New Political Ideas in the Aftermath of the Great War

260 Pages·2017·2.19 MB·English

by  Alessandro Salvador

New Political
Ideas in the
Aftermath of the
Great War
Edited by Alessandro Salvador
& Anders G. Kjøstvedt
New Political Ideas in the Aftermath of
the Great War
Alessandro Salvador • A nders G. K jøstvedt
Editors
New Political Ideas in
the Aftermath of the
Great War
Editors
Alessandro Salvador Anders G. Kjøstvedt
University of Trento University of Oslo (IAKH)
Trento, Italy Blindern, Oslo, Norway
ISBN 978-3-319-38914-1 ISBN 978-3-319-38915-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-38915-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956213
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover image © Anna Stowe / Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
F
OREWORD
As is well known and documented, the First World War did not quite end
with the armistice, nor with the closing of the peace conferences. Both
minor and major confl icts continued well after the war—not to mention
the fact that the memory of the war affected private life, behaviours and
political regimes in Europe and beyond. 1
This book refl ects on the multiple levels at which the war continued to
have an impact on post-war societies by looking at individual biographies,
groups, associations and political regimes throughout Europe. By focus-
ing on these different levels, the book illustrates how the political proj-
ects of various individuals and associations were created, how they worked
in different contexts and how they were modifi ed by such contexts. The
research thus shows the sometimes diffi cult—and always indirect—rela-
tions between individuals’ dreams and their programmes. It considers
the various ways in which they related to one another in the formation
of political and social movements and examines the ways in which these
movements built (or infl uenced) new regimes.
These three levels of analysis are especially investigated in relation to
individuals and groups claiming a close relationship with the war experi-
ence and willing to make this experience a central element for building
new political perspectives which could provide a third way between liber-
alism and communism—as the essays by Torreggiani, Salvador, Kjøstvedt
and Lundberg make especially clear. The book, therefore, does not offer a
complete picture of the situation in post-war Western Europe, but rather
focuses on some of the elements that shaped post-war societies.
v
vi FOREWORD
Not surprisingly, three topics emerge as particularly relevant to the lev-
els of analysis chosen by the editors and the authors. These topics are the
crisis of the liberal state and its institutions, the centrality of violence in
the political arena and the development of the political myth of planning
as a solution of the limits of liberal institutions. In most European coun-
tries, liberal institutions underwent a deep crisis at the very height of their
spread: they came to be perceived as a political model incapable of respond-
ing to the confl icts and challenges determined by the democratization of
society, which was then in the process of turning into mass society. 2 What
was at stake was the role of the state in social and economic life (in areas
ranging from class and labour confl icts to industrial and economic plan-
ning), the ways in which political and social representations were enforced
in this institutional system and the role that the experience of war played
in the post-war period. The actors and associations considered here were
all, in different ways, seeking to restore a lost political and social order in
which veterans and former fi ghters would play a central role.
It is in this context that the use of violence started to be legitimized as
a force capable of regenerating society and political institutions. Violence
had a double role. On the one hand, it was a means to contrast class
confl ict and to silence workers’ movements and neutralize their increas-
ingly important role in liberal societies, where the liberal state proved inca-
pable of controlling the level of confl ict and the institutional weakness
this determined—especially in the immediate aftermath of the war and
after the crisis of 1929. On the other hand, violence provided a means
for the creation of new forms of government and institutions throughout
the interwar period. These two processes were particularly important in
Italy, as described in Matteo Millan’s essay, and signifi cantly contributed
to establishing the Fascist experience as a model throughout Europe.
In the interwar years, economic and social planning became a world-
wide standard. No matter the ideology, no matter the national or the
international mind-set: organization was considered the key to post-war
affairs, both international and national. 3 Hardly any intellectual could
resist the fascination of planning, and the romance of economic planning
captured most attention and submerged differentiated identities and loy-
alties. 4 Be it empires or international organizations, any big entity—or
wanting to be—had to deal with planning. It was a legacy of the war, as
Charles Maier’s classic R ecasting Bourgeois Europe has discussed, one of
the areas that did not experience demobilization but rather increased in
its importance in the interwar years. 5 The years between the introduction
FOREWORD vii
of the Soviet Five Year Plan in 1928 and the beginning of American New
Deal in 1933 saw a proliferation of different visions of economic control,
and many were the experiments, spanning from Soviet planning, through
fascist, syndicalist and Catholic form of corporatism, to plans for techno-
cratic and Keynesian-style demand management based on the experience
of the workers councils supported by European leftists.
Transnational models thus had a huge impact in forging national
debates, just as they had played an important role in the creation of
national ideologies in the previous decades. Indeed, although nationalism
was a driving force in these years, a transnational dialogue existed between
individuals, groups and regimes in the search for models capable of estab-
lishing new political and national projects. The experiences described
above clearly show, although not always as explicitly as would be useful,
that historians need to confront in the analysis of these years a dimension
that has for a long time been neglected. As Glenda Sluga claims in her
Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism , there was a close interconnec-
tion between the success of nationalism and the emergence of internation-
alism. The interwar years witness a large range of secular internationalist
utopians, and several attempts to make these come true through some
form of institutionalization, be it in the form of non-governmental orga-
nizations or in the more institutionalized setting of the League of Nations.
In post-war democracies, political parties as well, as the chain between
the masses and political power, inclined toward internationalism. Socialist
internationalism competed with other ideologies. A Green International,
established in 1923 in Prague, collected the Bauernparteien (peasants’
parties) in Eastern and Central Europe; a Radical International (E ntente
Internationale des partis Radicaux et des partis Démocratiques Similaires )
was founded in 1924 in Geneva; and a White International, the S ecrétariat
international des partis démocratiques d'inspiration chrétienne (SIPDIC),
was established in Paris in 1925. These internationals were all concerned
with the defence and promotion of peace, although differing on economic
and social issues, such as on the road to modernization. The emergence
of international organizations is the epiphenomenon of a broader transna-
tional circulation of ideas and practices and the existence of networks that
shaped the political realm in the 1920s and 1930s. This element is not
crucial to the narrative of the book, which is structured along more classic
lines of interpretation. However, internationalism clearly emerges with all
of its strength in a few essays, especially as far as the intellectual dimension
is concerned. The essays by Tommaso Milani, Daniel Knegt and Valerio
viii FOREWORD
Torreggiani all revolve around the complexity of dealing coherently with
varied and not easily compatible intellectual fascinations, which are trans-
mitted over the borders and in cosmopolitan settings.
Other essays focus in different ways on specifi c crisis of identity and
divided loyalties, which are especially diffi cult to elaborate in the case of
the loss of the pre-war political entity. 6 In the interwar years competing
identities were the norm, partly because of the infl uence of authoritative
ideologies or ethno-national consciousness, partly—like in the case of the
veterans described at length in the book—because of other highly com-
partmentalized identities.
The cultivation of trans-ethnic cultural syntheses was not on the
agenda, surely not in the mind of liberal internationalists, 7 not in the mind
of communists (the former Romanov Empire was also unpacked in several
Soviet socialist republics), and even less so in other forms of revision of
identity, where more basic community identities, ethno-religious, confes-
sional, clan based or based on a communal experience like the trenches an
the victimization of a specifi c group. 8 This book mirrors the complexity of
such interplay, and tackles the complexity of composing into a coherent
picture experiences that were revised and elaborated throughout, at indi-
vidual, at group and at institutional level.
NOTES
1. There is a huge literature on this theme. Among the most recent publica-
tions, see at least: Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (eds.), War in Peace:
Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the War (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012); Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson (eds.),
Sortir de la guerre. Le monde et l’après 1918 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008).
2. See Mark Mazower, T he Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New
York: Knopf, 1998).
3. Akira Iriye, G lobal Community: The Role of International Organizations in
the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004).
4. David Engerman, “The Romance of Economic Development and New
Histories of the Cold War”, Diplomatic History 28:1 (2004); Dirk van Laak,
Imperiale Infrastruktur. Deutsche Planungen für eine Erschließung Afrikas
1880 bis 1960 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004) and Daniel Ritschel, T he
Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the
1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
FOREWORD ix
5. Susan Pedersen, T he Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of
Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
6. On citizenship see Christopher Capozzola, “Legacies for Citizenship:
Pinpointing Americans during and after World War I”, Diplomatic History
38:4 (2014), 713–726 (fi rst published online August 8, 2014) doi:10.1093/
dh/dhu041.
7. See Mark Mazower, N o Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the
Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
8. Aviel Roshwald, E thnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe,
Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London: Routledge, 2001).
G iulia   Albanese
S ara   Lorenzini
I
NTRODUCTION
Last year’s centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was observed
on all continents, with commemorations ranging from offi cial remem-
brance ceremonies to countless school projects. The sea of red ceramic
poppies surrounding the Tower of London, each representing a life lost,
and the crowds gathering to witness Gavrilo Princip’s gun and the ostrich-
feather hat the Archduke wore on that ill-fated day in Sarajevo, both on
display in a new exhibition at the Museum of Military History in Vienna,
are both testimonies of the huge presence this military confl ict still enjoys
in Western memory culture. They also both point to the huge public
interest following such events. Unsurprisingly, the centenary of 1914 also
sparked a host of new publications. The great majority of new books on
the Great War fall into one of three major categories.
Quite a few publications try to capture the apparent innocence and
overwhelming sense of prolonged progress and peace in the time imme-
diately before the catastrophe. Both Florian Illies and Charles Emmerson
attempt to invoke transnational or global perspectives, without falling for
the temptation of smashing their pre-1914 worlds by allowing the war to
unfold itself. 1 This, however, is precisely the aim of the new books who
have received the most attention in the last couple of years: by return-
ing to the hectic summer of 1914 and the agonizing questions of how
it all began. Whilst Christopher Clark and Margaret MacMillan both are
prepared to deliver an equal share of guilt to all major powers involved,
with Clark more so than MacMillan, Max Hastings is having none of that.
Hastings, whose book is actually very brief on the causes of the war, instead
focusing on the fi rst fi ve months of the confl ict, is laying the major blame
xi