I Disagree

Solutions to April 2013 HIS242: Europe in the Twentieth Century Final Exam at University of Toronto Mississauga

This is a set of partial solutions to the April 2013 exam of this course at UTM.

April 2013 UTM Exam Solutions

PART ONE : ONE ESSAY

In the Doctrine of Fascism, Mussolini does not put forth a lot of positive doctrine. It is not a white paper that outlines what his policy will be in the next few decades. However, some of the imagery he uses is specifically targeted at evoking the Roman Empire. He also talks of how peace is a sign of indolent decadence, and the urge to imperial war (Nietzsche's “will to power”) is proof of fascism's vitality. Thus he does not directly state that he plans to conquer territory for the glory of fascist Italy, but he heavily implies it.

What he offered was a break with the past. The world was shaken after the Great War, the previously dominant scientific positivism was obviously untenable. People wanted a new ideology, because the doctrines of liberalism, socialism, and democracy had failed them; they had brought them to a low point. Fascism offered this simply through its deliberate repudiation of the past, and was swiftly adopted in Italy, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Poland, and most European countries with the exceptions of Britain, France, and Czechoslovakia. Communism also was appealing on this ground, its novelty propelled it to power in Russia where it stayed until it stagnated.

To accomplish this effect, the Doctrine sets forth very little description of what fascism is. Mussolini spends the bulk of his time talking about what fascism is not. He criticizes democracy for reducing the state to the will of the majority, in contrast fascism places the state as something higher than the people, an ideal that is more important than even the will of a large majority. There was also a sense throughout the war that parliamentary squabbling weakened democratic regimes, as is evident from Petain's report. This feeling would lead in France to the adoption of a constitution with a high level of executive control under de Gaulle. Further, he criticizes liberalism as inevitably leading to decadence. Liberalism was based on the idea that happiness can be achieved on earth, especially through science and capitalism. World War I cast doubt on this view, as the widespread death and destruction cast a shadow of sorrow over everything. Science and material conditions continued to advance throughout the 20^th century in Europe, but this did not make problems of hatred and war vanish, as is shown by the recent Yugoslav wars, or the slightly less recent Algerian War.

Mussolini also gained popularity because he was seen as a force that could restore order. His bad of Black Shirt thugs fought communists in the street and burned the buildings of opposing parties. The government was weak and unable to control this, so the people felt insecure in the power of the democratic regime, and Mussolini's emphasis on authority seemed like the solution. He gained popularity by creating chaos, feeding into the widespread unemployment, crime, and poverty caused by the war, and then promising to restore order.

At that time, Italy had only been a unified country for decades. Mussolini's strength was seen by many as a force that could hold Italy together, and this they thought was necessary to ensure its continued relevance in international relations.

Mussolini raised national sentiments with imperial promises and conquests. Italian felt they had been treated unfairly by the agreements of the Paris Peace Conference. Like Romania, Italy joined the Allies largely for the promise of territorial gain at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They thought the Austrian Tyrol and parts of Dalmatia rightly belonged to Italy. Unlike Romania, they did not get it. The allies felt Italy's contribution to the war effort was not significant enough to warrant reward; they allowed national self-determination in the Tyrol at Italy's expense while violating this principle in awarding Romania Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovna. Mussolini promised to claim this area by force, and this was a goal many Italians could get behind. Also, Italy had been humiliated in the Battle of Aduwa, being the first European nation to lose a war to a non-European nation: Abyssinia. Mussolini promised and delivered conquest in Ethiopia, his slaughter of Haile Selassie's subjects was unopposed by the League of Nations. The lack of international intervention, as well as the success itself, boosted Mussolini's prestige; Italian nationalists could point to this as evidence that other countries were now beginning to take Italy seriously, owing to Mussolini's fascism.

Mussolini's decline came when it became doubtful that the Axis would win World War II. The allies reclaimed North Africa in 1943, ousting Italian troops. Russia and America entered the war in 1941, and the Germans were sustaining heavy losses (95% of their wartime total) in the Soviet Union, at battles like those of Leningrad and Stalingrad. Italian troops had been forced out of Albania in 1943, when Mussolini was removed from office. Essentially, Mussolini lost power because Italy could not handle the war. The home front was collapsing, and the Allies had taken Italy, which was right on Italy's doorstep.

After the war, people were more favourable to moderate regimes, because they had seen the extremes to which fascist regimes could lead in Hitler's Germany. Knowledge of the Holocaust stigmatized fascism, as did American cold war propaganda campaigns against totalitarianism in general.

Fascism was based on the vitality that it advertised, and Mussolini stated that this vitality was the reason fascist governments were propelled to war. Thus, once the war efforts to conquer the rest of Europe failed, Mussolini's fascist government collapsed.

PART TWO: IDENTIFICATIONS

1. Matteotti

Matteotti was an Italian socialist politician who criticized Mussolini's fascist regime in 1924. He accused them of committing electoral fraud, and denounced their use of the Black Shirt thugs to intimidate the populace and gain votes. As a result, Mussolini mentioned to some of his subordinates that it would be opportune if Matteotti should disappear. He did. This shows Mussolini's power, and emphasized the trait of totalitarian regimes, both fascist and communist, that they ban all dissenting views in order to completely dominate the inner political life of their subjects.

3. Locarno Pact

The Locarno Pact was a treaty signed by Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany in 1925. It was designed to prevent any future conflict, and it reaffirmed Germany's postwar borders in the west. Germany also promised not to break the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles. However, it left the question of Germany's eastern borders unresolved, and consequently the goals of German revisionists were to conquer the land east of Germany. There were renewed German claims to the Danzig, the Polish corridor, and upper Silesia. This can be seen by Hitler's talk of Lebensraum, followed by the annexation of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Austria. The Locarno pact also informed Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, all the same leaders met at Munich. He was convinced that all of Europe's nations were committed to peace, because they were devastated by the first World War. This was not the case, and for most of the 1930's Hitler was able to use this expectation to prepare for war while talking peace. He violated the points of the Treaty of Versailles by expanding the army, occupying the Rhineland (March 1936), the Anschluss (March 1938), unopposed. Chamberlain would talk of the Locarno spirit in his defence of the Munich agreement.

4. The Marshall Plan

The Marshall plan was also informed by the experience of the interwar period. After the first world war, governments became extremely austere and protectionist. The Marshall Plan specifically sought to implement a Keynesian policy by reducing trade barriers and providing stimulus.

6. An Iron Curtain had Descended

Churchill said this in a speech shortly after the war (1946) while receiving an honorary degree at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, accompanied by U.S. President Harry Truman. He referred to the fact that the Soviet Union had not relinquished control of the eastern European countries that they had liberated during the war (Hungary, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, GDR, Bulgaria) as Stalin had promised at the Potsdam peace conference of July 1945. Stalin had instead installed communist puppet governments in these states. The iron curtain became an important piece of imagery in the cold war period. It was symbolic of the isolation of communist countries from western culture, as communist governments increasingly prevented visits to or media and commerce from western countries, to ensure their people would not know how much better life was in the west. The eastern bloc experienced period shortages of basic goods and no political freedoms, while the west entered into the post war era of economic growth under liberal democracies. The Berlin Wall (1961) meshed nicely with this imagery, as it provided a physical manifestation of the curtain that prevented the flow of traffic.

9. Stabbed in the back

Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the German army in general, invented the stab-in-the-back myth immediately after losing the war. This said that Germany did not lose the war for military reasons, but because they were betrayed by the home front. This was widely believed, especially by Germans who had fought on the east, where the Germans did win the war against Russia. Further, it provided a convenient excuse for the military leaders, like Hindenburg, who later went on to become important in Weimar politics. It allowed Germans to believe that they lived in the greatest country, and lost not through their own faults, but because of betrayal. The idea of the home front originated in World War I, as it was the first war large scale enough to require the constant efforts of the entire population. Specifically, in the years of Hitler's ascension, the Jews were blamed for Germany's loss. A study was commissioned that reported on how involved the Jewish members of the population were with the war effort, in an attempt to prove that they did not contribute. The study found that Jews had contributed more than other sectors of the population, but the results were suppressed. The perception of Jews as traitors became more important to ideologues than the realities of the situation. This led to the Nuremberg Laws (1935), Gleischaltung, Kristallnacht (1938), and later the final solution and Holocaust. It allowed Hitler's rise to power by giving him a means to scapegoat a section of the population.

Also the Freikorps were made of eastern soldiers who returned thinking they had one, and then accepted this myth as the reason for Germany's losing the war. They went on to vindictively fight against communism in eastern Europe, as the communists were one of the groups blamed for Germany's defeat. This would prevent communist governments from taking root in east Europe in the interwar period, and contribute to the rise of fascist governments instead, as the Freikorps were extremely right wing.

10. Night of the Long Knives

After Hitler assumed the title of power, he had to consolidate his power before he was able to go to war and carry out the Holocaust. Similar to Mussolini's Black Shirts, Hitler had made use of a band of paramilitary thugs, the Brown Shirts or Stormtroopers (SA), to fight communists in the street. They created disorder so that Hitler could be elected on the promise of restoring order. They were led by Ernst Rohm, and they represented a legitimate threat to Hitler's authority, as Rohm commanded a good deal of authority himself. On the Night (1934), Hitler had his new force, the SS under Himmler, execute Rohm, as well as other key political opponents, like those loyal to Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen. Papen was one of the politicians behind Hitler's rise, thinking he could control him. Consequently, Hitler had the undivided allegiance of all the major players in German politics: the Wehrmacht, politicians, and industry (because his expansionist fiscal policies were good for business). The army was becoming offended by the disorder created by Nazi street fighting. Now that Hitler had used the street fighting to achieve power, he had no need for it and wanted to distance himself from ruffians in order to attract the support of the more conservative members of the army. He used this power to execute his own policies, sometimes against what the public wanted, including the takeover of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and the subsequent attack on Poland (1 September 1939), which led to the second World War. Like in Mussolini's case, incumbent politicians had appointed Hitler to a position of power, thinking they could use him to restore order and then dispose of him, but had been outwitted by his ability to consolidate power once in office.

19. Five Year Plan 1928

This refers to Stalin's economic policy after becoming head of the communist party following Lenin's death in 1924. It took Stalin until this time to consolidate power in the party by defeating challengers like Trotsky. Stalin's focus was on massive forced industrialization. Industrialization had happened naturally in the capitalist west, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany being the archetypal examples. Russia, however, had remained largely industrially underdeveloped until the October Revolution, and this was one of the reasons for its defeat by Germany in the war. Stalin thought that the most important step to take to make Russia's largely agricultural economy competitive on the world stage was to force farmers to move to industrial towns and start working in new factories.

This policy also nicely fit in with official communist ideology. Marxism focuses on the class of the industrial proletariat, factory workers, and this class can only exist in an industrialized country. As in China later, Soviet communism was based on the demand of a large and only recently emancipated peasant class for land reform. Thus, Stalin thought he could bring about the next stage in the evolution of a communist society by forcibly creating a proletariat class. With them, he could enjoy immense support that would legitimate his recent ascension to power. Notably, this plan involved no efforts to foster global socialist revolution, as did Lenin's Comintern and his use of the Red Army to attempt to conquer eastern Europe in 1920. Stalin's focus was entirely on building “communism in one country”, planning to deal later with the problem of winning over the rest of the world by example, and by a modern military supplied by a booming industrial sector.

Because of his intention to shift Russia from an agricultural to an industrial society, Stalin had to forcibly remove peasants from their farms. Many peasants were unhappy at being forced to change professions from the one they had held all their lives. He seized the land of all of these peasants and forced them to work on massive collectivized farms, where they could be supervised to makes sure they were not hoarding any produce to sell for private gain. Those that resisted were sent to the Gulag or liquidated, the term that was used for the genocide of the manufactured “kulak” class of wealthy peasants. In fact, Stalin's victimization of this class was for private gain rather than ideological consistency, confiscated goods and wealth paid Party member salaries and built state-owned factories.

The Plan greatly increased Soviet industrial capacity, and modernized the Soviet economy, giving them the economic backbone that garnered international respect and allowed them to win World War II. However, agriculture suffered. The collectivized farms were far less productive than individual agriculture, likely because peasants lacked incentive to increase productivity. Peasant incentive had been the driving force behind improvement in agricultural techniques for all world history, and it was foolish for Stalin to abandon it. What's more, the resistance itself was a problem. People would often burn their property and livestock rather than yield it to the communists. Many workers who were formerly producing food were instead breaking rocks in the Gulag. Thus, massive food shortages resulted and millions died or were imprisoned. Economic dissatisfaction contributed to the collapse of communism.

Part THREE: Multiple Choice

1. Field Marshal Hindenburg said Germany was stabbed in the back (he was a royalist, it was against his will that he advised the Kaiser to abdicate)
2. Gustave Stresemann called the Locarno conference
3. Kellogg-Briand pact agreed to pacifist resolution of international disagreements
4. The Lateran Accords were seen as a sell-out by the Church for tax benefits
5. Benito Mussolini moved his army to the Brenner pass in 1934 to keep Hitler out of Austria
6. Volkische Beobachter was the voice of the NSDAP
7. Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen beetle.
8. Sophie Scholl said a crime has been perpetrated against human beings.
9. Rudolf Hess said Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler
10. Neville Chamberlain said we have a clear conscience
12. Josef Stalin said the development of capitalism takes place through war and catastrophe
13. President Truman said totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want
14. Walter Ulbricht ruled East Germany with the Party and 20 Russian divisions
15. Winston Churchill said we must proclaim the principles of freedom and human rights
16. Simone de Beauvoir said there can be no real mass movement without women
17. Brezhnev said the USSR had to act decisively against Czech nationalism
18. Robert Schumann integrated French and West German coal and steel production
19. Charles de Gaulle vetoed British entry into the EEC
20. Nikita Krushchev said we are resolutely opposed to the arms race
21. Mikhail Gorbachev supported the sovereignty of the Soviet republics within the federal nation.

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Solutions to April 2013 HIS242: Europe in the Twentieth Century Final Exam at University of Toronto St. George.

I'm currently going through old exams as part of my studying process. As a result, I've got extra sets of solutions on my hands, and it would be a shame to let them go to waste. Please excuse the lack of writing style, I'm trying to simulate exam writing conditions.

April 2013 Exam, St. George

1) Essay

This passage is from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's speech to parliament in defence of his decision to sign the Munich agreement in October of 1938. The events were as follows: In March of that year, Hitler executed the Anschluss, in which he claimed Austria as part of Germany. This was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles to limit German power; overturning measures such as these won Hitler popular German nationalist support. It went over relatively smoothly, as the population of Austria was majority German speaking, and the Nazi party had wide support therein. In contrast, his desire to annex Czechoslovakia met fierce resistance, both in that country and internationally. The Sudetenland, the northern region of Czechoslovakia, was a thriving industrial region, and was very important for the strategic defence of Czechoslovakia. For months before this speech, Hitler and the Nazi party had been purposefully inciting incidents through the Nazi party in the Sudetenland, riots, run-ins with Czech police. The region was majority ethnic German.

Hitler first made a set of more reasonable demands, known as the Karlsbader Programm, for the peaceful transition of the region to autonomy and then German control. He alleged that the Czechoslovak government was abusing Sudeten Germans. These were agreed to by the British, French, and Czechs in the summer. Subsequently, having seen that he would meet little resistance, Hitler made a series of more extreme demands at Bad Godesberg in mid-September, threatening forcible takeover of the area if they were not met. At the Munich conference, Britain and France accepted Hitler's Godesberg demands on September 30. This is the agreement to which the speech refere.

France and Britain were the key players because France had a defence treaty with Czechoslovakia, and would be obliged to go to war with Germany if Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia. The French, however, were cautious about standing up to Germany because they were not certain of British support in the event of war. Also, the French overestimated the strength of the German military (as shown by their allowing Germany to break the Treaty of Versailles and occupy the Rhineland), and were generally indecisive due to the quibbling of a weak parliament (the third republic, whose inefficacy de Gaulle asserts and is shown by their capitulation early in WW2). Moreover, France and Britain both had disarmed in the interwar period, hoping for peace in accordance with the Treaty of Locarno (1925) and Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), as they focused on economic reconstruction and dealt with the great depression.

Chamberlain's doctrine of appeasement, allowing concessions to dictators like Hitler and Mussolini in the hope of avoiding war, came under harsh criticism in retrospect, as it proved ineffective in ultimately preventing the outbreak of World War II. However, at the time, it was not so easy to foresee appeasement's disastrous effects, and it enjoyed plentiful popular support. Chamberlain saw Munich as a triumph of the European international system's ability to resolve conflicts without American or Soviet intervention, as shown by the textrl. The people of Europe were war-weary from the first World War, which was still very vivid in people's memories. Indeed, even the people of Germany did not want a war, there is strong historical evidence that this was only the goal of Hitler, who had the unique goal of enslaving the world due to ideology of racial supremacy (Race and Space, Lebensraum). Chamberlain believed the benefits of possibly avoiding World War were greater than the risks of yielding the Sudetenland to Hitler; hindsight itself cannot disprove this. No one knew at the time how committed Hitler was to war.

Furthermore, the above-mentioned demilitarization means that it would have been extremely disadvantageous for France and Britain to go to war in October 1938. Hitler had been fervently rearming since his accession in 1934, and the German Army was by far the most technologically advanced in the continent; the Soviets had them outmanned. Even though the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not signed until August of 1939, the USSR would likely not have entered a war between the UK, France, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. The Soviets would have seized the opportunity to let their enemies, all western capitalist nations, weaken themselves and each other over Czechoslovakia, which they viewed as insignificant. The allies would probably have been swiftly crushed. France was defeated quickly anyway when war did break out, by June 1940, even though it had more than a year after Munich to prepare its army. Hitler was obsessed throughout his life with timing, thinking that he had missed his chance to rise to power in the early 1930s when the NSDAP vote share fell from one year to the next, and wondered afterwards whether he ought have gone to war in 1938 when his foes were less ready. Chamberlain's policies may have been the reason for allied victory, also allowing the British army to build itself up enough to hold out long enough for the Soviets and the Americans to enter the war.

In many ways this occurrence highlights the influence that the first World War had on the second. The strategy of appeasement would have been inconceivable in the 19^th century, when tensions ran so hot that world empires would go to war over the assassination of a minor member of the Austrian royal family (Franz Ferdinand), and the UK would enter the war over Germany's violation of the Belgian neutrality. The great force of the Great War in modern memory accounts for why Britain would not go to war over Germany's violation of Czechoslovakia's neutrality.

Further, the Paris Peace Conference of 1920 was allegedly drawn up in accordance with the principle of national self-determination. This was the official view expounded by American President Woodrow Wilson's 14 points of peace, which played a key part in the discussion. Due to this, Germany felt excluded from the just desserts of the War. Many large ethnic German minorities were locked up, in the Danzig, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Further, large parts of Hungary with large Hungarian majorities were given to Romania to reward her for fighting on the allied side. The treatment of Germany's colonies was not different, the victorious allies did not give these nations independent status, but instead distributed them among the existing colonial empires. Defeated central powers rightly felt that self-determination was meaningless rhetoric that the Entente used to divide up the lands of the defeated central powers as spoils of war. On the basis of this hypocrisy, Hitler had reasonable grounds for claiming the Sudetenland; the Sudeten Germans nationally determined that they wanted to be a part of Germany. Hitler self-consciously titled one set of his demands the fourteen points after Woodrow Wilson's. Hitler's goal was not honest, because in March of the next year, he invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and set up a Czech protectorate (The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) and a Slovakian puppet state (the Slovak Republic), ruling over other ethnicities for the benefit of Germans, not granting national self-determination to any people but his own. Thus it was only a convenient excuse, afforded by hypocritical actions of the allies after WW1.

Mussolini was perhaps also appeased, when we waged war against Empress Haile Selassie's Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) as revenge for Italy's humiliation in the Battle of Aduwa in the previous decade. The League of Nations did not intervene, effectively letting Mussolini have Ethipia in hopes that he might not make trouble in Europe. This failed as well, as Mussolini joined the Axis. The inefficacy of the League of Nations in this instance was one of the factors that contributed to its dissolution after WW2 in 1946. There was then pressure on the United Nations that would inform their decisions to intervene in the Vietnam War, the Bosnian and Croation Wars of Independence (bombing Serbia), and the war in Kosovo (also bombing Serbia).

Also, the example of the failed attempt to appease Hitler and Mussolini informed the doctrine of containment that the US took toward the USSR as part of the interventionist Truman Doctrine. The US viewed the USSR as a hostile entity that could not be reasoned with, and the only prudent course of action was to try and prevent them from gaining any countries beyond what they got during the War (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, GDR, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria). The fear was that once one country fell, the rest would fall like dominos. This is an intentionally stark break with Chamberlain's appeasement, as the US and Western European countries were unwilling to grant the USSR any territorial gain at all, for fear that this would embolden them to take actions similar to Hitlers. Thus, the US and NATO found themselves involved in many seemingly insignificant countries (that they would otherwise not interfere with) like Greece (1946-9), Korea (1950-3), Vietnam (1945-54, 1956-45), Afghanistan (1979-89), propping up any anticommunist regime – no matter how fascistic – just to not be seen as appeasing Soviets.

2) Terms ID and Significance

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact:

This was the non-aggression pact signed between Hitler's Germany and Soviet Russia in August of 1939, roughly one week before the beginning of the war. In it, both parties agreed not to attack each other if the other party should go to war. In the secret appendix, they agreed to partition Poland between Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. It was signed in Moscow by German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov. It also announced the Soviet intent to invade Finland in the Winter War.

It was significant because with this in hand, the Germans could safely pursue an attack on France, and by the Anglo-French Alliance Britain, which they did a week later. The Soviets were the most powerful military force on the continent, and they could have been a major problem for Hitler if they had intervened early. This is shown by the fact that once Hitler did violate the Pact in 1941, Operation Barbarossa directly led to 95% of German casualties and the Axis defeat.

Further, it was in Poland that many of the practices that came to define the Holocaust were first implemented. Ghettoization, liquidation, putting Jews in charge of administrating their own imprisonment. All this would be implemented as the Germans marched into east Europe after 1941.

Also, this began the tradition of Soviet domination of Poland, and many other eastern European nations, that would continue until the collapse of communism in 1991 (Poland was liberated by Solidarity in Sept 1989). The Soviet Union wanted to dominate Poland so that they could rule it as a communist puppet state. Indeed, in 1944, when the Polish Home Army (The third largest allied military force) rose against the occupying Wehrmacht, the Soviet Army stood across the banks of the Vistula and watched. A Soviet air base 5 minutes away sent no aid. They wanted Poland weak so that they could dominate it after the war, as they did with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR. The Pact gave Stalin freedom to pursue this course of action.

Stalin was also able to pursue a war against Finland in the North. Though this proved unsuccessful, the Soviet inability to crush the Finnish was seen as weakness by Hitler, and informed his decision to invade Russia, which ultimately lost him the war.

Marshall Plan:

The Marshall Plan was the system of financial aid that the US gave to help rebuild Europe after WW2. Much of the money went to food. The recipients were most western European countries.

The significance was that it deepened the divide between western and eastern European nations that already existed in the ideological difference between capitalism and communism. The USSR was offered money under the plan, but they refused because t hey did not want to allow the concomitant American control of their economy. They also prohibited any of the Eastern Bloc countries from accepting. The Russians had already been excluded from the Lend-Lease Act, even though the Americans promised to include them. This further exclusion, blamed on the Americans because of their “unreasonable” terms further damaged American-Soviet relations.

It also marks a shift in world power. The first world war weakend Europe to the extent that its countries had some economic trouble. The second World War decimated Europe to the extent that it was extremely reliant on America to rebuild it.

Further, the Marshall Plan led to the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in 1948 to administer its funds. This was the first pan-European (partially) decision making body, and paved the way for the ECSC (1952), the EEC (1957), and eventually the EU (2009). This organization showed that European countries were capable of working together, and as a result they opted for tight integration to prevent further wars. Organizations were formed of old enemies, such as France and Germany, also France and Italy, in the ECSC.

Francisco Franco:

Francisco Franco was the right-wing dictator of Spain from the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) to his death in 1975. He began as Spain's youngest general, and came to command the Nationalist army against the Republicans, led by the Popular front.

The Spanish Civil War was an ideological battleground for the forces of liberal democracy that dominated France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia, and the new political ideology of fascism that rose to power in all other European nations (except in the USSR) in the interwar period. The republicans received material support from the Soviet Union, and had many British volunteers. The Nationalists received military support from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. This helped make the two sides more hostile towards each other, and led to the war.

Further, Hitler took advantage of the opportunity to test the Luftwaffe, his air forces, especially in the bombing of Guernica – a civilian town. This showed that Germany's army, especially the air force, was the most advanced in Europe at the time, and intimidated France and Britain into policies of appeasement; they did not want to directly challenge Hitler, and handed him Austria, the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, and the lifting of military restrictions, without a fight. This also convinced the British of the need to modernize the RAF, which they did in time to do well enough in the Battle of Britain to prevent an amphibious invasion.

This war solidified the ties between the fascist leaders Hitler and Mussolini, though Francisco refused to fight in WW2, citing his nation's poverty.

Existentialism:

Existentialism was a philosophy of life that emerged with the writings of French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir after WW2, and had its foundations in late 19^th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaarde and German Friedrich Nietzsche. It put an emphasis on absolute human freedom of choice to create identity, and the tremendous responsibility arising from that choice.

It was significant because it gave people a way of dealing with the aftermath of the war. People needed to forget parts of the past, the war, and a philosophy where you can choose to redefine your past at any moment renders the past insignificant. Further, the emphasis on anguish and difficulty meshed well with the feelings of people after the war. People in the war had to make difficult choices.

One concrete example is from Sartre's life, the French had to choose whether to collaborate with Petain's Vichy Regime or to join de Gaulle's Free French Army and resist. Sartre himself resisted. Existentialism provided a basis for indicting collaborators, they cannot use the excuse that they had no choice because whatever they did, they made a deliberate free choice to do. They could have joined the resistance. Thus, existentialism informed punishment of collaborators in France and abroad, where Sartre's writings found a place.

Existentialism also meshed nicely with de Beauvoir's creation of the second wave feminist women. By emphasizing free choice, existentialism minimized the biological aspects of personality. Thus, “woman” was a social construct, and all the concomitant behaviour was the result of choices that women made. It liberated them by telling them they could simply choose to do different things, empowering women to do what they want, and encouraging feminist's to campaign for a world where women have equal opportunity to choose their lives.

Vaclav Havel:

Vaclav Havel was a playwright who published Charter 77 (1977), a document demanding basic human rights in Soviet dominated communist Czechoslovakia. He was also a leading figure in the Velvet Revolution (1989), where Czechoslovakia gained independence non-violently as part of the collapse of communism, and the Velvet Divorce, where Slovakia separated from the Czech Republic. He was the first president of the Czech Republic, and the last of Czechoslovakia.

He was significant because he showed how fragile Communism had become. Collapse must have been in the air, for Czechoslovakia to receive independence without firing a shot in only 10 days (roughly). The previous attempt at liberalizing reforms, the Prague Spring (1968), met with Soviet military intervention. Soviet Communist Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) had real effects, the USSR was committed to non-intervention in eastern bloc countries in a way that it was not only 20 years ago. He inspired Bulgaria and Romania to throw off communist regimes later in that year.

His human rights campaigns revealed problems with communism. If communism was working in the eastern bloc, there would not have been need to militarily repress protests. Official “apparatchiks” received luxury goods while non-party members suffered shortages of basic necessity. Discontent led to the collapse of communism.

The velvet divorce may have been the result of Hitler's division of the federation into two protectorates during WW2.

3) Put in Chronological Order.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Death of Adolf Hitler

VE Day (Victory in Europe Day)

Death of Josef Stalin

Potsdam Conference

Cuban Missile Crisis

Gorbachev named General Secretary of Communist Party in USSR

German Reunification

Russo-Japanese War

German Loss of Colonies in West Africa

Suez Canal Crisis 1956

Official End of Algerian War of Independence 1963

4. Matching

Simone de Beauvoir

Frank Caplan

Andrey Sakharov

Warsaw Pact

T-4

5. Multiple Choice

1. f
2. a
3. b
4. c
5. e

Canada Annexes North Pole

Canada Annexes North Pole

At 6:00 P.M. NPST (North Pole Standard Time), the National People's Republic of the North Pole (NPRNP) officially joined Canada as its 11^th province.

The move follows the NPRNP's application to join the Canadian federation after yesterday's referendum, in which 87.5% composed an overwhelming affirmative majority.

“I think our economic and political future lies to the south, with Canada”, said Peter Kowalski, interim Klaus and long standing Northern Pole.

The international community, however, has raised concerns about the legitimacy of the vote. The referendum was held after 9 soldiers wearing Canadian army uniforms entered the Pole unannounced on Friday, shocking and effectively doubling the population. Canadian government officials deny that the move was planned, and instead claim that the group is the militant arm of a right-wing anti-Santa group.

“We don't know who they are, or how they got Canadian army uniforms, or why they're exclusively and deliberately advancing the interests of the Canadian government. The only thing we do know is that there's nothing we can do to stop them. Sorry,” apologized Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird

Canadian nationalists have pointed out that the region's population has been 62.5% ethnic Canadian since the state's inception last Wednesday. Critics have suggested that this fact is mostly due to a seal hunting expedition that took a tragic turn when the party got lost.

Ousted pro-Denmark NPRNP leader Kristopher Kringluun is in hiding in Copenhagen, where he fled for his safety during anti-government demonstrations.

“Rest assured, I am going to be looking over the documentation very carefully,” he said when asked to comment. “I've been keeping a close eye on the issue, and I will determine how to assign blame.”

Protesters occupied the Republic's capital–and only–city around the pole for hours at a time, before returning to lodging to warm up. The metropolis, North Pole City, is not to be confused with City of North Pole, Alaska.

The region's American inhabitant Herman Hobbs protested the referendum, questioning the legitimacy of a vote during military occupation. “The question on the referendum was 'Would you like to join Canada as its 11^th province, or as its 4^th territory?' I don't think that's indicative of public opinion,” argues Hobbs. “Also, I think some people might have had trouble reading the ballot, because it's been night for 4 months.”

Countries are interested in the area because of large hydrocarbon fuel deposits, 9-10 trillion tonnes according to a report by the Russian Agency for Management of Mineral Resources. Nonetheless, experts estimate that 90% of the region's energy would come from training polar bears to ride unicycles. Paid consultants from the Carnival Workers' Union are still in deliberations.

No word yet on when Canada Post will begin delivery to the area, or if service will be community mailbox based rather than door-to-door. Incorporation into the existing system should be fairly easy, as key NPRNP addresses already follow the alternating 6-digit alphanumeric postal code format.

Date: April 6, 2014

Author: Alaric McKenzie-Boone