German Hegemony and the Socialist International’s Place in Interwar European Diplomacy

Abstract

Although communism’s role in European international affairs between the wars has garnered substantial attention, to this day we know very little about the much more important impact on the European state system exerted by communism’s internecine rival, socialism. By employing a multinational archival approach that draws on hitherto unused Austrian, Belgian, British, Czechoslovak, French, German, Polish and Russian materials, this article focuses on socialism’s critical contribution to Weimar German diplomacy and suggests that the international politics of the democratic left set the stage for the great powers’ later appeasement of Hitler’s Germany.