Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (24 page)

To such objections, de Man replied that the fate of Weimar had revealed what could happen when social democrats refused to cooperate with the middle classes: it was no use proposing schemes for boosting employment which were politically unacceptable to them, nor to talk of doing away with capitalism when the Party lacked the
strength or the will for this. Like Mosley, de Man offered cogent insights into the new situation created by the crisis: the need for socialists to come to terms with nationalism, to challenge the gospel of the balanced budget and to offer a decisive alternative to the market. But in practice he was only slightly more successful: as minister of public works in the 1935 Belgian Government of National Renovation, de Man brought down unemployment substantially. But this was chiefly the result of the long-overdue currency devaluation the government imposed at the same time rather than of the
Plan de Man
. His achievement was a real one, but far from the triumph of
planisme
he fought for. Disillusioned, de Man moved slowly to the Right, and he collaborated with the Germans in 1940, declaring that Nazism was “the German form of socialism.” But his ideas bore fruit after the war: the famous
Plan
was in many ways a model for state planning in much of western Europe after 1945.

In France, the
Plan de Man
was widely discussed, but an equivalent plan was entirely omitted from the Popular Front programme in 1936; worse still, the Blum government tried to satisfy workers’ demands at the same time as preserving a strong franc. Blum had come to admire Roosevelt’s pragmatism, and offered himself as a “loyal manager” of French capitalism. The result was economic failure, satisfying neither Left nor Right, dashing the high hopes many had held of the Popular Front, and further diminishing the prestige and self-confidence of the non-communist Left in Europe. Even the much-vaunted gains of the Popular Front government—the paid holidays, forty-hour week and arbitration in industrial disputes—had already been won in many other countries.

While de Man, Mosley and others gave up on democracy, and came to believe that concerted action against unemployment was only possible through the authoritarian state, the 1930s and its lessons for democracy could also be interpreted rather differently. Some liberals came to reject state interventionism and economic nationalism entirely as the root of the problem, and saw planning itself as inherently authoritarian. This was the free-market critique of the totalitarian state. Popular in both Britain and Italy, it was espoused most forcefully by émigré Austrian economists Hayek and von Mises. The 1930s, however, were not the best time for their message to strike
home, and they would have to wait another forty years to make their mark.

In the short run, liberalism’s democratic critics were far more successful. Many shared the view of one analyst of the 1930s, H. W. Arndt, who wrote in 1944 that “the Nazis developed a number of economic techniques—in the sphere of Government finance, planned State intervention, exchange control and the manipulation of foreign trade—which
mutatis mutandis
may well be applicable in a worthier cause.”
⁴⁹
John Maynard Keynes, for instance, came to discern certain virtues in economic nationalism, in particular the autonomy which individual states had gained over policy as a result of the collapse of a unified international economy. “Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel—these are the things which should of their nature be international,” he wrote in 1933. “But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonable and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national.”
⁵⁰

A similar moral was drawn by Keynes’s Polish contemporary, Michal Kalecki. In an article on the Blum experiment, Kalecki argued that exchange controls were necessary for governments wishing to alter the balance of industrial power to labour’s advantage; otherwise capitalists could always threaten capital flight to undermine a regime’s credibility. Kalecki belonged to a school of economists which argued that the state needed to “wind the economy up” to full employment, a doctrine which underpinned the Polish 1936 Four-Year Investment Plan, one of the most important ventures in centralized planning to take place outside the Soviet Union. In Keynes, we can see the incipient rethinking of capitalism which provided guidelines for post-war policy in western Europe; in Kalecki, the doctrines which contributed to state socialism in the East. In both East and West, the memory of classical liberalism’s failure in the 1930s would provoke a reassessment of the balance between public and private power in the modern economy, paving the way for the great post-war boom. That the state needed to be brought in to the life of the national economy was not, therefore, a lesson which the Europeans needed to be taught by the Russians or American New Dealers; their own experience between the wars pointed to the same conclusion.
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FIVE

Hitler’s New Order, 1938–45

It is my impression that Germany has certain plans … aiming at a lasting European new order … along the lines of the planned economy known to Germany, which will certainly contain important advantages compared with the lack of planning hitherto reigning, which has been part of liberalist egoism. We had better calmly and willingly collaborate in the adaptation which I have here hinted at
.

—DANISH PRIME MINISTER THORVALD STAUNING, 8 MARCH 1941
¹

It has become increasingly clear to us this summer, that here in the East spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: German sense of honour and race, and a soldierly tradition of many centuries, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts, whipped up by a small number of mostly Jewish intellectuals … More than ever we are filled with the thought of a new era, in which the strength of the German people’s racial superiority and achievements entrusts it with the leadership of Europe. We clearly recognize our mission to save European culture from the advancing Asiatic barbarism. We now know that we have to fight against an incensed and tough opponent. This battle can only end with the destruction of one or the other; a compromise is out of the question
.

—COLONEL-GENERAL HERMANN HOTH,
17TH ARMY, 25 NOVEMBER 1941
²

In the spring of 1942 a young Italian diplomat called Luciolli returned home after serving a year and a half in the Berlin embassy. His first task in Rome was to set down his thoughts on the way Italy’s ally was tackling the major issues arising out of the war. The result was a penetrating critique of the foundations of the Nazi New Order in Europe; when it was brought to Mussolini’s attention, the Duce’s
reaction was that “he had not read anything so significant and farreaching for a long time.” Luciolli noted:

To defend to the death the great amount that has so far been conquered, to exploit it, to organise the economic and political life of Europe so as to increase its powers of endurance and develop its offensive capacities—all this seems capable of constituting a clear and precise goal, a programme around which to collect adherents and consensus, were it not for the fact that it is precisely in this
political
mission that Germany shows herself to be decisively and obstinately inferior to her task.

The emphatic German decision to organise Europe hierarchically, like a pyramid with Germany at the top, is known to all. But this alone fails to capture the attitude of the German regime to the problems of European reconstruction. In every country, even in those which till yesterday had a rather clear anti-German attitude, there was no lack of political personalities and currents ready to admit that the international order which emerged from the French Revolution and culminated in Versailles had been definitively superseded and that the nation-states would have to give way to much larger political entities … Thus the concept of a hierarchical organization of Europe in itself was not unacceptable. But what strikes anyone who comes into contact with the Germans is their purely mechanical and materialistic conception of the European order. To organize Europe for them means deciding how much of this or that mineral should be produced and how many workers should be utilised. They have no idea that no economic order can rule if not based on a political order, and that to make the Belgian or Bohemian worker work, it is not enough to promise him a certain wage, one must also give him the sense of serving a community, of which he is an intimate part, which he feels an affinity with and in which he recognises himself.
³

As Luciolli observed, many Europeans were ready by the end of the 1930s to leave behind the liberal, democratic order created after 1918
by Britain, France and the United States for a more authoritarian future. What they did not bargain for was the brutal reality of Nazi imperialism, the reintroduction of slavery into Europe and the denial of all national aspirations apart from German ones.

Nazi governance was never more chaotic than during the war: Hitler’s satraps wrestled for his attention, and a host of allies and collaborators intrigued among themselves. Yet through all the confusion, the uncertainty, the innumerable blueprints for the future which emanated from Nazi think-tanks, one may trace the broad outlines of the New Order as it was realized between 1938 and 1946. No experience was more crucial to the development of Europe in the twentieth century. As both Hitler and Stalin were well aware, the Second World War involved something far more profound than a series of military engagements and diplomatic negotiations; it was a struggle for the social and political future of the continent itself. And such was the shock of being subjected to a regime of unprecedented and unremitting violence that in the space of eight years a sea-change took place in Europeans’ political and social attitudes, and they rediscovered the virtues of democracy.

European hearts and minds were not so much won by the Allies as lost by Hitler. Luciolli’s assessment of German failure was echoed by many other observers. Reporting from Romania, an acute American journalist noted that on her arrival there in the summer of 1940 she had felt “that Hitler might not only win the war, but could win the peace and organize Europe if he did.” But by the time she left “on an icy morning at the end of January 1941, I was convinced that under no circumstances could Hitler win the peace or organize Europe.” Let us, then, begin our analysis of the New Order by dwelling on what we might call the Führer’s lost opportunity.
⁴

HITLER’S LOST OPPORTUNITY

Opinion in Europe at the end of the 1930s was by no means opposed to the idea of an authoritarian reconstruction of the continent under German leadership. The potential basis for a New Order which rejected the inheritance of Versailles extended well beyond pro-Nazi or fascist extremists. Mistrust of German power was blended with
admiration for their economic recovery; attachment to British notions of liberty was mixed with suspicion of the “plutocrats” in the City of London whose defence of the gold standard and laissez-faire had doomed much of the continent to depression and failed to find an exit from it. “These European peoples themselves had become indifferent to democracy, which was advertised to them in intellectual terms of freedom of thought and freedom of speech, but which in terms of their daily experience meant chiefly freedom to starve,” observed Countess Waldeck. “I saw that not more than ten per cent of the people on the European continent cared for individual freedom or were vitally interested in it to fight for its preservation.”
⁵

In Belgium, in the summer of 1940, public opinion greeted news of the German victory with “palpable relief,” and for a while Brussels was gripped by a genuine “anti-parliamentary rage.” Belgians appeared well disposed towards the Germans, glad that the war was finally over and hopeful that their country would regain prosperity in a unified continent under a reformed and less divisive domestic political system. Hendrik de Man, president of the Belgian Workers’ Party and a close adviser of King Leopold, declared in a famous manifesto on 28 June that the democratic era was ended. In his words: “This collapse of a decrepit world, far from being a disaster, is a deliverance.” His vision of an authoritarian government led by the King seemed briefly—in the summer of 1940—a more “realistic” outcome of the war than any foreseeable revival of democracy. For politicians and diplomats who make a fetish out of realism, the summer of 1940 stands as a warning.

In the Netherlands, too, the revulsion against party politics lay behind Hendrik Colijn’s attack on the “evils of democracy”; Colijn, a former prime minister and head of the conservative Anti-Revolutionary Party, envisaged—like de Man—an authoritarian regime loyal to the royal House and willing to work with the Germans. Danish Social Democrat Thorvald Stauning, prime minister since 1924, advised collaboration in the interests of Europe’s future economic well-being, and a national coalition government in Copenhagen cooperated smoothly with Berlin.
⁶