Written after Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Huntington’s Class of Civilisations, but before the ‘war on terror’, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of China, the 2008/09 Great Recession, the Arab uprisings, the rise of the far right, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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Why then do the European states claim for themselves the right to spread civilization and manners to different continents? Why not to Europe itself?
– Joseph Roth, 1937
“Modern democracy, like the nation-state it is so closely associated with, is basically the product of the protracted domestic and international experimentation which followed the collapse of the old European order in 1914.
In the short run, both Wilson and Lenin failed to build the ‘better world’ they dreamed of. The communist revolution across Europe did not materialize, and the building of socialism was confined to the Soviet Union; the crisis of liberal democracy followed soon after as one country after another embraced authoritarianism.
Ruling elites in many countries soon showed themselves to be anti-communists first, democrats second. This became clear as early as 1919 in Hungary with the suppression of the Béla Kun revolutionary government and the installation of Admiral Horthy’s regime. In Italy Liberal elites supported the formation of a Fascist government in 1922. Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain; Portugal’s republic succumbed to the dictatorship of Professor Salazar. Poland took a sharp turn away from parliamentary rule in 1926, following a period of hyperinflation and political instability. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, one government after another moved rightwards.
The workers’ and soldiers’ councils which had been set up at the same time, inspired by the Bolshevik example, were forced to accept the primacy of parliamentary rule.
In this way, amid the chaos and confusion of post-war central Europe, where nationalist paramilitaries, bandits, peasant radicals and pro-Bolsheviks were all seeking to exploit the collapse of the old regime, middle-class lawyers and politicians tried to lay down the bases of a new, democratic, constitutional order.
Where the new constitutions departed sharply and most controversially from nineteenth-century liberal values was in their extension of rights from political and civil liberties to areas of health, welfare, the family and social security. The goals of social policy – new in their ambition and promise – were set out in constitutional provisions, not only in countries like Germany and Austria where the Social Democrats held power at the end of the war, but even in Romania, which talked about the ‘social rights of man’ and in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which mentioned land reform and the need for social and economic legislation. The Spanish constitution declared the country ‘a democratic republic of workers of all classes’ and laid down that property might be expropriated ‘for social uses’.
This social democratic agenda was clearly a response to events in Russia, and reflected a desire to win the masses away from Bolshevism and over to parliamentarism. ‘Either Wilson or Lenin,’ wrote Hugo Preuss, who drafted the Weimar constitution and saw it as a bulwark against the Bolshevization of Germany.
Today, it is hard to see the inter-war experiment with democracy for the novelty it was: yet we should certainly not assume that democracy is suited to Europe. Though we may like to think democracy’s victory in the Cold War proves its deep roots in Europe’s soil, history tells us otherwise.* Triumphant in 1918, it was virtually extinct twenty years on. Maybe it was bound to collapse in a time of political crisis and economic turmoil, for its defenders were too utopian, too ambitious, too few. In its focus upon constitutional rights and its neglect of social responsibilities, it often seemed more fitted to the nineteenth than to the twentieth century. By the 1930s the signs were that most Europeans no longer wished to fight for it; there were dynamic non-democratic alternatives to meet the challenges of modernity. Europe found other, authoritarian, forms of political order no more foreign to its traditions, and no less efficient as organizers of society, industry and technology.
In the long run, the 1940s were important for another reason too. The exhausting, murderous experience of total war – the culmination of nearly a century of imperial and national struggles inside and outside the continent – led to a growing weariness with ideological politics across the continent. The great tide of mass mobilization began to ebb, and with it the militarism and collectivism of the inter-war years. Believers became cynics at worst, at best apathetic, resigned and domesticated. People rediscovered democracy’s quiet virtues – the space it left for privacy, the individual and the family. Thus after 1945, democracy re-emerged in the West, revitalized by the challenge of war against Hitler, newly conscious of its social responsibilities. Only now it faced competition from the Left not the Right, as the Red Army, having crushed Nazi Germany’s imperial dreams, brought communism to the new Soviet empire in eastern Europe.
The two systems armed themselves for a war that could not be fought, and competed to provide welfare for their citizens, and to bring economic growth and material prosperity. Both offered some astonishing initial achievements; but only one proved capable of adapting to the growing pressures of global capitalism. With the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, not only the Cold War but the whole era of ideological rivalries which began in 1917 came to an end.
*My italics.
Excerpts from Dark Continent by Mark Mazower, 1998, pp. 1-10
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