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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Michael J. Carley, 1939 : L'Alliance de la dernière chance (Montréal : Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal 2001) ; 1939 : The Alliance That Never Was (Chicago: Ivan J. Dee, 1999)

IT MAY SEEM out of place for a work on European diplomacy to be reviewed in a journal devoted to the study of working people. But the separation among historical fields easily disguises the importance of class struggle to diplomatic considerations. This is certainly the case in terms of the diplomatic maneuverings of the 1930s that allowed Adolf Hitler to re-arm a prostrate Germany and to go on to prepare for a war that resulted in 55 million deaths and the Holocaust of European Jewry. While left-wingers in the historical profession have largely devoted themselves to uncovering "history from the bottom up," an unfortunate result has been to largely cede the study of the causes of World War II, among other "big P" political events, to an assortment of right-wingers, many of whom cheerfully repeat the official capitalist state versions of events.	1
Michael Carley is an important exception. His close study of the diplomacy of the immediate period preceding the war reveals quite closely the link between the anti-worker domestic policies and the "appeasement" policies of the dominant conservative circles in British and French politics. An anti-communist fixation, Carley argues, with abundant supporting evidence, dominated Western diplomacy, and disposed the leaders of Britain and France to go easier on Hitler and Mussolini than on Stalin. As it became clear that Hitler's imperialist plans might go beyond a tiny eastern or central European country here and there, the leaders of the Soviet Union redoubled their efforts, begun in 1934, to seek a collective security arrangement with the Western powers. They were continually rebuffed, and even after Hitler had swallowed up in March 1939 the parts of Czechoslovakia that the Munich agreement left free, the British and the French carried on negotiations with the Soviets that were farcical and intended only to fool anti-fascists at home that these governments were 'doing something' to counter Hitler.	2
Some of this may sound unsurprising to readers of this journal, who are aware of the Popular Front politics of the Comintern in this period, but it is continuously denied in the standard diplomatic literature. Throughout most of this literature, anti-communism, if admitted to be a factor at all, is minimized. Instead, it is said that the complexities of British and French foreign policy, rather than joy at Hitler's overthrow of domestic communists, socialists, and unions, as well as promises to smother the Soviet Union, influenced the élites of London and Paris. British needs to protect territories in its far-flung empire, France's economic weakness, and doubts about the Soviet Union as an ally in the period following Stalin's purge of the military in 1937 are all trotted out regularly to pooh-pooh notions that a softness for fascist nations' defence of profit-making and hatred for Soviet Communism propelled the Western leaders. Sometimes, to this rich brew of defences for the "appeasers," is also added the complaint that Western leaders found Stalin and company's brutality shocking, and they could not see their way to an alliance with left-wing authoritarians in an effort to unseat governments by right-wing authoritarians. And indeed, suggest such apologists for the capitalist democracies of the West, Britain and France did try to negotiate seriously with the Soviet Union for a united front against Hitler in 1939, but got nowhere because Stalin wanted territorial concessions that democracies could not think to provide and which, in the end, he could only get from Hitler himself.	3
These arguments seem convincing enough, on the surface, though most of the diplomatic histories actually provide rather flimsy evidence to support them. Carley knocks most of the props out from the apologists' defences, demonstrating that Neville Chamberlain in Britain, Edouard Daladier in France, their respective foreign ministers, and many other leading government figures were indeed, in their correspondence, rather obviously fixated with anti-communism. Their offers to the Soviets in 1939 were shameful, reflecting a desire to have the Soviets join in defence of various states that might be subject to German invasion but rejecting any commitment to aid the Soviets if they proved to be the target of a German attack.	4
Even for many left-wingers, there is much that is new in this account, particularly with regards to Soviet foreign policy in this period and reaction to it in Britain and France. While Stalin brutally ran and ruined the first experiment in Communism in the world, he left foreign-policy-making, at least in part, to career experts in diplomacy, particularly his brilliant long-time Commissar for Foreign Policy, Maksim Litvinov. In turn, Litvinov staffed diplomatic positions abroad with bright, flexible individuals such as Maiskii in London and Potemkin in Paris. The anti-Nazi factions within the ruling class in Britain and France, led by people such as Churchill, Vansittart, Mandel, and Reynauld, attempted to work closely with these Soviet representatives, whose commitment to a common front of non-fascist nations, without territorial aggrandizements, was genuine. That others in the leadership of these nations did not wish to deal with the Soviet representatives was hardly surprising. They wanted to make common cause with the fascists, and had little time for the communists, whose overthrow they expected the Nazis to accomplish for them. They were not appeasing Hitler, in the sense of simply trying to give him little tidbits so that he would not mount a full-scale war, but rather egging him on to do the dirty deed of destroying the Soviet Union and placing the old Russian Empire under capitalist, if regrettably Nazi, control.	5
Carley sticks fairly close to the evidence and cautiously avoids suggesting that many of the leading politicians and businessmen in Britain and France before the war might be seen as Nazi collaborators rather than mere "appeasers." This caution has not won him much support from diplomatic historians generally, judging by the tone of their reviews of the book. They cling to their defences of the appeasers and regret the supposedly simplistic character of the tale that Carley weaves. For those who might nonetheless like to read a less cautious appraisal than Carley's, I would recommend my own co-written book with Clement Leibovitz (the research is mostly Leibovitz's, the writing mostly mine), The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (1997).	6
Reappraisals such as Carley's of European ruling-class thinking about how to deal with the Nazis in the 1930s seem particularly appropriate in light of work in recent years, much of it by social historians, that sheds light on the unseemly popularity of fascism and Nazism among both the upper classes and the petite bourgeoisie in a variety of countries. In Canada, such work includes Martin Robin's Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada, 1920–1940, Ester Delisle's Myths, Memories and Lies, and the edited collection by Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe, Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad. These books probe respectively the extent of support for fascist ideology and participation in fascist movements within English Canada, French Canada, and Italian-Canadian communities. Together they demonstrate that earlier literature that tried to minimize fascist and Nazi support among various élites in Canada was more of a whitewash by current élites than an honest attempt to probe the forces behind ultra-right-wing ideology. A recent book by Jacques Pauwels, published initially in Flemish, but soon to be released in English, makes a similar case regarding the US. It is doubtful however that the European diplomatic history field will soon embrace a critical reappraisal of the inter-war period. Too many of its denizens have committed themselves to apologies for both past and present foreign policy decisions of Western élites.	7
Alvin Finkel Athabasca University

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