The main caiuse of the second world war

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   The first half of the twentieth century represented the swan song of Europe's great power status. Those who so spectacularly gathered at King Edward's wake in 1910 believed with certainty that the European progress and stability that had spawned such glorious empires would continue, if not ad infinitum, at least for the next century. Few could or would foresee the undiluted years of calamity, the destruction of once-proud imperial families, the brutal regimes of fascist, Nazi, and communist extremism. The squalor of trench warfare that slaughtered not only many of Europe's best and brightest young men but also the mirage of liberal democratic government would be no more than a ghastly hors d'oeuvre to the bloody feast served up to Europeans, soldier and civilian alike, in the war of 1939-1945. The following details some of the most significant works of the last fifty years on the historiography of the origins of that war in Europe.

 

After World War I, a treaty was signed by the winning and losing countries, called the Treaty of Versailles. Germany, which was a losing country, was badly hurt by the severity of the treaty. Italy, one of the winning countries, was not satisfied with the territory that it gained. And Japan, also a victor, was unhappy about its failure to gain parts of China. The dissatisfaction of these three countries was one of the factors that lead to World War II. Later Germany, Italy and Japan formed an axis coalition to gain territory and respect from other nations, that these countries felt they had not received from the Treaty of Versailles.

The Treaty of Versailles made Germany pay huge reparations to the winning countries for the damage that they caused. Germany also had to give up land to specific ethnic groups to form new countries, which were weak and could easily be taken over. Germany was forced to decrease the size of its army and the amount of military equipment it had, so that it would be less powerful. Another thing the treaty did was it blamed Germany for starting World War I. Germany had a hard time paying the reparations because of economic issues and problems with the Great Depression. Because Germany had lost land in the Treaty of Versailles, there were too many people living in Germany, and not enough resources for them to live on. Later on, Germany took over Austria, Sudetenland, Poland, the Baltic Countries, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France to expand and gain more territory for the German people.

The Treaty of Versailles gave some land to Italy because they were on the winning side, but Italy gained less territory than it felt it deserved and wanted to become more powerful. Benito Mussolini, the leader of Italy, wanted Italy to expand into a Fascist-Roman Empire and to rule the Mediterranean and African lands.

To achieve its expansion goals and to gain more living space and more resources for the Italian people, Italy took over Ethiopia and Albania. Because Italy had the same expansion goals as Germany, it joined an alliance with Germany.

 Disarmament was one problem that the treaty attempted to solve. Statesmen looked at the situation before WWI and had decided that the arms race was a major cause of the war. Hence it was decided that in order for nations never to go to war again, each nation would disarm. However, the treaty (in the League of Nations Covenant) only stated that nations were to disarm to "the lowest point consistent with national safety."(Alan Bullock). This created a problem; each nation considered the lowest point consistent with national safety to be the point at which they owned more arms than their potential enemy or their neighbour. Disarmament could never have succeeded in such an environment. There was much debate over disarmament in the 1920s and over how it should be implemented. However, by 1932 when a conference was actually held to address the issue, disarmament had already failed. Japan was in the middle of annexing Manchuria and in 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany - a man who had renounced the Treaty of Versailles and the concept of disarmament and vowed to repudiate the treaty and disregard disarmament if he were to come to power. The failure to achieve disarmament was an unsolved problem of WWI which definitely contributed to the outbreak of WWII. Nations, on the contrary rearmed during the 1930s.

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 The sine qua non of the Second World War, without which it never would have occurred, was The Great Depression, which started in 1929, one of the most significant causes of the WWII. During the First World War, whilst the countries that were fighting had to slow down their production, the young nations developed their own lands to supply the combatants in return for the price of gold. Take as an example the American giant. From 1913 to 1919 the annual production of corn rose in the United States from seven hundred and sixty-three to nine hundred and fifty-two million ...

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