A Low Dishonest Decade: The great powers, Eastern Europe, and the economic origins of World War II, 1930-1941.

• Author: Tooley, T. Hunt
• Position: Book Review

A Low Dishonest Decade: The Great Powers, Eastern Europe, and the Economic Origins of World War II, 1930-1941

By Paul N. Hehn New York and London: Continuum, 2002. Pp. 560. $35.00 cloth.

The causes and outbreak of World War II have formed the subject matter for one of most active subfields of diplomatic history, and scholars continue to work out the various details in the general picture. Yet, on the whole, few historians have been willing to depart radically from the old paradigm of "Hitler and the march to war." A. J. P. Taylor did so in his classic work The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Premier, 1961). Some we might now call "Old Revisionists," such as Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Callan Tansill, did so in the 1940s and 1950s. By and large, however, historians have been unwilling to depart from the paradigm itself.

In A Low Dishonest Decade, Paul N. Hehn attempts to do so. He rethinks the origins of World War II by reading diplomatic history through the lens of economic and political history. A number of earlier works, in particular David E. Kaiser's Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War: Germany, Britain, France, and Eastern Europe, 1930-1939 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), have been devoted to the theme of economic diplomacy with regard to eastern Europe before World War II. Hehn's work goes well beyond earlier works, however, by integrating research on the internal dynamics of the countries involved in what one might call technical economic diplomacy. The result is a big book: more than five hundred pages of text and many pages of notes at the end.

Hehn states his thesis clearly at the outset: World War II erupted out of "an economic and political conflict over Eastern Europe during the tariff wars era of the 1930s" (p. 4). His chapters are semi-independent studies of aspects of this thesis.

The main story, outlined in his first chapter and expanded on throughout the book, is as follows. After World War I, the international economic system was in terrific disarray. The prewar system--based on the balance-of-power system, the international gold standard, the self-regulating market, and the liberal state--was for the most part gone. Imperialism remained as a kind of external factor, but even in that regard, colonies and power had been redistributed, to the confusion of the system. The liberal states had disappeared or had been transformed, and the international system was now marked by political and economic imbalance, a result of both the war and deeper structural economic changes. The main feature in...