Hitler and Trotsky recognized the same reality that Churchill did. They too believed that World War I had opened a new phase of ‘world organization’. But whereas Churchill took this new reality as cause for celebration, for a communist revolutionary like Trotsky or a national socialist such as Hitler it threatened nothing less than historical oblivion. Superficially, the peace settlements of 1919 might seem to advance the logic of sovereign self-determination that originated in European history in the late Middle Ages.
