Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [89]
The primary aim of a state, by definition, is its own self-preservation. Though a parent may sacrifice himself for his child, or a friend for his comrades, the nature of the political entity does not lead it to this kind of self-abnegation. As Palmerston once said in a moment of unwonted candor, “Britain has no eternal friends or eternal enemies, Britain has only eternal interests.” As a coalition nears defeat, the interests of the individual members assume paramount importance. The breakdown is invariably accompanied by recrimination and charges that the other partners failed to fulfill their obligations. Thus in 1940, when the strain of the war became too great for the Belgian government to sustain it, Belgium signed an armistice. Her allies accused her of gross betrayal. Less than a month later, the French were negotiating their armistice in their turn, they and the British each feeling let down by the other. The chief aim of the French government was that the French state should survive, not that France should sacrifice herself for Great Britain. Looking back, one can say the French politicians made the wrong choice, but that is the luxury of hindsight by those who were not faced with the agonizing necessity of decision.
Ironically, victorious coalitions tend to break up in the same kind of distrust and divergence as do defeated ones. Military victory is the sine qua non of survival, but it is not an end in itself; it is but the means to some larger political end, defined and perceived by the state and its leaders. Each state will have different ultimate aims, arising out of a variety of factors—historical, geographical, and ideological. As the military crisis is faced and surmounted, the differing political ends become more apparent, and the coalition, the more successful it waxes militarily, becomes shakier politically. As the potential postwar situation is partially predetermined by who takes what where, and what it costs him to take it, the political problems become increasingly acute, and few wartime coalitions long survive the war. In 1814, the about-to-be-victorious Allies signed a twenty-year alliance against France. A year later, half of them were threatening to go to war with the other half, and both sides were courting French support. In 1914-18, the Western Allies promised Russia things that they had spent a century denying her, just to keep her in the war. Yet by 1918 they were mounting massive military interventions in Russia, while Britain and the United States were refusing to ally with France. World War II, both in spite of and because of the aims for which it was fought, went the same way.
The major determinants of the course of action pursued by any given state depend upon the historical circumstances of the state, its situation at successive points in the conflict, the strength and predilections of its leaders, and their war aims, either announced or assumed. As a means of understanding why World War II went the way it did, and why so many of the postwar decisions were taken almost by default, it is worthwhile examining the three major allies on these points.
Nations are molded by their geography and by their history. Time, and its expression through historical development, is a fourth dimension for the individual and the group. In Great Britain, the most important event of recent history was World War I, and her strategy and her attitudes in World War II were extensively conditioned by the experience of the First World War. This