THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (12 page)

In this chaos, the Italian premier called the election of May 1921. When as a result the fascists were admitted to the national governing bloc, they were able to continue their campaign of violence against the socialists and communists from within the shelter of the police and the national government. Mussolini himself, however, left the coalition and relentlessly attacked the government, recognizing that the true source of his appeal lay in his posing an alternative to parliamentarianism. His campaign was equally aimed at the left and the liberals: he attacked the parliamentary system and the Versailles settlement, while managing a campaign of street terror against the parties and unions of the left. In 1922 he reoccupied Fiume and, when the government acquiesced in this move, he stepped up terrorist assaults in a number of industrial cities against leftists and trade unionists. When the left responded with a call for a general strike, Mussolini answered with an ultimatum threatening the government, challenging it to stop the strike and vowing to stop it himself if the government did not. By such maneuvering against the left, Mussolini was able to build an independent base of financial support among industrialists and landowners while at the same time making himself increasingly attractive to the very administration he was weakening. Although Mussolini always portrayed his rise to power as culminating in the March on Rome, in fact the role of the March was more complicated. Mussolini did not seize power. Rather he threatened to do so, began mobilizing the fascist paramilitaries, and thus provoked the collapse of the government. He then coolly refused to be brought into a coalition; faced down the interim government when the king refused to give permission to declare martial law; watched as a new
coalition collapsed; and was finally invited by the king to be prime minister on the advice of the very parliamentarians whose ability to form a government he had frustrated.

A similar story can be told of Hitler's route to power, based also on the triangulated conflict between fascism, communism, and parliamentarian-ism refracted through domestic and international dimensions. Hitler's contempt for parliamentary democracy at home and the Versailles system abroad, his disgust at the political flaccidness of the parliamentary states and the pusillanimity of the Weimar politicians, his hatred of the socialist parties in Germany, and his desire to destroy the Slavic enemy where those parties held power, even his anti-Semitism, which called attention to the prominent role of Jews in parliamentary Weimar and in the communist movement—all these united the domestic and the international in a program of enormous moral and political appeal to the German people.

Hitler's skill, however, was not just in uniting these two dimensions, and thus tying his fortunes to the conflicts with (and between) parliamentarianism and communism. There were other, more established parties doing that. Indeed, the Nationalists themselves were a kind of protofascist party, who also attacked Versailles, were anti-Marxist, called for an aggressive foreign policy, and so forth. Rather it was because his was not an established party that, when the Great Depression made the Weimar Government appear helpless and confused, Hitler inherited the conservative followers of Hindenburg. His sociopathic nationalism and antisocialism only found a financial base in industrialists and landowners
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after they began to doubt the ability of the established forces to maintain order against a left revolution. In Germany, as in Italy, but on a far larger and more aggressive scale, the fascists relied on street fighting and political violence against the left to provoke disorder. The civil conflict that fascism sought provided fascism's road to power much as the civil war in Russia had coalesced support for Bolshevism. When unemployment exceeded 30 percent, workers began to abandon the center parliamentary parties for the fascists and communists, the support for the latter ironically increasing the support for the former. Thus we can chart the dramatic rise in Hitler's electoral success from 1924 to 1932
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with the parallel loss of support for the conservative forces. In July 1932, when the Nazi party won 37.3 percent of the vote, it exceeded this number in fourteen of Germany's thirty largest cities and in only one fell as low as 20 percent. In a multiparty state, with proportional representation, this is a remarkable popular showing. When Hitler ran against the conservative Paul von Hindenburg for the presidency, the latter was able to win only by relying on votes from the left-wing party, the SPD. When Hitler acceded to the chancellorship, he did so
on the same basis as the leader of any parliamentary party: he had the votes.
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Thus neither Hitler nor Mussolini seized power: both were brought to premierships by the calculations of other politicians who realized they needed them. They were needed because the parliamentary states that had “won” the First World War, or been set up by the winners, could not during their fleeting ascension settle the constitutional and moral question at issue, and were thus never secure in their claims of legitimacy in those states where this legitimacy was most closely tested. Legitimacy is a constitutional idea that is sensitive to strategic events; when the Versailles system proved itself strategically vacuous, the legitimacy of the parliamentary regimes that were its constitutional progeny suffered accordingly.

For the same reason that the Versailles peace was unstable domestically, the international scene was haunted by increasing violence. Consider the following timetable: In September 1931, on the basis of an odious and farcical pretext, the Japanese occupied Mukden and the area surrounding the Manchurian Railway. The following January they invaded the region north of Shanghai; by March 1933 they had reached the Great Wall. That same month, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and Hitler came to power in Germany. In March 1935 Germany renounced the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty and began open rearmament. In October, Italy invaded Abyssinia. In March 1936 the Germans occupied and fortified the demilitarized Rhineland, renouncing provisions of the Locarno treaty as well as those of Versailles. In July the Spanish Civil War began, accompanied by armed intervention on the part of Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union in an explicit, violent competition. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. By the end of September, the German-speaking Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia had been seized. In March 1939, the rest of the Czech state was engorged. In April, Italy occupied Albania. All these states—China, Abyssinia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania—were members of the League of Nations; indeed, two of them had been created by the Versailles Treaty. It is therefore not implausible to suggest that “war” did not begin with the declarations of war in 1939.

For some years before Hitler invaded Poland—a parliamentary state also created by Versailles
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—triggering the declarations of war on September 3, 1939, by Britain and France, the world had experienced increasing armed conflict. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded Poland.
Though both states, fascist Germany and communist Russia, anticipated the conflict between them that ultimately came in 1941, they were united in their contempt for the international system of the parliamentary states. It seems clear that what was
not
established at Versailles was a peace, and therefore it seems reasonable to conclude that war had not really finally ended there.

There were of course other states in which these three competing paradigms struggled for supremacy—notably Japan and China—that entered the conflict at this stage, even though they had not been parties at its inception in 1914. Japanese fascism was driven by its own inner/outer struggle—the Eurocentric settlement that caused the war to pause in 1919 could not have prevented the rise of Japanese militarism, whatever the provisions agreed upon at Versailles. It is characteristic of epochal wars that parties change sides—as did Italy and Japan during the Long War, Austria during the Wars of the French Revolution, France during the Thirty Years' War—and that new parties join the conflict, while exhausted parties retire. It is interesting, however, to point out two facts about the rise of Japanese fascism that bear, even if tangentially, on the thesis of the Long War.

As we will see in Part II, the history of states reflects a complex interaction between profound constitutional change and strategic innovation. “The Long War” is a name that can be given to the strategic consequences of the constitutional development of the nation-state that began in the late nineteenth century, as this constitutional order replaced the imperial state-nations of the previous century and searched, restlessly, for the axiomatic legitimacy the old regimes had long enjoyed. Each of the three models of the nation-state—the parliamentary, the communist, and the fascist—strove for constitutional legitimacy in the domestic arena, and for a validation of that legitimacy in the international sphere. Japan also followed this course.

It was the bewildered response of the Tokugawa regime to the external pressures from Britain, France, and Holland for trading rights, and the threat posed by Russia to Japan's northern territories, that cast doubt on the vitality and internal legitimacy of that regime. The strategic crisis came in 1853 when a United States naval vessel appeared in Uraga Bay, armed beyond anything the Japanese could launch, and delivered an ultimatum demanding an opening of the Japanese trading market. China's sovereignty had already collapsed under the pressure of Western military technology after the Opium Wars of 1842, and now fears in Japan of a similar event precipitated a constitutional revolution of the kind that had occurred earlier in Europe. The Tokugawa regime could only offer continued isolation—which the West had shown it could penetrate—or appeasement, which had so notably failed to preserve sovereignty in the Chinese
context.
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The Meiji Restoration of 1868 thus began as a defensive response to Western threats. Although it was considered impractical to confront the Western powers in light of Japan's inferior military apparatus, a program of national defense was begun under the slogan “A strong economy: a strong army,” with the goal of expelling the Western interlopers once economic self-sufficiency was achieved. Constitutional change, precipitated by strategic challenges, in turn brought forth its own strategic innovations. Conscription was introduced in 1873, which tended to encourage nationalist attitudes; with the forces thus raised, an internal rebellion in the 1870s was crushed, strengthening the allegiance of the nation to the State.
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Gradually the objective of self-defense and renewed seclusion was replaced by the desire to become a great power on the European model. In 1890 the constitution of this transformed Japanese state was adopted. Significantly, it was modeled on the Prussian constitution.
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It instituted a weak legislature without effective control over the budget. As a result, the political parties of the Diet were never able to claim to speak for the nation—that was reserved for the Emperor—and more and more they became perceived as corrupt, divisive forces. The Diet's efforts to control military spending by holding up the budget process were contrasted with the military's victories over China in 1894 and Russia in 1905, legitimating the role of the military as the voice of the nation, and showing the politicians up as petty and partisan.
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Thus, although the principal parliamentary parties “provided Japanese premiers in the 1920s, they failed to establish the mantle of legitimacy for parliamentary democracy.”
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Moreover, although the socialist parties within Japan were ruthlessly suppressed,
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the example of Russian Bolshevism, and especially the rising specter of Chinese communism, increased the desire of the Japanese military to go on the offensive in East Asia. This group was able to discredit the parliamentary system by seizing the initiative in foreign policy: the invasion of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet regime of Manchukuo both were undertaken without political authorization.
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When junior officers organized an abortive coup d‘état in Japan itself, a wave of violence followed, including the assassination of the premier. The views of these insurrectionaries are reflected in this reminiscence:

These two facts—the role of the protofascist Prussian constitution and the alarm at socialism—are often overlooked in the debates about the relationship of Japanese to European fascism. For our purposes they provide some context to the expansion of the Long War into Asia, and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States immediately following Pearl Harbor. The defeat of the Japanese and the success of the American occupation destroyed fascism in Japan, even though the ethnic source of state legitimacy on which fascism depends had deeper roots in Japan than perhaps anywhere else. Fascism in Europe was also destroyed, not simply because it was defeated, but because the nature of the defeat, its totality and remorselessness, discredited it. Can we say then that the Long War ended in 1945?

Can we say, that is, that Yalta succeeded where Versailles had failed? It is by now a commonplace among some historians and politicians to observe that the illness of President Roosevelt, combined perhaps with his naive faith in his ability to manipulate Stalin, was responsible for the division of Europe—or at least the cession of the states of Eastern and Middle Europe to the Communist empire.
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I am inclined to believe that this precise division was entirely a matter of the condition and location of armies in Europe, and that the date of the Normandy invasion—as to which the Americans actually had less leeway than any of the negotiating parties believed—determined the line of advance of Western forces of any magnitude. But whether or not I am correct in this conjecture, Yalta did not resolve the systemic issue: whether the order among nations, or within the conquered states, would be a rule of parliamentary law or of communism. The wartime Grand Alliance of nation-states—actually called the “United Nations”
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—that prosecuted the war against Germany was a three-sided relationship dominated by fear of fascism but in no sense one coalesced around parliamentary values.
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