Wars and Betweenness

Wars and Betweenness
Author: Bojan Aleksov
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9633863368

The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars. The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks. The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.

The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich

The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich
Author: Klaus Hildebrand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1973-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520025288

In this short outline history of Hitler's foreign policy, Professor Hildebrand contends that the National Socialist Party achieved popularity largely because it integrated all the political, economic and socio-political expectations prevailing in Germany since Bismarck. Thus, foreign policy under Hitler was a logical extension of the aims of the newly created German nation-state of 1871. Trading on his domestic economic successes, Hitler relied on the traditional methods of power politics-backing diplomacy with force. Had he pursued expansionist aims alone, using specific lighting wars as threats or instruments of conquest he might have been more successful. As it was, the scheme went awry when the first phase-European hegemony-was overtaken by and forced to run parallel with the second and third phases: American intervention and “racial purification.” The ideology became too great a burden to bear, stimulating internal resistance, and the Allies of course determined to wage total for a total surrender.