European Self-Reflection Between Politics and Religion

The Crisis of Europe in the 20th Century

L. Bruun, K. Lammers, G. Sørensen, L. Bruun, K. Lammers, G. Sørensen, L. Bruun, K. Lammers, G. Sørensen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137315113
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

This collection of essays suggests new ways of looking at the intertwining of political and religious agonies in the period 1914-1991. The long 'European civil war' revealed that Europe, far from being formed by a one-track progression, has followed several tracks or fault lines, leading to a number of contrasts in European self-perception.

1

Introduction

Lars K. Bruun, Karl Christian Lammers and Gert Sørensen

The question of the nature of the notion of ‘Europe’ poses itself. What is Europe? Is it simply a geographical place or unit? A historically and culturally based community of values? An economic and political project without noticeable popular anchoring? Does a specific European identity exist at all? In what way do Europeans differ from the ‘others’? And who are strictly speaking Europeans, and who are then the ‘others’? These and many more controversial questions of identity policy have been posed and sought to be answered on countless occasions during the twentieth century. Perhaps it is even characteristic for ‘the Europeans’ that the question of what is European never ends? Definitely no exclusive established idea about Europe and ‘the European’ has crystallized, but through the centuries there has been a manifold and ever-changing discourse on Europe that ranges from intellectual utopias over more or less chromium-plated plans and designs to absolutely pragmatic agreements on, for instance, coal, steel, agriculture, customs and nuclear power (Wilson and van der Dussen, 2005).

During the so-called short twentieth century (Hobsbawm, 1994), ranging from 1914 to 1991, Europe experienced a great variety of intense controversies and conflicts (the great World Wars, the Cold War divide and the subsequent decolonization of the European empires) in regard to which Europe now has to ask itself, What is European identity and which forms of identity should be associated with the term ‘European’? And which political systems, values and ideas should carry this European identity forward, including the discussions about the role of nation-states in the new supranational or transnational organizations in Europe? Today’s Europe seeks to redefine its relations to the past and thus to the surrounding world on a basis that is strongly influenced by the epoch-making experiences of the twentieth century.

It has been and still is characteristic for Europe that far from being formed by a one-track development in the persecution of one single idea, it has followed several tracks, not to mention fault lines, thereby leading to a number of dualities and contrasts in European self-perception, for instance: those between democratic and authoritarian and dictatorial forms of government, between Europe and ‘the others’, between secularization and religion and between West and East. The European identity construct is internally flexible, stratified and hybrid in the sense that the history of European identity and culture has divided the continent into different languages, cultures, memories, religions and nations – and at the same time its history has been the key to modern transnational und successful efforts within the ECSC, the EEC and the EU to overcome these divisions that have prevailed for a long time in European history. Thus Europe combines, throughout its long history, a state and an economic and social model that has brought significant growth opportunities, but which is also characterized by a marked propensity for violence and a built-in Machiavellianism, which under the auspices of modernity and modernization has led to the dissolution of traditional ways of life, both inside and outside Europe. However, since the Renaissance’s ‘civic humanism’ and the Enlightenment, Europe has also fostered a concept of universal human rights that has become increasingly important in Europe’s dialogue with itself and with others. Most recently, in the Berlin Declaration from 2007, it is not only the talk of Europe as ‘an idea, holding out hope of peace and understanding. That hope has been fulfilled.’ But it speaks of Europe as a community of values: ‘In the European Union, we are turning our common ideals into reality: for us the individual is paramount. The individual is inviolable. The individual’s rights are inalienable. Women and men enjoy equal rights’ (Berlin Declaration, 2007, www.eu2007.de).

The essays presented in this book allow for the possibility of looking at the long period between 1914 and 1991 – with two World Wars and a Cold War – even as a shift of paradigm that decisively influenced Europe’s way of acting and reflecting in the world. In order to understand the reach of this shift in cultural and identity history that with great haste and with such tragic costs prevails during the period from 1914 to 1991, it seems relevant to reflect on some of the leading identitycreating factors that already from around 1500 constituted Europe as a global historical event.

Part I – Contesting European Identities: Fascism and the Challenges from within

The scholarly view on Europe has long ago left behind what Ulrick Beck once called methodological nationalism. This becomes clear through the more frequent use of the notion ‘European civil war’ for the 30-years period from 1914 to 1945 (Balibar, 2004, p. 202; Rossi, 2007, pp. 100, 131). Actually, in 1985, commemorating the 40 years since the end of the Second World War, the former German president Richard von Weizsächer made use of the word: ‘Der 8. Mai ist ein tiefer historischer Einschnitt, nicht nur in der deutschen, sondern auch in der europäischen Geschichte. Der europäische Bürgerkrieg war an sein Ende gelangt, die alte europäische Welt zu Bruch gegangen’ (Lund and Øhrgaard, 2008, pp. 7–8). What contributed to this characterization, and the revelation of some dramatic schisms, was the fact that not only was the Great War between different European nations or alliances of nations (the Central Powers versus the Entente Powers), it was even more, or soon became, a conflict between different social classes and the intellectual elites within each European state. The workers and peasants – the fourth estate known from the famous painting Il Quarto Stato (1901) of the Italian painter Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo – had been organized in large mass parties, and soon also the middle classes were mobilized, being jammed, as it were, between a well-organized lower class and an aggressive renewal of economic and financial conditions by different capitalist groups. The outcome was that the leading groups that had led the states into war to a great degree were eliminated at the end of war or in the following years. Most evidently, that was the case in core countries such as Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy. In these countries the war and its cultivation of violence and heroism founded a new mentality of values that defeated democratic initiatives and soon laid the ground for the creation and consolidation of totalitarian Communist and Fascist regimes. In the introduction to her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt identifies war and revolution to be the two crucial phenomena of the century (Arendt, 1990) that destabilized and questioned hitherto known forms of government and culture and paved the way to a quite new situation of social experiments, the outcomes of which were predicted only by a very few.

Shortly after the end of the Great War in November 1918 the Englishman John Maynard Keynes and the Italian Francesco Saverio Nitti viewed European development in such a light. In his famous lampoon The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes brought the expression ‘the European civil war’ into play. Keynes had been delegate in the British delegation at the peace negotiations in Paris 1919, and he regarded it as the primary task of the book ‘to show that the Carthaginian Peace is not practically right or possible’ (Keynes, 1920, p. 33). Thus Keynes rejected a peace that seemed to aim at an annihilation of Germany by imposing on the defeated Germans a heavy burden of war reparation, especially for France. The consequences of this scheme of revenge were that it would become nearly impossible for the new, republican and democratic Germany to satisfy economic growth and at the same time secure social discipline among the broad masses. Rather than renewing the brutal conduct of the old Romans towards Carthage that was announced in Cato’s famous words about Carthage being destroyed (Censeo Carthaginem delendam esse), Keynes insisted on the much more promising way for a new Europe that was to be found in the mutual recognition of states.

But there was not much on which to build his hopes when, for instance, the agenda-setting French chief negotiator, Georges Clemenceau, persisted in the dominating ways of thinking of old Europe that made of nations ‘real things, of whom you love one and feel for the rest indifference – or hatred’ (ibid., pp. 26–7). The distance to the Fourteen Points of American president Wilson was evident. The appointed Reparation Commission was in the view of Keynes given almost ‘dictatorial powers over all German property’ (ibid., p. 71). And it consequently refused the German laments that were in reality not without foundation:

German democracy is thus annihilated at the very moment when the German people was about to build it up after a severe struggle – annihilated by the very same persons who throughout the war were never tired of maintaining that they sought to bring democracy to us [. . .]. Germany is no longer a people and a State, but becomes a mere trade concern [. . .]. The Commission, which is to have its permanent headquarters outside Germany, will possess in Germany incomparably greater rights than the German Emperor ever possessed; the German people under its régime would remain for decades to come shorn of all its rights, and deprived, to a far greater extent than any people in the days of absolutism, of any independence of action, of any individual aspiration in its economic or even in its ethical progress. (ibid., p. 201)

We find a similar diagnosis in the comprehensive works of the former Italian premier Francesco Nitti on the European crisis in the interwar period. In La Pace he lined it up sharply: either Europe began working together, eventually within the frameworks of a United States of Europe, or it would end with new wars. To avoid a repetition of the Great War, Nitti requested that European leaders abandon the idea of giving the Germans the sole responsibility for the war and break definitively with the idea of nationalism – the idea that some nations had a moral superiority that tended to impose on other nations their rules with the use of all kinds of violent measures and call it a process of civilization. Like Keynes, even Nitti pleaded for a renegotiation of the many errors of the Treaty of Versailles (Nitti, 1925, pp. 189–91). And in 1931 the Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset, from the so-called 1898 generation and former editor of La Revista de Occidente, proceeded along similar lines when in his classic La Rebelión de las Masas he suggested the moral home of Europe. To him it now was clear that ‘our part of the world that dominated the world and commanded itself’ no longer could reckon on ‘being dominating’: ‘There is no longer talk about “the fullnes of time”, because it implies that the future is clear, predetermined and unambiguous, like it was in the case of the nineteenth century.’ In that respect Europe was in a sort of ‘interregnum, a gap between two historical periods’. One epoch was running out while a new one had not appeared, not to speak of one that built on the assumption that ‘it is not to France, the French, and not to Spain, that the Spanish owe the main portion of their spiritual assets, but to a common European foundation’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1956, pp. 179–81).

Thus, Europe’s history in the twentieth century became a struggle over values and over social and political strategies of how to discipline and integrate the working classes and the up and coming middle classes into both the ranks of capitalistic production and the expanding state apparatus, now being mobilized due to the implosion of former patterns of government and of culture. However, it also became clear that the value-loaded shift following the advance of totalitarianism not only weakened the fundamental values of the Enlightenment tradition, so eminently expressed in Kant’s book Zum ewigen Frieden (1795), but it also challenged Christianity. Namely, up till then its Catholic and Protestant forms had adapted themselves nolens volens to a secularized and intellectually more broad-minded and tolerant world by the introduction of Christian-based political parties like Deutsche Zentrumpartei or Partito Popolare (and their parallels after 1945, the CDU and DC). While democracy built on the transparency of decisions – for instance the political class might be deprived of its mandate and its dispositions always were negotiable in the totalitarian regimes soon to be established in Russia, Italy and Germany, and later on in Spain – there was a tendency to resacralize the political forms of the party and the leaders that assigned to them elements of infallibility and inviolability. So, Communism, Fascism and Nazism turned into what Erich Vögelin already in 1939 called political religions in his book Die politischen Religionen, forming a threat to Christianity and its churches and the nearly religious monopoly that they had so far maintained (Gentile, 2006). Max Weber had predicted a general tendency towards an Entzauberung der Welt due to the rationalization and specialization of modern bureaucracy and science. However, the ideas of Weber, who died in 1920, were soon to be contested by this return of religious and religious-like discourses that Weber thought to be definitively outdated. These perspectives undoubtedly contributed and gave a larger space to theological discussions that in the interwar period led to radical Christian criticism. On the other hand, we witnessed that the Catholic Church, although criticizing the atheist and racist tendencies of the new regimes, nonetheless entered into a compromise when the Vatican stipulated the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini in 1929. And in Germany, Deutsche Christen, a group within the German Evangelical Church, directly supported Hitler up to and even after 1933.

The modern parliamentary and pluralistic democracy and the ideas of universal civil and religious rights, common to constitutional states, prevailed in most of the old and new European states after the Great War. Up till then democracy where it existed had usually been democracy for a minority. The years following the Great War thus looked like victory for democracy as a form of government and a standard of value – and this was the conclusion of James Bryce in his two volumes on Modern Democracies (1921). Then followed a period where democratic forms of government came under pressure and were overthrown in 16 countries in order to be replaced by dictatorship or authoritarian rule from the left as well as from the right – from Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism and other authoritarian tendencies. Democracy was also exposed to harsh criticism in more stable democratic states for being an ineffective form of government. The outcome, however, of the Second World War was a victory for democracy, although democratic states needed help from the Stalinist dictatorship to defeat Nazism and Fascism. And the well-known Danish legal and moral philosopher and scholar of international law Alf Ross, in the years soon after the war, was indeed very cautious in predicting the future of democracy, without a general public discussion of what democracy is and why it should be preferred to any other form of government:

The military defeat of Fascism by no means signifies that the spirit of Fascism is dead. Development curves from before the war drift freely though the air like steel girders in a shattered house. We shall again pick up the threads and feel our way forward. In this way [is there] going to be a resumption and continuation of democracy, or shall we seek for new gods? This is the great question, and the destiny of our generation depends on how it is answered. (Ross, 1952, p. 5)

As a consequence of the brutality of the war, democratic values were strengthened by the United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. But it was not until 1990 that modern democracy got the upper hand in Europe when Eastern European People’s Democracies, in reality one-party democracies, broke down. This fact was supposed to have been institutionalized in the draft for the constitutional treatise of the EU, where human and democratic rights were at the centre. However, as is well known, it did not happen.

One might argue that the perspective of civil war continued during the Cold War, although at a lower level of intensity. Not only did East and West contain each other with their respective stocks of deterrent weapons, but with respective internal balances unsettled one did not restrain from using means that were more in conformity with the fundamental principles of the power state than with those of the constitutional state – in accordance with the contrast that Ernst Fraenkel introduced in his book on the dual state (Fraenkel, 1974). That this was the case was almost predictable when looking at the popular revolts in Eastern Europe since the 1950s that culminated in Prague in 1968 and Gdansk in 1980. But even in Western Europe, where democracy was regarded as superior to dictatorship, powerful antidemocratic groups were to be found that did not in pressing situations abstain from resorting to various covert operations and terror. In that respect Italy was emblematic during the years of the Strategy of Tension from 1969 to 1980.

One might argue that Europe in the interwar period still had the potential to take matters into its own hands, but did not take up this challenge, one that was so clearly formulated by the more visionary intellectuals of the time. Instead Europe after the Second World War was confronted with the catastrophic results of wrong decisions. The world was different. Europe was divided and no longer its own master. Consequently, a process of integration was at first carried out in Western Europe on the initiative of Alcide De Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, but now within the framework of American economic, political and military superiority. The USA now had far more impact than after the First World War when American President Wilson and his Fourteen Points programme for a new European order failed when confronted with the European power game that was still able to determine the negative outcome of the Versailles peace negotiations.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union it was the Western European model centred round an axis of France and Germany that became decisive for the further development of Europe, followed up by the Eastern extension and later the establishment of the Euro zone. In the light of the present situation with debt crisis and low growth in most European countries, one might argue that the problems following in the wake of the great European crisis of the twentieth century are still lacking adequate answers that might secure the future of Europe in a globalized era with quite a different agenda.

In the contemporary historical context the discourse on Europe soon began to focus on Italian Fascism that came to power in 1922 and presented itself as a solution to the political crisis in Europe. As Fascism and the (later) German version National Socialism developed as political movements that were able to attract and mobilize great masses without giving them real political influence, intellectuals and politicians in Italy as well as in Germany soon realized that international Fascism created a serious challenge to democratic concepts of Europe. In his essay in this volume, Gert Sørensen presents the Italian debate at that time about the concepts of nation and of Europe based on the diagnosis of the philosopher Benedetto Croce concerning the European crisis that culminated in the First World War. The antifascist Croce, who was preoccupied with the situation in Mussolini’s Italy, defined the war as a result of a historical process going back to 1870–71, the years of the Paris Commune and the French defeat to Prussian Germany. These years had marked a turning point in the sense that liberalism, dominating the previous decades of the century, had now been substituted by imperialism and a tendency towards more authoritarian forms of government. Croce was a sort of mentor to Francesco Nitti, Itali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Contesting European Identities: Fascism and the Challenges from within
• Part II: Renegotiating the Religious–Secular Divide
• Part III: Post-War Reinterpretation of European Heritage
• Index of Names