Dark Continent, page 7
During the nineteenth century, nationalism had already begun to corrode the older dynastic or religious sentiments upon which imperial loyalties had once depended. Uprisings in the Ottoman Balkans led to the formation of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria; the revolutions of 1848 showed the power of German, Italian and Hungarian nationalism in central Europe, while the Polish revolt of 1863 showed the depth of resentment there at Russian rule. The failure of Habsburg neo-absolutism in the 1850s underlined the impossibility of turning the clock back to the eighteenth century.
For the rulers of empire, two strategies presented themselves in the face of nationalism’s advance. One was the creation of a new imperial nationalism—Turkification of the Ottoman Empire, Russification of the Tsarist lands, and Magyarization in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy. Such policies aimed at the creation of modern, centralized empires. They might try, as the Hungarians did, to win acceptance by offering the possibility of assimilation into the ruling national group, but their intrusion into traditional society, their insistence upon standardization of language and promptly paid taxes often had the undesired effect of creating a backlash and encouraging counter-nationalisms. Hence in the first decade of this century, the Young Turks inadvertently fuelled the rise of Albanian and Macedonian nationalist movements, Hungarian heavy-handedness boosted Romanian and Croatian resistance, while the Russians faced increasing opposition in Finland, the Baltic states and Poland.
The other strategy to cope with nationalism was through a policy of divide and rule. Thus the Ottoman authorities exploited differences between Greeks and Bulgarians by creating a separate Bulgarian Orthodox Church, while the Habsburgs—unable to build up their own imperial nationalism, since there were no Austrians—played off German nationalists against the Czechs. This strategy, of course, opened up possibilities for nationalist groups to gain concessions themselves, and so it is not surprising that in the decade before the First World War, imperial rulers were faced with demands for constitutional reform, a broader suffrage and linguistic and educational rights. The vehicle for such demands was new mass political parties. But these parties almost never envisaged complete national independence. Rather they pressed—with some success—for democratization and greater freedoms within the existing imperial state structures.
It was the Austrian Social Democrats who developed the most interesting discussion of how the empires could be modified to embrace national aspirations. By the turn of the century, Austria-Hungary—that “historical experiment” (as the constitutionalist Oscar Jaszi once described it)—had fifty-one million inhabitants, two states, ten “historic nations” and over twenty other ethnic groups. Two things seemed obvious to many Habsburg political thinkers: first, that nationalism was a political force which could not be ignored; and second, that the nation-state was an anachronism in the modern world, since economic progress required states to be organized into much larger units. Modern life therefore required some kind of political structure which did not deny national feelings but did not give in to them completely. British imperial theorists of the “Commonwealth” idea were thinking on much the same lines.
From the Habsburg perspective before the First World War it seemed possible to pull off this difficult achievement by offering national groups cultural autonomy and an expansion of the franchise within the empire. Many nations, in this view, could live together in a single fatherland. In the words of Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz in 1908: “Its unique culture rather than its patrolled borders guarantees a nation its independent existence.”4 Jews like Peretz supported such views because they offered a third way between Zionism (a nationalism which abandoned Europe) and complete assimilation (with its denial of Jewish identity). But similar demands were voiced by the leaders of other national groups; few Czech or South Slav nationalists thought in terms of outright independence until very late in the day. Even in 1918 the Austrian socialist Karl Renner advocated turning the Habsburg empire into a “state of nationalities” in order “to present an example for the future national order of mankind.”5
If this humane approach failed to materialize in central and eastern Europe, it was less because of pressure from the nationalists themselves than because the empires committed suicide during the 1914–18 war by fomenting nationalism as a form of political warfare against their opponents. John Buchan’s best-seller Greenmantle reflected British fears that the Turks would lead India’s Muslims to revolt. But it was London and Paris who encouraged both Jewish and Arab separatists (with fateful consequences) to rise up against Ottoman rule in the Middle East. Russians and Germans tried the same game, and started a bidding war with the Poles. In August 1914, the Romanov Grand Duke Nikolai pledged autonomy to the Poles in the event of a Russian victory; two years later he was trumped by the Central Powers, who offered independence to a rump Poland wrested back from the Tsarist armies. Two years later still, the Entente reluctantly went one better by pledging an independent Poland with an outlet to the sea. Polish freedom-fighters sensibly moved from one sponsor to the next as the bidding progressed.
In wartime Berlin the Germans helped Ukrainians and Jews for the same short-term ends. They encouraged the formation of a League of Oppressed Nations of Russia to wean support away from the Tsar and to subvert morale inside the multinational Tsarist army: they sponsored Finnish and Ukrainian nationalist groups, supported religious autonomy for Polish Jews, and recognized Yiddish as an official language in Congress Poland. German Zionists formed a Committee for the Liberation of Russian Jews, and proposed an eventual federation of minorities in the Tsarist lands. Had Germany won the First World War, the fate of the Jews would have looked very different and we would no doubt be reading monographs on the murderousness of Russian or Polish rather than German anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile the Entente played exactly the same game against the Central Powers: the anti-Habsburg Congress for Oppressed Nationalities—Czechs, Croats, Slovenes and Poles—convened in Rome. In London the magazine New Europe enthusiastically conducted its own campaign for the “oppressed nationalities” of the Habsburg lands. But not everyone in the British or French governments thought this was such a sensible idea. Lord Robert Cecil, for instance, criticized those who believed “in nationality as if it were a religion” and warned: “I do not myself believe that a European peace founded only on nationality, and without any other provisions, is likely to be desirable or even in all respects beneficial.”6
Nor did the Central Powers really believe in national self-determination either. The Germans, in particular, had other dreams for solving the ethnographic mess of eastern Europe. One of the most popular of these—in Germany at least—was the idea of an economically coherent Mitteleuropa. This was the goal of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s politics, and it was popularized by a wartime bestseller, Friedrich Naumann’s Mitteleuropa, which outlined the virtues of a German-dominated European heartland. But non-Germans were not so easily convinced of the economic and cultural benefits of enlightened German rule, while the Habsburgs—with whom the Germans were uneasily allied during the war—did not like being made to feel like second-class Germans.
Yet for the more extreme German nationalists the idea of Mitteleuropa was far too considerate of the sensitivities of other peoples in central-eastern Europe. The generals on the German general staff, men like Hindenburg and Ludendorff, were principally concerned to ensure military and political domination in the East. Their vision was an essentially authoritarian one which left little freedom to the Reich’s nationalist allies.
For a brief moment near the end of the war, their dreams were realized. In the spring of 1918—a strange prefiguring of 1941—they signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the new Bolshevik Government, which was desperate to make peace and willing to grant the Germans most of what they wanted in the East. This peace treaty offered Berlin influence beyond the wildest dreams of the Pan-German League, and gave it control of a vast area of eastern Europe: client states in the formerly Tsarist lands of Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic. Austria-Hungary was marginalized and one million tons of wheat was pledged annually in the “bread peace” from the Ukraine as a condition of its independence. German troops pushed into Finland, the Ukraine and down towards Rostov and the Caucasus. The alliance with Turkey was cemented by the cession of former Russian territory. The war in the east seemed over: Brest-Litovsk had brought a Pax Germanica to eastern Europe. If today Brest-Litovsk is almost entirely forgotten, and seems “a mere bubble,” burst by the German collapse a few months later, it did not look that way to the British Foreign Office, who feared that Germany would now be able “to fight the world for ever and be unconquerable.” The combination of Germany and Turkey could threaten India and hold the Eurasian land mass indefinitely: the war might go on for years. Only the Entente victory in the West turned these fears into memories.7
After the war the German Right looked back to the Brest-Litovsk interlude as the great might-have-been, the Reich’s first grand venture into an east European empire. Few Germans saw that they had been too harsh for their own good and too indifferent to others’ national aspirations. For one extreme nationalist, Alfred Rosenberg, writing in 1921, Berlin had in fact been too considerate of the rights of the Poles and other national groups. Twenty years later, as Hitler’s Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in a new war of imperial expansion, he would be well placed to avoid his predecessors’ mistake. Right to the end, the authoritarian strand in German nationalism clung instinctively to direct military rule over the Slav “barbarians” and ignored the advantages which a more cooperative approach might have offered. The Russians, whose own approach to the nationalities problems of eastern Europe was far more sophisticated, reaped the benefits.8
One must ask why it was that the Habsburg Empire expired while the Tsarist empire came back to life as the Soviet Union. In part, no doubt, it was because of their differences, most obviously the fact that while Germans and Hungarians never even amounted to one half of the population of the former, Russians alone never comprised less than half the population of the Soviet Union, and together with Ukrainians and Belorussians amounted to around two thirds. An imperial nation predominated there in a way that was not true of the Dual Monarchy, enhancing the tradition of state centralism developed under the Tsars and brought to fruition under Stalin.9
But this is only half the answer. It is also true that Russian Marxists learned much from the Habsburg debate about nationality and empire. In some ways, the Soviet Union was the Habsburg Empire’s real heir, just as Hitler’s New Order was its ultimate rejection. Thanks to the Bund—the Yiddish-speaking Jewish workers’ movement—the pre-war Austro-Marxist debate about nationalism had reached Russia and the Bolsheviks. The Bundists had wanted to turn the Russian empire into a federation of peoples, with national-cultural autonomy independent of territory—in line with the Austrian Social Democrat programme for the Habsburg Empire—and attacked the Russian demand for assimilation as a “nationalism of appropriation.” One leading Bundist presciently attacked Lenin and other Russian Social Democrats in 1902 for their intolerance of Jewish national autonomy, warning that an apparently internationalist workers’ movement might become “nationalistic” if it were “blinded by the ‘general-Russian,’ ‘general-Polish’ or ‘general-German’ cause which holds the rights of subject nationalities in contempt.”10
A decade later Lenin, who had initially been extremely hostile to the Bundist line, became convinced that nationalism could not be wished away. Before the war he had opposed the Bund’s federalism as weakening the Russian workers’ movement; and he had opposed its nationalism on conventional Marxist grounds, insisting that to oppose assimilation meant “to turn back the wheel of history,” since “this process of assimilation of nations by capitalism means the greatest historical progress … especially in backward countries like Russia.” But during the war, his views began to change. Opposing his comrades’ call for “the liquidation of the national states in Europe,” Lenin moved gradually towards a commitment to national self-determination. This commitment, however, was always conditional upon the interests of the proletariat. For Lenin it was necessary to enter into a temporary alliance with nationalist groups for the sake of the revolution. But at what point might this alliance cease to be useful? The difficulty of answering this question helps explain the uncertainty of Bolshevik nationalities policy between 1917 and 1920.11
By the end of 1917, as Richard Pipes has put it, Russia “as a political concept had ceased to exist.” Taking Lenin at his word—or rather, simply reflecting Moscow’s lack of power and German dominance—national movements had swept to power in the Baltic states and Finland. Along the southern and eastern rim of the Tsarist dominions, new republics sprang up. Was the doctrine of national self-determination not now simply endangering the revolution? Stalin reached this conclusion well before Lenin, as early as December 1917: the Ukrainian crisis, he argued, showed an independence movement simply masking counter-revolution. With the outbreak of civil war, and Allied intervention from the periphery, such an analysis gained in plausibility.12
Thus Bolshevik Russia in the 1920s faced at the outset what the Habsburgs only confronted at their end—“the management of politically conscious, ambitious nationalities.” To this problem, the Bolsheviks found a solution which was subtle, pioneering and remarkably durable. They created a federal system which was, in effect, a combination of an Austro-Marxist state and a centralized Communist Party. Founded in the 1920s, this system, with all its contradictions, proved more effective in its capacity to manage nationalist politics than anything the Habsburgs or the Germans devised. It was called the Soviet Union.13
On the one hand, the Bolsheviks won over the new non-Russian nationalities, offering them real political power through participation in government and administration; economic power by enjoying the benefits of social revolution, in which previously dominant ethnic groups among the urban bourgeoisie and the landowning classes found themselves dispossessed, and peasants took over the cities; and cultural power through new educational rights with the spread of mass literacy and compulsory schooling. In the Ukraine, for instance, 97 per cent of Ukrainian children received instruction in their native language by 1929, something they could only have dreamed of before the revolution; Poland at the same time was busy shutting down its Ukrainian-language schools, whose numbers fell from 3,662 to 144 in the inter-war period.14
It is not surprising that Bolshevik nationalities policy, so far from being regarded as oppressive and tyrannical, exerted a powerful attraction over the minorities of central-eastern Europe between the wars. In the 1920s, communist support was high among these groups—Macedonians, Belorussians, Jews and others—who were the chief victims of Versailles’s love affair with the nation-state. The Ukrainians themselves could contrast the violent police repression they faced against their culture in Poland with the situation in the Soviet republic, at least until the famine of the early 1930s, and perhaps even after. Only on the basis of this contrast can we understand why so many Ukrainians and Jews celebrated the downfall of the Polish republic and the arrival of the Red Army into the Western Ukraine in the autumn of 1939.15
On the other hand, the ostensibly federal structure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as it emerged in the early 1920s, hid an increasingly centralized reality. Republics may have had greater powers than the so-called autonomous regions, but they were still subject to Moscow, and their constitutional right to secession—designed to prove the egalitarian nature of the Union—existed only on paper.
In fact the Bolshevik leadership’s willingness to consider federalism depended upon real power remaining in the hands of an organization that was not even mentioned in the 1923 USSR constitution—the Communist Party. Lenin may have rebuked Stalin in 1922 for “Great Russian chauvinism,” and stressed the need to avoid “imperialistic relations towards our oppressed minorities.” But there was no essential disagreement between them over the party’s fundamental role in cementing the new empire together. This it carried out successfully enough to make Russia Europe’s last imperial power. Communism turned out to be the last, and perhaps the highest, stage of imperialism.16
THE LIBERAL VARIANT: TOWARDS MINORITY RIGHTS
Much like the Bolsheviks, the victors at Versailles also had to grope their way towards a policy which could reconcile their pledges of national self-determination with the need for regional stability in Europe. Through the first months of 1918, in fact, many policymakers in Washington and London still believed the best solution for eastern Europe remained confederation: nation-states would be too small to be viable and too unstable to keep the peace. The Americans planning their version of Europe’s future hesitated between recommending independence for Poland and turning it into a federal state in a brand-new Russian democracy; the British Foreign Office only reluctantly abandoned the idea of re-forming the Habsburg Empire.17
But the sudden collapse of the old empires made such thinking redundant and as a result brought the minorities issue into the open for the first time, primarily and initially in relation to Poland. Given that, as the Polish nationalist Roman Dmowski put it, “the aim of this war was to reduce German power to limits which would allow the reestablishment of European equilibrium,” Poland played a crucial role in any post-war settlement. But defining Poland was not a straightforward matter in terms of either territory or ethnicity, since the country had not existed as an independent state for over a century, and was home to large communities of Germans, Lithuanians, White Russians, Ukrainians and Jews as well as Poles. Polish nationalists themselves were torn between two visions of past glory: an exclusively Polish nation-state of pristine ethnic purity, or a multi-ethnic Commonwealth under Polish leadership.18
