Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (13 page)

Between 1934 and 1936 the European balance swung inexorably away from Paris and London. The French alliance system was damaged by Poland’s decision to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany in January 1934. France then turned towards the Soviet Union, but western and east European anti-communism made it difficult for Moscow to fulfil the role France had once intended for Poland and Czechoslovakia. Even more critical was the Abyssinia crisis of 1935–6, which brought Italy into conflict with the League. The French, in particular, were desperate to keep close links with their Mediterranean neighbour; the sanctions imposed by the League wrecked this hope and pushed Mussolini into Hitler’s arms. In 1934 Mussolini had stood up to Hitler and prevented a Nazi takeover of Austria; four years later, he offered no objection and
Anschluss
took place.

The British watched all this happen with some detachment. Suspicious of the French, they were overextended in the Far East and could ill afford further military or naval commitments in Europe. Government policy was affected by pacifism, by a certain liberal sympathy for German ethnographic claims in central Europe, by fiscal conservatism (which opposed rearmament), and by a poor strategic sense which exaggerated Italian power in the Mediterranean and undervalued the significance of eastern Europe.

As for the French, their basic defensiveness was amply illustrated by the construction of the Maginot line: French generals had no offensive plans where Germany was concerned. Defence spending was at low levels, politically the country was deeply divided. From 1937 onwards, these factors produced a growing willingness to come
to terms with Germany. At the nadir of French diplomacy, in the winter of 1938, after Munich, there was a Franco-German declaration of friendship, and French politicians indicated a “fundamental alteration” in France’s relations with eastern Europe.

Not surprisingly, these developments doomed the League of Nations. By 1936, with the Disarmament Conference ignominiously wound up and the minorities system more or less moribund, few people looked any longer to Geneva for the answers to Europe’s problems. As civil war erupted that summer, Spain was added to Manchuria, Abyssinia and the Rhineland in the roll-call of the League’s failures. Not even the ineffectual International Non-Intervention Committee was organized from Geneva. Hardly surprising, then, that the Spanish foreign minister should bitterly reproach the League’s Assembly in September 1938 with following “a strange theory according to which the best method of serving the League was to remove from its purview all questions relating to peace, and the application of the Covenant.” One French supporter of the League, Gaston Riou, saw 1936 bringing to an end a phase of history that had started in 1918: the League had simply been defeated. “If European democracy binds its living body to the putrefying corpse of the 1919 settlement,” warned E. H. Carr in November 1936, “then it will merely be committing a particularly unpleasant form of suicide.”
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Rather than embodying the nucleus of a new international order, universal in its aspirations, the League was shrinking to something far more modest, a mere coalition of like-minded states which made no claim to monopolize the pattern of international relations. In 1937 a Nazi political scientist pointed out acerbically that there was a kind of “asserted monopoly of the Geneva system.” In fact, he argued, there was not just one, but several actual or possible systems of collective action. He was right.
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In the 1920s there had been fumbling alternative schemes of international cooperation such as the anti-communist White International, sponsored briefly by the Hungarians, or Count Coudenhove-Kalergi’s schemes for pan-European union. None of these amounted to very much. Under Hitler’s leadership, however, the Third Reich evolved a vision of a European order based on fundamentally different principles from those developed in Geneva. In the ideologically
charged climate of inter-war Europe, a shift in the balance of power implied a profound political and moral challenge to the League system. The whole idea of liberal universalism came under attack.

AGAINST THE LIBERAL NEW ORDER

Hitler grew up steeped in the Pan-German nationalism—viciously anti-Slav and anti-Semitic—of the late Habsburg Empire. In 1923 during the Beerhall Putsch, he walked through the streets of Munich alongside the more famous Erich Ludendorff, who, together with Hindenburg, had been the architect of Germany’s wartime victories in the East. It is, therefore, tempting to interpret National Socialist foreign policy in terms of older German nationalist traditions. Undoubtedly, they were influential both on Hitler personally and on the movement he led. It would, however, be a great error to ignore the substantial differences between him and his predecessors. To imagine that Hitler was merely following in, say, Bismarck’s footsteps was profoundly to misunderstand the man and his view of the world. Bismarck thought in terms of great-power politics, Hitler of racial triumph.

Hitler did not object to the League of Nations simply because it defended the Versailles settlement. That would have implied a willingness to participate at Geneva if the settlement could have been revised. Many German nationalists, of course, did take this position, which was also the assumption underlying British appeasement policy. But in
Mein Kampf
, Hitler made it clear that restoring the frontiers of 1914 was certainly not his aim. He was after further
Lebensraum
for the German people. This imperial programme flowed naturally from his broader vision of politics as racial struggle. Such a struggle—seen in Darwinian terms as an existential battle—implied a hierarchical vision of international (or, better, interracial) relations.
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The League, after all, was an organization of states. But what was the state? According to Hitler’s biological view of politics, it was no less than “a living organism.” Reflecting the writing of German geopoliticians, he argued that boundaries could not be fixed; they were, rather, “momentary frontiers in the current political struggle of any period,” at the mercy of “the mighty forces of Nature in a process
of continuous growth … to be transformed or destroyed tomorrow by greater forces.”
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Hitler’s own vision of global politics—unlike that of many geopoliticians—rested upon race: the state itself was merely the expression of the racial
Volk
. “Blood is stronger than a passport,” wrote a prominent pan-Germanist in 1937. The German minorities abroad were “racial comrades” of Reich Germans; the Third Reich had a duty to the whole of the German people, not merely those who happened to live within its current borders.
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The fundamental problem, therefore, with the League was not merely that it defended Versailles, but that—in Nazi eyes—it embodied a wholly mistaken philosophy of international affairs. There could be no equality among states, for some “are not worthy of existence”; there could therefore be no universal morality or law. Even the highly paternalistic liberalism which Geneva embodied reeked of humanitarian weakness to the Nazis. The stronger race must prevail over the weaker; it would thus win the right to impose its own wishes upon the loser. It followed that legal arrangements were purely matters of convenience, to be followed or repudiated as the interests of the
Volk
dictated.
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It is true that among German political theorists in the 1930s there were endless debates—for or against forms of European federalism, for German-led economic zones, for cooperation with Russia or an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Nevertheless, the logic of Hitler’s racial obsessions forced the discussion within narrow bounds and gave rise to a National Socialist doctrine of international law that attempted to define Germany’s new stance in the world. Equality in international relations was not taken as absolute; it was relative “to the concrete value of the race represented by the state,” in other words “their natural superiority or inferiority.” Thus was justified the “hegemony” of some races over others. Not surprisingly, German legal theorists argued that international law had only a very limited role to play in regulating relations between states, and they criticized the League for the way it had led to a “juridification” of international life. What masqueraded as a liberal philosophy of human rights was really—on this view—nothing other than a fig-leaf for the “1919 Versailles-Diktat,” and an expression of “the Jewish spirit” with its opposition to the life of the
Volk
and hatred of national specificity. Since there existed no
“common rule of law,” there was little value in international institutions such as the League or the Permanent Court of International Justice.
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That the Nazi challenge to the League went far beyond mere territorial revisionism was clear enough at the time to those who wished to see. For C. A. Macartney, for instance, a leading British expert on central Europe, “Hitlerism was flatly incompatible with the League system and its philosophy.” One would have “to succumb to the other.” In a melancholy but fascinating article written in 1938, an émigré lawyer asked whether the collapse of belief in a universal international law did not reflect the “disintegration of European civilization.” There was no longer a cohesive value-system or an international society in the old sense; social and political divisions in Europe made it a “fiction” to talk about the “universal validity of all rules.”
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FASCIST EMPIRES

In an era when biological metaphors were widely applied to international relations, when fears of population decline were widespread, and nations themselves (in France, Hungary and Greece just as much as Germany) were seen as bodies—facing extinction, asphyxiation or decline if they could not “sustain life” within their borders—the need for “living space” was a common concern across the political spectrum. It was, for instance, not Hitler but Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, who in 1928 opened a colonial exhibition entitled
Space without People and People without Space
. Anxious contemporaries saw no inconsistency in arguing simultaneously that their country had too small a population,
and
not enough land.
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For both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, empire was crucial to their claims to be great powers as well as to their very survival as dynamic nations. Empire was land, and land meant room for settlement, foodstuffs, raw materials and healthy colonists. Never mind the evidence that it was easier to win land than to direct people to it or that in the nineteenth century far more Europeans had preferred to settle in the Americas than in Africa: these were lessons fascist regimes would have to learn the hard way. Fascist empire-building marked the culmination of the process of European imperial expansion
that began in the 1870s. Mussolini and Hitler accepted the basic geopolitical tenets of nineteenth-century imperialism, while jettisoning its liberalism.

Fascist empire came first to Ethiopia, following the Italian invasion late in 1935. The fighting itself was conducted with unprecedented brutality by the Italians, who were desperate for a quick victory: gas and chemical warfare, as well as saturation bombing, killed enormous numbers, as did the detention and concentration camps that the Italians brought with them from the pacification campaigns of a few years earlier against the nomadic Senussi. Around 3,000 Italians died compared with tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians. Neither later nor at the time did this kind of bloodshed occasion much criticism; inside Italy, victory marked the high point of Mussolini’s reign, a “golden age” of “Fascist empire.”
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The peace that followed was equally enlightening. Following an assassination attempt on Viceroy Graziani, notorious for his brutality, Fascist squads went on the rampage in Addis Ababa, killing over a thousand people in cold blood. Others were executed in mass reprisals, including several hundred monks. All this offered a foretaste of what Europe—and Italy—would itself experience a few years later at the hands of the Germans. Meanwhile, Ciano addressed the General Assembly of the League of Nations, and referred to the “sacred mission of civilization” which Italy was heeding, declaring that his country would “consider it an honour to inform the League of the progress achieved in its work of civilizing Ethiopia.”
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Empire-building was closely connected with racial laws and decrees which were new to Italian Fascism. Considerations of racial “prestige” led the authorities to try to regulate sexual and other contacts between Italians and Ethiopians, in ways that they had not considered in Libya or on Rhodes. Just as the apartheid of the Nuremberg laws had been prefigured in pre-1914 German colonial policy, so Italian racism in Africa paved the way for the 1938 racial laws inside Italy itself. The infamous Manifesto of Racial Scientists, and the accompanying anti-Semitic laws, were thus not mere mimicry of National Socialism but an expression of Fascism’s attempts to create a fitting image for itself as an imperial power.
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Fascism’s admirers abroad took heart. Sixty-four French academics
published a manifesto attacking “that false juridical universalism that equates superior and inferior, civilized and barbaric.” “Why continue to lie?” wrote a French journalist. “There
are
different levels among men; there is a human hierarchy. To deny it is absurd, and to disregard it a shameful confusion. Forget about Ethiopia, even two or three Ethiopias, if one is not enough … This is the absolute right of human civilization when the hour comes to impose itself upon barbarism.” Just a few years later, Marshal Pétain would publicly describe Vichy France as “a social hierarchy … rejecting the false idea of the natural equality of men.”
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