The Age of the Dictators

A Study of the European Dictatorships, 1918-53

D.G. Williamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138168954
• eBook ISBN: 9781317870135
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Age of the Dictators presents a comprehensive survey of the origins and interrelationship of the European dictatorships. All the regimes are addressed, with ample coverage of the period 1939-45, and analysis of the Soviet government up to Stalin's death in 1953.

Exploring their ideological and political roots, and the role of the First World War in their rise to power, David Williams identifies the dictatorships as products of their time. He examines the Soviet, Italian Fascist and Nazi dictatorships, as well as the authoritarian regimes in Spain, Portugal, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, providing an analysis of each as an entity, of how they evolved and related to one another, and to what extent they were a common response to life after the First World War.

Mindful of historiographical issues, the textbook attends to the arguments of key historians, and includes a list of relevant sources to assist students in their study of the period. Combining an accessible, succinct writing style with a broad historical scope, The Age of the Dictators is an illuminating and thorough account of a fascinating period in world history.

Part One
The origins of the
dictatorships

Chapter One
The years of crisis, 1890-1918

Timeline

March-April	German offensive on the Western front
29 September	German High Command calls for an armistice
11 November	Armistice signed between Germany and Allies

Introduction

During the years 1917–45 Europe was reshaped by the revolutionary forces of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. For historians the key question is whether the triumph of these movements was caused by the cataclysm of the First World War or whether their emergence as powerful forces would have happened even without the war. In retrospect the years immediately before the outbreak of the First World War seemed to be a golden age of peace and prosperity, yet they were also a period of massive change, dislocation and political and social crisis. Accelerating industrialization led to the development of a new mass culture, large cities and the expansion of the working classes, which challenged the nineteenth-century liberal and conservative dominance of the political system. However, it is all too easy to read into these years an inevitability that did not exist. In Russia Lenin had developed his revolutionary variant of Marxism, and in Western and Central Europe there certainly was an intellectual revolt against rationalism and liberalism, and the emergence of the core ideas of what was later to be called Fascism, but without the First World War it is doubtful whether this revolt would have been sufficient to destabilize and finally to overthrow the existing political systems.

THE KEY ISSUES IN THIS CHAPTER ARE:

• The difficulty in defining Fascism.
• The intellectual backlash against liberalism and the rise of irrational ideologies.
• The fusion of nationalism and Socialism.
• The decline of Socialism as a revolutionary force and the emergence of syndicalism and Bolshevism.
• The radicalizing impact of the First World War.

Proto-Fascism

Before tracing the origins of Fascism it is important to define the term. It is, as the American historian Stanley Payne has observed, ‘probably the vaguest of the major political terms’.¹ Apart from Italian Fascism, most of the regimes that could be regarded as Fascist in inter-war and wartime Europe never called themselves Fascist and differed significantly from each other. Consequently one of the major tasks of historians of Fascism has been to define what is meant by the term and try to identify common points in the regimes that have been described as ‘Fascist’. Payne² has drawn up a table in which he breaks up the characteristics of political Fascism into three main sections:

1. Ideology and aims:
   • An idealist or ‘vitalist’ philosophy (see p. 10) aiming at creating a new nationalist, authoritarian state, which would
   • not be based on traditional conservative principles.
   • Its economy would be controlled by the state, or be ‘corporatist’, and attempts made to integrate both the workers and employers into one common organization.
   • The worship of force and the readiness to use it to achieve territorial expansion.
2. It was opposed to:
   • liberalism
   • Communism
   • conservatism, although it might temporarily ally with the traditional Right.
3. Its style and organization:
   • Creation of a party militia and mass mobilization of the population.
   • The use of symbols, language and orchestrated mass meetings, which emphasized the mystical or religious side of the movement.
   • Stress on male dominance and superiority over the female.
   • Emphasis on the dynamism of youth and the conflict of generations.
   • The creation of a charismatic authoritarian leadership.

Corporatism

The attempt to defuse class hatred by giving both capital and labour a role in running industry – see pp. 109 and 110.

The revolt against materialism, rationalism and liberalism

During the period 1890–1914 the cultural elite in Continental Europe, particularly Germany, Italy and France, began to reject the prevailing beliefs of liberalism and rationalism which had been accepted almost without question by the preceding generations. The attack on liberalism gathered strength, while the yearning for great men, heroism and violence grew. Typical of this new spirit was the Futurist movement in Italy, in which Filippo Marinetti played the leading role. Its art, drama and philosophy stressed the glories of war and aimed to exalt aggression and violence. After the war both Italian Fascism and Russian Communism were to draw on the ideas and imagery of the Futurist manifesto published 10 years earlier (see Document 1 and pp. 58 and 93).

In Germany the reaction against liberalism took the form of a rejection of modernity by the new völkisch philosophy, which by 1914 dominated nationalist and right wing thought in Germany. The völkisch writers, Lagarde, Langbehn and later Moeller Van der Bruck, propagated a nostalgic, anti-modernist ideology, which looked back to an idyllic Germanic pre-industrial rural society. Its message was that urbanization, industrialization and liberalism were destroying the good old pre-industrial Germany with its heroic values. Above all in this process the Jews were playing a leading role (see Document 2). These nationalist fantasies and utopias, which composed the new Germanic ideology, had an immediate resonance and were to colour the attitude of a whole generation of Germans, and make them more receptive to Nazi propaganda. Langbehn’s work, Rembrandt als Erzieher, for instance, was republished 39 times in two years.

Rembrandt als Erzieher

Literally, Rembrandt as Educator.

Friederich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Argued that in contemporary culture religion had been replaced by materialism and the quest for pleasure, drawing the conclusion from this that God was ‘dead’. To remedy this he urged in Thus Spake Zaruthustra the creation of a new ruthless elite under a totally amoral leader or ‘superman’.

Similarly, in the hands of minor intellectuals and textbook writers, the ideas of the great late-nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists, such as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the French thinker Henri Bergson and the English biologist Charles Darwin (1808–82), were simplified and made accessible to a much wider audience. Darwinian biology, for example, gave rise to ‘social Darwinism’, which viewed life as a bitter struggle for the survival of the fittest and opened the way up to eugenics and racial engineering. The new theories of the supremacy of the Germanic races drew heavily on these ideas.

Henri Bergson (1859–1941)

In his book L’Evolution Creatrice he stressed the importance of the ‘vital instinct’ (élan vital) in life which favoured the creativity of the individual as opposed to the drab conformity of society.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, for example, in his two-volume Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, linked the superiority of the German race to their racial purity, and argued that the real threat to this superiority came from the Jews. The theories of Gustav Le Bon, which stressed that crowds were essentially irrational and hysterical, as well as the views of the Italian Vilfredo Pareto, that politics rested on emotion rather than reason, also created a climate in which great men, charismatic leadership and daring deeds, rather than the more prosaic virtues of liberalism and internationalism, seemed to be the requirements of the time.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927)

The son of an English admiral, who became a German citizen and was a great admirer of the composer, Wagner, whose daughter he married.

Gustav Le Bon (1841–1931)

One of the founders of sociology and the writer of The Psychology of the Masses.

The alliance of nationalism and Socialism

The years 1880–1914 were the incubation period for Fascism and National Socialism. Fuelled by France’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Prussia, new radical nationalist groups, such as the League of Patriots and the Action Française were formed in France, while in Italy Enrico Corradini was popularizing the view that Italy was treated like a proletarian nation by the great powers. He urged a new national revolution that would create a more united and powerful state. In this context he sometimes used the term ‘National Socialism’. In Germany extreme nationalism became increasingly popular with pressure groups like the Pan German League, the Navy League and the Agrarian League. In 1893 small anti-Semitic parties managed to win 16 seats in the Reichstag, although by 1912 their number had fallen to seven. In Bohemia, a province of the Austrian Empire in 1904, a German Workers’ Party was set up, which increasingly became more nationalist and racist, and by 1918 called itself the German National Socialist Workers’ Party.

Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923)

An economist, whose most important book, Mind and Society, was written in 1916.

Eugenics

The science of improving the population by selective breeding.

Enrico Corradini (865–1931)

A journalist and nationalist politician.

Taken together the ideologies and policies of these groups anticipated much of the Fascist and National Socialist programmes of the 1920s:

• They all advocated an authoritarian nationalism.
• They were hostile to liberalism and the parliamentary process.
• The nation counted for far more than the individual. Thus their nationalism had a socialist dimension to it. Charles
• Maurras, who founded Action Française in 1899, declared, for instance, that there existed a ‘form of socialism, which, when stripped of its democratic and cosmopolitan accretions, would fit in with nationalism just as a well-made glove fits a beautiful hand’.³
• They advocated the doctrine of corporatism for regulating competing social and economic interests.
• They were anti-Semitic and realized that anti-Semitism could be used to integrate the workers into the national community.

How much impact, however, did these radical groups have? They influenced intellectuals and university students, and appeared to provide some answers to the problems created by accelerating industrialization and the growing power of the masses. However in 1914 the prospects of any proto-Fascist seizure of power in a European state were still inconceivable. It is true that there was a growing disillusionment with nineteenthcentury liberalism and parliamentarism in both Italy and Germany, and the increasing industrial unrest and growth of socialist parties was producing a conservative backlash with demands for limiting the franchise and the creation of a more authoritarian state but, as long as there were no cataclysmic and polarizing crises, a peaceful absorption of the new mass parties on the left into democratic politics was still possible.

Feudalism

The social system in medieval Europe whereby land was held by a vassal from a superior in exchange for military allegiance and other dutie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of maps
• Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE The origins of the dictatorships
• PART TWO The Legacy of War and Partial Recovery
• PART THREE The 1930s: The Impact of the Great Depression
• PART FOUR The dictators and the Second World War
• PART FIVE Assessment
• Further reading
• Glossary
• Index