The Struggle Begun: Fascism, Communism, Parliamentarianism,
1914 – 1919

 

WE SHOULD REGARD the conflicts now commonly called the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Cold War as a single war because all were fought over a single set of constitutional issues that were strategically unresolved until the end of the Cold War and the Peace of Paris in 1990.

The Long War (as I shall call it) was fought to determine what kind of state would supersede the imperial states of Europe that emerged in the nineteenth century after the end of the wars of the French Revolution (a war that also appeared as a series of engagements and discrete wars until the Congress of Vienna resolved the fundamental questions at issue). These states dominated Europe and eventually the world until the collapse of the European system in 1914. The Long War was fought to determine which of three new constitutional forms would replace that system: parliamentary democracy, communism, or fascism.

What propelled this cataclysm? What put these three particular alternatives in play? It was the instability of two states, Germany and Russia, within whose domestic societies these three options furiously contended. Once Germany and Russia were taken over by one of the radical alternatives to the parliamentary systems outside these states, Germany and the Soviet Union attempted to legitimate their regimes by making their systems the dominant arrangement in world affairs. As we shall see in Part I, the legitimacy of the constitutional order we call the nation-state depended upon its claim to better the well-being of the nation. Each of these three constitutional alternatives promised to do so best. Within every state, these alternatives contended, but it was the triumph of the radical alternatives in two Great Powers that led to the Long War. To understand this it is necessary to begin with the German struggle to create a nation-state.