‘All this trouble becomes cumulative’: foreign policy, 1933–9

Josiah Wedgwood was not a man who in his twilight years could look back on a life of achievement with satisfaction in a job well done. His historical work, while in some ways dramatically successful, had also brought frustration and disappointment; his career at the forefront of politics was long over; the Radicalism that he espoused – of laissez-faire, individualism and land reform – seemed in terminal decline; and the British empire – for so long at the centre of his vision of a better world – was wracked by native nationalism and, as he saw it, Britain's cack-handed response to it. It was not only in the field of academic history that Wedgwood's deeply held ‘Whig’ view of progress was under profound attack. The whole world, it seemed, was retreating from the liberal progress that had seemed almost pre-ordained. The world was in decline, and with his heart condition worsening, so was he. And yet, as in the Great War, Wedgwood showed some of his best qualities in a crisis. His aggression, hyperbole and messianic streak, so unsuited to the realms of administration or academia, came into their own as Britain and the Liberal world faced an existential threat. For Wedgwood, unlike most British politicians of his day, always loathed and feared Nazi Germany. He consistently and publicly criticised Hitler's regime from the start and personally helped as many of its victims as he could.

Until the 1930s Wedgwood, along with most of the British Left and not a few on the right, favoured an isolationist foreign policy that eschewed European alliances and favoured arms control. He did so because, despite unpleasant regimes likeMussolini’s, he did not think that Britain faced any serious external threats. The rise of Hitler, however, convinced him that Fascism and Nazism were an ideological and military challenge to western democratic ideals that could not be appeased and must be challenged. He frequently likened the situation to the wars of religion of the seventeenth century. For Wedgwood this was not mere hyperbole, for, unlike the supporters of the anti-Fascist Popular Fronts of the 1930s, he did not see Fascism and Nazism as extreme forms of capitalism, but rather as extreme manifestations of the authoritarian strand within Catholicism.