Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (2 page)

What all ideologies have in common is that they like to present their own utopia as an End to History—whether in the form of universal communism, global democracy or a Thousand Year Reich. They share what Ignazio Silone once described as “the widespread virtue that identifies History with the winning side.” They read the present back into the past, and assume—for instance—that democracy must be rooted deeply in Europe’s soil simply because the Cold War turned out the way it did. Today a different kind of history is needed—less useful as a political instrument but bringing us closer to past realities—which sees the present as just one possible outcome of our predecessors’ struggles and uncertainties. After all, democracy reigned supreme in Europe as the First World War ended, but was virtually moribund two decades later. And if 1989 marked democracy’s victory
over communism, it was a victory which could not have come about without communism’s earlier comprehensive and shattering defeat of National Socialism in the war. It was thus not preordained that democracy should win out over fascism and communism, just as it remains still to be seen what kind of democracy Europe is able and willing to build. In short, what I describe here is a story of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, not inevitable victories and forward marches.
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Ideologies matter, not so much as guides to history, but as vehicles for belief and political action. If the dogmas of the past no longer hold us in their grip, this does not mean they were merely grand deceptions from the start. The end of communism has been described as “the passing of an illusion,” but a funeral oration is not a historical analysis. After 1945, fascism was similarly explained away as a political pathology by which insane dictators led bewitched, hypnotized populations to their doom. Yet the wounds of the continent cannot be dismissed as the work of a few madmen, and its traumas will not be found to lie in the mental condition of Hitler or Stalin. Like it or not, both fascism and communism involved real efforts to tackle the problems of mass politics, of industrialization and social order; liberal democracy did not always have all the answers. “We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage,” writes Hannah Arendt, “to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion.”
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National Socialism, in particular, fits into the mainstream not only of German but also of European history far more comfortably than most people like to admit. If Soviet communism involved a truly radical break with the past—an attempt, in Europe’s most underdeveloped and war-torn country, to create a new property-less society, to hold together a disintegrating empire and simultaneously to telescope an industrial revolution into a few years—Nazism, by contrast, was less ambitious and far more secure at home, and ultimately far more aggressive abroad. Its revolutionary rhetoric masked greater continuities of ideas and institutions with the past. Its construction of a racial-nationalist welfare system simply pushed to extremes tendencies visible in European thought more generally and it held power against negligible opposition in Europe’s most technologically advanced
economy. Yet this solidly established regime was committed in a way the Soviet Union never was to overthrowing the Versailles settlement by force. This is why it was the Third Reich which posed the most serious challenge to liberal democracy this century, and why an analysis of the changing content of European democratic thought and practice means acknowledging the very real possibility that emerged in the late 1930s of a continent organized along Nazi lines.

It would of course be possible to take a very different view of the century, focusing less upon fascism than upon communism. Marxist historiography, exemplified recently in Eric Hobsbawm’s panoramic
Age of Extremes
, downplays fascism’s significance in its concentration upon what it regards as the fundamental struggle between communism and capitalism. If I have chosen not to do that here, it is partly because communism’s impact upon
democracy
—important though it was—was in general more indirect and less threatening than the challenge posed by Hitler. But it is also, and more basically, because if this century has shown one thing, it is that politics cannot be reduced to economics: differences in values and ideologies must be taken seriously and not simply regarded as foils for class interest. Fascism, in other words, was more than just another form of capitalism.

Precisely because the Nazi utopia of a dynamic, racially purified German empire required a war for its fulfilment, and because that utopia was also a nightmarish revelation of the destructive potential in European civilization—turning imperialism on its head and treating Europeans as Africans—the experience of fascism’s New Order (and its short-lived allure) was forgotten as quickly as possible after 1945. The city council of Bologna melted down its bronze statue of Mussolini on horseback and recast it as a noble pair of partisans; France canonized the memory of a united opposition to Vichy, while Austria shamelessly milked its status as Hitler’s first victim and erected memorials to its anti-Nazi “fighters for Austrian freedom.” These were the foundation myths of a Europe liberated from history; they expunged awkward memories and asserted the inevitability of freedom’s triumph.

Keeping intact a sense of European civilizational superiority also involved an endless redrawing of mental boundaries. The so-called “European Community” implicitly ignored half the continent: post-war
Europe became equated with the West. Dismayed East Europeans talked themselves into “central Europe” to distance themselves from the barbarians. The habit persists today: a leading British historian recently described the war in Bosnia as “a primitive, tribal conflict only anthropologists can understand,” preferring to see Yugoslavia as part of the barbaric Third World than to accept that contemporary Europe itself might be tainted. Not even the murderous record of the twentieth century has yet, it seems, diminished Europeans’ capacity for self-delusion.
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My own geographical conception of Europe and its limits is basically a pragmatic one. This is a book about events and struggles within Europe rather than about Europe’s place in the world. But of course it is not possible to consider Hitler’s continental ambitions without seeing them in the context of European imperialism overseas, nor to describe the Cold War without reference to the United States. The Soviet Union—as the great Eurasian power—stands both inside and outside European history at different times. Hence this is a Europe whose boundaries—as in reality—are porous and adaptable. Eastern Europe is no less a part of the story than the West, the Balkans no less than Scandinavia.

As ever, issues of geography disguise arguments about politics, religion and culture, and those who are keen to establish Europe’s unity will find my agnosticism deeply unsatisfying. Yet this merely corresponds to the uncertainty which now surrounds the concept of Europe itself. Fascism, after all, was the most Eurocentric of the three major ideologies, far more so than either communism or liberal democracy: a creed which was both anti-American and anti-Bolshevik at least had the virtue of clarity. What Europe means for us today after the end of the Cold War is far vaguer—is it part of the “West” (itself a notion with an antiquated edge), a western outcrop of “Eurasia,” both or neither? The “Europe” of the European Union may be a promise or a delusion, but it is not a reality. Taking the divisions and uncertainties of this continent seriously—as I have tried to do here—implies abandoning metaphysics, renouncing the search for some mysterious and essential “Europe,” and exploring instead the constant contest to define what it should mean.

Ultimately it is the question of values which lies at the heart of this
history—the values which drove people to act, which shaped and transformed institutions, guided state policy and underpinned communities, families and individuals. “Every social order is one of the possible solutions to a problem that is not scientific but human, the problem of community life,” wrote the French scholar Raymond Aron in 1954. “Are Europeans still capable of practising the subtle art required by liberal communities? Have they retained their own system of values?” The “problem of community life” which Aron raises is perhaps the central theme of this book. Against Aron, however, one must ask: what was Europe’s “own system of values”? Liberalism was but one of them, and there were others. Europe’s twentieth century is the story of their conflict.
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My primary debt is to the many other scholars upon whose work I have drawn. I owe thanks too to the institutions and individuals who have supported me through hard times for British universities. This book grew out of the uniquely invigorating environment of the University of Sussex, and I would like to thank my students and colleagues in the School of European Studies, and the History and International Relations subject groups, for their help—especially the late Christopher Thorne, Alasdair Smith, Nigel Llewellyn, Rod Kedward, John Röhl and Pat Thane.

Thanks too to Bob Connor, Kent Mullikin and the staff of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina for giving me the opportunity to start this project, and the Annenberg Foundation for making my year there possible. I am very grateful to Dimitri Gondicas and the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University for their continued support, to the staff of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, for allowing me to finish the book in such peaceful surroundings, and to Barbara Politi and Walter Lummerding for their truly extraordinary hospitality. Part of this material appeared initially in
Daedalus
and
Diplomacy and Statecraft
, and I thank the editors of these journals for permission to use it here.

Deb Burnstone gave me much confidence in this project from the outset. She, Nikos Alivizatos, Bruce Graham, Dave Mazower, Michael Pinnock, Gyan Prakash, Pat Thane, John Thompson and
Johanna Weber offered me encouragement and support, and suggested many improvements. My father’s recollections of the 1940s helped me greatly. Peter Mandler gave me all kinds of precious companionship, not least intellectual. Steve Kotkin worked out what I was trying to say before I did, and pushed me to say it. My heartfelt thanks to them all. I dedicate this book to Ruth Shaffer, most remarkable of grandmothers, and to the beloved memory of Grandpa, Frouma and Max. The story of Europe’s twentieth century is their story too.

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See Notes (
this page
).

ONE

The Deserted Temple:
Democracy’s Rise and Fall

 … a time when one hears talk on all sides of a crisis—and sometimes even a catastrophe—of democracy
.

—HANS KELSEN, 1932
¹

Freedom? Many people smile at the word. Democracy? Parliaments? There are few who do not speak ill of Parliaments
 …

—FRANCESCO NITTI, 1927
²

At a “Congress of Dethroned Monarchs” held at Geneva in 192–Europe’s erstwhile crowned heads tried to win back their old supporters. But their stirring proclamation (“Only monarchy is able to defend European culture from an onslaught of Bolshevik barbarism, from soulless American mechanization, from the anger of awakening Asiatic nationalisms … Europe can choose: annihilation or monarchy …”) fell on deaf ears. Bowing to the spirit of the times, they finally set up their own Republic of Kings on a small island in the Indian Ocean. There, to their surprise, they were soon forgotten by their former subjects. The “twilight of the history of monarchy” had begun.
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That was fiction, as narrated by the Polish writer Alexander Wat in his 1927 story “Kings in Exile.” But the real constitutional changes wrought by the First World War were no less dramatic. In that moment of “bourgeois triumph,” the
ancien régime
was finally toppled—sultans, pashas, emperors and dukes reduced to impotence. Before the First World War there had been just three republics in Europe; by the end of 1918 there were thirteen. “In the eyes of a Wilson,
a Lloyd George, a Clemenceau, a Masaryk, a Beneš, a Venizelos,” wrote a French commentator, “the flight of the Kaiser Wilhelm and the departure of the Emperor Charles completed the flight of Louis XVI … 1918 was a sort of European 1792.”
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Following the wholly unforeseen collapse of the great autocratic empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Hohenzollern Germany and Ottoman Turkey, the Paris peace settlement saw parliamentary democracy enthroned across Europe. A belt of democracies—stretching from the Baltic Sea down through Germany and Poland to the Balkans—was equipped with new constitutions drawn up according to the most up-to-date liberal principles. British scholar James Bryce, in his 1921 classic
Modern Democracies
, talked about the “universal acceptance of democracy as the normal and natural form of government.”
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