Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century

Democracy suits Europeans today partly because it is associated with the triumph of capitalism and partly because it involves less commitment or intrusion into their lives than any of the alternatives. Europeans accept democracy because they no longer believe in politics. It is for this reason that we find both high levels of support for democracy in cross-national opinion polls and high rates of political apathy.

Post-modernity” had spawned an obsession with “roots” and “heritages” among a politically immobilized electorate, too sophisticated any longer to trust the media, and deprived of any dependable sources of knowledge. Television opened up a world of images, but robbed personal experience of its authenticity. The spread of astrology, New Age philosophies and other forms of irrationalism reflected this growing anxiety in the face of an uninterpretable world. The Guardian talked of the “fretful 1990s, when fear is the new badge of citizenship.

To imagine that Hitler was merely following in, say, Bismarck’s footsteps was profoundly to misunderstand the man and his view of the world. Bismarck thought in terms of great-power politics, Hitler of racial triumph.

Discrimination against minority rights was not primarily the work of reactionaries and conservatives. On the contrary, in eastern Europe it was above all the work of modernizing liberals who were trying to create a national community through the actions of the state. For them, the state had to show that its power was above “everyone and everything,” and to override its opponents whether these be the Church, brigands, communists or ethnic minorities. Thus it was entirely consistent for the Romanian Liberal Minister of Education, Constantin Angelescu, to criticize not only minorities but also the Church and provincial administrators in his desire to build up a centralized school system, since “the interests of the State, the interests of the Romanian people, stand above individual interests, be they those of the communities . . . The Romanian State that is ours, all of ours, must be strengthened and . . . this State can only be strengthened by . . . letting the State mold the souls of all its citizens.” Because democracy was about the creation of national communities, it was generally anti-Semitic, or at least more ready to allow anti-Semitism to shape policy—through separate electoral colleges, for example, or entry quotas into the universities and civil-service posts—than old-fashioned royalists had been. In Hungary a 1920 law marked out Jews as a separate race rather than as “Hungarians of the Mosaic faith”; had the country been more democratic, it would probably have been more anti-Semitic still. “All citizens in Poland irrespective of creed and nationality must enjoy equal rights,” the Polish Peasant Party announced in 1935, adding the rider that “the Jews, however, as has been proved, cannot be assimilated and are a consciously alien nation within Poland.” Similar views were evident in Slovakia and Romania. And this was not just an east European problem: such sentiments were on the rise in once ultra-assimilationist France as well, and eventually led to the notorious clause in Vichy’s draft constitution describing the Jews as “a race that conducts itself as a distinct community that resists assimilation.

The very distinction between “high” and “low” culture was itself looking increasingly shaky, a product of an earlier era of elite intellectual self-confidence and benevolent moral superiority.

Where conservative parties were stronger, radical anti-immigrant parties found it more difficult to make headway. Where weak, the conservatives themselves often flirted with the same rhetoric: in Vienna, for instance, the ÖVP slogan of “Vienna for the Viennese” was hardly less inflammatory than the FPÖ version.

By the 1990s the UK was the most unequal society in the Western world, with around fourteen million living in poverty, including over four million children, but other west European countries were heading in the same direction.

When we eat wheat from Canada,” remarked Hitler one evening during the war, “we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.

Germany had to be kept in her place. The new states of eastern and central Europe would act both as a buffer against Bolshevik revolution and as a check against Germany. The slogan of national self-determination was thus a means to an end, and could be overridden when it clashed with French interests. This explains the French lack of enthusiasm for the minorities treaties—which seemed merely to weaken her new east European allies—and the French refusal in 1918–19 (and again, implicitly, in 1931) to allow Austria and Germany to be united, against the evident wishes of the bulk of the Austrian population.

The crucial difference was between the regimes of the old Right, who wanted to turn the clock back to a pre-democratic elitist era, and the new Right, who seized and sustained power through the instruments of mass politics.

But it is also, and more basically, because if this century has shown one thing, it is that politics cannot be reduced to economics: differences in values and ideologies must be taken seriously and not simply regarded as foils for class interest. Fascism, in other words, was more than just another form of capitalism.