Chapter 5

In This Chapter

Making a bad peace after the First World War

Establishing dictatorships in Turkey, Italy, and around the world

Watching Hitler’s rise to power

The 1920s and 1930s saw a worrying new trend in government, first in Europe and then around the world: Right-wing militaristic dictatorship. Italy’s fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, set the pattern and many rulers copied him. His most famous admirer was Germany’s Adolf Hitler: The whole world felt the effects of his style of government. This chapter explains what was going on and why everyone seemed to fall for these men in uniform.

The story of the twentieth-century’s love affair with dictatorship begins with the peace settlement that ended the First World War. Unlike most peace treaties, where the two sides sit down and talk things over along we’ll-give-you-back-this-if-you-give-us-back-that lines, the Allies, France, Britain, and the United States, did all the talking and Germany and her allies just had to sign on the dotted line. They resented this situation. Deeply. (Chapter 3 has the details on the treaties that ended the First World War.) In fact, the first inter-war dictatorships (though, of course, they didn’tknow they were inter-war!) were set up by countries smarting at the way they were treated in the 1919 peace treaties. That didn’t just mean those on the losing side – some of thewinners were unhappy, too.

At-a-boy, Atatürk!

The first country to set up an authoritarian government in reaction to the 1919 peace settlement (refer to Chapter 3) was Turkey. Everyone had known the old Ottoman empire for its corruption and chronic inefficiency – it was even known as the ‘sick man of Europe’ but in 1908 a group of young army officers had seized control in Constantinople to try to restore a bit of strong government and national pride. As a result, the Turks had fought much better in the Great War than anyone, including their enemies, had expected.

The British and French had already decided to carve up the Ottoman empire in the Middle East between them back in 1916; in 1919 the Allies planned to carve up Turkey-in-Europe too. The Treaty of Sèvres handed Turkish land over to the Turks’ old enemies, the Greeks, and allowed the Armenians, whom the Turks had spent the war trying to wipe off the map, to set up their own state. It also imposed reparations, though under an even more humiliating name: Capitulations. While the other defeated powers felt they had no choice but to accept the Allies’ terms, in Turkey one man decided to tell the Allies just where they could put their humiliating treaty. His name was Mustafa Kemal (later Kemal Atatürk).

Kemal was a great believer in direct action:

1919: Treaty of Sèvres gives the Turkish port of Smyrna to Greece.

1920: Kemal leads a successful Turkish attack on the Greeks in Smyrna, killing as many Greeks as his men can find. Then he joins with the Bolsheviks – who’d changed their minds about allowing non-Russian peoples to pull away from Russia – in crushing the Armenians. Then he takes power in Constantinople.

1922: Kemal closes down the Ottoman empire, declares Turkey a republic, and threatens the British garrison at Chanak on the Dardanelles. The Allies decide they’d better negotiate with him.

Thanks to Kemal, Turkey was the only state which, in effect, tore up its peace treaty and negotiated a new one, the Treaty of Lausanne. Turkey agreed to give up its claims to Arab lands and various islands in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, but the payoff was that the Turks got to keep Smyrna and were let off paying any capitulations to the wartime Allies. From the Turkish point of view, the treaty was a triumph.

Kemal was determined to drag Turkey, by force if need be, into the twentieth century as a secular, not an Islamic, state. He didn’t actually ban Islam, but he made it very hard to practise it. He abolished the Caliphate of Constantinople, which had made the city the centre of the Muslim world, banned Islamic dress, especially the fez for men (which wasn’t actually Islamic but everyone thought it was) and the veil for women, and made everyone wear Western clothes. The weekly day off moved from the traditional Muslim Friday to the Christian (and therefore Western) Sunday. Children, including girls, were to go to secular schools where they would be taught to use the Western, Latin script; in 1934 Turkish women even got the vote. If all these changes sound liberal, don’t be fooled: Tough penalties were enforced for defying Kemal’s liberalising policies. Turkey was now effectively a military state in civvies.

Kemal adopted a new name for himself; henceforth he was to be known as Kemal Atatürk, which means ‘Father of the Turks’. His new title started a trend for leaders of dictatorships: Mussolini was ‘Il Duce’ and Hitler was ‘der Führer’, both of which mean ‘Leader’.

Present-day Turkey remains committed to the tradition of secularism, in the tradition Atatürk started, but for some Muslims, Atatürk is a controversial figure: They applaud his success in defeating the Western Allies, but they hate the steps he took against Islamic culture.

Who now remembers the Armenians?

Armenia is a region in the Caucasus that straddles Russia and Turkey. The Armenians have their own, ancient Christian Church but for many years they did not have their own state. In the 1890s the Turkish sultan, Abdul Hamid II, had ordered the wholesale massacre of Armenians and the Turks resumed their campaign in 1915, driving thousands of Armenians from their lands regardless of how many of them died. After Lenin decided that letting so many of the nationalities of the old tsarist empire, including the Armenians, set up independent, anti-communist states on Russia’s borders might not be such a good idea after all, he and Kemal co-operated in crushing the briefly-independent Armenian state and the Turks resumed their campaign of ethnic cleansing. Yet, the rest of the world largely ignored what happened in Armenia and to this day the Turks furiously deny that they launched a campaign of genocide to wipe out the Armenian people, even though that’s the consensus of historians. When the Nazis weren’t sure if they would get away with trying to deport or intern the Jewish population of Germany, Hitler reassured them by saying, ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’ He had a point.

Persia and Reza Khan

The great powers were very interested in Persia (modern-day Iran), but their interest was more because of its strategic position than because of oil. Persia acted as a buffer between Russia in the north and British India and Afghanistan in the south. In 1907 the Anglo–Russian entente divided the country into three zones: A Russian zone in the north (it didn’t belong to Russia but Russia was allowed to station troops there), a British zone in the south, and a neutral zone in the middle, which neither side was supposed to go into. That situation didn’t mean the two sides trusted each other to keep to the terms of the deal, though, especially once the Bolsheviks had come to power in Russia. So in 1921 the British decided to take advantage of the fact that the Russians were in the throes of civil war (see Chapter 4 to find out why) and get their man in power in Tehran. They backed a coup by Reza Khan, who overturned the shah (the ruler) and took power.

Reza Khan was a sort of Persian Atatürk (see the previous section to find out what Kemal Atatürk was up to in Turkey). First Reza told the Russians to pack their bags and clear out, which they did (both sides in the civil war could do with extra troops so they had plenty of reasons for going home). In 1925 he declared himself Shah of Shahs and set up a dictatorship. As in Turkey, this was to be a Western-dressed and Western-looking dictatorship: Reza banned Islamic dress for men and women and started redrafting the country along Western lines. He drew the line at rights for women, though. In 1935 he even dropped the country’s ancient name and renamed it Iran (meaning ‘Aryan’).

Reza was a canny operator. He owed his power to backing from the British, but he didn’t let that limit him. In 1933 he started to take over the operations of the Anglo–Persian Oil Company and in the early days of the Second World War, when the Germans seemed bound to win, he started talking with Berlin. Which is why, in 1941, the British and Russians put aside their old quarrels over the region and together kicked him out.

Ooh, I do like a man in uniform

Mussolini liked to see himself as the heir to the great Italian nationalist leader of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Garibaldi (find out about him in European History For Dummies (Wiley)). Garibaldi couldn’t afford proper uniforms, so he dressed his men in red shirts: Very becoming and the blood wouldn’t show. The communists had taken red as their colour, so Mussolini dressed his men in black shirts instead. Other fascist leaders followed his lead. Hitler dressed his followers in brown shirts, and the fascist movement that sprang up in Ireland wore blue shirts. The British fascists wore black jumpers with buttons along the shoulder. The idea was to get round bans on private armies by claiming these outfits weren’t proper military uniforms at all, honestly, officer. No one was fooled.

Mussolini Muscles In

While Turkey was fretting about the settlement of a war she had lost (see the earlier section ‘At-a-boy, Atatürk!’), the Italians were angry about the outcome of a war they had won. Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, the big three at the Paris peace conference, decided Italy hadn’t fought well enough to get all the territory along the Adriatic coast it claimed for itself, so they gave it to Yugoslavia. The Italians were deeply disappointed; they spoke of a ‘mutilated peace’ and they all cheered when an eccentric poet called Gabriele d’Annunzio did his bit to put it right by leading a military take-over of the Adriatic port of Fiume, which the Italians had decided was that year’s must-have. Grabbing Fiume was all very well, though: Who would grab Italy?

The man the Italians turned to was a fire-brand journalist-turned-soldier called Benito Mussolini. Mussolini seized power in 1922 in what he liked to call, rather grandly, the March on Rome. In fact, Mussolini took the train to Rome (give the man a break: He marched from the station) and demanded that the king appoint him prime minister so he could restore order and put down the political violence that had erupted all over Italy. The fact that the violence was caused by his own supporters, known from their paramilitary uniforms as blackshirts, was neither here nor there. The king, who was terrified of the communists (and rather scared of Mussolini), agreed and Mussolini took power.

Socialist + nationalist = fascist

Mussolini had been a socialist, but he was a proud Italian nationalist as well, and he sought a way of tying his nationalism to his socialist principles. He got his inspiration from Italy’s glory days under the ancient Romans. Mussolini took the symbol of the old Roman republic, a bundle of rods bound together to symbolise unity and strength and known as the ‘fasces’, and from it coined the word fascism.

Although we think of fascism and socialism as complete opposites, in fact the two had a lot in common. Fascism and socialism both believed that:

All power should go to the State rather than to individuals.

Individuals should submit their will to the will of the State.

The State should control private enterprise, and especially heavy industry.

The State should control education.

And, in practice, even though it went against socialist theory, both accepted that one man should control everything from the top.

Life under Mussolini

Mussolini called himself Il Duce, ‘the Leader’, and made Italians salute him in the old Roman way, with a raised right arm. He liked to present himself as a multi-talented superhero, riding horses, playing the violin, or stripping to the waist to help with the harvest (anything to show off his pecs). He reorganised Italian industry in what he called the Corporate State, which essentially meant the State gave all power to the bosses and told the workers to stop grumbling and get to work. Oh, and trade unions were abolished, in case you hadn’t already guessed.

Mussolini’s regime started another trend others would copy: Ruthless violence. His blackshirts disrupted socialist meetings and beat up political opponents, sometimes by forcing them to drink castor oil (according to the victims, if you ever get the choice, choose being beaten up). In 1922 they even went so far as to murder the socialist leader of the parliamentary opposition, Giacomo Matteotti. Mussolini’s regime was successful in establishing full employment (mainly by setting the nation to work building up Italy’s armed forces), and he signed an important agreement with the pope, which won many of Italy’s Catholics over to his regime and set up the independent state of the Vatican City. And he really did make sure the trains ran on time, or at least the tourist trains that foreign visitors were likely to take. To many people around the world Mussolini seemed to be restoring some much-needed order to Italy, but the threat of political violence was never very far beneath the surface.

I’m the leader! And so am I! Me too! Mussolini copy cats

The fascists created a leader cult around Mussolini. His face was everywhere, and children learned to swear loyalty to Il Duce. They even learned a nice, simple slogan ‘Mussolini is always right’, which saved everyone the trouble of having to think things through for themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, other leaders were impressed and set about copying Mussolini’s methods:

Portugal: Portugal was suffering from serial military coups when in 1928 the finance minister, Dr Antonio Salazar, restored a bit of stability. In 1932 he took over as prime minister and he ruled as dictator until he had a stroke – in 1968!

Hungary: Since the fall of Bela Kun’s short-lived socialist republic (see Chapter 4) Hungary was ruled by the right-wing dictator Admiral Miklós Horthy.

Poland: Marshal Józef Pilsudski seized power in a military coup in 1926 and ruled as a right-wing dictator.

Albania: In 1919 Ahmed Bey Zogu seized power and ruled along fascist lines. In 1928 he declared himself King Zog I, which was much more memorable.

Yugoslavia: King Alexander I staged a royal coup in 1929 and centred all power in his own hands. Mind you, he did so because divisions in the Yugoslav parliament had got so bad the deputies had started shooting at each other!

Romania: In 1930 King Carol II seized power, overthrowing his little son King Michael. Carol set up a royal dictatorship with the support of the Romanian fascists, the Iron Guard.

Austria: In 1933 Chancellor Engelbert Dollfüss, scared that the workers were going to stage some sort of revolution, closed the Austrian parliament and set up a fascist-style regime. He sent the army in to drive the socialists out of their bases in Vienna’s housing estates, and he developed close links with Admiral Horthy in Hungary and Mussolini in Italy. You don’t see any of that in The Sound of Music.

And then, of course, there’s Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s Germany

To get an idea of how Germans responded to the Treaty of Versailles (see Chapter 3), you only have to visit the war memorial in Munich. The grave of the Unknown Soldier shows a Bavarian soldier lying on his tomb in full uniform and holding his rifle. He’s not dead; he’s asleep, and the writing on the monument says ‘I shall arise’. The memorial is a sign that the Germans did not regard the Treaty of Versailles as a done deal. Already they were thinking of the Great War as Round One: Germany would arise again, ready for Round Two. And this was before anyone except his friends and his mother had heard of Hitler.

What a way to run a republic

When the war ended, armed groups of communists and anti-communists tried to seize power. The street fighting in Berlin was so dangerous that the new republican government moved out to the spa town of Weimar, where it was safer. Not such a good idea: The Germans, who reckoned – with reason – this whole democracy idea had been forced on them by the Allies, thought this relocation showed the government was running scared, and the regime was known, rather contemptuously, as the ‘Weimar Republic’ from then on.

Students can be fairly dismissive of the Weimar Republic and think it was bound to fail. For many years historians took the same view, but they are generally a bit kinder to it now. The Republic overcame the crises of the early 1920s, which could easily have brought it crashing down, and achieved a good level of stability for most of the decade. What brought the Weimar Republic down was the worldwide slump that started with the Wall Street Crash in 1929. No government in the world, including the United States, knew how to handle that situation.

The Weimar Republic had a balanced constitution which guaranteed everyone’s civil rights and ensured political freedom for all. But first, it had some urgent problems to deal with.

Putsch attempts

Seizing power by force – using troops to overthrow the government and seize all the vital communications and services – is normally known in English by the French term coup d’état (literally, ‘a blow of the state’). The German term for it is putsch, which means the same thing, but for events in Germany historians usually use the German term.

In 1919 the German communists tried to take power in Berlin and Munich (see Chapter 4 to find out a bit more about the German communists). That attempt failed when right-wing ex-army groups known as Freikorps took the law into their own hands and shot the communist leaders. Next, some of those self-same right-wing ex-army groups tried to take power in Berlin and the real army seemed ready to stand by and let them do it. That attempt also failed when the socialists called a general strike that paralysed the capital and forced the putsch leaders to give in. Not until the end of 1920 could the actual elected leaders of the Republic finally come out from behind the sofa, dust themselves down, and start governing.

Economic meltdown

Any war costs money, and the Great War cost a great deal. The German government was deeply in debt to all those it had borrowed from during the war. And the Treaty of Versailles’ insistence that Germany should pay reparations made this bad situation ten times worse. Much of what Germany produced in terms of coal or steel or manufactured goods, as well as a significant part of her annual budget, had to be shipped straight off to France and Belgium. In 1923 the German economy took a downturn and the government asked the French if they could suspend reparation payments until things picked up. ‘Definitely not!’ said the French, and when the Germans suspended the payments anyway, the French and Belgian armies marched into Germany, occupied the industrial Ruhr region, and insisted on overseeing the flow of reparations themselves. Result: The Germans called a general strike, production came to a halt, the French troops got angry, and ugly incidents occurred in which some German civilians were killed. Meanwhile, the German mark had collapsed. Really collapsed.

With nothing being produced in the Ruhr, the whole basis for Germany’s financial system disappeared, and the German mark began to lose its value rapidly. The Germans responded by printing more banknotes, which simply meant they became worthless. Prices went through the roof and became silly: A cup of coffee cost a billion marks, and you’d be well advised to pay when you got it because the price would have gone up by the time you’d drunk it. Less funny was seeing your life savings becoming worthless or having all the people who owed you money coming round to hand over worthless notes with grins all over their faces.

Stresemann to the rescue!

Germany wasn’t rescued by Hitler, but by a man who’s largely forgotten nowadays, though he was a big figure in his day: Gustav Stresemann. Stresemann was a no-nonsense German nationalist, who, like many Germans, dreamed of a stronger – and much larger – Germany, but he was a practical man and he knew he had to sort out Germany’s problems first. In his few months as prime minister in 1923, he simply called in all the useless bank- notes circulating in Germany and burned them. He told the workers in the Ruhr to get back to work, and he assured the French and Belgians that the reparation payments would resume. Then he issued a new, solid, sensible currency called the Rentenmark, which means ‘mark-with-profits’ and sounded very reassuring. Immediately the economy started turning again.

Stresemann also negotiated a deal with the American financier Charles Dawes for a schedule of reparation payments, so Germany knew exactly how much she had to pay each year, instead of having to pay extra every time the French decided they were a bit short. In 1926 Stresemann negotiated the Locarno Treaties, signed at a nice lakeside retreat in Switzerland, which were a sort of renegotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, on fairer terms this time, which agreed Germany’s western borders, left the eastern borders to be settled some other time, and got Germany admitted to the League of Nations. People often say that Hitler tore up the Treaty of Versailles, but Stresemann started the process.

In 1929 Stresemann went back to the thorny reparations question and did a deal with the American financier Owen D. Young for a massive reduction (75 per cent) in the reparations bill, with a schedule of ever-smaller payments, not to France and Belgium but into an international bank, with a definitive end-date of 1988.

Stresemann managed to get Germany floating again but he did it by negotiating deals with the Americans. In effect, the German economy in the 1920s was based entirely on American loans. This situation was fine as long as the American economy remained strong; if it ever collapsed, Germany was in deep trouble.

If you enjoy historical speculation you can have fun wondering how things might have been different if Stresemann had carried on. You can certainly argue that he was doing so well that Germans didn’t see any need for extremist parties such as the Nazis and the communists. Unfortunately, in 1929 two things happened which changed their minds: The Wall Street Crash brought the American economy hurtling down, and Gustav Stresemann died.

Race and ‘Science’

Hitler’s regime is notorious for its racism. The Nazis believed in a strict hierarchy of races and Jews, Gypsies, and the Slavic peoples came at the bottom. They liked to claim their thinking was purely scientific, derived from Darwin’s ideas about natural selection in the animal and plant worlds. They drew particular pleasure from the rambling writings of an English racist, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Nazi professors churned out one pseudo-scientific ‘racial science’ volume after another. Children were even taught ‘race theory’ at school.

Racism wasn’t some peculiarity of the Germans; until Hitler came to power the most anti-Semitic countries were probably Poland, France, and Russia. Some fascist regimes were as racist as the Nazis, but not all. In particular, the Italian fascists and Admiral Horthy’s regime in Hungary weren’t particularly interested in Nazi racial theory until the Germans forced them to start applying the same racial laws as in Germany. After the Second World War and the creation of the state of Israel, anti-Semitism spread to the Arab world, though it had more to do with religion than with discredited pseudo-science.

Hitler comes to power

In 1923, just after the inflation, Adolf Hitler made his first attempt to seize power. He’d joined a small political party which felt that Germany was going to the dogs and the communists were to blame. Hitler gave the party a make-over, changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (‘Nazi’ for short), and in November 1923 he tried to lead it to power by armed force. He attempted to take the government of Bavaria hostage in a beer hall in Munich but, on this occasion at any rate, Hitler proved incapable of organising a putsch in a beer cellar; he and his gang were rounded up and sent to prison. However, the judge was clearly sympathetic to the Nazis and they were kept in very comfy surroundings. Hitler used the time to dictate his deadly dull bookMein Kampf (My Struggle).

Hitler’s first real chance for power came with the worldwide slump that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 (see Chapter 8 to find out about this event). As unemployment soared and the government seemed powerless to get the economy going again, Germans lost confidence in the mainstream parties and turned to the extremists. Enough right-wingers with money were scared of the communists to lend their support to Hitler and the Nazis started winning votes in large numbers. In January 1933, after a bit of political wheeler-dealing, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

Doing away with democracy

In 1933 the Reichstag, the German parliament building, was set on fire. The Nazis claimed the fire was a communist plot to seize power and started rounding their opponents up and sending them off to detention centres, or concentration camps, as they were called. The first one, at Dachau on the outskirts of Munich, opened only two months after Hitler became chancellor. Parliament, meeting in its temporary quarters in the Berlin Opera House, passed a law saying that the government could pass whatever laws it liked without having to pass them through parliament, and when old President Hindenburg died in 1934 Hitler didn’t bother electing a new president; he just rolled the post together with the chancellorship and created a single ruler whom everyone had to obey: The Führer.

The Nazis set up a number of organisations to run different sections of German life: The Hitler Youth and the League of German Maidens for young people, Nazi organisations for lawyers, teachers, and doctors, and a labour corps for workers (no trade unions were allowed, of course – far too socialist). The Nazis even laid down ‘proper’ rules for how artists and sculptors should work. The Olympic Games held in Berlin in 1936 provided a wonderful showcase for all this nazification of German society. Famously, the black American athlete, Jesse Owens, spoilt Hitler’s show by winning a string of gold medals (which, according to Nazi racial theory, shouldn’t have been possible), but don’t underestimate the effect of the staging of the games: It made the Nazi regime look strong, organised, and efficient to the rest of the world.

Underlying the Nazis’ efficiency, however, was a network of terror. The secret police, the ‘gestapo’, used informers to make people too scared to act, or even speak, against the regime; anyone who did ended up in a concentration camp. Rules against Germany’s Jews got steadily tougher: They lost their jobs, found it harder to get educated, and were even excluded from public parks and telephone boxes. In November 1938 the government organised a ‘spontaneous’ attack on Jewish property throughout Germany; so many shop windows were smashed that it became known as ‘Reichskristallnacht’, the Reich’s Night of Broken Glass. Not only the glass suffered that night: Thousands of Jews were murdered as well.

If understanding why people put up with dictatorship is difficult, look at the benefits it could bring. As long as you weren’t Jewish or a communist or otherwise fell foul of the government, life could be great in fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. The government provided work and cheap, even free, holidays, and it gave the people a sense of pride in their nation. Most people thought that a bit of curtailing of their civil liberties was a small price to pay for a higher standard of living. And these smartly dressed, efficient, and active regimes looked so much better than the rather shabby, inefficient, and weak-willed democracies.

For most Germans, Hitler’s trump card was that he intended to tear up the hated Treaty of Versailles: He would build up Germany’s armed forces and start taking back the territory the Treaty had taken away. Then he would take over land in the east as GermanLebensraum, ‘living space’, an area where Germany could expand and Germans could move to settle, like in the American West. Chapter 9 looks at how he did it.

Go ahead, priest, make my day

The long years of Spanish rule had left South America overwhelmingly Catholic. However, the Catholic Church had become closely associated with the power of the State and of the rich landowners, so many of the poorer people were cynical about the Church and about religion in general. Revolutionary movements in South America – and the region had plenty of them – therefore tended to be fiercely anti-clerical, that is, they saw priests and nuns as the enemy, and were quite prepared to kill them, often very brutally.

Jackboots in South America

The countries of South America were very proud of having gained their independence from Spain in the nineteenth century. However, they were new countries, heavily dependent on outside help. For most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, most of them turned to Britain for investment and trade, and even for population: Large numbers of Irish and Welsh settlers headed for Argentina and Chile. The South Americans were also very wary of the growing power of their northern neighbour, the United States.

Argentina, 1916: Radical Party of Hipolito Irigoyen wins the election by promising all kinds of reforms. Radical Party forgets these promises once it has been in power for a bit and gets used to chauffeur-driven cars and state dinners. A military coup in 1930 puts the landowners back in charge, with an oppressive right-wing regime – until the next coup, thirteen years later.

Brazil: Population going up fast; price of coffee coming down, also fast. Result: Trouble. Military coup in 1930 brings Getulio Vargas to power and he stays there until 1945.

Venezuela: Juan Gomez, ‘the tyrant of the Andes’, runs the country as a brutal dictatorship since seizing power in 1908. He stays in power largely because the economy is doing well since the discovery of oil in 1913.

To add to the region’s problems, war broke out in 1932 between Bolivia and Paraguay over a border dispute. The League of Nations tried to sort the conflict out, but neither side took any notice. Finally, in 1935, the United States stepped in. It was not to be the last such border dispute, nor the last border war.

Big in Japan

For westerners, the Japanese were always the big exception in their view of Asia. They saw most Asian peoples as backward and needing to be ruled by Europeans, but they recognised that the Japanese were different. Japan had been single-mindedly westernising itself since the 1860s and had shown in its war with Russia (1904–5) and in the First World War that it was perfectly capable of taking on Western powers and defeating them. Japan’s treatment at the Paris peace conference (see Chapter 3), however, suggests that westerners didn’t really view them as racial equals.

The Japanese didn’t see why, if Western powers could have empires, they shouldn’t too. In fact, by the 1930s the Japanese were increasingly sure that they didn’t just want an empire: They needed one. The population of Japan was soaring and the Japanese were beginning to feel very crowded in their small islands. Even worse, the economy went into recession in the 1920s and into nosedive in the 1930s. In the Great Depression (you can find out more about this in Chapter 8) no one was trading with anyone much, and they certainly didn’t want Japanese silk. Then, just when the Japanese didn’t need it, the paddy fields produced a bumper crop of rice, which sounds good but actually meant that rice farmers were ruined because the price slumped. So by the 1930s Japan was experiencing the same sort of economic crisis that had helped bring Hitler to power in Germany. The answer seemed to lie in a Japanese version of – you’ve guessed it – fascism.

The divine emperor is all-powerful and will do as he’s told

Japan never got its own Mussolini or Hitler because it already had its emperor, Hirohito, a mild-mannered man who enjoyed marine biology and treasured his Mickey Mouse watch, which he’d picked up on a trip to America. The Japanese owed their emperor unquestioning obedience and nothing could happen in terms of policy without his say so, yet at the same time they made sure he had virtually no power at all. He presided over cabinet meetings and clearly followed the arguments carefully, but he had to agree with every decision that was taken, even if he didn’t. The emperor couldn’t stop anyone who wanted to twist Japanese politics for their own ends. By the 1930s, the Japanese army wanted to do just that.

Asia for the (Japanese) Asians!

The Japanese liked to claim they were fighting on behalf of all Asians, but in reality they were trying to extend their own borders. When they crushed the Russians in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905, riots broke out in the streets because the Japanese were so disappointed they hadn’t ended up with more land, and they were similarly disappointed with their share of the 1919 peace settlement at the end of the Great War. They had been looking forward to taking over large sections of China, but all they got were some of the areas the Germans had controlled. They put forward a proposal to uphold racial equality, but everyone knew it was just an excuse to try to grab more land in China, so they didn’t get it.

Japan’s young army officers decided to act. Nationalists had already assassinated two – yes, two! – prime ministers, in 1921 and again in 1932, and in 1936 these Mussolini-admiring officers tried to stage a coup and seize power. The emperor stood firm and had the ringleaders executed, but the lesson wasn’t lost on the army generals, who thought these young officers may have been a bit hot-headed, but they had the right idea. Under the Japanese constitution no government could meet without a Minister of War chosen by the army (not by the prime minister, note) so all the army had to do was say ‘Right, the Minister of War is resigning’ and the government collapsed. That situation meant that by the 1930s Japan was effectively controlled by the army, and the army was increasingly inspired by the examples of Hitler and Mussolini. Japan didn’t have a fascist leader as such, but it was a fascist state.