Fear Itself (16 page)

Not all killing, though, was anonymous or indifferent as to its victims. The Armenian massacre between 1915 and 1917, which cost at least 800,000 lives, perhaps as many as 1.5 million,
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introduced genocide, the type of mass murder identified by Raphael Lemkin three decades after 1914, and defined in 1948 by a United Nations Convention adopted by the General Assembly, as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.
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Not constrained by utilitarian motivations or simple self-interest, this radical evil crossed a line distinguishing real from putatively objective enemies.
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Notwithstanding the catastrophic scale of destruction wreaked by the Great War, many believed it would be possible finally to realize Risley’s disappointed hope for international institutions. A number of global instruments indeed were fashioned to keep the peace. These included not just the League of Nations but also the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, which produced a series of treaties limiting the construction and scale of battleship fleets, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, providing “for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy.” Good sense seemed to triumph. As late as September 10, 1931, Britain’s Robert Cecil, 1
st
Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937), announced to the League’s Assembly, “I am sure that no one in this vast assemblage will rise to contradict me when I say that war was never more remote, nor peace more secure.”
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Nine days later, imperial Japan invaded Manchuria (a huge area, one-fourth the size of China), and completed its conquest by February 1932. Japan also attacked Shanghai from January to March 1932, leaving hundreds of Chinese dead. The League proved helpless and ineffective.
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The international security system soon disintegrated. In October 1933, Adolf Hitler withdrew Germany from the League and from the World Disarmament Conference the League had summoned in 1931. Interwar efforts to limit military spending began to fail. In 1933, both Germany and the Soviet Union started down the path to become the world’s first military superpowers. With the acceleration of civil upheaval in China and anticolonial challenges to the Great Powers, most conspicuously in India, global anarchy became more prominent. “The ‘hinge years’ of 1929–33,” Zara Steiner’s monumental study of international history concluded, “witnessed the threat to the hopes and institutions nurtured during the previous decade and the collapse of many of them.” With the mood visibly darkening, she observed, national interests clearly trumped international attempts to replace the pre–World War I European system with a peaceful global order. Germany’s radical turn and Japan’s military assertion of regional dominance made clear that future events and attempts to keep the peace “would take place outside the Washington treaties, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the League of Nations.”
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It was during this darkening international atmosphere that Franklin Roosevelt would assume the presidency.

Amid the shift from expectation to disappointment that preceded his election, the United States stood aloof. Not a participant in the League of Nations, the country repeated a familiar pattern of military demobilization, secure, it was thought, behind two great oceans.
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At the close of the Civil War, the United States, despite grievous losses on both sides, had possessed the world’s most powerful army and its second-greatest naval force. Protected by geography, the nation disarmed after the emergency passed. Following the Armistice of November 1918, another “great army was disbanded; all attempts to maintain a serious military force failed.”
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A long-term peace did seem at hand. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which set limits on construction in order to prevent a new arms race, proved the Harding administration’s most popular achievement. Despite the far-reaching military potential of the United States, its armed forces numbered only some 230,000 army and navy personnel at the start of the 1930s, less than half of Italy’s services, even though the United States had more than three times the population of Italy. U.S. spending on arms and manpower, moreover, totaled just a quarter of that of the Soviet Union.
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For a time, it seemed that this American absence would not much matter. In the war’s glowing aftermath, as “the world seemed dedicated to reconstruction,” recalled the novelist Stefan Zweig, “it seemed as if a normal life was again in store for our much-tried generation.”
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The projection made by
The Cambridge Modern History
before the war of a global victory for liberal democracy did not seem far-fetched. Its prediction that an arc of membership in a global “European brotherhood, ruled under the same forms of government, practicing the same arts, pursuing the same commerce and industry by the same financial methods, in short as States created and living after the European pattern” based on “the steady advance” of liberal democracy looked prescient.
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In 1918, the American historian James Harvey Robinson observed how “the opening years of the twentieth century have witnessed a steady increase in people’s control of their governments,” noting that “the House of Lords in England has been forced to admit that the final word in lawmaking rests with the House of Commons; the monarchy has been overthrown in Portugal; Turkey has tried to establish a constitution and a parliament; China, having overturned the imperial administration, has founded a republic; and Russia has dethroned the Tsar.”
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Common to all such existing and potential democracies, both Robinson and
The Cambridge Modern History
stressed, was a place of privilege for their national legislatures. “In every country where the Constitution is democratic, representative institutions afford a means, however imperfect, for the expression of popular sentiments; they act as a real check on the executive authorities and exercise a modifying influence upon older national institutions and customs.” Through this process of political representation, the essay confidently announced, “the interests of the masses” become central to political life without engendering “warfare of class against class.”
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The war’s settlement ushered in what the English Liberal constitutional scholar James Bryce portrayed as liberal democracy’s “universal acceptance . . . as the normal and natural form of government.”
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With a European “belt of democracies—stretching from the Baltic Sea down through Germany and Poland to the Balkans,”
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and with the establishment of parliamentary democracies on other continents, President Woodrow Wilson’s assured 1918 declaration that “democracy seems about universally to prevail,” and his confident analysis of how “the spread of democratic institutions . . . promise[s] to reduce politics to a single form . . . by reducing all forms of government to Democracy” seemed confirmed.
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These expectations were cruelly deflated even before the spectacular fall of the Weimar Republic, the leading example of the general failure of European democracy.
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Lost illusions put the liberal democracies on trial.
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“The public press,” as a Harvard political scientist noted in 1926, “not only of this country but of England and of Continental Europe as well, is full of current prophecies that the age of democratic liberalism is dead and done for.”
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Such foretelling was prescient. Caught between mass parties of the Left, some inspired by the Bolshevik experiment, and nationalist, Catholic, conservative, and frankly Fascist parties on the Right, enthusiasm for liberal democracy hollowed out. Mass support frequently was lacking. Political and technical elites often grew impatient with the give-and-take of parliamentary government. “Liberalism’s triumph proved short-lived,” an overview of the period has noted. “By the 1930’s, parliaments seemed to be going the way of kings.”
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Especially significant was the tragedy of German democracy. From the start, it was placed under exceptional political and intellectual stress. Aping the themes and apocalyptic language that marked the fledgling Nazi movement, a 1923 best-seller, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s
Das Dritte Reich
(
The Third Reich
), announced that “liberalism is the death of nations.” It identified liberal democracy as “a dangerous mental infection” and “a disintegrating atmosphere . . . which spreads moral disease amongst nations, and ruins the nation whom it dominates.”
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This tome epitomized a broad and growing current of thought that advanced what the historian Carl Schorske identified as “post-rational politics” that sought to “organize masses neglected or rejected by liberalism in ascendancy.”
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Each of the era’s dictatorships, however different, advanced van den Bruck’s claims about liberal democracy. Led by iron men and motivated by unforgiving ideological zeal, these tyrannies seemed to have seized the future.

On the eve of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt faced a world rather different from the one Woodrow Wilson had envisioned. By 1933, the European map of democracies no longer included Russia, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, or Estonia.
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With the exception of Britain, Scandinavia, and (still) France, all of interwar Europe turned authoritarian, dictatorial, or Fascist.
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Concurrently, Stalin extended and intensified Lenin’s revolutionary heritage by leading an effort to strengthen Party control over all spheres of Soviet life, to purify the thoughts and composition of Communist cadres, to remake agriculture in a collectivist image, notwithstanding the risk of famine on a mass scale, and to make a massive leap forward in industrialization, whatever the human price.

Writing shortly before going to Yale from the University of Munich, a leading émigré lawyer, Karl Loewenstein, correctly observed in 1935 how “by far the greater part of European territory and of European population is under dictatorial rule of one kind or another,” and concluded that “fear persists today more than ever that the contagious spread of dictatorships cannot be checked.”
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He might also have taken notice of antidemocratic transformations in Japan, and various types of limitation on democracy across Latin America. Writing again in 1937, he worried that the antidemocratic tide had “developed into a universal movement which in its seemingly irresistible surge is comparable to the rising of European liberalism against absolutism after the French Revolution.”
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Loewenstein concluded that “perhaps the time has come when it is no longer wise to close one’s eyes to the fact that liberal democracy . . . is beginning to lose the day to the awakened masses.”
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Thin and defensive, the democracies seemed no match for the vigor and dynamism of the radical one-party dictatorships.

Half a decade earlier, as Roosevelt prepared his presidency, none of the era’s emerging dictatorships had achieved full and complete legitimacy or control. Some looked back, nostalgically, but the newest kinds of dictatorship, the ones that came to be designated as totalitarian, were revolutionary responses to modern democracy that boldly pointed to the future. Frequently rejecting tradition, and seizing instruments of mass politics, they had a variety of ideological goals and utopian projects—leveling the class order, achieving racial purity, rebuilding traditional religious cultures, expanding or defending territory, among others. Across the Left-Right divide, they identified others as implacable enemies.
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German Nazism and Italian Fascism declared an overwhelming opposition to Russian Bolshevism that was heartily reciprocated. But individually and collectively, their contrast with liberal democracy was profound. Even Europe’s pre-1914 authoritarian states had more than one party and respected parliamentary forms, however weak their legislature or limited their electorate. By contrast, the era’s revolutionary dictatorships introduced the one-party state as a righteous innovation. They made the ideological party, not the national state, the regime’s driving force. This novelty was their answer to what Ortega y Gasset, the influential Spanish philosopher, identified in 1930 as “the coming of the masses,” the “one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at the present moment.”
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These dictatorships claimed to be vanguards that could discern directions to history. Their parties—Fascist, Nazi Communist—took ultimate responsibility for what their states did, and for shaping how members of society should think and behave. As vigilant guardians that fought subversion by combining persuasion and rewards with intimidation and coercive violence, their power was unconstrained by liberal rules and rights. As Carl Schmitt, the Berlin law professor, put the point after joining the Nazi Party in May 1933, the party can administer “the highest justice” and it is “the
Führer
[who] protects the Law” as “the highest judge of the nation and the highest lawgiver.”
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Proudly opposed to parliamentary democracy, the dictatorships produced an antiliberal moral universe that rejected any government based on rights, political representation, and the rule of law as flaccid and incapable. Their political parties did not compete for power, appeal to distinct constituencies, or represent constellations of interests, each of which they thought to be pathologies in the democratic world. Rather, by supervising, persuading, coercing, and integrating their societies, the parties in each of the revolutionary dictatorships “supplied the practical means to bind population to their citizens.”
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Though the dictatorships maintained constitutional structures, these were routinely overridden by an extraconstitutional state under the rubric, as Hitler put things in July 1933, of the “Unity of Party and State.”