Dark Continent, page 25
The new commitment to rights raised knotty problems of race and empire. In the late 1930s, lawyers had witnessed the development of a body of Nazi jurisprudence which consciously attacked liberal notions of individual autonomy in the name of the interests of the race and the state. Now they argued that anti-Semitism inside Germany had paved the way for the racist ambitions which led to the Nazi conquest of Europe, as well as to the extermination of millions of Jews discussed openly and in detail by Maritain and others by 1943. Yet Western intellectuals—not to mention governments and public opinion—hesitated to make any connection with the ideas of racial superiority still very much current in their own societies.27
Noting that this was “an ideological war fought in defense of democracy,” Swedish Social Democrat Gunnar Myrdal observed that “in this War the principle of democracy had to be applied more explicitly to race … In fighting fascism and nazism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial tolerance and cooperation and racial equality.” Some white Americans were increasingly uncomfortable at the hypocrisies involved in fighting Hitler with a segregated army. Black Americans commented upon “this strange and curious picture, this spectacle of America at war to preserve the ideal of government by free men, yet clinging to the social vestiges of the slave system.” “The fight now is not to save democracy,” wrote Ralph Bunche, summing up what was probably the dominant view among African-Americans, “for that which does not exist cannot be saved. But the fight is to maintain those conditions under which people may continue to strive for realization of the democratic ideals. This is the inexorable logic of the nation’s position as dictated by the world antidemocratic revolution and Hitler’s projected new world order.”28
British attitudes were marked by similar hypocrisies. Dudley Thompson, a Jamaican volunteer arriving in England to join the RAF, was asked: “Are you a pure-blooded European?” George Padmore, the remarkable journalist imprisoned in 1933 by the Nazis for attacking Hitler’s racial policies, spearheaded the efforts of the Pan-African movement to force the British to extend their democratic crusade to the empire. Under Churchill, the archetypal romantic imperialist, this was never likely to happen. Hard though it may be now to credit it, the British government actually launched its own Empire Crusade in late 1940 to whip up support for the war. Whitehall’s feeble effort to spread a “dynamic faith” among the public contrasted Nazi efforts to build a “slave empire” with the British version: “The British Empire is exactly the opposite. There has been nothing like it in the world before; it is a commonwealth, a family of free nations—linked together by a loyalty to one king. It stands for progress; it is the hope of the future.”29
That the Empire Crusade turned out to be a complete flop may tell us something about the attitude of Europeans to their empires. During the war this seems to have been based largely on indifference, at least in Britain and France (though not perhaps in the Netherlands). In all these countries, domestic matters were of much livelier concern than questions of imperial government. The cause of empire beat weakly in British hearts. But so too did anti-imperialism. Most Europeans seemed scarcely aware that any inconsistency was involved in defending human liberties at home while acquiescing in imperial rule overseas. One examines the resistance record in vain for indications of an interest in the predicament of colonial peoples. In Italy, for example, the retention of colonies was a question of amour propre. In France, there was much discussion of remodelling the empire but virtually none of dismantling it; the Left more or less ignored the issue, and their silence at the Brazzaville Conference on imperial reform in early 1944 was entirely characteristic. Queen Wilhelmina simply offered to turn the Dutch Empire into a commonwealth which “would leave no room for discrimination according to race or nationality.” To the Indian Congress Party’s demands for British withdrawal, Whitehall countered by arresting Gandhi and offering Dominion status.30
To astute and sensitive observers of the Allied war effort, the ambiguity of European attitudes to race was one of the most striking features of the war. The American anthropologist Robert Redfield remarked on how, faced with Nazi theories, democracy had been forced to a “self-examination” of the inconsistency between what it professed and practised: “The ideal is now asserted as a program for an entire world—a free world,” Redfield noted. “And yet the leaders who announce this program are citizens of the countries in which racial inequality is most strongly applied.” Redfield predicted in the future “a moderate reaction favourable to intolerance” with a “corresponding postponement of the resolution of the inconsistency.” This was not far from the truth: if the war, with its renewed stress on racial equality and human rights, did eventually contribute to the ending of European imperialism, it did not do so automatically: Europeans (and white Americans) remained largely unmoved by the drama of their own racial problems. So long as colonial subjects were willing to fight on their behalf, they had little incentive to alter the structure of power in a radical fashion. But here too, in ways largely invisible to British, French, Belgian and Dutch eyes, the war itself was the catalyst of change: Ho Chi Minh continued the struggle he had begun against the Japanese—against the French; Asian, African and Caribbean servicemen—Kenyatta and Nkrumah among them—returned home from fighting in Europe prepared to continue the struggle which had been started against Hitler.31
THE NATION-STATE AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER
In 1944 the international lawyer Raphael Lemkin called for the United Nations, by their victory, to impel the Germans to “replace their theory of master race by a theory of a master morality, international law and true peace.” But it was not only Lemkin who believed that the revival of international law was essential to any future world peace and moral order. The racial basis of Nazi jurisprudence and Germany’s abandonment of the accepted principles of international law had been regarded since the late 1930s as among the principal causes of the breakdown of order in Europe. Nazi aggression had undermined the very existence of an “international community.” At the same time, Nazi treatment of the Jews persuaded many people that if the individual was to be protected against the state, the traditional doctrine of state sovereignty in domestic affairs would have to be reconsidered. A revival and reinvigoration of international law thus emerged as the natural adjunct to liberal concern for world peace and, in particular, for the safeguarding of human rights.32
“Effective international organisation is not possible,” wrote Quincy Wright in 1943, “unless it protects basic human rights against encroachments by national States.” Wright observed that, unlike Poland or Czechoslovakia, Germany had not been obliged to conclude a minorities treaty with the League of Nations, with the result that “there was no formal ground on which the League of Nations could protest against the beginning of the persecutions in Germany. It was a general principle that a State was free to persecute its own nationals in its own territory as it saw fit.”33
But the protection of human rights required the existence of a body superior to the state to which the individual could have recourse. The Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen insisted that “a right consists only in the legal possibility to invoke a court … [International law] can confer rights on individuals only under the condition that individuals have direct access to an international court.” His colleague Lauterpacht warned that the international protection of human rights “touching as it does intimately upon the relations of the State and the individual … implies a more drastic interference with the sovereignty of the State than the renunciation of war.” But in his aptly named Peace through Law, Kelsen argued that only people who believed in a “theology of the State” refused to recognize the need for all states to be bound by international law. Sovereignty was simply a red herring. “We can derive from the concept of sovereignty,” he went on, “nothing else than what we have purposely put into its definition.”34
The limits of sovereignty, then, reflected political rather than jurisprudential or philosophical considerations. But who was going to make states acknowledge the supremacy of international law? Liberal thought in the inter-war period had reposed its confidence in the pressure of world public opinion to safeguard human rights. It was obvious that a more effective instrument of enforcement would be required in the post-war period. What complicated matters was the Allies’ commitment, as enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, to respect traditional ideas of state sovereignty. The post-war state, in other words, was being asked in some measure to acquiesce in its own weakening. Experienced lawyers like Kelsen and Lauterpacht saw no realistic alternative to persuading individual states to make their international obligations a part of domestic law. The alternative was to push for some form of World State, but this they regarded as utopian.
An equally serious dispute centred on the question of whether the human rights to be enshrined in the new post-war order should be individual or collective. The League of Nations had chosen the latter in its system of protection for ethnic minorities in eastern Europe. Yet despite the obvious importance of safeguarding minorities, strong arguments were advanced in favour of demolishing rather than improving the collective-rights approach. President Benes and the Czech government in exile denounced the League system on the grounds that experience had shown it had actually jeopardized their national security. “Every protected minority will ultimately find its Henlein,” warned one observer. In addition, the states of eastern Europe resented the fact that they had been singled out for special obligations towards their minorities whereas the Great Powers, including Italy and Germany, had not had to suffer such an indignity.
“In the end,” wrote Beneš in 1942, “things came to such an extraordinary pass that the totalitarian and dictator states—Germany, Hungary and Italy—persecuted the minorities in their own territories and at the same time posed as the protectors of minorities in states which were really democratic.” Rather than attempting to restore the League system, Beneš suggested that the post-war approach to minorities should be based upon “the defense of human democratic rights and not of national rights.”
On top of this east European opposition, the major Allied powers—Britain, France and the United States—also showed little enthusiasm for reviving a system which had succeeded in internationalizing the most serious source of tension in Europe without finding adequate means of resolution. As the post-war settlement in Europe would show, the main interest of the major powers was in limiting their obligations to minor states, and this meant that they too were happy to bury the League’s approach to collective rights. The result was that the United Nations’ eventual commitment to individual human rights was as much an expression of passivity as of resolve by the Allies. It was a means of avoiding problems, not of solving them. This fact helps us understand why so few of the wartime hopes for a reinvigoration of international law were to be realized.
The wartime desire to limit national sovereignty by inducing states to surrender some of their powers to a higher authority was not confined to matters of law. One of its most striking manifestations was to be found in the vogue for federalism, which approached fever pitch around 1940. In a war which many attributed to the cancerous development of national rivalries, the idea of creating international harmony through federation seemed increasingly attractive. A Dutch resistance leader saw “this war as the great crisis of the ‘sovereignty of the state.’ ” For one English lawyer “the alternatives are war once in every generation, or federation.”35
In both Britain and France such ideas had been much in the air in the late 1930s. The Federal Union movement was founded in 1938 in London and soon proved extraordinarily popular. Its call for a union of democracies was based on the view that “no international order based on co-operation between sovereign States will prove either effective or durable since all sovereign States in the last resort seek their own national self-interest.” In his Federal Europe, R. W. G. MacKay described “a system of government for a New European Order, the establishment of which would enable the peoples of Europe to hope with some confidence that in future they might live and work in peace free from the fear of war, want and insecurity.” The spectacular proclamation in the darkest days of June 1940 of an “indissoluble union” between Britain and France was the culmination of this vein of thought.36
Even though that union was never realized, the federalist idea only slowly lost its allure and remained a striking feature of official and unofficial planning for the future of Europe. A plethora of map-makers speculated upon how the continent might be carved up, and though their fantasies varied the federationist principle was common to virtually all of them. Thus an American geographer, in a 1942 article for Collier’s called “Maps for a New World” (heralded by the blurb: “Here’s a brave new world redesigned for lasting peace—a world from which war-breeding frictions are gone, where all nations live secure and unafraid, thanks to the new science of political geography”) offered a Europe carved up into a “British-Dutch Commonwealth” alongside the “United States of Fennoscandia,” “Czechopolska,” a German-Magyar state and a “Balkan Union.” More serious, though scarcely more accurate, was the frontispiece of Bernard Newman’s 1943 book, The New Europe. This showed a map which divided Europe into West European, Scandinavian, Baltic, German, Central European, Balkan and Iberian federations. Only Italy escaped intact.37
British and American officials engaged in post-war planning also tended—as they had in 1914–18—to see federation as an attractive solution to Europe’s border problems. Austria, for example, posed British Foreign Office clerks with no less of a dilemma than the Habsburg Empire had done earlier. Few in Whitehall appear to have believed that Austria could survive as an independent state, but even fewer were happy to allow the Anschluss to stand: a surrogate empire in the form of Danubian “integration” was the answer. Reviving the inter-war Balkan Union, and press-ganging Bulgaria into joining it, was an analogous pipe-dream.38
Churchill was drawn to the idea of a United States of Europe, envisaging an arrangement by which Britain could exert leadership on a continental scale. From May 1940, US planners for the post-war world came to believe that a new international organization, far from being incompatible with regional or continental unions, would in fact be more firmly based if they were created first. Indeed Newman’s 1943 map was very similar to that envisaged by the US State Department in 1940.39
At the same time, though, we should keep these schemes in perspective. Federalism diminished in popularity inside and outside government as the war went on. One reason was the strong hostility of the Soviet Union to arrangements which seemed intended to create anti-Soviet blocs in eastern Europe. Another was the objection of many small countries which—despite the examples of the wartime Czech-Polish and the Greek-Yugoslav alliances—worried about disappearing into a Europe more than ever dominated by the major powers.
Inside continental resistance movements, the idea of Europe stood for an ethical heritage rather than a specific set of politico-economic arrangements. Asserting the existence of common European values was a way of denying the durability of Hitler’s New Order. By talking of the struggle as a European civil war, the Italian Partito d’Azione set its struggle for a “democratic revolution” firmly in a continental framework. High school pupils in Paris in 1943 demanded “a new European order” to take the place of the Nazi order, and insisted that what they had in mind was not a Europe dominated by one hegemonic state, nor an economic and financial network like the Pan-American union, but “a cultural and moral community which must be transformed by the war into a political and social one.” Le Franc-Tireur announced that “as one regime collapses, another is being born. It arises from the fire of the struggle of liberation and from the icy cold of prisons, with the mass resistance that has sprung up from the French maquis to the Polish plains, from the factories of Milan to the German forced labour camps, from Norwegian universities to the mountains of Bosnia.”40
There were some more specific commitments to the ideal of federation. But in general the strength of the commitment was in inverse proportion to the size of the group concerned. The anti-Fascist “Ven-totene Manifesto” of August 1941, for example, reflecting the ideas of British federalists, had only limited circulation during the war. Resistance support for federation was rarely at the head of their programme. Hence, the efforts made by some historians to trace the origins of the Common Market back to declarations of the wartime resistance are in the last resort unconvincing, and one could with equal if not greater justice argue that its origins lay with the Nazis: by 1943 many Axis sympathizers were keener “Europeans” than their opponents. In general, résistants remained motivated—as did most Europeans—by considerations of domestic social and economic policy and patriotism, their horizons bounded by the confines of the nation-state.
For at the same time as giving an impetus to federalism, the war had actually increased nationalist sentiment in Europe. Patriotism, after all, was far more important than “Europeanism” as a motive for resistance. Intelligence reports coming out of Holland in late 1941 noted that “the population is … ardently nationalistic. There is even reason to fear an intensification of Dutch nationalism. A blood-bath is imminent.” British pride at the country’s stand against the Third Reich may help explain why support for federal union faded away as the war ended. France saw a resurgence of the “idea” of the nation. When Polish resistance groups agreed that “the Polish Republic will be a member of the federation of free European nations,” this was less an expression of federalist faith than a desire to ensure the security of an independent Poland after the war. In traditionally nationalistic countries like Greece, internationalist sentiment never took hold. There, as in Poland, Albania and Yugoslavia, a virtual civil war within the resistance led both Left and Right to insist on its nationalist credentials. In general, conservative and right-wing resisters to the Germans were more hostile to the idea of surrendering national sovereignty than were socialists or Christian Democrats; but even the latter tended to attach greater importance to the cause of reform at home. Federalism remained, in other words, a relatively weak element of the wartime consensus.41
