Defending Democracy: The Popular Fronts and Stalin

Were the popular fronts held hostage by Stalin?

I think the answer to whether the popular fronts were held hostage by Stalin depends on which front is being examined. If the most important popular fronts were those in France and Spain, then it seems clear that the former was not held hostage while the latter was. Whereas the Popular Front in France seems to have failed more as a matter of the ability of the competing ideological bloc to draw popular support, the Popular Front in Spain was brought down at least in part by an extension of Stalinist ideological purity tests to Spain.

Discussing the case of France, Tom Buchanan makes a compelling case that the "democracy had become fused since at least the 1870s with the Republican tradition,"[1] whereas the very idea of democracy in Spain was a "radical threat to the old elites."[2] As a result, the right was far more to engage with the left within the context to democracy in France, while in Spain, the forces of reaction, linked to the military, the church, and the monarchy, dominated the right wing. As to why the Popular Front failed in France, Helen Graham and Paul Preston contend that the opportunity was wasted by a failure of the Popular Front to use the momentum from the 1936 election to effect genuine change to the economic balance of power. The deepening of the economic crisis and Léon Blum's failure to respond to worker mobilization resulted in first his own and then the Front's fall from power.[3]

In the case of Spain, George Orwell perhaps made the most eloquent case for Stalinist intrigue being a major culprit in the failure of the Popular Front government to successfully withstand the coup of the generals, although to attribute Franco's victory entirely to Stalin would be to overlook other major factors, including the arms embargo, the intervention of Germany and Italy, and so on. On the point of Stalin's hostage taking of the Spanish Popular Front, Buchanan seems to hedge his bets, recounting Largo Caballero's correspondence with Stalin, with the latter giving him "guarded approval"[4] to a democratic implementation of socialism. However, the record of Soviet espionage in Spain is well established -- from the torture and assassination of POUM head Andreu Nin by agents of the NKVD to the actual recruitment of Trotsky's eventual assassin from Barcelona.

Orwell provides a wonderful summarization of the issue as faced in Spain: "Between the Communists and those who stand or claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this manoeuvre simply gives Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery. But so long as no argument is produced except a scream of 'Trotsky-Fascist!' the discussion cannot even begin."[5]

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[1] Tom Buchanan, "Anti-Fascism and Democracy and Democracy in the 1930s," European History Quarterly, 32, no. 1 (2002): 44.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Helen Graham and Paul Preston, "The Popular Front and the Struggle against Fascism" in The Popular Front in Europe, edited by Helen Graham and Paul Preston (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), 11.
[4] Buchanan, ibid, 40.
[5] George Orwell, Homage to Calalonia (New York: Mariner Books, 1969), 247.

Constructing Utopia? The Third Reich

How important was anti-Semitism to the Nazi regime before 1939? Had the regime started on the 'twisted road to Auschwitz' before 1939?

Anti-Semitism was always vitally important to the Nazi regime, although that importance could be muted in public at times. Certainly it was a core philosophical underpinning of the Nazi movement, and while the Nazis would occasionally mute their presentation of the issue while attempting to campaign for votes, they did not hesitate to implement anti-Semitic legislation once in power. That said, it is also true that the state-sponsored anti-Semitism of 1939 was both qualitatively and quantitatively different from that in 1933.

For instance, while the regime implemented such measures as the one-day boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, and the systematic removal of Jews from the white-collar professions began almost immediately, the actual extraction process by which Jews would be removed from German life was quite slow. Several authors make it clear that the Nazis' primary objective during their first year in power was the establishment of single-party rule and Gleichschaltung; for instance, Jeremy Noakes details the suppression of the Bavarian People's Party, writing, "Although the BVP leaders were treated gently by comparison with Socialists and Communists and released after only a few days, this kind of cat-and-mouse tactic was clearly calculated to exercise the maximum psychological pressure on respectable middle-class people, for whom imprisonment would have a particularly traumatic effect."[1] Therefore, the anti-Semitic legislation of the first two years notwithstanding, the power of the state was principally against political enemies: the KPD and SPD, then other parties, and subsequently Nazi party rivals in the Knight of the Long Knives.

The period between the passage of the Nuremberg Law, which altered the citizenship status of German Jews, and Reichskristallnacht, which marked the first instance in which the full fury of Nazi Party functionaries was unleashed at large against the German-Jewish population, marked a section stage during which increased legal pressure was exerted upon the Jewish population while, perhaps counterintuitively, the Jewish population of the state increased by virtue of the annexations of Austria (particularly Vienna) and the Sudetenland (and Prague in March 1939). As hinted at in the prompt for this post, Karl Schleunes nevertheless points out in The Twisted Road to Auschwitz that, even as the noose tightened around the necks of German Jews and many sought to emigrate, the retail sector, which was heavily populated by Jewish family businesses, was exempted from much of the legislation because of the precarious state of the German economy, primarily the lack of foreign reserve currency. Remarking on the 1933 boycott, Schleunes writes, "economic considerations had forced the Nazis to protect several Jewish department stores"; this protection was followed by a government bailout for one of these stores.[2] Thus, despite Kristallnacht, the reason for Hermann Göring's anger with Joseph Goebbels at having unleashed the pogrom was that Germany was not yet prepared to lose this vital section of the economy, not to mention its physical capital.

Ultimately, as became the case even into the war with the implementation of the Final Solution, Nazi Jewish policy was clearly enunciated in philosophy but tended to limp along until a major event caused it to ratchet up significantly. The Nuremberg Laws were the first major elevation, Kristallnacht was the second, and with the war, the elevations became both greater in magnitude and more radical and deadly. This is the "twisted road" of which Schleunes's title speaks, and because the extermination camp at Birkenau was certainly not envisioned in 1933, the road that led there was necessarily contingent and thus "crooked."

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[1] Jeremy Noakes, "The Nazi Revolution," in Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Moira Donald and Tim Rees (London: Palgrave, 2001), 107.
[2] Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-39 (Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 93.

Irredentism and Minorities in the Interwar Period

Why did the Minorities Treaties fail to solve the minorities question? To what extent did they merely intensify hatreds and mistrust?

Although well intentioned, the Minorities Treaties ultimately failed to solve the minorities question because they underestimated the sheer complexity of the demographics in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, the enforcement mechanisms of the treaties were weak and therefore ineffectual in truly remediating the issues that arose between the wars. Finally, although it is not clear that these treaties made matters worse for minorities, they certainly did not make them any better.

Most importantly is the sheer ethnic heterogeneity of most of these states. Although we are commonly conditioned to see the minorities of Czechoslovakia as being Hungarians and Ruthenians, the most significant minority was the Slovaks. Therefore, part of the underestimation of the treaties was bound up in an incomplete understanding of the different ethnicities. For instance, Thomas Hammond writes, "Many of the Slovaks resented being dominated by the Czechs and insisted that their nationality was neither 'Czech' nor 'Czechoslovak.'"[1] Moreover, there was the problem of ethnic stratification cutting across class in ways not considered by the treaties. Using the example of Lithuania, whereas the landed gentry was German, the bureaucracy was largely Russian, and the urban middle class was largely Jewish, only the peasantry was Lithuanian on an ethnic basis, and as such, legal protection of minorities so empowered was not likely to mitigate class-based resentments. Moreover, each group also professed a different faith, respectively, Lutheran (at least a majority), Orthodox, Jewish, and Catholic, and as Ivan Behrend notes, "In an area of permanent foreign occupation that lacked independent statehood, religion played an important role in self-identification."[44]

Beyond misunderstanding the sheer complexity of the issues, the Minorities Treaties lacked sufficient enforcement mechanisms. Despite the obvious existence of severe ethnic conflict in some places, Carole Fink writes (specifically about the Polish treaty) that it "was dictated largely by great powers that had refused to accept, even theoretically, similar obligations; it was imposed on behalf of named and unnamed minorities that had not been consulted and would play no role in the enforcement process."[3] A knock-on effect was that countries with minorities outside its borders, principally Hungary and Germany, could use the enforcement process to protect its own ethnic groups while at the same time violating the treaty regarding its own minorities, particularly in the 1930s. According to Jennifer Jackson Preece, "minority grievances (both real and contrived) were deliberately exploited by revisionist Germany and Hungary throughout the 1920s and 1930s."[4]

The explosion of ethnic violence in Eastern Europe occasioned by the outbreak of World War II is sufficient proof that the Minorities Treaties did not help the condition of these minorities before the war. That said, I do not see evidence for the treaties making the situation worse. Rather, the lack of teeth in the treaties resulted in the problems occasioned by the creation of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe remaining when the international system began to disintegrate in the 1930s.
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[1] Thomas T. Hammond, "Nationalism and National Minorities in Eastern Europe," Journal of International Affairs, 20, no. 1 (1966), 21.
[2] Ivan T. Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 44.
[3] Carole Fink, "Minority Rights as an International Question," Contemporary European History, 9, no. 3 (2000): 273
[4] Jennifer Jackson Preece, "Minority Rights in Europe: from Westphalia to Helsinki," Review of International Studies, 23, no. 1 (1997): 84.

The Interwar Crisis: Politics

The rise of the NSDAP to power is often seen as inexplicable, but placed in the context of interwar Europe as a whole, is the ascension to power of a radical, nationalist and anti-Semitic party more easily understood?

This is a topic I've been thinking a lot about lately, so I thought I'd write about it for this week's assignment as a way of aligning these new sources I've not read before with what I already had learned. To first answer briefly, I believe that it is not the context of interwar Europe as much as the specific circumstances in late Weimar Germany that make the ascension to power of the NSDAP more easily understood. This is not to say that the generally rightward, authoritarian drift of Europe was not a factor -- it certainly was. However, that the NSDAP came to power, rather than a military-style dictatorship à la Hungary, was quite specific to the personalities involved.

One of the most important things to bear in mind, in my opinion, despite it not often being said, is that Germany essentially stopped being a democracy once the government of Chancellor Hermann Müller collapsed in 1931. Thereafter, no chancellor had the support of the government and government by emergency decree, although, Harold James makes excellent points on how Heinrich Brüning maintained power, both because the SPD feared an even more reactionary government should it participate in a no confidence against him and because, by pursuing a policy of revising the reparations agreement, Brüning kept the animus of the population and political rivals outward, toward France, rather than inward: "Revision had become the principal way of uniting German politics in the face of the centrifugal pressures exerted by the unpleasant nature of economic choices during the depression."[1]

The terms in office of Chancellors Papen, Schleicher, and ultimately Hitler were backroom deals, with the mistaken impression on the part of Hindenburg's inner circle of advisers that Hitler could be reined in -- obviously an impression belied by the Reichstag Fire and subsequent events. In this regard, the situation of Hitler's party being propelled into power is unique. Whether the question is why a fascist, anti-Semitic political party could become the largest party in the country by July 1932 is a more difficult question but still one specific to Germany. The center had clearly collapsed, as witnessed by the massive losses suffered by the SPD and DVP, with their votes going largely to the KPD and Nazis, respectively. The drift of voters on the fence toward the right rather than the left was likely based on the relatively recent memory of Soviet-inspired revolution in Berlin and Munich.

All that said, Eric Hobsbawn offers a nicely concise overview of the context in which democracy had been thrown off increasingly over the 1920s and 1930s across Europe, and this context offers the remainder of the explanation for how the NSDAP ended up in power in January 1933 by explaining why both the power brokers in Germany and the electorate abandoned democracy. In detailing the three types of anti-democratic forces that were emergent in Europe between the wars, Hobsbawm writes, "All were against social revolution, and indeed a reaction against the subversion of the old social order in 1917-20 was at the root of all of them. All were authoritarian and hostile to liberal political institutions, though sometimes for pragmatic reasons rather than on principle."[2] While Germany took the third route of fascism, it could easily have gone one of the other two, had the army or monarchists acted decisively after the suspension of democracy following Müller's ouster.
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[1] Harold James, "Economic Reasons for the Collapse of the Weimar Republic," in Weimar: Why Did German Democracy Fail?, ed. Ian Kershaw (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990), 54.
[2] Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 114.

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.