FASCISM

 

After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 full recognition was given to the sovereignty of both Catholic and Protestant German princes of the Holy Roman Empire—that, indeed, was the key solution to the conflict. Thus, despite paper provisions to the contrary, the Empire ceased to exist in practical terms. It had no common treasury, no authoritative common tribunals, and no means of coercing dissenting member states. In place of the Empire, there was only a collection of weak and disorganized states divided by religious affiliation.1 This collection of states faced the great continental powers of France, Russia, and Austria, and the great maritime powers of Holland and England, all of whom had consolidated themselves constitutionally in the seventeenth century. These Great Powers were thus not joined by a great German state.

Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did one German state, Prussia, impose its rule on the others and create the first European nation-state.* From its beginning the German state was hostile to the prevailing international system and its creators, which had hitherto provided models for a German state. We owe to Bismarck the decisive strategy of separating German national aspirations from the liberal background that had formerly nurtured them. He accomplished this through the adroit use of war, defeating in turn both Austria-Hungary and France, the two states that had dominated German politics since Westphalia. This allowed him to place at the apex of the German state a radically conservative, militarist class whose only claim to pan-German legitimacy was that it alone was able to realize the ambitions of national unity. German nationalism—a program that held that a state was legitimated by its service to a pre-eminent ethnic nation—was the prototype for fascism, as its expression in the Constitution of 1871 confirms.2

Bismarck did not so much unify as conquer the other German states and then proceed to transform their politics by delivering German unity under a popular doctrine of militarism and ethnic nationalism. This put fascism on the table as a competitor to the parliamentary systems. But that would not necessarily have led to war had the question of constitutional legitimacy not arisen within the new German state. It is useful to remember that Bismarck's goal had been “to achieve German unity without revolution so as to fend off the social consequences of successful revolution,” as Geoffrey Barraclough has put it.3 When Bismark's successors were threatened by a Social Democratic electoral victory in 1912, they found the moment to attempt an ambitious strategic program of European conquest. Germany sought through an attack on the pre-existing empires of Europe a means of vindicating its claim to destiny that would, perforce, also vindicate its autocratic regime's claim to legitimacy. Indeed, we might think of the situation in Germany in 1914 as replicating that of Europe as a whole: within, as without, Berlin sought to defeat the movement for parliamentary self-government and the threat of revolution, the two other options contending for the future of Europe. This point is powerfully supported by the path-breaking work of the historian Fritz Fischer.4 Whatever may have been the case when Barbara Tuchman wrote her popular and influential Guns of August, or A.J.P. Taylor his War by Timetable: How the First World War Began, it is impossible to maintain today,* in light of German archival research, that World War I was all a ghastly mistake, unintended by any of the parties, the result of complicated alliances and railroad timetables.5

In 1959, Fischer published an article in Historische Zeitschrift that would itself have considerable historical significance. Relying on archival materials from Wilhelmine Germany, including the September Program drafted by an assistant to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg and initialed by Bethmann Hollweg, Fischer insisted that German war aims consistently pursued before and during the First World War were uncannily like those of the Nazis in the Second World War; that these war aims were the logical consequence of German political policy before the Sarajevo assassination in 1914;6 and that these policies could only be fully understood as the effort of the Prussian elite to secure its victory over domestic elements of both liberal parliamentarianism and socialist revolution by achieving a European hegemony and a world position of epic dimensions.7 Fischer showed further that the basic continuity in German history between 1871 and 1945 lay in its substantive goal:8 the defense of a fascist constitutional system against liberalism and socialism.9 This was the state that plotted the beginning of what became, after the miscarriage of its war plan in September of 1914, the Long War. While the outbreak of war may have preceded the ideal German timetable by some months owing to the Serbian crisis in July 1914, the decision to go to war had already been taken by the only constitutional authority empowered to make that decision, as part of a program in which war was a necessary step. That this decision should come from Germany underscores the source of the question put to the world community by the Long War: for in Germany the choice among three constitutional options first flared into international violence. As we shall see, Russia somewhat later also resolved these historic constitutional options by violence. The United States, Britain, and France had already opted in favor of one of the critical paths, that of parliamentarianism, not without internal strife. Thus were the three principals of the Long War arrayed: Germany, Russia, and the three Atlantic states.

World War I did not solve the question of what sort of system would succeed to power; it only generalized that question to virtually all states. Thus one important political consequence of the war was the rise of a state embodying the ideal of socialism, bringing into the strategic and international sphere a third international ideology that arose in a domestic context. The Bolshevik Revolution may be seen, for our purposes, as bringing to the international level of conflict one of the domestic options in play in the collapsed states of post-1914 Europe.