Page 202 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

interwar years (1918–1939) 1021

colonized populations elsewhere grew even wearier of had begun to decline, and prices had begun to fall. Fur-
the imperial double standards that offered freedom and thermore, wobbly governments deeply indebted from the
democracy at home but oppression abroad. To combat war and small investors had begun to default on their
European liberalism’s numerous contradictions, anti- loans from the United States. As a result federal man-
colonial forces began to claim various forms of nationa- agers raised interest rates, and financial institutions
lism for their own. began to collapse.The panic spread to the world market,
where investors had been investing in speculative ven-
Anticolonialism tures for a quick profit.The crash led to the rise of tariff
In Kenya, where colonialism was fairly recent, Harry borders and hence a contraction in world trade. Every-
Thuku began demanding that the British simply provide where people suffered from unemployment and hunger.
better education and return the lands they had seized The depression caused people to further question the lib-
from the natives. He was arrested by the British in 1922. eral doctrine of free markets, and states began to inter-
In India an outright anticolonial nationalist movement vene more heavily in economic affairs.
was under way.Throngs of Indians followed the leader- To many people U.S.-style laissez-faire (opposing gov-
ship of Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who insti- ernmental interference in economic affairs) democracy
gated a campaign of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha) in seemed to have failed to provide the prosperity it had
1922 to attain self-rule (swaraj). In Egypt an elite Egypt- promised, and people began welcoming authoritarian
ian politician asked to be invited to the peace conference solutions to poverty and mass unemployment. Soviet
at Versailles so that he could present his case for inde- Russia, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and militaristic Japan
pendence from Britain. When he arrived, however, the mobilized against the liberal democracies whose “moral
British arrested him.The incident led Egyptians to revolt, decay” and “decadence” they claimed to overcome. Lead-
which gained them partial independence by 1922. ers such as Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) of the Soviet
In 1926, in an act of good faith, the League of Nations Union, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) of Italy, and Adolf
invited Germany to join. Furthermore, in 1928 the French Hitler of Nazi Germany promised to deliver all of moder-
foreign minister, Aristide Briand (1862–1932), and the nity’s benefits without side effects such as class division,
U.S. secretary of state, Frank Kellogg (1856–1929), ini- urban-industrial squalor, or moral and social decay. In
tiated a pact to exclude war as an option in foreign pol- order to enact their programs, however, the authoritarian
icy except in self-defense. Sixty-five nations met in Paris leaders of both the right and the left first identified scape-
to sign the Kellogg-Briand pact.The Kellogg-Briand pact goats upon whom they could place the blame for the ad-
was a tremendous accomplishment, to be sure; however, verse economic and social conditions, and then they ad-
the fault lines of the period ran deep. Britain, for exam- vocated violence to dispense with their “enemies” in the
ple, agreed to sign the pact only as long as Britain could name of national progress. Stalin identified the “wealthy
use force within its own colonies. The conflicts that peasants” as the primary enemies of the state and pro-
raged throughout the 1930s were not dissolved in Paris ceeded to intern them in work camps. The Nazi Party
in 1928. In fact, they were on the verge of deepening in blamed Jews for all of modernity’s evils. Hitler railed
the face of the devastating economic depression that was against both “Jewish capitalism” and “Jewish bolshe-
just around the corner. vism,” and when he came to power in 1933, he imme-
On 29 October 1929 (Black Tuesday), the U.S. stock diately devised a number of plans to take care of the “Jew-
market crashed and sent shock waves throughout the ish problem”—plans that would lead to the Holocaust.
world economy. By the mid- to late 1920s the consum- By the mid-1930s the international order created by
erism of the “jazz age” that had led to greater production the treaties of Versailles,Washington, and Locarno was in