The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Finally, only in a very few countries – a sub-set of the sub-set of dictatorships – did the end of parliamentary power and the rule of law also mean an aggressive foreign policy. The majority of authoritarian regimes were in fact relatively peaceable.

  MUSSOLINI’S MOMENT

  In 1918 Roosevelt’s predecessor Woodrow Wilson had declared: ‘Democracy seems about universally to prevail… The spread of democratic institutions… promise[s] to reduce politics to a single form… by reducing all forms of government to Democracy.’ For a time he seemed to be right. Political scientists have attempted to quantify the global spread of democracy since the early nineteenth century. Their calculations point to a marked upsurge in both the number of democracies and the quality of democratization between 1914 and 1922. The proportion of countries with a democracy ‘score’ of higher than 6 out of 10 rose from 22 per cent to nearly 37 per cent. The mean level of democracy in the world rose from 7.8 to 8.7. This was the ‘Wilsonian moment’ and its impact was authentically global, not only transforming the landscape that had once been the Habsburg monarchy, but causing the earth to move uneasily under the European empires that had won the war. But it was only a moment. In the two decades after 1922 numerous democracies failed. By 1941 fewer than 14 per cent of countries were democracies; the mean level of democracy plunged to 6.4. The levels attained in 1922 were not seen again for some seventy years.

  The story of a democratic wave, flowing then ebbing, is essentially a continental European story. In the English-speaking world (excluding undemocratic and only partly Anglophone South Africa) there was never a serious threat to democracy. Meanwhile, because the West European empires had survived the war intact, and indeed grew slightly in size, there was next to no democracy in Asia and Africa before or after the war. Japan, as we shall see, was the only Asian country to experience the democratic wave. In Latin America a few countries did go from more or less democratic regimes to dictatorships: Argentina, where the army overthrew the Radical president, Hipólito Irigoyen, in 1930, as well as Guatemala, Honduras and Bolivia. But the majority of countries south of the Rio Grande were not democracies to begin with and stayed that way. One, Costa Rica, was a democracy throughout. A few – Colombia, Peru and Paraguay – actually achieved modest progress towards democracy between the wars. Chile suffered a military coup in 1924, but constitutional rule was restored by General Carlos Ibáñez in 1932.

  Of twenty-eight European countries – using the broadest credible definition of Europe – nearly all had acquired some form of representative government before, during or after the First World War. Yet eight were dictatorships by 1925, and a further five by 1933. Five years later only ten democracies remained. Russia, as we have seen, was the first to go after the Bolsheviks shut down the Constituent Assembly in 1918. In Hungary the franchise was restricted as early as 1920. Kemal, fresh from his trouncing of the Greeks, established what was effectively a one-party state in Turkey in 1923, rather than see his policies of secularism challenged by an Islamic opposition. However, it was events in Italy the previous year that seemed to set a more general pattern.

  Benito Mussolini was the first European leader not only to dispense with multi-party democracy but also to proclaim a new fascist regime. A blacksmith’s son, a socialist and the author of two crudely anticlerical books, The Cardinal’s Mistress and John Huss the Veracious, Mussolini had switched to nationalism even before the Italian Socialists opposed their country’s entry into the First World War. The Roman fasces – the bundle of rods of chastisement that symbolized the power of the state – had been adopted by various pro-war groups; it was one of these that Mussolini joined. Here was the formula for fascism: socialism plus nationalism plus war. After a brief and undistinguished period of military service, Mussolini reverted to journalism, his true métier. But his political moment came with peace. Like their counterparts all over Europe, Italy’s political establishment felt vulnerable as the Bolshevik contagion swept into the factories of Turin and the villages of the Po Valley. With his flashy charisma, Mussolini offered an echo of Francesco Crispi, the hero of the previous generation of Italian nationalists. With his newly formed Fasci di Combattimento, he offered muscle in the form of gangs of ex-soldiers, the squadristi. Even before his distinctly theatrical March on Rome on October 29, 1922 – which was more photo-opportunity than coup, since the fascists lacked the capability to seize power by force* – Mussolini was invited to form a government by the king, Victor Emmanuel III, who had declined to impose martial law. The old Liberals were confident they could continue business as usual. They underestimated Mussolini’s appetite for power; it was entirely in character that at one point he held seven ministerial portfolios as well as the premiership. The press, the only thing he was competent to control, began to promote him as an omnipotent Duce, but behind the surface glamour there was always the threat of violence. Following the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 (almost certainly ordered by Mussolini) political opposition was suppressed. The likes of the Leninist Antonio Gramsci were consigned to prison. Henceforth, the National Fascist Party brooked no competitors. Newspaper editors were required to be fascists, and teachers to swear an oath of loyalty. Parliament and even trade unions continued to exist, but as sham entities, subordinated to Mussolini’s dictatorship.

  Italy was far from unusual in having dictatorship by royal appointment. Other dictators were themselves monarchs. The Albanian President, Ahmed Bey Zogu, declared himself King Zog I in 1928. In Yugoslavia King Alexander staged a coup in 1929, restored parliamentarism in 1931 and was assassinated in1934; thereafter the Regent Paul re-established royal dictatorship. In Bulgaria King Boris III seized power in 1934. In Greece the king dissolved parliament and in 1936 installed General Ioannis Metaxas as dictator. Two years later Romania’s King Carol established a royal dictatorship of his own. In Hungary there was no king, but the political elites retained the fiction that the country was a monarchy, with Admiral Miklós Horthy as Regent; power was wielded in his name by two strongmen, first Count Stephen Bethlen and then Gyula Gömbös. Elsewhere it was elected presidents who simply did away with parliaments. Antanas Smetona established a dictatorship in Lithuania in 1926. Konstantin Päts ruled Estonia by decree for four years as Riigihoidja (Protector) and then President after 1934, the same year that Prime Minister (later President) Karlis Ulmanis dissolved parliament in Latvia.

  In other cases, it was the army that seized power. General Jósef Piłsudski, Poland’s Cromwell, marched on Warsaw in 1926 to become de facto dictator until his death in 1935, when much, though not all, of his power passed to another soldier, Edward Śmigły-Rydz. In Spain there was a constitutional monarchy from 1917 until 1923, then a military dictatorship under Primo de Rivera until 1930, then a republic that drifted steadily to the Left, culminating in the formation of the Popular Front coalition, which included both Communists and Socialists. After a bitter three-year civil war initiated in 1936 by a group of army officers and supported by the parties of the National Front, General Francisco Franco established himself as dictator, the beneficiary not only of German and Italian intervention but also of the debilitating ‘civil war within the civil war’ between the various factions of the Left. The transition in Portugal was similar, though smoother. There, the army seized power in 1926; six years later the finance minister António de Oliveira Salazar became premier, promulgating an authoritarian constitution which established him as dictator the following year. Engelbert Dollfuss tried to pull off the same trick in Austria, governing by decree after March 1933. Though assassinated in July 1934, he was able to bequeath a functioning authoritarian system to his successor Kurt Schuschnigg.

  Considering the emphasis the new dictatorships laid on their supposedly distinctive nationalistic traditions, they all looked remarkably alike: the coloured shirts, the shiny boots, the martial music, the strutting leaders, the gangster violence. At first sight, then, there was little to distinguish the German version of dictatorship fro
m all the rest – except perhaps that Hitler was marginally more absurd than his counterparts. As late as 1939, Adolf Hitler could still be portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in his film The Great Dictator as an essentially comic figure, bawling incomprehensible speeches, striking preposterous poses and frolicking with a large inflatable globe. Yet there were in reality profound differences between National Socialism and fascism. Nearly all the dictatorships of the inter-war period were at root conservative, if not downright reactionary. The social foundations of their power were what remained of the pre-industrial ancien régime: the monarchy, the aristocracy, the officer corps and the Church, supported to varying degrees by industrialists fearful of socialism and by frivolous intellectuals who were bored of democracy’s messy compromises.* The main function the dictators performed was to crush the Left: to break their strikes, prohibit their parties, deny voice to their voters, arrest and, if it was deemed necessary, kill their leaders. One of the few measures they took that went beyond simple social restoration was to introduce new ‘corporate’ institutions supposed to regiment economic life and protect loyal supporters from the vagaries of the market. In 1924 the French historian Élie Halévy nicely characterized fascist Italy as ‘the land of tyranny… a regime extremely agreeable for travellers, where trains arrive and leave on time, where there is no strike in ports or public transport’. ‘The bourgeois’, he added, ‘are beaming.’ It was, as Renzo De Felice said in his vast and apologetic biography of the Duce, ‘the old regime in a black shirt’. Even the Catholic Church, which the young Mussolini had despised, was accommodated under the terms of the 1929 Concordat. True, there were fascist leaders and movements in some of these countries whose rhetoric went further, conjuring up visions of national regeneration rather than merely reaffirming the old order. But the fascism of the Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista – to give the Spanish fascist party its full, grandiose title – was only a small component of Franco’s fundamentally conservative support; the key word in Franco’s merged Falange Española Tradicionalista was the last one. In other cases, notably in Austria, Hungary and Romania, the dictatorship acted to suppress or at least restrain fascist parties.

  Only in Germany was fascism both revolutionary and totalitarian in deed as well as in word. Only in Germany did dictatorship ultimately lead to industrialized genocide. There were good reasons for this. Fascist movements were optional accessories for most dictators. Not in the German case. As Figure 7.1 shows, no other fascist parties came close to achieving the electoral success of the National Socialists. In terms of votes, fascism was a disproportionately German phenomenon; add together all the individual votes cast in Europe for fascist or other extreme nationalist parties between 1930 and 1935, and a staggering 96 per cent were cast by German-speakers.

  Viewed globally, the collapse of democracy cannot easily be blamed on the Depression; as we have seen, too many democracies survived deep economic crises and too many dictatorships were formed before the slump or in the wake of quite modest declines in output. Viewed in strictly European terms, however, it is hard to ignore the correlation between the magnitude of a country’s economic difficulties and the magnitude of its fascist vote (see Figure 7.2). By and large, the countries with the deepest Depressions were the ones that produced the most fascist voters. The economic crisis was most severe in Central and Eastern Europe. That was also where the political appeal of fascism was greatest. But the crucial point is that it was Germans – inside and outside the Reich – who were most attracted to fascism; or, to put it differently, the only variant of fascism that was truly a mass movement was German National Socialism.

  Two things made the German experience unique. The first was Hitler himself, who was in many ways more bizarre than Chaplin knew. An art-school reject who had once scraped a living by selling

  Figure 7.1 Maximum percentage of votes won by fascist or ‘semi-fascist’ parties in free national elections held during 1930s

  kitschy picture postcards; an Austrian draft-dodger who had ended up a decorated Bavarian corporal; a lazy mediocrity who rose late and enjoyed both Wagner’s operas and Karl May’s cowboy yarns – here indeed was an unlikely heir to the legacy of Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck. In Munich in the early 1920s he could be seen attending the soirées of a Romanian princess ‘in his gangster hat and trenchcoat over his dinner jacket, touting a pistol and carrying as usual his dog-whip’. It is not altogether surprising that President Hindenburg assumed he was Bohemian. Others thought he looked more like ‘aman trying to seduce the cook’, or perhaps a renegade tram conductor. I fit had not been for the advice of his publisher Max-Amann, he would have called his first book Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice instead of the distinctly catchier My Struggle. The longer title captures something of Hitler’s shrill and vituperative personality. As for his sexuality, about which there has long been speculation on the basis of circumstantial or tainted evidence, he may have had none. Hitler hated. He did not love.

  The second crucial difference between the Third Reich and the

  Figure 7.2 Real output from peak to trough in the Depression

  other fascist regimes of the 1930s was simply Germany. Most of the countries where democracy failed between the wars were relatively backward, with half or more of the working population engaged in agriculture in around 1930. Indeed, there would have been a relatively close negative correlation between this proportion and the likely duration of democracy, but for two outliers. Those were Germany and Austria, both societies where fewer than one in three people worked on the land. The challenge is to explain how a pathological individual like Hitler was able to gain total control over what seemed to many people, at least prior to 1933, to be the most sophisticated country in Europe, if not the world.

  BROTHER HITLER

  To many visitors, Germany in the 1920s was the United States of Europe: big, industrial, ultra-modern. It was home to some of Europe’s biggest and best corporations: the electrical engineering giant Siemens, the financial titan Deutsche Bank, the automobile maker Mercedes Benz, the chemical conglomerate IG-Farben. Berlin boasted the biggest film industry in Europe, producing in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis the science-fiction masterpiece of the twenties and in the same director’s M the definitive film noir. Berlin had newspapers as sensational as William Randolph Hearst’s (the 8Uhr-Abendblatt); department stores as big as Macy’s (the Kaufhaus des Westens); sports stars as idolized as ‘Babe’ Ruth (the boxer Max Schmeling). So pervasive was the transatlantic influence that Franz Kafka felt able to write Amerika without even going there. Indeed, in one vital respect Germany went one better than the United States. It had by far the best universities in the world. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 per cent went to Americans. Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1932, when he moved to Princeton, but in 1914, when he was appointed Professor at the University of Berlin, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.

  There was, however, another Germany – a Germany of provincial hometowns that felt no affection for the frenzied modernism of the Grossstadt. This Germany had been traumatized by the upheavals that had begun with the ghastly revelation of military defeat in November 1918.* Nearly all the revolutionary events of the immediate post-war period took place in the big cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. Despite the decision to draft the new republic’s constitution in the sleepy capital of Thuringia, the Weimar Republic was always a metropolitan affair. Not much changed in the provinces, as the English ‘wandering scholar’ Patrick Leigh Fermor found when he set off to walk from the Rhine to the Danube in late 1933. His first encounte
r in the Third Reich was with a troop of brownshirts in a small Westphalian town, who held a perfunctory parade in the main square and then repaired to the nearest inn for beer and a hearty sing-song. From the Krefeld workhouse run by Franciscan monks to the book-lined study of a deceased professor, from the hold of a Rhine barge to a farmhouse near Pforzheim, Fermor passed through a Germany little different from the Germany his father or even his grandfather would have seen had they made the same journey. As the industrialist and philosopher Walther Rathenau complained to the diarist Harry, Count Kessler, ‘There was no revolution. The doors only sprang open. The wardens ran away. The captives stood dazzled in the prison courtyard, incapable of moving their limbs.’

  The Republic attempted the impossible: simultaneously to create a welfare state and to pay the reparations imposed under the Treaty of Versailles. The strains this imposed on Germany’s economy produced not just one but two crises: first hyperinflation in 1923 and then steep deflation after 1929. It is hardly surprising that these twin crises undermined Weimar’s already frail legitimacy. The inflation seemed to signal a collapse not just of monetary values but of all the values of the pre-war bürgerliche Gesellschaft (bourgeois society). What price the Rechtsstaat – the state based on law – if long-standing contracts could be fulfilled only with worthless paper marks? As for Ruhe und Ordnung, the peace and order that had been so dear to nineteenth-century Germans, there seemed little left of that. In every year between 1919 and 1923 there were attempted coups by the extreme Left or the extreme Right, to say nothing of a spate of assassinations by sinister secret societies, one of which claimed the life of Rathenau, who as Foreign Minister had become identified with the effort to fulfil the Versailles obligations. In the wake of the currency collapse, many voters drifted away from the middle-class parties of the centre-right and centre-left, disillusioned with the horse-trading between business and labour that seemed to dominate Weimar politics. There was a proliferation of splinter parties and special interest groups, a slow process of fission that was the prelude to the political explosion of 1930, when the Nazi share of the vote leapt to seven times what it had been in 1928. The Depression was crucial not because the unemployed voted for the Nazis, but because so many of them swung to the Communists; as in so many other countries, fascism seemed to many a rational political response to the threat of Red revolution. The Depression also exposed the dysfunctional character of the Weimar system, which seemed too democratic – or, rather, too representative of well-organized interests – to deal with so vast and universally perceptible a crisis. But the political disintegration of republican Germany had begun seven years prior to the election breakthrough of 1930, with the wheelbarrows of worthless cash that symbolized Weimar’s bankruptcy.