A Global Civil War? Japanese Anticommunism and the Axis Alliance

The Anti-Comintern Pacts of 1936/1937 were often described as weak, meaningless
treaties in the literature on the origins of the Second World War. However, this paper
shows how, in Japan, anti-communism led many fascists in the late 1930s to support the
risky alliance with Germany and Italy. As the violence escalated in Spain and China, the
Anti-Comintern Pacts seemed to be the perfect means to prevail in (civil) wars that now
were supposedly globally connected. One consequence of the pacts thus was that the
trouble spots in Europe and Asia were increasingly interlinked in the running-up to the
Second World War.