THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  If Winston Churchill was right when he called the Second World War the “Unnecessary War”—because the threat of force by the West would have deterred the armed aggression by Nazi Germany, perhaps indefinitely, as proved to be the case with the Soviet Union—he was nevertheless wrong to imply that something short of a collapse of the competing systems would have given the world peace, or even an end to the outbreaks of international violence that have formed much of the history of the Long War and thus of the twentieth century. Even in Britain, these choices were not finally made by the 1930s; perhaps this is one reason why the British were so irresolute in opposing the rise of Hitler. Indeed by the 1930s there was scarcely a country in the developed world, and few in the colonial world, that had failed to produce indigenous fascist, communist, and parliamentary parties.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Struggle Continued: 1919 – 1945

  IN 1917, Bolsheviks overhrew the Russian parliamentary state and in the ensuing decades civil conflict erupted between fascist and communist militias and parliamentary governments in Germany, Italy, and Spain, with the latter wholly unable to maintain order. The contested domestic order in each of these states would ultimately be controlled by that party that was able to leverage strategic and international maneuvering into domestic primacy. In Germany, Hitler used the universal public hatred of the Versailles Treaty as the foundation for his claims to power; in Russia, Lenin's adroit removal of Russian forces from World War I served the same role.

  The relation between law and strategy, between the inner and the outer faces of the State, is maintained by history—the account given of the stewardship of the State. This account changes when the constitutional order of the State changes, as the new order sets new criteria for legitimacy. For the nation-state, these criteria were derived from its mission to improve the welfare of the nation. In a sense, all the nation-states of this era, whatever their ideology, were welfare states. For the nation-state, ideology supplies its history, and each of the contending ideologies—communist, fascist, and parliamentary—had a different account to give of the forces of history. Marx, Spengler, and Macaulay (among many others) all provided historical explanations of the political development of Europe that served to legitimate the ideological struggles of the three competing constitutional forms.

  Thus it was crucial to the rise of fascism that a particular historical account be given to the strategic events of World War I, if that conflict was to be extended and renewed.1

  Many influential groups—indeed much of German political society and of the general population—did not believe that Germany had been defeated: because Germany had been tricked into surrendering, the Allied victory in the First World War had never really been consummated. Apart from a brief period at the start of the war, there had been no military engagements in Germany. Virtually until the Armistice there had been a general expectation of ultimate victory in Germany, and, as one historian put it, “many [Germans] saw [the Armistice] not as a defeat but as a setback which, with suitable leaders and policies, would be overcome.”2 This sense was both aggravated by and responsible for the “stab in the back” account of events, which depicted the collapse of Germany in 1919 as the act of corrupt politicians who had betrayed the nation by agreeing to an armistice. A widespread feeling of injustice took the immediate form of a campaign against the terms of the Versailles treaty, but the many sympathizers with this position in England and America were wrong, I think, to believe that a mere repudiation of some of the treaty's more onerous terms—rather than a renaissance of the German Reich—was the objective of the complaining parties. The reparations demanded by the Treaty were ludicrously punitive, but were eventually largely written off; more serious is the claim that Wilson's Fourteen Points had induced the German surrender on a basis that was not genuinely fulfilled at the Peace Conference.

  Speaking of the anti-Versailles groups in Germany at this time, Fischer recognized that

  over and above mere revision of Versailles, their great objective was the rehabilitation of the German Great-Power position, above all with regard to eastern Europe, to an eastern imperium guaranteeing a self-sufficient war economy… In such a political context the use of military force was taken for granted…. This objective had originated during the Kaiserreich, led to the First World War… and gathered momentum during the Third Reich and into the Second World War… which must be understood primarily as a reaction to the First World War, as a refusal on the part of [Germany] to accept the outcome of the First World War.3

  Hitler achieved power in Germany by taking this task as his objective and by identifying repudiation of the Treaty with a rebirth of the German state. He studiedly and publicly pursued the goal of reopening hostilities. There had been of course a period during which overt hostilities ceased. Doubtless at the time of the Treaty of Locarno (1925) it must have appeared that Germany had chosen a parliamentary path and that the War had actually ended. The Dawes Plan (1924) plus inflation had eased the reparations burden on Germany, which, by the time Hitler came to power, was of little economic consequence in any case. But these appearances obscured the fact that a decision for parliamentarianism had not been made by the German nation, and that once the great economic depression cast doubt on the ability of a parliamentary state to deliver stability and prosperity, Germany would opt for the fascist alternative to pursue precisely the same goals it had sought in 1914 by means that were dictated by the nature of fascism itself. On this view, one might say that hostilities were resumed in 1935 with German rearmament, not in 1939 with the attack on Poland.

  Alan Bullock concluded his magisterial biography of Hitler with the claim that Nazism was rooted in German history, and that Hitler represented the logical outcome of nationalism, militarism, the worship of force, and the exaltation of the State.4 I prefer to put this slightly differently: Hitler was the apotheosis of a particular malaise of Europe, which had provided the basis for the seizure of power over the German states at the end of the nineteenth century, and which inspired global ambitions. That Nazism was to some extent idiosyncratic to the German nation is a consequence of fascism itself and its derivation of the legitimacy of the state from its identification with the national ethnos and its interest. Fascism not only follows, but intensifies and exalts, unique cultural and ethnic aspects of the society that it seeks to govern. What is striking, for the purposes of the present work, is the deliberate resort to international violence on the part of all the great fascist powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, before 1939.

  It is an interesting historiographical issue whether the economic conditions and policies of the fascist states—their rapid rearmament, and heavy demands for the import of raw materials, fuel, and food, coupled with their chronic lack of foreign exchange and of sufficient export earnings—whether these conditions impelled the fascist states to war, as asserted by historians such as D. E. Kaiser,5 or whether Hitler was essentially an improvising leader, seizing opportunities provided by the inept diplomacy of his adversaries, as suggested by A.J.P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War, and war a mere contingency.6 Taylor argues that the various stages of the Czech crisis were driven by Neville Chamberlain's initiatives, to which Hitler had only to react, and even that the declarations of war in 1939 were largely a result of poor timing by Hitler in his reaction to the continuing offers of appeasement by Britain and France. Others have concluded that Hitler's plan was, as William Shirer claimed, a blueprint for a series of world-dominating campaigns7 animated by a visionary malice. And there are still other causal accounts of the origins of the Second World War by distinguished historians.8 Perhaps all these judgments are to some degree true;* they do not entail the conclusion that, absent the causes they emphasize, war would not have occurred in any case. Putting to one side the various accounts of the origins of World War II, one may say that the Long War could not have ended so long as fascism was alive in a great power—fascism as an outlook, as a guide to managing the affairs of state, as much a
n understanding of history as a political program. It is this attitude that Hitler shared with the German veterans of the First World War, that made him their hero as well as their representative. Resolute actions might have deterred Germany for a time; absent such actions, the temporary stalemate of Versailles was bound rapidly to end in violence.

  To be able to appreciate the force of this attitude, this mentality, it is useful to remember three general facts about Europe before 1939, when large-scale hostilities resumed: first, that Hitler and Mussolini* were brought to power by the very parliaments they despised, and not by coups d'état, and that this occurred not because they had simply intimidated the ministries they faced down but because their programs and personalities were overwhelmingly popular, embodying the hopes and ideals of millions; second, that the programs of the fascists were defined by their opposition to parliamentary liberalism and communism, to conflicts with whom the fascists owed their ascension to power; and finally that for two years before the triumph of fascism in Germany in January of 1933, violence had been renewed on the international scene in a way that utterly discredited the Versailles parliamentary vision of world peace through law.† On these first two points, it is useful to review the record, which has been obscured by the fascist claims of a dramatic seizure of power, as well as by Western historians who are loath to admit the deep appeal of fascism to democratic publics.

  In Italy the fascist ascendancy began to take shape as soon as the Versailles Conference was concluded. The Italian government that negotiated the treaty was swept away largely on that account by the election of 1919, and the new government was immediately shaken by the extraconstitu-tional seizure of Fiume by a group of army veterans led by the poet D'Annunzio, in protest against the Versailles agreement. The refusal of the government to arrest D'Annunzio or even to call for the withdrawal of his forces, and the Italian threats against Yugoslavia when its government wished to resume control of the city, reflected popular disenchantment with the Versailles settlement and reinforced those groups that favored direct extralegal anticonstitutional action.

  The option of fascism was in play both domestically and internationally, and so long as it was alive in one arena, it remained a possibility in the other. In some states, notably Spain, its appeal lay principally in dealing with domestic conflict, and yet it played an international role. In Italy, what began as an international move quickly became a model for direct action on the domestic scene. Paul Hayes describes this vividly:

  [In Italy] demobilization had been followed by mass unemployment… Inflation, already high, rose sharply after 1918, exacerbating social tensions. Two of the worst-affected groups—landless peasants and poorly paid factory workers—soon resorted to the seizure of land or to strikes and factory occupations. The owners of property were terrified by this militancy and resentful of the government's apparent toleration of illegality. By 1920 fears of an Italian version of the events of 1917 in Russia were widespread among the upper and middle classes. It was in this situation that Fascism found its voice… In September 1920… a wave of occupations and lockouts struck the industrial centres of the north…. Landowners and industrialists formed their own organizations and recruited private armies, mainly from the ranks of the unemployed war veterans. Increasing disorder lent credibility to Mussolini's vehement attacks on the lack of government authority.9

  In this chaos, the Italian premier called the election of May 1921. When as a result the fascists were admitted to the national governing bloc, they were able to continue their campaign of violence against the socialists and communists from within the shelter of the police and the national government. Mussolini himself, however, left the coalition and relentlessly attacked the government, recognizing that the true source of his appeal lay in his posing an alternative to parliamentarianism. His campaign was equally aimed at the left and the liberals: he attacked the parliamentary system and the Versailles settlement, while managing a campaign of street terror against the parties and unions of the left. In 1922 he reoccupied Fiume and, when the government acquiesced in this move, he stepped up terrorist assaults in a number of industrial cities against leftists and trade unionists. When the left responded with a call for a general strike, Mussolini answered with an ultimatum threatening the government, challenging it to stop the strike and vowing to stop it himself if the government did not. By such maneuvering against the left, Mussolini was able to build an independent base of financial support among industrialists and landowners while at the same time making himself increasingly attractive to the very administration he was weakening. Although Mussolini always portrayed his rise to power as culminating in the March on Rome, in fact the role of the March was more complicated. Mussolini did not seize power. Rather he threatened to do so, began mobilizing the fascist paramilitaries, and thus provoked the collapse of the government. He then coolly refused to be brought into a coalition; faced down the interim government when the king refused to give permission to declare martial law; watched as a new coalition collapsed; and was finally invited by the king to be prime minister on the advice of the very parliamentarians whose ability to form a government he had frustrated.

  A similar story can be told of Hitler's route to power, based also on the triangulated conflict between fascism, communism, and parliamentarian-ism refracted through domestic and international dimensions. Hitler's contempt for parliamentary democracy at home and the Versailles system abroad, his disgust at the political flaccidness of the parliamentary states and the pusillanimity of the Weimar politicians, his hatred of the socialist parties in Germany, and his desire to destroy the Slavic enemy where those parties held power, even his anti-Semitism, which called attention to the prominent role of Jews in parliamentary Weimar and in the communist movement—all these united the domestic and the international in a program of enormous moral and political appeal to the German people.

  Hitler's skill, however, was not just in uniting these two dimensions, and thus tying his fortunes to the conflicts with (and between) parliamentarianism and communism. There were other, more established parties doing that. Indeed, the Nationalists themselves were a kind of protofascist party, who also attacked Versailles, were anti-Marxist, called for an aggressive foreign policy, and so forth. Rather it was because his was not an established party that, when the Great Depression made the Weimar Government appear helpless and confused, Hitler inherited the conservative followers of Hindenburg. His sociopathic nationalism and antisocialism only found a financial base in industrialists and landowners* after they began to doubt the ability of the established forces to maintain order against a left revolution. In Germany, as in Italy, but on a far larger and more aggressive scale, the fascists relied on street fighting and political violence against the left to provoke disorder. The civil conflict that fascism sought provided fascism's road to power much as the civil war in Russia had coalesced support for Bolshevism. When unemployment exceeded 30 percent, workers began to abandon the center parliamentary parties for the fascists and communists, the support for the latter ironically increasing the support for the former. Thus we can chart the dramatic rise in Hitler's electoral success from 1924 to 193210 with the parallel loss of support for the conservative forces. In July 1932, when the Nazi party won 37.3 percent of the vote, it exceeded this number in fourteen of Germany's thirty largest cities and in only one fell as low as 20 percent. In a multiparty state, with proportional representation, this is a remarkable popular showing. When Hitler ran against the conservative Paul von Hindenburg for the presidency, the latter was able to win only by relying on votes from the left-wing party, the SPD. When Hitler acceded to the chancellorship, he did so on the same basis as the leader of any parliamentary party: he had the votes.*

  Thus neither Hitler nor Mussolini seized power: both were brought to premierships by the calculations of other politicians who realized they needed them. They were needed because the parliamentary states that had “won” the First World War, or been set up by the winners, could not du
ring their fleeting ascension settle the constitutional and moral question at issue, and were thus never secure in their claims of legitimacy in those states where this legitimacy was most closely tested. Legitimacy is a constitutional idea that is sensitive to strategic events; when the Versailles system proved itself strategically vacuous, the legitimacy of the parliamentary regimes that were its constitutional progeny suffered accordingly.

  For the same reason that the Versailles peace was unstable domestically, the international scene was haunted by increasing violence. Consider the following timetable: In September 1931, on the basis of an odious and farcical pretext, the Japanese occupied Mukden and the area surrounding the Manchurian Railway. The following January they invaded the region north of Shanghai; by March 1933 they had reached the Great Wall. That same month, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and Hitler came to power in Germany. In March 1935 Germany renounced the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty and began open rearmament. In October, Italy invaded Abyssinia. In March 1936 the Germans occupied and fortified the demilitarized Rhineland, renouncing provisions of the Locarno treaty as well as those of Versailles. In July the Spanish Civil War began, accompanied by armed intervention on the part of Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union in an explicit, violent competition. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. By the end of September, the German-speaking Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia had been seized. In March 1939, the rest of the Czech state was engorged. In April, Italy occupied Albania. All these states—China, Abyssinia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania—were members of the League of Nations; indeed, two of them had been created by the Versailles Treaty. It is therefore not implausible to suggest that “war” did not begin with the declarations of war in 1939.