Murray Rothbard’s view of the origins of World War II has an important lesson for us today. Many people today think that a non-interventionist foreign policy is unrealistic. Neocons always cry out “Hitler!” if you resist their demands for all-out war. “Hitler openly avowed his plan to conquer the world in Mein Kampf! How can you ‘isolationists’ ignore that!” Rothbard had a simple answer to this.
He said that history doesn’t follow a predetermined plan. Historical actors respond to events as they occur in time. They may have ideas about what they want to do, but once something actually comes up, the situation will have many details that they didn’t anticipate, and they will have to react on the spur of the moment.
He found support for his view in a book written by the British historian A.J. P. Taylor in 1961, The Origins of the Second World War. In a memo written for the Volker Fund, he said: “The central theme of Taylor is simply this: Germany and Hitler were not uniquely guilty of launching World War II (indeed they were scarcely guilty at all); Hitler was not bent on world conquest, for which he had armed Germany to the teeth and constructed a ‘timetable.’ Hitler, in brief, (in foreign affairs) was not a uniquely evil monster or daimon, who would continue to gobble up countries diabolically until stopped by superior force. Hitler was a rational German statesman, pursuing — with considerable intuitive insight — a traditional, post-Versailles German policy (to which we might add intimations of desires to expand eastward in an attack on Bolshevism). But basically, Hitler has no ‘master plan’; he was a German intent, like all Germans, on revising the intolerable and stupid Versailles-diktat, and on doing so by peaceful means, and in collaboration with the British and French. One thing is sure: Hitler had no designs, no plans, not even vague intimations, to expand westward against Britain and France (let alone the United States). Hitler admired the British Empire and wished to collaborate with it. Not only did Hitler do this with insight, he did it with patience, as Taylor excellently shows; the legend (that perhaps all of us have accepted in one degree or another), is that Hitler annoyingly created one European crisis after another, in the late 1930s, proceeding hungrily onward from one victory to another; actually, the crises naturally arose, were developed from external conditions (largely from the breakup of the inherently unstable conditions imposed by the Versailles-diktat), and by others, and which Hitler patiently awaited the outcome to use to his and Germany’s advantage.”
Of course, Rothbard didn’t doubt that Hitler was monstrously evil. But he thought it was a mistake to infer that an evil person or regime must have an aggressive foreign policy.
The first step in Hitler’s alleged master plan was the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, but in fact this wasn’t planned. Hitler had reached an agreement with the Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, with Schuschnigg violated. As Rothbard explains: “Schuschnigg, was happy to conclude a Gentleman’s Agreement with Germany, in July 1936, in which he acknowledged that Austria was a ‘German State,’ and agreed to admit Nazis as members of his government. In return, Hitler acknowledged Austrian ‘sovereignty,’ and contentedly believed that Austria was now a kind of subordinate state to Germany and that the Austrian Nazis would gradually, and peacefully, gain control of Austria. This, indeed, was the rational thing to expect from such an agreement. No coercive Anschluss or dramatic marching of German troops was contemplated.”
But then Schuschnigg precipitated a crisis and only then did Hitler act: “Schuschnigg, in effect, repudiated the voluntary Berchtesgaden Agreement of February 12, 1938. Suddenly, after two years of rational appeasement, he decided on a ‘tough’ line; he decided to hurl a challenge to Hitler by dramatically announcing an Austrian plebiscite on Austrian independence, to be held almost immediately.”
In like fashion, the next step in Hitler’s alleged master plan, the takeover of Czechoslovakia, also came about by accident. “The Germans living in the Sudetenland wanted action: they were not responding to Hitler’s orders: The Germans were particularly unhappy at being plunged from co-partners in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to sufferers under the Czechs. The Anschluss electrified them, and the Czech crisis was on. [Czech President Eduard] Benes deliberately provoked the Sudeten Germans into demanding a transfer to Germany and not just autonomy, frontiers.”
The Munich Conference settlement allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, after that the Czech state collapsed: “Benes saw this, and skipped the country, from then on to proclaim against ‘appeasement’ from a safe sanctuary. The Poles moved in on Tesin; the Hungarians, bitterly smarting from the Versailles-like Treaty of Trianon, moved in. Finally, the Slovaks, taking their cue, declared their much yearned-for independence. The Czechs, turning tough yet once more, prepared to march on Slovakia, whereupon Hitler recognized Slovak independence, to save Slovakia from the Czechs and Hungarians. The Czechs were now left with their own true section of Bohemia; surrounded by enemies, and faced with a Hungarian threat, Hacha, president of the Czechs, again voluntarily sought an audience with Hitler, and requested Hitler to adopt Bohemia as a protectorate. And yet, the world again saw this as a ‘betrayal’ of Munich, German ruthless invasion of a noble, small country, etc. Again, Hitler had not bargained for open invasion, but only for slow, evolutionary disintegration of Czechoslovakia; events again presented him with (overly) dramatic gains.”
The last step in the alleged master-plan was the invasion of Poland, but once again Hitler had moderate goals until the Polish government forced his hand: “[Polish Foreign Minister Josef]Beck, though initially allied with Germany, elected to stand alone, a Great Power, triumphantly defiant of both Germany and Russia, taking a resolutely ‘tough,’ firm line against anybody and everybody. And as a direct result, Poland was destroyed. Hitler’s “demands” on the Poles were almost non-existent; as Taylor points out, the Weimar Republic would have scorned the terms as a sell-out of vital German interests. Hitler at most wanted a ‘corridor through the Corridor’ and the return of heavily-German (and pro-German) Danzig; in return for which he would guarantee the rest. Poland resolutely refused to yield ‘one inch of Polish soil,”’ and refused even to negotiate with the Germans, and this down to the last minute. And yet, even with the Anglo-French guarantee, Beck clearly knew that Britain and France could not actually save Poland from attack. He relied to the end on those great shibboleths of all ‘hard-liners’ everywhere: X is ‘bluffing’; X will back down if met by toughness, resolution, and the resolve not to give an inch. As Taylor shows, Hitler had originally not the slightest intention to invade or conquer Poland; instead, Danzig and other minor rectifications would be gotten out of the way, and then Poland would be a comfortable ally, perhaps for an eventual invasion of Soviet Russia. But Beck’s irrational toughness blocked the path.”
Rothbard sums up the lessons we can learn from Taylor’s book in this way: “There are two further, amplifying general observations of importance which I am moved to by this scintillating book. One is the perniciousness of the typical ‘hard line’ mythology, a mythology that has been especially beloved in the United States and Great Britain. It is a mythology that has consistently failed and consistently plunged these ‘great democracies’ into one war after another. This is the mythology of conceiving the enemy as, not only a “bad” guy; but a bad guy cast in the mold of Fu Manchu or someone from Mars. The bad guy is out, for some obscure reason, to conquer the world, or at the very least, to conquer as much as he can keep conquering. This is his only goal. He can be stopped only by force majeure, i.e., by ‘standing firm’ on a ‘tough line.’ In short, while irredeemably evil, the Bad Guy is a craven at heart; and if the noble Good Guy only stands his ground, the Bad Guy, like any bully, will turn tail. Rather than Fu Manchu, then, the Enemy is a Fu Manchu at heart but with all the other characteristics of the Corner Bully, or of a movie Western. ‘We’ are the Good Guys, interested only in justice and self-defense who need only stand our ground to face down the wicked but cravenly bluffing Bad Guys. This is the almost idiotic Morality Play in which Americans and Britons have cast international relations for half a century now, and that is why we are in the mess we are today. Nowhere in this Copybook nonsense is it every conceived that (a) the Bad Guy might be afraid of our attacking him (But Good Guys never attack, by definition!); or (b) that the Bad Guy might, in his foreign policy demands, have a pretty good and just case after all — or at least, that he believes his case to be good and just; or (c) that, faced with the defiance, the Bad Guy might consider it loss of self-respect if he backed down — and so two war. Let us all give up this childlike game of international relations, and begin to consider a policy of rationality, peace, and honest negotiation.
“The second general observation is that Eastern Europe seems to have been the cockpit — and in tragic folly — of every major war of the twentieth century: World Wars I and II, and the Cold War. Eastern Europe, as I have indicated above, is a land of many teeming nationalities, almost all small and divided. The reality of Eastern Europe is that it is always fated to be dominated by either Germany or Russia, or both. If East European politicians are to be rational, they must realize this and understand their fated subservience to one or both of these two Power; and, if there is to be peace in Eastern Europe, both Germany and Russia must be friends.
“Now don’t misunderstand me; I have not abandoned moral principle for cynicism. My heart yearns for ethnic justice, for national self-determination for all people, not only in Eastern Europe but all over the world. I am a non-Ukrainian who would like nothing better than to see a majestic independent ethnic Ukraine, or of Byelorussia; I would to see and independent Slovakia, or a just settlement, at long last, of the knotty Transylvanian question. I still worry over whether Macedonia should properly be independent, or should be united to their presumably ethnic brothers in Bulgaria. But, to paraphrase Sydney Smith’s famous letter to Lady Grey, please let them work this out for themselves! Let us abandon the criminal immorality and folly of continual coercive meddling by non-East European powers (e.g., Britain, France, and now the U.S.) in the affairs of East Europe. Let us hope that one day Germany and Russia, at peach, will willingly grant justice to the people of East Europe, but let us not bring about perpetual wars to try to achieve this artificially.
“I cannot refrain from quoting Smith’s famous passage, so a propos is it “I am sorry for the Spaniards — I am sorry for the Greeks; I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Baghdad is oppressed; I do not like the present state of the Delta; Tibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people? The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be a champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy? We have just done saving Europe, and I am afraid that the consequence will be, that we shall cut each other’s throats. No war, dear Lady Grey! — No eloquence; but apathy, selfishness, common sense, arithmetic! … ‘May the vengeance of Heaven’ overtake the Legitimates of Verona! But in the present state of rent and taxes, they must be left to the vengeance of Heaven. … There is no such thing as a ‘just war,’ or, at least, as a wise war.”
Let’s do everything we can to absorb the lessons Rothbard taught us about how World War II began!
