Austrian-controlled Lombardy; in Vienna, where the feeble-minded Ferdinand i remarked, “Tell the people I agree to everything”; and, in Berlin, where Frederick william iv announced his intention of reforming the german confederation under Prussia’s leadership, and emulated his counterparts by pledging a constitution. Third, the revolts were largely urban-based and concentrated in the capital cities, although there were also some sporadic peasant outbursts, notably in southern Italy, Silesia, Baden, and Hungary. Fourth, the demonstrations were well organized, with ARTISANS as well as bourgeoisie to the fore, and were often accompanied by spontaneous scenes of popular celebration: the planting of liberty trees and declarations of fraternity. Not for nothing were the revolutions described as “the Springtime of the Peoples.” The many nationalities within the Habsburg lands seemed briefly at peace with one another, as czechs and Germans collaborated on the Prague “National committee” and Romanians and Hungarians initially buried their differences. As lamartine put it, the revolutionaries were making the “sweetest of dreams.” However, this should not obscure the violence of the demonstrations and the attacks that artisans launched against power-driven machinery, notably in the Rhineland.
The revolutions are frequently contextualized within the wider social and economic forces that were overtaking Europe. population growth put pressure on RURAL SOCIETY, reducing the size of average smallholdings and forcing peasants into MIGRATION towards the cities which were feeling the early effects of industrialization and urban squalor (see also URBANIZATION). Social tensions had been exacerbated by the failure of the potato crop in 1845-6, the staple diet for many peasants in Poland, the Netherlands, parts of Germany, and northern France, as well as in Ireland where the worst famine seized hold. Moreover, the cereal harvest of 1846 had been disastrous. The upshot was an uncontrollable inflation in food prices, which consumed the meager surplus wealth of artisans. Such handworkers were forced to curtail their spending on manufactured goods, effectively putting themselves out of a job. Urban-rural tensions, bankruptcies, unemployment, and food riots ensued. It did not help that all this coincided with a more general cyclical slump in business, part of an emerging pattern associated with the early stages of industrialization.
Although the worst of the downturn was over by early 1848, bourgeois revolutionary elements used the economic crisis to boost support for LIBERALISM and NATIONALISM. Their demands were generally modest: the granting of constitutions that would enshrine parliamentary elections and basic civil liberties, and the promotion ofnational unity. These middle-class activists were generally prepared to live with monarchism. The nationalists congregated in the frankfurt parliament increasingly looked to Prussia under the hohen-ZOLLERN DYNASTY to realize their goal of german UNIFICATION. Even in Hungary, keen to untie itself from Austria, there was an initial willingness to acknowledge Ferdinand’s sovereignty. To be sure, republicanism did make headway in Italy, notably in Rome under garibaldi and mazzini, whereas the regime of manin proclaimed in Venice owed more to the former Republic of Saint Mark than it did to any French-inspired model.
Confronted with a swirl of protests, governments lost their self-assuredness, and must take some responsibility for allowing revolution to take hold so easily. In this respect, it should be remembered that Europe’s ruling dynasties were closely interrelated and still mindful of louis xvi’s execution. Despite Lamartine’s reassurances that France had no territorial designs, many rulers agreed with Metternich’s gloomy assessment that Europe was reliving 1791-2 and that the terror and BONAPARTISM were sure to follow. This was the fear of those German princes who lacked the military resources to withstand the protests and who became exiled in London. It has been speculated that if, early on, governments had shown a greater willingness to use force then the revolutions would have evaporated and, in some areas, might not have happened at all. In Prussia, for example, General von Prittwitz, military commander of Berlin, bemoaned his king’s timidity. Recently, however, historians have doubted whether loss of nerve by the ruling elites was so crucial. The loyalty of troops was questionable, and in the one case where formidable force was deployed, during radetzky’s defense of Milan, the insurgents still enjoyed some success.
Whatever the case, from summer 1848 onwards governments recovered their composure. In France universal male suffrage in the hands of the peasants resulted in a conservative Chamber which closed the national workshops and supported the repression of the Paris workers in the JUNE DAYS. When the Second Republic’s definitive constitution appeared in November, it carried a conservative potential that was amply confirmed by the presidential polls of December. These brought victory to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (who at the end of 1852 would convert himself into Emperor napoleon iii). In the German lands uprisings in Baden and Cologne were suppressed in September, and in November General Wrangel’s army entered Berlin. In April 1849 an increasingly confident Frederick William rejected the imperial crown offered him by the Frankfurt assembly; in May-June Prussian troops restored order in bavaria, saxony, wUrttemberg, and Baden; and in August several revolutionaries were tried and executed. In the Habsburg empire, Ferdinand’s flight from Vienna in April 1848 had allowed the army to regroup, permitting windischgrAtz to snuff out an insurrection in Prague. In July of that year, Charles Albert’s army was routed at custozza (and would be resisted again at novara in February 1849 when the Piedmontese resumed their fight). Vienna remained a volatile and dangerous place but in the final week of September 1848 troops retook the capital; shortly afterwards the fragile Ferdinand abdicated in favor of francis Joseph i. The new emperor had little patience with the recently-elected Austrian Reichstag which he dissolved in February 1849. Further afield, his troops enjoyed successes in Transylvania and across the Italian peninsula, notably in Venetia, Tuscany, and the Two Sicilies, while the crushing of the Roman republic was left to the French. The Hungarian revolution, ably led by Kossuth, proved a tougher nut to crack, though this was eventually broken in August 1849 with the assistance of Russian troops.
The steadying of nerve on the part of Austria and Prussia, plus Russia’s willingness to reprise its role as “the gendarme of Europe,” played an important part in quelling the revolutions in central and southern Europe. Yet other factors were also operative. Ethnic tensions dissipated revolutionary ambitions. Kossuth had to deal not only with Vienna but also with Serb and Romanian nationalists hostile to the Magyars. To Habsburg delight, the Croatian contingents of the Austrian army under jelaCiC proved especially zealous in their willingness to contain events in Prague and Budapest. Matters might have been different if middle-class revolutionary leaders had consolidated a mass following. Yet in Prussia the creation of the first all-German Workers’ Association to promote the concerns ofartisans spread anxiety, while in France liberals such as Lamartine were relieved at the crushing of the June Days. Crucially, the revolutionaries failed to comprehend the concerns of a peasantry that remained suspicious of the urban upheavals. In France, the imposition of a 45-centime property tax alienated the countryside. Within the Habsburg lands, the regime’s early abolition of the remnants of serfdom (outside of Hungary) sapped much of the support for revolution that might have otherwise developed in rural areas. Marxist historians occasionally argue that radical and socialist revolutionaries should have reached out to the industrial working class, but such a proletariat had scarcely developed as yet in significant numbers outside of limited areas.
When in November 1850 the olmutz agreement restored the German Confederation under Habs-burg presidency, it seemed as though the revolutions of 1848 had barely happened. Only in France had a new regime survived, and even this was now rapidly mutating into the imperial rather than republican brand of Bonapartism. Most of the constitutions debated or promised elsewhere had come to nothing. However, the Piedmontese Statute remained in force, and the revolutions also brought tangible gain through the destruction of feudalism in the non-Hungarian parts of the Habsburg empire, and in East Prussia and southern Germany. More broadly still, a subtler change was afoot. Though the early 1850s were indeed a period of reaction, often influenced by the Catholic church (see Catholicism), many post-1848 conservatives embodied attitudes that were different from those of their predecessors. Though they valued the forces of repression, they increasingly understood the need to be more supple and imaginative in responding to progressive ideas and to social and economic discontent. Such lessons were perhaps most keenly felt by BISMARCK, whose eventual achievement of German unification under Prussian leadership was inseparable from his belief that change would come better from above than from below.
Revolutions of 1989-91 These upheavals, whose most central events occurred during the bicentenary of “1789,” overthrew the hegemony of COMMUNISM across eastern Europe. They impacted directly on the soviet union, and on eight other states: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
The GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC (gDr), HUNGARY, POLAND, ROMANIA, and YUGOSLAVIA. Though such geographic breadth has encouraged comparison with the REVOLUTIONS OF 1848-9, those earlier disorders were generally more violent and yet also less successful than the transformation which unfolded around 1989-91 (see also Maps 11 and 12).
In the years immediately following world war II, STALIN had sought to extend Moscow’s dominance across all the areas just listed. His efforts helped to set a context for the four decades of division between East and West that characterized COLD WAR Europe. Due mainly to certain limitations in the range of red army control, such expansion of communist rule turned out to be less monolithic than Stalin had intended. Most notably, by the end of the 1940s the tito regime was asserting for Yugoslavia a model of Marxism
That became increasingly divergent from the Kremlin one. At that same epoch, however, Stalin was locking the remaining seven states into the COMECON trading bloc as partners of the USSR, and in 1955 KHRUSHCHEV used this same grouping as the basis for the military Warsaw pact. Even though disagreements with Moscow triggered Albania’s exclusion from both organizations in the course of the 1960s, that country continued to promote its own distinctive brand of Marxist ideology. Thus the crisis of governance that climaxed towards the end of the 1980s remained directly relevant to all the states where communist regimes had developed since the later 1940s.
During the intervening decades resentment against Soviet authority had not been entirely limited to the Yugoslav and Albanian cases. Elsewhere, the GDR’s regime under ulbricht had in June 1953 crushed a workers’ rising centered on East Berlin. During autumn 1956 a series of Poznan demonstrations that unsuccessfully challenged the Kremlin’s hold over Poland became swiftly overshadowed by the still more dramatic launching (and rapid brutal repression) of the HUNGARIAN RISING. By 1968 the main focus of dissent had shifted to Czechoslovakia, where the efforts of the so-called Prague spring to liberalize communism proved abortive in the face ofSoviet-controlled invasion by Warsaw Pact forces. Though these eruptions were as yet effectively contained, they sprang not only from circumstances specific to each case but also from more general faultlines running through Moscow’s “satellite” system. In most of the relevant countries this enjoyed, at best, only limited popular support. Its weaknesses, which became increasingly evident during the course of the 1970s and 1980s, included the survival of nationalism as a recurrent source of anti-Russian feeling; the ongoing hostility to Soviet-style schemes of agrarian reorganization in countries where rural society remained strongly influenced by traditional peasant values; and, particularly wherever Catholicism retained its hold, the persistence of religious beliefs hostile to Marxist materialism. Even so, if the system had proved more capable of supplying those material advantages that it constantly promised, then its chances of overcoming such difficulties would have been significantly better. Instead, after 25 years of solid growth, the eastern European economies were very badly affected by the sharp downturn caused by the oil crises of the 1970s. Whereas that experience helped to jolt capitalist rivals into hastening “postindustrial” forms of innovation, the communist bloc lacked such flexibility of response. Consequently, it found itself retreating towards zero rates of growth while also incurring rising quantities of external debt. Under late-twentieth-cen-tury conditions of communications, no amount of state propaganda could entirely conceal the fact that the capitalist West continued to offer standards of living generally far superior to those experienced in the communist East.
By the end of the 1970s signs of dissent were again clearly evident in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, yet most markedly of all in Poland. The 1978 papal election of john paul ii, previously Archbishop of Krakow, gave encouragement to anti-government feeling which, early in the 1980s, became manifest via a mass-based movement of workers’ opposition known as solidarity. Its constant harassment of the jaruzelski regime might have proved less effective had it not also coincided with a crisis of Soviet leadership. The final years of BREZHNEV’s rule down to 1982 witnessed not only the USSR’s debilitating embroilment in an Afghan war but also severe stagnation in other aspects of policy-making. Matters drifted further under the brief administrations of his two similarly ailing successors, andropov and chernenko. Though the transfer of power to gorbachev in 1985 offered the prospect of more dynamic governance and of long-overdue reforms, it was his policies that then served, unintentionally, to hasten rather than postpone or prevent the collapse of communist authority in eastern Europe. The more strongly he insisted on glasnost (“openness”), the more apparent became the daunting scale of the perestroika (“restructuring”) also needed. Thus Gorbachev increasingly alienated both the traditional hardliners and those who had begun to realize that his continuing loyalty to communism might itself constitute another real barrier to appropriate reform. He also showed himself increasingly disinclined to dictate to the satellite states any single model of adaptation, while also refusing to guarantee Soviet support for any of their communist regimes that resisted perestroika altogether. In the Polish case, by December 1988 such attitudes from Moscow had prompted Jaruzelski as head of state to accept that at least a qualified form of free elections must be held the following June. The outcome was a sweeping victory for Solidarity in all the seats that were fully contestable, and the appointment of Tadeusz Mazowiecki as an anti-communist premier.
Meanwhile, in mid-1988, the modernizers within the Hungarian regime had ousted kAdar from a leadership held since 1956. They were soon offering the prospect of freely contested elections, and by October 1989 had moved as far as formally dissolving the Communist Party in its existing form. Equally momentous was their decision to open the border with Austria: while Hungarians themselves already enjoyed some freedom of travel, it was East Germans who benefited most from a relaxation of frontier controls that offered them a route for major exodus towards the West. Now faced with mass demonstrations in Berlin and Leipzig and still lacking Soviet support, the hitherto intransigent honecker was forced to relinquish his authority over the GDR. Those in government who did cling on to power sought to extricate themselves from disaster by relaxing the transit controls along the Berlin wall - only to discover that they had unwittingly given the signal for the start of its actual dismantlement by crowds of protesters. The scenes at the Brandenburg Gate on the night of November 9 became the central symbol of the European revolutions of 1989, and accelerated the startling “domino effect” already evident. Within hours zhivkov, dominant in Bulgaria since 1954, had been ousted. In Czechoslovakia too dissidents were now returning to the streets, and not even the brutality of the riot police in Prague on November 17 (when some 500 demonstrators were wounded) could contain the tide of revolt that brought the anti-communist playwright havel to the presidency during December. By the end of that month, but under bloodier circumstances, even the Romanian dictatorship had been overthrown. After more than 100 protesters were killed in Timisoara, ceauijEscu still seemed confident enough in his own leadership to summon a pro-government rally in Bucharest on December 21. When things turned sour, a pitched battle ensued in which his heavily-armed riot police (the Securitate) killed more than a thousand demonstrators. The army, however, refrained from reinforcing such repression, and by Christmas Day the rebels had succeeded in seizing and summarily executing both the dictator and his equally despised wife.
In the course of 1990 this whole transformation was progressively consolidated, especially through the holding of predominantly free elections. The early entrenchment of post-communist regimes was most evident in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (which in 1993 split, peacefully, into two states). In Bulgaria and Romania, however, elements from the old regime were for a time rather more successful in retaining some influence by means of simply rebranding themselves. As for the GDR, this was in meltdown - and all the more so when the polls of March 1990 indicated solid support for Christian democracy and when currency union with the Bonn regime became increasingly imperative as a means of averting financial collapse. By July there was growing acceptance, both domestic and international, of the need for the german reunification that was then formally proclaimed three months later. The official ending of the Warsaw Pact in February 1991 further confirmed the collapse of the satellite system, and Moscow’s recognition of the independence of the Baltic states during that same year presaged an even wider fragmentation of the USSR itself. There the military coup launched in August against Gorbachev, though it failed, marked the point at which yeltsin (leader of the Russian part of the Soviet Federation) emerged as the main focus of authority. By the end of the year Gorbachev had resigned and the USSR had been dissolved. Within the succession STATE of Russia under Yeltsin, the Communist Party was now banned. Changes were also afoot in the two remaining cases, where the overthrow of Soviet control had not needed to feature as a central issue. in Albania the promises of liberalization conceded in 1990 eventually produced the free elections of March 1992 and a victory for the anti-communist Democratic Party. For the Yugoslavs, however, much of the thrust of the upheaval had less to do with attaining representative government than with maneuvering for ethnic advantage under circumstances where rival separatist ambitions were now unleashed. Here, as in the uSSR, state socialism collapsed in tandem with the breakdown of the previous federal structures (see federalism[1]). Yet Yugoslavia’s fragmentation involved the additional feature of an extensive civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1995 and devastated much of bosnia-herzegovina in particular.
By the early 1990s the frontier-map of the former USSR and of much of central-eastern Europe lookedfar more complex, and indeed more vulnerable to dispute, than it had in 1989. Furthermore, across the whole region of previous communist hegemony, each country was confronted by conditions of “transformational crisis” as communist ideology, centralized state planning, and familiar trading patterns were now disrupted by the new and often painful challenges associated with the prospect of political, economic, and social “Westernization.”
Rexists Members of the Belgian fascist party, “Rex,” founded in the 1930s by Leon Degrelle (1906-94). It drew its name from the Christus Rex (Christ the King) publishing house at Louvain owned by the Association of Belgian Catholic Youth Movements. Pitched at a Catholic membership (see also Catholicism), it embodied a formulaic blend ofauthoritarian and nationalist ideals typical of fascism. Although Rex won 21 parliamentary seats in 1936, Degrelle’s attempt to propel himself into power by a “March on Brussels” in october was a failure. Following condemnation of the movement by the church the following year, membership hemorrhaged to more moderate Catholic parties such as the Union Catholique Belge. Unsurprisingly, the remaining Rexists welcomed the arrival of the Wehrmacht in 1940. Degrelle himself eventually fought in the Waffen-SS (see schutzstaffel), before taking refuge in Spain under franco’s protection and associating with various neo-Nazi movements.
Reynoud, Paul (1878-1966), Prime Minister of the French third republic during the German invasion of his country early in world war ii. A lawyer by training, Reynaud was elected deputy for the Basses-Alpes in 1919, and became minister of finance in 1930, the year in which he joined the right-leaning Alliance Democratique. A maverick politician, he was in 1934 an early supporter of de GAULLE’s views on military strategy. In 1938 Rey-naud was minister first of justice and then of finance in the daladier government, in which latter capacity he undid the ambitious social program of blum’s popular front. Marked by his opposition to the Munich agreement, Reynaud became in March 1940 both prime minister and foreign minister, but struggled to maintain cabinet discipline during the battle for France. On 18 May he made weygand commander-inchief in place of gamelin and appointed pEtain as his deputy. The hope was that these two heroes of World War i would bolster morale. They did the exact opposite, working for an armistice with HITLER. On June 16, 1940 a dejected Reynaud resigned. Arrested by the vichy regime, he was accused at the riom trials of having failed to prepare adequately for war, yet he turned the tables on his accusers. After 1945 he published his memoirs and resumed his political career, occupying ministerial office in the fourth republic. In 1958 he assisted de Gaulle in the establishment of the FIFTH REPUBLIC, although four years later he opposed the General’s reforms of the presidency.
Rhine, Confederation of the (see confederation
OF THE RHINE)
Rhineland crisis One of the limitations placed upon Germany by the 1919 Versailles treaty was demilitarization of the strategically important Rhineland region, as well as its occupation by British and French troops for fifteen years. Though the locarno treaties of 1925 reconfirmed demilitarization, the occupying forces had departed by 1930. In March 1936 hitler took advantage of the divisions between France, Britain, and Italy over Abyssinia (see italo-ethi-OPIAN war) to remilitarize this zone. He claimed that the Franco-Soviet pact of May 1935 had rendered worthless the Locarno accords. it has since been speculated that Anglo-French armed intervention at this point might have prevented a later and more generalized conflict. In the event, the Allies chose not to act. The British cabinet considered that the Rhineland was in Germany’s own “back garden,” having also decided a year earlier that the continued demilitarization was not strategically important. France was caught off-guard in that it was being administered by the stopgap administration of Albert sarraut, while its High Command regarded the Rhineland as irretrievable and preferred to rely on the defensive MAGINOT LINE. The failure to respond to this flagrant breach of the 1919 settlement (see also appeasement), coming hard on the heels of
German rearmament and conscription, further emboldened Hitler who, in January 1937, renounced the Versailles Treaty.
Ribbentrop, Joachim von (1893-1946), German Foreign Minister (1938-45). In 1933, a year after entering the Nazi party (see Nazism), this well-connected former wine salesman became an advisor to hitler on external affairs, often favoring policies at odds with the more cautious ones generally coming from the foreign ministry. From October 1936 until February 1938 Ribbentrop served as an unimpressive ambassador in London. His subsequent ministerial appointment at the WILHELMSTRASSE, replacing Constantin von Neur-ath, was a signal of acceleration in Hitler’s planning for territorial expansion. In August 1939 Ribbentrop concluded with molotov the NAZI-SOVIET PACT, and in September 1940 an important tripartite agreement between Germany, Italy, and Japan (see also axis). As war increasingly overshadowed diplomacy, his influence as foreign minister waned. In the Nuremberg trials Ribbentrop was found guilty of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and subsequently executed.
Ricasoli, Bettino (1809-80), Prime Minister of Italy (1861-2, 1866-7). His career illustrates the importance of noble families in the processes of ITALIAN UNIFICATION. Ricasoli was a liberal Tuscan aristocrat who supported moderate nationalism and admired victor emmanuel ii. In April 1859 he took charge of the provisional government of Tuscany following the overthrow of Grand Duke Leopold II. In this capacity, he negotiated the union with the Kingdom of piedmont-sardinia which was approved in a plebiscite of 1860. Known as “the iron baron,” he became premier of newly-united Italy on cavour’s death in 1861. Ricasoli pursued a number ofreconciliatory measures, permitting mazzini to return from exile, integrating garibaldi’s Red Shirts into the regular army, and attempting a rapprochement with Pope PIUS IX. However, his decision to extend more liberal religious legislation throughout much of the peninsula led to alarmist fears from conservative Catholics. Political intrigue led to his resignation in 1862. On resuming the premiership in 1866, he refused napoleon iii’s disingenuous offer to hand over Venetia in return for Italy relinquishing its ties with Prussia. once again, he attempted a policy of reconciliation with the papacy. When this ran into parliamentary opposition, he resigned and returned to his estate vineyards, establishing in 1874 the blending rules for Chianti Classico.
Riga, Treatyof (see under russo-polish war)
World History
