A Surge in Global Imperialism
The global imperialism of the 1930s ultimately produced a thoroughly global war. The French, Dutch, British, and Belgians increased their control over their colonies, while in Palestine European Jews continued to arrive and claim the area from local peoples especially as Hitler enacted his harsh anti-Jewish policies in 1933. Japan’s military and business leaders longed to control more of the Asian continent and saw China, the Soviet Union, and the Western powers as obstacles to the empire’s prosperity and the fulfillment of its destiny.
Japan suffered from a weak monarchy in the person of Hirohito, just twenty-five years old when he became emperor in 1926, which led military and other groups to seek control of the government. Nationalists encouraged these leaders to pursue an expanded empire as key to pulling agriculture and small business from the depths of economic depression. A belief in racial superiority and in the right to take the lands of “inferior” peoples led the Japanese army to swing into action. In 1931, Japanese officers blew up a train in the Chinese province of Manchuria, where Japanese businesses had invested heavily. The army made the explosion look like a Chinese plot and used it as an excuse to take over the territory, set up a puppet government, and push farther into China. Amid journalistic calls in Japan for aggressive expansion, Japan continued to attack China from 1931 on, angering the United States, on which Japan depended for natural resources and markets. Advocating Asian conquest as part of Japan’s “divine mission,” the military solidified its influence in the government. By 1936–1937, Japan was spending 47 percent of its budget on arms.
The situation in East Asia affected international politics. The League of Nations condemned the invasion of Manchuria but imposed no sanctions. The league’s condemnation outraged Japanese citizens and goaded the government to ally with Hitler and Mussolini. In 1937, Japan attacked China again, justifying its offensive as a first step toward liberating the region from Western imperialism. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese were massacred in the Rape of Nanjing—an atrocity so named because of the Japanese soldiers’ brutality, especially toward girls and women. President Roosevelt immediately announced a U.S. embargo on the exportation of airplane parts to Japan and later drastically cut the flow of the crucial raw materials that supplied Japanese industry. Nonetheless, the Western powers, including the Soviet Union, did not effectively resist Japan’s territorial expansion. (See “Document 26.2: The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”)
Like Japanese leaders, Mussolini and Hitler called their countries “have-nots” and demanded land and resources more in line with the other imperial powers. Mussolini threatened “permanent conflict” to expand Italy’s borders. Hitler’s agenda included gaining Lebensraum (“living space”), to be taken from the “inferior” Slavic peoples and Bolsheviks, who would be moved to Siberia or would serve as slaves. The two dictators portrayed themselves as peace-loving men who resorted to extreme measures only to benefit their country and humanity. Their anticommunism appealed to statesmen across the West, and Hitler’s anti-Semitism also had widespread support.
Germany and Italy now moved to plunder other countries openly. In the autumn of 1933, Hitler announced Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. In 1935, he loudly rejected the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles that limited German military strength. Germany had been rearming in secret for years, but now it started doing so openly. Mussolini chose in 1935 to invade Ethiopia, one of the few African states not overwhelmed by European imperialism. “The Roman legionnaires are again on the march,” one soldier exulted. The poorly equipped Ethiopians resisted, but their capital, Addis Ababa, fell in the spring of 1936. Although the League of Nations voted to impose sanctions against Italy, Britain and France opposed an embargo with teeth in it—that is, one including oil—and thus kept the sanctions from being effective while also suggesting a lack of resolve to fight aggression. In March 1936, Hitler defiantly sent his troops into what was supposed to be a permanently demilitarized zone in the Rhineland bordering France. The inhabitants greeted the arrival with wild enthusiasm, and the French, whose security was most endangered by this action, protested to the League of Nations instead of occupying the region, as they had done in the Ruhr in 1923. The British simply accepted the German military move. The Italian and German dictators thus appeared as powerful heroes, creating, in Mussolini’s muscular phrase, a dynamic “Rome–Berlin Axis.” Next to them, the politicians of France and Great Britain looked timid and weak.