By Martin Girder
Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
On January 1st of this year, eleven European countries began participating in the European Monetary Union, making the Euro their legal currency. This represented the fulfillment of a long process begun in the aftermath of World War II as Europe searched for collective institutions that, it was hoped, would both prevent another bloody conflict on the continent and return Europe to the global primacy it had lost in the first half of the twentieth century.
While it is still too early to tell what the long term effects of monetary union will be, for now the signs look auspicious. Europe is growing again and, with the worrisome exception of the former Yugoslavia, the continent is at peace. On the other hand, restrictions on fiscal and monetary policy imposed by membership in the EU have contributed to a trend toward high unemployment that Europe seems unable to shake, and at the same time have prevented countries from enacting spending measures that might alleviate some of the political strain caused by having to limit expenditures on education, health, and other programs benefiting public welfare. Concern over the cost at which union has been achieved, and worry over the potential cost of sustaining it, keeps alive the question of how successful Europe ultimately will be in redefining itself.
It’s to Mark Mazower’s credit that he has managed to make audible the echo of today’s uncertainties in past events already familiar to most readers. A teacher of history at the University of Sussex, Mazower has written a brilliant interpretation of Europe’s history in the twentieth century. That he is able, without being abrupt or too short in his account, to summarize in 400 pages the great events and important trends in Europe from the end of World War I to the present day suggests what a masterpiece of concision this work is.
Divided into eleven chapters with an epilogue, Dark Continent begins with a short sketch on how parliamentary democracies were established in a number of European countries after World War I, how they failed to solve critical economic and social problems, and how those failures led to widespread support for fascism. Popular opinion across Europe came to hold that liberal democracy was an ineffective form of government; this was not just the case in continental Europe. Even Great Britain could count among its opinion makers those who believed parliamentary democracy might be unsuited to other countries. Fascism’s ascendance, according to Mazower, was not the result of a mad spasm of irrationality on the part of a couple of men, or even a couple of countries, but rather a general political trend among Europeans who had experienced the inadequacies of the liberal alternative. "Fascism," he quotes from a 1938 text entitled Fascism for Whom, "was the product of democratic decay."
Another important factor in the development of fascism in inter-war Europe was the presence of large minorities in the newly born nation-states. Once tolerated subjects of the continental empires that had abruptly disintegrated during the Great War, minorities found themselves at the mercy of nation-states now defined by ethnicity rather than dynastic loyalty. As Mazower explains, "… the pure nation had to be made, for it was still a dream, not a reality. Neither Greece nor Germany nor any of the other so-called nation-states of central and eastern Europe was really ethnically homogenous. [The Treaty of] Versailles had given sixty million people a state of their own, but it turned another twenty-five million into minorities. They included not only Jews, gypsies, Ukrainians, and Macedonians but also former ruling groups such as the Germans, Hungarians, and Muslims." It was this fracturing of ethnic populations that allowed the protecting of Germans stranded in other nation-states, and then later engulfing the land they were in, to become the motivating force behind Hitler’s foreign policy of acquiring Lebensraum for the German people.
Although racism is popularly thought to have been a defining characteristic of Hitler and Germany, Hitler’s racism was not particular to him, or to Germans in general. All of Europe in the first half of the century held strong views on racial hierarchies, and the anti-Semitism found in Germany was more than matched in virulence and pervasiveness by its French and Russian manifestations. What was different about Hitler was the extremes to which he was willing to push the state to implement his views. Mazower sheds light on Hitler’s success in this regard by giving it a meaningful context. Populations had been decimated in some nation-states following the First World War; strong opposition in those states to abortion, widespread policies that encouraged marriage, and popular belief in social Darwinism and eugenics combined to create a backdrop against which someone with Hitler’s well-known racial views could come to power without causing a stir. States assumed a need and a right to direct the course of human procreation toward a presumed collective good. As Mazower notes, "…we now know[ ] Sweden, Switzerland and several other European countries continued to employ sterilization and other coercive measures in social policy until relatively recently. Such practices make Hitler’s Germany look less exceptional and closer to the mainstream of European thought than once seemed possible."
If Hitler’s racial views drew little notice, the same could not be said for his economic policies. Discredited by the Great Depression, economic liberalism, like liberal democracy, had lost the faith of many Europeans. Fascist capitalism, on the other hand, seemed vibrant and more relevant to the nationalist feeling then emerging across the continent. It disdained international finance (an aspect of economics the Nazis deemed loathsome by virtue of its association with Jews), focusing instead on national production. The notion of national self-sufficiency appealed to many in the west, for whom Hitler’s economic policies also seemed the surest way to keep Bolshevism from spreading. More to the point, those policies were successful. In 1938, unemployment in Germany stood at three percent, while Great Britain’s was at 13 percent and Belgium’s at 14 percent. Although Mazower disputes that there was actually a distinctive fascist capitalism and points out that both economic liberalism and socialism would out-produce the German state during the war, many—including John Maynard Keynes—saw certain advantages to economic nationalism. These perceived advantages increased the popularity of Hitler’s government among both Germans and some foreign observers. In fact, Hitler was very much in front of European opinion until as late as 1940.
Among the surprises one encounters in Dark Continent is the discovery of the narrowness of liberal democracy’s eventual victory over fascism. Accustomed though some readers may be to explanations of history that make these events seem inevitable—as though the triumph of liberal democracy and socialism resulted simply from application of the superior force of an obviously good idea—Mazower makes clear that the outcome of this ideological contest was far from certain. For if, in the course of his occupation of their countries, Hitler had not lost the good will of many in Europe who previously had been well disposed to him and his ideas, he might indeed have established a new order.
Surprisingly, it was Hitler’s economic policies that lay behind the turnaround in public opinion. Fearful that living standards inside Germany would fall because of the war, Hitler made a practice of putting the onus of wartime production on the nations he invaded. Once in control, he would send in a team of economic experts whose main task was to expropriate to Germany as much of production as possible. While the details of this policy varied widely from country to country, its overall effect was to increase resistance to fascism everywhere it was in place. Thus, as the scope of German domination grew, supporters of Hitler became disillusioned and the momentum of fascism, seemingly unstoppable until then, began a fast and irrevocable backward slide.
Once Germany was defeated, unease and exhaustion rather than the triumphalism of liberal democracy defined the spirit of the age. People wanted to forget about politics: women wanted to quit their jobs in the factories and return home; soldiers were uneasy of returning home to find no work, as memories of the failing pre-war economy were still fresh in their minds. It was in this context of much hoped-for but tenuous stability that peace was established and the Cold War began.
Mazower is not as interesting here as he is in the rest of his book, in part because he de-emphasizes the seriousness of the confrontation between east and west. While he describes the battle between fascism and liberal democracy as being ultimately ideological in nature, he downplays similar differences between communism and liberal democracy, focusing instead on their shared experiences. Thus, it is the search for political stability on both sides that Mazower underscores, along with shared growth in the 1950s and ’60s and the mutual desire to avoid war. Even the west’s eventual Cold War triumph is described as accidental: western banks were still investing money in Eastern Europe up until the time the Berlin Wall came down; commercial interests presumed the status quo would prevail because there was an assumed stability to the bipolar world in Europe.
Mazower’s conclusions about the future of Europe may strike some as startling, for he suggests that today’s economic union has been pursued for some unsound reasons. He credits the nation-state for both the extreme violence of the first half of the century (in which sixty million died) and the relative lack of it in the second (in which the total thus far is closer to a million). Through both the Second World War and most of the Cold War, the nation-state thrived in Europe; only in the 1980s did federalism begin to grow. This federalism, Mazower argues, is driven both by the fear of a resurgent Germany and by a desire on the part of many Europeans to return to their pre-W.W.II position at the center of the world stage.
But the urge toward union is based on misplaced fears. There is no impulse today in Germany to attain the kind of empire it sought in the Second World War. "Its military caste has been destroyed," Mazower observes, "its minorities in eastern Europe are reduced to a remnant of the millions who constituted Hitler’s casus belli. Five million war dead weigh more heavily on German minds than all of Hitler’s triumphs. If German companies invest today in Eastern Europe, it is not because they represent the vanguard of a Fourth Reich, but because they are capitalists, whose capital is as vital as ever to Europe’s economic health." This sentiment of Mazower’s concerning Germany is probably uncontroversial among most Europeans today. But his prescription for Europe’s ambition—the return to global primacy through European institutions—is not: "If Europeans can give up their desperate desire to find a single workable definition of themselves and if they can accept a more modest place in the world, they may come to terms more easily with the diversity and dissension which will be as much their future as their past."
Modern Europeans tend to look at their history and see an inevitability that is not there, even going so far as to assume the coming death of the European nation-state. "They read the present back into the past," says Mazower, "and assume… that democracy must be rooted deeply in Europe’s soil simply because the Cold War turned out the way it did." But the nation-state in Europe still has its place despite the growth of global capitalism and regional institutions. Mazower contends that, "Today a different kind of history is needed—less useful as a political instrument but bringing us closer to past realities—which sees the present as just one possible outcome of our predecessors’ struggles and uncertainties."
Dark Continent is such a history. It is an antidote for the modern tendency to assume human events disclose a predictable pattern discernible to the more educated among us, and that this pattern tends in the direction of global democracy. In showing how both fascism and communism could quite reasonably have seen themselves as the inevitable endpoints of history, Mazower provides a cautionary tale to those who see global capitalism, regional institutions like the European Union, and the broad, ever widening definition of ‘who is a European’ as preludes to the inevitability of a United Europe. Mazower’s is not a pessimistic book. But it is a sobering one. For, while doubts about the wisdom of Europe’s modern ambitions have been voiced before, especially in Great Britain, this fine historical analysis takes careful account of unexamined assumptions, clears away triumphalist sureties, and places our prognostications on the most brightly illumined, if less than comfortable, terrain.
Martin Girder resides in central California, where he is part owner of a real-estate firm. A former member of the armed services, he indulges interests in weapons nonproliferation and Asia in his spare time.