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The Munich Agreement was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, the French Republic, and Fascist Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, where more than three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. The pact is also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal, because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
The Pact of Steel, formally known as the Pact of Friendship and Alliance between Germany and Italy, was a military and political alliance between Italy and Germany.
The Battles of Khalkhin Gol were the decisive engagements of the undeclared Soviet–Japanese border conflicts involving the Soviet Union, Mongolia, Japan and Manchukuo in 1939. The conflict was named after the river Khalkhin Gol, which passes through the battlefield. In Japan, the decisive battle of the conflict is known as the Nomonhan Incident after Nomonhan, a nearby village on the border between Mongolia and Manchuria. The battles resulted in the defeat of the Japanese Sixth Army.
The Treaty of Rapallo was an agreement between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in the aftermath of the First World War. It was intended to settle the Adriatic question, i.e. Italian claims over territories promised to the country, in return for its entry into the war, against Austria-Hungary; claims that were made on the basis of the 1915 Treaty of London. The wartime pact promised Italy large areas of the eastern Adriatic. The treaty, signed on 12 November 1920 in Rapallo, Italy, generally redeemed the promises of territorial gains in the former Austrian Littoral by awarding Italy territories generally corresponding to the peninsula of Istria and the former Princely County of Gorizia and Gradisca, with the addition of the Snežnik Plateau, in addition to what was promised by the London treaty. The articles regarding Dalmatia were largely ignored. There Italy received the city of Zadar and several islands. Other provisions of the treaty contained safeguards for the rights of Italian nationals remaining in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and provisions for commissions to demarcate the new border, and facilitate economic and educational cooperation. The treaty also established the Free State of Fiume, the city-state consisting of the former Austro-Hungarian Corpus Separatum that consisted of Rijeka and a strip of coast giving the new state a land border with Italy at Istria.
The military occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany began with the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, continued with the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and by the end of 1944 extended to all parts of Czechoslovakia.
The Franco-Polish Alliance was the military alliance between Poland and France that was active between the early 1920s and the outbreak of the Second World War. The initial agreements were signed in February 1921 and formally took effect in 1923. During the interwar period the alliance with Poland was one of the cornerstones of French foreign policy.
The Corfu incident was a 1923 diplomatic and military crisis between Greece and Italy. It was triggered when an Italian general heading a commission to resolve a border dispute between Albania and Greece was murdered in Greek territory along with two other officers of his staff. In response, Benito Mussolini issued an ultimatum to Greece and, when it was not accepted in whole, dispatched forces to bombard and occupy Corfu. Mussolini defied the League of Nations and stated Italy would leave if it arbitrated in the crisis, and the Conference of Ambassadors instead eventually tendered an agreement favouring Italy. This was an early demonstration of the League's weakness when dealing with larger powers.
The Balkan Pact, or Balkan Entente, was a treaty signed by Greece, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia on 9 February 1934 in Athens, aimed at maintaining the geopolitical status quo in the region after the end of World War I. To present a united front against Bulgarian designs on their territories, the signatories agreed to suspend all disputed territorial claims against one another and their immediate neighbours following the aftermath of the war and a rise in various regional irredentist tensions.
The Vlora War was a military conflict in the Vlora region of Albania between the Kingdom of Italy and Albanian nationalists divided into small groups of fighters. The war lasted three months until an armistice was reached, forcing Italy to abandon its plans to make Albania a mandate and cede Vlora, which was eventually abandoned. As a result, Italy retained diplomatic protection over Albania to ensure its independence, while annexing the island of Saseno. This agreement was ratified a year later by the Conference of Ambassadors of the League of Nations. The Vlora War is considered an important moment in the formation of Albanian independence.
The military alliance between the United Kingdom and Poland was formalised by the Anglo-Polish Agreement in 1939, with subsequent addenda of 1940 and 1944, for mutual assistance in case of a military invasion from Nazi Germany, as specified in a secret protocol.
The remilitarisation of the Rhineland began on 7 March 1936, when military forces of the German Reich entered the Rhineland, which directly contravened the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. Neither France nor Britain was prepared for a military response, so they did not act. After 1939, commentators often said that a strong military move in 1936 might have ruined the expansionist plans of Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Germany. However, recent historiography agrees that both public and elite opinion in Britain and France strongly opposed a military intervention, and neither had an army prepared to move in.
The Italian invasion of Albania was a brief military campaign which was launched by the Kingdom of Italy against the Albanian Kingdom in 1939. The conflict was a result of the imperialistic policies of the Italian prime minister and dictator Benito Mussolini. Albania was rapidly overrun, its ruler King Zog I went into exile in neighboring Greece, and the country was made a part of the Italian Empire as a protectorate in personal union with the Italian Crown.
The Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was a bilateral treaty between France and the Soviet Union with the aim of enveloping Nazi Germany in 1935 to reduce the threat from Central Europe. It was pursued by Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister, and Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister, who was assassinated in October 1934, before negotiations had been finished.
The Anti-Fengtian War was the last major civil war within the Republic of China's northern Beiyang government prior to the Northern Expedition. It lasted from November 1925 to April 1926 and was waged by the Guominjun against the Fengtian clique and their Zhili clique allies. The war ended with the defeat of the Guominjun and the end of the provisional executive government. The war is also known as either Guominjun-Fengtian War, or the Third Zhili–Fengtian War.
On 20 March 1939, Nazi Germany's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop presented an oral ultimatum to Juozas Urbšys, foreign minister of Lithuania. Germany demanded that Lithuania give up the Klaipėda Region which had been detached from Germany after World War I, or the Wehrmacht would invade Lithuania and the de facto Lithuanian capital Kaunas would be bombed. The Lithuanians had been expecting the demand after years of rising tension between Lithuania and Germany, increasing pro-Nazi propaganda in the region, and continued German expansion. It was issued just five days after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. The 1924 Klaipėda Convention had guaranteed the protection of the status quo in the region, but the four signatories to that convention did not offer any material assistance. The United Kingdom and France followed a policy of appeasement, while Italy and Japan openly supported Germany, and Lithuania accepted the ultimatum on 23 March 1939. It proved to be the last territorial acquisition for Germany before World War II, producing a major downturn in Lithuania's economy and escalating pre-war tensions for Europe as a whole.
The Anschluss, also known as the Anschluß Österreichs, was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 12 March 1938.
The Mongolian Revolution of 1921 was a military and political event by which Mongolian revolutionaries, with the assistance of the Soviet Red Army, expelled Russian White Guards from the country, and founded the Mongolian People's Republic in 1924. Although nominally independent, the Mongolian People's Republic was a satellite state of the Soviet Union until the third Mongolian revolution in January 1990. The revolution also ended the Chinese Beiyang government's occupation of Mongolia, which begun in 1919. The official Mongolian name of the revolution is "People's Revolution of 1921" or simply "People's Revolution".
The final offensive of the Spanish Civil War took place between 26 March and 1 April 1939, towards the end of the Spanish Civil War. On 5 March 1939, the Republican Army, led by Colonel Segismundo Casado and the politician Julián Besteiro, rose against the socialist prime minister Juan Negrín, and formed a military junta, the National Defence Council to negotiate a peace deal. Negrín fled to France but the communist troops around Madrid rose against the junta, starting a civil war within the civil war. Casado defeated them and started peace negotiations with the Nationalists. Francisco Franco, however, was prepared to accept only an unconditional surrender. On 26 March, the Nationalists started a general offensive and by 31 March, they controlled all of Spanish territory. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans were arrested and interned in concentration camps.
The Second Italo-Senussi War, also referred to as the Pacification of Libya, was a conflict that occurred during the Italian colonization of Libya between Italian military forces and indigenous rebels associated with the Senussi Order. The war lasted from 1923 until 1932, when the principal Senussi leader, Omar al-Mukhtar, was captured and executed.
International relations (1919–1939) covers the main interactions shaping world history in this era, known as the interwar period, with emphasis on diplomacy and economic relations. The coverage here follows the diplomatic history of World War I and precedes the diplomatic history of World War II. The important stages of interwar diplomacy and international relations included resolutions of wartime issues, such as reparations owed by Germany and boundaries; American involvement in European finances and disarmament projects; the expectations and failures of the League of Nations; the relationships of the new countries to the old; the distrustful relations between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world; peace and disarmament efforts; responses to the Great Depression starting in 1929; the collapse of world trade; the collapse of democratic regimes one by one; the growth of economic autarky; Japanese aggressiveness toward China; fascist diplomacy, including the aggressive moves by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; the Spanish Civil War; the appeasement of Germany's expansionist moves toward the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and the last, desperate stages of rearmament as another world war increasingly loomed.
References
- ↑ Rothschild 1974, pp. 227–229.
- ↑ ""Swine" Judged". Time. 1929-06-17. Archived from the original on November 7, 2012. Retrieved 2013-04-17.
- ↑ Rothschild 1974, pp. 232–233.
