In February of 1934 the growing antagonisms in France between the political Left and the political Right – greatly exacerbated by the Stavisky investment fraud which implicated many Leftist cabinet members – erupted in the form of Paris riots, which many thought was the prelude to an attempt at a Right-Wing political coup. Order was restored to France.  However, Left-Wing suspicions of on-going Right-Wing Fascist plots, and similar suspicions by the Right of Communist plots of the Left to take over France, split the country into deeply hostile political groupings.

Besides the Left-Right deadlock over the basic political path the country should take, the evolution of the larger world of European politics, especially during the 1930s, made French national politics even more complex.  The French could not decide which rising power to the East, Nazi Germany or Communist Russia, posed the greater danger to Western, or at least French, civilization.  Along with this went wide disagreement on how to respond to Mussolini in Ethiopia and the civil war raging in Spain (1936-1939).

In short – France really was not able to get its act together at a time that it was supposed to be one of the two major enforcers of the post war international status quo (the other being Great Britain).  Indeed, by the late 1930s France found itself floundering in a deep domestic political war.

The Conservative Party leader Stanley Baldwin dominated British politics during much of the period following the Great War.  Baldwin’s governance was characterized by a policy of peace-at-any-price. He understood that the British did not want ever to go to war again; that they expected him to keep them from diplomatic entanglements and any military buildup, viewed at that time as largely responsible for the Great War of 1914–1918; and that his first priority as Britain’s leader was to get the country back on sound economic footing.

Thus he cut back tremendously on British military spending and strength at a time that Germany was rebuilding its military power (happening even before Hitler took charge of Germany in 1933) – in well-recognized violation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and the Locarno Pact of 1925.  Every effort was made by Baldwin (and most British politicians and intellectuals) to excuse Hitler's moves to remilitarize Germany – on the basis that Germany was only compensating for the horrible injustices inflicted on Germany by the now notorious Versailles Treaty.²

Thus Baldwin and fellow Conservative Party member Winston Churchill (himself a former party leader) found themselves constantly at odds over this issue of Great Britain's pacifism in the face of German remilitarization.  Baldwin viewed Churchill as a war-monger who wanted to drag Great Britain into an arms race and thus another war with Germany.  Churchill viewed Baldwin as one who invited German military adventurism by the obvious lack of English resolve to stop Hitler before he became so strong that there would be no way to block his military ambitions.

Basically, Baldwin was working out of the spirit of the moment, of the times he lived in.  Churchill was working out of a longer sense of British history – and its long-standing role as balancer of power on the European continent (as for instance in the days of Napoleon in the early 1800s).  History would soon be the judge of which of the two had it right.

²The spirit of total pacifism was so strong in Britain that not only did the British Communist and Labour Parties on the Left denounce British remilitarization but also in 1933 the Oxford Union debated the issue of British intervention in the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, producing (with a vote of 275 to 153) a final resolution declaring that "this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country."  The resolution brought on much debate not only in Britain, but around the world.  Churchill was loud in his contempt for this resolution!

Although Spain was a Constitutional Monarchy (like Great Britain and most of the rest of the European continent) the country had actually been run by a system of local bosses (caciques) with little interest in turning Spain into a modern society. Spain itself was highly divided as to the direction it wanted to go, especially after the Great War, which Spain stayed out of but which benefitted a small group of industrial entrepreneurs who sold goods to the combatants.  The vast and highly traditional countryside (strongly Roman Catholic and even semi-feudal in mentality) was greatly alienated by this small intrusion of modernity into a society still romantically attached to the glorious past of the 1500s, a past that was very unlikely to ever return.  Then there were the new industrial workers who grudgingly took their place in Spain's factories, who felt a bit of kinship with the Russian workers who similarly had moved abruptly from feudalism to modern industrial society – led by Communist idealists (the Bolsheviks).  In short, Spain was a confused and highly divided society.

Into that confusion stepped Spanish General Primo de Rivera – who seized power in 1923, and forced economic and social discipline on Spain, settling things down a bit (and eliminating the caciques) – but whose rule gradually began to draw strong criticism from impatient modernizers who felt that his Mussolini-like grip over Spanish society (and the Spanish monarchy that supported him) was only serving to block real social progress.  Ultimately both Rivera and King Alfonso, tiring of the situation, in 1931 called for a referendum on Spain's future.  The results went in favor of a Republican government, and Rivera stepped down and the king abdicated.

But the Republican government's move to secularize Spain's Catholic culture (undercutting the Church's role in the country's schooling and cultural disciplines, such as its stand on marriage and divorce) served only to deepen the cultural division that split Spain into two hostile groups, the Republicans concentrated heavily in urban Spain – actually bitter about the slowness of the social reforms (and increasingly of a Communist or anarchist frame of mind) – and the more rural Nationalists who clung desperately to a clearly dying traditional Catholic Spain.

Back and forth power swung in the national parliament (the Cortes) until by mid-1936 the battle had moved to the streets in the form of fighting between the two groups: the Conservative Falangists (backed by a very conservative Spanish military) and the proto-Communist Republicans (supported by 200,000 Asaltos or fighters).  This was the signal for General Francisco Franco Bahamonde to leave his position in Morocco with accompanying Nationalist troops and head to Spain, to fight the Republicans.  At this point the very bloody Spanish Civil War broke out.

But this civil war did not actually remain much of a civil war.  Instead it turned itself quickly into a test run of the superpowers, especially Germany and Italy which intervened on Franco's side, to try out their new military products and strategies (dive bombers, for instance).  At the same time, Stalin sent a huge number of advisors to help the Republicans against Franco – as did also France and Britain, although only on a very small scale.  Volunteers poured in from America serving on one side or another, Hemingway, for instance, actually serving with the Republicans – building his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, on his own experience in the war.

Feelings ran very hot on both sides of the war, both sides destroying villages (and killing villagers) caught in the crossfire.  And major atrocities occurred: Leftist Republicans killing priests and raping nuns – and the Nazi allies of Franco leveling the town of Guernica as practice in developing divebombing techniques that would later be used by Hitler in his conduct of Blitzkrieg (Lightning War).

Little by little Franco's Falangists (with a lot of help from the Germans and Italians) were able to gain ground against the Republicans, until in 1939 Madrid was finally taken by Franco, and the war came to a halt. 

Spain was devastated.  And it would have presiding over it a dictator determined to shape Spain exactly as he himself determined, all the way up until his death decades later (1975).

Also, Spain was exhausted, and in no hurry to get involved in another war (they would also sit out World War Two). 

But everything that pointed to the tragedy that was about to break out in Europe was contained in those events of 1936–1939.  The Spanish Civil War, in fact, was simply a dry run on the larger war that Hitler had planned for Europe.  And the responses of all the major players to the events focused on Spain would resemble very closely how the diplomacy and military development would occur as events leading up to World War Two.  But few understood this at the time, especially the British and French who continued to hope that they somehow knew the formulas for keeping the peace in Europe.  Spain taught them nothing.

Japan had come to consider itself one of the great world powers as the 20th century got underway, having modernized its army and navy to the point that it was able to defeat Tsarist Russia in a Siberian war fought in 1904 and 1905.  Also, although the Great War (1914–1918) was essentially a European war, Japan played a part as an Asian ally of the British and French – and was rewarded accordingly by the formal recognition on the part of those victorious powers of the Japanese takeover of German colonies in the Pacific.

America, of course, was wary of Japanese broader interests in Asia (the Philippines was an American protectorate defended by a number of American troops posted there).  But in general Japanese-American relations remained somewhat friendly, although the Japanese were insulted by America's 1924 Immigration Act, which reduced greatly the number of immigrants allowed to come to America – virtually excluding all Japanese.

But the Japanese were making an effort to move closer to the ideal of democracy – democracy supposedly having proved itself the stronger social system in the recent war with autocracy.

However with the onset of the depression, democracy was not looking so impressive, and the Japanese military group within the Japanese Imperial Cabinet began to take a scornful attitude toward the Japanese pro-democracy civilian politicians – who had agreed to internationally determined formulas of naval and military disarmament – the military party pressing instead for a military buildup of both the army and the navy.  Indeed, radicals within the Japanese military were calling for a revival of Shinto, a somewhat mystical philosophy stressing the virtue of military valor or bushido – even the glory of death in battle.  For some (especially the younger) Japanese soldiers, Shinto and its bushido ethic formed for them an intoxicating ideal.

By the early 1930s civilian leaders were being assassinated – and cabinets were being turned over with destabilizing rapidity.

Also in 1932 young officers in the Japanese occupation army in Manchuria (northeastern China) staged a fake crisis and used the event to simply take full control of the Chinese province and set up a puppet government there.  The Japanese Emperor Hirohito did not seem to object – and the civilian government seemed unable to undo the takeover (very popular with the Japanese people).

Chamberlain would have the opportunity soon enough to make good on his promise – and once again back down in the face of Hitler’s aggressive moves. Hitler now set his eyes on the Germans living in the mountainous borderlands of Czechoslovakia (the region known as Sudetenland).  Hitler began to claim loudly that the Czechs were mistreating the Germans of the Sudetenland (totally untrue) and he was thus forced to have to deal with this situation.  However, Czechoslovakia’s military defenses (aimed primarily against Germany, but also the new Poland) were well dug in there, and Czechoslovakia’s battle-ready forty infantry divisions would have offered very effective and very embarrassing resistance to any aggressions on the part of Hitler.

But to avoid a mounting international crisis, Chamberlain agreed to meet in September (1938) with Hitler (and Mussolini) in Munich, to seek a peaceful resolution to this (non) crisis, not knowing that officers in the German high command were secretly making plans to depose Hitler before he dragged the country into an unwanted war.

Then as a result of the discussions held in Munich concerning this Czechoslovakian crisis (to which the Czechoslovakian leadership itself was not even invited), Chamberlain was pleased to offer the world a peaceful solution, one that would avoid dragging Europe into another war.  Hitler would be allowed to take over the Sudetenland (and Czechoslovakia's mountain border defenses), with Hitler's promise that this was all of Czechoslovakia that he wanted.

So happy was the European world (except the outraged Czechs, whose beloved President Edvard Beneš resigned rather than agree to the terms forced on his country) that Chamberlain had "saved Europe from another war," that talk grew of awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize!

And most tragically for the world, it also forced the German High command to cancel its proposed removal of Hitler – as Hitler's acquisition of Sudetenland again made him the supreme hero of the German people.

Of course Hitler had no intention of keeping his promise to Chamberlain, and in March of 1939 – at the "invitation" of Czechoslovakia's new leadership (the browbeaten President Hacha) – Hitler sent his troops to take over all of Czechoslovakia.

The world was shocked, but again did nothing.  Chamberlain again repeated his promise that he would protect Germany's neighbors (Poland the next obvious target) – with the threat of a declaration of war against Germany if Hitler were to make such a move.

But by this time few believed that Chamberlain would – or even at this point could – deliver in a meaningful way on such a threat.