THE PEACE OF VERSAILLES did not bring closure to the epochal conflict that had begun in August 1914. Like earlier international constitutional conventions, Versailles enshrined a new constitutional order, which was the nation-state. But the nature of this form of the state required a further decision among ideologies, and with respect to this decision, Versailles was premature.
Versailles did attempt to certify one ideological variant of the consti-tutional order, but this variant was not accepted by two important states, Germany and the Soviet Union. The ideological option endorsed by Versailles, the parliamentary nation-state, accepted the legitimating premise of the nation-state that it was based on the will of the people and was constituted for their material benefit. Parliamentary ideology went on, however, to specify free, fair, regular, and open elections as the means of determining the popular will. The parliamentary nation-state made voting publics the judges of whether their governments were in fact maintaining and enhancing the welfare of the nation. Moreover, this type of constitutional form required governments to comply with their own laws and to administer law impartially. Accountability to the electorate provided the ultimate check on whether such respect for the rule of law was forthcoming from the State.
The parliamentary nation-state, however, was by no means congenial to many persons in Germany, on whom it was pressed by the Versailles victors, nor to the new state of the Soviet Union, which proffered to the world its own variant of the archetype of the nation-state. Until the fascist and communist alternatives to the parliamentary nation-state were discredited in the eyes of the German and Russian people, the Long War could not end, for this war, like other epochal wars, continued precisely because it had become a struggle over alternative constitutional orders and thus the State itself was at stake.
In time both the fascist and communist Great Powers were defeated and their constitutional forms discarded. Nazism, with its claims of militaristic racial superiority, was thoroughly beaten by an alliance that included the multiethnic United States and the Slavic Soviet Union. Most damning, however, to German fascism was the disclosure of the death camps, a logical culmination of fascist ideas about racism and the State. The disgust and horror experienced by civilized people everywhere effectively removed fascism from the list of possible choices that nations might consider in forming states and marginalized it forever to the dormitory rooms of misfits. At least one cannot add futility to the cruelties suffered by the victims of Nazi concentration camps, for these victims did not die in vain. They defeated fascism just as surely as did the victorious soldiers at Normandy or Kursk, because the crimes committed against them rendered fascism odious. The discrediting of communism came in a different way—though the exposure of the murder of millions of innocents played a similar role. In this chapter we will discuss how this delegitimation came about in the Soviet Union and in the Warsaw Pact countries, and how this led to the Peace of Paris that completed the work of Versailles in 1990.