Unit 7.9 — Causation in Global Conflict

The peace settlement that closed World War I did not simply fail to prevent a second war -- it actively manufactured several of the specific grievances that a second generation of leaders would later exploit. Its harshest terms discredited Germany's new democratic government from the start, its language of self-determination raised expectations among colonized peoples that its own mandate system then betrayed, and its critics warned from the very first year that the settlement's economic terms would produce exactly the instability that followed. To evaluate how far the settlement caused the later war, it is worth separating a direct chain of German grievance from a broader, slower-burning chain of colonial grievance, since both fed into the 1930s but through different mechanisms.

By 1919, the Allied powers had already spent four years fighting the costliest war in the world's history, and every government at the Paris Peace Conference faced a public that wanted the defeated powers held to account -- context that explains why the settlement's terms leaned so heavily toward assigning blame and extracting payment rather than toward a negotiated peace among equals.

The clearest chain of causation runs through Germany. Document 2's Article 231 assigned Germany sole responsibility for the war's damage, the legal basis for the reparations payments that followed. Document 5 shows that this was recognized as dangerous immediately, not only in hindsight: Keynes, who had attended the conference as a British Treasury official before resigning in protest, warned in 1919 that deliberately impoverishing Central Europe would provoke "vengeance" rather than stability -- a prediction whose accuracy is worth weighing against the document's obvious limits as evidence, since Keynes was arguing for looser terms he had personally favored and had every professional reason to want proven right. Reparations pressure fed directly into Germany's 1923 hyperinflation, a specific, dated collapse in which the mark became worthless. A decade later, the Depression discredited the Dawes Plan's loan-dependent stabilization of that same reparations system, and it was against this backdrop of prolonged economic humiliation that Hitler built a political movement. Document 6 shows the direct result: in 1936, Hitler treated ripping up the treaty's demilitarization clause in the Rhineland as an act worth publicly declaring to the Reichstag, using the settlement's unpopularity in Germany as the very justification for defying it. Document 7's Chamberlain, negotiating at Munich two years later, was responding to the same treaty's legacy from the opposite direction -- his willingness to hand over the Sudetenland without even including Czechoslovakia's government reflected a British public and political class desperate to avoid repeating 1914-1918's total-war devastation, a purpose that explains appeasement as a genuine strategic choice rather than simple weakness, even though it failed to stop Hitler's next move into the rest of Czechoslovakia the following year.

A second, slower chain runs through the settlement's colonial promises. Document 1 shows Wilson framing "colonial claims" as owed equal weight to the "populations concerned," language colonized peoples took at face value. Document 3's Article 22 shows what actually followed instead: former Ottoman and German territories were placed under a mandate system whose own language described their inhabitants as "not yet able to stand by themselves," continuing prewar imperial justification under new institutional cover rather than ending it. Document 4 captures the resulting disappointment directly: Ho Chi Minh's petition to the peace conference asked only for basic civil liberties within the French empire, not even full independence, and was still refused a hearing by the same Allied leaders who had just finished proclaiming self-determination -- a rejection whose significance lies less in what it asked for than in who was doing the asking and how narrowly the conference's principles turned out to apply. This betrayal did not itself cause the war between Germany, Britain, and France that began in 1939, but it built the nationalist organizing -- from Ho Chi Minh's own movement to the Indian National Congress -- that would make the war's colonial empires far harder to hold together once it started, showing that the settlement's damage extended well beyond Europe even if its most direct causal line to 1939 ran through Germany specifically.

Beyond the documents, Japan's own path to war shows that the settlement's failures were not confined to Europe: Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria exposed the League of Nations -- the very institution Document 3's mandate system depended on -- as unable to enforce collective security, the same institutional weakness that would later fail to stop German and Italian aggression as well.

Taken together, the documents support treating the 1919-1920 settlement as a major, though not sole, cause of World War II: it created a specific chain of German grievance running from Article 231 through hyperinflation and the Depression to Hitler's treaty violations and Chamberlain's failed appeasement, while its betrayed promise of self-determination discredited the peace's own stated principles across the colonized world. The settlement did not make a second war certain in 1919, but it left remarkably few of the mechanisms available -- economic, diplomatic, or institutional -- that might have prevented one twenty years later.

European fighting between 1914 and 1945 changed dramatically in its tactics and in the destructive reach of its weapons, but it did not change in the deeper sense that mattered most to the people living through it: both wars demanded that entire societies, not just standing armies, be organized around winning. The tactical picture shifted from grinding, static endurance to fast-moving offensives, and the technology used to kill grew from machine guns and gas to strategic bombing and, finally, atomic weapons -- yet the total-war logic of mobilizing a whole nation's labor, industry, and civilian life persisted across both conflicts and, if anything, intensified rather than disappeared.

Contextually, the decades before 1914 had already seen European states pour unprecedented resources into standing armies and navies, so both wars opened onto a continent where mass industrial production could already be converted into mass violence; the only open question by 1939 was how that capacity would be used differently the second time around.

The clearest change is tactical. World War I's Western Front locked into trench warfare almost immediately: two lines of fortified ditches faced each other across "no man's land," and machine guns made any attempt to cross that gap catastrophically costly, so the front barely moved for years even as offensives cost tens of thousands of lives at a time. Germany's blitzkrieg doctrine in World War II was built specifically to avoid repeating that stalemate: fast tanks, mechanized infantry, and coordinated air support worked together to punch through a defensive line and encircle the enemy before trenches could even be dug, which is why German territorial gains in 1939-1940 came in weeks rather than years. This is a direct, deliberate response by military planners to the failure mode of the earlier war, not just an incidental improvement in equipment.

A second, related change is the reach and character of the weapons used to end each war. World War I's most feared new weapon was chlorine gas, whose reaction with moisture in the lungs made it an agonizing but still battlefield-confined killer. World War II ended with a technology of an entirely different order: the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later, forcing Japan's surrender through a single weapon capable of destroying a city outright. Between those two poles, strategic bombing campaigns had already made deliberately targeting industrial production and civilian morale from the air a routine part of the war, a level of direct violence against civilian populations that World War I's trench-bound Western Front never approached.

Despite these real changes, the underlying commitment of entire societies to the war effort did not let up between the two conflicts -- it continued and, arguably, deepened. Both wars saw governments direct national economies toward military production, ration civilian food supplies, and use censorship and propaganda to sustain public morale; both drew heavily on colonial troops and colonial labor to fill the trenches and the supply lines; and both pulled women into factory work at a scale each society's peacetime labor patterns had never approached. Reading the tactical and technological changes against this stable backdrop of total war reveals the more precise argument: World War II did not abandon total war for something new, it escalated total war's civilian and industrial mobilization into new tactical and technological forms capable of killing at a scale the trench-bound total war of 1914-1918 could not yet reach.

(a) Between 1912 and 1913, the two Balkan Wars stripped the Ottoman Empire of nearly all the European territory it still held, handing that land to a set of newly assertive small Christian states in the region. Combined with a shrinking economy and an export base that had already been contracting for years, the loss made plain to the rest of Europe's great powers that an Ottoman collapse was no longer a remote possibility but something close to inevitable, and it left the Balkans a volatile patchwork of new borders and unresolved grievances.

(b) A military mutiny that broke out in central China in 1911 spread within weeks into a wave of provincial rebellions the Qing court could no longer put down, and by the time the fighting settled the dynasty had fallen entirely. Sun Yat-sen took office as the first president of the resulting Chinese Republic, so for the first time in roughly two millennia no emperor sat on a Chinese throne — a single, dated turning point rather than a slow fade.

(c) When Japan defeated Russia in 1905, it became the first Asian state in the modern era to beat a major European power in open warfare, a result that also helped destabilize Russia internally and feed that year's revolution at home. The victory told the rest of the world that industrial and military strength, not geography or ethnicity, now decided which states counted as great powers, and it put Japan on that list for the first time.

(a) The Holocaust fits Lemkin's definition directly: Nazi Germany's systematic murder of approximately six million Jews, along with Roma people, disabled people, and political dissidents, grew out of the racial hierarchy at the center of fascist ideology and escalated from discriminatory laws into organized mass killing once Germany controlled the machinery of an industrial state at war.

(b) The Holodomor killed through a different mechanism than the Holocaust's organized shootings and camps: Soviet authorities forced Ukrainian peasants onto collective farms and then set grain quotas so high that entire villages were stripped of food while grain exports continued, so the deaths came from engineered starvation rather than direct killing, showing that a regime could produce mass death through economic policy alone.

(c) The scale of these atrocities pushed their aftermath into international law rather than leaving it as an unaddressed historical fact: Lemkin's own coinage of "genocide" fed directly into the United Nations' 1948 Genocide Convention, and the same recognizable pattern -- an extremist ideology paired with a state or militia able to act on it -- reappeared later in the century in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, prompting renewed, if imperfect, international attention to prevention and prosecution.

(a) The Great Depression spread from the United States to Europe largely through the international gold standard and the collapse of American lending. After the 1929 crash, U.S. banks stopped extending the loans that had been financing Germany's reparations payments under the Dawes and Young Plans, and gold reserves were pulled out of European banks to cover American losses. Because most major currencies were still pegged to gold, the resulting credit contraction and bank failures (such as the 1931 collapse of Austria's Credit-Anstalt) spread quickly to Germany and beyond, driving down production and employment across the continent.

(b) Mussolini responded to Italy's economic and social instability by building a corporatist state in which the government organized each sector of the economy into "corporations" combining employers and workers under Fascist Party oversight. He banned independent trade unions in 1925 and replaced them with state-controlled Fascist unions, using this centralized control of labor and industry to suppress the strikes and class conflict that had fueled fears of a communist revolution and to consolidate his personal dictatorship.

(c) The Great Depression sharply reduced Japan's export markets and convinced military leaders, particularly the Kwantung Army stationed in Manchuria, that Japan needed direct control of overseas raw materials such as Manchurian coal and iron ore rather than dependence on international trade. Acting largely on its own authority, the Kwantung Army staged the Mukden Incident in September 1931 as a pretext to seize Manchuria, tying Japan's military expansion directly to the economic insecurity produced by the global depression.