Europe: A History (194 page)

Reparations initially fixed at 269 million German Goldmarks payable over 42 years, i.e. to 1962, were successively reduced. In 1921 the British made a move by promoting an Anglo-Soviet Trade Treaty, thereby breaking the boycott of the Bolsheviks. Having pressed for a reduction of German reparations to 132 billion Goldmarks, they acquiesced in the French threat to occupy the Ruhr if the reduced payments were not met. In 1922 they proposed the cancellation of
all
war debts, alternatively the limitation of British repayments to the USA to £33 million per annum over 63 years, i.e. to 1985. In 1923, having fuelled Germany’s hyperinflation by their demands, the French occupied the Ruhr to no good effect. In 1924, under the Dawes Plan, moderation at last prevailed. Germany was to pay reparations at a moderate rate until 1929, then at 2,500 million Reichsmarks per annum. An Allied loan of 800 million RM was to facilitate the next instalment. But even this proved impossible. In 1929, under the Young Plan, Germany was told to pay 34,500 million GM annually over 58 years, i.e. to 1988, on a mortgage secured against the German state railways. In 1932, at the Lausanne Conference, Germany was invited to make one final payment of 3,000 million RM—which was not achieved. By that time the whole business had become irrelevant. Germany had been receiving more by way of US loans than she was paying in reparations. In any case, as from 24 October 1929, the day of the Great Crash on the New York Stock Exchange, the world economy was moving into depression; and all US loans to Europe were suspended.

Inter-war politics
were dominated by the recurrent spectacle of liberal democracies falling prey to dictatorship. The Western Powers had hoped that their victory would usher in an era modelled in their own image. After all, at the start of the Great War the European Continent contained 19 monarchies and 3 republics; at the end, it consisted of 14 monarchies and 16 republics. Yet the ‘Democratic Revolution’ soon proved illusory. Hardly a year passed when one country or another did not see its democratic constitution violated by one or other brand of dictator. It cannot be attributed to any simple cause, save the inability of the Western Powers to defend the regimes which they had inspired. The dictators came in all shapes and sizes—communists, fascists, radicals, and reactionaries, left-wing authoritarians (like Piłsudski), right-wing militarists (like Franco), monarchs, anti-monarchists, even a cleric like Father Tišo in Slovakia. The only thing they shared was the conviction that Western democracy was not for them (see Appendix III, p. 1320). [
EESTI
]

Of the two new states to come into existence between the wars, one, Ireland, was a national republic, the other, the Vatican state, an apostolic dictatorship. The Irish Free State was established in 1922, initially as a sovereign dominion of the British Empire. Millions of Irishmen had loyally served in the British army during the Great War. But opinion in 1918 was still split by the prospect of Home Rule. Ulster prepared once again to defend the Union by force, and in 1920 was turned into an autonomous province of the UK. The predominantly Catholic southerners prepared for independence. They succeeded, but only after two
vicious wars—one against a British paramilitary police force, the ‘Black and Tans’, the other a civil war amongst themselves. The dominant personality, and many times Premier, Éamon de Valera (1882–1975), was a half-Cuban Catholic born of an Irish mother in New York. The Free State declared itself the Republic of Eire in 1937, severing all formal ties with Great Britain in 1949.

The Vatican State, which was almost as papist as Eire, was created in 1929 in pursuance of the Lateran Treaty signed by Mussolini’s Italy and Pope Pius XI. It covered 44 hectares (c.100 acres) on the right bank of the Tiber in central Rome. Its population of perhaps 1,000 resident souls was to be ruled by the absolute authority of the Pope. Its creation ended 60 years of the Pope’s ‘captivity’ since the suppression of the Papal States in 1870.

Despite the victory of the Western democracies, the most dynamic political product of the Great War lay in the anti-Western, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic monster of totalitarianism. The term was coined by Italian fascists to describe their own aspirations. But it was taken up from 1928 to encompass the common denominator of both fascism and communism. After the suppression of Soviet Hungary, Soviet Russia (1917–22) and its successor, the USSR (from 1923), long remained the sole communist state. Its example was immensely influential. The main fascist regimes emerged in Italy (1922), Germany (1933), and Spain (1936).
¹⁵

The concept of totalitarianism was rejected both by communists and by fascists, that is, by the totalitarians themselves. It was destined to become a political football in the era of the Cold War, and it has enjoyed only mixed fortunes among Western academics and political theorists.
¹⁶
It has failed to attract those who demand tidy, watertight models, or who identify political phenomena with social forces. It is anathema, and abominable ‘relativism’, to anyone who holds either communism or fascism to be uniquely evil. On the other hand, it is strongly supported by those Europeans who have had practical experience of both communism and fascism at first hand. Communism and fascism were never identical: each of them evolved over time, and each spawned variegated offspring. But they had much more in common than their practitioners were prepared to admit. The features which they shared form a long list. A seminal study on the subject talks in terms of‘a six-point syndrome’.
¹⁷
But six points are not enough:

Nationalist-Socialist ideology
. Both communism and fascism were radical movements which developed ideologies professing a blend of nationalist and socialist elements. During the 1920s the Bolsheviks gradually watered down their inter-nationalist principles, whilst adopting the characteristic postulates of extreme Russian nationalism. Under Stalin, the ideological mix was classified as ‘National Bolshevism’. The German Nazis modified the socialist elements of their ideology over the same period. In both cases the socialist-nationalist or nationalist-socialist blend was stabilized at the same moment, in 1934.

At the conscious level, communists and fascists were schooled to stress their differences. On the other hand, when pressed to summarize their convictions, they often gave strikingly similar answers. One said, ‘For us Soviet patriots, the homeland and communism became fused into one inseparable whole.’ Another put it thus: ‘Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism, and extracted the [real] meaning of socialism from it. It also took Nationalism from the cowardly bourgeois parties. Throwing both together into the cauldron of our way of life, the synthesis emerged as clear as crystal—German National Socialism.’
¹⁸
It is not for nothing that people treated to such oratory were apt to think of communists as ‘red fascists’ and of fascists as ‘brown communists’.

Pseudo-science
. Both communists and fascists claimed to base their ideologies on fundamental scientific laws which supposedly determined the development of human society. Communists appealed to their version of ‘scientific Marxism’ or historical materialism, the Nazis to eugenics and racial science. In neither case did their scientific methods or findings find widespread independent endorsement.

Utopian goals
. All totalitarians cherished the vision of a New Man who was to create a New Order cleansed of all present impurities. The nature of the vision varied. It could be the final, classless stage of pure communism as preached by the Marxist-Leninists; the .racist, Jew-free Aryan.paradise of the Nazis: or the restoration of a pseudo-historical Roman empire in Italy. The building of the
New Order was a task which justified all the sacrifices and brutalities of the present, [
UTOPIA
]

The dualist party-state
. Once in power, the totalitarian party created organs within its own apparatus to duplicate and to oversee all other existing institutions. State structures were reduced to the status of conveyor belts for executing the Party’s wishes. This dualist dictatorial system was much more pervasive than that implied by the familiar but misleading term of the ‘one-party state’. (See Appendix III, p. 1321.)

The
Führerprinzip
or ‘Leader Principle’
. Totalitarian parties operated on strict hierarchical lines. They exacted slavish obedience from their minions, through the unquestioning cult of the Party Leader, the fount of all wisdom and beneficence—the
Führer
, the
Vozhd’
, the
Duce
, the
Caudillo
or the ‘Great Helmsman’. Lenin shunned such a cult: but it was a centrepiece both of Stalinism and of Hitlerism.

Gangsterism
. Many observers have noted the strong similarity between the conduct of totalitarian élites and that of professional criminal confraternities. Gangsters gain a parasitical hold over a community by ‘protecting’ it from the violence which they themselves generate. They habitually terrorize both their members and their victims, and eliminate their rivals. They manipulate the law and, whilst maintaining an important façade of respectability, use blackmail and extortion to take control of all organizations in the locality.

Bureaucracy
. All totalitarian regimes required a vast army of bureaucrats to staff the bloated and duplicated organs of the party-state. This new bureaucracy offered rapid advancement to droves of opportunist individuals of any social origin. Entirely dependent on the Party, it arguably formed the only social constituency whose interests the regime had to consider. At the same time, it included a number of competing ‘power centres’ whose hidden rivalries gave rise to the only form of genuine political life in existence.

Propaganda
. Totalitarian propaganda owed much to the subliminal techniques of modern mass advertising. It employed emotive symbols,
son et lumiere
, political art and impressive architecture, and the principle of the ‘Big Lie’. Its shameless demagoguery was directed at the vulnerable and vindictive elements of society uprooted by the tides of war and modernization, [
PROPAGANDA
]

The Aesthetics of Power
. Totalitarian regimes enforced a virtual monopoly in the arts, propagating an aesthetic environment which glorified the ruling Party, embellished the bond between Party and people, revelled in heroic images of national myths, and indulged in megalomaniac fantasies. Italian Fascists, German Nazis, and Soviet Communists all shared a taste for portentous portraits of the Leader, for oversized sculptures of musclebound workers, and for ostentatious public buildings of ultra-grandiose proportions.

The dialectical enemy
. No totalitarian regime could hope to legitimize its own evil designs without an opposite evil to contend with. The rise of fascism in
Europe was a godsend for the communists, who otherwise could only have justified themselves by reference to the more distant evils of liberalism, imperialism, and colonialism. The fascists never ceased to justify themselves in terms of their crusade against Bolshevism, the communists through ‘the struggle against fascism’. The contradictions within totalitarianism provided the motor for the hatreds and conflicts which it promoted.

The psychology of hatred
. Totalitarian regimes raised the emotional temperature by beating the drum of hatred against ‘enemies’ within and without. Honest adversaries or honourable opponents did not exist. In the fascist repertoire, Jews and communists headed the bill; in the communist repertoire, fascists, capitalist running dogs, ‘kulaks’, and alleged saboteurs were mercilessly pilloried.

Pre-emptive censorship
. Totalitarian ideology could not operate without a watertight censorship controlling all sources of information. It was not sufficient to suppress unwanted opinions or facts; it was necessary to prefabricate all the data that was permitted to circulate.

Genocide and coercion
. Totalitarian regimes pushed political violence beyond all previous limits. An elaborate network of political police and security agencies was kept busy first in destroying all opponents and undesirables and later in inventing opponents to keep the machinery in motion. Genocidal campaigns against (innocent) social or racial ‘enemies’ added credence to ideological claims and kept the population in a permanent state of fear. Mass arrests and shootings, concentration camps, and random murders were routine.

Collectivism
. Totalitarian regimes laid stress on all the sorts of activity which strengthen collective bonds and weaken family and individual identity. State-run nurseries, ‘social art’, youth movements, party rituals, military parades, and group uniforms all served to cement high levels of social discipline and conformist behaviour. In Fascist Italy, a system of Party-run Corporations was established to replace all former trade union and employers’ organizations and in 1939 to take over the lower house of the national assembly.