The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (40 page)

The contrast between the American and German responses to the Depression illuminates the central difficulty facing the historian who writes about the 1930s. These were the two industrial economies most severely affected by the economic crisis. Both entered the Depression as democracies; indeed, their constitutions had much in common – both republics, both federations, both with a directly elected presidency, both with universal suffrage, both with a bicameral legislature, both with a supreme court. Yet one navigated the treacherous inter-war waters without significant change to its political institutions and its citizens’ freedoms; the other produced the most abominable regime ever to emerge from a modern democracy. To attempt to explain why is to address perhaps the hardest question of twentieth-century history.

Recovery from the Depression plainly called for new economic policies in all countries; by 1933, as Roosevelt said, the traditional remedies favoured by his predecessor Herbert Hoover had been discredited. Any country that adhered tenaciously to the combination of sound money (the gold standard) and a more or less balanced budget was doomed to a decade of stagnation. Nor were tariffs the answer. However, there was a variety of different ways to engineer economic recovery. At one extreme were the policies of the Soviet Union, based on state ownership of the means of production, central planning and the ruthless coercion of labour. At the other, there was the British combination of currency devaluation, modest budget deficits and a protectionist imperial customs union. Other measures – such as the system of bank deposit insurance introduced in the United States –
did not constitute a drastic break with the liberal economic order. Most countries adopted policies somewhere in between these two extremes, combining increased state involvement in employment, investment and the relief of poverty with looser fiscal and monetary policies and measures to limit the free flow and/or pricing of goods, capital and labour. The key point is that the political consequences of these new economic policies varied much more between countries than the policies themselves. Only in some countries was the adoption of new economic policies subsequent to, if not actually conditional upon, a political switch to dictatorship. The English-speaking world saw a variety of departures from economic orthodoxy without any erosion of democracy. So too did Scandinavia; it was in the 1930s that the Swedish Social Democrats laid the foundations of the post-1945 European welfare state. Ironically, moves away from democracy in other countries were sometimes justified by the need for more stringently orthodox fiscal policies, on the ground that the parliamentary system, with its special interests represented in the legislature, made it impossible to run balanced budgets. In fact, unbalanced budgets provided a generally beneficial stimulus to demand. It should also be remembered that changes of monetary policy did not require any diminution of democracy since in most countries before the Depression central banks were not democratically accountable. Some had their independence from parliamentary control legally enshrined. Others – notably the Bank of England and the Banque de France – were still considered to be private firms, accountable to their shareholders rather than to voters, even if their role and mode of operation were governed by statute.

Moreover, only in a sub-set of countries did the end of democracy also mean the end of liberty and the rule of law. Although the weakening of parliamentary power was often associated with increased persecution of ethnic minorities, it was in fact logically possible to have the one without the other. Liberal critics of democracy since Madison, de Tocqueville and Mill had warned against the ‘tyranny of the majority’. It was already apparent in East Central Europe before the Depression that democracy could indeed lead ethnic majorities to discriminate against minorities (see
Chapter 5
). To be sure, executives unhampered by parliamentary scrutiny found it easier to violate existing
laws or constitutions. But the degree to which inter-war authoritarian regimes persecuted individuals or particular social groups varied widely. In some cases dictators may actually have been better for ethnic minorities than elected governments willing to give full vent to majority prejudice. More than is commonly realized, authoritarian rulers could act as a check on violently intolerant fascist movements, most obviously in Romania, but also in Poland (see below).

Finally, only in a very few countries – a sub-set of the sub-set of dictatorships – did the end of parliamentary power and the rule of law also mean an aggressive foreign policy. The majority of authoritarian regimes were in fact relatively peaceable.

In 1918 Roosevelt’s predecessor Woodrow Wilson had declared: ‘Democracy seems about universally to prevail… The spread of democratic institutions… promise[s] to reduce politics to a single form… by reducing all forms of government to Democracy.’ For a time he seemed to be right. Political scientists have attempted to quantify the global spread of democracy since the early nineteenth century. Their calculations point to a marked upsurge in both the number of democracies and the quality of democratization between 1914 and 1922. The proportion of countries with a democracy ‘score’ of higher than 6 out of 10 rose from 22 per cent to nearly 37 per cent. The mean level of democracy in the world rose from 7.8 to 8.7. This was the ‘Wilsonian moment’ and its impact was authentically global, not only transforming the landscape that had once been the Habsburg monarchy, but causing the earth to move uneasily under the European empires that had won the war. But it was only a moment. In the two decades after 1922 numerous democracies failed. By 1941 fewer than 14 per cent of countries were democracies; the mean level of democracy plunged to 6.4. The levels attained in 1922 were not seen again for some seventy years.

The story of a democratic wave, flowing then ebbing, is essentially a continental European story. In the English-speaking world (excluding undemocratic and only partly Anglophone South Africa) there was
never a serious threat to democracy. Meanwhile, because the West European empires had survived the war intact, and indeed grew slightly in size, there was next to no democracy in Asia and Africa before or after the war. Japan, as we shall see, was the only Asian country to experience the democratic wave. In Latin America a few countries did go from more or less democratic regimes to dictatorships: Argentina, where the army overthrew the Radical president, Hipólito Irigoyen, in 1930, as well as Guatemala, Honduras and Bolivia. But the majority of countries south of the Rio Grande were not democracies to begin with and stayed that way. One, Costa Rica, was a democracy throughout. A few – Colombia, Peru and Paraguay – actually achieved modest progress towards democracy between the wars. Chile suffered a military coup in 1924, but constitutional rule was restored by General Carlos Ibáñez in 1932.

Of twenty-eight European countries – using the broadest credible definition of Europe – nearly all had acquired some form of representative government before, during or after the First World War. Yet eight were dictatorships by 1925, and a further five by 1933. Five years later only ten democracies remained. Russia, as we have seen, was the first to go after the Bolsheviks shut down the Constituent Assembly in 1918. In Hungary the franchise was restricted as early as 1920. Kemal, fresh from his trouncing of the Greeks, established what was effectively a one-party state in Turkey in 1923, rather than see his policies of secularism challenged by an Islamic opposition. However, it was events in Italy the previous year that seemed to set a more general pattern.

Benito Mussolini was the first European leader not only to dispense with multi-party democracy but also to proclaim a new fascist regime. A blacksmith’s son, a socialist and the author of two crudely anticlerical books,
The Cardinal’s Mistress
and
John Huss the Veracious
, Mussolini had switched to nationalism even before the Italian Socialists opposed their country’s entry into the First World War. The Roman
fasces
– the bundle of rods of chastisement that symbolized the power of the state – had been adopted by various pro-war groups; it was one of these that Mussolini joined. Here was the formula for fascism: socialism plus nationalism plus war. After a brief and undistinguished period of military service, Mussolini reverted to journalism, his true
métier
. But his political moment came with peace.
Like their counterparts all over Europe, Italy’s political establishment felt vulnerable as the Bolshevik contagion swept into the factories of Turin and the villages of the Po Valley. With his flashy charisma, Mussolini offered an echo of Francesco Crispi, the hero of the previous generation of Italian nationalists. With his newly formed
Fasci di Combattimento
, he offered muscle in the form of gangs of ex-soldiers, the
squadristi
. Even before his distinctly theatrical March on Rome on October 29, 1922 – which was more photo-opportunity than coup, since the fascists lacked the capability to seize power by force
*
– Mussolini was invited to form a government by the king, Victor Emmanuel III, who had declined to impose martial law. The old Liberals were confident they could continue business as usual. They underestimated Mussolini’s appetite for power; it was entirely in character that at one point he held seven ministerial portfolios as well as the premiership. The press, the only thing he was competent to control, began to promote him as an omnipotent Duce, but behind the surface glamour there was always the threat of violence. Following the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 (almost certainly ordered by Mussolini) political opposition was suppressed. The likes of the Leninist Antonio Gramsci were consigned to prison. Henceforth, the National Fascist Party brooked no competitors. Newspaper editors were required to be fascists, and teachers to swear an oath of loyalty. Parliament and even trade unions continued to exist, but as sham entities, subordinated to Mussolini’s dictatorship.

Italy was far from unusual in having dictatorship by royal appointment. Other dictators were themselves monarchs. The Albanian President, Ahmed Bey Zogu, declared himself King Zog I in 1928. In Yugoslavia King Alexander staged a coup in 1929, restored parliamentarism in 1931 and was assassinated in1934; thereafter the Regent Paul re-established royal dictatorship. In Bulgaria King Boris III seized power in 1934. In Greece the king dissolved parliament and in
1936 installed General Ioannis Metaxas as dictator. Two years later Romania’s King Carol established a royal dictatorship of his own. In Hungary there was no king, but the political elites retained the fiction that the country was a monarchy, with Admiral Miklós Horthy as Regent; power was wielded in his name by two strongmen, first Count Stephen Bethlen and then Gyula Gömbös. Elsewhere it was elected presidents who simply did away with parliaments. Antanas Smetona established a dictatorship in Lithuania in 1926. Konstantin Päts ruled Estonia by decree for four years as
Riigihoidja
(Protector) and then President after 1934, the same year that Prime Minister (later President) Karlis Ulmanis dissolved parliament in Latvia.

In other cases, it was the army that seized power. General Jósef Piłsudski, Poland’s Cromwell, marched on Warsaw in 1926 to become
de facto
dictator until his death in 1935, when much, though not all, of his power passed to another soldier, Edward Śmigły-Rydz. In Spain there was a constitutional monarchy from 1917 until 1923, then a military dictatorship under Primo de Rivera until 1930, then a republic that drifted steadily to the Left, culminating in the formation of the Popular Front coalition, which included both Communists and Socialists. After a bitter three-year civil war initiated in 1936 by a group of army officers and supported by the parties of the National Front, General Francisco Franco established himself as dictator, the beneficiary not only of German and Italian intervention but also of the debilitating ‘civil war within the civil war’ between the various factions of the Left. The transition in Portugal was similar, though smoother. There, the army seized power in 1926; six years later the finance minister António de Oliveira Salazar became premier, promulgating an authoritarian constitution which established him as dictator the following year. Engelbert Dollfuss tried to pull off the same trick in Austria, governing by decree after March 1933. Though assassinated in July 1934, he was able to bequeath a functioning authoritarian system to his successor Kurt Schuschnigg.

Considering the emphasis the new dictatorships laid on their supposedly distinctive nationalistic traditions, they all looked remarkably alike: the coloured shirts, the shiny boots, the martial music, the strutting leaders, the gangster violence. At first sight, then, there was little to distinguish the German version of dictatorship from all the
rest – except perhaps that Hitler was marginally more absurd than his counterparts. As late as 1939, Adolf Hitler could still be portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in his film
The Great Dictator
as an essentially comic figure, bawling incomprehensible speeches, striking preposterous poses and frolicking with a large inflatable globe. Yet there were in reality profound differences between National Socialism and fascism. Nearly all the dictatorships of the inter-war period were at root conservative, if not downright reactionary. The social foundations of their power were what remained of the pre-industrial
ancien régime:
the monarchy, the aristocracy, the officer corps and the Church, supported to varying degrees by industrialists fearful of socialism and by frivolous intellectuals who were bored of democracy’s messy compromises.
*
The main function the dictators performed was to crush the Left: to break their strikes, prohibit their parties, deny voice to their voters, arrest and, if it was deemed necessary, kill their leaders. One of the few measures they took that went beyond simple social restoration was to introduce new ‘corporate’ institutions supposed to regiment economic life and protect loyal supporters from the vagaries of the market. In 1924 the French historian Élie Halévy nicely characterized fascist Italy as ‘the land of tyranny… a regime extremely agreeable for travellers, where trains arrive and leave on time, where there is no strike in ports or public transport’. ‘The bourgeois’, he added, ‘are beaming.’ It was, as Renzo De Felice said in his vast and apologetic biography of the Duce, ‘the old regime in a black shirt’. Even the Catholic Church, which the young Mussolini had despised,
was accommodated under the terms of the 1929 Concordat. True, there were fascist leaders and movements in some of these countries whose rhetoric went further, conjuring up visions of national regeneration rather than merely reaffirming the old order. But the fascism of the
Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista
– to give the Spanish fascist party its full, grandiose title – was only a small component of Franco’s fundamentally conservative support; the key word in Franco’s merged
Falange Española Tradicionalista
was the last one. In other cases, notably in Austria, Hungary and Romania, the dictatorship acted to suppress or at least restrain fascist parties.