Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (34 page)

But the protection of human rights required the existence of a body superior to the state to which the individual could have recourse. The Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen insisted that “a right consists only in the legal possibility to invoke a court … [International law] can confer rights on individuals only under the condition that individuals have direct access to an international court.” His colleague Lauterpacht warned that the international protection of human rights “touching as it does intimately upon the relations of the State and the individual … implies a more drastic interference with the sovereignty of the State
than the renunciation of war.” But in his aptly named
Peace through Law
, Kelsen argued that only people who believed in a “theology of the State” refused to recognize the need for all states to be bound by international law. Sovereignty was simply a red herring. “We can derive from the concept of sovereignty,” he went on, “nothing else than what we have purposely put into its definition.”
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The limits of sovereignty, then, reflected political rather than jurisprudential or philosophical considerations. But who was going to make states acknowledge the supremacy of international law? Liberal thought in the inter-war period had reposed its confidence in the pressure of world public opinion to safeguard human rights. It was obvious that a more effective instrument of enforcement would be required in the post-war period. What complicated matters was the Allies’ commitment, as enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, to respect traditional ideas of state sovereignty. The post-war state, in other words, was being asked in some measure to acquiesce in its own weakening. Experienced lawyers like Kelsen and Lauterpacht saw no realistic alternative to persuading individual states to make their international obligations a part of domestic law. The alternative was to push for some form of World State, but this they regarded as utopian.

An equally serious dispute centred on the question of whether the human rights to be enshrined in the new post-war order should be individual or collective. The League of Nations had chosen the latter in its system of protection for ethnic minorities in eastern Europe. Yet despite the obvious importance of safeguarding minorities, strong arguments were advanced in favour of demolishing rather than improving the collective-rights approach. President Benes and the Czech government in exile denounced the League system on the grounds that experience had shown it had actually jeopardized their national security. “Every protected minority will ultimately find its Henlein,” warned one observer. In addition, the states of eastern Europe resented the fact that they had been singled out for special obligations towards their minorities whereas the Great Powers, including Italy and Germany, had not had to suffer such an indignity.

“In the end,” wrote Beneš in 1942, “things came to such an extraordinary pass that the totalitarian and dictator states—Germany,
Hungary and Italy—persecuted the minorities in their own territories and at the same time posed as the protectors of minorities in states which were really democratic.” Rather than attempting to restore the League system, Beneš suggested that the post-war approach to minorities should be based upon “the defense of human democratic rights and not of national rights.”

On top of this east European opposition, the major Allied powers—Britain, France and the United States—also showed little enthusiasm for reviving a system which had succeeded in internationalizing the most serious source of tension in Europe without finding adequate means of resolution. As the post-war settlement in Europe would show, the main interest of the major powers was in limiting their obligations to minor states, and this meant that they too were happy to bury the League’s approach to collective rights. The result was that the United Nations’ eventual commitment to individual human rights was as much an expression of passivity as of resolve by the Allies. It was a means of avoiding problems, not of solving them. This fact helps us understand why so few of the wartime hopes for a reinvigoration of international law were to be realized.

The wartime desire to limit national sovereignty by inducing states to surrender some of their powers to a higher authority was not confined to matters of law. One of its most striking manifestations was to be found in the vogue for federalism, which approached fever pitch around 1940. In a war which many attributed to the cancerous development of national rivalries, the idea of creating international harmony through federation seemed increasingly attractive. A Dutch resistance leader saw “this war as the great crisis of the ‘sovereignty of the state.’ ” For one English lawyer “the alternatives are war once in every generation, or federation.”
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In both Britain and France such ideas had been much in the air in the late 1930s. The Federal Union movement was founded in 1938 in London and soon proved extraordinarily popular. Its call for a union of democracies was based on the view that “no international order based on co-operation between sovereign States will prove either effective or durable since all sovereign States in the last resort seek
their own national self-interest.” In his
Federal Europe
, R. W. G. MacKay described “a system of government for a New European Order, the establishment of which would enable the peoples of Europe to hope with some confidence that in future they might live and work in peace free from the fear of war, want and insecurity.” The spectacular proclamation in the darkest days of June 1940 of an “indissoluble union” between Britain and France was the culmination of this vein of thought.
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Even though that union was never realized, the federalist idea only slowly lost its allure and remained a striking feature of official and unofficial planning for the future of Europe. A plethora of map-makers speculated upon how the continent might be carved up, and though their fantasies varied the federationist principle was common to virtually all of them. Thus an American geographer, in a 1942 article for
Collier’s
called “Maps for a New World” (heralded by the blurb: “Here’s a brave new world redesigned for lasting peace—a world from which war-breeding frictions are gone, where all nations live secure and unafraid, thanks to the new science of political geography”) offered a Europe carved up into a “British-Dutch Commonwealth” alongside the “United States of Fennoscandia,” “Czechopolska,” a German-Magyar state and a “Balkan Union.” More serious, though scarcely more accurate, was the frontispiece of Bernard Newman’s 1943 book,
The New Europe
. This showed a map which divided Europe into West European, Scandinavian, Baltic, German, Central European, Balkan and Iberian federations. Only Italy escaped intact.
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British and American officials engaged in post-war planning also tended—as they had in 1914–18—to see federation as an attractive solution to Europe’s border problems. Austria, for example, posed British Foreign Office clerks with no less of a dilemma than the Habsburg Empire had done earlier. Few in Whitehall appear to have believed that Austria could survive as an independent state, but even fewer were happy to allow the
Anschluss
to stand: a surrogate empire in the form of Danubian “integration” was the answer. Reviving the inter-war Balkan Union, and press-ganging Bulgaria into joining it, was an analogous pipe-dream.
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Churchill was drawn to the idea of a United States of Europe, envisaging an arrangement by which Britain could exert leadership on
a continental scale. From May 1940, US planners for the post-war world came to believe that a new international organization, far from being incompatible with regional or continental unions, would in fact be more firmly based if they were created first. Indeed Newman’s 1943 map was very similar to that envisaged by the US State Department in 1940.
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At the same time, though, we should keep these schemes in perspective. Federalism diminished in popularity inside and outside government as the war went on. One reason was the strong hostility of the Soviet Union to arrangements which seemed intended to create anti-Soviet blocs in eastern Europe. Another was the objection of many small countries which—despite the examples of the wartime Czech-Polish and the Greek-Yugoslav alliances—worried about disappearing into a Europe more than ever dominated by the major powers.

Inside continental resistance movements, the idea of Europe stood for an ethical heritage rather than a specific set of politico-economic arrangements. Asserting the existence of common European values was a way of denying the durability of Hitler’s New Order. By talking of the struggle as a
European
civil war, the Italian Partito d’Azione set its struggle for a “democratic revolution” firmly in a continental framework. High school pupils in Paris in 1943 demanded “a new European order” to take the place of the Nazi order, and insisted that what they had in mind was not a Europe dominated by one hegemonic state, nor an economic and financial network like the Pan-American union, but “a cultural and moral community which must be transformed by the war into a political and social one.”
Le Franc-Tireur
announced that “as one regime collapses, another is being born. It arises from the fire of the struggle of liberation and from the icy cold of prisons, with the mass resistance that has sprung up from the French maquis to the Polish plains, from the factories of Milan to the German forced labour camps, from Norwegian universities to the mountains of Bosnia.”
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There were some more specific commitments to the ideal of federation. But in general the strength of the commitment was in inverse proportion to the size of the group concerned. The anti-Fascist “Ven-totene Manifesto” of August 1941, for example, reflecting the ideas of
British federalists, had only limited circulation during the war. Resistance support for federation was rarely at the head of their programme. Hence, the efforts made by some historians to trace the origins of the Common Market back to declarations of the wartime resistance are in the last resort unconvincing, and one could with equal if not greater justice argue that its origins lay with the Nazis: by 1943 many Axis sympathizers were keener “Europeans” than their opponents. In general,
résistants
remained motivated—as did most Europeans—by considerations of domestic social and economic policy and patriotism, their horizons bounded by the confines of the nation-state.

For at the same time as giving an impetus to federalism, the war had actually increased nationalist sentiment in Europe. Patriotism, after all, was far more important than “Europeanism” as a motive for resistance. Intelligence reports coming out of Holland in late 1941 noted that “the population is … ardently nationalistic. There is even reason to fear an intensification of Dutch nationalism. A blood-bath is imminent.” British pride at the country’s stand against the Third Reich may help explain why support for federal union faded away as the war ended. France saw a resurgence of the “idea” of the nation. When Polish resistance groups agreed that “the Polish Republic will be a member of the federation of free European nations,” this was less an expression of federalist faith than a desire to ensure the security of an independent Poland after the war. In traditionally nationalistic countries like Greece, internationalist sentiment never took hold. There, as in Poland, Albania and Yugoslavia, a virtual civil war within the resistance led both Left and Right to insist on its nationalist credentials. In general, conservative and right-wing resisters to the Germans were more hostile to the idea of surrendering national sovereignty than were socialists or Christian Democrats; but even the latter tended to attach greater importance to the cause of reform at home. Federalism remained, in other words, a relatively weak element of the wartime consensus.
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THE NEW CONSENSUS: LIMITS AND CONTRADICTIONS

In 1944 the émigré Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek published a small book entitled
The Road to Serfdom
. “If we take the people whose views influence developments, they are now in the democracies all socialists,” bemoaned Hayek. “Scarcely anybody doubts that we must move towards socialism.” This prospect he found deeply alarming. Why, he asked, had the West gone to war against Nazism if it was prepared to stamp out freedom at home?
The Road to Serfdom
argued incisively that freedom and what Hayek preferred to call “collectivism” were incompatible. According to Hayek, the idea of “democratic socialism” was simply a confusion of terms; any attempt to achieve such a synthesis would tilt society inexorably towards totalitarianism. Those, like H. G. Wells, who argued that economic planning and the protection of human rights could coexist were deluding themselves; planning required dictators and reduced parliament to impotence. Denouncing “the totalitarians in our midst,” Hayek called for people to turn away from the mirage of “the great Utopia” and to return to what he termed “the abandoned road” of economic liberalism.
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Some four decades would pass before Hayek’s ferocious polemic succeeded in gaining an influential audience, and then it would become the new bible of the Thatcherite laissez-faire revivalists in their assault on the post-war social order. But in 1944 Hayek was a voice in the wilderness. His insistence that Western planning was equivalent to Soviet collectivism fell on deaf ears, as did his assault upon the notion of democratic socialism. The Austrian neo-liberal tradition found a readier audience in the United States.

Far more in keeping with contemporary European opinion was the expatriate Hungarian-Jewish sociologist Karl Mannheim, who argued (in
Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction
, 1940) the contrary view to Hayek’s. For Mannheim, the age of laissez-faire was over. He argued that in a modern industrial society “there is no longer any choice between planning and laissez-faire, but only between good planning and bad.” In a discussion which anticipated Isaiah Berlin’s
Two Concepts of Freedom
, Mannheim insisted that there are different
conceptions of freedom, and that the libertarian’s insistence upon “freedom from external domination” leads him to neglect the other forms of “freedom as opportunity” which certain types of planning create in society. For Mannheim, democracy needed to come to terms with planning if it was to survive; the enemy to beware was not the planner but the bureaucrat. As he puts it: “The problem of the democratic constitution of a planned society mainly consists in avoiding bureaucratic absolutism.”
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