The Inter-war Period
1919–1939: the two decades between the two world wars, the analytical heart of Tragedy and Hope
Also known as: interwar period, inter-war years, Twenty Years' Crisis, between the wars
The Inter-war Period is the analytical centerpiece of Tragedy and Hope: the twenty years between the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the outbreak of the Second World War (1939). Quigley devotes the bulk of the book to this span — from the disorganized peace settlements through the Dawes and Young plans, the Locarno Pacts, the Great Depression, the rise of the dictators, and the Munich Agreement of 1938 — because he locates here the decisive failure of the Anglo-American order to manage the consequences of the First World War and the policy choices of the Milner Group's Cliveden Set that he treats as exemplary of that failure.
Periodization
Quigley breaks the inter-war years into characteristic sub-periods that organize the central chapters of Tragedy and Hope: the period of disorganization and peace settlements (1919–1923); a period of relative stabilization built on the Dawes Plan and the Locarno Pacts (1923–1929); the financial collapse and Great Depression (1929–1933); and the years of the dictators and appeasement (1933–1939). The chapter 'THE POLICY OF APPEASEMENT, 1931–1936' (T&H 557) and 'THE DISRUPTION OF EUROPE' (T&H 605) name the late phase. The interwar order rests on three weak pillars: the post-Versailles territorial settlement, the gold-exchange standard reconstituted by central bankers around the Bank of England, and the League of Nations. Quigley argues that each pillar was deliberately under-engineered — the territorial settlement penalized but did not contain Germany; the gold-exchange standard depended on policy coordination among central banks that broke under strain; the League lacked enforcement teeth — and that the convergence of their failures produced the Second World War.
The Anglo-American Establishment and appeasement
The inter-war period is the period in which the Milner Group reached the height of its influence and made, in Quigley's reading, its decisive policy errors. In The Anglo-American Establishment Quigley devotes whole chapters to the Group's role in shaping the Versailles settlement, the inter-war administration of mandates, and — above all — the policy of appeasement toward Hitler that culminated in Munich. Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Lord Astor, Geoffrey Dawson of The Times, and Neville Chamberlain's coterie are read as exponents of a Group worldview in which a strong Germany was a desirable bulwark against the Soviet Union and a partner in a federated 'English-speaking world.' The Cliveden Set is Quigley's name for the inter-war social circle through which this policy crystallized. The Hoare–Laval Pact (1935) and the Abdication Crisis (1936) are read as further inflection points of the same configuration of forces.
Economic and financial structure
Quigley treats the inter-war decade as the period in which the Bank of England, the New York Federal Reserve Bank under Benjamin Strong, and the financial powers of the Anglo-American world attempted to reconstruct the pre-1914 gold standard on a managed, two-tier 'gold-exchange' basis. The Dawes Plan of 1924 and the Young Plan of 1929 — both, in Quigley's account, products of the same private-banker network that ran the prewar international financial system — were the operational instruments of this reconstruction. Quigley reads the Industrial Revolution's late-phase 'financial capitalism' as reaching its zenith in this period and being decisively broken by the deflationary collapse of 1929–1933. The Great Depression is the hinge event of the period: it destroys the financial reconstruction, it consolidates Fascism in Germany and Italy, and it triggers the shift away from financial-capitalist control of the economy toward monopoly capitalism and state intervention that defines the post-1945 order.
Within the seven-stage cycle
Within Quigley's seven-stage civilizational model the inter-war period belongs to the early Age of Conflict of Western Civilization: the period in which the great expansion of 1440–1900 has lost its momentum, the existing instrument of expansion (financial-monopoly capitalism) has become institutionalized and predatory, and intra-civilizational warfare has supplanted external expansion. The two world wars and the inter-war years together form what Quigley elsewhere calls a 'twenty-five-year truce' — a single extended crisis of the European state system in which the older powers, exhausted by 1914–1918, attempted but failed to reconstitute a stable order. The failure is, in Quigley's view, more analytically interesting than the wars themselves: it shows how 'institutionalization' of a once-creative organization produces, of itself, the conditions for the next major war.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 677 Quigley
In the interwar period there was a third theory, violently disputed, about the effectiveness of air power.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 678 Quigley
These ideas on the nature and limits of sea power had received only minor challenges in the interwar period, except from the extreme advocates of air power like General William Mitchell.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 79 Quigley
He has written a number of books, including a history of the inter-war period called The Lost Peace (1941).
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 11 Quigley
XII. THE POLICY OF APPEASEMENT, 1931-1936.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 12 Quigley
XIII. THE DISRUPTION OF EUROPE 605.