The First and Second world wars were directly linked in that the settlement imposed on the defeated states after the former succeeded in deepening the antagonisms which led to the latter. The background to the First World War was the clash in the Balkans. Germany aimed to move through the Balkans across the Dardanelles and onwards, taking in the Middle East with its oil resources and strategic importance. It was given dramatic expression in the planned Berlin-Baghdad railway. Such a thrust meant cutting off Russia from its Balkan proteges and an outlet to the Mediterranean, and meant severing the British Empire life-line through the Suez Canal to India and beyond. France with its African interests was as vitally concerned as Britain to stop this German dream of world power.

When the war came in 1914 Italy deserted the Triple Alliance while Turkey joined it. Part of the Allied bribe to Italy was the secret promise of a rich share in the spoils of victory - a promise which Italy claimed was never kept. Later on, in the early 1920s, with Germany prostrate and Russia weakened by the civil war and Allied intervention, Europe was dominated by France and the French system of alliances with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, a system aimed both against the revival of Germany and against Russia. The British Government, following its traditional European balance of power policy, saw the need - in the interest of British capitalism - of helping Germany recover to offset French preponderance. A new factor, however, came into being after the world slump which followed on from the Wall Street Crash of 1929: the coming to power in Germany of the Hitler dictatorship.

The slump led in 1931 to a major breakdown in the system of international payments. Production fell in country after country and trade plummeted. Gold became concentrated in the hands of the dominant capitalists in the USA, Britain, France and the countries associated with them. These states also had a monopoly of access to most of the sources and raw materials in the world. The world thus became divided into two groups; those countries which had the gold and raw materials and those which lacked them. Germany, Japan and Italy were in the second group and in a bid to solve the problems this presented, the governing parties organised on an aggressive totalitarian basis and resorted to policies which challenged the other, dominant group.

To get gold and currencies to buy essential raw materials the totalitarian states tried 'dumping', i.e. selling their products below cost. In their trade with other countries they used devices which avoided gold, such as barter and bilateral trade agreements and credits which had to be used to buy their goods. All these devices tended to tie their trading partners to them and thus take them out of the world market.

This decline in the use of gold threatened the financial centres of London and New York. London was also threatened as the centre of dealings in raw materials. Pursuing these aggressive economic policies Germany had considerable success in Southern Europe and Latin America, while Japan made headway in the markets of Southern Asia. In 1931 Japan used armed force in Manchuria to set up a trading monopoly there. In the past the imperialist powers had decided on an open door policy for trade with China as none of them was strong enough to exclude all the others. Now Japan was trying to do just this, a policy which inevitably led to conflict with America and Britain. Italy similarly used force to get an overseas market in Abyssinia in 1935.

By way of response, the dominant powers decided on a determined campaign to regain the markets lost to the totalitarian countries. German, Japanese and Italian goods were boycotted. Credits were offered to the countries of Southern Europe to win them away from dependence on Germany. The more successful these policies were the more desperate became the economic position of German capitalism. Without the funds to give credits, force appeared to be the only way. Hence the annexation of Austria in 1938, the breaking up of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

At this point the conflict of economic interests was coming to a head. Germany was trying to keep its gains in Southern Europe by all means, including force, and Britain and France were using credits to undermine German influence. There was no backing down on either side. War would break out as soon as Britain and France decided to resist force with force.

This article got hidden because of the comparison of Bush and Hitler, which degrades e.g. the significance of the Holocaust and the NS regime and is therefore e.g. antisemitic and so on.