The War that Ended Peace
Page 38
Yet did European socialists really want victory at that price? Would it not be better both to work against war and use peaceful means to acquire power? The spread of the franchise and the improvement in the conditions of the working classes, especially in western Europe, seemed to promise another route using the ballot box, the law, and co-operation with other political parties where their interests overlapped rather than that of bloody revolution. The attempt to revise the Marxist orthodoxy which held that change occurred through the violent clash between one class and another caused painful and divisive debates within the European socialist parties, notably the German Social Democratic Party, and was to shake the Second International as well. After many debates in which the works of the great socialist fathers Marx and Engels were ransacked for support by both sides, the German socialists voted to uphold revolutionary orthodoxy. The irony was that they were in practice becoming reformist, even respectable. The trade unions, whose membership was growing, were perfectly prepared to work with business to get benefits for their members and, at the local level, socialist members of such bodies as town councils co-operated with middle-class parties. At the national level, however, the socialists kept to the old stance of hostility, voting against the government on all occasions, and their deputies ostentatiously remained seated when the Reichstag gave its cheer for the Kaiser.74
The German socialist leadership feared, with good reason, that there were many in the government who would have liked any excuse to revive Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. Nor did the Kaiser help matters by publicly reminding his soldiers that they might have to shoot their own brothers. The election of 1907, which was fought in an upsurge of nationalist feeling in the aftermath of Germany’s brutal repression of an uprising in its colony of Southwest Africa, shook the socialists. They were accused by the nationalist right of being unpatriotic and lost forty of their eighty-three seats in the Reichstag. This in turn strengthened the moderate wing of the party: a new SPD deputy, Gustav Noske, promised in his maiden speech in the Reichstag that he would repel foreign aggression ‘as implacably as any member of the bourgeoisie’.75 The party leadership also did its best to keep its own left wing under control, resisting all suggestions for general strikes or revolutionary activities.76 If the German government had been wiser and picked up on the many signals that the SPD was no longer a serious threat to the established order, it might well have brought the socialists into mainstream politics. Instead the government continued to treat the socialists with suspicion, doubting their loyalty. As a result the socialist leadership had little reason to abandon their lip service to Marxist orthodoxy, whatever they and their members were doing in practice.
The key person responsible for this mix of ideological conformity and timidity was a small, slim man, August Bebel. He was the SPD’s chief organiser, its main parliamentary spokesman and the man largely responsible for maintaining the adherence to Marxism. His parents were working class, his father a non-commissioned officer in the old Prussian army and his mother a domestic servant. By the time he was thirteen he was an orphan and his remaining relatives apprenticed him to a carpenter. In the 1860s he was converted to Marxism and devoted the rest of his life to politics. He opposed both Germany’s war of unification against Austria in 1866 and its war against France in 1870 and was consequently convicted of treason. Although he used his time in prison to read widely and to write a tract on women’s rights, he always remained more comfortable with organising – at which he was a master – than theorising. He helped to found the Social Democratic Party in 1875 and built it into a large and well-disciplined organisation.
Bebel was part of the German delegation at the founding of the Second International and over the years the SPD became its most important member thanks to its size and discipline. The German prescription for the constituent members of the International was simple and rigid: they must keep the class struggle in mind at all times and there must be no compromise, no deals with bourgeois parties, no taking part in bourgeois governments or supporting bourgeois causes. At the 1904 congress in Amsterdam, Bebel condemned the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès for supporting the French republic during the Dreyfus affair: ‘Monarchy or republic – both are class states, both are a form of state to maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie, both are designed to protect the capitalist order of society.’ The Germans and their allies, who included the more doctrinaire French socialists, pushed through a resolution condemning any attempts to move away from the class struggle ‘in such a way that instead of conquering political power by defeating our opponents, a policy of coming to terms with the existing order is followed’. Jaurès, who believed passionately in socialist solidarity, accepted the resolution. Where others might have despaired or been bitter he simply set himself to work to bring together the different factions in both the French and the international socialist movement.77
It was typical of Jaurès that the cause was more important than himself and that he did not bear grudges. In his own life his friendships crossed ideological lines and in politics he was always ready to reach out to his opponents. ‘His human sympathy was so universal’, said Romain Rolland, ‘that he could be neither nihilistic or fanatical. Every act of intolerance repelled him.’78 Among the socialist leaders before 1914 Jaurès stands out for his common sense, his grasp of political realities, his willingness to work for compromises and his optimism. With an unshakeable trust in reason and the essential goodness of human nature, he believed until the day he died that the purpose of politics was to build a better world. Although he had studied Marx and the rest of the socialist canon thoroughly, his socialism was never doctrinaire. Unlike Marx he did not see history unfolding itself in an inevitable pattern through class struggle; for Jaurès there was always room for human initiative and idealism, always the possibility of different and more peaceful paths to the future. The world he wanted was one based on justice and freedom for all, and one that brought happiness. A goal of socialism, he once said, should be to allow the common people ‘to savor all the joys of life which are now reserved for the privileged’.79
Solid and broad-shouldered with an open, friendly face and beautiful deep-set blue eyes, Jaurès barrelled through his life with enormous energy. He was both a consummate politician and a thoughtful intellectual who could have been a great classical scholar. He was a clever, even brilliant man, but this did not make him arrogant or unkind. He married a dull woman who did not share his interests but he remained loyal to her. Although he had lost his own faith in God as a young man, he raised no objections when she gave their children a religious upbringing. He loved good food and wine but would frequently forget to eat when he was engaged in his other enthusiasm of good conversation. He did not care about wealth or status. His apartment in Paris was comfortable but shabby and his desk was made of boards set on trestles. He himself dressed in clothes which, said Ramsay MacDonald, who saw him at a socialist congress in 1907, looked as though they had been thrown on with a pitchfork. With a battered straw hat on his head, Jaurès strolled along completely unselfconsciously, said MacDonald, ‘like a youth upon a new world, or a strolling player who had mastered fate and discovered how to fill the moments with happy unconcern’.80
Jaurès was born in 1859 in Tarn, in the southern part of France, to a middle-class family but experienced what it was like to be close to poverty as his father moved restlessly from one unsuccessful pursuit to another. His mother, who seems to have been the strong one in the family, managed to send him to a local boarding school where he won more prizes than any other student ever had. His talent and accomplishments took him to Paris for further schooling and ultimately to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, then as now the hothouse in which much of the elite of France is formed. Even at a relatively young age, Jaurès showed a strong concern for social issues and it was not surprising that he chose to go into politics. First elected to parliament in 1885, he was defeated in 1889 and spent the next four years teaching in Toulouse and serving on the m
unicipal council, practical experience which was to give him a lasting appreciation of the importance of bread-and-butter issues to voters. He served as a member of the French parliament for thirty-five years and was head of the French Socialist Party for ten of those. He was a great speaker. Mopping his brow from the effort, he spoke with deep conviction, eloquence and emotion whether in parliament, socialist congresses, or the towns and villages of France as he criss-crossed the country. He found time as well to write copiously and he edited the new socialist paper L’Humanité from 1904 and wrote over 2,000 articles for it during the next ten years.
After his defeat in 1904 at the congress of the Second International Jaurès became increasingly concerned about the deterioration in the international situation and devoted much of his energies to the cause of peace. He had long supported arbitration and disarmament but he now studied war itself. Being Jaurès, he undertook a serious study, reading military theory and the history of war and working with a young French army captain, Henry Gérard. One night as the two men sat in a café in Paris, Jaurès described what a future war would be like: ‘the cannon-fire and the bombs; entire nations decimated; millions of soldiers strewn in mud and blood; millions of corpses …’ During a battle on the Western Front some years later, a friend asked Gérard why he was staring into space. ‘I feel as though all this is familiar to me,’ Gérard replied. ‘Jaurès prophesied this hell, this total annihilation.’81 Within France, Jaurès proposed transforming the French military from a professional force focussing on the offensive into a citizens’ militia such as the Swiss had where soldiers did six months of service and then came back for short spells of training. This new army would be used only to defend the country. That, he argued, was how the French Revolution had defeated the armies sent against it by its enemies – by arming the nation. Not surprisingly, his ideas were rejected by the political and military establishment although in retrospect his stress on the defensive made a lot of sense.82
He did not have much more success with stirring up the Second International to action even though the issue of what it should do to prevent war or in the face of a general European war was on the agenda at every one of its congresses from 1904 onwards. Unfortunately it was clear from early on that profound and potentially damaging divisions of opinion existed. Jaurès and those who thought like him, such as the British Labour MP Keir Hardie, believed that socialists should use all weapons possible against war, whether agitation in parliament, mass demonstrations, strikes or, if necessary, an uprising. The German socialists, however, for all their revolutionary talk, showed the same caution in practice as they did at home. The key issue over which the different sides fell out was whether there should be agreement on concrete steps to be taken should war come. The Germans were simply not prepared to commit themselves or the Second International in advance to such measures as calling a general strike even though most socialists (and indeed Europe’s political and military leaders as well) believed that this would make it impossible for nations to wage war. Jaurès, for his part, was not prepared to split the socialist movement by insisting on it. The differences were concealed behind fine-sounding resolutions which condemned war, asserted the determination of the working classes of the world to prevent it, and were deliberately vague about how this would be done. As the Stuttgart congress resolution said in 1907: ‘The International is not able to lay down the exact form of working class action against militarism at the right place and time, as this naturally differs in different countries.’83 Seven years later the International was going to be faced with the biggest challenge of its existence.
In the remaining years before the Great War, the Second International remained confident that it could work effectively for peace. Despite its rhetoric, it was losing some of its old tendency to see capitalism in black and white terms as the enemy. With the spread of investment and trade, capitalism was knitting the world together and surely this made the chances of war less. Even the old hardliner Bebel said in 1911: ‘I openly admit that perhaps the greatest guarantee of world peace lies in this international export of capital.’ And when the powers successfully managed the crises in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913, these seemed more evidence that capitalism was now on the side of peace. At its Basle congress in 1912 the Second International went so far as to state that it would now work with middle-class pacifists.84
There was also encouraging evidence of socialist solidarity in the face of international tensions. In January 1910, the socialist parties from the different Balkan countries met in Belgrade to find common ground. ‘We must break down the frontiers’, their statement said, ‘that separate these peoples whose cultures are identical, these countries whose economic and political fortunes are closely linked, and thus shake off the yoke of foreign domination which robs nations of the right to determine their own fate.’85 In the spring of 1911, as relations were particularly strained between Austria-Hungary and Italy, socialists from both countries campaigned against higher military expenditures and the threat of war.86 The moment of greatest hope came in the autumn of 1912 when the First Balkan War broke out. Socialists across Europe, 200,000 of them in Berlin, another 100,000 outside Paris, held massive demonstrations for peace, and the Second International held an emergency congress. Over 500 delegates from twenty-three different socialist parties (only the Serbs had chosen not to come) met in the Swiss city of Basle. Children dressed in white led them through the streets to the great red sandstone Gothic cathedral. Luminaries of the socialist movement climbed up into the pulpit to condemn the war, indeed war in general, and to assert the power of the working classes. Jaurès, who spoke last, made one of his greatest speeches. ‘We will leave this hall’, he concluded, ‘committed to the salvation of peace and civilization’. The congregation, for that is what it seemed, sang one last song and the organ played Bach. ‘I am still dizzy with all I have lived through,’ the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai wrote ecstatically to a friend.87 Three months later, the two largest parties in the Second International, the French and the German, issued a joint manifesto condemning the arms race and promising to work together for peace.88 That summer, however, while the French socialists were opposing a proposal that would make the French army bigger, the German Social Democrats in the Reichstag voted for an increased budget for the German army.
The fundamental weakness of the Second International was not merely national differences on strategy and tactics; it was nationalism itself. This too was masked by language; at every congress before 1914 speakers from all countries uttered noble sentiments about the international brotherhood of the working classes and no doubt most meant what they said. As early as 1891, however, a Dutch delegate to the Second International’s second congress had uttered the awkward but prophetic words: ‘The international sentiments presupposed by socialism do not exist among our German brothers.’89 He could have said the same of the other socialist parties and of the unions. Nationalism, it turned out, was not merely something whipped up and imposed on the rest of the nation by the ruling classes; it had deep roots in the different European societies. It manifested in the nationalistic songs of French workers or the pride which German workers took in their military service.90 It is easier perhaps to see the impact of nationalism on the Second International in retrospect, the inability, for example, of the different socialist parties to agree on how May Day should be celebrated, the polemics in 1905–6 between the leaders of German and French unions during the first crisis over Morocco, or the criticisms of the German and French socialist parties of the other’s way of doing business.91 The attempt in 1910 by socialists in the Balkans to build a united front foundered the following year as the Bulgarian socialists who were already busy fighting among themselves turned on the Serbs.92
In 1908 the Austrian Socialist Party criticised its own government’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina but showed little sympathy for Serbian resentment at the action. Indeed, Austrian socialists tended to assume that their own country had a civilis
ing mission in the Balkans.93 Nor were they alone. Although it was a given in socialist theory that imperialism was bad, in the years before 1914 there was an increasing tendency for European socialists to defend the possession of colonies on the grounds that the superior civilisation was bringing benefits to the inferior one. Some German socialists went further still and argued that Germany needed more colonies for the economic benefits they brought the German working classes.94 In 1911, when Italy launched an openly imperialist war on the Ottoman Empire in order to seize territory in North Africa, the right wing of the Italian Socialist Party voted with the government. Although the party later expelled the deputies its secretary made it clear that he resented the pressure from the Second International: ‘All criticism must cease and all requests for more energetic manifestations – from whatever quarter they emanate – must in justice be described as exaggerated and irrational.’95
The following year the Belgian Camille Huysmans, who ran the Second International’s bureau, had to give up temporarily the idea of holding its next congress in Vienna because of tensions among the socialists of different nationalities. ‘The situation in Austria and Bohemia’, he wrote, ‘is quite deplorable. Our comrades there devour each other. Discord has reached a peak. Feelings are running high and if we assemble in Vienna we shall have a congress of strife which will make the worst possible impression on the world. Not only the Austrians and Czechs are in this situation; the same is true of Poland, the Ukraine, Russia, and Bulgaria.’96 The relationship between German and French socialists was the cornerstone of the Second International (just as that between Germany and France is the key one for the European Union today) and both sides repeatedly stressed how important it was. Yet in 1912 Charles Andler, a professor of German at the Sorbonne, known for his sympathies towards both socialism and Germany, brought into the open an uncomfortable truth. German workers, he wrote in a series of articles, were more German than they were internationalists and they would, if war came, for whatever reason, support Germany.97