Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  Hessel was not a communist. He had joined de Gaulle’s forces in London and was parachuted into occupied France in March 1944, an act of extraordinary bravery, especially for a Jew, even with false papers. (He was betrayed and arrested in July.) But Hessel’s political ideals were certainly well to the left of de Gaulle’s idea of France. De Gaulle was viewed by the French left much as Churchill was by many people in Britain, a great man of his time, no doubt, but a reactionary obstacle to progress. Marguerite Duras, who had been part of a left-wing resistance group, described de Gaulle as “by definition a leader of the Right.” De Gaulle, she wrote, “would like to bleed the people of their vital strength. He’d like them to be weak and devout, he’d like them to be Gaullist, like the bourgeoisie, he’d like them to be bourgeois.”20

  She wrote this in April 1945. The feeling would persist, and grow even stronger, as colonial wars in North Africa and Indochina became ever grimmer. But de Gaulle, although undoubtedly a conservative, and quick to block the former resistance from taking political power, knew that compromises with progressisme had to be made. It was under de Gaulle that the Renault motor factories and five big banks were nationalized in 1945, as well as coal, gas, and public transport. And it was to de Gaulle, in December of that same year, that Jean Monnet, a technocrat from Cognac who had spent much of the war in Washington, D.C., presented his plans for modernizing the French economy. His schemes to put the state in charge of industry, mining, and banking were typical of the faith in planning. Planning, and yet more planning, was the way to a better future, not just because it promised greater fairness, but because it would prevent Europeans from embarking on a catastrophic war again.

  And so it went all over Europe. Arthur Koestler, that consummate European survivor, a Jewish ex-communist who had escaped from a fascist jail in Spain, wrote with considerable misgivings that “if we are in for an era of managerial super-states, the intelligentsia is bound to become a special sector in the Civil Service.”21 Even though the resistance organizations failed to become the political force they had hoped to be, many of their left-wing ideals were indeed carried out. Social democratic governments were elected in the Netherlands and Belgium. Land reforms in Sicily, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland made smallholders out of millions of peasants, often at the expense of unpopular minorities such as the Germans in East Prussia and the Sudetenland. In the Soviet zone of Germany, the social democrats were trying, in vain as it turned out, to make common cause with the communists.

  There was, in fact, a strong pan-European element in all of this; New Jerusalem as a European rather than just a national idea. Major Denis Healey, later to become an important cabinet minister in several Labour governments, landed with the British Army in Sicily and Anzio. His explanation for the left-wing leanings of his fellow soldiers was “contact with the resistance movements and a feeling that a revolution was sweeping Europe.”22 Healey had been a communist, but broke with the party in 1939 over the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But a cold splinter of his old communist heart was still in evidence in 1945 when he told the Labour Party conference to help socialist revolutions in Europe. Labour, he insisted, should not be “too pious and self-righteous when occasionally facts are brought to one’s notice that our comrades on the Continent are being extremist.”23

  In the case of Cyril Connolly, his Francophilia and love of European culture, as much as his political views, led him to conclude that only a united Europe would serve as a barrier to another suicidal conflict. “Every European war is a war lost by Europe,” he wrote in Horizon in December 1944, and “a war lost by Europe is a war lost by England; a war lost by England leaves the world poorer.” Never again, to him, meant “a European Federation—not a nominal federation, but a Europe without passports—a cultural entity where everyone is free to go where they like . . . If Europe cannot exchange economic nationalism for international regionalism it will perish as the Greek City States perished, in a fizzle of mutual hate and distrust under the heel of an invader.”

  That Connolly was not just a Europhile eccentric is proved by the fact that many others shared his views, including Churchill himself, even though it was never quite clear whether the former prime minister wanted Britain to be part of the new European construction. Probably not. In a speech he gave in Zurich a year after the war, Churchill expressed his enthusiasm for a “United States of Europe.” But it would be a united Europe with “Britain and the British Commonwealth of Nations” among its “friends and sponsors.”24 However, the role of the left remained highly contentious. Connolly believed that a European Federation could only be brought about by the left, that is “a European Front Populaire which is determined to be strong and also to avoid a Third World War.” Similar ideas were being promoted by the Soviet Union, especially in Germany, whose unity, as Moscow saw it, was supposed to be achieved under communism. After having lunch at the French embassy in London, Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary about the dangers of communist propaganda: “To combat this we must provide an alternative ideal; the only possible ideal is a federal Germany in a federal Europe.”25

  The other argument for Europe was a patriotic one, the idea that national grandeur could be regained only in a united Europe. This notion was most pronounced in France, held by technocrats in the Vichy regime no less than by some of their opponents. The key figure was again Jean Monnet, whose dreams of unity transcended French borders. His life, recorded in his memoirs, was a constant attempt to seize “exceptional moments” to overcome diversity and forge unity. May 1940, when the Germans were rampaging across France, was such a moment. One year before, Monnet had tried to interest Neville Chamberlain in a union between France and Britain. In 1940, Churchill was prepared to go along with idea, which then foundered on mostly French suspicions.

  State planning was Monnet’s patriotic contribution to France. This, he told de Gaulle, was the only way back to French grandeur. To achieve this, it was essential to capitalize on the unity of all French citizens. This time, 1945, was the perfect moment for such “collective efforts, because the patriotic spirit of Liberation was still present and had not yet found a way to express itself in a grand project.”26 The first grand project was the modernization of France by nationalizing the economy and directing German coal to French factories. The next project was European, the Coal and Steel Community, then the European Economic Community, and finally, in Monnet’s dream, the full grandeur of a United Europe.

  De Gaulle liked to call this European dreamer, not without affection, “L’Americain.” Monnet was that rare Frenchman who felt as much at home in Washington and London as he did in Paris. Yet there was something Continental, something faintly Roman Catholic, something not entirely in tune with liberal democracy, about Monnet’s unifying obsessions. There was a whiff of Holy Roman incense wafting over his European dreams. And his unease with party politics, naturally competitive as they were, and free market economics, uncontrolled by state bureaucrats, suggested a technocratic faith which had antecedents on the right as much as the left. Or, rather, right and left were less than meaningful categories in the technocratic utopia. It was more a belief that social justice would be delivered most efficiently by a benign authoritarian government. Churchill was not entirely wrong that this might not suit the British as much as the left-wing planners of 1945 might have hoped.

  • • •

  GERMAN TECHNOCRATS WORKING for the Third Reich were great planners too. One of the more shadowy tales of World War II is the cooperation between German planners and their European counterparts under Nazi occupation. Architects, urban planners, builders of dams and motorways, found one another, not as fellow Nazis, but as kindred spirits and fellow engineers of a new European order. For them, too, destruction was often the “exceptional moment” of opportunity.

  Rotterdam was the first city in western Europe to have its heart ripped out by bombs. The damage was not as vast as
in Warsaw, bombed eight months before Rotterdam in September 1939, but the center of the city was pretty much obliterated. Plans to rebuild Rotterdam were made almost immediately. Unhindered by democratic procedures or private interests, a committee of Dutch urban planners and engineers set out to have the rubble cleared, private property expropriated, and the city rebuilt according to rational blueprints. They were not Nazis; in fact, most were not in the least sympathetic to the German occupiers, but these highly practical men had long been impatient with the indecision, the bickering, and the general messiness of liberal democracy. Much like Jean Monnet, they believed in unified action under strong leadership. In this sense, the Nazi government gave them an opportunity to do what they had wanted all along.

  For the Germans, though not necessarily for the Dutch technocrats, there was an important pan-European dimension as well. Rotterdam would be one of the major hubs in a greater region of Germanic peoples. In the racist jargon of the German occupiers, “The Netherlands form a part of the European Lebensraum. As a member of the Germanic tribe, the Dutch people will follow the destiny of this natural bond.”27 There would be no room in the new order for the “plutocratic” prewar liberal market economy. All economies, including the Dutch, would be made to conform to a Continental planned economy (Kontinentalwirtschaft). Collective interests would trump any private interests, unless, of course, those interests happened to be those of Nazi leaders.

  The talk about Germanic tribes held no appeal for a man like Dr. J. A. Ringers, the engineer put in charge of rebuilding Rotterdam in 1940. In fact, he was later arrested for helping the Dutch resistance. But he was convinced that planned cities were the right way forward. And in the first few years of the war, the Germans were happy to share their considerable expertise with Ringers and other Dutch technocrats. This didn’t mean they always agreed. German plans to rebuild Rotterdam in the monumental fascist style were not at all what the Dutch had in mind. And, besides, the modernization of Rotterdam was not allowed to come at the expense of German port cities, such as Hamburg or Bremen. So in 1943, by which time Ringers had already been arrested, plans to rebuild came to a halt. But Ringers survived, despite a grueling time in a German concentration camp. As soon as the war was over, he was appointed minister of public works in charge of rebuilding the Netherlands. Ringers would be one of the chief engineers of the Dutch New Jerusalem, whose blueprints owed something to Karl Marx, something to prewar socialist planning, and perhaps a little more to the Nazi occupation than people care to remember.

  • • •

  THE BIGGEST PLANNERS of all were the Japanese. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Manchukuo, Japan’s Manchurian puppet state, was the most perfectly planned colony in the world, a kind of dream palace of Japanese pan-Asianism. It could not officially be called a colony, of course, as Japan was ostensibly the liberator of Asia from Western imperialism. And since the Japanese empire was also set against “selfish” Western-style free market capitalism, Manchukuo would be not just a pseudo-independent Asian state, but a showcase of collective social justice and egalitarianism. In fact, it was nothing of the sort; Japanese-built mines and factories relied on Chinese slave labor, and life for Chinese and Koreans under the Japanese Kwantung Army was brutal. But the economy, like everything else in the puppet state, was strictly controlled by the military government, and ably assisted in this enterprise by government-favored Japanese industrial companies and banks.

  The capital city of Manchukuo, known in Japanese as Shinkyo or New Capital, was little more than a small railway junction called Changchun when the Japanese set up the puppet state in 1932. Almost at once teams of Japanese planners, engineers, architects, and bureaucrats of the South Manchurian Railway and the Kwantung Army set out to design the most modern, most efficient, cleanest, most orderly city in Asia, to be built in the “New Asian” style. Shinkyo’s blueprint bore the marks of Western influence—Haussmann’s Paris, nineteenth-century British ideas on the Garden City, German Bauhaus—but the huge, modernist government buildings would be adorned with gabled Oriental roofs copied from various Japanese temples and Chinese palaces.

  On the flat northern Chinese landscape, covered in snow all winter, a brand-new city arose in five years of high-speed construction under the auspices of the State Council of Manchukuo. If Albert Speer had been Japanese, this would have been his monument to totalitarian planning: grandiose bureaucratic fortresses in the New Asian style flanking wide and perfectly straight boulevards leading to massive round plazas like the spokes of a giant wheel.* Everything had been worked out with mathematical precision. And everything worked, from the sleek South Manchurian high-speed railway trains, the “Asia Express” which always ran on time, to the flushing toilets in public housing, an innovation that was unheard of in most homes back in Japan.

  The public face of Manchukuo was Chinese, all the way up to Henry Pu’yi, the effete “last emperor” of the Qing Dynasty. Behind his throne and every Chinese official stood a Japanese puppeteer, or “deputy.” To call the Japanese rulers fascists would be inexact. Many of them were militarists, all were Japanese nationalists, and quite a few believed in the pan-Asian ideal of their official propaganda, a new Asia, led by Japan, free from Western-style capitalism and imperialism.

  All the military and government bureaucrats were dedicated to planning, unhindered by democratic procedures or the individual interests or desires of Manchukuo’s mostly Chinese subjects. Behind the sinister force of the Kwantung Army, the murderous Kempeitai police, and an assortment of Japanese gangsters and carpetbaggers was an army of highly sophisticated bureaucrats, managers, and engineers who saw the puppet state as a kind of drawing board for running a perfectly planned economy. Their plans were coated in a cultlike imperialism, revolving around the divine Japanese emperor and his royal vassal in the old “Salt Palace” in Shinkyo, the bemused, hapless, and utterly humiliated puppet emperor Pu’yi.

  Some Japanese planners were distinctly right-wing in their dedication to conservative military order; some were socialists who shared with the militarists an aversion to free market capitalism. But even the right-wing bureaucrats believed in Soviet-style five-year plans. The typical Manchukuo “reform bureaucrat” might best be described as a right-wing radical who had more in common with communists than with liberals. Kishi Nobusuke was of this type. A suave rabbit-faced bureaucratic operator, Kishi hardly looked like a strongman who ruled over huge numbers of industrial slaves. However, barely forty years old, he was one of the most powerful men in the Japanese empire. His brief was to turn Manchukuo into a state-controlled powerhouse of mining, chemicals, and heavy industries.

  Industrial policy was set, not for the profit of businesses and corporations, or not in the first place, and certainly not to satisfy Japanese consumers, who were increasingly squeezed by wartime rationing, but to expand the power of the state. Some companies did very nicely out of this. Nissan, for example, moved its headquarters to Manchukuo in 1937, where, in partnership with the government, it established a new industrial and banking conglomerate, or zaibatsu, making five-year plans and producing everything from military vehicles to torpedo boats. The Mitsubishi zaibatsu manufactured fighter planes, and Mitsui enriched itself and the Manchukuo government by monopolizing the opium trade in China. Two major figures in this sordid business were Ayukawa Gisuke, founder of the Nissan corporation, and Kishi Nobusuke, the industrial bureaucrat whose contacts with the criminal underworld would always be carefully maintained. But the interests of big business and the military did not always coincide. Even Ayukawa disapproved of Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany. War with Britain and the U.S. was not necessarily good for business, and corporations, even when they benefited from special tax breaks and subsidies, did not always take kindly to bureaucratic interference.

  What Kishi and others pioneered in Manchukuo was later put into practice in Japan itself. From the beginning of the war in China, in 1937, till the end of the Pacific War, the Japa
nese economy was effectively controlled by such government organs as the Cabinet Planning Board, the Finance Ministry, and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. The men who ran the war economy were recruited from the same network of reform bureaucrats, strategic planners, and antiliberal ideologues from left and right who had industrialized Manchukuo with callous efficiency. The minister of Commerce and Industry was none other than Kishi Nobusuke himself. In 1943, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry was renamed Ministry of Munitions, more in keeping with the true nature of the Japanese war economy. Kishi, officially as vice munitions minister, continued to run the war economy for another year. In August 26, just days after the Japanese defeat, by imperial ordinance, the Ministry of Munitions disappeared and became the Ministry of Commerce and Industry once more.

  One of the mysteries of the U.S. occupation of Japan is how the Americans allowed the Japanese to get away with such conjuring tricks. After all, Never Again was what the victors had in mind for Japan as well. There, too, 1945 would be Year Zero, the perfect moment to create a new society on the ruins. Clearly some people had to be purged. Kishi Nobusuke was arrested as a Class A war criminal, as was Ayukawa Gisuke. But the institutions they built in Japan were left pretty much intact, even as the industrial stock of Manchukuo was being systematically looted by the Soviet Red Army.

  Quite how Japan would rebuild itself was a matter of much dispute. There was a strong current of opinion in Washington that Japan should no longer be involved in heavy industry at all, but should instead specialize in products more in keeping with a quaint Oriental nation: toys, ceramic figurines, silk, paper goods, porcelain bowls, and the like. Cocktail napkins for export to the United States was one helpful suggestion.28 Japanese had different ideas. Just before the U.S. troops arrived, the head of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu wrote a letter to one of his executives talking about a “great hundred-year plan.”29 Even though this phrase, borrowed from the Chinese classics, was not meant to be taken literally, planning was still very much on Japanese minds. A year later, a report drafted by the Japanese Foreign Ministry explained that the age of laissez-faire was over, and the world had “at last entered an era of State capitalism or an age of controlled, organized capitalism.”30