11: Authoritarian Challenges to the International State System (30s) Flashcards
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930)
17 June 1930 - Massively raised tariffs on a wide range of imports into the US.
During 1920s, the US economy had faced the problem of overcapacity, resulting from new techniques of mass production [production line] and new technology in agriculture [tractors].
Aim: Increase the market share of domestic firms, boosting employment and output in the wake of the 1929 crash.
Consequences:
34 formal protests lodged with State Department from foreign countries
Retaliations: many states moved to raise their tariffs against US imports, even before the Act itself began (i.e. as soon as it was passed by the House of Representatives)
Especially Canada: established new duties on 16 products, encompassing about 30% of all US merchandise exports to Canada
Germany developed system of autarky
US imports plunged by 2/3 from $4.4 billion (1929) to $1.5 billion (1933), and exports fell from $5.4 billion to $2.1 billion, in both far more than 50% fall in GDP
Led the world down the path of protectionism. International trade radically decreased over 1930s, causing the world economy to further contract and unemployment to soar; a shock to the proponents of Smoot-Hawley.
“Greatest policy blunder in American economic history”?
o YES because GDP shrank, exports / imports fell by 50% and the GATT agreement was made largely to avoid impediments to global trade as a possible lesson from this period; OR
o NO because Federal monetary policy overall had shrinking effects as there was Devaluation of currency, deficit financing etc which would naturally cause the economy to shrink.
Ramsay MacDonald
Ramsay MacDonald was the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who belonged to the Labour Party, leading minority Labour governments for nine months in 1924 and again between 1929–1931. From 1931 to 1935, he headed a National Government dominated by the Conservative Party and supported by only a few Labour members.
The second Labour Government (1929–1931) was dominated by the Great Depression. He formed the National Government to carry out spending cuts to defend the gold standard, but it had to be abandoned after the Invergordon Mutiny, and he called a general election in 1931 seeking a “doctor’s mandate” to fix the economy. The National coalition won an overwhelming landslide and the Labour Party was reduced to a rump of around 50 seats in the House of Commons.
After 1931, MacDonald was repeatedly and bitterly denounced by the Labour movement as a traitor to its cause. Since the 1960s, historians have defended his reputation, emphasising his earlier role in building up the Labour Party, dealing with the Great Depression, and as a forerunner of the political realignments of the 1990s and 2000s.[
Oswald Mosely
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosleyas a British politician who rose to fame in the 1920s as a Member of Parliament and later in the 1930s, having become disillusioned with mainstream politics, drifted towards fascism and became the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF).
He was considered a potential Labour Prime Minister but resigned because of discord with the government’s unemployment policies. Mosley returned to Parliament as Labour MP for Smethwick at a by-election in 1926. Mosley’s New Party became the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932.
Mosley was imprisoned in May 1940 and the BUF was banned. He was released in 1943 and, politically disgraced by his association with fascism, moved abroad in 1951, spending most of the remainder of his life in Paris and two residences in Ireland. He stood for Parliament during the post-war era but received very little support. During this latter period he was an advocate of pro-European integration.
Ottawa Conference
The British Empire Economic Conference was a 1932 conference of British colonies and dominions held to discuss the Great Depression.
The conference saw the group admit the failure of the gold standard and abandon attempts to return to it. The meeting also worked to establish a zone of limited tariffs within the British Empire, but with high tariffs with the rest of the world. This was called “Imperial preference” or “Empire Free-Trade” on the principle of “home producers first, empire producers second, and foreign producers last”.
The conference was especially notable for its adoption of Keynesian ideas such as lowering interest rates, increasing the money supply, and expanding government spending.
Stavisky Affair
The Stavisky affair was a financial scandal in France in 1934, involving embezzler Alexandre Stavisky. The scandal had political ramifications for the Radical Socialist moderate government of the day when it was revealed that Prime Minister Camille Chautemps had protected Stavisky, who suddenly died in mysterious circumstances. The political right engaged in large anti-government demonstrations on 6 February 1934, resulting in Paris police firing upon and killing fifteen demonstrators. A right-wing coup d’état seemed like a possibility at the time.
The scandal engulfed a remarkable range of personalities from politics, high society and the literary-intellectual elite of Paris.The Stavisky Affair left France internally weakened. The country remained deeply divided for the rest of the decade, but the political weaknesses it exposed and exacerbated were not confined to France. The Affair was emblematic of a broader erosion of democratic values and institutions in post-World War I Europe
Action Francaise
During the First World War, Action française supported the prime minister Georges Clemenceau and the will to defeat the Germans. France’s victory in the war, and the movement’s anti-German intransigence on the peace terms resulted in a peak of success, prestige and influence in the inter-war period.
Action française exploited the disquiet aroused on the right by the victory of the left-wing coalition in 1924 and the horror of communism, sending about thirty candidates to the French parliament. The successes shaped the ideology of Action française. It became more integrated into mainstream conservatism, stressing patriotism and Catholicism as opposed to monarchism.
Despite the 1926 Papal condemnation, Action française remained popular during the interwar periodAs increasing numbers of people in France (as in Europe as a whole) turned to authoritarian political movements, many turned to Action française. However, with the rise of fascism and the creation of seemingly fascist leagues, added to the 1926 Papal condemnation, the royalist movement was weakened by various dissidents.
Brüning
Heinrich Brüningwas a German Centre Party politician and academic, who served as the chancellor of Germany during the Weimar Republic from 1930 to 1932.
Shortly after Brüning took office as Chancellor on 30 March 1930 he was confronted by an economic crisis caused by the Great Depression. Brüning responded with a tightening of credit and a rollback of all wage and salary increases. These policies increased unemployment and made Brüning highly unpopular, losing him support in the Reichstag. As a result, Brüning established a so-called presidential government, basing his government’s authority on presidential emergency decrees invoking President Paul von Hindenburg’s constitutional powers. Brüning announced his cabinet’s resignation on 30 May 1932, after his policies of distributing land to unemployed workers had led him into conflict with the President and the Prussian land owners, and the President therefore had refused to sign further decrees. Fearing arrest after the Nazi regime’s ascent to power, Brüning fled Germany in 1934.
Brüning remains a controversial figure in Germany’s history, as historians debate whether he was the ‘last bulwark of the Weimar Republic’ or the ‘Republic’s undertaker’, or both. Scholars are divided over how much room for manoeuvre he had during the depression and period of great political instability.[While he intended to protect the Republic’s government, his policies, notably his use of emergency powers, also contributed to the gradual demise of the Weimar Republic during his chancellorship.
Von Papen
Franz von Papen was a German conservative politician, diplomat, Prussian nobleman and General Staff officer. He served as the chancellor of Germany in 1932, and then as the vice-chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934.
Appointed chancellor in 1932 by President Paul von Hindenburg, Papen ruled by presidential decree. He negotiated the end of reparations at the Lausanne Conference of 1932.
Determined to return to power, Papen, believing that Adolf Hitler could be controlled once he was in the government, persuaded Hindenburg into appointing Hitler as chancellor and Papen as vice-chancellor in 1933 in a cabinet ostensibly not under Nazi Party domination. With military dictatorship the only alternative to Nazi rule, Hindenburg consented. Papen and his allies were quickly marginalized by Hitler and he left the government after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, during which the Nazis killed some of his confidants. Subsequently, Papen served as an ambassador of Germany in Vienna from 1934 to 1938 and in Ankara from 1939 to 1944.
After the Second World War, Papen was indicted in the Nuremberg trials of war criminals before the International Military Tribunal but was acquitted of all charges. In 1947, a West German denazification court found Papen to have acted as the main culprit in crimes relating to the Nazi government.
Enabling Act of 1933
The Enabling of 1933 was a law that gave the German Cabinet—most importantly, the Chancellor—the powers to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or Weimar President Paul von Hindenburg. Critically, the Enabling Act allowed the Chancellor to bypass the system of checks and balances in the government and the laws created under it could explicitly violate individual rights prescribed in the Weimar Constitution.
In January 1933 Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler convinced President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint him as chancellor, the head of the German government.Four weeks into his chancellorship, the Reichstag building caught fire in the middle of the night. Hitler blamed the incident on the communists and was convinced the arson was part of a larger effort to overthrow the German government. Using this justification, Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to enact the Reichstag Fire Decree. The decree abolished most civil liberties including the right to speak, assemble, protest, and due process. Using the decree the Nazis declared a state of emergency and began to arrest, intimidate, and purge their political enemies. Communists and labor union leaders were the first to be arrested and interned in the first Nazi concentration camps. By clearing the political arena of anyone willing to challenge him, Hitler submitted a proposal to the Reichstag that would immediately grant all legislative powers to the cabinet. This would in effect allow Hitler’s government to act without concern to the constitution.
Mukden Incident
The Mukden Incident was a false flag event staged by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
On September 18, 1931, Lieutenant Suemori Kawamoto of the Independent Garrison Unit of the 29th Japanese Infantry Regiment detonated a small quantity of dynamite close to a railway line owned by Japan’s South Manchuria Railway near Mukden. The explosion was so weak that it failed to destroy the track, and a train passed over it minutes later. The Imperial Japanese Army accused Chinese dissidents of the act and responded with a full invasion that led to the occupation of Manchuria, in which Japan established its puppet state of Manchukuo six months later.
The deception was exposed by the Lytton Report of 1932, leading Japan to diplomatic isolation and its March 1933 withdrawal from the League of Nations.
Manchukuo
Manchukuo was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Northeast China and Inner Mongolia from 1932 until 1945. It was founded as a republic in 1932 after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and in 1934 it became a constitutional monarchy under the de facto control of Japan. It had limited international recognition.
In 1931, the region was seized by Japan following the Mukden Incident. A pro-Japanese government was installed one year later with Puyi, the last Qing emperor, as the nominal regent and later emperor. Manchukuo’s government was dissolved in 1945 after the surrender of Imperial Japan at the end of World War II. The territories claimed by Manchukuo were first seized in the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945, and then formally transferred to Chinese administration in the following year.
Engelbert Dollfuss
Engelbert Dollfuss was an Austrian politician who served as Chancellor of Austria between 1932 and 1934. He ascended to Federal Chancellor in 1932 in the midst of a crisis for the conservative government. In early 1933, he dissolved parliament and assumed dictatorial powers.
Suppressing the Socialist movement in February 1934 during the Austrian Civil War and later banning the Austrian Nazi Party, he cemented the rule of “Austrofascism” through the authoritarian First of May Constitution. Dollfuss modelled Austrofascism according to Catholic corporatist ideals with anti-secularist tones and in a similar way to Italian fascism, dropping Austrian pretenses of unification with Germany as long as the Nazi Party remained in power. In August 1933, Benito Mussolini’s regime issued a guarantee of Austrian independence.
Dollfuss was assassinated as part of a failed coup attempt by Nazi agents in 1934. His successor Kurt Schuschnigg maintained the regime until Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.
Stresa Front
The Stresa Front was an agreement made i between French Prime Minister Pierre-Étienne Flandin (with Pierre Laval), British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini on 14 April 1935. Its aim was to reaffirm the Locarno Treaties and to declare that the independence of Austria “would continue to inspire their common policy”.
The Stresa Front began to collapse after the United Kingdom signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June 1935 in which Germany was given permission to increase the size of its navy. It broke down completely within two to three months of the initial agreement, just after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia.
Hoare-Laval plan
The Hoare–Laval Pact was an initially secret December 1935 proposal by British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister Pierre Laval for ending the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Italy had wanted to seize the independent nation of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as part of its Italian Empire and also avenge the 1896 Battle of Adwa, a humiliating defeat. The Pact offered to partition Abyssinia and thus partially achieve Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s goal of making the independent nation of Abyssinia into an Italian colony.
The proposal ignited a firestorm of hostile reaction in Britain and France and never went into effect. Hoare and Laval were both sacked.
