Diplomacy and Economics in Interwar Europe

In what ways were diplomacy and economics linked in this decade?

In my opinion, diplomacy and economics were linked in the 1920s in essentially two regards, i.e., with regard to French-German relations and to American-European relations. On the one hand, the economic situation in Germany had a direct impact on the extent to which it was able to meet its responsibilities to pay reparations to France, with immediate repercussions in most cases to the diplomatic relationship between the two countries. On the other hand, as the United States drifted into neutrality and non-interventionism, the extent to which this position was reflected in its economic relationship with Europe at large was also affected.

On the former point, the key example is likely the French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, which came with a German default on coal payments per the Treaty of Versailles. Kathleen Burk describes the crisis thus: "[French Prime Minister] Poincaré finally decided that the only way Germany would pay reparations on the scale which had been agreed was if the United States loaned her the money, and France occupied the Ruhr essentially to force the Americans to do so."[1] The diplomatic and economic response was the Dawes Plan, which "tacitly assumed an immediate end to the economic occupation and reduction of the military occupation to a skeleton force."[2] The occupation of the Ruhr notwithstanding, the Dawes Plan was effective in forestalling complete collapse of the German economy and so can be considered a diplomatic victory.

On the latter point, Burk's review of Melvyn Leffler's The Elusive Quest praises Leffler's approach to American policy during the 1920s as properly considering both economic expansionism and political isolationism.[3] Pointing out the primary American goal of providing security for France and revitalizing Germany's economy, she notes that the U.S. policy on Europe was one that had abandoned the notion of European stability as "not of vital importance."[4] That the Coolidge administration nevertheless implemented the Dawes Plan indicates that the U.S. regarded the German economy as more important than French security. Thus, the U.S. had conceded the supremacy of economics over diplomacy, although the plan affected both economics and diplomacy positively in Europe, at least with regard to forestalling a war between France and Germany and/or German collapse.
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[1] Kathleen Burk, "Economic Diplomacy Between the Wars," Historical Journal, 24, no. 3 (1981): 1005.
[2] Sally Marks, "The Myths of Reparations," Central European History, 11, no. 3 (1978): 246.
[3] Burk, ibid., 1011.
[4] Ibid.

Culture in Interwar Europe

Can we define a typology of modernism in Interwar Europe?

I think it's possible to define a typology of modernism in Interwar Europe that permeates the visual arts, music, and literature. Part of understanding the term "modernism" is seeing it as something other than a merely date-specific categorization. Rather, it's informative to situate culture within the larger historical context and to compare cultural output to that during the preceding period to identify the distinctive aspects of the typology of modernism.

For instance, in the area of music, the debut of Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps is instructive. For Modris Eksteins, the key aspect here is Freud's ability to shock fin-de-siècle Europe's sensibilities: "For modern art as for modern science shock and surprise had become by the early years of the twentieth century an integral part of the cultural landscape."[1] In this regard, Stravinsky's work did not disappoint, with audience members rioting at its premiere. More broadly, Stravinsky's music and even the more "radical" atonal work of Arnold Schoenberg were marked by the influence of neoclassicism, which could be seen as a reaction to the romanticism of the previous century.

In the visual arts, Eksteins notes the influence of new thinking about science and morality on cubism: "the geometric shapes that formed the basis of cubist composition-its critics derided it as decomposition - hinted at a fourth dimension beyond time, space, and matter related to the new ability to escape existing laws, be they gravitational, moral, or artistic."[2] Here, there is also again a reaction to the previous prevailing form, i.e., impressionism, with its realistic, if softly focused, emphasis on the subject matter. In this arena, Picasso is possibly the most famous artist and his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon embodying both a break with previous form and content -- the subject being prostitutes.

Finally, in literature, the subgenre of High Modernism was ascendant. With High Modernism, another sort of neoclassicism, which combined a return to mythic archetypes with radically new styles, was an important factor. A rallying cry was issued by the American expatriate (and future fascist) Ezra Pound, who exhorted his proteges to "make it new."[3] The literary figures thus influenced certainly include James Joyce, whose Ulysses retold Homer's Odyssey as a single day in 1901 Dublin, or the Anglo-American T.S. Eliot, whose poem "The Waste Land" juxtaposed passages wholly parachuted from ancient and medieval literature with lines such as "These fragments I have shored against my ruins,"[4] a direct reference to the fragmentation of High Modernist poetry (and prose).

In conclusion, the arts offered a typology of modernism in interwar Europe characterized by a radical break with past forms influenced in part by the rapidly evolving intellectual environment and by a desire to react directly against the previous mode. Although it does not make a particular point in this regard, I thought I'd end this post with this quotation from Paul Johnson's Modern Times, if only because it so nicely mashes together a bunch of figures from the arts into a single sentence: "They [Marcel Proust and James Joyce] in Paris on 18 May 1922 , after the first night of Stravinsky's Renard, at a party for Diaghilev and the cast, attended by the composer and his designer, Pablo Picasso. Proust, who had already insulted Stravinsky, unwisely gave Joyce a lift home in his taxi."[5]

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[1] Modris Ecksteins, "Culture," in Europe, 1900-1945, ed. Julian Jackson (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 178.
[2] Ibid, 175.
[3] Michael North, "The Making of 'Make It New,'" Guernica (August 15, 2013), https://www.guernicamag.com/the-making-of-making-it-new/
[4] T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
[5] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: From the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 9-10.

The Triumph of Democracy?

Why was violence such a salient feature of politics in the immediate postwar period?

A phenomenon like increased public violence is not likely to be one with a simple explanation. It is more likely that a complex interrelationship of several factors, among them historic, sociological, and economic. Here, it seems the greatest contributors to this trend were; the demobilization of a rootless, recently defeated, often armed, group of young men (a population more often disposed to violence than others); increased ethnic heterogeneity with new or redrawn national borders; and the influence of certain romanticized notions of violence "from above."

On the first and second points, I think Gerwarth and Horne make several very persuasive arguments in their article on paramilitarism as a direct contributor to the increase in violence in the postwar period. Describing the large group of recently demobilized soldiers, they write, "Together they formed explosive subcultures of ultramilitant masculinity in which brutal violence was an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, form of political expression.[1] Here, the example of the Freikorps in revolutionary Berlin and Munich and these men's deployment against the revolutionaries is probably the most prominent. Gerwarth and Horne write later in their piece, "In other parts of Eastern Europe, however, the violence was less ideological, remaining more concerned with interethnic rivalries or the territorial borders of new nation-states."[2] Here, the authors' examples of violence during the dissolution of British rule over (most of) Ireland or the almost immediate ethnic violence emerging in the new Yugoslavia between Serbs and Croats are informative examples.

On the third point, a direct relationship is more difficult to draw, in part because evidence of the influence of philosophy on middle- and working-class men is difficult to track. Nevertheless, given his influence on prominent postwar leaders like Mussolini and his participation in Action Française, it is difficult to exclude the influence of Georges Sorel on this process. Charles Maier writes, "The task of Sorel's famous myth, with its incitement to class tension and creative violence, was to reinvigorate the elites as well as the proletarian challengers. Both Sorel and Pareto shared a new and still unusual bourgeois hostility to liberalism. Yet it was significant that in decrying a crisis of European culture, they summoned up the rhetoric of class confrontation. Social conflict had become preoccupying enough to call into question the entire legacy of Enlightenment rationality and humanism."[3]

The point here regards not only Sorel's appeal to the redemptive power of violence, which informed certain leaders' willingness to deploy it when unnecessary, but also the larger issue of a retreat from Enlightenment solutions to social problems that had been ensconced within the framework of liberal democracy as the Age of Reason's crowning achievement.

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[1] Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, "Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923," Journal of Modern History, 83, no. 3 (2011): 498.
[2] Ibid, 503.
[3] Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1975), 23.

Undermining the System: Revisionists and Counter-Revolutionaries

• How important was the relationship between fascism and nationalism?  
• What did fascists in Eastern Europe believe in?
• To what extent was fascism in Central Europe, in essence, a revolt against modernity?
• Did fascism represent a challenge to the established order in interwar Europe?  
• How far was fascism the exception rather than the rule in radical right-wing politics in Europe in this period?  
• Who constituted the elites - and what was the attitude of fascism to them?

Rather than note the specific questions I'm trying to answer here, I thought this week I'd instead write a more general post that touches upon most, if not all, of the questions regarding fascism. First, it's important to note that there is the concept within the study of fascism called the "fascist minimum," i.e., those qualities that, at the very least, can be said to be shared by all fascist movements. Roger Griffin defined it in 1991 as "palingenetic ultranationalism": nationalism that seizes on the idea of "the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it."[1] In this regard, the relationship between fascism and nationalism is absolutely essential -- there is no fascism without nationalism. Thus, we can conclude that the fascists in Eastern Europe believed in ultranationalism, but at least according to Griffin, to move beyond that minimum is inherently problematic, although it's fair to say that fascists were anti-communist, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal; however, notably, these positions are all negative, rather than positive. Finally, there is the pervasive violence of the fascist movement, which Gerwarth and Horne argue persuasively was a contribution of postwar paramilitarism and the "mobilizing power of defeat"[2] or, in the case of Italy, "mutilated victory."

The extent to which fascism was an exception to radical right-wing politics in Europe rather than the rule is a complex question. Stanley Payne's work on fascist history provides a useful taxonomy for understanding this question, I think. He classes the right generally into three categories: conservative right; reactionary right; and fascist. Thus, to use the example of Germany, while the conservative right could include broad swaths of the liberal and monarchist parties, the reactionary right was categorized by the nationalist parties, notably the DNVP, led by Alfred Hugenberg, which ended up being the Nazis' coalition partner. This latter group would include parties seeking to withdraw from democracy and reverse constitutional reforms, while the fascists are classed by Payne as revolutionary, seeking to smash the system entirely and construct something new. In this regard, we can consider the elites to encompass parts of the two non-fascist groups, either seeking to retain power by opposing fascists (conservative right) or to retain power by collaborating with (but, in theory, restraining) fascists (reactionary right). The extent to which both these strategies failed is self-evident.

The final question, of whether fascism represented a revolt against modernity, is best answered by Mazower, who writes, "there were dynamic non-democratic alternatives to meet the challenges of modernity."[4] Notably, however, Mazower includes Bolshevism and right-wing authoritarianism generally among these alternatives. It's also necessary to acknowledge that, while fascism was a reaction to modernity, the framing of the revolt itself could differ depending on the country under study. For instance, in Romania, which I am studying closely this term, there was a firm rejection of modernity for more traditional peasant values and specifically the Romanian Orthodox Church. For the Nazis, in contrast, the response was more revolutionary than reactionary, seeking to transform modern society not into a version of its past but rather something different and new. Moreover, the Nazis were willing to embrace modern means, e.g., mass media and propaganda, to accomplish this goal.

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[1] Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, "Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923," Journal of Modern History, 83, no. 3 (2011): 491.
[2] Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1991), chapter 2, page 48/117.
[3] Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-45 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 15.
[4] Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1998), 4.