Dominoes #1: Sanctions on Italy, Effect in Germany

In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. In response, the League of Nations (equivalent to the UN) imposed sanctions on Italy. Germany and Japan watched this closely: If sanctions were imposed on them, how would they fare? That is the theme of an interview with the author and European historian, Nick Mulder.

 

Let’s start with Germany. As they started to increasingly focus on militarization and industrialization in the 1930’s, they needed energy. Coal and oil. This need for coal was the reason they invaded the Ruhr eventually (apart from the point that it was theirs to begin with and wrongly taken by France after World War I). On oil, they got lucky with the timing. Thanks to the Great Depression, trade and thus prices fell, making it cheaper for Germany to import oil. The Germans realized that sanctions were unlikely to be imposed on them at a time of global depression – Germany not being allowed to buy oil would mean some exporter like the US would also suffer!

 

But in the longer term? Germany needed to develop “blockade resilience”. How?

“The road to full self-sufficiency is a road that goes through conquest.”

 

This is a great and tragic example of how nothing is predictable in international relations. If the League of Nations had done nothing when Italy invaded Ethiopia, it would have led to the feeling that the organization was useless (sound like the UN?). But by imposing sanctions, they set off Germany on a what-if-the-next-sanctions-are-on-us thought process. Since Germany had no colonies of its own from whom it could secure critical resources, it had “no choice” but to invade its European neighbours for self-sufficiency. “Lebensraum”, in other words, the German term meaning “living space”, originally referring to a nation's need for territory to thrive. 

 

In today’s context, the US has probably set many countries on the same thought process as Germany back then. What if the US imposes unilateral sanctions and tariffs on some country X? Thankfully, today countries don’t set off invading others as easily as they did a century back. But they do make other consequential changes, like reducing connections and dependencies on some countries, and getting cozier with others. It is impossible to know how the cookie will crumble when more and more pieces on the global chess board start rearranging their alliances, connections and dependencies.

 

The story of Japan is more complicated, messy and nothing like what the West would have us believe (Of course, that is to be expected: the victorious West wrote the history books, didn’t they?). That tale warrants a separate blog, the next one in the series.