HITLER’S REAL AIMS

Southland Times, Issue 23648, 25 October 1938, Page 6

HITLER’S REAL AIMS

German Hegemony In Europe FATE OF THE SMALL NATIONS All the world is waiting to know the details of the policy upon which British and French Ministers agreed last Sunday, wrote Sir Alfred Zimmern, Professor of International Relationships at Oxford University, in The Sydney Morning Herald on September 21. Specu lation is idle in the absence of particulars, some of which may be crucial. Meanwhile, however, it may be useful to set out some general considerations bearing on the situatioin. For Herr Hitler, the grievances of the Sudeten-Germans are a pretext and nothing more. If he really cared for the fate of Germans living outside the Reich, his natural course would have been to take up the cause of those who were suffering the most, such as the compact group of 200,000 Germans south of the Brenner Pass, who are being steadily denationalized by the policy of Signor Mussolini. Moreover, from the point of view of the Hitlerian racial philosophy, the Sud-eten-Germans would be anything but an acquisition to the German nation, since they are very much mixed in stock, living as they do in a borderland, where the German and the Slav have intermingled and intermarried during the last 500 years. The reason why Herr Hitler selected the Sudeten-Germans as his special proteges was simply because they lay directly on the path which he had chosen for Germany’s expansion towards the south-east, according to the programme set forth in “Mein Kampf.” The result is that there is a contradiction between Herr Hitler’s declared aim, which' is to rescue the SudetenGermans from Slav oppression, and his real aim, which is to extend his power over the whole of the area occupied by the Czechoslovakian State, and, in particular, to wipe out the salient of Bohemia and Moravia with their compact Czech population. THE REAL ISSUE This contradiction has peeped out in Herr Hitler’s repeated denunciations of the Czechslovak State as such, and his fuminations against its alliance with Russia. There was, for instance, a curious passage in one of the German cable messages last week, in which Herr Hitler was credited with the intention of turning the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia into a Dominion on the British model—a typical example of the total inability of the present German regime to understand British institutions. Thus, the detachment of the Sudeten-German districts from. Czechoslovakia accompanied by solid guarantees from the Western Powers and Russia for the remainder of the State, though meeting Herr Hitler’s declared desire, would really introduce a stronger political barrier than has hitherto existed to his south-eastern courseprovided the barrier is really made effective. The real issue behind all this is, however, much more far-reaching than the fate of the Czechoslovak State. It is the issue between a German hegemony in Europe as against the maintenance of the present system of balance. If Germany were to succeed in eliminating Czechoslovakia as an independent State, she would bestride the Continent from the North Sea to the Black Sea, reducing every other Continental European State to the condition of a second-rate or a third-rate Power. UNITY BY FORCE And why not —it may be asked. Is not the present division of Europe into 25 sovereign states a survival of an antiquated system? Why should not the Continent of Europe be under a single political Power like the Continent of Australia? Is not Hitler, in spite of the brutality of his methods, performing a real service by introducing into European politics an eliment of order which the other European States, greater or smaller, have lacked the will or desire to introduce for themselves Is not Hitler, in other words, in spite of his anti-international professions, really leading Europe a stage onwards on the road of world unity. It is worth while examining this argument, although one hears it more often on American than on British lips. Indeed, although it. is sometimes advanced in British quarters as a good programme for Europe, it is thoroughly out of fashion in the British Empire, since federation is no longer regarded as practical politisc for the British Commonwealth.

The argument for a United States of Europe under German supremacy ignores two facts. One is that there is all the difference in the world between freedom and tyranny, and that a big unfree State is totally different from a big free federation. The Australian Commonwealth is a political asset to the world,' not because it is big, but because it is free.

The second point is that nearly all that is best in the European tradition originated and is still maintained in the small nations. Democracy was first worked out in the small communities of Greece, and took its rise in modern times from the Swiss forest cantons. A Europe in which Switzerland, Sweden Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium were satellites in a German

system, or remained shivering just outside it, would be a Europe which had abandoned its political leadership. To this, it may be retorted that the only alternative to the hegemony of a single power is the system of balance power, and this has been discredited. This is an argument that naturally appeals to Australians, as to North Americans, because they have the good fortune .to live in a part of the world where the strong powers are also free powers. BACK TO 1914 When President Wilson declared that the system of balance of power was discredited in Europe, it was because he believed that the free power had once and for all secured a preponderance in Europe similar to their preponderance in the oversea world. Had that been so, had democracy struck its roots deep enough in Germany and in the other countries which drew up democratic constitutions in 1919, Euro- , pean politics would actually have passed into a new phase as President Wilson believed they had, but in point of fact, of the new democracies established in Central Europe, the Czechoslovak was the only one that survived the diseases of infancy. Thus,' after Germany’s rearmament had made her once more a Great Power in the old-fashioned sense of the term, Great Britain and France, as the democratic Great Powers, found themselves again in the position that they occupied before 1914 and during part of the 19th century, confronted with a preponderance of power in the hands of nondemocratic Governments. In such a situation a policy of union or co-oper-ation on League of Nations lines becomes face impossible and the defenders of democracy face the alternative of abandoning the cause of freedom, in Europe or using the method of the balance of power. POWER POLITICS AGAIN The necessity for this painful choice has been masked from many people by the existence of the League of Nations, but though the League of Nations is still a going concern, it is no longer a Wilsonian League—that is to say, a League of free democratic States. The eclipse of the Wilsonian League has led to much confusion, since different members of the League have different conceptions of its function. For some, it is a mere centre for consultation between the Great Powers; it is this school of thought which would like to see Germany, Italy, and Japan “brought back” to Geneva. For others, it is an agency of social progress, and this school of thought lays great stress on its universality. For others, it is the nucleus of a system of mutual protection for the free States and any others, such as Russia, who may care to adhere to it. But whether these theories are put into practice wholly or in part at Geneva or not, they cannot alter the fact that Europe has relapsed, for the time being, into a system of power in which Great Britain, as the leading democratic Great War Power, has reluctantly to en.ploy the old-fashioned weapons which, when the League was founded, men thought had been put aside for good. Thus, what is at stake today in Europe is not simply the fate of Czechoslovakia, but that of every State in Europe, of the smaller democracies, of France, of the numerous other States, such as those in the Danube Basin, who are painfully struggling towards free institutions and who have been looking to Great Britain and France for guidance and help in their upward progress, and last but not least, of Great Britain herself.