Europe: A History (195 page)

Militarism
. Totalitarian regimes habitually magnified the ‘external threat’, or invented it, to rally citizens to the fatherland’s defence. Rearmament received top economic priority. Under party control, the armed forces of the state enjoyed a monopoly of weapons and high social prestige. All offensive military plans were described as defensive.

Universalism
. Totalitarian regimes acted on the assumption that their system would somehow spread across the globe. Communist ideologues held that Marxism-Leninism was ‘scientific’ and therefore universally applicable. The Nazis marched to the refrain ‘Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland, I Und morgen die ganze Welt’ (For today it’s Germany that’s ours, and tomorrow the whole wide world.) [
LETTLAND
]

Contempt for liberal democracy
. All totalitarian despised liberal democracy for its humanitarianism, for its belief in compromise and co-existence, for its commercialism, and for its attachment to law and tradition.

Moral nihilism
. All totalitarian shared the view that their goals justified their means. ‘Moral Nihilism’, wrote one British observer, ‘is not only the central feature of National Socialism, but also the central feature between it and Bolshevism.’
¹⁹

The concept of totalitarianism stands or falls on the substance of these points of comparison between its principal practitioners. Its validity is not affected by the various intellectual and political games for which it has subsequently been used.

However, communism and fascism obviously differed in the sources of their self-identity. Communists were wedded to the class struggle, the Nazis to their campaign for racial purity. Important differences also lay in the social and economic sphere. The fascists were careful to leave private property intact, and to recruit the big industrialists to their cause. The communists abolished most aspects of private property. They nationalized industry, collectivized agriculture, and instituted central command planning. On these grounds, communism must be judged the more totalitarian branch of totalitarianism, [
GAUCHE
]

Of course, one has to insist that the ‘total human control’ sometimes claimed on behalf of totalitarianism is a figment of someone’s imagination. Totalitarian utopias and totalitarian realities were two different things. Grand totalitarian schemes were often grandly inefficient. Totalitarianism refers not to the achievements of regimes but to their ambitions. What is more, the totalitarian disease generated its own antibodies. Gross oppression often inspired heroic resistance. Exposure to bogus philosophy could sometimes breed people of high moral principle. The most determined ‘anti-communists’ were ex-communists. The finest ‘anti-Fascists’ were sincere German, Italian, or Spanish patriots.

From the historical point of view, one of the most interesting questions is how far communism and fascism fed off each other. Before 1914, the main ingredients of the two movements—socialism, Marxism, nationalism, racism, and autocracy—were washing around in various combinations all over Europe. But communism crystallized first. Its emergence in 1917 occurred well in advance of any coherent manifestations of fascism. The communists, therefore, must be rated the leaders, and the fascists the quick learners. The point is: can chronological precedence be equated with cause and effect? Was fascism simply a crusade for saving the world from Bolshevism, as many of its adherents maintained? What exactly did the fascists learn from the communists? It is hard to deny that Béla Kun gave Horthy’s regime its
raison d’être
. The Italian general strike of October 1922, dominated by communists, gave Mussolini the excuse for his ‘March on Rome’. It was the strength of the communists in the streets and voting booths of Germany which frightened the German conservatives into handing power to Hitler.

But that is hardly the whole story. The fascists, like the communists, were notorious fraudsters: one should not take their pronouncements too seriously.
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), sometime ex-editor of the socialist newspaper
Avanti
(Forward), author of a pseudo-Marxist work on the class struggle (1912), embezzler and street brawler, had little commitment to political principle. He had no qualms about using his squads of
Fascisti
first to help the nationalists’ brutal seizure of Fiume in 1920, to support Giolitti’s liberal bloc in the general election of 1921, and later to murder the Socialist leader, Matteotti. He declared himself in favour of constitutional monarchy, for example, shortly before overthrowing it. One need not search for ideological consistency in such tactics: he was simply seeking to exploit the mayhem which he had helped to unleash.

The same must be said of Mussolini’s extraordinary, and extraordinarily successful, behaviour in October 1922. Having first contributed to the chaos which produced the general strike, he then cabled the King with an ultimatum demanding to be made Prime Minister. The King should have ignored the cable; but he didn’t. Mussolini did not seize power; he merely threatened to do so, and under the threat of further chaos Italy’s democrats surrendered. ‘The “March on Rome”’, writes the leading historian of Italy, ‘was a comfortable train ride, followed by a petty demonstration, and all in response to an express invitation from the monarch.’
²⁰
Years later, when Mussolini’s regime was in dire trouble, Adolf Hitler insisted on saving him. ‘After all,’ the Führer was reported as saying, ‘it was the Duce who showed us that everything was possible.’
²¹
What Mussolini showed to be possible was the subversion of liberal democracy, and a second terrible round of Europe’s ‘total war’.

The tone of international relations was set by the almost universal abhorrence of war. On the surface at least, ‘non-aggression’ was obligatory. In twenty years, a large number of non-aggression pacts were signed (see Appendix III, p. 1322). For those states who intended no aggression, such pacts were irrelevant. For those intending aggression they provided excellent cover: both Hitler and Stalin were fond of them.

The creation of the League of Nations must be counted among the achievements of the Peace Conference. The Covenant of the League came into force on 10 January 1920, the same day as the Treaty of Versailles, into which it had been incongruously incorporated. It sought to provide for the settlement of disputes by arbitration and consent, and for the use of collective force against aggressors. It envisaged an annual General Assembly, where each member state had an equal vote, an executive Council, and a permanent Secretariat, all based in Geneva. The League also took over the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and the International Chamber of Labour. The General Assembly first convened in November 1920, and met every year thereafter until 1941. It dissolved itself in April 1946, when the residual operations were transferred to the United Nations Organization in New York.

The work of the League started too late to affect the immediate settlement of the Great War, and was hobbled by the non-participation of the powers who might have rendered it effective. At no time in the 21 years of its operation were
all three of Europe’s power centres properly represented. Of the Western Powers, France alone played a full part. The USA, the League’s original sponsor, stayed away, and Great Britain failed to sign the fundamental Geneva Protocol (1924) on the pacific settlement of disputes. Germany only participated from 1926 to 1933, Italy from 1920 to 1937. The Soviet Union was admitted in 1934, and expelled in 1940. An important initiative was taken by France and the USA in 1928 to plug some of the League’s obvious failings. The Briand-Kellogg pact for the renunciation of war was eventually signed by 64 states, including the USSR. But it was never incorporated into the League’s own rules. Hence, whilst the League advocated military or economic sanctions against aggressor states, it did not possess the means to enforce its own sanctions. As a result, it played a major role in the management of minor issues and a negligible role in the management of major ones.

Thanks to the ambivalent attitudes of the Western Powers, the League was not empowered to challenge the general European Settlement which the former thought they had put into place in 1919–20. A fatal ruling determined that demands for Treaty revision could not be accepted as a ‘dispute’ under the terms of the Geneva Protocol. The principle of unanimity, which governed voting in the Assembly and the Council, ensured that no decision could ever be taken contrary to the wishes of the Powers. The crucial Disarmament Conference did not meet until 1932, by which time rearmament was well advanced in the USSR and was soon to be launched in Germany.

Overall, therefore, the sponsors of the League deprived it of the means to observe its high ideals. It ran the colonial Mandates Commission for Palestine and Syria. It administered the Free City of Danzig, the Saarland, and the Straits Commission. It mediated between Turkey and Iraq over Mosul, between Greece and Bulgaria over Macedonia (1925), and, unsuccessfully, between Poland and Lithuania over Wilno (1925–7). It could not cope with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) or the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (1936). Through no fault of its own, it was completely out of its depth when the major powers of Europe began to unsheath their claws in the late 1930s.

The most active statesman in the field of European peace and co-operation was undoubtedly Aristide Briand (1862–1932). A reforming socialist born at Nantes, Briand had been ten times France’s Premier; but the most expansive phase of his career was reached in 1925–32, when he served as Foreign Minister. He was specially energetic in the pursuit of Franco-German reconciliation. He was the chief architect of the Locarno Pact; he forged the Kellogg-Briand pact for the renunciation of war; and he made proposals for European union. His noble ideals, and their lack of success, were typical of the times.

Briand’s proposals for European union had few immediate consequences. But they are important for all who seek the seeds of policies which eventually bore fruit twenty years later. They were first raised in a speech to the Assembly of the League on 5 September 1929:

‘I think that among peoples constituting geographical groups, like the peoples of Europe, there should be some kind of federal bond… Obviously, this association will be primarily
economie, for that is the most urgent aspect of the question … Still, I am convinced that this federal link might also do useful work politically and socially, and without affecting the sovereignty of any of the nations belonging to the association …’
²²

The key phrases were ‘geographical groups’, ‘primarily economic’, and ‘sovereignty’.

A more detailed Memorandum was presented in May 1930. This document spoke of ‘the moral union of Europe’, and outlined the principles and mechanics whereby it might be achieved. It insisted on ‘the general subordination of the economic problem to the political one’. It envisaged a Permanent Political Committee for executive decisions, and a representative body, the European Conference, for debate. In the immediate term, it called on the 27 European members of the League to convene a series of meetings to study a wide range of related issues, including finance, labour, and inter-parliamentary relations. From January 1931, Briand chaired a subcommittee of the League which examined members’ responses to the Memorandum. Of these, only the Dutch reply was prepared to accept that European union involved an inevitable reduction of sovereignty.

As it proved, 1931 was the terminal year both for Briand and for his ideas. His initial speech on European union had been closely followed by the Wall Street crash. Discussions on his Memorandum coincided with the first electoral success of the German Nazis. Briand’s European schemes were overtaken by his chairmanship of the Manchurian Committee, which, after much deliberation, issued a verbal reprimand to Japan for the invasion of China. In Asia, Japan flouted the League and reaped the rewards of aggression. In Europe, ‘the spirit of Locarno’ was sick. Stresemann was dead; Briand himself ailed, and resigned. Briand’s death elicited an impassioned tribute from Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain. Briand ‘was proud of his country, and jealous of her prerogatives,’ he said. ‘But his pride was only content when France stepped out like a goddess, leading the other nations in the paths of peace and civilisation. There is no-one of his stature left.’
²³
It was a rare demonstration of Anglo-French solidarity.

In this atmosphere, an alternative plan for European security was advanced by Fascist Italy. Mussolini proposed a four-power pact of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. It represented a cynical return to the bad habits of the Concert of Europe, and would have dropped all pretence about the equal standing of states. It unashamedly attempted to mobilize the ‘West’ against the dangers of the ‘East’—that is, against the squabbles of the successor states, and the potential expansion of communism. It found a measure of favour in the British Foreign Office; but it did not appeal to the Quai d’Orsay, which preferred to stick to existing arrangements. Apart from the Munich Conference, its provisions remained a dead letter.

Europe’s cultural life was deeply affected by the hangovers of war, which heightened the questioning of traditional values and accelerated existing centrifugal
trends. The tone of anxiety and pessimism was set by Oswald Spengler’s
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
(The Decline of the West, 1918), a specifically German view of‘Western civilization’. The advent of communism excited many Western intellectuals, for whom the defiant Utopian stance of the Bolsheviks in Russia proved unusually fascinating. Active communist politics was for the few; but
marxisant
opinions were much in fashion. The long stream of Moscow-bound pilgrims, for whom the most murderous regime in European history could do no wrong, offers one of the stranger spectacles of mass delusion on record.
²⁴
Fascism, too, was to recruit its academic and cultural collaborators. Some individuals, such as G. B. Shaw, managed to fawn on dictators of all hues. Visiting the USSR in 1931, he remarked: ‘I wish we had forced labour in England, in which case we would not have two million unemployed.’ His opinion of Stalin after a personal meeting was: ‘he is said to be a model of domesticity, virtue and innocence’.
²⁵
In retrospect, books such as the Webbs’
Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation
(1935) look simply fatuous; but they pandered to the genuine anxieties of the post-war generation whilst serving to hold the world in ignorance about Soviet realities. The lack of moral integrity among politically pressured intellectuals, as described in Julien Benda’s
La Trahisón des clercs
(1927), was a recurring theme. It would have been more convincing if Benda himself had not tried to justify Stalin’s show trials. The Spanish social philosopher José Ortega y Gasset saw totalitarianism as a sign of the threat from mass culture. In his
Rebelión de las Masas
(Revolt of the Masses, 1930), he warned that democracy carried the seeds of tyranny by the majority.