1
War and Civil War / America and Europe / Balance and Hegemony / Constitution and Nationality / Freedom and Equality / Warfaring Virtues and Mechanized Death / Two Kinds of Anti-Bolshevism / Race and Class / Sea Power and Land Power / Demos and Ethnos / Self-Government and Self Determination / Fascism and Anti-Fascism / West and East
On 10 November 1942, shortly after the landing of American troops on the shores of the North African coast, Ernst Jünger noted in his diary that through his entanglement in current events, he felt like someone caught less in a world war, more in a “universal civil war”—a Weltbürgerkrieg. The intensity of the struggle at work here was of an entirely different nature than what had been manifest in earlier wars fought by nation-states. In the face of America’s involvement, such wars had been reduced to secondary affairs and were basically finished.1
The entry sounds rather odd: Nazi Germany had been at war with the detested Bolshevik Soviet Union for over a year. This war displayed all the signs of an ultimate conflict of planetary proportions. Its rules of engagement knew no mercy; indeed, in the East a veritable war of annihilation was unfolding. Nevertheless, Ernst Jünger assigned more historical importance to the arrival of American troops in the European theater. Why did he use the term Weltbürgerkrieg, with its strong overtones of the Continental philosophy of history? And just what was so important about America?
America’s intervention in a European war is not just reminiscent of its decisive entry into the Great War in the spring of 1917. It also touches on something much more fundamental: on differences between Europe and America that Jünger viewed as scarcely irreconcilable. That author’s presentiments regarding the onset of a “universal civil war” were soon confirmed.2 At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill issued their demand for nothing less than unconditional surrender from the Axis powers. Negotiations were precluded. At the ensuing press conference, the two leaders offered an explanation of the concept of “unconditional surrender.”3 Especially Roosevelt was referring to Ulysses S. (“Unconditional Surrender”) Grant, who of course imposed an unconditional capitulation on the southern states.4
Unconditional surrender is a principle of submission that usually follows civil war. It rules out any compromise that might allow for the continued existence of both parties. In fact, the coexistence of two governments in a single state is a logical self contradiction. In an undivided polity, only one party can hold a monopoly on state and governmental use of force (or indeed violence); the vanquished party must be at least subdued and sometimes completely destroyed. For that reason, civil wars are the most brutal wars possible, intensifying animosities and the exercise of violence to a radical degree. The opposition of doctrines, worldviews, and values typically accompanying civil wars may contribute to their rationalization and justification, but their intensity derives from an uncompromising a priori inherent in the very opposition of either-or.
The goal of political destruction essential to civil wars generates an unlimited degree of radicalization. States may recognize each other as equal enemies on the basis of their institutional separateness, the mutual violence they exercise thus being limited and subject to the rules of war.5 This violence does not strive for the enemy’s destruction but is satisfied with a complaisance that preserves the existence of both body politics. Hence civil wars and wars between states are conceptual antipodes.
Although civil wars can take various forms, they are inevitably propelled by questions of religion and values, of ideology and principles.6 Thus civil wars are always also wars of values. Correspondingly, a war of values fought between states will often approach the character of a civil war in its intensity. In this light, it would appear that Ernst Jünger’s diary entry was less apocryphal than it seems at first glance. The United States represents a body politic completely different from its European counterparts. And in juxtaposition, yet in opposition, to traditional Continental states, the wars America fought were of a significantly different nature. Over the course of its history, the country has in fact been caught up mainly in conflicts that, as wars of values, have had the basic features of civil wars. This was the case with the War of Independence—an uprising against the English king. “No taxation without representation” was the battle cry of the rebels. The civil war between North and South continues to dominate American memory. America entered World War I with the intention of making the world “safe for democracy.” And in turn, participation in World War II was perceived as a “crusade for freedom.” Finally, the Cold War—a forty-year period of antagonism between East and West—was a war of values sui generis. Principles of freedom here stood opposed irreconcilably to an ideal of literal social equality.7
Hegel observes in passing that, in comparison with traditional polities, America represents a “civil [bürgerlich ] society without a state.”8 From the Continental European perspective, there is indeed something supraterritorial, even boundless, about the United States, a quality accompanied by strong gravitation toward procedures, abstract values, and doctrines tending to confound traditional European ideas of state and nation. The genesis of the territorial European state rests especially on the neutralization of the political meaning of religious “truth” and therefore on the neutralization of “ideological” conflicts. America, founded on a plurality of denominations beyond power and politics, was remote from a societal order relying on the primacy of the state, as enshrined in Continental tradition. In line with the Hegelian understanding of America, this social construction tends to intervene in the affairs of others, in opposition to European practice. It does so, for example, by maintaining the convention of recognizing not states but only governments considered “lawful” according to its own understanding of legality.9 At its very core, America’s self-perception is revolutionary.
But such a revolutionary universalism differs significantly from both a universalism stemming from the French Revolution and, most markedly, the eudaemonistic experiments pioneered by the Bolsheviks. The American Revolution was blessed by a universalism of human and civil rights not confronted with a preexisting order that needed to be transformed. America’s historical privilege consisted, as it were, of inventing a new world out of itself. American utopia established itself in the present; Continental revolutions projected their social visions into the future.10 The exercise of violence in the French and, especially, Russian revolutions sprang from a desire to accelerate historical time. While America was establishing institutions offering a prospect of individual happiness in the here and now, the task of European revolutions was primarily overturning the past, toppling anciens régimes. The Continental traditions were driven by a philosophical-historical telos. America was more fortunate: it has known no history, even if it possesses a chronicle of past events.11
Beyond its philosophical claims and human pathos, the universalism of the French Revolution had particularistic parameters. Its universal values were dressed in distinctly French garb. This specific national coloring necessarily impeded the spread of freedom and equality; other nations’ resistance to universalistic French form imposed through occupation turned increasingly against that form’s universal content.12 Indeed, through its political actions vis-à-vis others, the république universelle revealed itself as an imperialist manifestation of the traditional claim previously upheld by the kings of France, the monarchie universelle.13 Napoleonic imperialism as a universalism in French colors consequently unleashed the nationalism of other peoples. For its part, America has persistently neutralized the ethnic and national affiliations of all those aspiring to join the New World commonweal: such aspirants can join only as individuals. All other emblems of belonging are relegated to the private sphere. That is the creed of American pluralism, transferred from the plain of denomination to that of ethnicity and culture. History in its Continental European meaning must be left behind.
Two contrasting temporal ciphers identify modern political history: 1815 and 1919. Each date stands for a major congress and the international orders resulting from it.14 And each stands for a historical threshold from which ensuing history would be measured. The ciphers are opposing in that the main task of the Congress of Vienna was to bring a revolutionary epoch to a close,15 while the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference contributed to a continuation of revolutionary tensions and political upheavals.16 This tumult would persist through the entire interwar era and culminate in a new catastrophe.
The Congress of Vienna ended the Napoleonic Wars. The principle of balance between the great powers was restored.17 Also, the threat of revolution associated with France would be contained, that motherland of unrest placed under guard. In the domain of ideas, philosophy’s intrusion into politics, climaxing in the year 1789, was exorcized. In the realm of domestic policies, the Restoration placed legitimist shackles on the principle of popular sovereignty, and it obstructed all popular intentions based on that principle’s corollary—the principle of nationality. Moreover, wars were to be waged only en forme. For revolutionary levée en masse, the arming of citizens and calling up of mass formations, had undermined the absolutist state’s strict divisions between military and civil, state and society, foreign and domestic, thus rendering war, as it were, into a boundlessly violent enterprise.18 It was an event no longer subject to a strict regime and limited to a “theater of war.” The use of force broke through all institutional limits. War and revolution fused together, forming a disastrous alliance for years to come. The Restoration had good reasons to tame this new type of warfare, dissolving the national guards and civilian militias that had emerged in the Napoleonic Wars and restricting an officer’s career mainly to those deemed apt for it by birth—those belonging to the aristocracy.19
The effort to reestablish prerevolutionary conditions consigned the memory of recent “total warfare” to oblivion and resurrected the eighteenth-century art of warfare. Battles were to be fought according to the Old Regime’s time-tested rules for “cabinet wars,” confined to a circumscribed area, directed at limited and symbolically important objects, and pushed toward expeditious arrangements for peace. Strikingly, this continued to apply even in long, drawn-out military undertakings such as the Crimean War (1853–56), in which all sorts of modern war machinery entered into operation—railroads facilitating troop movements, telegraphs transmitting intelligence, trenches being prepared for positional warfare. In any event, the relatively high number of casualties in this war resulted less from the fighting proper than from disease and epidemics.20
The war that contained all the ingredients of World War I—Europe’s “seminal catastrophe” (George Kennan)—was the American Civil War. The mobilizations by railroad, the massive armies sent into battle, the automatization of killing resulting from the invention of the machine gun, the ambushes carried out by lurking submarines, the involvement and suffering of the civilian population, above all the fusion of warfare and economic productivity, in short, the totalization of war—all these phenomena pointed toward a future still inconceivable in Europe.21 The Old World certainly took note of the American Civil War, but the meaning of its horrors did not penetrate a European consciousness still shaped by the Restoration of 1815. For the war was unfolding in the New World, “beyond the line,” in a civilization that Europe’s aristocratic culture considered inferior. Following his brief comment about America as a civil society without a state, Hegel remarks in his Philosophy of History that the New World “will no longer concern us.”
The taming of warfare in the post-Napoleonic era was the result of resolutions and measures introduced by the Restoration. The reestablished repression of popular demands based on the principle of nationality and popular sovereignty was meant to guarantee stability, order, and peace.22 Revolution, rebellion, and unrest were to be ruthlessly confined. This was not astonishing. For the eastern powers, especially for the Hapsburg monarchy, considerable dangers inhered in the principle of popular sovereignty, not only for the political regime itself but also for the very integrity of the empire. In the end, such a principle threatened the fabric and existence of any multiethnic state.23
The conversion of the institutional principle of popular sovereignty into a series of metastasizing questions of nationalities marks one basic difference between the political cultures of Western and Eastern Europe. While revolutionary ferment in the West, more specifically in Paris in 1830 and 1848, expressed itself in the political language of “class,” toward the East it had increasingly adapted the language of “nationality.” And while social conflict in the West was embodied in the iconic urban barricade—class against class—in Europe’s East such conflict took on ethnic colors. Barricades now became borders.24
In the classical West, popular sovereignty was mediated by political institutions. This culture of institutional mediation was modern in that it relied on the ideals and promises of the Enlightenment. For the narrative material of collective memory, it drew on those events that had contributed to the constitution of just those institutions. These events were mostly revolutions, hence political actions that had had an effect on the commonweal and had glorified the achieved freedoms of estate or class.Increasingly, these freedoms were being claimed on the basis of higher principles and in the name of all. In this manner, the freedoms pointed beyond their particular origins, consequently toward the universal.
There was also a demand for freedom and liberties in the East, in the premodern contexts of multinationally composed empires, where social stratification and ethnic fragmentation overlap. This resulted in a unique intermeshing of class-based social semantics with the emblematics of culture, religion, and ethnic belonging. Conflicts originally rooted in social structure and hierarchies of estate were increasingly rationalized in ethnic and national terms.25 From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that the social revolution that broke out in Paris in July 1830led in October to the national Polish uprising, or that France’s February revolution of 1848 mutated further eastward into the “springtime of nations.”26
One of the unsettling certainties of the Restoration order established in 1815 was that acceding to demands for popular sovereignty and the principle of nationality would have far-reaching consequences for a European peace based on the balance of power. It was particularly in the interest of the dynastically legitimated multinational Hapsburg and Romanov empires to thwart such demands and to challenge the peril of revolution that accompanied them. For Austria, the peril stemmed chiefly from the nationalities question; for Russia, it also stemmed from the increasingly apparent social question.England,although keeping its distance from the autocratic Eastern powers, was first and foremost concerned with questions of stability. Intervening only by proxy, the British avoided direct involvement in Continental affairs, upheavals, and popular unrest. For them, the power balance was a prerequisite for expanding beyond the seas. France in turn was eager to undermine the system established in Vienna in1815. Especially in the wake of the 1848 revolution and the establishment of the Second Empire by Napoleon III, France was increasingly inclined to promote the nationality principle everywhere. Through its support of national movements,Paris did its outmost to remove the constrictions imposed on the motherland of revolution by the 1815 system. By promoting Italian unification, and to some extent facilitating the road to German unity as well, the Second Empire— to be sure, unintentionally—brought disaster on itself.27
The Vienna order would secure peace and stability for decades to come. Conflict, competition, and rivalry among the powers were moved from the center to the periphery of Europe, where measures were undertaken to calibrate the balance between them. This locus was the Orient and the Levant—the domain of the Ottoman Empire, the last universal Muslim power. It was, in fact, the traditional dumping ground of European politics. The term “Eastern Question” covered the empire’s decay and its effects: the national awakening of peoples with long historical memories such as the Serbs and the Greeks; the great-power rivalry in the Straits, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean—principally the long-term antagonism between England and Russia. These problems threatened not only to undermine the European system of order and stability but also to wash away the institutional and political pillars supporting the Vienna order.28
The Greek war of independence introduced the European powers to the potentially grim consequences of new states being established on the basis of ethnic affiliation and nationality.29 Greek independence involved a clear break with the principle of legitimacy so dear to the Eastern powers, especially the Hapsburg Empire. At the same time, such ethnically grounded states— carved from the soft fabric of multinational empires—generated endless conflicts, uprooting and eradicating those populations not seeming to belong to the titulary nation. The great powers thus demanded that the new Greek state grant its Catholic population, starting with the Franciscan order, the same rights as Hellenic Greeks. Accordingly, in the London Protocol of 1830 the Greek state committed itself to equal treatment of the non-Orthodox population. At the 1878 Congress of Berlin, this formal commitment would serve as a precedent for introducing minority protection in the newly independent Balkan states of Montenegro, Serbia, and Rumania.30
The concern of the great powers with protecting groups whose ethnicity or religion did not necessarily fit into the new, nationally conceived states reflected a sharpened awareness of problems that had become virulent under the sign of the national question. The Congress of Vienna had a general political mandate to disregard the claims of popular sovereignty in favor of dynastic legitimacy. But the Polish nation, although divided, was granted the exceptional privilege of preserving its language and culture.31 In general the great powers took an active interest in national questions solely out of concern for broader political stability. Greece’s independence as the first “ethnic” state was due to a compromise between Russia, England, and France aimed at newly adjusting the European balance of power. Even the czar—the “gendarme” of the Continental order of legitimacy restored in 1815 and the infatuated instigator of the value-rooted Holy Alliance—supported the establishment of the new “ethnic” state. That state was understood as a mere deviation, meant to increase his influence in the Straits and the Aegean. The deviation was in line with his policy of expansion at the cost of the Ottoman Empire, Russia’s eternal foe in the region and key to the core conflict at work in the notorious Eastern Question. However, the czar’s anomalous decision ignored Austria’s existential interest in thwarting any application of the nationality principle.32
During the revolutionary ferment of 1848–49, the czar intervened on behalf of the Hapsburg Empire. However, a short time later Austria chose to play a dubious role in the Crimean War, infuriating the czar by not siding with its old Russian ally but rather pursuing its own selfish interests in the strategically and economically important Danube principalities. The formerly close and intimate relationship between the two “black eagles” now permanently deteriorated. In the future Russia would no longer be prepared to stand by an Austria increasingly mired in imbroglios related to the nationalities question. Piedmont-Sardinia and Prussia seized the historical moment and fulfilled their national missions.33 While Piedmont promoted the Risorgimento with French help, Prussia went to war against Austria in 1866 to force a military resolution to the lingering “dualism” between the two dominant German Confederation powers.
As a result of its defeat, Austria was ousted from the German domain and pushed toward the southeast—a development not without severe historical consequences.34 After the “arrangement” with Hungary in 1867—an attempt to secure the monarchy by defusing if not resolving one of its most pressing nationality questions—the Austro-Hungarian Empire would persistently come up against the national demands of the southeastern Slavic peoples.35 Their strivings threatened to erode the empire from within while simultaneously entangling it in future external military enterprises. The conflicts with Russia in the Balkans would become notorious, culminating in a confrontation that would destroy old Europe.36
The events in the Balkans preceding the First World War bore all the hallmarks of ethnically based territorial conflicts. The decline of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of future nation states based on language and autocephalous churches pushed the newly awakened peoples into military conflicts with their former imperial masters as well as one another. And while the new states claimed national or religious homogeneity, the extraordinary intensity of their disputes over borders and populations took the shape of military confrontations stamped with the horrors of “ethnic cleansing,” as the phenomenon would eventually be called.37 Thus the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, fought mainly over the Ottoman province of Macedonia, were notorious for an intensity and ferocity alien to wars between established European states that were still being conducted in the traditional way. While the latter wars were primarily military affairs, the former were carried out as ethnic civil wars.38 The so-called Balkan atrocities were inflicted not just on opposing armies but to a large extent on civilian populations. Those groups not fulfilling the requirement of belonging to the dominant ethnic group became targets of merciless violence. This unrestrained use of force was referred to at the time as “demographic warfare.” It was anything but European war enforme.39
Although the Great War was sparked by events in the Balkans, the circumstances leading up to it suggest a much wider range of causes, both short-term and long-term.40 For some time now, the European balance had been shaken, the traditional nineteenth-century constellations supplanted by a rather paradoxical dualism of alliances. The so-called revolution of alliances that finally evolved in the 1890s had brought an end to the long-term rivalry between England and France and the enduring antagonism between England and Russia. This was especially the case in two realms: that of the Eastern Question in the Balkans and the Levant and that of the Great Game in Asia; the revolution’s result was a transformation of the European power system. At the same time, military technology was being revolutionized; armies and fleets had been expanded enormously. The political and logistical mechanics of mobilization were now extremely sophisticated, intermeshing with intangibles linked to the Continent’s network of alliances.
Everything seemed to have changed deeply, with a single exception: Austro-Hungary continued to wrestle with its nationalities problem and constantly threatened to come into conflict with Russia in the Balkans. Events in 1908 thus already prefigured the constellation of 1914. In response to the Young Turk revolution in Constantinople, the Hapsburg monarchy risked annexing the provinces of Bosnia and Herzogovina, which it was administering as a result of the Berlin Congress of 1878.41 This development sparked a vehement protest by Serbia and denunciation by Russia. But the czarist empire was too weakened by its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and the ensuing revolution in 1905 to be taken seriously as a military threat. Humiliated by Germany, which sided with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Russia backed off. In July 1914, the situation was different. Mobilizing its army, Russia finally interceded for Serbia. For its part, a modernized Germany, which in Prussian form had managed to push Austria out of the German confederation in the direction of the Balkans in 1866, now found itself allied with a rather traditional Hapsburg Empire, an entity that had transferred its unresolved nationalities problem into the arena of great power politics, hence from the Continent’s periphery into the heart of Europe. And since Austro-Hungary had become the “pivot” of German foreign policy,42 its problems were passed on to Germany. The events unleashing the world war were in any case the expression of a failing tied to the retrograde elements in nineteenth-century politics. In 1914 it seemed that just what the Congress of Vienna had sought to prevent had come to pass: a linkage of tensions created by issues of nationality with the imponderables of great-power politics.
Initially, the intention was to wage a war en forme; a brief campaign was envisioned. But the war’s character soon changed, in a manner allowing none of the restraint in the application of military force manifest in the wars of the nineteenth century.43 All previous limits were surpassed. And as long as unlimited resources could be sacrificed to the Moloch of war, nothing seemed to stand in the way of its lasting forever.44 In the end, the entire economy of the warring states was marshaled in its service. And the more it became a total war, the more it resembled a civil war.45
But can the Great War really be described as a “civil war”? This in fact appears doubtful. Despite the magnitude of its violent dynamism, it was not marked by any clash between two camps laying a global claim to truth46—the sort of clash between opposing value systems, ideas, and worldviews figuring so prominently in Europe’s wars of religion, the French Revolution, even the American War of Independence. This is the case despite the propaganda emanating from both sides to the effect that this was a war of ideas.47 The labor and sacrifices being demanded of everyone required justification, and appropriate words were easily found. “Heroes” thus confronted “shopkeepers,” French superficiality German profundity, German socialism Russian despotism,culture civilization.48
A cultural-historical interpretation of political mentalities might approach the Great War as a struggle of ideas, but this corresponds less to reality than to the exalted self-understanding of nations bludgeoning one another on the field of battle.49 Above all, the enmity between Germany and England produced opulent portraits composed of hate-filled motifs. The German Empire saw itself as an exceptionally modern European state that was attempting to alter the existing power relations. It felt that England, a conservative empire committed to the status quo, was an obstacle in the path of its destiny. Patronized as “English,” rational, utilitarian, and empirical values were both dismissed as mere ex-ternalities and invested with attributes such as hypocrisy, self delusion, and fraud—in short, scorned as “bourgeois liberalism,” whose exponents had to be brought low.50 In the face of this exultant Germany, England saw itself as a citadel of steadfastness, its proud mission lying in bringing others “the law”: the norms and values of the status quo Britain represented, emerging from the nineteenth-century power arrangement and with a canon of virtue consisting of duty, honor, dependability, and social stability symbolized in both sport and the conventions of chivalry. As the British perceived it, these public values were thrown into question by the importune German Machtstaat with its noisy modernity.51 And further, the German Reich was now granted the role of troublemaker previously assigned to France as the motherland of revolution. In fact, especially in its conduct of war Germany was considerably less squeamish about using means destined to transform old Europe from the ground up. Reason of war trumped customs of war.52 In fighting the war, the German high command not only concerned itself with the imperial cohesion of its eastern adversary, aiming to chop it into national morsels. It also struck at its very social order by helping Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The decomposition of the Russian Empire and the outbreak of revolution corresponded to the German inclination to break up the constellation of the two-front war.53
For Germany the world war became a struggle to break free from conventions identified with the archenemy England: a banally experienced world, a materialism averse to everything metaphysical, a despicable reality of exchange, trade, and money earning. Germany wanted to change the world; England was straining to preserve it. In the end, a struggle was being played out here between hierarchal orders bound up with two different epochs, one past, the other future:54 England was the dominant power in a waning century; Germany hoped to lead the coming century. From this perspective, the Great War can indeed be viewed as a war between cultures—in the words of Franz Marc, a “European civil war.”55
Nonetheless, the concept of civil war—and certainly of universal civil war—can hardly be applied to World War I. The concept of universal civil war presumes a secular schism in which state loyalties and national distinctions are undermined by an opposition of classes or values. Nevertheless, within the divergent sociocultural awareness of contemporaries, this power struggle may well have taken on the meaning of a civil war; in any event, it intensified the ideological enthusiasm of the warring parties,56 even if the violence raging in the European slaughterhouse did not adhere to any antithesis of basic values.57 At best, this war might be considered a “European civil war” in which exalted middle classes faced off in the trenches with the differently, nationally colored values of their bourgeois constituencies.58 And yet, such an overextended notion of civil war does little to illuminate the violent cataclysms that brought down old Europe. The Great War can be described as a civil war only insofar as each side aimed at the total defeat of the other. But it was not a war of antipodal, socially anchored worldviews, a war splitting the configuration of nations along fault lines of class and values.
Until the sudden onset of the Great War, the menace of catastrophe had remained hidden. Nothing comparable had loomed on the prewar era’s perceptual horizon. Only a few dared imagine the war of the future.59 The potency of the destructive forces lay dormant, encoded in a mechanization of weaponry that would shatter all established conventions of European warfare.60 It would have a devastating impact on the consciousness of a fading world numbed and narcotized by the virtues of predictability. The blessings of technology and progress, until then celebrated as an inexhaustible source of social wealth, as liberation from hardship and misery, were now inverted, mercilessly revealing their destructive side.61
From the right distance, the catastrophe of the Great War can be understood as a collision between the forces of industrialization and technical progress and a premodern sensibility, largely agrarian in its conception of the world and its values.62 This premodern sensibility was by no means universal. But it managed to find a niche precisely in that locus where destructive potential has always been sheltered: in the ranks of the military. The officer’s career was pursued mainly by members of the nobility and by bourgeois individuals oriented toward aristocratic norms and ways of life.63 Bound to the traditions and values of the past, the military acted as a brake on the otherwise overwhelming tide of modernization. Indeed, it prided itself on preserving more of tradition than any other socially and politically relevant institution or class, even if this was primarily a matter of forms, conventions, and mentality. At the same time, the technological innovations of an industrial society were pouring into the ever-expanding military apparatus, transforming its armies and fleets. This heralded a fateful fusion of modern weaponry and the traditional conduct of war, though the military remained unaware of its dire potential. Europe’s civilization was hurled blindly into a cosmos of destruction—a trauma that would permanently stamp the twentieth century.64
The actual gravedigger of the European century was less the political will to destruction than the conduct of the war, which slipped from the control of those meant to direct it. In retrospect, the breach in the body and the spirit of the nineteenth century is clearly visible. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916, British troops marched toward the German lines in formation to the sound of bagpipes without seeking cover, kicking a rugby ball ahead of them as they marched. They seemed stoically unfazed by the prospect of death in a hail of machine-gun fire.65 For their part, the German gunners merely had to reload their machine guns. They could not believe their eyes: the British were marching to their doom like lemmings, their officers at the fore.
In his “patriotic reflections,” Werner Sombart mocked the British mode of combat. He was repelled by their idea of transferring “fair play” from the rugby pitch to the battlefield. In his view, the idea stemmed from their being a nation of traders. Nothing was really existential; everything was a game.66 The German military may well have considered the British assault on the Somme as having a sharply unreal quality, as bizarrely ritualized, compared with the practice of other armies. But in fact, the British conduct was not so fundamentally different, for soldiers from other countries also repeatedly ran toward the enemy’s machine-gun positions, as if they hoped to convince the mechanical devices of the enduring superiority of human resources. Beyond the clash of armies was another between man and machine.67 It was as if the premodern virtues of daring, courage, and self-sacrifice were futilely rising one last time against the automatized efficiency of the world of machines. David Jones has called the Somme offensive the last great exploit of the Old World. After the offensive, nothing was the same; the conventions of warfare had been fundamentally transformed.68 In Ernst Jünger’s view, war and life itself had assumed a new Gestalt: the machines had taken command.69
The machine gun’s impact on the battlefields of the Great War was staggering.70 It enhanced the already-privileged position of defense in relation to attack to a degree that had been inconceivable. A single machine-gun nest could break many assault waves, and when combined with barbed wire, the defensive positions were virtually impenetrable. Only tanks would allow a renewed mobilization of offense. But before they arrived on the scene, an entire generation would expire on Europe’s killing fields. In any event, the armies’ command staffs, spatially distant and perceptually estranged from the war front, made no efforts to abandon the strategy of attrition, the bleeding to death of the adversary.71 In a Sisyphean effort, they pinned their hopes on even more firepower, more massed men, and a fresh, perhaps decisive offensive that would finally lead to the long hoped-for breakthrough.72
The war, which had long since mobilized the home front with all its resources, became total when the machine gun rendered defense impregnable. Some 80 percent of all the Great War’s casualties were a result of this weapon. The horrific effects of gas and automatic artillery also spread a great deal of terror,73 but the machine gun acquired a special status on the European battlefields. Although it had been around before 1914, there was little awareness of what it meant.
This mental blindness had various causes. One was the romantic-aristocratic image of the battlefield, despite all technological advances still oriented toward a rapid campaign. The generals believed that the key to victory was rigorous training, audacity, and the resolve of the foot soldier, trained in the offensive use of the rifle and bayonet. Years of exacting instruction were required for a British rifleman to fire his weapon in rapid succession.74 French infantry soldiers were themselves drilled exclusively in offensive tactics. In 1913, General Joseph Joffre insisted that the sole precept the French army knew was attack, even at the expense of heavy losses; any other approach was contrary to the nature of warfare and hence to be spurned. The tactical assault, he observed, culminated in the élan of the bayonet thrust.75 Astonishingly, despite developments in long-range weaponry, the arme blanche was still held in huge esteem by the commanders in chief. The same was true for the cavalry, embodying the classic aristocratic form of warfare. Despite the broad devastation caused by the machine gun and the gruesome hindrance posed by barbed wire, there were repeated cavalry attacks—and this despite the fact that the Russo-Japanese War had already made clear to anyone who could see that the machine gun had voided their efficacy. An observer of the battles in the Far East had noted wryly that in view of the machine gun’s frightful firepower, the cavalry now had no function other than to cook rice for the infantry.76
Even as late as 1926, the former commander of the British Expeditionary Forces in France, General Sir Douglas Haig, was not prepared to give up his romantic image of warfare. He was convinced that aircraft and tanks had only a supporting role in any decisive operation; the final blow would still be delivered by the infantry’s bayonet charge and the charge of the cavalry, wielding bared sabers like outstretched lances.77 The cult of the horse and the naked blade was apparently the last attempt on the part of the traditional warrior caste to escape the increasing depersonalization of warfare.
The resistance before World War I among the higher echelons of the British (and not only British) officer corps to accepting the machine gun for what it was—namely, an indiscriminate weapon exponentially increasing defensive capacities—was thus in part a consequence of the proverbial antimodernism of officer-gentlemen. Motivated by romantic conceit, their traditionally self-reproducing warrior caste did indeed work to discredit this envoy of the industrial age as an “unfair weapon.” Hence instead of entrusting the flat-firing machine gun to the infantry, it was shunted off to the artillery, with its ballistic ordnance. In France automatic weapons were first incorporated into the approved arsenal in 1910. The Germans were far more open-minded on this score. As early as the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), Prussian forces had used machine guns in the battle at Wissembourg, although only sporadically and while advancing. The weapon’s enormous potential as a defensive asset thus remained unrecognized.78
In any event, traditions and mentalities alone were not responsible for virtually expelling the machine gun from the European imagination before the Great War. In the first place, there was the Gatling gun, a weapon that had been developed outside Europe, in the New World during the American Civil War,79 where, in an alarming but potent dialectic, the mobilizing of mass armies had led to the invention of a weapon of mass destruction. Even in the United States, however, the memory of the machine gun and its destructive power was steadily fading. It was barely used in the Indian wars. General Custer did not have one at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.80 In the second place, it was primarily used outside the military’s perimeters, as a police weapon in quelling strikes and other forms of labor unrest.81 The weapon’s superiority in this context was due to its mechanical advantages: automatic fire reversed the unfavorable relation between the few custodians of the law and their many opponents. This was especially the case in a situation where few stood against many by definition: in the colonies. Long before the Great War, the machine gun was used to enhance the power of the “white man” over the “native” population. Strictly speaking, it was an instrument of colonial subjugation. Indeed, the domination of Africa in the age of imperialism around the turn of the century would have been inconceivable without the machine gun’s intimidating powers.82
In the European battle theater, the machine gun, an essentially colonial weapon, would prove to be a Trojan horse for precisely those power relations taken for granted in the overseas colonies, but whose significance had remained hidden to the increasingly racist European consciousness. It transferred the violence exercised unceremoniously on the colonial periphery to the heart of old Europe, contributing substantially to its destruction. Once again, the secret of this destruction was the denial of a dramatic re- versal: the weapon’s automatic mechanism had nurtured the white man’s illusion that when the few defeated the many, this was due to natural superiority rather than the instrument at his disposal.
Like the comparable images of slaughter from Langemark, Ypres, Verdun, Isonzo, and other Continental battlefields, the stoic readiness of the British troops on the Somme again and again to storm German positions defended by machine guns and surrounded by barbed wire barriers, despite murderous repulse,83 may have elicited a bewilderment in outside observers similar to that sparked in the typical scenarios of colonial warfare—indeed, a similar sense of “magic.” In 1898 in the Battle of Omdurman, the British army, assisted by indigenous auxiliary troops led by Kitchener and including young Winston Churchill among its officers, employed six Maxim machine guns to mow down the proud warriors of the Mahdi by the thousands. This was, in fact, no battle but a massacre,84 for the charging Mahdi warriors refused to understand the machine gun’s enormous firepower.
In light of later events on the Great War battlefields, it seems doubtful that the white man really understood his own weapon. How could the nature of his superiority in the colonies have escaped him? Was he unable to recognize that it was the automatic weapon that permitted the few to rule over so many, and not the natural blessings of race? Actually the colonial masters were not so simpleminded. Among the British military forces in Africa, only officers, hence white men, were allowed to handle machine guns. The native troops were not to gain any knowledge of their mechanics—of the precondition for white rule. Such caution reveals a self-reflective insight captured ironically in an anti-imperialist couplet: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”85 And yet, there was no great desire to renounce the racist illusion of a superiority that was God given, not simply the result of the machine gun’s firepower.
The subjection of those who were colonized would not last for ever. Paradoxically, the Great War pushed things forward: for the first time nonwhite colonial troops appeared on Europe’s battlefields; for the sake of military efficacy, they were not only allowed to kill white soldiers but were ordered to do so. By participating in the carnage, they achieved an equality that, although precarious, nevertheless contrasted with their usual colonial subjugation.86 Many of the early nonwhite anticolonialist leaders thus emerged from the emancipatory trenches of World War I.87
The equality issuing from Europe’s killing fields was universal. In the face of the machine gun, everyone could serve the apparatus of death—workers, peasants, the nobility, the bourgeoisie. The machine gun simply cancelled attributes and capabilities, whether inherited or acquired, mental or physical. The finger on the trigger made everyone lord of the battlefield. In the Great War’s struggle for survival, the barriers of class and estate were transcended, their value having plunged into an abyss.
Machines make people equal. Already in the nineteenth century, civil equality had advanced together with the industrialization process. But the equality had been circumscribed, shackled politically in the traditional legitimacies. Now, however, equality achieved a breakthrough precisely at the point where it had become existential: in the indiscriminate slaughter of the battlefield; in the trenches defended by machine-gun emplacements.88 Such an experience of equality could not be easily forgotten.Once the Great War came to an end, it demanded its political tribute.
But the equality ratified on the battlefields soon provoked a reaction: ideological objections to the leveling experience of automatic equality. Those objecting were inclined toward a staging of martial individuality and exclusivity. They wished to reawaken aristocratic values and virtues. During the war, few men could participate in action in the skies. In that realm, through the air duel, the dogfight, it was tempting to nurture the illusion of a long-gone world, one sunk into ruins. But the exhausted duel of the flyers could not revive mentalities refuted by the machinery of war.89 Those upholding status, class, and estate had to go elsewhere to voice their protest against equality and the machine.
Increasingly, the disillusioned German veterans of trench warfare found a substitute for the world of experience lost in the war in one particular location: that where, following the decline of the old world, social equality tried to acquire a revolutionary hearing. This equality was mercilessly repressed by a force hardened in the experience of the front: “praetorians against proletarians”;90 counterrevolutionary in the face of the domestic enemy, nationalist or even racist in the face of the external enemy. The Freikorps were executors of such a force—not least in service to the Weimar Republic.91 They were deployed against the Spartacists and rebellious workers in the suppression of the republic of councils in Munich and to smother the violence that flared up in the Ruhr in the spring of 1920. These “wanderers into the void” were also sent into action on the now-fluid eastern frontier, 92 where they were used to brutally quell strikes as well as Polish nationalist stirrings.93 This counterrevolutionary violence surfaced most sharply in the Baltic, where the struggle against Reds, Latvians, and Estonians was ethnically and socially charged to the same degree.94 The Freikorps here revealed itself as a civil war’s racist army. The socalled Baltics cultivated a form of fighting attributed with special cruelty and recklessness.95 In view of the executed horrors and devastation, Ernst von Salomon, a machine gunner in the Liebermann Freikorps, spoke of a burning of “the bourgeois tablets, laws, and values of the civilized world.”96 The historic borderland of the Baltic had become a special battle zone in the Russian Civil War. Various social and ethnic conflicts mingled in a ferment of political mentalities later distilled into Nazism. A special variety of anti-Bolshevism was taking shape.
Truly unusual protagonists, only inadequately described by the distinction between red and white, confronted each other in the Baltic region. The confrontation reflected both the fronts formed in the civil war and the complex circumstances behind the genesis of the Baltic states, especially Estonia and Latvia. The equivocal attitude of the Allied powers confused the situation even more. France and the United States supported the counterrevolutionary Russian Whites in the civil war in the Baltic, committing themselves to preserving “the only and indivisible Russia.” In contrast, England stood by the Baltic states in their quest for independence,97 for instance, dispatching a squadron into the Baltic Sea to assist the governments of Estonia and Latvia. This situation, baffling enough to begin with, was further complicated by the presence of German formations, mobilized as part of the anti Bolshevik intervention on orders from the Allies and on the basis of Article 12 of the Compiègne armistice. These formations had been sent to the Baltic by the Reich government to prevent a Bolshevik advance into East Prussia, as well as to provide cover for the withdrawal of regular German units no longer willing to serve in combat. They comprised German-Baltic units of the so-called Landeswehr, in addition to Freikorps forces. Together with the first Guard Reserve Division, transferred from East Prussia to Cour land, they were combined into the Iron Division under the command of Major Bischoff. The German Legion under Otto Wagener, later Hitler’s Reich economy commissar, also deserves mention. Count Rüdiger von der Goltz was appointed commander in chief over all the German troops.98
Although the German units had been sent to the Baltic for defensive purposes and to fight the Bolsheviks, they were viewed with suspicion by the Estonians and especially the Latvians. The not unjustified feeling was that under the pretext of anti-Bolshevik intervention, the units had been sent to reinforce the German Balts and, if possible, to undermine the hard-earned independence of the Baltic republics with the help of the counterrevolutionary White Russian warlords. In April 1919, units of the German Baltic Landwehr overthrew the Latvian government in Liepaja, which sparked opposition from the Entente. The British issued an ultimatum calling for the withdrawal of the German units or their subordination under Latvian command. There were similar clashes between such units and the Estonian military.99
However the conflicts between Reds, Whites, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, Russians, and Allied intervention forces evolved, the battles on the Baltic frontier revealed a special potential for violence. This stemmed from the unusual blend of civil war on national disputes, already enflamed during the world war by plans of the German Reich to annex and settle the region.100 After the war, the German government dropped such plans. But with rumors spreading in the Reich that the Latvian government was willing to reward mercenaries with both citizenship and land for settlement, soldiers proved increasingly willing to serve on the Baltic front of the Russian Civil War. Disillusioned with the situation at home, many Freikorps fighters were ready to move elsewhere. These “last Germans” (Ernst von Salomon’s term for them) enriched the already confusing situation tied to the Baltic civil war with an additional, colonial dimension.
In this way, the Baltic conflict was marked by a merger of national, colonial, and counterrevolutionary motives. In Courland, Livonia, and Estonia, the merger led to support for the German-Baltic element by reichsdeutsch irregulars. The measures taken in the February 1917 revolution had already stripped these people of their privileges, hence of their historically embedded social position. As a result of that position, they had become a paramount, visible object of both nationalistic and social revolutionary violence: a double threat deriving from the overlapping of ethnic origin and social status typical of the Baltic territories. To be a German meant to be a merchant, a landowner, the lord of a manor—in short, a baron. “Latvian,” on the other hand, signified a dependent farmer who performed menial tasks. In the end, this overlapping of ethnicity and social standing led to a fusion of the struggle of classes and estates with “national” conflicts into one and the same event. This was especially the case when, filled with social hatred, the peasants began to ransack and set aflame the nobility’s estates. Such an explosion took place in Riga in 1905, and the unrest there soon spread to the countryside in Courland and Livonia, where above all the German-Baltic landowners were targeted. In circumstances resembling a civil war, there were dozens of deaths; over five hundred manor houses were plundered and destroyed.101 These events functioned as a social and political alarm signal—one prompting the creation of a nationalistically colored German self-defense association.
The fact that many of the first prominent Nazis stemmed from the Baltic-German milieu does not necessarily imply a general tendency among the German populace there. Nevertheless, the specific experience of the Baltic conflict, with its distinctive fusion of “race” and “class,” may have influenced the diverse political orientations entering into Nazism. Alfred Rosenberg is here a good example, Estonia-born and raised and eventually finding his vocation as “Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories.” Another is Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter; already active in 1905 in Baltic-German self-defense, he marched at Hitler’s side to the Feldherrnhalle during the beer hall putsch in November 1923, where he was shot down by the police in a hail of bullets, an early “martyr of the movement.” Nazi artist Otto von Kursell and the virulent anti-Semitic propagandist and Nazi diplomat Arno Schickedanz had belonged to the same student fraternity in Riga.102 The Balts were conspicuous in the Nazi Party. In fact, they were so numerous among the party journalists that Hitler joked about the Völkischer Beobachter being a Baltic paper. As it was, Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism was deeply influenced by the German Balts.103 A considerable number of the irregulars transferred from the Reich to the Baltic in the “year of decision,” 1918–19, would later join the ranks of the Nazi party, especially the SA. Most of the SA leaders assassinated in June 1934 in the “Night of the Long Knives” (the so-called Röhm putsch) had been Freikorps fighters, and many had seen combat in the Baltic.104
The unbridled violence of the Baltic battles was directed against the Bolsheviks and the eastern peoples, deemed socially and ethnically inferior.105 Indeed, it was this violence that lent the Freikorps a certain allure. In their clashes on the “frontier”— against Poles in Upper Silesia, Latvians and Estonians in the Baltic—the Freikorps and other irregulars experienced highly violent conditions approximating those found in the colonies. Indeed, a surprisingly large number of the older Freikorps officers had served in Africa and were apparently accustomed to the unrestrained use of force.106 Also, the Freikorps indulged in a kind of aestheticizing of violence, expressed in an array of rituals and symbols that would later be assimilated into insignia of the Nazi elite: the silver death’s head on the cockade of the Iron Division or the white swastika of the Ehrhardt Brigade. The praetorians of the civil war harbored a deep hatred of the Weimar Republic, and their commanders even toyed with the idea of forging a military and settler state in the Baltic–East Prussian domain. The idea was to use such a state as a base from which to assault and destroy the loathed democratic regime in Berlin. The Ehrhardt Brigade, active mostly in the Reich and providing the main counterrevolutionary storm troops in the Lüttwitz-Kapp putsch of March 1920, embarked on such a venture.107 After being disbanded, some of its former members belonging to the “Organization Consul” helped murder Republican politicians such as Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau, prompting Reich Chancellor Wirth’s famous outcry, “This enemy is on the right!”
Not all Freikorps members went on to join the Nazi movement. But wherever they were active—from the civil war against the Reds within the Reich to the ethnic struggles in the Baltic borderland—mentalities emerged that nurtured völkisch and Nazi tendencies. These mentalities coalesced into a racist anti Bolshevik weltanschauung that differed fundamentally from Western-style, liberal-democratic anti-Bolshevism. While the latter was based on a concern with forms of society and modes of social encoding, as manifest in the real world, the Nazis transformed Bolshevism into a biological phenomenon. In other words, their distinctions were centered not on a political,socially grounded opposition of classes and values but rather on a racist conception of ethnicity. In short, for Nazism, Bolshevism was less a political than a racial attribute fusing the “Slavic sub-race” with the “Jewish intelligentsia.”108
In the twentieth century, when it came to interpreting reality in social terms, a pair of concepts associated with the Enlightenment and deriving from the late eighteenth-century revolutions stood opposed to each other: freedom and equality.109 The concept of freedom basically denoted liberation from the traditional ties of an estate-based, corporative nature. It was grounded in the principle of the free individual whose obligations to society were construed as an expression of free will. Such contractualism is, of course, pivotal to Western political philosophy, especially its Anglo-American variety. For its part, the concept of equality, originally understood as equality before the law, increasingly evolved into a concept antithetical to freedom, the two concepts having acquired contrary social meanings in the first third of the nineteenth century, as an outcome of the French Revolution’s radical tendencies.110 Within the socialist tradition and in Marxism, this opposition was expressed as that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The great powers themselves gravitated toward one or another of these dominant concepts, value decisions here being tied to both geographical constants and traditions reaching far behind the century’s temporal horizon. In turn, spatially anchored modes of life and the resulting political cultures left their mark on the internal constitution of the various polities.111
In this respect, the difference between maritime and continental political cultures would have lasting significance.112 Maritime civilizations such as England tended to limit monarchic rule, institute a separation of powers, and create a more civic society. The insularity conferred by nature protected the community from various tribulations suffered by the continental powers. Having emerged from the older empires, these powers were beset by territorial conflicts and standing armies that shaped their inner circumstances and ways of life, allowing scant scope for individual rights.113 In contrast, the constitutions of maritime polities reflected their civil societies; at the same time, the external use of force by these polities was distinctive. Simply by deploying their navies and the destructive power they wielded from a distance, they were able to protect their political cultures from contamination by the direct use of force. Although their use of such force was total, it was well beyond their shores. This was the case with both economic blockades and the indiscriminate use of force connected with long-range weaponry.114 In this way, the threat of strategic aerial warfare with intercontinental missiles continues to reflect the basic approach of the maritime powers.115
During World War II, the weapons turned to by the AngloSaxon powers for use against Germany and Japan manifestly reflected the same strategy. The reduction to ash of German cities from the air and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki reflected a policy of using unlimited air space to crush the adversary,116 very much the policy of insular sea powers operating from a great distance. The atomic bomb averted a lengthy land war, much feared by maritime powers. In this way, civil society’s political culture was shielded inside the country from any mental fallout that might have arisen from the application of total force abroad.
Compared with the sea powers and the force at their disposal, deployable from a safe distance, continental states are at a great disadvantage. Their largely terrestrial force makes physical proximity more or less unavoidable, with lasting consequences for their domestic conditions. As suggested, continental powers must maintain standing armies, and in states of emergency, the soldiers are assigned a domestic policing function. In such emergency circumstances, the differences between maritime and continental traditions become evident, as shown by a comparison of English martial law, which remains subject to judicial power, with the French état de siège, steered by the executive.117 These differing traditions form canons of values and are embedded in the corresponding political institutions.
In the twentieth century, the waves of an “Atlantic revolution” swept over the political cultures of the Continent, especially in the wake of the world wars.118 It mainly consisted of Anglo-Saxon political forms and values that spread ever further east: liberal democratic attitudes, constitutions, concepts, political ciphers, penetrating the Continental civilizations. The successive adoption, from west to east, of Atlantic constitutional forms and modes of interaction was readily apparent in Germany after 1918 and 1945, and in East Central and Eastern Europe after 1989.
The Atlantic penetration of continental Europe took place in two movements of varying speed. Cultural change drifted eastward more slowly, whereas political change followed the faster historical vicissitudes. The long-term, culturally encoded changes emerged from the tension between maritime and continental factors. By contrast, the shorter political changes emerged from the tension between freedom and its absence, self-determination and autocracy, democracy and despotism. In the nineteenth century’s cultural-geographical dynamics, either England and Russia or France and Russia confronted each other. In the twentieth century, this dualism shifted into the sharper, politically and ideologically charged confrontation between the powers representing freedom, on the one hand, literal equality, on the other hand. The United States followed in the footsteps of England, while Russia transformed itself into the Soviet Union. The demise of relatively short-lived ideological antagonisms in 1989 has simply served to highlight the likely endurance of these two deep-seated cultural-geographical traditions.
Historically, the mergers between cultural-geographical constants and ideological surges have been highly diverse.119 The antagonism between two power blocs after 1945 was an extreme example of such a merger—the ideological dimension being, in any case, the sole focus of contemporary attention. Already in the nineteenth century, state powers had emerged as bearers of differing values, ideas, and sociopolitical missions, even if the conflicting values took second place to the cultural-geographic encodings of both politics and the balance of power.120 In any case, it is striking that in one way or another, the great powers of the nineteenth century were forced to both foster and hinder value-related factors. France was considered a nest of revolutionary ferment, if only because it used every opportunity to alter the status quo established in 1815. Russia represented reaction. England viewed its own role mainly as guaranteeing stability and security, only secondarily as championing the liberal freedoms.121
The October Revolution in 1917 transformed the political landscape of Europe and its major powers. There was a basic reversal of the nineteenth century’s classic constellation of states, with France and Russia switching roles. The formerly autocratic Russia, now Bolshevik, espoused a radical variant of literal equality: the proletarian revolution. France, to the contrary, assumed the vanguard of the anti-Bolshevik intervention. Britain, albeit the financier and arms supplier of the Russian counterrevolutionaries, remained largely committed to its traditional balancing role on the Continent. In America, Woodrow Wilson, representing a liberal-democratic codex of values now also spreading eastward across the old Continent, did not have a clear position regarding the Bolsheviks. He ascribed the Russian Revolution to dreadful socioeconomic conditions, seeing parallels with the French Revolution. As a republican-minded American, he was distrustful of the counterrevolutionary Whites, above all for their monarchist leanings. All told, despite their ideological reservations about the rule of the soviets (the councils of workers and peasants) in Russia, the Great Powers assembled in Paris in 1919 seemed less interested in determining who should rule in Russia than that there simply be a functioning government there.122
For the Americans, the democratic revolutionary events in early 1917 in Petrograd were opportune. They made it easier to enter the Great War, although this would probably have happened in any case.123 In the end, Berlin’s resumption of unlimited submarine warfare was a great provocation, as was its effort to threaten the United States from Mexico. Nevertheless, entering the conflict before February 1917 would not have suited Washington, which, sunning itself in liberal pathos, considered the pact between the democratic Entente and the despotic czardom a misalliance. America cultivated the self-image of a freedom-championing power remote from Europe’s quarrels, which is why Washington chose to join the conflict as an “associated” rather than “allied” power.
Russia’s February Revolution thus offered America its long-awaited chance to combine realpolitik with the idea of democratic mission. When in April 1917 in a speech before a joint session of Congress, Wilson announced America’s entry into the war against the kaiser’s German Reich, he was able to combine a celebration of the fall of the czar with words of scorn for the“Prussian autocracy.” Wilson’s credo of a liberal order, which culminated in the famous dictum of making the world safe for democracy, was soon challenged by the October coup and the Bolshevik proclamations.124 In actuality, the programs espoused by Wilson and Lenin were both similar and contradictory.125 On the one hand, each program raised a universal claim based on a social interpretation of the social environment;126 on the other hand, the two programs espoused diametrically opposite notions of freedom: in the words of Thomas Masaryk, world democracy versus world revolution.127 Wilson’s “Program for World Peace,” announced to Congress on 8 January 1918 and known as his Fourteen Points, was conceived as a response to the Soviet government’s “Principles of Freedom” of December 1917, which along with stipulating that there be no annexations or indemnities, called for the “right of peoples to self-determination.” Aside from a mention of Poland’s independence, a right to “self-determination” was not included in Wilson’s Fourteen Points.128 But a month later, in a February 1918 speech to Congress, he used precisely that term.129 His appeal to the national consciousness of Europe’s peoples had an impact equal to the threat of social revolution.
The principle of self-determination tore through the structures of old Europe like a projectile, although the collapse of the multinational empires did not require Wilson’s speech. The demand for democracy and popular sovereignty, echoing through the previous century, was itself undermining the cohesion of these multiethnic aggregates. They finally broke apart as a result of war and increasingly acute tensions between both the various nationalities (and the populace) and imperial authorities.
Democracy, popular sovereignty, and the principle of nationality had become the gravediggers of the dynastic, multiethnic empires. These components of the new era could be subsumed under the rubric of self-determination. In the process, a major difference emerged between the Anglo-Saxon, especially American, political theory of self-determination and the traditional Continental self-understanding. The Anglo-American theory viewed self-determination as the right of a “people” in the sense of a population to provide itself with sovereign institutions and choose its government. For its part, the continental tradition emphasized the right of a nation to self-constitution independent of other nations, whereby nation was construed as an ethnically determined and historically grounded community. Within this conceptual framework, being affiliated with a nation was less an expression of political will and subjective decision than an “objectively” existing affiliation. Hence where Western political cultures tended to understand self-determination as involving a principle of self government, this to a large extent institutional concept shifted as it moved eastward into a concept of national self-determination. This shift would be reflected in the formation of states based on ethnicity. More concretely, it led to demands that ethnic groups be incorporated into already existing, nationally kindred, and territorially adjacent polities—in short to irredentism.
Western principles tied to the concept of self-determination as self-government were difficult to realize in the cultural-geographical and political contexts of Central and East Central Europe. The long historical memories on the Continent rendered it virtually impossible to form institutions aimed at neutralizing ethnicity. What remained was a compromise between the Western, Anglo-American notion of institutional self-government and the more Eastern and Continental understanding of national self-determination. In the treaties signed in the Paris suburbs, the compromise was reflected in the stipulations concerning the protection of minorities, and it was further incorporated into the constitutions of the new or expanded states.130 Self-determination and minority protection thus turned out to be complementary; while the principle of self-determination gave the titulary nation priority, minority protection limited the hegemonial effect of self-determination on domestic affairs. The newly created polities, for example, the restored Polish republic, perceived this as a restriction placed on their hard-won sovereignty.131 The entire interwar period was ridden with conflicts arising from the tension between titulary nations and minorities. The former sought to cast off the obligations of minority protection imposed on them in 1919, while the latter struggled to assure that the principle was enforced.132 The Western powers had in any event not reached any consensus regarding the very survival of ethnic minorities. Rather, they presumed a process of step-by-step assimilation into the state or titular nation. Minority protection was meant to advance this process, not impede it.133
Both during the Second World War and especially in the postwar era, the principle of self-determination and the Western demand for self-government would lead to some tension between the United States, which was traditionally anticolonial, and Great Britain, which hoped to preserve its empire. Before America’s entry into the war, in the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, Roosevelt (similarly to Wilson before him) sought not only to proclaim the precepts of a new liberal-democratic world order and of free trade but also to initiate a process of decolonization.134 The dissolution of the colonial empires was an implicit motive in the shaping of America’s war policy. Thus Article 3 of the charter recognized “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and the desirability that “sovereign rights and self government [be] restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”135 The peoples living under colonial rule understood this article as a commitment to their imminent independence; Churchill rejected such an interpretation. In his view, the article only applied to those peoples subjugated by the Nazis, certainly not to the British Empire.136 This disagreement between Washington and London over self-determination for colonial peoples, especially in Asia and India, would persist until the end of the war. Only Churchill’s replacement by Clement Attlee ushered in a policy of decolonization. In any event, England had been totally exhausted by World War II, and a new conflict loomed, the Cold War, which demanded enormous energy.
The Soviet Union also expressed reservations regarding self determination. Allied since the summer of 1941 with Britain and (indirectly) with the United States in the struggle against Nazi Germany, it felt obliged not to reject the Atlantic Charter outright. But Moscow was determined to retain those territories, especially the Baltic states, that had been absorbed into the Soviet Union on the basis of the 1939 accord with Hitler. It was also suspicious of those points in the charter enunciating the framework of an “indivisible world market” based on liberal, democratic values of free trade.137 These points had in fact been developed fully in the spirit of the American doctrine of freedom. Already at the turn of the century, Washington had proclaimed its open door principle, whereby all nations would have equal trading and development rights in China (as opposed to the emergence of separate spheres of interest and economic dominance by particular nations). The idea of an indivisible world market and multilateralism in foreign trade was directed against the Axis powers, whose policies promoted autarky and the creation of closed economic areas. But its thrust also worked against the closed economic system of Soviet socialism and, though in attenuated form, the protectionism of the colonial empires.
Both the Soviet Union and Great Britain thus had misgivings about the principles of a liberal world economy and the absolute right of self-determination.138 Although Roosevelt ended up diluting much of the Atlantic Charter’s binding force for the sake of preserving Allied harmony, differences and tensions would still form around these principles, foreshadowing postwar realignments among the victorious powers.
The clash between a West stamped by Anglo-American attitudes and Soviet Russia ran through the entire century, although it did not fully unfold ideologically and power-politically until after 1945. Two phases can be distinguished in this struggle between West and East, freedom and equality. The first phase involved the various interventions by the Allied and associated powers and the “border states” associated with them in the Russian Civil War (1918–20). This phase continued in milder form in the interwar period, in policies aimed at isolating Soviet Russia (later, the Soviet Union).139 But with Washington’s formal recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 and Moscow’s admittance into the League of Nations the following year, the antagonism abated, only to emerge again with the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. With the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the formation of the anti-Hitler coalition, the Western-Soviet relation then again changed, this time abruptly (albeit once more temporarily). The second phase of the conflict would set in with the end of World War II. From that point onward, the clash between freedom-centered and equality-centered values would traverse several stages. During the Cold War it would appear as a great confrontation between East and West—a bipolarity of fear based on what George Kennan would term a “mathematics of destructive forces.”
Taking various historical shapes as it unfolded, the decisive stages of this confrontation of values marked most of the twentieth century, beginning with the October Revolution of 1917 and more or less finishing in 1989. “Universal civil war” in fact seems the appropriate metaphor for describing this global political confrontation, which was itself informed by clashing philosophies of history.140 On a vertical plain, the confrontation cut through previous state and national loyalties, corresponding in this way to the nineteenth-century antinomies of freedom and equality, bourgeoisie and proletariat, revolution and counterrevolution. Decolonization also appropriated the political terminology of 1789 : in the second half of the twentieth century, entire continents were raised to the status of revolutionary subjects, with commentators now beginning to speak of a tiers monde in analogy to the tiers état.
Much speaks for the confrontation between freedom and equality as the central interpretive axis for understanding the twentieth century. When applied, this axis does justice to the tense reality embedded in the century’s warp and woof of events, with one exception: the years 1941 to 1945. But despite their brevity when measured against the steady confrontation between freedom and equality, these years have left imperishable traces on the consciousness of posterity. In the face of these years, the impression emerges of an incriminated event producing a kind of temporal compaction,one drawing both preceding and ensuing epochs into its vortex. That these few years lay claim to such a huge region of memory is doubtless due to the affectively and cognitively unendurable nature of contemplating mass murder—contemplating “Auschwitz.” The years collide violently with the civilized world’s expectations of rationality, from now on placing a burden on historical memory. The memory of this event inscribes itself into the epoch as its actual emblem.
An interpretation of the twentieth century in terms of the clash between freedom and equality is thus incapable of assimilating two events. Neither the wartime alliance against Hitler’s Germany of those earlier and later adversaries, the Anglo Americans and the Soviets, nor Nazism’s biologistically based mass annihilation of human beings, can be reconciled with an understanding of the century as a universal civil war of values and ideologies. In this regard, it is striking that although no causal connection exists between the wartime alliance and the Nazi mass murder, such a connection, endowing coherence, has been created in historical memory. In retrospect, things seem to suggest that the 1941 pact between the Western powers and Moscow came about because of the mass murder—as if the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets had reached an agreement to oppose the biologism of German Nazism on the basis of a shared societal interpretation of their social realities. It is as if the biologizing of the social emanating from Nazi Germany prompted the protagonists in the century’s defining confrontation to call a truce, in order to confront a phenomenon radically incompatible with the Enlightenment’s defining ideas. For a short period of less than four years, two fundamentally opposing interpretations of the world faced each other on the battlefield. There was no shared secular reality between them. In contrast, the powers espousing a societal interpretation of the world, the Anglo-American proponents of freedom, on the one hand, the Soviet proponents of radical equality, on the other, could draw together on the basis of historically transmitted and geopolitically shaped premises. This rapprochement led to a formation of fronts resembling the original constellation of the Great War, Even the designation of the post-1941 events as the “Second World War” presumes a continued unfolding of past events. From the perspective of the Anglo-American West, it seemed appropriate to view biologizing Nazism as a direct extension of the Prussian power-state; from that of the East, to view it in familiar images of a heroic war to defend the motherland. Between these allied forces, a tacit agreement prevailed to suspend potentially disruptive confirmations of the continued opposition between freedom and equality. In 1943, the agreement was reflected in Stalin’s symbolic decision, so gratifying to his Anglo-American allies, to dissolve the Comintern. Nevertheless, measured against the universal civil war waged since 1917 between proponents of liberal-democratic freedom and an ideal of literal equality, the anti-Hitler coalition constituted a manifest, dramatic exception. Following Germany’s defeat, the enduring conflict between the liberal West and the Communist East returned with an intensity that seemed meant to efface memory of the years 1941 to 1945.
It may seem startling to locate Nazism outside the conventional boundaries set by the universal civil war between Bolshevism and anti-Bolshevism. For was not anti-Bolshevism an integral, even decisive, component in the Nazi negative canon of values? Did the Nazi regime not consider the Communists and Soviet power its foremost enemies? Were the two antagonists not pitted against each other across Europe, for instance, in the Spanish arena, where all the signs of a universal civil war were manifest in the second half of the 1930s? The attack on the Soviet Union, bound up with a ruthless war of annihilation in the East, together with its rationalizations, seemed to provide ample evidence of the Nazis’ extreme anti-Bolshevism.
It would be incorrect to contend that National Socialism was not radical in its anti-Bolshevism. Yet its anti-Bolshevism differed fundamentally from that of the interventionist powers in the Russian Civil War of 1918–20. Nor can it be equated with the antagonism that kept the world in suspense for decades after the collapse of the anti-Hitler coalition. Indeed, the huge divide separating Western, liberal-democratic anti-Bolshevism from that of the Nazis is obvious. The former was political; it was fought out in the arena of differing views of social reality.The conflict between West and East was a confrontation between political systems that both espoused values rooted in the Enlightenment. As a conflict between factions on a global scale, their antagonism took on the trappings of a civil war. Thus it transcended traditional demarcations based on loyalty to a state or a nation. This is reinforced by the figures of the defector, the agent, the traitor, and later the dissident. Within his or her polity, the dissident represents the universal canon of values of the opposite side.141
National Socialist anti-Bolshevism was of a completely different nature. Its racializing, biologistic character contradicts the concept of civil war. Thus, the Nazi worldview had no interest in defectors from the racially inferior opposition. The fiction of racial immutability prevented the Nazis from admitting supporters from beyond the perimeter of the German racial community and peoples regarded as artgleich (racially similar). They had no interest in political “proselytizing.” The racially defined folk was absolute; all Artfremde (those alien to the race) were excluded. With its categories of race and space (Raum), National Socialism exceeded and destroyed concepts such as territory, state, and nation.142 It more closely resembled an extreme form of integral nationalism than a warring faction in the universal civil war over values. As such, it was similar to Italian Fascism, albeit distinct in its biologistic worldview.
At the beginning of their alliance, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were brought together to a large extent by their respective interests in foreign policy rather than by their common ideology. This accord culminated in the Spanish Civil War. The rapprochement of the two powers had been initiated by Italy’s attack on Ethiopia in October 1935. This imperialistic colonial war on the Horn of Africa had isolated Italy internationally, while alienating the Western powers of England and France. In the spring of that year, Rome was still allied with London and Paris in the short lived “Stresa Front” against Germany.143 The League of Nations issued sanctions against Italy in response to its aggression against a member state. The German Reich, which had quit the League of Nations in the autumn of 1933, came to Italy’s aid with urgently needed supplies of coal. It was not alone in this, another league member, the Soviet Union, furnished Fascist Italy with crude oil: even the “fatherland of all toilers” had to be realistic and protect its foreign interests.144 When the Berlin-Rome Axis was proclaimed in the fall of 1936, concurrent with their joint intervention in the Spanish Civil War, only two years had passed since Italy, in reaction to the attempted National Socialist putsch in Vienna and the murder of the Austro-Fascist Chancellor Dollfuss, had massed troops at the Brenner Pass with the aim of thwarting an attack by Hitler on Austria and countering German desires for expansion in Central Europe.
The Spanish Civil War is officially regarded as the classic, indeed archetypal, confrontation between the powers of Fascism and anti-Fascism in Europe. In the self-image of anti-Fascism, the Spanish Republic soon acquired an iconic status, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy standing behind the Falangist rebels on the Iberian Peninsula, the republican forces being aided by volunteers from all over the world organized into special “international brigades.” Moreover, the Spanish Republic was supplied with arms and matériel by Moscow and assisted by Russian military advisors. The extent of that aid, which the Republic paid for dearly from its gold reserves, would not become known until the late 1950s. Recent revelations indicate that the Soviet shipments involved deception if not treachery toward the republic.145
The confrontation in Spain thus seemed to have all the characteristics of a major front in the universal civil war of ideologies. Those wedded to the “anti-Fascist” viewpoint had a clear interest in this representation, especially once Germany and Italy intervened. The political rhetoric of the republican camp had itself contributed substantially toward stylizing the war into a decisive clash with European Fascism. The Nazis themselves cultivated this image of the events in Spain. In Goebbels’ propaganda, the fighting there was consistently presented as an ideological battle in a universal conflict between Fascism and Bolshevism.146
In fact, the romantic image of the “poet’s war” drawn by volunteers in the International Brigade was a deception.147 The deception is reflected in the reactions of the Western powers and in the conduct of France and especially England. London and Paris tried to avoid entanglement in the Spanish imbroglio and persuade other states to do likewise. The aim of this effort was to preserve peace in Europe—a lofty goal of the Western powers, notably Britain, which felt obliged to stay out of Continental squabbles for the sake of maintaining the balance of power. And the states that openly intervened, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, were themselves motivated by calculations tied more to foreign policy and strategic alliance than to ideology. Hitler wished to harness General Franco’s rebellion against the Spanish Republic to further Germany’s strategic aims and undermine the European system of collective security. Also, it seemed likely that following a victory by Franco, Spain would stand alongside Germany in the event of a great European war. In any event, a German intervention would have the effect of estranging Spain from London, Paris, and Moscow, powers that needed to be kept from exercising any future influence on Spain in the framework of alliance policies.148 Other factors were less significant. For example, the often repeated observation that modern instruments of warfare were tested in Spain and that particularly the Luftwaffe had found a testing ground for its bombers derives from a statement by Göring at Nuremberg that later research has shown to be unfounded.149 Moreover, Germany was less interested in an expeditious victory by Franco than in a drawn-out civil war.
It is thus clear that the alliance between Germany and Italy emerging from the Spanish Civil War was largely prompted by complex foreign-policy calculations tied to Italy’s Ethiopian adventure.150 Berlin’s foreign ministry was pleased to keep Italy occupied in Africa and the Mediterranean; in this way, Rome’s unfavorable stance toward German interests in Central Europe could be effectively neutralized, an approach vindicated in the Anschluß with Austria in March 1938. Also, Mussolini’s actions in Ethiopia aggravated differences with London, impelling Italy to move ever closer to Berlin.151 All these proceedings unfolded under the primacy of an alliance policy revolving around the fundamental European conflict of the 1930s: the coalition of the Versailles status quo versus the powers wishing to revise that treaty’s order.
Italy’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War reflected its expansionist policy, the program of mare nostro meant to further its power-political and strategic aims. There was an anti-French component to these ambitions. The traditional Franco-Italian rivalry in the western Mediterranean and North Africa would endure throughout the war, with Italy and Vichy France pursuing their conflicting aims under the aegis of German hegemony. Rome’s Ethiopian adventure and intervention in Spain had cast doubt on Mussolini’s role as “Europe’s mediator.”152 Nonetheless, in Munich in 1938 Il Duce succeeded in refurbishing his faded image as an intermediary. Relations in Europe were not yet as polarized as they would seem from a wartime perspective. We thus find London and Rome reaching an understanding in the Mediterranean in January 1937, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War.
England was committed to preserving peace in Europe—and indeed at any price. Its paramount concern was maintaining stability. The Spanish conflict could not be allowed to expand into a general European war. If the Conservative government had any sympathies, they were with the rebels surrounding Franco. But in principle London was indifferent to Spain’s internal situation. Given such ideological agnosticism, the British found it relatively easy to foster adequate relations with both sides. Economic interests encouraging precaution in both directions were also at play. But the decisive factor was Spain’s allegiance in a future European conflict. Should the expected greater war finally erupt, Germany wanted a Francoist Spain on its side, whereas England was intent on securing the good will of whichever party proved victorious.153 Importantly, the Baldwin government’s nonintervention policy was approved by most of the British populace and, to large extent, by the British trade unions.
To further its aim of confining the Spanish Civil War to the Iberian Peninsula and assuring nonintervention by the major powers, England exerted pressure on France. Unhappy with the Franco-Soviet agreement of May 1935, London cautioned Paris against any measures that might help trigger a European war. If France intervened in Spain, it could not expect British support in a conflict with Italy. But in fact there was no need for such pressure. Although Léon Blum’s Popular Front had now and then furnished the Spanish government with clandestine aid, it was constrained on this issue by domestic politics.154 The socialists themselves were split between interventionists and pacifists, a schism hardly conducive to swift political decision making. Finally, the Popular Front was chiefly interested in realizing its social programs and wished to avoid hurling itself into a Spanish adventure.155
Initially, the Soviet Union also hesitated to become involved in the Spanish Civil War. During the 1930s, it had sought to preserve peace in the framework of the League of Nations and the system of collective security. This strategy was neither unselfish nor unproblematic. Peace abroad made it possible for Stalin to wage war at home, to carry out his relentless program of accelerated “social development.” In helping protect the Soviet Union from foreign turbulence and military challenges, the principle of collective security thus had a dubious function: allowing Stalin to focus on “building socialism in a single country.” But in the West, Nazi Germany loomed as a danger; in the East, Japan had launched its campaign of conquest in Manchuria in 1931, thus itself threatening a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. For these reasons, there was no real alternative to Moscow’s participation in the Western policy of collective security.156
Because the British strategy of containing the Spanish Civil War was in the Soviet interest, Moscow decided to join the international Nonintervention Committee. But when the Soviets urged its fellow committee members to intercede in response to the German and Italian intervention in Spain, relations with London deteriorated. The British were distrustful, and fears were voiced that in a mode of ideological relapse, the Soviets were about to inaugurate a new round of Bolshevik intrigues on the international stage.157 Old tensions between England and Russia flared again at the Montreux Conference in July 1936, when the Soviets advanced the traditional Russian demand that the Black Sea be opened only to warships from countries adjoining its shores. The British, who wished to preserve a hard-won balance of naval power, felt threatened by the Soviet initiative. They feared that Moscow was trying to plunge its overstretched empire into the imponderables of a continental war in Europe.
In their turn, the Soviets were displeased with the Western powers’ military restraint in the face of the German and Italian actions. Their distrust was intensified by the fact that Japan’s aggression against China in 1937 had gone unpunished. The ultimate result of such European and Asian developments would be that seemingly paradoxical volte-face of August 1939, the Hitler Stalin pact. Perceived as initiated with Madrid, the unfolding scenario was confirmed for the Soviets in 1938 in Munich, where they were excluded from the meeting between Hitler and the Western powers, with Mussolini in attendance. At the same time, Moscow feared a possible understanding between London and Berlin at Poland’s expense, which would draw Nazi Germany’s frontiers even closer to the Soviet Union. This was in any case the Soviet perspective regarding its turn toward Nazi Germany and away from the status quo. The British were concerned with other problems. They considered the military action on behalf of Spain that Moscow was urging to be a dangerous proposition. They preferred to work out a compromise with Italy in the Mediterranean rather than risk a major war to gratify the Soviets.
As an iconographic event, the Spanish Civil War has contributed greatly to an enduring narrative of global struggle between classes and ideologies. But the romantic effects of this narrative have far exceeded the significance of the material that it recounts. This narrative bypasses an entire crucial dimension of the Spanish events: the policies regarding alliance and security as developed by the various European powers. It bypasses the important opposition between those powers wishing to maintain the status quo and other powers bent on either demolishing it or, like the Soviet Union, partaking of the results of the demolition. It bypasses the crisis in Asia, Japan’s invasion of China, which, however one tries, cannot be subsumed under the dualistic schema of Fascism versus anti-Fascism, Bolshevism versus anti-Bolshevism. And it bypasses the civil war conducted by the Soviet regime itself, as played out, for instance, in Stalin’s conviction that he had to settle accounts with the party’s old Bolsheviks, reflected in his bloody purging of the Red Army officer corps in 1938. Nazi Germany’s intervention in Spain does not necessarily define that country as the open battlefield in an enduring universal civil war over values. Nor can the crushing of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent extinction of Poland be construed as further stages in an ideological war between Bolshevism and anti-Bolshevism. Rather, these acts were the outcome of an ultrarevisionist German expansionism and nationalism propelled by a fanatic integralist impulse. The fact that the mainly Central European internationalists who fought in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War may have understood their activities differently belongs to another story. Or in any case, that different, widely held perspective has given an ideological cast to a complex of motives with, in reality, a power-political core.
Within the power-political constellation emerging with the Spanish Civil War, it is difficult to discern the sharp demarcating lines of an ideological opposition.158 Spain was not the arena for a decisive round in a civil war over values spreading over the globe, as retrospective accounts of the events there would often have us believe. Rather, within this conflict players jostled for trumps and positions in a westward-directed European war of revision. Only later, beginning in 1941, was this transformed into an eastward directed racist-ideological war of annihilation. For decades, the opulent revolutionary portrait of the Spanish Civil War would help mask one of Nazism’s most characteristic features: the biologism of its weltanschauung, located outside the horizon of all usual social interpretations of reality.
German Nazism was as fundamentally different from liberal universalism of Western provenance as it was from and Bolshevik internationalism. In its hermetics of biologism and racial theory, it cannot be reconciled with the conceptual structure of a civil war. The racist Slavophobia of the Nazis functioned as a self imposed obstacle precisely at those moments when they might well have enjoyed success as one faction in a universal civil war over values, for instance, by inciting the various ethnic populations in the Soviet Union against the Stalinist regime.159 But the anti-Bolshevik civil war waged by Nazi Germany was not about conflicting values. It was a race-ideological war of subjugation and annihilation. As a civil war, it was inauthentic.
The biologistic elements of Nazi anti-Bolshevism grew from a völkisch matrix injected with racial ideology. These elements surmounted and smothered the political substance inherent in a civil war. It is thus not surprising that otherwise classical antagonists in a universal civil war of values, vehemently opposed as proponents of either freedom or radical equality, could come together on the basis of what they had in common: things originating, as suggested, in a societal interpretation of history, hence in the Enlightenment. This rapprochement took place in the exceptional historical situation prevailing between 1941 and 1945, when what was at stake was the confrontation and defeat of the biologistic threat. Once this had been accomplished, freedom and equality abandoned their ceasefire in order to resume their interrupted struggle of values with even greater intensity—for over forty years. The principle of freedom won when the social blueprint for material equality foundered on its own inadequacies. The principle of literal equality ultimately failed because of a fundamental discrepancy recognized by Marx. In the idiom of the critique of political economy, the forces of production were shackled by politically determined relations of production. Freedom, formerly considered a dispensable diversion of the privileged classes, had meanwhile matured into a force of production, adopting itself to new technologies. With nothing of equal value to offer in opposition, the system of equality expired without ceremony in 1989 and 1990.