Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (6 page)

Nor was it only the confirmed anti-democrats who thought democracy effete and worn out. Robert Musil, author of
The Man without Qualities
, affirmed: “I do not fight against fascism, but in democracy for her future, thus also against democracy.” H. G. Wells urged Oxford summer-school students to transform themselves into “Liberal Fascisti” and “enlightened Nazis” who would compete in their enthusiasm and self-sacrifice with the ardent supporters of dictatorship. Unless democracy was able to mobilize such advocates, he saw little future for it. Liberalism seemed too individualistic to cope with the demands of a more collectivist age.
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In 1930 Weimar’s Chancellor Hermann Müller warned that “a democracy without democrats is an internal and external danger”; but the founders of post-war constitutionalism had not given this matter much thought. Kelsen, for instance, had proudly promoted his vision of a “legal theory purified of all political ideologies”; yet such a theory, by virtue of its detachment from politics, lacked supporters. Kelsen criticized Austria’s Christian Socials and Social Democrats for following different legal traditions, contaminated by political Catholicism or Marxism, but they at least had large party memberships and he did not. His position might have been intellectually unassailable; politically he was still living with the comfortable illusions of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. Democracy in Europe had been shored up briefly after 1918 by an unstable coalition of international and domestic forces which was now breaking down across much of the continent. There were, simply, fewer and fewer committed democrats.

In the first place, democracy’s international backers were less supportive as time passed. Woodrow Wilson’s legacy of messianic liberalism was undermined by American isolationism, while the European victors—Britain and France—were concerned more about communism than dictatorship; so long as the new states of central-eastern Europe held communism at bay, they cared little about their domestic political arrangements. They made sure that the deposed monarchs
and emperors of the Central Powers could not return to power, but were less concerned with other kinds of threat. They failed to realize that if democracy was identified with the peace imposed at Versailles, then the abolition of democracy implied an attack on the peace settlement as well. Back from Catalonia, Orwell chafed at the “deep, deep sleep of England,” which by the late 1930s was losing the battle of ideologies by default.

Unambiguous support for democracy was thin on the ground throughout Europe. Guglielmo Ferrero remarked in 1925 that democracy’s failure in Italy was chiefly due to the lack of a strong democratic party. But not only in Italy. The core group of old-time liberals were marginal figures in the inter-war years, their battles largely won with the defeat of monarchs and aristocracies. “The
positive
argument for being a Liberal,” according to John Maynard Keynes in 1925, was “very weak.” The decline of Britain’s Liberals had little impact upon the stability of the political system, but this was not true, for instance, of Weimar’s Democratic Party and other classic liberal parties. Mass suffrage threatened them with a marginal political role in the face of the great parties of the Left, of conservatism and nationalism, and of Catholicism. Fear of communism, in particular, drew many liberals towards authoritarian solutions. They were joined there by other kinds of elitists—the social engineers, business managers and technocrats, who wanted scientific, apolitical solutions to society’s ills and were impatient with the instability and incompetence of parliamentary rule.
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The European Left was seriously weakened by the split between Social Democrats and Communists, and was never again as strong as in 1918–19. The Communists opposed what they regarded as “bourgeois formalism”—parliamentary democracy—but could not destroy it, though they tried hard enough, at least before 1934. With the possible exception of 1930s France, they remained on the margins of politics and emerged—in the words of one recent historian—“on the losing side of all electoral battles of the inter-war years.” “By any reasoned judgement,” concludes Donald Sassoon, “the record of pre-war communism in Europe must be described as one of failure.” The Social Democrats did not want to destroy democracy, so long as it could be transformed into socialism. “Republic, that’s not much/Socialism
is the goal” was the ditty which summed up SPD attitudes to Weimar. This was a very provisional kind of backing, based on Marxist premises and reservations, especially once it became clear that many of the social rights set out in the second part of the Weimar constitution would remain a dead letter. At least one percipient critic foresaw the consequences; Hermann Heller warned at the height of the depression that either Weimar would realize its promise to become a
soziale Rechtsstaat
—a state with social and economic justice as foreseen in the constitution—or else it would slide into dictatorship. Only where Social Democrats forged a secure alliance with rural populations—as most notably in Scandinavia—or with conservatives—as in Belgium and Britain—did democracy survive. Elsewhere, constitutional commitments to socio-economic rights and welfare benefits were undermined by the depression and mass unemployment. The healing of the breach on the Left through a Popular Front strategy came too late for Germany and Austria, failed to save the Republic in Spain and ultimately collapsed in its heartland, France, as well.
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Many conservatives, for their part, were no happier with inter-war democracy and were keen to see a return to more elitist, aristocratic and occasionally even monarchical modes of government. For them the problem with democracy lay in the power it gave the masses, in the supposed incompatibility of democracy and authority. They were prone to attack democracy on ethical grounds too. It placed too much stress on rights and not enough on duties. It had bred egotism and sectional self-interest and had thus contributed to its own downfall by failing to encourage a civic consciousness or a sense of community, or so many Catholic, Orthodox and nationalist critics of democracy in the 1920s argued. The Spaniard de Madariaga called for liberal democracy to be replaced with “unanimous organic democracy”; the French social Catholic Emmanuel Mounier greeted the fall of the Third Republic in 1940 by calling for “a struggle against individualism, a sense of responsibility, restoration of leadership, sense of community … [and] a sense of the whole man, flesh and spirit”; his readers were reminded that for years he had been calling for a rejection of the pernicious individualism of “liberal and popular democracy.”
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Such criticisms marked the failure of democracy to live up to its own boast to have embodied and given voice to the nation as a whole. Once it had sounded so confident: “We, the Czechoslovak Nation, in order to form a more perfect union of the nation …” began the preamble to the 1920 Czech constitution, yet it was an open question whether the country’s Slovaks, Jews, Hungarians and Germans regarded themselves as included in such a phrase. Hugo Preuss had drawn up his draft of the Weimar constitution noting that “there is neither a Prussian or Bavarian nation … there is only one German nation which is to shape its political organization in the German republic.” And yet facts proved the contrary: Austria was prohibited from joining the new Germany and Bavaria was prevented from seceding; the constitution itself was drafted in an atmosphere of civil war. The confident bourgeois claim that liberal constitutions would both acknowledge and nurture the Nation was belied almost everywhere by ethnic and class cleavages. As a result, those whose highest priority was national unity were increasingly tempted by more integral and authoritarian forms of government; liberal democracy had failed the Nation, and might have to be sacrificed if the Nation was to survive. “When a constitution proves itself to be useless,” Hitler wrote to Chancellor Brüning in 1931, “the nation does not die—the constitution is altered.”
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It is thus not surprising that by the 1930s many asked why it should ever have been expected that democracy would flower in Europe. This sort of attitude fitted neatly with the British pursuit of appeasement. “It may be that the system of parliamentary Government which suits Great Britain suits few other countries besides,” sniffed
The Times
, defending non-intervention in Spain: “Recent Spanish Governments have tried to conform to the parliamentary type of republican democracy, but with scant success.” From this perspective, the crisis of democracy in Europe simply proved Britain’s superiority.
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But it was not only Little England that took such a view. Karl Loewenstein was just one of many who pointed out how few European countries had any indigenous tradition of democracy. In few states, he argued, had the inhabitants a long tradition of fighting for popular liberties. Did the history of eastern Europe not suggest that democracy had been a last-minute gift—if not an imposition—of the
victors at Versailles rather than the result of a popular mobilization? Was it then surprising that people should acquiesce so calmly in the loss of something they had scarcely fought for? Democracy’s shallow roots in Europe’s political tradition helped explain why anti-liberal regimes were established with such ease and so little protest.
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FORMS OF THE RIGHT

Benedetto Croce once described Fascism as a parenthesis in Italian history, implying that liberal democracy was the country’s natural condition. Many critics of Fascism liked to see Europe’s move to the Right as a burst of collective insanity, a form of mass madness over which reason must eventually prevail. Even today it seems easier for many people to envisage inter-war Europe as a continent led astray by insane dictators than as one which opted to abandon democracy. We lap up books which portray Mussolini as a buffoon, Hitler as a demented and disorganized fanatic, Stalin as a paranoid psychopath. But what, for instance, can Mussolini’s life really tell us about Fascism’s appeal? It was, Michael Oakeshott noted in 1940, a characteristically liberal failing to see the enemy of liberty as “the single tyrant, the despot”—first monarchs, then dictators—and to lose sight in the process of where the real challenge to democracy came from.
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Oakeshott insists upon the need to take the political doctrines—and practices—of the Right and Left seriously, for “each of them belongs to some current of tradition … in our civilization.” Liberalism had lost “touch with the contemporary world,” unlike fascism, communism, political Catholicism and National Socialism, and could learn from them. “Democracy should learn, on the basis of the extreme example of Fascism, how to reconcile individual liberty with the regulation and control of social affairs necessitated by the general welfare,” observed a student of Mussolini’s Italy. “With knowledge of the Fascist experiment it may come to realise the futility of applying nineteenth-century standards in the contemporary world.” “Benevolent despotism,” concluded a young American diplomat called George Kennan, “had greater possibilities for good” than democracy, and he went on to propose that the USA too travel “along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.”
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Given the explicit irrationalism of the Right and its preference for action and intuition over reason and logic, it might seem strange to take theories of the authoritarian state seriously. Right-wing intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger were invariably disappointed in right-wing realities; men such as Mussolini and Hitler took up and dropped their ideas without hesitation. Conversely, the irrationalism of the Right can easily be exaggerated. The Right too had its political theory (or theories) and its own jurisprudence, accepted by millions of people, and continuing earlier traditions no less potent and no less forward-looking than liberalism. “In the great laboratory of the world today,” declared the Portuguese dictator Salazar in 1934,

when the political systems of the nineteenth century are generally breaking down and the need for adapting institutions to the requirements of new social and economic conditions is being felt more and more urgently, we may be proud … because, with our ideas and our achievements, we have made a serious contribution to the understanding of the problems and difficulties which beset all States … I am convinced that within twenty years, if there is not some retrograde movement in political evolution, there will be no legislative assemblies left in Europe.
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The fact is that in most of Europe by the mid-1930s—outside the northern fringe—liberalism looked tired, the organized Left had been smashed and the sole struggles over ideology and governance were taking place
within
the Right—among authoritarians, traditional conservatives, technocrats and radical right-wing extremists. Only France continued its civil war between Left and Right through the 1930s, until that was ended by Vichy. But civil war had already erupted briefly in Austria (in 1934) and more protractedly in Spain before ending in right-wing triumph. In Italy, central Europe and the Balkans, the Right held sway. Regimes varied from the royal dictatorship of King Carol in Romania, through the military men ruling Spain, Greece and Hungary to the one-party states in Germany and Italy. Not all of these were fascists; indeed, some saw in fascists their most threatening enemies.

The crucial difference was between the regimes of the old Right,
who wanted to turn the clock back to a pre-democratic elitist era, and the new Right, who seized and sustained power through the instruments of mass politics. The former included General Franco and the Greek dictator Metaxas, men who feared mass politics and allied themselves with bastions of the established order such as the monarchy and the Church. In the Balkans, the Right harked back to the nineteenth century, when a strong, autocratic monarch picked his ministers, supervised political parties and ran closely controlled elections.