A People's History of Europe

From World War I to Today

Raquel Varela

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780745341354
• eBook ISBN: 9781786806543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This concise people's history of Europe tells the story of the last hundred years of a very old continent and the ordinary people that shaped the events that defined it from World War I to today. From the Russian Revolution, through May '68 and the Prague Spring, to the present day, we hear from workers, trade unionists, conscientious objectors and activists and learn of revolutions, labour movements, immigration struggles and anti-colonial conflicts. Cutting against the grain of mainstream histories, this is a history of Europe told from below.
Containing new and fascinating insights, Raquel Varela paints a different picture of the European story; one where ordinary Europeans are active agents of their own history.

1

The War of Wars, the Revolution of Revolutions, 1917

aquí encaja la ejecución de mi oficio: deshacer tuertos y socorrer y acudir a los miserables [here fits the execution of my trade: to mend wrongs and help the miserable]

Don Quijote de la Mancha¹

The war of wars (1914–18)

In 1914, England had an empire 114 times its size; Belgium, 80 times its size; The Netherlands, 60 times its size; France, 20 times its size; and Portugal, more than 20 times its size. In today’s Portugal, the older generation still remember being taught during the dictatorship with a famous map hanging on the walls of their primary schools that showed Portugal with its colonies projected over the entire European continent. ‘Portugal is not a small country’, the caption said.

Between 1850 and 1911, the whole world was virtually conquered by the European empires. In Africa, only Liberia and Ethiopia were left out of division by the central powers. If we look at the map of Africa, we find the borders drawn by the great powers at the 1884–85 Berlin Congress with long straight lines, crossing rivers, cutting mountains and suppressing the livelihood of shepherds and farmers who were left without access to their means of production.² In China and Indochina, the dispute began over spheres of influence, in a regime of protectorate and/or conquest.³ In these years, ‘the broad current of human history flowed through a narrow channel designed by a few European countries.’⁴

Central and Balkan Europe were under the boots of empires, Western Europe was fighting for colonies and markets. The European scenario was, therefore, of a crisis that would lead to ‘revolution or barbarism’; the dichotomy was equated by the socialists at the beginning of the century.⁵ The Austro-Hungarian Empire disputed territories with Serbia. And, on its way, it crushed several oppressed nationalities: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Czechs, Slovaks and Bulgarians. In 25 years, France had lost its population supremacy to Germany and demanded the fertile territories of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been lost in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, the outcome of which had then propelled the first working-class government in history, the Paris Commune.⁶ British capitalism could not survive with a strong Germany that defeated France in the mainland. The bulk of the wealth in dispute between Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire laid in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Finland. But, for Germany, a strong Russia was a threat.

Russia competed with the Austro-Hungarian Empire for its western territories, which were the most industrialised and the source of taxes for the empire. The Hermitage Palace would symbolically concentrate the spaces of war and revolution – there we find the rooms filled with semiprecious stones, gold, floors made of noble woods and chandeliers, all accumulated over 400 years of serfdom that, still in 1914, kept 40 per cent of the peasants on the edge of survival. Besides this, led by the Bolsheviks, Russian workers seized power in October 1917, storming the Winter Palace, a scene immortalised by the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the film October (1928).

In one word, imperialism, that is, the phase of capitalist accumulation in which no single capitalist entity could survive without trying to expand at the expense of others.⁷ We will see that during a short period of post-war 1945, the ‘golden years’ in Europe would allow for an unusual balance between imperialisms without wars in their territories (until the 1992–95 Bosnian War and the Ukrainian war since 2014).

The nineteenth century begins with a crisis of colonialism – of the old empires – and ends with the ‘victory of colonial imperialism, which leads to a division of the world among the European powers – joined later by the United States and Japan – the intensification of international tensions, and finally the First World War.’⁸ As the historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, ‘the most striking consequence’ of the ‘dual revolution’ – the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous (British) Industrial Revolution – ‘was to establish a domination of the globe by a few western regimes (and especially by the British) which has no parallel in history.’⁹ We can relativise this statement if we think that the rule of the Roman Empire was only over one part of the world, but it was the essential world at the time and it was more stable and lasting.

John Reed, a journalist and revolutionary, author of the sublime book on the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World,¹⁰ is also the writer of a series of reports on the Balkans, shortly before the revolution, in the midst of the First World War (1915). In one passage, chaos stands out when a Russian ‘captain Martinev’ describes the apocalyptic carnage. They are called to Poland, where they arrive five days later because of the lack of trains, supplies and organisation:

We went in at ten in the morning and stood particularly heavy fire all day so heavy that the cook-wagons couldn’t reach us until midnight, so there was nothing to eat. The Germans attacked twice in the night, so there was no sleep. Next morning heavy artillery bombarded us. The men reeled as if they were drunk, forgot to take any precautions, and went to sleep while they were shooting. The officers, with blazing eyes, muttering things like men walking in their sleep, went up and down beating the soldiers with the flat of their swords … I forgot what I was doing, and so did everybody, I think; indeed, I can’t remember what followed at all but we were in there for four days and four nights. Once a night the cook-wagons brought soup and bread. At least three times a night the Germans attacked at the point of the bayonet. We retired from trench to trench, turning like beasts at bay though we were all out of our heads … Finally on the fifth morning they relieved us. Out of eight thousand men two thousand came back, and twelve hundred of those went to the hospital.¹¹

On 2 January 1916, the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg¹² wrote:

Business thrives in the ruins. Cities become piles of ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared; churches, horse stalls. International law, treaties and alliances, the most sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds. Every sovereign ‘by the grace of God’ is called a rogue and lying scoundrel by his cousin on the other side. Every diplomat is a cunning rascal to his colleagues in the other party. Every government sees every other as dooming its own people and worthy only of universal contempt. There are food riots in Venice, in Lisbon, Moscow, Singapore. There is plague in Russia, and misery and despair everywhere.¹³

The First World War began on 28 July 1914. In that month of 1914, everyone was talking about a quick war: ‘It will all be over by Christmas!’, people said.¹⁴ It was the most ‘popular’ of the imperialist wars.

Victor Serge was a revolutionary and a writer born in Belgium to a couple of Russian exiles; he was arrested in France at the beginning of the war and wrote:

Vehement Marseillaises were heard in prison, sung by crowds accompanying the convoys of soldiers. We also heard: ‘To Berlin! To Berlin!’ This delusion, incomprehensible to us, was the consummation of the height of the imminent social catastrophe.¹⁵

War was not that popular. The French socialists even hypothesised a general strike against a European war in July 1914;¹⁶ in Germany, strikers were sent to the front as punishment; historical sources show that the working class of the powerful Ruhr region – still today the strongest and most unionised region of the European industrial working class – was not keen on patriotic demonstrations.¹⁷ Across the Atlantic, in the USA, the government called for the voluntary recruitment of 1 million troops – but in the first six weeks after the declaration of war, only 70,000 had been enlisted.¹⁸

Recruitment for the First World War was relatively easy, however, because the peasants lived in isolated villages and because the experience of such a war was hitherto unknown. There is a geographical and social isolation in the rural world, even in the already industrialised England, Germany and France, which makes organised resistance very difficult. In fact, the peasants become resistants, deserters, only after being incorporated into a collective organisation – the army, and at war.

Nationalism thrives rapidly as an ideology. Novelists such as H.G. Wells called for support to ‘a war to end war’, Anatole France made ‘little speeches to the soldiers’.¹⁹ However, the main support came from the organised labour movement. The war was supported by the majority of German social democracy, Austrian social democracy, the English Labour Party, the French Socialists, the large unions, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the Indian pacifist Mahatma Gandhi. The ‘unity of the nation’, the ‘sacred union’, the appeal of the national bourgeoisies to the leaders of the popular strata was magnetic – and catastrophic: 10 million dead according to some sources,²⁰ 20–22 million dead including civilians according to different sources.

Those who were against the war were only a few: the Bolsheviks and the Serbian socialists. And there were many individual heroes – Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader who opposed the war, was assassinated by a French nationalist on 31 July 1914.

War has revolved the bowels of society: women have entered the labour market en masse. It was this shift from isolated housework to concentrated factory work, from unpaid housework to wage labour, and the Russian Revolution – the achievement of broad social rights – that allowed for the first breath of gender equality in contemporary history. Although female suffrage was on the agenda in the early twentieth century, having already been conquered in Australia in 1902 and Finland in 1906, for example, only the First World War would break down the first major barrier to gender equality in England and Germany.²¹ And, in the case of Italy and France, this would only happen after the Second World War. In the southern countries, which became urbanised in the 1960s, the major change in gender relations occurred only with the Portuguese revolution of 1974 and 1975.

An economic cataclysm, the war and a social revolution, the Russian Revolution, are the factors that drove one of the most important social changes of the twentieth century – the increasing of gender equality and the gradual path to free union.²² Later, with the rise of fascism and Stalinism, many of these rights would be reversed until the victory of the resistance, both socialist and democratic, post-1945.

The middle classes join the ranks of those discontent with governments; there is hunger, deprivation and a shortage of supplies because production is aimed at serving war, and because many workers leave the factories and join the belligerent armies. Production turns to weapons of destruction. There is no bread because there are no bakers. There are soldiers. In Germany, only two-thirds of the calories needed to stay alive were guaranteed and there were 750,000 deaths due to malnutrition.²³ Vienna was probably the hardest hit city: ‘by 1917, a quarter of million people stood daily in one of 800 food lines spread throughout the city.’²⁴ The black market expands, fuelled by inflation.

This was the irrational but predictable conclusion of the first total war in history. The war wasn’t over by Christmas and it was devastating. It spread to Mesopotamia, Greece and Turkey with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa.

Although the number of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants in Northern and Western Europe increased from 22 to 120 between 1800 and 1900,²⁵ the massification of urban life, the exponential growth of the population, is a phenomenon that changes Europe only in the twentieth century. It is the century of population increase. Europe went from 279 million people in 1850 to 408 million in 1900 and then to 740 million in 2012. This would become one of the most important features of the last 100 years: the consolidation, even in southern countries, of the transition from rural to urban societi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Kevin Murphy
• Preface
• 1. The War of Wars, the Revolution of Revolutions, 1917
• 2. ‘Man, Controller of the Universe’: The Crisis of 1929, the Revolutions of the 1930s and Nazism
• 3. Midnight in the Century: The Second World War
• 4. The 1945 European Social Pact
• 5. Anti-Colonial Revolutions
• 6. Crisis and Revolution: From May 68 to the Carnation Revolution
• 7. The End of the Social Pact (1981–2018)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index