Another Note On Annexation

A Brief Survey Of Imperial Takeovers Since 1914

By Gabriel Haythornthwaite, The DNA Report

With 9 days until Alberta’s pre-annexation referendum, The DNA Report continues its look at the concept and experience of annexation following the brief historical review posted on September 27. In that review, the ancient origins of annexation were sketched out to distinguish between mere military takeovers and the colonial administration model of the Roman empire (starting in the middle of the second century BCE) which was then applied to European conquests in the modern colonial period.

This first note concluded with a snapshot of annexation under industrial capitalist Empires; in particular, the origins of the American Empire. This successor note considers annexation in the 20th and 21st centuries as a more direct point of comparison to the American Annexation operation in Canada.

Imperial Annexation in the World War Era

World War I (1914-18) was the greatest clash of empires up to that point in history. This ‘War To End All Wars’, as it was optimistically called afterwards, resulted in around 20 million deaths, shattering imperial European complacency and the legitimacy of naked conquests and annexations. A League of Nations premised on national self-determination (for European countries and settler-states) was formed in 1920, and though annexation as a political method was poorly looked upon, German colonies were annexed by the war victors while the Levant territories of the Ottoman Empire were put under British and French control with special mandates from the League.

The humiliation of Germany by France and Britain in the 1919 Versailles Treaty, forced upon a liberal republican government, set the stage for Hitler’s 1933 rise to power with the Nazi promise to make Germany great again. Exploiting economic crisis, societal breakdown (aided considerably by the Nazis) and legitimate liberal guilt in Europe (especially in Britain) over the excesses of Versailles, Hitler as Führer seized upon the presence of German communities adjacent to the borders of the shrunken Reich as the main pretext for aggressive expansion that eventually would trigger a new world war in 1939.

The first formal Nazi German annexation was that of Austria, the anschluss of 1938. This example is particularly interesting to The DNA Report as the takeover drama involved a ‘unification’ plebiscite one month after the Nazis carried out a bloodless military occupation of the country. Even more interesting is that the Nazi invasion occurred one day before the Austrian government was set to hold a referendum vote affirming independence on March 13th. Shockingly, the Hitler ballot in April—which put both ‘reunification’ and Nazi rule in the same question—sanctioned anschulss overwhelmingly after leftists and racial enemies were barred from voting.

The Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia—which started with the aid of Britain and France in September 1938 and concluded with an invasion that overran the entire country six months later—dispensed with the theatrics of a sham vote and, instead, enacted a military decree designating Czechoslovakia as a protectorate of the Third Reich.

In the early years of a new war with France and Britain, triggered by Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Nazi Germany formally or de facto annexed bordering territories in Poland, France, Belgium and Yugoslavia as well as the tiny country of Luxembourg. These were all administrative-political moves without the exercise of a sanctioning vote.

The Return of Annexation

After the Nazis’ defeat in 1945, the practice of annexation was no longer carried out by major Western powers and those carried out by smaller powers were generally small-scale takeovers that were not recognized by the United Nations. However, Israel’s colonial ambush of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the June 1967 war led to the seizure of lands from all three countries. These takeovers would eventually result in two formal annexations; East Jerusalem in 1980 and the Golan Heights the following year.

The Palestinian territories in the West Bank have been subject to decades of pre-annexation colonization moves which fascist and other regressive Israeli parties have championed with the explicit goal in mind of formal incorporation into the Jewish apartheid state. Annexation calls in Israel have also been extended to Gaza since the 2023 invasion, an example that has had an undoubted influence on Herr Trump, who weirdly claimed the area for the USA in February 2025 and gained an obscene UN mandate to set up retro-colonial control through a ‘Board of Peace’ which was established in January 2026.

Another pertinent contemporary example of annexation are the moves carried out by Russia in Crimea (2014) and in four eastern Ukranian regions in 2022. From the Kremlin point of view, these takeovers were a response to both decades of US-NATO expansion in eastern Europe and the repression of Russian-speaking communities by Nazi-led Ukrainian military and security forces. In both of these cases, Russia held ratification referendums in the wake of military takeovers.

Trump’s unparalleled zeal for annexation as a hyper-aggressive model of imperial power projection has added the precedent of targeting vassals like Canada and Greenland. The Alberta referendum also sets a precedent. Here we have a situation where political allies of an aggressive power are organizing a popular mandate for ‘separation’ which directly opens the door to beginning the ‘51st state’ takeover promoted by the MAGA President.

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Gabriel Haythornthwaite is a former labour-allied school board trustee in BC and currently advises First Nations around political and intergovernmental relations. He is also a leftwing writer and political organizer.