In Europe between Democracy and Dictatorship, 1900-1945, Conan Fischer echoes the Cold War refrain of a choice between democracy, identified as free market capitalism, and dictatorship, in which he conflates the “totalitarian” systems of Communism and Nazism. Aside from abolishing parliament and freedoms of press and assembly, the two systems shared a cynical belief that individual initiative (i.e. capital) cannot be tolerated under one-party rule. In this light, he portrays the economist John Maynard Keynes as partly sharing this negative view of laissez-faire capitalism. Fischer concedes that all European nations, including the U.S., had very few options to state-centered welfare reforms, given the debts following World War I and the reparations regime set up at Versailles in 1919. However, he suggests throughout that this new trend of state involvement in economics ultimately weakened liberal governments, while strengthening the authoritarianism emerging in Central and Eastern Europe. In fact, he implicates statism, not imperialism, as the economic foundation for militant forms of nationalism that contributed to both world wars, as he states:
[G]overnmental intervention in national economies, often unavoidable under the circumstances of the time, served to undermine the internationalism of the global economy. Governments are by their nature national, and politicians, whether democratic or fascist, felt beholden to national opinion.
Leaving aside the astounding claim that fascists “felt beholden to national opinion,” the idea that capitalist economy is essentially “international” and opposed to the State’s budgetary needs assumes that economic strategies are divorced from national concerns of finance capital, GDP, and infrastructure development that form the heart of a still nationally-based corporate elite. Similarly, Fischer appears to extend the origins of the European Union, sketched in his conclusion, back to the pre-World War I European context. We have to be clear that just because European companies worked together before World War I in the mutual interests of imperial geopolitics, in spite of their nations’ growing suspicions of one another, does not mean that global economic cooperation, such as we witness today, must have been in utero prior to 1914. And this is exactly what Fischer tries to argue in a lengthy excursus of the causes of World War I, in which descriptions of European economic cooperation as “internationalism” function to negate Lenin’s claim that industrial capitalism (a motive force behind imperialism) caused the war.
While claims of direct imperialist (or economic) causes of World War I have been rejected by historians, a case can be made for the roots of the secret treaties, the naval arms race, and inflexible foreign policies lying in Europe’s dysfunctional diplomatic culture, which privileged crude demands of imperialist supremacy (including a continental “balance of power”), as the war’s main causes. In fact, we continue to see the pre-war alarms raised by imperialist concerns, as recounted by Fischer himself, in the question after World War I of the industrial capacity of Germany, to rearm and eventually overrun an otherwise victorious France.
In fact the real culprit of belligerence between 1914 and 1945 was not so much antagonism between democracy and dictatorship, emphasized by Cold War histories, but political blindness to the contradictory shift in balance between still nationally-based markets, and the political elites that promoted them, and the international opportunities (colonies, resources, and potential markets) that the former (in their limited industrial scope and war-centered strategy) could not hope to integrate, direct, or absorb. This was the case whether it was overseas regions or eastern (or southeastern) Europe. Consequently, nationalism, originally based on the liberal Nation-State, has always served as the rallying point for economic interests, one-sided trade policies, and the global search for new markets, and capitalism, far from providing an “internationalist” alternative to the socio-political order promoting the Nation-State, continues to work hand-in-glove with nationally-defined interests, increasingly rephrased during the inter-war years by elements espousing even more horrific expansionism.
This expansion came after World War I in Fascism and Nazism, in the wake of defeat, territorial losses, and extensive political, social unrest that plagued Italy and Germany. Only France among the Western victors, as Fischer carefully details from new research, sought expansion in the industrial Ruhr and Moselle districts of Germany, as Prime Minister Poincaré planned the 1923 Occupation by exploiting an provision in the Versailles Treaty that allowed any victor power to seek whatever means to punish Germany for any default on reparations.
The other partner in the Entente, Russia did not fare as well as its Western allies. In presenting the Russian Revolution and the construction of the Soviet Union, Fischer follows the anti-Soviet line of historian Richard Pipes, who presents the Bolsheviks as a terrorist clique that managed to hijack the Russian people into a 70-year political disaster. However, one has to ask the question, how did such a “clique” manage what no other revolutionary clique (think Jacobins) had previously done? More explanation is needed, and Fischer omits the critical history of Lenin’s building the Party and seeing it through two revolutions, the political reaction during the Civil War (enjoined by Tsarist officers, Cadets, and anti-Lenin Mensheviks), and the change of course under NEP. Fischer also leaves out developments after Lenin’s second stroke and his Last Testament, which touched off the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin and shaped the subsequent path toward industrialization. There appears to be no effort to provide more than a uni-dimensional narrative of this complex history, while providing plenty of details and historical sensitivity to the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism.
In fact Fischer seems to fall prey to the often fantasized, but false choice of presenting the lesser of two evils in Mussolini’s Fascism. As Fischer asserts:
Of the two Bolshevism was undoubtedly the more extreme, for despite its declared intention “to forge a totalitarian state and society” Fascism accommodated significant elements of the existing domestic establishment (including the courts, the monarchy and the church), respected existing property relations, and initially at least, conducted its foreign policy within the framework laid down by the Paris Peace Settlement.
Fischer discounts the thug-style politics with which the Fascist squads persecuted and murdered their political opponents, many of them liberal and socialist members of the “domestic establishment,” as well as downplaying the violent expansionism of Fascist foreign policy, which Mussolini unleashed on the smaller, less-protected nations of North Africa, not to mention his secret gassing of Libyan rebels in the late 1920s. On top of that, recent research has uncovered the diary of Mussolini’s mistress Ciara Petacci, which documents the leader’s murderous fantasies against Italian Jews, well before Hitler’s demand that he shift them off to the east. Historians can no longer dismiss the racist profile of Italian Fascism.
Understandably, no such historical blind spots have accrued around the corpse of German fascism. Nazi aggression against Eastern Europe (namely Poland and Ukraine), and the subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler solidified the “Grand Alliance” (U.S., Britain, the Soviet Union). It appears that here an alternative title to Fischer’s “democracy vs. dictatorship” offers itself, one that might emphasize international cooperation, in the similar spirit of the European Union, namely a contrast between the narrow visions of nationalism, undeniably the cause behind World Wars I and II, and the lesson of international union in the face of a common aggressor. It seems to me that Europe suffered no real “decline” after the World Wars, as Fischer suggests in his conclusion, as much as achieved a higher level of development, one born from the ashes of nationalist arrogance and the unregulated boom-bust of market economies. These latter failed precisely because they placed the desires of national, elite minorities above the “bread and butter” issues of common, everyday people, whether under the iron heel of Stalinist collectivism, fascism, or Hooverite austerity. The need to take full stock of the damaging effects of nationalism and the ongoing search for higher levels of international cooperation should be the lesson of Europe from 1900-1945, a lesson of “union” that Europeans seem to have gotten, and which they could patiently teach their cousins across the pond, who appear to be lulling themselves to sleep again with mad dreams of “superpower” exceptionalism.
