The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth Century Europe

Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics

David Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134651177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

By developing a long-term supranational perspective, this ambitious, multi-faceted work provides a new understanding of 'totalitarianism', the troubling common element linking Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. The book's original analysis of antecedent ideas on the subject sheds light on the common origins and practices of the regimes.

Through this fresh appreciation of their initial frame of mind, Roberts demonstrates how the three political experiments yielded unprecedented collective mobilization but also a characteristic combination of radicalization, myth-making, and failure.

Providing deep historical analysis, the book proves that 'totalitarianism' best characterizes the common features in the originating aspirations, the mode of action and even the outcomes of Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German Nazism.

By enhancing our knowledge of what 'totalitarianism' was and where it came from, Roberts affords important lessons about the ongoing challenges, possibilities, and dangers of the modern political experiment.

1 Layers, proportions, and the question of historical specificity

Unforeseen political departures between the wars

The novel political regimes that we associate with Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler fundamentally altered our sense of the political spectrum, even the range of human and historical possibilities. Defying expectations, each emerged in the wake of the First World War spearheaded by a new elite that claimed to offer a new vision in response to inadequacies in what had seemed the political mainstream so far. Each rejected liberal individualism and parliamentary democracy, and each featured unprecedented mobilization for grandiose projects. Indeed, each seemed to galvanize genuine enthusiasm for acting collectively, beyond immediate individual self-interest. At the same time, each engaged in coercion, violence, and sometimes terror or even systematic killing. Whereas the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini came crashing down in overt imperialism and war, the Soviet Communist regime survived the extremes of Stalinism only to unravel, with a whimper, two generations later.

Although each failed disastrously, these regimes proved unprecedented, and their memory and legacy live on in numerous essential ways. We think of gulags and gas chambers, ritual and spectacle, Big Brother and the banality of evil, Darkness at Noon and The Captive Mind. For the vast majority, the images are profoundly negative, and the confident self-understanding of liberal democracy by the end of the twentieth century derived partly from the outcomes of those departures. But despite generations of indispensable specialized scholarship, we still have difficulty making sense of this set of episodes within the contours of our continuing political experiment, articulating what went wrong and what is to be learned. We proclaim “never again,” but the imperative can be flabby, as if the lesson is that we must guard against evil. Distancing ourselves from the agents through moralism and reductionism, we fail to address much about how that earlier set of episodes relates to us. Although their outcomes may seem to warrant liberal triumphalism, those departures have occasioned some loss of nerve, some restriction in our sense of possibilities, even in our range of questioning.

So tangled are the issues that we have difficulty sorting out layers, proportions, and intersections, even the synchronic and diachronic range of whatever is to be understood. We tend to vacillate as we ponder the places of, and intersections between, suprahistorical evil, ongoing human propensities, our historically specific Western culture, specifically modern possibilities, common national peculiarities, and unfortunate contingencies. Although all three regimes clearly departed from what seemed the liberal mainstream, we face questions not only about how each was related to the other but also about the basis and extent of the differentiation from that mainstream. We have come to recognize, for example, that novel aspects of Nazi population policy were not as different from the contemporaneous practice of the democracies as we had long assumed.¹ So pinpointing origins or sources and the bases of the differences within the experience of the period comes to seem trickier than we had recognized. At the same time, we ask to what extent and in what ways these regimes were historically specific, perhaps even confined to a particular period that they themselves helped to define—and that is thus by now over and done with. Alternatively, in what sense might they be better understood as revealing ongoing problems, tensions, or possibilities?

Because the Soviet regime far outlasted the Italian and German regimes, we encounter questions about symmetry and even about the subject of the inquiry on the Soviet Communist side. Do we focus on Stalinism, as a delimited Chapter, even a phenomenon in its own right, or on the whole Soviet experiment, which, in outliving the fascist regimes, raises questions that they do not? Did the Stalinist phase, especially as it emerged during the pivotal interwar period, in some sense determine what the overall Soviet experiment became?

Obviously, political and moral concerns have been and remain heavily implicated— and complicate any inquiry immeasurably. What we say about these earlier regimes might lend legitimacy to this or that form of neo-fascism or neo-communism. Moreover, a concern that to understand is to forgive still lurks in some reaches of the discussion. When we come to the extreme outcomes, especially the Holocaust, those like Emil Fackenheim and Claude Lanzmann have insisted that we simply focus on the evil, eschewing the historical account, which might produce the illusion of understanding but would necessarily be too neat, redemptive, even exculpatory.² Better that the Holocaust be left, in Lawrence Langer’s haunting phrase, a “ruin of memory.”³

Germans who suggest that Nazism was either an incomprehensible eruption of evil or a merely freakish concatenation after the dislocations of the Great War are charged with apology or bad faith.⁴ Yet non-Germans who suggest that Nazism can be delimited as idiosyncratically German draw comparable denunciations. Whereas some level of uniquely German responsibility for the Holocaust is obvious, we assume, or insist, that the most troubling outcomes of Nazism grew from supranational processes that, by definition, implicate others, even the whole of Western culture.

Even before Hitler came to power in 1933, some, recognizing that something new and unexpected was emerging, sought to devise a comparative framework that would encompass Fascist Italy and the developing Soviet regime.⁵ And the almost contemporaneous advent of Nazism and Stalinism by the early 1930s made the quest for new categories of understanding seem all the more pressing. However, there were obvious differences in origins and priorities—between Communism and generic fascism, and even between Italian Fascism and Nazism. So in what sense the three regimes overlapped or criss-crossed, participated in the same wider departure, or even invited comparison, remained uncertain.

The advent of those regimes brought “totalitarianism” into our vocabulary. Coined by anti-Fascists in Italy in 1923, the term was quickly adopted by the Fascists themselves, becoming central to their self-understanding. Yet the Nazis came to eschew the category, especially because they saw in the Italian usage a commitment to conservative statism as opposed to the dynamism of movement or party. So the term was contested virtually from the start.⁶ It continues in lay usage, although it is generally conflated with authoritarianism or the sort of nasty dictatorship that has been all too prominent in parts of the world in recent decades. At least for a time, however, specialists had plausible criteria of differentiation, and it was through the totalitarianism category that fascism and communism were most often considered in tandem. But even as used in scholarly discussion, that category proved notoriously inadequate and misleading, for reasons we will consider below. Still, the three regimes seemed to entail some common novel and historically specific dimension requiring some new category.

Playing with overlap and contrast can be a fool’s errand, and we have had good reason to be dubious about questioning the three regimes together, especially because certain parallels were long played up for questionable political or ideological reasons. However, although we must obviously be true to the singularity of each case, the present study seeks to show how we might most fruitfully encompass all three. Although doing so affords a frame for comparison, which is surely self-recommending, my purpose is not simply “comparative” in a static sense, as if the point were ahistorical classification, generalization, definition— some science of political extremism. The central question concerns whatever common place the three regimes had in the wider modern political experiment that continues in us. So treating the three cases together entails not simply comparing them as parallel instances but backing up to probe the soil from which they emerged, seeking to understand any common elements in the diagnoses and prescriptions that, partly for idiosyncratic contextual reasons also to be addressed, led counter-elites in three major European countries to spearhead departures from the liberal Western mainstream in the wake of the Great War. Deeper understanding of that common layer illuminates not only the wider era but also each of the three regimes.

However, reference to the wider soil suggests a question from the opposite angle—and points us back to the issue of synchronic and diachronic range. If the soil is to be understood in broader, supranational terms, is it too conventional to focus on Russia, Italy, and Germany to the neglect of other regimes, movements, even individual figures who seem comparable on some level, and who thus might also illuminate the overall departure? Clearly, that departure was not limited to these three countries, but just how wide it was, and whom or what else it encompasses on the synchronic level, is beyond the purview of the present study. Conventional though they are, these three cases must be among those considered, and I believe them to be sufficient to reveal the supranational, historically specific dimension, in both origins and ensuing dynamic. I hope that the present study will prove helpful to others examining other instances from the same epoch. Although I will limit the synchronic purview to these three cases, I will consider in the concluding Chapter the diachronic question of what has ended and what continues, or may continue, from within the wider framework of modern politics.

This enterprise requires considering antecedent ideas that responded to tensions in the mainstream development in the West. That dimension of “intellectual origins,” in turn, implicates the interface of “theory and practice,” itself fraught with conceptual pitfalls, quite apart from the special difficulties that these now detested regimes present. Indeed, facile ways of positing the theory/practice dichotomy have long impeded the necessary encounter.⁷

So the essential reconceptualization and synthesis require a broad brush and a certain reflexive thickness in light of the conceptual obstacles and ethical sensitivities at work. Indeed, so pervasive are the difficulties, as exacerbated by the limitations of longstanding assumptions and approaches, that only by first systematically questioning and even “unthinking” certain of our ways of tackling the issue can we open to a more convincing, more deeply historical understanding. Thus we will need to address the obstacles and uncertainties as we consider how we have come to approach the overall problem as we have. We will need to distinguish suprahistorical and historically specific national and supranational factors, sorting out layers and proportions. Such thickness is daunting, but in fact all studies, even those apparently most down-to-earth and atheoretical, presuppose something of the whole business—not only the proportions of the various dimensions but also something about theory and practice and the significance of intellectual antecedents.

As I will emphasize again and again, the outcome of the three regimes is not at issue. The phase they constituted in our ongoing political experiment was tragic, catastrophic—an enduring nightmare. Nor is the point that it could have turned out well, or better, were it not for certain contingencies. Contingencies there were, and we will need to consider them, but questioning the experience afresh enables us better to understand what we can now recognize as the originating flaws and thereby to grasp the strength of the contingency of the actual dynamic in each of the three cases. The outcomes were no accident, but how they followed from the initial aspirations is not obvious. Nor is the supranational, historically specific dimension of those aspirations themselves. A deeper understanding of all that fed the three departures and then produced their negative outcomes enables us better to distinguish what has ended, consumed by their failures, and what continues.

We recognize the need and the scope for fresh questioning thanks in part to the wider cultural changes generally lumped, faute de mieux, under the ambiguous term “postmodernism.” This term has come to cover a hodge-podge of sometimes incompatible notions, some of which have bred confusion, especially regarding the place of “history” and the scope for historical understanding. But the postmodern turn can be understood as warranting, and showing the way to, a deeper, more significant engagement with our own past. It entails, most basically, a deeper sense of historicity. That sense, in turn, has begun to affect our sense of how things come to be through history, our conception of what history encompasses, and our sense of our own place in history—as we both peer into the past and generate the future through our aggregate response to the world as it has become so far.

The change in our sense of how history happens has made us suspicious of essentialism, teleological assumptions, and master narratives. Conversely, we have become more sensitive to the place of contingency in history. Thus we are prepared for a greater raggedness as we find responses to novel situations yielding partially unintended outcomes that then demand further response. Each step becomes possible only because of the often unforeseeable results of the preceding. Thus we better understand that we cannot infer intentions, purposes, or origins from outcomes, and we learn to beware of the teleological backloading that, in the case at hand, has led us to take the most extreme outcomes, like the Holocaust, as the keys to the originating aims.⁸ If we privilege such extremes as revelatory, we may not be able to understand even those outcomes, let alone the larger phenomenon from which they resulted, for we miss the genesis of the wider realm of possibility from within which they emerged, contingently.

However, we can allow scope for such disconnection between origins and outcomes without invoking the fashionable notion of “discontinuity” or reducing the phenomenon—limiting understanding—to synchronic slices. Although the processes at issue in the present case were ragged, with contingency at every step, the outcomes resulted from a continuous process. Even as we take care to avoid overdoing conscious control or intentional direction, we can probe for an overall dynamic that resulted from the effort to act on the basis of the originating aspirations. Even if not intended, some such dynamic might be discernible ex post facto, proving at once characteristic and comprehensible in historical terms.

In terms of substance, postmodernism entails a new angle on modernity itself as we pull back especially from the master narrative of “modernization.” There is still a modern mainstream, found in “the West,” but it is less obviously the privileged standard, and we open to uncertainties, tensions, creases in what had long seemed the relatively smooth fabric of modern deployment. On that basis, we recognize that restrictively “modern” criteria may have guided our questioning, even our selection of the evidence, as we have dealt with the interwar regimes. Some such selection remains inevitable, but we open to a wider range of evidence—and possible meanings.

Coming more genuinely to terms with our own historicity makes us more alert to our own place in the continuing history we study. Our inquiries become more reflexive as we recognize that our assumptions and categories are themselves historically specific—and historical products. We grasp more deeply the sense in which understanding is itself a historical process and part of the larger continuing history in which we too are enmeshed as participants, even as we question the past. Our efforts may have unacknowledged historical antecedents that shape our questioning, delimiting what we are prepared to ask, to find, to hear.⁹

However, although reflexivity has become almost a buzzword, it is not easily encompassed in historical inquiry—especially an inquiry into the subject at hand. It means, most basically, that in approaching the three regimes we keep in mind that we know some of what we know only because of what they tried to do, the catastrophic outcomes of what they did. Indeed, their experience has affected our way of framing the basic categories that structure our understanding of our past, our present political world, and even our sense of human possibilities. Such categories as power, ideology, myth, and action, or freedom, reason, commitment, and responsibility, were not given once and for all, in some essentialist way, but were themselves contested—and are still contested, or potentially contested. We learn to take particular care with binary dualisms, recalling, for example, Jane Caplan’s call for a riskier but potentially more illuminating approach even to Nazism and fascism, putting at issue the binary oppositions at work—rational/irrational, for example—so that we might question their positive terms.¹⁰ As themselves in play in our continuing history, such categories are not as stable as we have long assumed.

We come to recognize that insofar as we have not been reflexive enough in approaching the problematic side of our recent political history, our use of the key categories may have been facile, even flabby. At the same time, we understand that we cannot grasp whatever fed into the regimes in question insofar as we engage it, place i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Layers, Proportions, and the Question of Historical Specificity
• 2. Seams, Creases, and the Emergence of New Conditions of Possibility In the Nineteenth Century
• 3. Some Diagnoses and Prescriptions
• 4. Innovative Departures In the Wake of the Great War
• 5. The Totalitarian Dynamics of Leninism–Stalinism
• 6. Conflicted Totalitarianism In Fascist Italy
• 7. The Hollow Triumph of the Will In Nazi Germany
• 8. The Epochal Commonality of the Three Regimes
• 9. Ending and Continuing After the Totalitarian Moment
• Notes