THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  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.

  COMMUNISM

  During the course of 1917, following defeat on the Eastern Front, the authoritative capacity of the Russian state, its power to govern, ceased to exist. The Provisional Government that forced the tsar to abdicate adopted a parliamentary form, but, perhaps for this reason, it did not succeed to the authority of the tsarist state, nor was it able to establish legitimacy on its own. As Edward Acton described the situation:

  [T]raditional military discipline collapsed; the… police force disappeared, and the new government proved unable to establish control over the armed militia organized by workers… The effect of these developments was to render the liberal-dominated Provisional Government incapable of enforcing its will and to make it dependent instead upon society's voluntary acceptance of its policies. Those policies, however, proved increasingly unpopular.10

  After introducing the full panoply of civil liberties and setting in train the democratization of local government, the Provisional Government wished to pursue the war according to the legal and moral obligations it felt it owed its allies as the legitimate heir to the sovereignty of the tsarist state. This attachment to law, so characteristic of the parliamentary democracies that served as models for the Russian Provisional Government, was fatal to its popular position because virtually all elements of the populace were united by an antipathy to the rule of law. Industrial workers who faced rapidly worsening economic conditions and the loss of their jobs frantically clamored for confiscatory government intervention on their behalf; peasants demanded to be given land and campaigned for the seizure and distribution of estates. There were also demands for separate preferential status by several of the national minorities. Antiwar feeling spread among the returning rank-and-file soldiers. On all these issues the Provisional Government had to repudiate the wishes of the people, and by so doing, it forfeited all popular support for its authority. As we shall see again in our later discussion of Weimar, Germany,* the parliamentary option had failed the nation.

  What underlay the Bolsheviks' increasing influence was the appeal of their policies… They committed themselves to a program of immediate peace, confiscation of noble estates, drastic reform of industrial relations and intervention to prevent economic collapse, and the principle of national self-determination… So widespread was popular support for its call for the transfer of “all power to the soviets” that when the party, operating through the apparatus of the Petrograd soviet, launched the armed uprising of 24 – 5 October, Kerensky and his colleagues [the parliamentary government] were unable to offer effective resistance…11

  This widespread popularity of their program permitted the Bolsheviks to seize power, but not to hold it. Lenin and his colleagues in the Communist Party were by no means intoxicated with the niceties of popular democracy, nor with the view that the party leadership should be subordinated to the political opinions of even its own rank and file, much less those of the populace at large. Nevertheless, during the first months of office, the new government concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (despite the wish of many in the leadership to reject harsh German terms and launch a revolutionary war). The government gave legal sanction to peasant seizures of land and the local distribution of titles to these properties (despite the leadership's commitment to collective landholding). And the government felt itself forced to recognize the right of minority ethnic groups to state status, and proposed various decentralizing industrial measures “despite its view that these steps could lead to the unraveling of the state.” In the ensuing months there were numerous confrontations between the government and the peasants as the latter withdrew grain and raw materials from the market and the former began requisitioning supplies from the countryside. During this same period there were similar confrontations with industrial workers, whose numbers were swollen by returning soldiers. By mid-1918, 60 percent of Petrograd's workforce was unemployed.12 It was far from clear, at this point, that the communist option would prevail. In the end, it was the conflict among the contending constitutional options for the state that actually saved the government and strengthened the Party, allowing it to centralize and finally to triumph.

  This conflict—between communism, parliamentarianism, and fascism—came to a decisive juncture in Russia with the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1918. Many of the most politically active persons were co-opted into the Soviet bureaucracy, the secret police, and the Red Army in the face of an armed challenge by the counterrevolutionary army, the Whites. The Whites represented a coalition of parliamentary and fascist groups, united by their hatred of communism. Their uprising suddenly presented the possibility that the redistribution in property relations and ownership that the workers and peasants had secured during 1917 might be reversed. This potential legal counterrevolution ignited the volunteers who joined the Red Army to defend their gains. The legal conflict—consti-tutional in nature—drove the strategic and, finally, the historical.13

  When the Civil War ended, the now greatly strengthened government determined to continue the policies of “war communism”—to continue grain requisitioning and military-style discipline in the factories. This provoked a number of violent strikes, peasant riots, and, in 1921, the revolt at the Kronstadt naval base. Lenin and the party leadership reacted with the ameliorative New Economic Policy (NEP), which ended requisitioning, legalized private trade, and abandoned the semi-militarization of labor.

  This was the prevailing economic program in 1927 when the first Five-Year Plan was introduced. This Plan proposed massive state investment that, with increases in agricultural and industrial productivity, was to bring about a
rise in living standards. But even though investment soared, gains in productivity were slight, such that workers and peasants were now called upon to finance the state's investment in heavy industry. As it became clear that considerable coercion would be required, some of the Soviet leadership, led by Bukharin, urged a revision of industrial goals. Josef Stalin led the majority that insisted on overcoming the resistance of the society and replacing the NEP.

  Requisitioning was reinstituted; when this proved insufficient, the state imposed a system of forced collectivization. Those peasants who resisted were deported to isolated regions in the north and east. Trade unions became parts of the Party apparatus, even as real wages fell; chronic shortages occurred and pressure increased for gains in production. Coercion succeeded, however, and this success was decisive in the state's attempt at transforming Russia into a communist society.

  How did this state—and Stalin—succeed? We have seen that the state apparatus had been decisively strengthened during the 1920s: the army, the bureaucracy, the network of secret police had all been expanded. More importantly, however, the state prevailed because of the widespread commitment it was able to inspire in the public, drawing on its origins in the October Revolution, its victory in the civil war, and, above all, its identification of patriotism with class warfare.14 The effect of this success was

  to radically redraw the boundary between state and society… Virtually every citizen became an employee of the state. Private commerce and independent artisan production were suppressed, and although collective farms notionally belonged to their members, in practice management was taken out of their hands, and they too became state employees…. [E]very worker was compelled to carry a labour book containing a detailed record of his labour performance; [absenteeism was a criminal offense]; and special permission was required to change from one job to another…. Virtually all institutions were subordinated to the state and run by party appointees. The press, the radio and publishing were run under direct party supervision.15

  A state was thus created that vigorously and wholly embodied the other option to liberal parliamentary democracy, just as the German state had embodied the fascist alternative. The Revolution that gave it birth, and the Civil War that first threatened and then consolidated it, were both fought over precisely this choice of systems, and both the Civil War and the Revolution were provoked by military engagements occurring during the First World War and immediately thereafter. Indeed one can go further: the success of the Soviet state depended upon a ruthless state violence in order to achieve industrialization, and “Stalin's forced-march industrialization prepared the Soviet Union for an astonishing victory in World War II.”16

  There are those who think that a civil war or a revolution cannot be thought of as a strategic part of a larger, international conflict, but there are countless examples to the contrary.* Indeed, any view that epochal war is constitutional in nature virtually predicts that such wars will give rise to the eddies of civil war. A key factor in whether these conflicts should be thought of as campaigns in a more general, epochal war lies in whether great powers intervene in them. For this reason, the Spanish Civil War and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, as well as the Russian Civil War, properly belong to the Long War; whereas the Ataturk Revolution, the Indian Civil War that accompanied partition, and the Nigerian Civil War do not. Intervention by the great powers is an indication that international interests are at stake—but only an indication, for there are sometimes regional or humanitarian reasons why a great power might intervene in a civil war, as Wilson did in the Mexican Revolution, or NATO chose to do in Kosovo. When Lloyd George intervened in the Russian Civil War, he meant Great Britain to intervene against the communist alternative, not against Russia. The interest at stake was Britain's interest in the international struggle against Bolshevism. The same is of course true of the Russian intervention on behalf of the Loyalist forces in Spain, and the German and Italian interventions on behalf of the Falange forces there.

  To appreciate the Soviet challenge and its role in the Long War it is important to recall the violent antiparliamentarianism of the Bolshevik revolution and Civil War. The success of the Bolshevik government meant that by the end of the 1920s, the three competing constitutional options now contended, despite the Peace at Versailles, in an unstable international environment. Nor did this instability arise owing to upheavals in the defeated states alone. With the collapse of three of the World War I belligerents, new states appeared. Although in the West we are often inclined to think of this period as one of peace—l'entre-deux-guerres—the frontiers of these new states were often established through fighting, the borders between Poland, Lithuania, and Russia being an example. More importantly, in every country the three contesting options found significant popular followings. After the triumph of communism in Russia in 1917, a Bolshevik revolution followed in Bavaria in January 1919, and in Hungary between March and August. These events cast the problem for the Peace Conference then meeting at Versailles into this form: to impose conditions on Germany such that both protofascism, the Prussian militarist state, as well as communism, were made impossible.

  Accordingly, the German state was dismantled. First, the army was reduced to 100,000 men (it had been, before the war and mobilization, 750,000)17 and the general staff was dissolved. Provision was made for the trial of war criminals, including the kaiser, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, and Field Marshals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Treaty articles proscribed a German military air force and permitted only a rump fleet. Second, several new parliamentary states were created with specified boundaries, and legitimacy was conferred on them by the Peace Conference. Third, an international system of law, embodied in the League of Nations, was set up as a sort of global constitution of parliamentarianism. But none of this could finally succeed, because the fundamental idea on which the Treaty rested—that fascism and communism were illegitimate forms of nation-statehood—was not established by the end of World War I. To appreciate this we need only consult the competing national accounts of that five-year belligerency.

  The Conference at Versailles offered a straightforward theory of the war: in Article 231 of the Treaty, Germany accepted responsibility for forcing the war upon the world, and underlying this was the view that the German system itself was to blame. The official German historians, however, took a different line. Between 1922 and 1926 the German government published a forty-volume collection of edited diplomatic documents (Die grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette—The High Policies of the European Governments), attempting to show that Germany had not sought war in 1914. Part of the argument was that if the general staff had wanted war, there had been better opportunities in 1905 or 1909 than in 1914. Part of the argument was that Russia and France had wanted war: Russia for access to the Mediterranean, France to recover Alsace-Lorraine. In fact, every state that was involved had some self-aggrandizing war aim. Because the war aims of the European victors were in fact expressed in the Treaty, thus compromising the Wilsonian claims to disinterestedness that had, to some extent, induced the German capitulation, the Treaty itself was cited as evidence not of German culpability but of German victimization.

  By contrast, Soviet commentators18 argued that the war was the inevitable product of the last stages of capitalism. An international competition for new markets, for raw materials from colonies, and for new opportunities for investment had pitted the capitalist states against each other in the Middle East, the Far East, and Africa. Thus both communists and fascists argued that the prevailing international system required war— though they based their conclusions on different theories. Communists saw war as the natural outcome of arms races, driven by the industrialists who profited from competition in (and by) arms. Fascists saw war as a necessary struggle by means of which stronger states superseded the weak. In either case, the Treaty of Versailles could not end the war begun in 1914 because it did not, indeed could not, reconcile these perspectives.

  By trying to answer th
e questions “What rights does a state have? When is a state legitimate?” with the utopian answers of the scientifically minded end of the nineteenth century—identifying the processes that cause a state to succeed in historical terms and thus to have its rights and its legitimacy accepted—each of these three competing ideologies offered a claim of equal plausibility. Only the complete collapse of actual states, the embodiments of these competing ideas, would answer these questions definitively. The Long War would be resumed until each of the competing systemic alternatives had been thoroughly and completely discredited in the eyes of its own people and the world. Despite all the second-guessing of the peacemakers at Versailles, it is hard to see how the resumption of war in the 1930s could have been avoided.