Anti-liberal Europe: A Neglected Story of Europeanization 9781782384267

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Part I. Concepts
Introduction: Anti-liberal Europe – A Neglected Source of Europeanism
1 The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism
Part II Anti-liberalism: A Feature of Colonial and Conservative Concepts of Europe
2 Europe as a Colonial Project: A Critique of its Anti-liberalism
3 Facing the Future Backwards: ‘Abendland’ as an Anti-liberal Idea of Europe in Germany between the First World War and the 1960s
4 The Call for a New European Order: Origins and Variants of the Anti-liberal Concept of the ‘Europe of the Regions’
Part III. Anti-liberal Europe in Dictatorships and their Aftermath
5 The ‘New European Order’ of National Socialism Some Remarks on its Sources, Genesis and Nature
6 Three Kinds of Collaboration Concepts of Europe and the ‘Franco-German Understanding’ – The Career of SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg
7 Communist Europeanism: A Case Study of the GDR
Afterword: The Limits of an Anti-liberal Europe
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Anti-liberal Europe

New German Historical Perspectives Series Editor: Paul Betts (Executive Editor), St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford Established in 1987 this special St. Antony’s series on New German Historical Perspectives showcases pioneering new work by leading German historians on a range of topics concerning the history of modern Germany and Europe. Publications address pressing problems of political, economic, social, and intellectual history informed by contemporary debates about German and European identity, providing fresh conceptual, international, and transnational interpretations of the recent past.

Volume 1 Historical Concepts between Eastern and Western Europe Edited by Manfred Hildermeier Volume 2 Crises in European Integration: Challenges and Responses 1945–2005 Edited by Ludger Kühnhardt Volume 3 Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective Edited by Jürgen Kocka

Volume 4 Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices Edited by Sylvia Paletschek Volume 5 A Revolution of Perception? Consequences and Echoes of 1968 Edited by Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey Volume 6 Anti-liberal Europe: A Neglected Story of Europeanization Edited by Dieter Gosewinkel

Anti-liberal Europe A Neglected Story of Europeanization

Edited by Dieter Gosewinkel

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015 Dieter Gosewinkel All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anti-liberal Europe: a neglected story of Europeanization / edited by Dieter Gosewinkel. pages cm. -- (New German historical perspectives; volume 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-425-0 (hardback: alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-426-7 (ebook) 1. Liberalism--Europe--History--20th century. 2. Political culture--Europe-History--20th century. 3. Nationalism--Europe--History--20th century. 4. European federation. 5. National characteristics, European. 6. Europe-Civilization--20th century. I. Gosewinkel, Dieter, 1956- editor of compilation. JC574.2.E85A67 2014 320.5094--dc23 2014019627 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78238-425-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78238-426-7 (ebook)

For Claire

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements x Part I.  Concepts Introduction 3 Anti-liberal Europe – A Neglected Source of Europeanism Dieter Gosewinkel 1. The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism Michael Freeden

33

Part II. Anti-liberalism: A Feature of Colonial and Conservative Concepts of Europe 2. Europe as a Colonial Project: A Critique of its Anti-liberalism Fabian Klose

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3. Facing the Future Backwards: ‘Abendland’ as an Anti-liberal Idea of Europe in Germany between the First World War and the 1960s Vanessa Conze

72

4. The Call for a New European Order: Origins and Variants of the Anti-liberal Concept of the ‘Europe of the Regions’ Undine Ruge

90

viii

Contents

Part III. Anti-liberal Europe in Dictatorships and their Aftermath 5. The ‘New European Order’ of National Socialism: Some Remarks on its Sources, Genesis and Nature Jürgen Elvert

105

6. Three Kinds of Collaboration: Concepts of Europe and the ‘Franco-German Understanding’ – The Career of SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg Peter Schöttler

128

7. Communist Europeanism: A Case Study of the GDR Jana Wuestenhagen

157

Afterword The Limits of an Anti-liberal Europe Martin Conway

179

Notes on Contributors

191

Index 195

Illustrations

6.1 Krukenberg in Paris, late 1920s.

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6.2 Krukenberg, far right, at Wildflecken, 1945; in the centre: Léon Degrelle.

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8.1 ‘Races of Europe’ map, taken from Sumner Welles, Postwar 182 Planning and the Quest for a New World Order 1937–1943 by Christopher D. O’Sullivan.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book came about during my one-year stay as a guest researcher at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford in 2010/11. Several institutions and many individuals contributed to the genesis of this work. I would like to thank, first of all, the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, especially the Marga and Kurt Möllgaard Foundation, for financing my stay in Oxford. The European Studies Centre welcomed me warmly and provided me with excellent conditions and the necessary infrastructure to carry out my work successfully. In particular, I am highly indebted to Jane Caplan, director of the center, who energetically supported the project and contributed a translation as well; for this I thank her warmly. I also owe much gratitude to Anne Guillermain for her skilful planning of the events that inspired this volume. I am very grateful to Paul Betts who accompanied and supported the final stage of development in putting together this anthology. The authors demonstrated remarkable perseverance, understanding and engagement throughout the long process of generating this work from its inception to its finalization and printing. A hearty thank you therefore to all of the authors as well as to the anonymous reviewers whose critiques and comments were highly valuable. Mary Kelley-Bibra, Hilde Ottschofski and Cornelia Vetter carried out the formal preparations and technical layout of the manuscript with great devotion to the task. I think them and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center for providing me with an ideal working environment. Finally, I dedicate this book to Claire de Oliveira who, from Paris to Oxford, gave me her loving support, without which an undertaking such as this one would not have been possible. Paris, December 2013

part i Concepts

Introduction Anti-liberal Europe – A Neglected Source of Europeanism Dieter Gosewinkel

The history of how today’s Europe developed is presented from the present-day perspective, from that of the current form of European integration: a democratic, politically integrated structure based on the rule of law and economic freedoms, growing prosperity and voluntary membership. This structure is characterized by common values in the canon of classical rights to freedom and the obligation for peace. It reflects how, after 1945, the European integration process foreswore excessive violence, pronounced nationalism, and the policy of excessive and authoritarian state control that destroyed freedom during the first half of the century. Renunciation of what was perceived as a historical mistake is a motive shared by all political exponents of the European integration process since 1945. There are two kinds of historical connection: democratic conceptions of Europe in the period between the two world wars, such as took form in the 1929/1930 Briand/Stresemann initiative for a united Europe at the League of Nations;1 and a close relationship to plans for a peaceful, free, united Europe that developed out of resistance to National Socialism, occupation and totalitarianism between 1933 and 1945.2 The two underlying assumptions are a common awareness of ‘the European peoples’ cited by an early draft of a European constitution ‘being the heirs to a culture and a civilisation’3 and a common canon of values. This canon is headed by the ‘dignity, freedom and equality of man’, as formulated by the ad-hoc assembly for the foundation of a European Political Community in March 1953 at the zenith of the political unification efforts in Europe at that time.4 To guarantee these objectives, the process of European unification was tied in with respect for the law and the ‘natural rights’ of the individual as set forth in the declarations on human rights. In public and private, the protagonists of the unification process repeatedly state the last rationale for these values in the form of Christian values, which for their part are derived from Europe’s common cultural heritage.

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These conceptions of a European federation have been held together by an ideal founded on Christian humanistic principles and aiming at the protection of human dignity and individual freedom. The projects for Europe therefore have a liberal core in a dual sense.5 First, they are defined politically by ensuring the freedom of the individual and by the development of his or her individual diversity and abilities – guaranteed and enforced by the protection of individual rights, particularly civil and political rights.6 Second, economically, these rights provide the basis for developing individual economic skills, capacities and action in a market society. In the political sphere, liberal is thus characterized by structural duality, referring to both the political and economic freedom of the individual as fundamental principles of a political and societal order.7 This was not so from the outset of the concept’s politicization in international politico-social parlance following the French Revolution, but only since the beginning of the twentieth century.8 ‘Liberal’ took independent shape as an economic doctrine alongside the political concept when the growing extent and force of government intervention in the economy in the twentieth century called individual economic freedom into question in a new way. If we thus examine twentieth-century conceptions of Europe, as this volume sets out to do, the liberality or anti-liberality of the construction of Europe is an issue that always presents itself in relation to both the political and economic order in Europe. This volume concentrates on concepts, intellectual blueprints and perceptions of Europe from the interwar period to the 1970s. The period covered reaches from the upswing in projects for European unification after the First World War to the height of European colonization and decolonization, the conceptions of Europe under dictatorship and in the Second World War, up to the broad European movement and institutionalization of European integration and an internal European market before the Europe project stagnated intellectually in the 1970s (only to assume new dimensions and forms with intensified efforts towards integration before and after the upheavals of 1989). This volume and the sources it draws on are concerned with Europe, to be more precise, with thinking about Europe in certain European countries, above all in Germany and France. The specific combination of political and economic aspects in liberal conceptualizations of Europe is evident, for example, in the best known intellectual project of European integration in the interwar period: Richard CoudenhoveCalergi’s ‘Paneuropa’.9 It was not by chance that this project of Europeanism based on economic liberties became most influential after 1945, to be enshrined in the basic economic liberties of the Rome Treaties,10 the constitutional foundation of the European Economic Community, even if the Paneuropean movement had no direct influence on the formulation of the integration treaties. It is well known that the ideas and institutions of economic freedom and a market economy fuelled the process of European integration from the late 1950s after the first vain attempts at achieving the political unification of Western European countries as a European Defence Community in the early 1950s.11

Introduction5

The development of a free market, the freedom of trade, movement and employment for nationals of this ever enlarging community, which started with six founding countries, became emblematic of the structure and even raison d’être of European integration. Thus economic liberalism12 based on constitutional civil liberties became the core and predominant impulse in the process of European integration throughout the second half of the twentieth century. These ideas and institutional efforts were – or at least saw themselves as being – in perfect accordance with what was and still is called modernity and modernization:13 progress in individual freedom, economic autonomy, enhanced consumerism, as well as prosperity hand in hand with democratic institutions. As we know, however, European integration and the historical process are not identical with Europe as a historical idea and place. This holds true although the continuous process of enlargement of the European Economic Community, which accelerated strongly after 1989, obscures two basic, though not to say trivial, facts. Until 1989 essential parts of Europe did not participate in economic liberalization and denationalization (and were excluded from these processes). Second, ideas and political projects for shaping Europe as a political, cultural and economic entity were current not only in these countries but also in the countries of Western Europe that took part in economic liberalization and Europeanization that often not only went far beyond the idea of liberalism, but were opposed to it. They were – and are – often based on the idea of a community that is perhaps rooted in pre-modern religious ideas, cultural or ethnic homogeneity, or even in coercion and violence. They very frequently either reject the idea of modernity or give it an explicitly non-liberal, even anti-liberal meaning and thrust. The ideas, concepts and political efforts to build Europe from an anti-liberal perspective as well as the perception or experience of Europe as anti-liberal are at the heart of this book. However, comparing liberal and anti-liberal conceptions of Europe from the interwar period until well into the 1970s entails certain simplifications and presuppositions that raise methodological questions and objections. First, the proposed definition of ‘liberal’ in terms of political and economic freedom borrowed from the political programmes and the legal and economic institutions of the world of (Western) European states and the European integration process after 1945 narrows the intellectual history perspective. This not only brings a risk of semantic constraint but also of teleological overstatement in the sense of a liberalization process asserting itself after 1945. We deliberately employ the term ‘liberal’ to denote a construct of conceptual elements, regarded by historical actors as essential – on whose semantic value consensus can be said to exist for a certain point of time in history – until the end of the period under study. However, this simplifying and typifying construction sets no normative standard for what is liberal, but introduces a concept of liberal as a heuristic tool serving as a point of reference and yardstick for deviating political concepts that are historically antecedent or run counter to this definition of political concepts and approaches with a liberal thrust. The polarizing opposition between ‘liberal’

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and ‘anti-liberal’ is not intended to offer a differentiating perspective of absolute contextualization.14 Against the benchmark ‘liberal’ the aim is, in contrast, to capture the ideational and political thrust of thinking among intellectual actors during the period under consideration. They saw themselves as anti-liberal. Such a methodological procedure naturally requires elimination of a misunderstanding: in this context the standard ‘liberal’ does not refer to any political norm of the liberals. This study accordingly does not judge liberal to be good or anti-liberal to be bad. The focus of interest is on the historical circumstances and arguments in which decidedly anti-liberal ideas and movements were able to develop an intellectual and political impact in confrontation with other ideas of Europe. The second, closely related consideration is that an ex post concept of liberal does not trace the politico-social changes in the semantics that occur over more than half a century. It does not even do justice to changing contemporary usage. What the chapters in this volume examine, however, are elements in the historical, diachronous development of the political concept of liberal and its counterconcepts, i.e. changes in the semantics and pragmatics of usage. The procedure aims to historicize the concept ‘liberal’ and the counter-concept ‘anti-liberal’. This includes looking at any shifts in the frequency of use and the legitimatory potential of the concepts. Even a superficial, preliminary assessment of political discourses from the interwar period shows the political devaluation of the concept of liberal and an upturn for the polemical counter-concept and political buzzword ‘anti-liberal’,15 whereas the opposite was the case after 1945. The legitimacy of the concepts decides how they are employed in the political discourse, offensively or defensively. This leads us to assume that the anti-liberal political positions persisting even after 1945 possibly toned down how they referred to themselves and their rhetoric by adopting the terms ‘illiberal’ or ‘non-liberal’.16 Thirdly, the thesis is that anti-liberal thinking about Europe in many European countries includes a comparative statement on the political language in the context of different national languages. There is a risk of ‘semantic nominalism’, which unthinkingly adopts a term from the politico-social vocabulary of one country as corresponding to a presumably equivalent term in the political discourse of another country.17 Any synchronous comparison18 that assumes the usage of the terms ‘liberal’, ‘anti-liberal’, and ‘Europe’ is semantically equivalent or even largely similar in the various European countries in, say, 1940 must fail due to profound national particularities and diversity of political semantics in intellectual history.19 In this sense Michel Freeden’s question about what liberalism or anti-liberalism is directed against can be answered by his own reference to a multitude of nationally and conceptually diverging liberalisms.20 Given these diachronous and synchronous discrepancies and differences in development between countries, this volume proceeds on the assumption that a semantic polarity between liberal and anti-liberal with respect to Europe developed and intensified in the political discourses and movements of certain European countries between 1920 and 1970. This is revealed by the sources, which show the profound ideational, political, and economic crisis of liberalism

Introduction7

in the interwar years, and often beyond.21 For this period we find abundant references to ‘Europe’, declarations of common Europeanness or political European unification projects that differ from the well-known and allegedly self-evident liberal basis of values and objectives, and take on a decidedly and explicit antiliberal thrust. Many of them can be shown to exist in the historical sources of the twentieth century, in political declarations, memoranda, institutional plans and autobiographical documents. But their treatment in historiography, by contrast, correlates inversely with their frequency and their political aim.22 Against a normative concept of Europe derived from the liberal concept of European integration that became reality after 1945, anti-liberal drafts are categorized as ‘anti-Europe’.23 Wolfgang Schmale, for instance, in his history of Europe published in 2001 – in contrast, incidentally, to most other overviews of European integration – goes into great detail on anti-liberal ideas of Europe in Nazism and European fascism, and concludes: ‘National Socialism did indeed develop ideas about Europe, but measured against the tradition of the European idea, they were anti-European.’ At the same time he confirms that the Nazi idea of Europe was developed after 1939 ‘with such vehemence and success’ that ‘the traditional concept of Europe, building on European ideas about the understanding of the law, was fundamentally jeopardised.’24 Here a clear tension developed between a normative understanding of the traditional – and I would like to add, ‘correct’ – idea of Europe, and the historical fact of a highly effective opposing concept of Europe. And this tension is what this volume will be examining, because a closer look at the historical sources disturbs the image of the harmony and dominance of what Schmale calls the ‘tradition of the idea of Europe’. There is abundant evidence of another strand of development that deviates from the liberal tradition in two ways, and even contradicts it. The first has to do with historical experience of Europeanization, the second with concepts of Europe.

Non-liberal Experience of Europeanization Experience of Europeanization,25 i.e. of the collective perception of Europe as a region that generates common experience with immediate and incisive impact on the lives of individuals, doubtless also exists in the deliberate orientation towards common political values and their political realization. However, juxtaposed with this is collective experience beyond the will of individuals – or even opposed to it.26 This includes experience with occupying forces, flight and displacement. As we know, these developments and experiences reached transnational, European proportions and a sad climax during the world wars of the twentieth century (europäischer Weltbürgerkrieg, a ‘global civil war of European origin’). However, the perception of Europe as either a common, collective experience of oppression exerted in the name of a European, Europe-wide mission,

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or a common defence of Europe goes back much further in the history of early modern Europe. Three historical constellations from the seventeenth century onwards illustrate this observation. First constellation: In the age of Louis XIV, European states and their populations experienced a long period of imperialist efforts to enlarge the French realm and territory by military means and with great violence. The almost Europewide French offensive to dominate the continent in the name of a specifically Christian mission of the French king (‘le roi très chrétien’) was confronted by an opposition of politically and religiously divergent powers: powerful kingdoms and small territorial states, Catholic and Protestant rulers united in the name of the ‘liberty of Europe’ to combat aspirations to establish a mono-confessional, i.e. Catholic, militarily and culturally oppressed Europe dominated by the French king. An anti-liberal concept and political practice of Europeanization thus gave rise to a liberal counter-concept of Europe based on religious pluralism, political heterogeneity and freedom. However, it was only the anti-liberal efforts of a hegemonic power and their catalytic effects that caused the condensation of liberal – anti-hegemonic – political ideas and values about Europe. Moreover, the cultural hegemony of French imperial power persisted in eighteenth-century Europe: French as the language of diplomacy, French political ideas and institutions of absolutism spread throughout continental Europe.27 Above all, this included elements of state structure and the development of the armed forces and administration, but especially the establishment of a central court with a whole ensemble of pretensions to sovereign power by the ruler, and display of this power up to and including its expression in architecture and art. Even though the French model was not accepted and adopted unchanged everywhere, and it was often more admired and proclaimed than adopted, a French claim to hegemony in political and cultural influence and the recasting of unlike or refractory traditional forms in Europe asserted itself. This claim to validity, which had no basis in liberal plurality, made European territorial states more similar to each other – an effect of Europeanization ‘avant la lettre’28 which did not have a liberalizing effect. It even opposed the ideas of a nascent age of individualism and liberal rights including religious diversity and economic self-determination.29 Second constellation: It was the French emperor Napoleon at the turn of the nineteenth century who had the vision of a ‘New Europe’.30 Somewhat in the expansionist tradition of Louis XIV, his armies conquered and occupied vast areas of continental Europe. The Napoleonic political rationale and core of its propaganda was to bring the achievements of the French Revolution to the peoples of Europe. It claimed to be directed against the ‘anti-liberty’, indeed despotic powers of ‘Old Europe’ so as to win acceptance for a new European order. This was partly true, and had some resonance particularly among the allies of Napoleonic France. It can be said, for example, that the introduction of anti-feudal civil law in the form of the ‘Code Napoléon’ based on individual freedom and the free disposal of property, was a genuinely modern, liberal idea.31 However, it was often brought to the peoples of the ‘New Europe’32

Introduction9

with the accompaniment of violence and oppression, and was instrumental in the establishment of French hegemony over large parts of Europe. In the era of the Napoleonic ‘New Europe’, the experience of violent subjugation, the compulsory requisition of property and the imposition of a new political regime were commonplace.33 Resistance to the imposition of a European order by the grace of Napoleon was particularly strong in the occupied territories of the former German ‘Holy Roman Empire’, which had regarded itself as a model of a balanced, peaceful European order. This resistance, fed by nationalist ideas and movements, also had the effect of discrediting the liberal ideas inherent to the Napoleonic European order owing to the anti-liberal way in which they had been imposed.34 The often compulsory or violent imposition of new legal or economic structures on occupied Europe did not fail to leave its mark, bringing together the territorial states in question.35 Throughout the nineteenth century they not only shared a common memory of violent Napoleonic occupation, but also institutional traces of a new order of modern, civil law extending to most countries in continental Europe that had been under Napoleonic rule. This new common European code (gemeineuropäisches Zivilrecht), which was the dominant model of codification in (continental) European civil law until the end of the nineteenth century is an example of the ambiguity between illiberal (or even anti-liberal) methods and effects of Europeanization.36 Illiberal methods of implementing political order could even foster the upsurge of liberalism.37 Third constellation: The nineteenth century, known as the golden age of liberalism, was at the same time the age of colonialism by European powers in and at the cost of the non-European world.38 There was a discrepancy between the status of liberal values within and without the European continent. Whereas liberal institutions in politics (individual rights and constitutions) as well as in trade and economy (global free trade, rights of intellectual property) experienced an upsurge and continuous development, colonial rule over non-European peoples was deeply marked by violence, often bereft of the legal and constitutional limitations that applied in the European territories of the colonizing powers. This fundamental discrepancy contributed to establishing a long tradition of critique of European colonialism from the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century onwards. Common intentions and practices in the European expansion and colonization of the ‘European Age’ and a genuinely European civilizational mission39 justifying talk of an ‘age of European expansion’,40 the primacy of economic exploitation and political dominance on the basis of racial inequality generated a double common (European) confrontation: firstly in the colonial metropolises of Europe itself criticism arose among intellectuals and politicians that, for example divided the public in the expansionist phase of the British Empire into proponents of an ‘empire of liberty’ and those of an ‘empire of race’.41 The critics of European colonial expansion – across all national boundaries – developed common patterns of thought and exchanged views with increasing intensity.42

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On the other hand, a second effect of domination by the European powers was that the subjects of colonial rule often came to see Europe in general as a violent political entity profoundly anti-liberal in nature – regardless of all national differences and quarrels between the colonial powers. We might call this effect indirect or reflexive Europeanization since it is the product of critical external perception.43 These historical constellations are intended to show that concepts and political practices for unifying Europe were perceived as – and often were – genuinely anti-liberal. However, the effect of this fact on the process of Europeanization was deeply ambivalent. The experience and practice of an anti-liberal Europe could lead to fundamental resistance and rejection of any attempt at Europeanization. However, it could also have the opposite effect. It only seems paradoxical that even – or precisely – the experience of violence could bring about a community of experience able to identify closely with Europe. To illustrate this fundamentally ambivalent relationship between the experience of violence and Europeanization we take an example from the history of twentieth-century Europe. Walter Lipgens, the German historian of European integration originating from the spirit of resistance, once described the phenomenon of a European community of experience in view of the Nazi occupation of Europe during the Second World War as follows: For four years during the War one had to experience as daily reality the effective shackling together of the whole region by the German occupiers, the servitude of the local administrations and the mobilisation of all resources irrespective of previous borders. The lessons illustrated by these collapses and servitude, the creation of a continental European economic region and central control, paved the way more rapidly for the general population to think along continental lines than the Coudenhove movement a decade before (and in the wake of cynical adoption of the catchword ‘Europe’ in the propaganda, some soldiers, both Germans and some in volunteer units, honestly believed that in Hitler’s armies they were fighting for Europe).44

In recent historiography, Mark Mazower suggests that the strong, even majoritarian approval of authoritarian and hierarchical political rule among the European population around 1940 as opposed to the liberal-democratic Versailles order might even have been transferred to a new – authoritarian – European order dominated by National Socialist Germany. Its political impetus, however, was discredited by the radical German politics of subordination, exploitation and even annihilation of other peoples.45 His 2008 book, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, sums up the effect of Nazi rule over Second World War Europe in a scene after Hitler’s death during the very last days of the war when his successor, Admiral Dönitz, brought together the German senior officials who ran the Empire’s last remaining territories in Norway, Bohemia and Moravia, Denmark and the Netherlands. As Mazower shows, their meeting reflected the ‘European scale of Nazi rule in its final days’ because it had ‘indeed become’ to use the propaganda phrase a ‘community of fate’. Moreover, he goes beyond

Introduction11

this observation, pointing in a more analytical conclusion to the conditional relationship between Nazi occupation and the process of Europeanization with regard to both the population and the resistance movement: ‘Precisely because Nazi conquest linked together the peoples of Europe more tightly than they had ever been connected before, those fighting the Germans also found it necessary to plan in European terms.’46 Finally, Mazower points out how National Socialist ideas on planning (occupied) Europe were not only reflected in but even inspired the Allies’ plans for reconstructing Europe. There are even good arguments to assume that German planning for a common European post-war economy was much more suitable for constructing a new economic order in (Western) Europe after 1945 than the notions of Soviet planning and liberal British laissez-faire.47 Recent historiography not only reveals structural and institutional parallels but also personal and intellectual continuities in the construction of the early European Economic Community. First, it seems that the political aims of a new European order (under National Socialist rule) have to be distinguished from the economic ideas and institutions which, according to their intensity and variety, played a dominant role in German planning for post-war Europe.48 They were based on new conceptions of a ‘greater European space’ (Großraum),49 which correspondingly opened the way for new juridical and economic organization beyond the narrow framework of the nation-state.50 This thread of research still has to be followed and developed. It is introduced here for illustrative purposes: to demonstrate how the experience of illiberal ideas and political practice could really end in processes of Europeanization – both in the political mentality of Europeans and in the institutions of European integration.

Anti-liberal Conceptions of Europe: Themes of the Volume Like experience of Europeanization that goes back to coercion and violence, conceptions of Europe emerged in the first half of the twentieth century that were decidedly non-liberal or anti-liberal in their thrust. Such conceptions are at the heart of this volume. The first section traces the outlines of the historiographical and conceptual classification of the topic. In his chapter on historical concept formation, Michael Freeden comments critically on the critique of anti-liberalism in European colonialism. He raises fundamental questions about the historically adequate formation of the concepts of ‘liberal’ and ‘anti-liberal’. After distinguishing between anti-liberal, illiberal, and non-liberal, Freeden asks what kind of liberalism antiliberalism is to be differentiated from. His answer is a plea to accept a multiplicity of liberalisms that are not covered by an ideal type of liberalism, which has in any case never existed. Liberal ideas, he claims, could develop a hegemonic universalism incompatible with the notion of pluralism. Finally, he asserts that

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European colonialism is not per se incompatible with liberal ideas; conversely, European colonial regimes often did not wish to be liberal. They could hence not be reproached with being ‘anti-liberal’ but at worst ‘non-liberal.’ The second section of the book, Anti-liberalism: A Feature of Colonial and Conservative Concepts of Europe, presents first empirical studies on concepts of an anti-liberal Europe that originated in the interwar period and made themselves felt in changed and intensified form after the Second World War. It takes a double perspective: first, Europe seen from without as anti-liberal, and, second, intellectual concepts and movements that sought to reconstruct Europe from within on the basis of anti-liberal ideas and movements. From the point of view of anti-colonial intellectuals and movements in the mid twentieth century, the European countries that during the nineteenth century had conquered the largest colonial empires in history based on racism and economic exploitation, and which at the same time presented themselves as standard bearers of the constitutional state, human rights, civilization, and humanitarianism, offered the image of profoundly anti-liberal, collective aggressors. Fabian Klose shows this, taking the four fundamental freedoms of the 1941 Atlantic Charter as core liberal ideas and a measure for the disappointed hopes of liberation from colonial oppression after the war. He describes the concerted action by the great European colonial powers after 1945 to suppress anti-colonial movements that espoused liberal values. In the colonial policy they continued to pursue after the war, the European colonial powers made a considerable effort to elude commitment to the liberal and emancipatory values of human rights declarations, thus harming liberal legal principles at home, as well as abroad. Pre-modern, and in many cases anti-modern, religious conceptions of Europe from the period before and after the Second World War struggled against European nationalism in the service of a timeless Western order that was directed against democracy and an unrestricted diversity of world views. The spectrum covered first of all Christian religious groupings, and thus above all Catholics combatted (liberal) modernity and fought for an Occidental Europe.51 Vanessa Conze addresses this topic. She points out that, for much of the twentieth century, the history of the European idea was the history of a multitude of European ideas, among which the pluralistic, liberal-democratic concepts that now dominate were in the minority. Taking the example of the ‘Occident’ concept in Germany from the end of the First World War to the 1950s, she shows the profoundly anti-liberal and anti-modern thrust of an idea of Europe that became a rallying call against secularization and communism and in favour of re-Christianization and the unification of Europe in a hierarchically organized society headed by an elite of charismatic personalities. The development of the Occident concept – in both Germany and other European countries – reflects attempts to revivify a historically legitimized idea of Europe and Europeanism precisely in the era of Europe’s political and economic decline during the interwar period.

Introduction13

Like the Occident movement, the movement marked by the philosophy of personalism, which aimed to establish a ‘Europe of the Regions’, was part of the broad anti-liberal current within the European movement of the interwar years. In her examination of the French group of intellectuals known as the ‘Ordre Nouveau’, Undine Ruge52 shows how strongly groupings considering themselves ‘ni droite ni gauche’ wanted to bring about a ‘personalistic’ revolution, whose point of departure was the human person, for a new European order in sharp opposition to liberalism, capitalism, collectivism, rationalism, parliamentary democracy, and also to the nation-state. This order was to consist of natural, organic units with their roots beyond the nation-state in regions or ethnic groups, which after 1945 were expected during the development of European integration and its subsequent stagnation in the 1970s to form the basis for a federated Europe. Whereas Guy Héraud’s integral federalism of a ‘Europe of ethnic groups’ inspired the networks of the new Austro-German and French right, the ‘Europe of the Regions’ propagated by one of the founders of the Ordre Nouveau, Denis de Rougemont, espoused an anti-totalitarian ethic of responsibility. The two variants remain key currents in present-day antiliberal conceptions of Europe. Anti-liberal thought ranged further from religious to areligious, conservative, and ethnocentric models53 of a European order to include notions of a decidedly anti-liberal totality in fascism,54 National Socialism55 and communism.56 This is dealt with in the third section on Anti-liberal Europe in Dictatorships and their Aftermath, addressing a far from self-evident question, which seems paradoxical, absurd, or even offensive to prevailing historiography on twentieth-century Europe: have anti-liberal, even totalitarian regimes made a genuine contribution to processes of Europeanization? We know that the imposed European order of the Nazi occupation was supported not only by the use of weapons but also by ideas of multinational collaboration in a ‘New Europe’, which in many cases (especially in France, but also in other European states) had already developed before 1939 and did not vanish without a trace after 1945.57 The intellectual roots of the totalitarian variant of a ‘New European Order’, which was the model of the National Socialist dictatorship for its European policy of conquest and a Greater Germany between 1933 and 1945, went back far into the nineteenth century. Jürgen Elvert discusses the concepts Friedrich List introduced in the 1840s for the economic colonization of Central Europe under German leadership, which found political expression in the aggressive striving of German elites for hegemony in Europe during the First World War, and was given journalistic expression by Friedrich Naumann in Mitteleuropa (Central Europe). In the 1920s, revisionist ideas of Europe developed in the intellectual context of the ‘Conservative Revolution’, which with its anti-democratic and anti-parliamentarian notions of a European empire under German leadership formed the semantic bridge to National Socialist ideas of a ‘Great Germanic Empire’. Particularly during the first phase of the war, this concept

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served the much more radical policy to place Europe under the total control of a National Socialist racial empire; with the military reversals from 1943 onwards, there was a return to plans for a new federative European order under German leadership. During the interwar period as a whole, these nationalistic and imperialist, later racist and thus profoundly anti-liberal concepts of Europe outweighed by far any conceptions, relatively weak in Germany, of voluntary political and economic cooperation in Europe.58 The essential and intriguing question is whether and to what extent there were continuities in anti-liberal thinking about Europe and even strands of anti-liberal Europeanism after (and before) 1945. Such continuity is particularly evident in the political propaganda and historical references of right wing extremism.59 Did the first half of the ‘dark continent’s’ (Mark Mazower) twentieth century, which was shaped by a fundamental intellectual and political denial of liberalism, nonetheless leave its mark on the period after 1945, which is widely regarded as a new liberal age of Europe crowned by the demise of communism in 1989?60 Jürgen Elvert and Peter Schöttler’s chapters take up this question and use the tools of intellectual history to analyze it in the texts of German intellectuals, such as well-known figures like Carl Schmitt, dealt with by Jürgen Elvert. The major intellectual designs for an anti-liberal Europe during the interwar period lost their attraction after 1945, but not because radical anti-liberalism had been discredited by the crushing of National Socialist and fascist dictatorship in Western Europe. On the contrary, recent research61 has shown that concepts of a Europe-wide order (Großraumordnung) in the major European crisis between 1930 and the end of the imperial expansion of an authoritarian European order in 1945 produced models of political orders whose political impetus, economic rationality and geopolitical sense were not an end as such: the stabilization of Europe in the face of a further loss of political and economic status in the world between the United States and the Soviet Union; the creation of an efficient European economic space across national boundaries and barriers; the defence of a cultural and political front against the atheistic and communist Soviet Union. All these elements are to be found in the work of Carl Schmitt, who as no other German political thinker evoked considerable interest among European and American scholars even after 1945. He is, however, only a particularly prominent and influential protagonist of and symbol for the idea of a legal and economic space transcending national borders, which had been developed during the same period in Germany and other European countries in connection with projects for European unification, to be realized during the war, but often precisely in its aftermath. Critical research62 is far from adapting, let alone adopting, integration concepts from the often centralistic, authoritarian, and imperialist models for shaping post-war Europe that had been developed before 1945. But in the continuity of legal figures of thought that led from the political design of a pre-democratic Großraum to a supranational legal order of European integration, the new European order found specific legal form on

Introduction15

the basis not of liberal concepts but of ordoliberal or neoliberal concepts that had been developed before 1945 and reached their greatest formative power in the post-war period.63 Planning policy forms a bridge between anti-liberal intellectual designs and the institutional design of European integration. In the interwar years there was a strong current of thought among French and German intellectuals but also in other European countries and the United States that sought to combat the flagrant political and economic crisis of the European system of states by far-reaching government intervention and by organizing the economy through systematic planning. These planning concepts were not based on total planning of the economy to the exclusion of individual entrepreneurial initiative. In this they differ explicitly from Soviet planning notions. At the same time, however, they differ explicitly and decidedly from a liberal economic system with far-reaching nonintervention by government and an unshackled market society. This moderately anti-liberal impetus was able to adapt to various political systems. In the course of economic collaboration during the German occupation of France, the leaders of the war economy, entrepreneurs, and technocratic organizers on both sides coupled economic planning policy in conception and practical implementation closely with the creation of a ‘nouvelle Europe’.64 In contrast to West Germany, France after 1945 persisted in a policy of ‘planification’, in the decisive initial phase under the leadership of the key architect of European integration, Jean Monnet. Under his guidance and that of his planning staff active in European institutions, French planning ideas became constitutive for the development of European integration. Although the original anti-liberal impetus had been attenuated in the practical realization of European planning policy, and would never have been compatible with the fundamental value of economic freedom in the founding documents of the European Economic Community, the far-reaching powers of regulation and control remained, transferred from the (French) state to the new institutions of European integration policy. In the middle of a period of upswing for economic (neo)liberalism65 a counterweight to liberal antipathy to control was preserved – and has remained in place to this day.66 The problem of continuity in anti-liberal Europeanism before and after 1945 is also thematized in Peter Schöttler’s chapter. He explores the case of an ‘ordinary intellectual’, who served different political regimes from the Weimar Republic to the Federal Republic, while touring Europe in his writings and political action in regard to Franco-German collaboration before and after 1945. Schöttler looks at the path taken by Gustav Krukenberg, a brigadier in the Franco-German Waffen-SS Division ‘Charlemagne’, from defence of the ‘New European Order’ under the National Socialist dictatorship to the postwar world of Western European integration. Schöttler associates the sequence of three phases in the biography of the ‘background figure’ Krukenberg with ‘three sorts of collaboration’, playing on the ambivalence of the term collaboration between cooperation and its specific meaning in Franco-German relations, i.e. political collaboration between the National Socialist and Vichy regimes

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during the Second World War. Krukenberg came from an educated middle-class background, was a lawyer and officer, politically conservative and with liberal economic views. After the First World War he was secretary of the FrancoGerman Study Committee, which sought to further European unification by promoting Franco-German rapprochement. In Conservative Revolution publications, Krukenberg blamed the failure of these efforts on backward-looking and self-righteous French policy. During the Second World War, Krukenberg, as general of the Charlemagne Division, defended the European military campaign against Bolshevism and the ‘Fortress Europe’, massively propagated in occupied France. As a journalist and economic lobbyist, he continued to work for European and Franco-German rapprochement after 1945. On the one hand he supported Adenauer’s policy of Franco-German rapprochement as the heart of European peace. On the other, he maintained close relations with veterans of his SS brigade and corresponded with prominent French collaborators who belonged to the radical right and denied the Holocaust. In his ‘double life’, Krukenberg saw himself in the continuity of his commitment to Europe during the war, describing himself as a pioneer in building Europe ‘from the bottom up’. With his anti-liberal image of Europe, Krukenberg formed a bridge between European collaboration in the Second World War and the European discourses of the Cold War and Western integration. The question of continuity may, finally, also be asked with regard to ideas of Europeanism in communist thinking and under communist rule before and after 1945.67 It has been established that such ideas existed. In her chapter, Jana Wuestenhagen explores the meaning, function and consequences of communist concepts of Europe in the system of an explicitly anti-liberal doctrine.68 She concentrates on the case of Germany (GDR), while also mentioning the cases of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Between 1945 and 1989, ideas of Europe were developed under the socialist dictatorships of the Eastern Bloc by both the ruling elites of the dictatorial systems and the opposition. Looking at the German Democratic Republic, Wuestenhagen shows that this – from her point of view – anti-liberal system, grounded in a totalitarian ideology, rejected societal differentiation and individual autonomy, and accordingly developed a concept of Europe that left no room for supranational integration structures. Europe was rather envisaged as a peaceable community of nationally sovereign states in which socialist governments proclaimed individual human rights only strategically, while hindering their application. Even the opposition in socialist systems was geared to the nation, although opposition groups were the first to call for free elections and civil rights. Particularly in the GDR, but also in other Eastern European countries, information about Western European culture and moves towards integration were rare or censored, whereas the officially proclaimed ‘cultural Europe’ was directed both against the bourgeois-liberal principles of Western integration and towards national values. This helps explain why the liberal, market economy, capitalist concept of European integration has found comparatively little support to this day in Eastern Germany.

Introduction17

Objectives of the Volume The volume sets itself the objective of investigating experience and concepts of Europe and Europeanization that do not correspond to the ‘tradition of the idea of Europe’ (Wolfgang Schmale) and do not fit in with the canon of values of European integration. Our interest is to record the historical appearance and impact of intrinsically anti-liberal concepts and violent experiences of or with Europe. In so doing we pursue the traces and continuities of anti-liberal concepts in their significance not only for the historical discourse, but also for the current discourse on the integration of Europe.69 This volume considers the ‘dark’, anti-liberal side of modern conceptions of Europe and the unintentional effects of enforced Europeanization. Both factors have affected the process of European integration, each in its own way. The following chapters put forward a twofold thesis for discussion. First, anti-liberal concepts of Europe were not simply anti-European; on the contrary, they were meant to strengthen a specific concept of European integration and to achieve the unity of Europe instead of hindering it. Second, Europeanization by violent means is not a contradiction in itself, but under specific circumstances may, like anti-liberal concepts of Europe, even strengthen the process of European integration. Both these sources of Europeanization may possibly constitute necessary conditions for its broad and far-reaching success. It is the task of historical research to analyze these conditions. Contrary to the prevailing opinion expounded in the literature on Europe, anti-liberal concepts of twentieth-century Europe are not the counterpoint to but a part of the process of European integration.

Notes  1. M.-R. Mouton. 1995. La société des nations et les intérêts de la France: 1920–1924, Berlin: Peter-Lang; A.-M. Saint-Gille. 2003. La ‘Paneurope’ – un débat d’ idées dans l’entre-deux-guerres, Paris: Presses de l‘Université de Paris-Sorbonne.  2. W. Lipgens (ed.). 1968. Europa-Föderationspläne der Widerstandsbewegungen 1940– 1945: Eine Dokumentation. Munich: Oldenbourg; W. Lipgens and W. Loth (eds). 1985. Documents on the History of European Integration. Vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union 1939–1945, Berlin: De Gruyter.   3. Preliminary draft of a European constitution (11 November 1948), second UEF congress in Rome, in W. Loth (ed.). 2002. Entwürfe einer europäischen Verfassung, Bonn: Europa-Union-Verlag, 55.  4. Loth, Entwürfe einer europäischen Verfassung, 73; similarly M. Debré. 2002. ‘Entwurf eines Paktes für eine europäische Union (Januar 1953)’, in W. Loth, Entwürfe einer europäischen Verfassung, 65.   5. On the historical semantics of the concept see J. Leonhard. 2002. Liberalismus: Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters, Göttingen: Oldenbourg; P. Rosanvallon. 1989. Le libéralisme économique: histoire de l’ idée de marché. Paris: Points

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Politique; J. Leonhard. 2003. ‘Semantische Deplazierung und Entwertung: Deutsche Deutungen von liberal und Liberalismus nach 1850 im europäischen Vergleich’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29(1), 5–39.   6. On the core elements of the political concept ‘liberal’ see chapter 1, ‘Liberalismus: Zur historischen Bedeutung eines politischen Begriffs’, in H.A.Winkler. 1979. Liberalismus und Antiliberalismus: Studien zur politischen Sozialgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 13–19.  7. This is reflected in the division of the major article on ‘liberalism’ into two parts: R. Vierhaus. 1982. ‘Liberalismus’, in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland Band 3 (H–Me), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 741–785; R. Walther. 1982. ‘Exkurs: Wirtschaftlicher Liberalismus’, in Brunner, Conze and Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 787–815.   8. Walther, ‘Exkurs’, 787, 808ff.  9. Cf. R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi. 1934. Europa Erwacht! Zürich/Vienna/Leipzig: Paneuropa Verlag; R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi. 1966. Paneuropa: 1922 bis 1966, Vienna: Herold; R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi. 2006. Ausgewählte Schriften zu Europa (edited by Coudenhove-Kalergi Foundation), Vienna/Graz: Neuer Wissenschaftliche Verlag; for a critical reception, see V. Conze. 2003. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi: Umstrittener Visionär Europas (Persönlichkeit und Geschichte Band 165), Gleichen: Muster-Schmidt; C. Pernhorst. 2008. Das paneuropäische Verfassungsmodell des Grafen Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Baden-Baden: Nomos; A. Ziegerhofer-Prettenthaler. 2002. Botschafter Europas: Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi und die Paneuropa-Bewegung in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. 10. Treaty establishing a European Economic Community (EEC), signed March 25, 1957, introducing the principles of the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital. 11 F. Knipping. 2004. Rom, 25. März 1957, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 98–155. 12. Walther, ‘Exkurs’, 787–815; B. Busch. 2008. Zur Wirtschaftsverfassung der Europäischen Union: Grundlagen, Entwicklung und Perspektiven, Cologne: Deutscher Instituts Verlag; A. Howe and S. Morgan (eds). 2006. Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing; G. de Ruggiero. 1930. Geschichte des Liberalismus in Europa, Munich: Drei Masken Verlag; M. Wegmann. 2002. Früher Neoliberalismus und europäische Integration: Interdependenz der nationalen, supranationalen und internationalen Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1932– 1965), Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag; H. Laski. 1936. The Rise of European Liberalism, London: George Allen & Unwin. 13. Vierhaus‚ Liberalismus, 741–785; G. Gutting. 1999. Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; P. Kondylis. 2010. Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensform: Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne, Berlin: Oldenbourg Akademie Verlag. 14. Michael Freeden, ‘The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism’ in this volume. 15. K. Sontheimer. 1957. ‘Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 5(1), 42–62; E. Nolte. 1968. Die Krise des liberalen Systems und die faschistischen Bewegungen, Munich: Piper. 16. The political use of the terms ‘illiberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ is to be distinguished from the analytical definitions provided by Michael Freeden in ‘The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism’, in this volume. He defines ‘illiberal’ as the occasional deviation of a

Introduction19

basically liberal political community from otherwise liberal ideas and practices. ‘Nonliberal’, in contrast, refers to societies and states that do not claim from the outset to be liberal, for example conservative or socialist polities. 17. See Leonhard, Liberalismus, 47. 18. On the underlying problem of the synchronous equivalence of terms in the comparative history of concepts see W. Steinmetz. 2008. ‘Vierzig Jahre Begriffsgeschichte – The State of the Art’, in H. Kämper and L.M. Eichinger (eds), Sprache – Kognition – Kultur, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 193–195. 19. For particularities in the French development of the concepts ‘liberal’/‘liberalism’ see F. Huguenin. 2006. Le conservatisme impossible – libéralisme et réaction en France depuis 1789, Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde; F. Denord. 2007. Néo-libéralisme, version française: histoire d’une idéologie politique, Paris: Demopolis; P. Nemo and J. Petitot. 2006. Histoire du libéralisme en Europe, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 20. See Michael Freeden, ‘The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism’, in this volume. 21. For a sketch of the ‘liberal system’ in Europe see Nolte, Die Krise des liberalen Systems, 19–25; E. Hobsbawm. 1994; Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, Vintage; M. Mazower. 1998. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, Middlesex: Vintage; W.L. Bernecker. 2002. Europa zwischen den Weltkriegen 1914–1945, Stuttgart: UTB, 21–25; contemporary studies of the crisis of liberalism: Ruggiero, Geschichte des Liberalismus, 403ff; Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism, 234ff. 22. See ‘Das “andere” Europa: EFTA und EWR’, chapter III, section 4 of H. Altrichter and W.L. Bernecker. 2004. Geschichte Europas im 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 251–258; G. Craig. 1995. Geschichte Europas 1815–1980: vom Wiener Kongress bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: C.H. Beck; N. Davies. 1997. Europa: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press; H. James. 2004. Geschichte Europas im 20. Jahrhundert: Fall und Aufstieg 1914–2001, Munich: C.H. Beck; T. Judt. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Penguin Press; R. Liedtke. 2010. Geschichte Europas: von 1815 bis zur Gegenwart, Paderborn: Schöningh; W. Loth and W. Wessels (eds). 2001. Theorien europäischer Integration, Opladen: Leske + Budrich Verlag; M. Mai. 2007. Europäische Geschichte, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag; H. Möller. 1998. Europa zwischen den Weltkriegen, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag; T. Schieder. 1979. Handbuch der europäischen Geschichte, Stuttgart: Klett; D. Schwanitz. 2000. Die Geschichte Europas, Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn. 23. W. Burgsdorf. 1999. ‘Chimäre Europa’: antieuropäische Diskurse in Deutschland (1648– 1999), Bochum: Verlag Dr. Dieter Winkler; M. Salewski. 1987. ‘Europa: Idee und Wirklichkeit in der nationalsozialistischen Praxis’, in O. Franz (ed.), Europas Mitte, Göttingen: Muster-Schmidt Verlag; A. Zaslove. 2004. ‘The Dark Side of European Politics: Unmasking the Radical Right’, Journal of European Integration 26(1), 61–81; B. Wassenberg, F. Clavert and P. Hamman. 2010. Contre l’Europe? Anti-européisme, euroscepticisme et alter-européisme dans la construction européenne de 1945 à nos jours, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 24. W. Schmale. 2001. Geschichte Europas, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 116. 25. For the broad discussion on ‘Europeanization’ in social science and the literature on European institutions see e.g. P. Graziano and M. Vink (eds). 2006. Europeanization: New Research Agendas, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; for one of the recent – and still rare – approaches to the history of Europeanization see M. Conway and K. Patel (eds). 2010. Europeanization in the Twentieth Century – Historical Approaches,

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Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; H. Kaelble. 2007. ‘Europäisierung’, in M. Middell (ed.), Dimensionen der Kultur- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 73–89. 26. For a parallel approach to Europe in the history of experience (‘Erfahrungsgeschichte’) – beyond the preferential topics of policy transfer, shared beliefs, institutional and informal norms, discourse and identity – see R. Gerwarth and S. Malinowski. 2010. ‘Europeanization through Violence? War Experiences and the Making of Modern Europe’, in M. Conway and K. Patel (eds), Europeanization in the Twentieth Century – Historical Approaches, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 189–209. 27. H. Duchhardt. 1992. Das Zeitalter des Absolutismus, Munich: Oldenbourg, 47–54; L. Schilling (ed.). 2008. Absolutismus, ein unersetzliches Forchungskonzept? Munich: Oldenbourg; R.G. Asch and H. Duchhardt (eds). 1996. Der Absolutismus – ein Mythos? Cologne: Böhlau. 28. P. Burke. 1980. ‘Did Europe Exist Before 1700?’ History of European Ideas 1(1), 21–29; H. Duchhardt. 1992. ‘Europabewusstsein und politisches Europa – Entwicklung und Ansätze im frühen 18. Jahrhundert am Beispiel des Deutschen Reiches’, in A. Buck, Europagedanke, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 120–131; K. Malettke. 1994. ‘Europabewusstsein und europäische Friedenspläne im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Francia 21(2), 63–93; D. Eggel and B. Wehinger (eds). 2009. Europavorstellungen des 18. Jahrhunderts, Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag. 29. With references: D. Gosewinkel. 2002. ‘Frankreich im Alten Reich: Außenpolitik und Europabewußtsein im Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV’, in R. Wahl and J. Wieland (eds), Das Recht des Menschen in der Welt: Kolloquium aus Anlaß des 70. Geburtstags von Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen und Reden zur Philosophie, Politik und Geistesgeschichte, Band 28), Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 111–133. 30. G. Beyerhaus. 1942/3. Das napoleonische Europa, Breslau: Wilhelm Gottlieb Korn Verlag; H.-O. Sieburg (ed.). 1971. Napoleon und Europa, Cologne: K&W Verlag; B. Savoy. 2010. Napoleon und Europa: Traum und Trauma; Anlässlich der Ausstellung ‘Napoleon und Europa: Traum und Trauma’, Munich: Prestel; S.Woolf. 1991. Napoleon’s Integration of Europe, London: Routledge; P. Dwyer (ed.). 2001. Napoleon and Europe, Harlow: Pearson Longman; F. Kagan. 2006. Napoleon and Europe, Cambridge: Da Capo Press; T. Lentz. 2005. Napoléon et l’Europe – regards sur une politique, Paris: Fayard. 31. E. Fehrenbach. 1974. Traditionale Gesellschaft und revolutionäres Recht, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 45, 49, 150–152; M. George and A. Rudolph (eds). 2008. Napoleons langer Schatten über Europa, Dettelbach: J.H. Röll; W. Schubert and M. Schmoeckel (eds). 2005. 200 Jahre Code Civil: die napoleonische Kodifikation in Deutschland und Europa, Cologne: Böhlau; X. Martin. 2003. Mythologie du Code Napoléon, Bouère: Dominique Martin Morin; H. Hecker. 1980. Staatsangehörigkeit im Code Napoleon als europäisches Recht: die Rezeption des französischen Code Civil von 1804 in Deutschland und Italien in Beziehung zum Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht, Frankfurt am Main: Metzner. 32. Cf. K. Wilson and J. van der Dusen (eds). 1995. The History of the Idea of Europe (vol. 1 of the series, What Is Europe?), London: Routledge, 68; Schmale, Geschichte Europas, 94–95; Savoy, Napoleon und Europa. 33. Cf. H. Berding. 1973. Napoleonische Herrschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik im Königreich Westfalen 1807–1813, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 109, 111. 34. Sieburg, Napoleon und Europa; George and Rudolph, Napoleons langer Schatten.

Introduction21

35. Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration of Europe, 240: the Napoleonic conquest ‘bequeathed a heritage that cut across national frontiers and imposed an unusual, perhaps unprecedented unity on political behaviour within the different European states during the Restoration’; P. Dwyer. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in P. Dwyer (ed.), Napoleon and Europe, Harlow: Pearson Longman, 20f. 36. As for Napoleon’s project to make the Civil Code a liberal codification of European civil law: ‘J’ai semé la liberté à pleines mains partout où j’ai implanté mon Code civil … Pourquoi mon Code civil n’eût-il pas servi de base à un Code européen?’, quoted in J. Carbonnier. 1997. ‘Le Code Civil’, in P. Nora (dir.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 1, Paris: Gallimard (Collection Quarto), 1,337; F. Ranieri. 2005. ‘220 Jahre Code Civil: Die Rolle des französischen Rechts in der Geschichte des europäischen Zivilrechts’, in W. Schubert and M. Schmoeckel (eds), 200 Jahre Code Civil: Die napoleonische Kodifikation in Deutschland und Europa, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 88–105; P. Grossi. 2010. Das Recht in der europäischen Geschichte, Munich: C.H. Beck; Hecker, Staatsangehörigkeit; C. Zacharie-Tchakarian. 2005. ‘Le Code civil, instrument de l’unification de l’Empire?’, in T. Lentz (ed.), Napoléon et l’Europe: Regards sur une politique, Paris: Fayard, 180–200. 37. Woolf, Napoleon’s Integration, 240. 38. B. Stuchtey. 2010. Die europäische Expansion und ihre Feinde: Kolonialismuskritik von 18. bis in das 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: Oldenbourg; J. Osterhammel. 2004. ‘Europamodelle und imperiale Kontexte’, Journal of Modern European History 2, 157– 182; J. Osterhammel. 1995. Kolonialismus: Geschichte – Formen – Folgen, Munich: C.H. Beck; J. Derrick. 2002. ‘The Dissenters: Anti-Colonialism in France, 1900–1940’, in T. Chafer and A. Sackur (eds), Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 53–68; F. Klose. 2007. Menschenrechte im Schatten kolonialer Gewalt: die Dekolonierung in Kenia und Algerien 1945–1962, Munich: Oldenbourg; S.-L. Hoffmann. 2010. Moralpolitik – Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag; H.-J. Lüsebrink (ed.). 2006. Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag; M. Delgado. 1995. ‘Kolonialismusbegründung und Kolonialismuskritik: der Januskopf Europas gegenüber der außereuropäischen Welt’, in M. Delgado and M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds.), Herausforderung Europa: Wege zu einer europäischen Identität, Munich: C.H. Beck. 39. J. Osterhammel. 2009. Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1,174f. 40. W. Reinhard. 1988. Geschichte der europäischen Expansion, four volumes, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 41. Stuchtey, Europäische Expansion, 183–187. 42. Stuchtey, Europäische Expansion, 228. 43. Stuchtey, Europäische Expansion, 388; Gerwarth and Malinowski. 2010, Europeanization, 189–209. 44. W. Lipgens. 1977. Die Anfänge der europäischen Einigungspolitik 1945–1950, I. Teil: 1945–1947, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 44. 45. M. Mazower. 1998. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, Middlesex: Vintage, 143, 151, 184. 46. M. Mazower. 2008. Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, London: Penguin, 569. 47. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 572; L. Herbst. 1995. ‘Die wirtschaftlichen Nachkriegspläne der SS, des Reichswirtschaftsministeriums und der Reichsgruppe Industrie im

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Angesicht der Niederlage (1943–45)’, in M. Dumoulin (ed.), Plans des Temps de Guerre pour l’Europe d’après-guerre 1940–1947, Brussels/Milan/Paris/Baden-Baden: Bruylant, 15–24; L. Herbst. 1982. Der Totale Krieg und die Ordnung der Wirtschaft: die Kriegswirtschaft im Spannungsfeld von Politik, Ideologie und Propaganda, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt; B. Martin. 1976. ‘Friedens-Planungen der multinationalen Großindustrie (1932–1940) als politische Krisenstrategie’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2, 66–88; M. Dumoulin (ed.). 1995. Wartime Plans for Postwar Europe, 1940–1947, Brussels: Bruylant; Gesellschaft für Europäische Wirtschaftsplanung und Großraumwirtschaft e.V. Berlin (ed.). 1941. Das Neue Europa – Beiträge zur Nationalen Wirtschaftsordnung und Großraumwirtschaft, Dresden: Meinold; H. Kahrs, A. Meyer and M.G. Esch (eds). 1992. Modelle für ein deutsches Europa: Ökonomie und Herrschaft im Großwirtschaftsraum (Beiträge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheitsund Sozialpolitik, Band 10), Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag; A. Tooze. 2006. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London: Penguin. 48. Mazower, Dark Continent, 153–157. 49. For the planning of a ‘greater European space’ (europäischer Großraum) see L. Herbst, Der Totale Krieg und die Ordnung der Wirtschaft, 132–144; Herbst, ‘Die wirtschaftlichen Nachkriegspläne der SS’, 15–24. 50. C. Joerges and S. Ghaleigh. 2003. Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of National Socialism and Fascism over Europe and its Legal Traditions, Oxford: Hart Publishing; C. Joerges. 2002. ‘Europe: a “Großraum”? Rupture, Continuity and Reconfiguration in the Legal Conceptualisation of the Integration Project’, EUI Working Paper LAW, 2002/2. Florence: European University Institute. Retrieved from (last accessed August 2013); Kahrs et al., Modelle für ein deutsches Europa; T. Sandkühler (ed.). 2002. Europäische Integration, Munich: Wallstein; T. Sandkühler. 2012., ‘Europa und der Nationalsozialismus: Ideologie, Währungspolitik, Massengewalt’, in D. Gosewinkel, P. Schöttler and I. Schröder (eds). Antiliberales Europa: Zeithistorische Forschungen 9(3), 428–441; from a polemical point of view fuelled by Euroscepticism, but based on considerable sources: J. Laughland. 1997. The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, London: Time Warner Paperbacks. 51. V. Conze. 2005. Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland zwischen Reichstradition und Westorientierung (1920–1970), Munich: Oldenbourg. 52. U. Ruge. 2003. Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’: Kritische Ideengeschichte eines konservativen Konzepts, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag. 53. Ruge, Europa der Regionen, 227–278. 54. M. Fioravanzo. 2010. ‘Die Europakonzeption von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus (1939–1943)’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 58(4), 509–542. 55. J. Elvert. 1999. Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag; W. Neulen. 1987. Europa und das 3. Reich: Einigungsbestrebungen im deutschen Machtbereich 1939–45, Munich: Verlag Universitas. 56. J. Wüstenhagen. 2001. ‘Blick durch den Vorhang’: die SBZ/DDR und die Integration Westeuropas (1946–1972), Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag; Cf. C. Domnitz, J. Faraldo and P. Gulinska-Jurgiel. 2008. Europa im Ostblock: Vorstellungen und Diskurse (1945– 1991), Cologne: Böhlau Verlag. 57. B. Bruneteau. 2003. ‘L’Europe nouvelle’: une illusion des intellectuels de la France de Vichy, Monaco: Rocher; B. Bruneteau. 2006. Histoire de l’ idée européenne au premier XXe siècle à travers les textes, Paris: Armand Colin, 164–187; B. Bruneteau. 2003.

Introduction23

‘Antiliberalismus und totalitäre Versuchung – Am Beispiel von fünf Intellektuellen des “Parti populaire français” in den 1930er Jahren’, in Uwe Backes (ed.), Rechtsextreme Ideologien in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Cologne: Böhlau, 123ff; J. Prévotaux. 2010. Un européisme nazi: le groupe Collaboration et l’ idéologie européenne dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Paris: François-Xavier de Guibert; M.L. Smith and P. Stirk (eds). 1990. Making the New Europe: European Unity and the Second World War, London: Routledge; P. Davies. 2004. Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two, New York: Longman; P. Davies and P. Jackson (eds). 2008. The Far Right in Europe – An Encyclopedia, Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 282–284; Y. Durand. 1990. Le Nouvel Ordre Européen Nazi, La Collaboration dans l’Europe allemande 1938–1945, Paris: Editions Complexe. 58. Elvert, Mitteleuropa!; Fioravanzo, Die Europakonzeptionen, 509–541. 59. A. Lange. 1993. Was die Rechten lesen: fünfzig rechtsextreme Zeitschriften: Ziele, Inhalte, Taktik, Munich: C.H. Beck; J. Algazy. 1989. L’extrême-droite en France (1965 à 1984), Paris: L’Harmattan; J. Algazy. 1984. La tentation néo-fasciste en France de 1944 à 1965, Paris: Fayard; G. Botsch. 1997. Zur Kontinuität nationalsozialistischer Europa-Konzeptionen nach 1945: Studien zum Europabild des frühen Rechtsextremismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin: self-published; A. Pfahl-Traughber. 2000. ‘Zeitschriftenportrait Nation Europa.’ Jahrbuch Extremismus und Demokratie 12, 305– 322; J.-Y. Camus and R. Monzart. 1992. Les Droites Nationales et Radicales en France – Répertoire critique, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, e.g. 246–247, 250–263, 265–270, 246–349. 60. Elements of this narrative (‘an irenic, peaceful continent’, ‘the European model’, Europe’s ‘multicultural future’) are even taken up in Tony Judt’s differentiated account of Europe’s post-war history, cf. T. Judt. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Penguin Press, 5, 7 and 9. 61. F. Blindow. 1999. Carl Schmitts Reichsordnung: Strategie für einen europäischen Großraum, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 62. J. McCormick. 2003. ‘Carl Schmitt’s Europe’, in C. Joerges and S. Ghaleigh, Darker Legacies of Law in Europe, 143–152; Compare: Joerges, Europe: a Großraum? to Loughland, The Tainted Source. 63. Thesis C. Joerges, Europe: a “Großraum”? 187–189; P. Manow. 2001. ‘Ordoliberalismus als ökonomische Ordnungstheologie’, Leviathan 29, 179–198; C. Joerges. 2010. ‘Europa nach dem Ordoliberalismus: eine Philippika’, Kritische Justiz: Vierteljahresschrift für Recht und Politik 43, 394–406; on the links between early neo-liberalism and ordoliberalism in their effect on European integration see Wegmann, Früher Neoliberalismus. 64. Bruneteau, L’Europe nouvelle; Durand, Le Nouvel Ordre Européen Nazi; on cooperation between the ministers Albert Speer and Jean Bichelonne, see O. Dard and D. Gosewinkel. 2007. ‘Planung, Technokratie und Rationalisierung in Deutschland und Frankreich während der Weltkriegszeit’, in M. Aust and D. Schönpflug (eds), Vom Gegner lernen: Feindschaften und Kulturtransfers im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag, 230. 65. With references M. Wegmann. 2009. ‘Das neoliberale Europakonzept’, in J. Elvert and J. Nielsen-Sikora (eds), Leitbild Europa? Europabilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 256–280. 66. More detail in D. Gosewinkel. 2008. ‘Zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie: Wirtschaftliches Planungsdenken in Deutschland und Frankreich: Vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Mitte der 1970er Jahre’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34, 327–359;

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G. Thiemeyer. 2009. ‘“Planification” und “Colbertisme” als Leitbilder französischer Europapolitik von 1950 bis heute’, in J. Elvert and J. Nielsen-Sikora (eds), Leitbild Europa? Europabilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 232–243. 67. Domnitz et al. Europa im Ostblock; S. Klunkert, B. Lippert and H. Schneider (eds). 1996. Europabilder in Mittel- und Osteuropa: Neue Herausforderungen für die politische Bildung, Bonn: Europa-Union-Verlag; C. Kraft and K. Steffen (eds). 2007. Europas Platz in Polen: Polnische Europa-Konzeptionen vom Mittelalter bis zum EU-Beitritt, Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag; B. Strath (ed.). 2004. Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, Brussels: Peter Lang Verlag; Wüstenhagen, Blick durch den Vorhang; G. Thum. 2004. ‘“Europa” im Ostblock: Weiße Flecken in der Geschichte der europäischen Integration’, Zeithistorische Forschungen 1, 379–395. 68. Cf. Domnitz et al. Europa im Ostblock. 69. Algazy, L’extrême-droite en France (1965 à 1984); Algazy, La tentation néo-fasciste en France de 1944 à 1965; P. Bathke. 2006. Neoliberalismus und Rechtsextremismus in Europa: Zusammenhänge – Widersprüche – Gegenstrategien, Berlin: Dietz; A. Osterhoff. 1997. Die Euro-Rechte: zur Bedeutung des Europaparlaments bei der Vernetzung der extremen Rechten, Münster: Unrast; C. Busch. 2007. ‘Rechte Internationale: die neue IST-Fraktion im Europaparlament’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 52, 320–328; C. Zirnstein. 2005. Die dunkle Seite Europas: Rechtsextreme auf dem Weg zum politischen Akteur? Netzwerkbildung der Rechten in der Europäischen Union, Marburg: Tectum Verlag; G. Harris. 1990. The Dark Side of Europe – The Extreme Right Today, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 26–30; A. Zirnell. 2007. Europa-Konzeptionen der Neuen Rechten: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Frankreichs, Italiens und Belgiens, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 466–473; J.G. Shields. 2007. The Extreme Right in France – From Pétain to Le Pen, New York: Routledge.

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Introduction27

Das Recht der Menschen in der Welt: Kolloquium aus Anlaß des 70. Geburtstags von Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen und Reden zur Philosophie, Politik und Geistesgeschichte, Band 28), Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 111–133. ———. 2008. ‘Zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie: Wirtschaftliches Planungsdenken in Deutschland und Frankreich: Vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Mitte der 1970er Jahre’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34, 327–359. Graziano, P. and M. Vink (eds). 2006. Europeanization: New Research Agendas, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Grossi, P. 2010. Das Recht in der europäischen Geschichte, Munich: C.H. Beck. Gruner, R. 2012. Der Europagedanke westeuropäischer faschistischer Bewegungen 1940–1945, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag. Gutting, G. 1999. Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, G. 1990. The Dark Side of Europe – The Extreme Right Today, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hecker, H. 1980. Staatsangehörigkeit im Code Napoleon als europäisches Recht: die Rezeption des französischen Code Civil von 1804 in Deutschland und Italien in Beziehung zum Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht, Frankfurt am Main: Metzner. Herbst, L. 1982. Der Totale Krieg und die Ordnung der Wirtschaft: die Kriegswirtschaft im Spannungsfeld von Politik, Ideologie und Propaganda, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt. ———. 1995. ‘Die wirtschaftlichen Nachkriegspläne der SS, des Reichswirtschaftsministeriums und der Reichsgruppe Industrie im Angesicht der Niederlage (1943–45)’, in M. Dumoulin (ed.), Plans des Temps de Guerre pour l’Europe d’après-guerre 1940–1947, Brussels/Milan/Paris/Baden-Baden: Bruylant, 15–24. Hobsbawm, E. 1994. The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914– 1991, London: Michael Joseph. Hoffmann, S.-L. 2010. Moralpolitik – Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Howe, A. and S. Morgan (eds). 2006. Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Huguenin, F. 2006. Le conservatisme impossible – libéralisme et réaction en France depuis 1789, Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde. James, H. 2004. Geschichte Europas im 20. Jahrhundert: Fall und Aufstieg 1914– 2001, Munich: C.H. Beck. Joerges, C. 2002. ‘Europe: a “Großraum”? Rupture, Continuity and Reconfiguration in the Legal Conceptualisation of the Integration Project’, EUI Working Paper LAW No. 2002/2, Florence: European University Institute. Retrieved from (last accessed August 2013). ———. 2010. ‘Europa nach dem Ordoliberalismus: eine Philippika’, Kritische Justiz: Vierteljahresschrift für Recht und Politik 43, 394–406.

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Joerges, C. and S. Ghaleigh. 2003. Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of National Socialism and Fascism over Europe and its Legal Traditions, Oxford: Hart Publishing. Judt, T. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Penguin Press. Kaelble, H. 2007. ‘Europäisierung’, in M. Middell (ed.), Dimensionen der Kulturund Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 73–89. Kagan, F. 2006. Napoleon and Europe, Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Kahrs, H., A. Meyer and M.G. Esch (eds). 1992. Modelle für ein deutsches Europa: Ökonomie und Herrschaft im Großwirtschaftsraum (Beiträge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits–und Sozialpolitik, Band 10), Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag. Klose, F. 2007. Menschenrechte im Schatten kolonialer Gewalt: die Dekolonialisierung in Kenia und Algerien 1945–1962, Munich: Oldenbourg. Knipping, F. 2004. Rom, 25. März 1957, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Klunkert, S., B. Lippert and H. Schneider (eds). 1996. Europabilder in Mittelund Osteuropa: Neue Herausforderungen für die politische Bildung, Bonn: Europa-Union-Verlag. Kondylis, P. 2010. Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensform: Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne, Berlin: Oldenburg Akademie Verlag. Kraft, C. and K. Steffen (eds). 2007. Europas Platz in Polen: Polnische Europa-Konzeptionen vom Mittelalter bis zum EU-Beitritt, Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag. Lange, A. 1993. Was die Rechten lesen: fünfzig rechtsextreme Zeitschriften: Ziele, Inhalte, Taktik, Munich: C.H. Beck. Laski, H. 1936. The Rise of European Liberalism, London: George Allen & Unwin. Laughland, J. 1997. The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, London: Time Warner Paperbacks. Lentz, T. 2005. Napoléon et l’Europe – regards sur une politique, Paris: Fayard. Leonhard, J. 2002. Liberalismus: Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters, Göttingen: Oldenbourg. ———. 2003. ‘Semantische Deplazierung und Entwertung: Deutsche Deutungen von liberal und Liberalismus nach 1850 im europäischen Vergleich’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29(1), 5–39. Liebold, S. 2012. Kollaboration des Geistes. Deutsche und französische Rechtsintellektuelle 1933–1940. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Liedtke, R. 2010. Geschichte Europas: von 1815 bis zur Gegenwart, Paderborn: Schöningh. Lipgens, W. (ed.). 1968. Europa-Föderationspläne der Widerstandsbewegungen 1940–1945: Eine Dokumentation, Munich: Oldenbourg. ———. 1977. Die Anfänge der europäischen Einigungspolitik 1945–1950, I. Teil: 1945–1947, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

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Lipgens, W. and W. Loth (eds). 1985. Documents on the History of European Integration. Vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union 1939–1945, Berlin: De Gruyter. Loth, W. (ed.). 2002. Entwürfe einer europäischen Verfassung, Bonn: Europa-Union-Verlag. Loth, W. and W. Wessels (eds). 2001. Theorien europäischer Integration, Opladen: Leske + Budrich Verlag. Lüsebrink. H.-J. (ed.). 2006. Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Mai, M. 2007. Europäische Geschichte, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Malettke, K. 1994. ‘Europabewusstsein und europäische Friedenspläne im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Francia 21(2), 63–93. Manow, P. 2001. ‘Ordoliberalismus als ökonomische Ordnungstheologie’, Leviathan 29, 179–198. Martin, B. 1976. ‘Friedens-Planungen der multinationalen Großindustrie (1932–1940) als politische Krisenstrategie’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2, 66–88. Martin, X. 2003. Mythologie du Code Napoléon, Bouère: Dominique Martin Morin. Mazower, M. 1998. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, Middlesex: Vintage. ———. 2008. Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, London: Penguin. McCormick, J. ‘Carl Schmitt’s Europe’, in C. Joerges and S. Ghaleigh, Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of National Socialism and Fascism over Europe and its Legal Traditions, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003, 143–152. Möller, H. 1998. Europa zwischen den Weltkriegen, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag. Mouton, M.-R. 1995. La société des nations et les intérêts de la France: 1920– 1924, Berlin: Peter Lang. Nemo, P. and J. Petitot. 2006. Histoire du libéralisme en Europe, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Neulen, W. 1987. Europa und das 3. Reich: Einigungsbestrebungen im deutschen Machtbereich 1939–45, Munich: Verlag Universitas. Nolte, E. 1968. Die Krise des liberalen Systems und die faschistischen Bewegungen, Munich: Piper. Osterhammel, J. 1995. Kolonialismus: Geschichte – Formen – Folgen, Munich: C.H. Beck. ———. 2004. ‘Europamodelle und imperiale Kontexte’, Journal of Modern European History 2, 157–182. ———. 2009. Die Verwandlung der Welt, Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: C.H. Beck. Osterhoff, A. 1997. Die Euro-Rechte: zur Bedeutung des Europaparlaments bei der Vernetzung der extremen Rechten, Münster: Unrast.

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Pernhorst, C. 2008. Das paneuropäische Verfassungsmodell des Grafen Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Pfahl–Traughber, A. 2000. ‘Zeitschriftenportrait Nation Europa’, Jahrbuch Extremismus und Demokratie 12, 305–322. Prévotaux, J. 2010. Un européisme nazi: le groupe Collaboration et l’idéologie européenne dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Paris: François-Xavier de Guibert. Ranieri, F. 2005. ‘220 Jahre Code Civil: Die Rolle des französischen Rechts in der Geschichte des europäischen Zivilrechts’, in W. Schubert and M. Schmoeckel (eds), 200 Jahre Code Civil: Die napoleonische Kodifikation in Deutschland und Europa, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 85–125. Reinhard, W. 1988. Geschichte der europäischen Expansion, four volumes, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Rosanvallon, P. 1989. Le libéralisme économique: histoire de l’idée de marché, Paris: Points Politique. Ruge, U. 2003. Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’: Kritische Ideengeschichte eines konservativen Konzepts, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag. de Ruggiero, G. 1930. Geschichte des Liberalismus in Europa, Munich: Drei Masken Verlag. Saint-Gille, A.-M. 2003. La ‘Paneurope’ – un débat d’idées dans l’entre-deux-guerres. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Salewski, M. 1987. ‘Europa: Idee und Wirklichkeit in der nationalsozialistischen Praxis’, in O. Franz (ed.), Europas Mitte, Göttingen, Zürich: MusterSchmidt Verlag, 85–106. Sandkühler, T. (ed.) 2002. Europäische Integration, Munich: Wallstein. ———. 2012, ‘Europa und der Nationalsozialismus: Ideologie, Währungspolitik, Massengewalt’, in D. Gosewinkel, P. Schöttler, I. Schröder (eds), Antiliberales Europa: Zeithistorische Forschungen 9(3), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 428–441. Savoy, B. 2010. Napoleon und Europa: Traum und Trauma; Anlässlich der Ausstellung ‘Napoleon und Europa: Traum und Trauma’, Munich: Prestel. Schieder, T. 1979. Handbuch der europäischen Geschichte, Stuttgart: Klett. Schilling, L. (ed.). 2008. Absolutismus, ein unersetzliches Forschungskonzept? Munich: Oldenbourg. Schmale, W. 2001. Geschichte Europas, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau. Schubert, W. and M. Schmoeckel (eds). 2005. 200 Jahre Code Civil: die napoleonische Kodifikation in Deutschland und Europa, Cologne: Böhlau. Schwanitz, D. 2000. Die Geschichte Europas, Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn. Shields, J.G. 2007. The Extreme Right in France – From Pétain to Le Pen, New York: Routledge. Sieburg, H.-O. (ed.). 1971. Napoleon und Europa, Cologne: K&W Verlag. Smith, M.L. and P. Stirk (eds). 1990. Making the New Europe: European Unity and the Second World War, London: Routledge.

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Sontheimer, K. 1957. ‘Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 5(1), 42–62. Steinmetz, W. 2008. ‘Vierzig Jahre Begriffsgeschichte – The State of the Art’, in H. Kämper and L.M. Eichinger (eds), Sprache – Kognition – Kultur, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 174–197. Strath, B. (ed.). 2004. Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, Brussels: Peter Lang Verlag. Stuchtey, B. 2010. Die europäische Expansion und ihre Feinde: Kolonialismuskritik von 18. bis in das 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: Oldenbourg. Thiemeyer, G. ‘“Planification” und “Colbertisme” als Leitbilder französischer Europapolitik von 1950 bis heute’, in J. Elvert and J. Nielsen-Sikora (eds), Leitbild Europa? Europabilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2009, 232–243. Thum, G. 2004. ‘“Europa” im Ostblock: Weiße Flecken in der Geschichte der europäischen Integration’, Zeithistorische Forschungen 1, 379–395. Tooze, A. 2006. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London: Penguin. Vierhaus, R. 1982. ‘Liberalismus’, in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland Band 3 (H–Me), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 741–785. Walther, R. 1982. ‘Exkurs: Wirtschaftlicher Liberalismus’, in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland Band 3 (H–Me), Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 787–815. Wassenberg, B., F. Clavert and P. Hamman. 2010. Contre l’Europe? Anti-européisme, euroscepticisme et alter-européisme dans la construction européenne de 1945 à nos jours, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Wegmann, M. 2002. Früher Neoliberalismus und europäische Integration: Interdependenz der nationalen, supranationalen und internationalen Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1932–1965), Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag. ———. 2009. ‘Das neoliberale Europakonzept’, in J. Elvert and J. Nielsen-Sikora (eds), Leitbild Europa? Europabilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 256–280. Wilson, K. and J. van der Dusen (eds). 1995. The History of the Idea of Europe (vol. 1 of the series, What Is Europe?), London: Routledge. Winkler, H.A. 1979. Liberalismus und Antiliberalismus: Studien zur politischen Sozialgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Woolf, S. 1991. Napoleon’s Integration of Europe, London: Routledge. Wüstenhagen, J. 2001. ‘Blick durch den Vorhang’: die SBZ/DDR und die Integration Westeuropas (1946–1972), Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag. Zacharie-Tchakarian, C. 2005. ‘Le Code civil, instrument de l’unification de l’Empire?’, in T. Lentz (ed.), Napoléon et l’Europe: Regards sur une politique, Paris: Fayard, 180–200.

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1 The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism Michael Freeden

There are many alternative versions of European integration that do not deserve the adjective ‘liberal’ (or possibly even the descriptor ‘integration’). Liberals have not been the only ones to support some version of a common Europe, a point that Dieter Gosewinkel has demonstrated in this book not only with impressive and illuminating historical breadth, but with ethical fervour. To be anti-liberal is not necessarily to be anti-European. In emphasizing the input of political systems outside the liberal family into the ideas and practices of European integration, the intellectual challenge becomes, as he sees it, to examine side-by-side some of the pre-1945 non-liberal antecedents of integration against what is now held to be a post-1945 liberal Europe, and to ascertain whether any elements of the former have shaped the latter. That is a powerful and original argument with which I have no quarrel. But the assumption of anti-liberalism is often made against a particular, and widely-held, conception of what European liberalism is. The contention in the following pages is that liberalism itself may be more elusive and more diverse than is commonly believed to be the case. True, many European institutional practices and ideological positions now exhibit features that are associated with liberalism. But the mere presence of those features may yet be insufficient for them to merit the full claim to be members of the liberal family. Like any ideology, liberalism requires a critical mass of components before it merits the name, and it is measured against a full potential complement of what liberalism is held to contain. Another kind of critique is that the liberal tradition itself can breed antiliberal sentiments and practices. Thus, Fabian Klose shows in his chapter how Europeans behaved badly in their role as colonizers, employing many violent and oppressive practices, which nevertheless ostensibly emanated from liberal regimes.1 Hence he contends that what was experienced from the perspective of

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such colonies was far from liberal, and it was the colonies instead that developed reactive liberal positions, albeit themselves fed by ideas derived from European liberalisms. We are therefore confronted with crucial questions about the viability of liberalism and about its supposed monopoly of the West European ideological spectrum. It transpires that arguments about the nature and impact of European liberalism are underpinned by sets of assumptions that need to be examined carefully. The first set is: are we talking about anti-liberalism in Europe, illiberalism in Europe, or simply about non-liberal governments, and possibly states, in Europe? The second set is: which variant of liberalism does an ‘anti-liberal’ interpretation have in mind? Of what is anti-liberalism the opposite? Do actual liberalisms conform to any of the ideals or fantasies they generate? What would a liberal state consist of? The third set is: should we be surprised that integration is not an exclusive liberal project? Is the current conception of European integration – and are the post-1945 European states – sufficiently liberal to deserve that accolade? And is state control a symptom of non-liberalism? The fourth set is: are we referring to anti-liberal liberalism (i.e. to established anti-liberal notions within the family of liberalisms), or to an internal failure of liberalism (i.e. the contingent violation of liberal principles by liberals), that is, to a liberal deficit? It might help in addressing the first set of questions to distinguish between (a) anti-liberalism as an assault on liberal principles and practices by non-liberal systems, (b) the departure of what might generally speaking be a liberal polity from some generally acknowledged liberal ideas and practices – that is to say, a liberalism with illiberal features, or (c) the existence of societies (and/or governments) that do not claim from the outset to be liberal, or are not recognizably liberal, and therefore cannot be accused of failing to do what they have no intention of, or remit for, doing. They do not go out of their way to be militantly ‘anti-liberal’; rather, they are non-liberal in the sense that conservative or socialist polities are non-liberal. Those are not just rhetorical devices for toning down anti-liberalism but substantive differences in ideological structure and content. The second set of questions goes right to the heart of European liberalism: against which liberalism do we posit an anti-liberal stance? The question of European common values grounded in liberal ideas is a complex issue. From many perspectives Europe appears indeed to possess a range of common values, not all of which are ethical, political or economic, but may be aesthetic, literary or artistic as well. Perhaps, though, some of those values are not common, but overlapping. That certainly applies to liberalism itself. The commonality of liberalism in Europe has often taken the form of an ideological desideratum rather than an historical or conceptual fact, and that has an impact on visions of European integration. Within the German liberal tradition it has centrally focused on constitutionalism and free markets, however much the latter are constrained in the name of fair individual opportunities.2 Those two domains are quite properly associated with human rights for, as Gosewinkel notes, the European projects ‘are defined politically by ensuring the freedom of the individual and by the development

The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism35

of his or her individual diversity and abilities – guaranteed and enforced by the protection of individual rights, particularly civil and political rights’.3 But it may well be that the European projects employ too thin a version of liberalism. In identifying the respect for human rights we get close to the liberal core, but we need to unpack the term. Human rights offer a broad umbrella in which there is some tension between civil (including economic), political and social rights. Even within each of those three categories there is still much room for leeway. An emphasis on the right to private property and non-intervention in the private sphere may lead to abuses of other rights, such as the right to well-being or to the protection of vulnerable people in the family domain, and encroach on individual development. Here there is the possibility of a zero-sum relationship between diverse areas of liberal practice. After all, even within a ‘perfect’ liberal state not all human rights can be pursued simultaneously when, say, the freedom of religious practice clashes with the equal treatment of citizens, especially women. Europe has already experienced those points of tension in many concrete instances in recent years. Diachronically, the liberal understanding of social rights has been changing continuously as the bases of human flourishing are understood to have become more intricate, comprising entitlements not only on the basis of merit, or of economic need, but of emotional and existential fragility. In particular the liberalism at the heart of welfare state thinking – liberalism’s finest domestic achievement in the twentieth century, emerging to a considerable extent from the British liberal tradition – has rejected many of the values of a market society.4 That development is not always grasped by German and French perspectives, which have habitually located liberalism at the centreright and have continued to characterize it as typified by its nineteenth-century exemplars. Moreover, liberalism has now incorporated a relatively new respect for cultural group rights, including some recognition accorded to ethnicity, which may conflict with individual rights. For many liberals, extensive rather than minimal welfare rights are a necessary element of the twentieth century liberal tradition, while economic rights are insufficient components of a full liberalism. On those grounds, the liberalism of European states is at the very least open to scrutiny, even in their domestic policies. And if the term ‘liberalism’ can pertain to a range of components that vary from one liberalism to another, there must be many varieties of anti-liberalism as well. Which liberal components, then, are sufficient in order to declare a particular state liberal? Some institutionalists and historians rest content with declaring that constitutionalism and respect for the rule of law, i.e. the Rechtsstaat, are what make states liberal. That is invariably a necessary condition, but it is certainly not a sufficient one. Nineteenth-century German political practice, for instance, displayed authoritarian forms of the Rechtsstaat that preceded its identification with liberal ideologies. The rule of law does not necessarily entail liberal legislation. Indeed, as Max Weber demonstrated, the rule of law has a non-liberal, bureaucratic pedigree.5

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The role of the state in liberal thinking is hence an ambiguous one. Most liberal continental approaches to the state were coloured by their diverse and often negative experiences of an external state, tyrannical or weak in turn. In French liberal thought, for example, intermediate institutions played a significant role in mitigating the direct impact of the state on its members. More generally, socialist and Marxist theory presented the state as a source of oppressive power. Nonetheless, there was a perceived need for strong state support for parliamentarianism, as democratic practices became constitutionally enshrined. But that was not matched by an equally strong advocacy of state intervention in securing the conditions for human flourishing when individuals were unable to secure them by their own efforts. While central to the British liberal tradition, those features were instead linked on the continent to the social democratic tradition whose liberal components, although acknowledged by its proponents, were not similarly identified in the arena of party-political competition. Over a century ago Eduard Bernstein realized that crucial elements of socialism and social democracy evolved out of liberal ideas,6 but that was quickly forgotten in the upheavals of the interwar years, and again in the wholly inaccurate association of the post Second World War Eastern European regimes with socialism. Some sociologically minded historians regard liberalism as the representation of bourgeois values, but that reduces it to a particular socio-economic culture of respectability earned through entrepreneurship and success in markets. Those economic freedoms may be part of the story, but they do not enlighten us on how liberals ought to behave outside the spheres of finance and materiallyoriented propriety. Indeed, economic liberalization can take place without any major bearing on whether a society is deemed a liberal one – think of China today. What makes a market truly liberal, even in the entrepreneurial and innovative sense, rather than just an instrumental means of profit-making, is a very important issue and one on which many variants of European liberalism display confusion. Continental liberalisms have vociferously propounded individual freedom and the development of individual diversity. Yet it is also emphatically contended, in Gosewinkel’s words, that the ‘ideas and institutions of economic freedom and a market economy fuelled the process of European integration from the late 1950s’. Was that a liberal policy even when the main governments moving in that direction were conservative or socialist ones? Is support for a market economy enough to change ideologies and policies from conservative or socialist to liberal? As is clearly to be seen in the case of British Thatcherism, while liberalism has retreated from extreme or even standard positions of endorsing the power of markets, those ideas have been taken over by conservative ideologies without in any way rendering their overall Weltanschauung less conservative. Indeed, if economic liberalism alone is at the core of liberalism, then Keynesianism (devised by an economist who defined himself as a liberal) would have to be located at the margins of the liberal domain. Or to take another example: there has been considerable overlap and mutual influence between Scandinavian social democracy and British liberalism: Swedish welfare theorists,

The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism37

for instance, recognized the influence of the British social liberal L.T. Hobhouse.7 Yet the argumentative thrust of European socialism has been notably anti-liberal on the issue of opposing or criticizing free markets – if that indeed is what liberalism stands for – without being anti-constitutional or anti-human rights. Ideologies, far from being constant or unitary, merit a detailed comprehension of their internal components. They regularly change the internal ordering and weight of their core ideas over time and across space. Even democratic practices, as we well know, do not ensure liberal policies. Many states within the U.S.A. – considered a liberal democracy – practise the death penalty, which has been condemned as illiberal and outlawed in recent European practice. Ideologies are complex amalgams, and never in a mutually exclusive relationship. Both liberalism and the various anti-liberalisms external to it are fluid and flexible constructs, and their micro-analysis reveals insurmountable problem areas, often in the face of intractable issues that have no solution within a liberal matrix. Frequently, then, former liberal principles themselves often lose at least some of their liberal cachet and have to be implemented with care, moderation and heavy qualifications. The centrality of the ownership of property to human well-being has been demoted, though not eliminated, in liberal discourse. We need therefore to add other ingredients to the liberal cocktail. The question is whether there are further essential conceptual components than just those of constitutionalism and free trade that constitute the minimum kit of liberalism. That may in the end be a matter for different local liberalisms to decide in diverse fashion; however, a local German, French or Greek understanding of liberalism is not indisputably the standard by which an integrated European liberalism should be measured, and even the liberal ideas embodied in current European formal documentation may themselves be weaker versions of liberalism than is generally assumed. At any rate, we are confronted with a tension between a macro-liberal perspective that assumes in some fundamental sense that all constitutional, rights-respecting regimes are ipso facto liberal, and a micro-liberalism that employs stricter criteria for qualifying as a liberal political entity. Recent research on ideologies tends to go for the latter. I am therefore not convinced that we can talk of a liberal tradition in the singular. Liberalism, as historical evidence demonstrates, is a collection of liberalisms, each of which has different internal ideational and conceptual arrangements.8 Expanding on this idea, European liberalism has never been one thing. European liberalisms have prioritized either a horizontal or a vertical axis. The one stresses private spaces, separate domains, constitutional constraints and checks, and the conditions for competitive economic activity – Dutch liberalism is a case in point.9 The other stresses individual growth, progress and diversity, originality and the nourishment of the human potential – leading off into welfare state thinking.10 The two have very different ideological neighbours with which they intermix. The first is compatible with some forms of neo-liberalism and has frequently been pulled in that direction; the second addresses the concerns of social democracy. Each would regard a sole concentration on the other

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not as anti-liberalism, but as a serious liberal deficit. In effect, they overlap but create significantly different internal weightings. Hence the suggestion that there is a semantic polarity between liberalism and some of the listed features of anti-liberalism is overstated. For example, liberals are not alien to the idea that there are collective experiences beyond the separate wills of individuals – witness the importance of some varieties of nationalism in liberal debate in the German, Italian and British liberal traditions, in which the notion of a cultural and social nationalism acted as a precursor for more inclusive ideas of group solidarity. Collective experiences need not be those of oppression, as is evident from social-democratic thinking as well. The left liberalism at the heart of the twentieth-century welfare state was often formulated in terms of a social interdependence that bordered on a palpable idea of a community of individuals, acting as a joint-interest grouping at many levels and led by an enabling state.11 So which European states are, or have been, liberal and in which sense? Here we need to think carefully. Was pre-Vichy France a liberal state, in comparison with which we are entitled to call the Vichy period anti-liberal? Or is being anti-liberal in contradistinction to some abstract ideal-type liberalism that never existed? France pre-Vichy did not present itself as a liberal regime, so we cannot complain that our ethical and political expectations have been disappointed on the liberal dimension. If indeed 1930s France was liberal (and very few French historians would argue that conclusively) then the failure lies in the prevention of the rise of Vichy, not in what happened once Vichy came into being. If we talk rather of the failure of liberal states, however, it is empirically indisputable that any given liberalism will fall short of its optimal expression. So the question is not, say, is Germany now a liberal state, but which elements of German society and politics are liberal and which are not? Anti-liberalism could then be assessed correspondingly as a variable cluster of counter-positions. What about the third set of questions, whether European integration is a project not exclusive to liberalism, and perhaps insufficiently liberal even now? Gosewinkel undoubtedly stands on firm ground in his extension of the vision of a common Europe beyond liberal views and crucially, in his significant argument that indirect inspiration has been derived from some of those non-liberal positions for a united Europe. Saint-Simon – one of the early propounders of the European idea – was plainly not a liberal. However, his version of European integration was based on a constitution and a common representative parliament, inspired both by English and French practice.12 Importantly, part of Saint-Simon’s enlightenment-induced appeal to human rationality and his dedication to the application of science were shared with liberals, just as other arguments developed by him were proto-socialist. But those features were not conjoined with other liberal essentials. We are therefore warranted the judgment that such theories did not decisively pass the threshold of entitlement to membership of the liberal family.

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There is another relevant argument, namely, that many of the non-liberal European unification or integration projects were hegemonic. That is a point well taken, but the question of hegemony is a tricky one. Attempts to impose hegemonic models of Europeanization are presented as running counter to the (liberal) pluralism that scholars such as Gosewinkel regard as an important part of recent understandings of European integration. Matters, however, are not quite as black and white on two grounds. Liberalism too displays a hegemony of sorts in a rather different guise. There is after all a strong nonpluralist strand in liberalism itself – its universalist aspirations and its desire to recognize human rationality and equal individual worth irrespective of social or geographical unit, of spatiality or temporality. Liberalism’s universalism long preceded its pluralism, and a tendency to homogeneity and unity at that level is part of the liberal ideational fabric. Is it not the case that the idea of liberal universalism, more than liberal diversity, underpins the notion of an integrated Europe? Obviously, integrative tendencies have also taken odious anti-liberal forms, but some level of uniformity of treatment is at the liberal core, as is the case with human rights, whereas its more recent – and on its own account, problematic – pluralism is a relatively new development. Second, like any ideology, liberals insist on their version being the ‘correct’ one. They have been predictably intolerant of breaches of their avowal of homogeneous universalism and have frequently resisted and punished its infringers. They are understandably intolerant of breaches of human rights. The cultural pluralism of liberalism is constrained by its understandably censorious and often defiant attitude towards social and cultural practices that deviate from its liberal principles. That is without exception a feature of all ideologies as they compete over the predominance of their beliefs. In fact, if compulsion – for example – is seen as an anti-liberal feature, then the First World War might have been lost by the U.K. without the belated introduction of compulsory conscription under a liberal government; and the liberal welfare state could not have come into existence, based as it was on compulsory contributions. In particular the presence of a proclivity for state intervention in some areas is no distinguishing feature between liberal and non-liberal ideologies. What does distinguish them in that dimension is the way the state is made accountable and the ethical ends to which such intervention is put. It is important to differentiate between the kind of intervention that erodes the liberties of civil society and that which ensures that planning will contribute to both individual and social development. Only the former is illiberal, but recent interpretations of liberalism, emanating from the Eastern and Central European members of the European Union and nourished by a more direct and continuous experience of various tyrannies than Northern Europe has been subject to, have elided the two kinds of intervention.13 In sum, liberalism is no stranger to a ‘hegemonic’ insistence on its superiority, to reliance on the state, and to an insistence on non-negotiable principles that have to be imposed by the edicts of law and morality.

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The fourth set of questions relates to the distinction that needs to be made between anti-liberalism on the one hand as an expression of dissent from, apathy towards, or conflict with, liberal policies, principles and ideologies, and on the other hand the failure of liberal societies and governments (if indeed they were liberal) to discharge their commitment to their own fundamental beliefs and guidelines, and to put them into practice. The first identifies beliefs and views that emanate from alternative ideological families competing with liberalism over the control of public policy. The second emanates, under certain historical and ideological circumstances, from the liberal core itself. In the latter case, it has not been uncommon for many internal manifestations of liberalism to be in practice elitist and paternalist, domestically and even more so internationally. But as Klose has pointed out, the matter is more serious. It revolves around the historical unease liberals have exhibited concerning the exercise of power. The use of excessive force in colonial situations may have always been an ethical aberration, but it was not always a legal or constitutional violation. The standards and expectations liberals have come to hold in the twenty-first century are far more exacting than those employed even fifty years ago, let alone in the nineteenth century. So whereas on the domestic front many scholars perceive liberalism to be characterized by what are in effect its nineteenth-century principles, on the international front the converse occasionally occurs: the principled nineteenth-century liberal attraction to empire is overlooked and decontextualized. It is well known that what is now termed colonialism was thought by many enlightened liberals, including for instance J.S. Mill, to be part of liberalism’s civilizing mission. We need to be careful about anachronism. Colonial rule was not ipso facto understood to be anti-liberal. If, however, one focuses on the issues of mid-twentieth-century colonialism, those are different again. Indeed, to talk of a ‘liberal post-war order’ is an acceptance of the self-description by post-war politicians and statesmen, embodied in the Atlantic Charter. The question is rather whether the Atlantic Charter was from the outset in line with actual Western thinking in the international arena, or whether the work the charter performed was of a very different ideological nature. It certainly was a limited liberalism focusing on territorial integrity, national self-determination, free trade and markets, peace and the disarming of aggressive states, but not on the kind of cultural equality that even the most enlightened mid-century liberals could not conceptualize at the time, or even on individual rights.14 What international relations scholars call liberal is not equivalent to what students of liberal ideology now seek to recognize (the recent term ‘muscular liberalism’ advocated by American neo-conservatives is a case in point). In mirror-image form, the counter-claims of the colonies against the imperial powers were mainly restricted to self-determination – once again an insufficient ingredient in the rich liberal basket, indeed, one that could equally incorporate a non-liberal form of nationalism. The core problem here, in more emphatic guise than the domestic one, is that there are many cases in which a state may have liberal constitutional features, but

The Elusiveness of European (Anti-)liberalism41

its governments are not liberal. During the British war against the Mau Mau and the state of emergency in Kenya from 1952 to 1959, and during the struggle for Cypriot independence, a conservative government was in power in the U.K. The mid-twentieth-century insurrections in Algeria were partially quelled by French governments that were demonstrably non-liberal in their composition and views. In which sense can one describe governmental policies as a failure of liberalism if those governments – although operating within quasi-liberal states that subscribe to constitutionalism and the rule of law – are conservative, populist or managerial and frequently denounce liberal ideas? Promises of self-determination are at best democratic, not unequivocally liberal, while the traditional French pursuit of liberty had mostly occurred in contexts more republican than liberal. Atlantic Charters are not only insufficiently liberal on their own, but in addition do not represent the actual, concrete thinking of non-liberal European governments. We are once again confronted with a question that does not lend itself to easy answers: to what extent are the institutional and political practices prevalent particularly in Western European states necessarily liberal in the first place, and to what extent are they lapses from liberalism? The dual danger is on the one hand to expect liberalism where it is not the dominant feature of a polity; and on the other hand to expect of liberalism more than it has ever delivered or can deliver. I am by no means trying to defend policies and actions that were plainly abuses of power and oppressive. In fact, I am not defending anything, except the complexity of liberalism itself and the attributes required for membership of the liberal club. But the question, ‘which forms of power are legitimate within a liberal framework?’ is further complicated by the fact that the German word Gewalt covers both force and violence, which in many other European languages are distinct concepts. While there is no scope within liberalism for legitimate violence, which from a liberal viewpoint is always a contradiction in terms, being arbitrary, unaccountable and irrational, there is scope for legitimate force. Within the liberal lexicon there is something called justifiable force; there is nothing called justifiable violence. Of course, grey areas between force and violence exist, when for instance an insurrection is quelled by a recognized and legitimate authority, during which protesters are severely injured or even killed, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between specific slippages from high-minded liberalism and fundamentally illiberal practices. Violence may indeed be antiliberal, but force and imposition are inevitable in order to promote some liberal ends. Force is not always avoided by soi-disant liberals, and the employment of force is not always wrong per se; rather, it is when the use of force dehumanizes, or is no longer exercised with rational and restrained control, that it mutates into violence. But there is also the converse issue of violence not by the state but against the state, be that even the state-cum-colonizer. Standard liberal civil disobedience theories counsel retreat from the use of violence against authorities when other means still beckon.15 So when third world liberation movements were prepared to assert human rights violently, we have an instance of illiberal means, in the name of some liberal values (but by no means all the crucial ones),

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employed against a non-liberal (not an anti-liberal) polity. Moreover, not all anti-colonial and anti-liberal movements were aligning themselves against the same thing; among its opponents – both internal and external to an assumedly liberal state – liberalism has often been the object of fantastic invention or exaggeration rather than cool-headed analysis. To sum up on this dimension, we have three challengeable assumptions: first, that anti-colonialism is fought mainly on liberal principles; second, that non-liberal European governments should have defended liberal principles yet failed to do so; and third, that the Atlantic Charter and its counterparts were adequately representative of European liberalism. Many European colonialist practices deserve to be condemned, but not on the basis of their abandonment of an imputed liberalism to which they did not wholeheartedly subscribe in the first instance. To reiterate, anti-liberalism implies an attack on liberal principles; non-liberalism a disinclination to be associated with them. That subtle difference is vital in comparing ideological positions. None of the above is intended to detract from the scholarly nature and significant findings encompassed in this volume. Both Gosewinkel and Klose argue convincingly that liberals often fall too short of what they might be expected to practise. Yet perhaps anti-liberalism should not be assessed by its relatively easy extreme instances, but put to the test of the vague borderlines that occasion difficult judgments. And perhaps we simply need to lower our expectations of liberalism. Most of all, perhaps some of the problems experienced by the European Union derive precisely from a shortfall in the richer aspects of liberalism. For while ‘economic liberalism’ has been at the heart of many of its policies, and while subscription to ‘constitutionalism’ is vital to the European project in the sense of establishing general rules of conduct for all member states, it has not been liberal enough in the areas of human development, of giving individuals voices, of voluntarism, and of respect for social diversity.

Notes   1. See the introduction and chapter 1 in this volume.  2. See Freie Demokratische Partei Deutschland. ‘Verantwortung für die Freiheit. Karlsruher Freiheitsthesen der FDP für eine offene Bürgergesellschaft’, resolution of 22nd April 2012 on the new party manifesto, FDP 63rd regular party convention, .   3. Gosewinkel, Introduction in this volume.   4. M. Freeden. 2003. ‘The Coming of the Welfare State’, in T. Ball and R. Bellamy (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 7–44.   5. M. Weber. 1978. Economy and Society, G. Roth and C. Wittich (eds), Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 956–1,005.  6. E. Bernstein. 1993. The Preconditions of Socialism, H. Tudor (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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  7. T. Tilton, 1990. The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.  8. For an analysis of the variety of liberal ideological permutations see M. Freeden. 1996. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press.   9. H. te Velde. 2008. ‘The Organization of Liberty: Dutch Liberalism as a Case of the History of European Constitutional Liberalism’, European Journal of Political Theory 7, 65–79. 10. M. Freeden. 2008. ‘European Liberalisms: An Essay in Comparative Political Thought’, European Journal of Political Theory 7, 9–30. 11. A. Simhony and D. Weinstein (eds). 2001. The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; A. Ryan. 2012. The Making of Modern Liberalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 12. H. Saint-Simon. 1975. Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, K. Taylor (ed.), London: Croom Helm, 130–136. 13. See J. Szacki. 1995. Liberalism after Communism, Budapest: Central European University Press. 14. Atlantic Charter, 14 August 1941, (accessed 17 January 2012). 15. See e.g. J. Rawls. 1972. A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 364.

Bibliography Atlantic Charter, 14 August 1941, (accessed 17 January 2012). Bernstein, E. 1993. The Preconditions of Socialism, H. Tudor (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeden, M. 1996. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press. –––––––. 2003. ‘The Coming of the Welfare State’, in T. Ball and R. Bellamy (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 7–44. –––––––. 2008. ‘European Liberalisms: An Essay in Comparative Political Thought’, European Journal of Political Theory 7, 9–30. Freie Demokratische Partei Deutschland. 2012. ‘Verantwortung für die Freiheit. Karlsruher Freiheitsthesen der FDP für eine offene Bürgergesellschaft’, . Rawls, J. 1972. A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryan, A. 2012. The Making of Modern Liberalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Saint-Simon, H. 1975. Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, K. Taylor (ed.), London: Croom Helm. Simhony, A. and D. Weinstein (eds). 2001. The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szacki, J. 1995. Liberalism after Communism, Budapest: Central European University Press.

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Tilton, T. 1990. The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. te Velde, H. 2008. ‘The Organization of Liberty: Dutch Liberalism as a Case of the History of European Constitutional Liberalism’, European Journal of Political Theory 7, 65–79. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society, G. Roth and C. Wittich (eds), Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

part ii Anti-liberalism: A Feature of Colonial and Conservative Concepts of Europe

2 Europe as a Colonial Project A Critique of its Anti-liberalism Fabian Klose

You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affection, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name. —Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, September 1961

Introduction The victory of the Allied armed forces on 8 May 1945 sealed the fate of Hitler’s totalitarian concept of a ‘New Order’ in Europe.1 The success of the Allies ended Nazi rule over the Continent once and for all, and this moment was celebrated with due exuberance in the countries formerly occupied by German troops. Also in colonial Algeria, which had been considered an integral part of France since 1871 and therefore a natural prolongement of the French republic in North Africa, masses of people gathered in the streets to celebrate fittingly the victory their concerted effort had achieved. In the Algerian towns Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata, these victory celebrations escalated into violent protests by Arab demonstrators against French colonial rule, during which attacks against the European population in the region also occurred.2 The French army reacted immediately to this unrest by launching a concerted campaign by the army, air force and navy that led to the arbitrary destruction of entire Arab villages. According to official reports, the number of Muslim Algerians who fell victim to these ‘measures to restore order’ reached 3,000 within a month, although today this figure is estimated

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to lie between 15,000 and 45,000.3 The bloody suppression of the Sétif unrest was seared into the collective memory of the Arab population and became, as the poet Kateb Yacine described, a key experience of Algerian nationalism: ‘My sense of humanity was affronted for the first time by the most atrocious sights. … The shock that I felt at the pitiless butchery that caused the deaths of thousands of Moslems I have never forgotten. From that moment my nationalism took definite form.’4 From the colonial perspective, the hour of Europe’s liberation was one of the bloodiest days in the history of European colonialism and became a decisive moment in the unfolding process of decolonization.5 In particular, the horror of the colonial massacre convinced many Arab veterans returning home from their service in the world war – men like Ahmed Ben Bella, who would later become a founding member and leader of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) – of the necessity of an ‘Algeria for the Algerians’ and was decisive in radicalizing the will of the Algerian nationalist movement to resist French colonial rule.6 Against the backdrop of the post-1945 struggle for decolonization, this chapter examines the ‘outside view’, namely the perspective of the European metropoles as seen by the periphery.7 Central to this is the criticism levelled by the colonized populations of an anti-liberal Europe that clamoured to maintain its hold over overseas territories contrary to its declared liberal principles of liberty and individual rights.8 First it will be shown that the promises proclaimed by the Allies during the Second World War flowered into a vision of colonial liberation and constituted the moral basis for the agitation of the anti-colonial movement. As if holding a moral mirror up before the faces of the European powers, anti-colonial leaders gauged these highly celebrated principles against the stark reality in the overseas territories. By explicitly referring to proclaimed European liberal core values such as individual, civil and political rights, they were trying to demask the face of colonial rule and to proof the anti-liberal nature of this concept of foreign domination.9 As a counter reaction, the European colonial powers can first be found closing their ranks and creating a unified diplomatic alliance to fend off the attacks by their common enemy, in particular, the United Nations. Furthermore, France and Great Britain resorted to the declaration of states of emergency, a legal instrument that, through its special laws, contributed significantly to a radicalization of violence in the early decolonization conflicts. The ambivalent role of the colonial powers as liberal democratic states in Europe and, at the same time, as authoritarian anti-liberal regimes in the periphery became more than obvious during the contested decolonization. From the perspective of the periphery, the European states, as is the main thesis of this chapter, did not stand for constitutional law and a restored liberal order, but for a ‘great collective aggression of Europe’10 in Asia and Africa. This anti-liberal policy of the colonial powers meant a gross violation of European core values as codified in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) of 1950 and was eventually even endangering democratic norms in the metropoles themselves.11

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Liberal Promises as a Vision for Colonial Liberation During the Second World War, the Allies mobilized hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects for the war effort. Troops from India and nearly all parts of Africa participated in the military campaigns to liberate Europe from Nazi rule. For example, soldiers from Maghreb and Senegal formed the backbone of the armed forces of France Libre, and without their support, the ‘French’ victory under the Generals Jean Joseph de Lattre de Tassigny, Marie-Pierre Koenig and Jacques-Philippe Leclerc would have never been possible.12 Despite the repression of a racist colonial regime, the majority of the subjects in the colonies displayed a surprising degree of loyalty towards their colonial rulers. In May 1943, Habib Bourguiba, leader of the Tunisian national movement, actually declared his support for solidarity with France and the Allied aims: ‘Today you must close ranks behind France … I am convinced that the French nation, once freed from the Nazi yoke, will not forget her true friend, those who stood by her in her hour of trial. What matters most now is to win the war.’13 One of the central reasons for the position taken by Bourguiba and other leaders of national movements in the colonies, men like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah and Ferhat Abbas, was that they placed absolutely no stock in the anti-colonial enticements propagandized in the racist ideologies of fascism and National Socialism. Instead, they expected a better future would evolve from an Allied victory and a corresponding liberal post-war order based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter. On 12 August 1941, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met secretly off the coast of Newfoundland and agreed upon an eight-point declaration that set forth ‘certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries’.14 The content of the so-called Atlantic Charter can be so summarized: no territorial gains or annexation; territorial adjustments only in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned; self-determination for all peoples; equal access for all countries to world trade and raw materials; international economic cooperation to advance economic and social standards; development of a sustainable peace by guaranteeing freedom from want and fear; and freedom for the seas. The final sentence set out general disarmament and a comprehensive disarming of the aggressor nations in order to create a comprehensive and lasting system of general security. Quite apparent in the charter was the presence of the four fundamental freedoms that Roosevelt had proclaimed as the maxims of his policies in January of that year. The historian Warren Kimball calls the declaration a classic New Deal document, with which Roosevelt tried to carry over the guidelines of his domestic policy to an international level.15 For the United States, the universal validity of the charter was beyond dispute,16 and on 1 January 1942, it was possible to commit another twenty-six countries to the aims of the Atlantic Charter with the signing of the ‘Declaration by United Nations’. By March 1945, the number of signatory states had risen to forty-seven, so that the liberal principles were no longer applicable just to the

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Anglo-American alliance but also served as a common basis for the Allies as a whole. In Roosevelt’s view, it was this document that gave the Allies the decisive advantage and distinguished them from the totalitarian enemy: ‘The belief in the four freedoms of common humanity – the belief in man, created free, in the image of God – is the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today. In it lies the absolute unity of our alliance, opposed to the oneness of the evil we hate. Here is our strength, the source and promise of victory.’17 In the colonies, such promises were welcomed euphorically.18 For the young Nelson Mandela, the text of the charter reinforced the belief in the dignity of every individual and advanced democratic principles: Some in the West saw the charter as empty promises, but not those of us in Africa. Inspired by the Atlantic Charter and the Allied struggle against tyranny and oppression, the ANC created its own charter, called African Claims, which called for full citizenship for all Africans, the right to buy land, and the repeal of all discriminatory legislation. We hoped that the government and ordinary South Africans would see that the principles they were fighting for in Europe were the same ones we were advocating at home.19

The principles of democracy and national self-determination were demanded by Africans more emphatically than ever before, and the Nigerian Nnamdi Azikiwe described the electrifying impact of the Atlantic Charter on the peoples of West Africa.20 For the later leading figure of the Ghanaian independence movement, Kwame Nkrumah, the aim of the African youth movement was to make the voice of Africa heard in the common worldwide fight against fascism and ‘to help build a post-war world based upon the principles of freedom as expressed in the Atlantic Charter’.21 Ferhat Abbas, the leader of moderate Algerian nationalism, derived concrete political demands from the Allied principles and spelled these out in his ‘Manifeste du Peuple Algérien’ of February 1943: the abolishment of colonial repression, the right of self-determination for all people, and an independent Algerian constitution that included the protection of human rights.22 In the ‘Additif du Manifeste’23 he expanded the demands to include the recognition of national sovereignty and the independence of the Algerian people. The Central Committee of the party founded by Abbas, Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté, thus greeted the approaching end of the war in May 1945 with the statement: ‘Long live the victory of the democracies over fascism, Hitlerism, colonialism and imperialism.’24 So formulated, the Allied victory was not limited to the defeat of the totalitarian threat, but also included an end to colonial repression. As the British Colonial Office had feared back in 1939, concepts like freedom, equality and independence turned into an ‘inconvenient boomerang’.25 The Atlantic Charter spread like a bushfire across the African continent.26 The means by which the Allies had empowered themselves morally in the fight against the totalitarian challenge now became the most important reference point and moral basis for the national movements with which to attack the colonial powers:27

Europe as a Colonial Project51

During the war the Allied Powers taught the subject peoples (and millions of them!) that it was not right for Germany to dominate other nations. They taught the subjugated peoples to fight and die for freedom rather than live and be subjugated by Hitler. Here then is the paradox of history, that the Allied Powers, by effectively liquidating the threat of Nazi domination, set in motion those powerful forces which are now liquidating, with equal effectiveness European domination in Africa.28

The populations in the colonies of Africa and Asia now gauged the new world order against the promises made during the war. Immediately after the war, the leaders of the anti-colonial national movements made their position more than obvious. Ahmed Sukarno, chairman of the Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI), justified the call for Indonesia’s independence from Dutch colonial rule in August 1945 by asking: ‘Is liberty and freedom only for certain favoured peoples of the world? … Indonesians will never understand why it is, for instance, wrong for the Germans to rule Holland if it is right for the Dutch to rule Indonesia. In either case the right to rule rests on pure force and not on the sanction of the populations.’29 In September, the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi followed Sukarno’s example and declared the independence of Indochina from French colonial rule with reference to the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789.30 Additionally he later justified the escalation to armed resistance in South Vietnam by arguing that France had betrayed the Allies already during the war by turning over the country to the Japanese enemy. Now that the war had ended, Paris was again sabotaging the Allied promises of democracy and freedom. The Vietnamese people, however, clearly fought on the side of the Allies in the struggle against the Japanese occupiers and were acting according to Allied principles: ‘Not only is our act in line with the Atlantic and San Francisco Charters, etc., solemnly proclaimed by the Allies, but it entirely conforms with the glorious principles upheld by the French people: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.’31 In using this line of argumentation, the anti-colonial nationalists held up a mirror to the European colonial powers that reflected with absolute clarity the betrayal of their own proclaimed principles and the fundamentally anti-liberal concept of their colonial rule.

‘That Great Collective Aggression of Europe’: The Manifestation of its Anti-liberalism Indeed, the European colonial powers had absolutely no interest in a radical change of the existing colonial relations. Decolonization was not on the ‘European political agenda’32 after the Second World War. Their ambition to maintain their status as world powers, and their urgent need to make use of their empires for economic reconstruction following the devastating war meant that the common aim was the re-establishment of their hegemonic position

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in the colonies.33 The most striking settings for this ‘struggle for European recolonization’ became the Dutch Indies and French Indochina.34 In both cases, the European metropoles worked in close military cooperation with one another, willingly backed by Great Britain. In both Indochina and Indonesia, the South-East Asia Command under Lord Louis Mountbatten acted as the colonial administration following the Japanese capitulation. It was this initial massive presence of British troops – the great majority of which were, paradoxically, Indian regiments – that enabled France and the Netherlands to return to the overseas territories they had lost during the Second World War.35 The British were interested in seeing their colonial allies regain their territories in an orderly fashion particularly because they feared that anti-colonial nationalism might start a chain reaction affecting British territories. This cooperation among the European colonial powers was not limited to the military level in the immediate post-war period but also existed in diplomatic negotiations on the shape of the post-war order. The more intense the situation became in the overseas territories, the larger the dilemma of the European colonial powers grew, on the one hand, to advocate the establishment of a liberal post-war order and, on the other, to defend their colonial ambitions by force.36 France and Great Britain, the two largest colonial powers, were founding members of the United Nations whose job it was, due to their long history as democratic constitutional states, to provide the important impulses needed to give substance to the creation of the UN system.37 By putting forth their own suggestions and drafts, both countries thus tried to exert their influence, such as in the codification of international human rights, whereby France liked to underscore its role as the ‘motherland of human rights’ in the tradition of the French Revolution.38 The colonial ministries of both countries were less happy about the involvement of their UN delegations in the issue of human rights. Particularly in Great Britain, the codification of universal basic rights was watched with growing concern. For example, in the secret section of a circular to the British colonies dated 28 March 1949, the British colonial secretary Arthur Creech-Jones referred to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a potential ‘source of embarrassment’,39 which might indeed have unwanted consequences for the colonies. At the same time, however, he also thought that Great Britain, as a member of the United Nations, was required to work in the Human Rights Commission, where the job of the British delegation would be to ensure under all circumstances that the international treaty would assume an acceptable framework for the colonies: ‘In fact, the requirements and the views of governors are frequently the decisive factor in determining United Kingdom policy in regard to international agreements of a political character drawn up within the framework of the United Nations, e.g. the draft covenant on Human Rights.’40 For this reason, the British position at the United Nations was influenced not so much by liberal principles as by colonial needs. To secure its colonial ambitions, Great Britain attempted to create a coalition of like-minded countries in the UN bodies and therefore began to seek

Europe as a Colonial Project53

contact with other European colonial powers.41 A particularly close cooperation ensued with France. At a meeting in March 1952 between Colonial Minister Pierre Pflimlin and his British counterpart Oliver Lyttelton, it was agreed that the two countries would work closely in all aspects of colonial policy.42 In addition to regular meetings at the ministerial level and mutual consultations, the two governments agreed on a joint stance against any form of intervention by the United Nations in the internal affairs of the overseas territories, specifically the right to discuss political issues and to permit inspection missions and petitions. Subsequently, London and Paris extended the circle of participants in these colonial talks to include Belgium and Portugal.43 The declared aim of these annual meetings, which always took place prior to each meeting of the UN General Assembly, was to coordinate the diplomatic position on various colonial problems and to agree upon a corresponding voting behaviour. The purpose of such a joint strategy was to bring the colonial powers together to defend each individual country’s colonial interests against the increasing anti-colonial attacks at the United Nations.44 The mutual support between Great Britain and France intensified in relation to the increasing attention in international politics to the bloody conflicts in their overseas possessions. The anti-colonial bloc of UN members ensured that the forceful control of the two colonial powers over their overseas territories, particularly Algeria and Cyprus, was a topic placed on the agenda of the UN General Assembly and that the human rights violations occurring there were discussed extensively.45 In reaction to this, London guaranteed the French government in October 1955 its maximum diplomatic support in defending French interests in the Algeria question.46 In addition to the development of military cooperation, the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Gladwyn Jebb, recommended to the Foreign Office that, among other things, it should clearly acknowledge France’s position in public statements and instruct its diplomatic representatives, particularly those serving in countries with anti-colonial leanings, to place the French Algerian policy in the best possible light.47 In September 1956, the French government even requested that London use the full measure of its influence among the Commonwealth nations to motivate them to veto or at least abstain in the vote on placing the Algeria issue on the agenda of the next UN General Assembly.48 In turn, France guaranteed its British allies its full support in the Cyprus issue, which Paris was glad to do in light of the aggressive stance taken by Greece against France during the debates on Algeria.49 This close British-French cooperation continued even after Cyprus was no longer a topic of diplomatic debate once it had been granted independence in 1959. Both colonial powers shared a common interest in preventing the world organization from intervening in any way into their inner colonial affairs and in having the ban on intervention strictly upheld, as stipulated by Article 2, paragraph 7 of the UN Charter. For Great Britain, the Algeria debate began by assuming a very special role. In a joint letter from July 1959, Harold Beeley, a member of the British UN delegation in New York, pointed out to the Foreign

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Office that major parallels existed between the situations in Algeria and in its own settlement colonies of Kenya and Rhodesia.50 It was to be feared that Great Britain would therefore soon have to defend itself before the United Nations and that the debate on Algeria would most likely set a precedent. For this reason, Beeley urgently recommended that the future development in Britain’s own African territories be taken into consideration when assuming a position on the issue of Algeria. Moreover, no reference should be made to these parallels to the French situation in North Africa in order to prevent the provocation of an unwanted UN debate on British problems in East and Central Africa. The shared anti-colonial threat thus closely conjoined the European colonial powers and shaped their joint policy in the United Nations. These forms of colonial cooperation did indeed enhance the perception of colonialism as a common European project, and fit perfectly into the image depicted in the influential writings of the leading thinkers of the anti-colonial movement after 1945.51 Not only Aimé Césaire, an important Afro-Caribbean poet, founding member of the Négritude movement and author of Discourse on Colonialism, but also Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Jew who wrote The Colonizer and the Colonized, and Frantz Fanon, a physician from Martinique and author of The Wretched of the Earth, all described colonialism in these respective works as a dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized, as a twofold world in which the majority of the earth’s population was being denied their most elementary rights on the basis of race.52 In describing those responsible for this situation, all three authors refused to make any national distinctions between Belgian, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese or Spanish colonizers, but used instead the overall term ‘European’ and spoke explicitly of ‘Europe’.53 In Césaire’s eyes, this Europe was morally and intellectually unsustainable because the denouncement of millions of people throughout the world had debunked the alleged connection between colonization and civilization, revealing it to be a huge lie and a collective sham perpetrated by the Continent. In reality, vastness existed between those terms; more importantly, colonization would eventually decivilize the colonizer, slowly but surely poison Europe and lead to its barbarization.54 Then the author drew parallels between European colonialism and Nazi tyranny, whereby he noted that the great outrage over Hitler evolved solely from the fact that he had committed crimes against white people and ‘that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “niggers” of Africa’.55 In this context, Césaire essentially accused the Europeans of propagating a ‘pseudo-humanism’ based on racism that had also fragmented and limited human rights for far too long.56 In his opinion, any nation undertaking colonization became part of a sick and morally decrepit civilization, and colonization itself was a bridgehead to barbarism for a civilization.57 He vehemently denied the accusation that his severe criticism made him an ‘enemy of Europe’. He argued instead that he had never diminished the importance of Europe in the history of human thought but that his criticism was directed against colonist

Europe as a Colonial Project55

Europe, which was ‘responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history’.58 According to Memmi, responsibility for the colonial project did not lie solely with European colonizers in the overseas territories but with Europe as a collective: ‘Furthermore, Europeans of Europe are potentially colonizers. All they need do is set foot on the colonized’s land. Perhaps they even receive some benefits from colonization. They are supporters or at least unconscious accomplices of that great collective aggression of Europe.’59 For Fanon, the consequence of this collective aggression was particularly evident in the scandalous accumulation of Europe’s economic wealth at the cost of ‘the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians and Asians’.60 In connection with this, he recalled the most recent past in which National Socialism had transformed the entire European continent itself into a ‘genuine colony’. When the war ended, the European nations had been given back the valuables stolen from them by the German occupiers and had received reparation payments from Germany as compensation for Nazi crimes.61 Using this same legal basis, the colonized would not let themselves be appeased with a strictly moral compensation in the form of their national independence but would lay claim to Europe’s wealth: The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth. … In concrete terms Europe has been bloated out of all proportions by the gold and raw materials from such colonial countries as Latin America, China, and Africa. Today Europe’s tower of opulence faces these continents, for centuries the point of departure of their shipments of diamonds, oil, silk and cotton, timber, and exotic produce to this very same Europe. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.62

One main pillar supporting this system of European exploitation of other continents was argued by the three authors to be the threat and use of massive force. The relationship between colonizer and colonized was characterized, in Césaire’s words, by the brutal links between domination and subjugation, ‘which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver’.63 Memmi ascribed the privileged position that Europeans had over the indigenous population to the protection provided by the police, army and air force, which were always willing to use force to defend the interests of the colonial rulers.64 In Fanon’s opinion, colonial life was based on the power of bayonets and cannons, whereby he specifically underscored his argument by referring to the thousands of victims of the recent colonial massacres at Sétif, on Madagascar, and in Kenya.65 In their work, all three authors included references to the highly influential contemporary experiences of the post-1945 contest over decolonization. Be it in Madagascar, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus or Algeria, the European colonial powers had demonstrated an unflinching willingness in the fight against the armed anti-colonial resistance to continue to defend their old claims to domination by military means, regardless of all liberal norms codified in international politics. By declaring a state of emergency66 in their

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colonies, Great Britain and France created the legal groundwork for suspending the universal basic rights for which they had previously voted to support in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Free from almost all constitutional constraints, their security forces were equipped with a carte blanche in fighting the anti-colonial resistance movement. In the end, this led to massive resettlement and detention, the systematic use of torture and severe war crimes resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths among the indigenous populations.67 In light of this radicalization of violence caused by the metropoles, Europe was not the stronghold and defender of liberal values but the starting point of a ‘great collective aggression’68 and the source for the negation of natural basic rights. With a note of sarcasm regarding the pretentious self-depiction of the Continent as the incarnation of the respect of human dignity, Césaire wrote: But let us move on, and quickly, lest our thoughts wander to Algiers, Morocco, and other places where, as I write these very words, so many valiant sons of the West, in the semi-darkness of dungeons, are lavishing upon their inferior African brothers, with such tireless attention, those authentic marks of respect for human dignity which are called, in technical terms, ‘electricity’, ‘the bathtub’, and ‘the bottleneck’.69

At precisely the time when the West was intoxicated with the word ‘humanism’, it was farther than ever before from doing true humanism justice.70 Yet, according to Césaire, the truth was that the colonial policy of violence would eventually bring about the ruin of Europe itself: ‘They thought they were only slaughtering Indians, or Hindus, or South Sea Islanders, or Africans. They have in fact overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely.’71 Memmi came to the conclusion that ‘the colonizer is a disease of the European, from which he must be completely cured and protected’.72 For the colonized, however, his lasting freedom lay in the destruction of the entire colonial system by way of a revolution.73 Fanon advocated a complete break with the Continent: Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world. For centuries Europe has brought the progress of other men to a halt and enslaved them for its own purposes and glory; for centuries it has stifled virtually the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called ‘spiritual adventure’.74

For the physician from Martinique, Europe was not a model endowed with liberal values but the negative image showing what should be avoided in the future and exactly the opposite of what the Third World should strive for. Fanon warned emphatically against imitating the European model in any way for it had led to the enslavement of four-fifths of the human race.75 In closing, he called upon the Third World to:

Europe as a Colonial Project57

start over a new history of man which takes account of not only the occasional prodigious theses maintained by Europe but also its crimes, the most heinous of which have been committed at the very heart of man, the pathological dismembering of his functions and the erosion of his unity, and in the context of the community, the fracture, the stratification and the bloody tensions fed by class, and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, the racial hatred, slavery, exploitation, and, above all, the bloodless genocide whereby one and a half billion men have been written off.76

This image of an anti-liberal Europe in the role of the aggressor and initiator of grave human rights violations was also evoked by the supporters of the anti-colonial cause in the metropoles. For example, in a personal letter to Great Britain’s colonial secretary in September 1952, the British Labour MP Fenner Brockway expressed his deep concern over the radicalization of the situation in the Crown Colony of Kenya. Brockway condemned the planned British state of emergency as a serious breach of the UN Human Rights Declaration and said that the special laws reminded him more of a totalitarian regime behind the Iron Curtain than of a democratic society.77 Intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre also raised their voices and took a firm stand. In his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre explicitly used the catchall term ‘Europeans’, whom he accused collectively of liberal hypocrisy in light of the solidarity between metropoles and their colonial emissaries: Yes, because Europe is doomed. But, you will say once again, we live in the metropolis, and we disapprove of extremes. It’s true, you are not colonists, but you are not much better. They were your pioneers, you sent them overseas, they made you rich. … You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affection, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.78

Sartre claimed that the acts of violence perpetrated against Europeans in Algeria and Angola were a boomerang of the violence they themselves had previously unleashed, and he reacted sarcastically to the recent recognition of ‘liberals’ that perhaps the ‘natives’ had actually been treated unfairly in the past.79 For France’s most notable intellectual, the entire European continent had been involved in the exploitation of other continents and its so laudable principles had become nothing more than empty words: And Europe, what else is it doing? And that super-European monster, North America? What empty chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honor, country, and what else? This did not prevent us from making racist remarks at the same time: dirty nigger, filthy Jew, dirty Arab. Noble minds, liberal and sympathetic – neocolonialists, in other words – claimed to be shocked by this inconsistency, since the only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters.80

Pointing to the example of Sétif, which had left over a million Algerians dead as a result of eight years of war and electro-torture, Sartre noted that the lofty European values had lost their wings and that, upon closer inspection, not

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one would be found unstained by blood.81 Consequently, Sartre believed, as Césaire had already implied, the violence sewn abroad by Europe would have repercussions back home on the Continent itself.82

The Repercussions of Anti-liberal Politics on the Metropole At the European diplomatic level, Great Britain began to feel these repercussions of its anti-liberal politics of force in the periphery. On 4 November 1950 in Rome, twelve European states belonging to the European Council, including the two leading colonial powers France and the United Kingdom, signed the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).83 As a convention, this treaty went much further than the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in providing legal international protection for basic human rights such as the right to life, the prohibition of torture, as well as the ban on slavery and forced labour. By granting individuals as well as states the power to bring a case to court, the ECHR enabled signatory states and individual persons to apply to the planned European Court of Human Rights in the case of human rights violations by other member states.84 The convention thus embodied a European community of shared liberal values, which guaranteed individual basic rights through international law and was prepared at the same time to enforce these by judicial means.85 It was precisely this new international standard that spelled trouble for Great Britain as a colonial power. As in other decolonization wars, London had pursued a brutal policy of repression in fighting the Cypriot liberation organization Ethniki Organosis Kyrion Agoniston (EOKA),86 which had fought against British rule over the Mediterranean island and for annexation to Greece from 1955 to 1959.87 British forces were relentless in their battle against the anticolonial resistance on Cyprus and used the well-established colonial measures of collective punishment, detention camps, torture and execution of prisoners. Greece, which supported the Cypriot liberation efforts, used the human rights violations against the Cypriot population as a chance to file a complaint against another nation based for the first time on the ECHR. The Greek government brought before the European Council two consecutive cases, in 1956 and 1957, against Great Britain for violating the convention. Due to its colonial policy of force, Great Britain, which had always been proud of its long liberal and constitutional tradition, thus found itself as the first country to sit in the dock of the European Council and thus in the pillory of the international public.88 In 1959, London was able to fend off any further diplomatic damage by taking the political decision to grant Cyprus its independence. The case against Great Britain served as a clear warning for the second largest colonial power, France. Although the French delegation under Pierre-Henri Teitgen had been significantly involved in drafting the ECHR and Paris had signed the treaty in November 1950 as one of the founding members, the French

Europe as a Colonial Project59

National Assembly put off ratifying the document for twenty-four years.89 The chief reason for this was the war in North Africa and the concern that France would be charged at the European level with committing grave human rights violations as Great Britain had been in the case of Cyprus.90 Because of the role played by the use of force in its colonial policy, France declined to ratify the agreement and hazarded the extremely difficult diplomatic position of being the only founding member of the European Council to remain outside the European community of liberal values embodied in the ECHR. Even apart from these diplomatic complications, the repercussions of the decolonization wars became far more dramatic for France because eventually they posed a very serious threat to the very existence of the democratic, constitutional order of the French republic. Early on, Memmi had argued that every colonial power using authoritarian police measures would thereby plant the seed of a fascist threat at home. Colonial fascism would not remain contained in the colonies alone; the danger existed that it would spread like a tumour to the colonial ‘motherland’ as well.91 Memmi’s point bore out with striking accuracy because the radicalization of the colonial situation did indeed start forces into motion that failed to remain in the North African departments and eventually threatened the colonial metropole itself. The rescission of constitutional norms and the growing militarization of all aspects of the state in the wake of the new emergency laws in Algeria also led to an increasing politicalization of the French army,92 which directed itself against the liberal political system. The severe crisis of trust between the government and the military high command that began during the Indochina campaign led to a complete alienation of the military from civilian authority.93 In particular, the elite units of the French Foreign Legion and the paratroopers cultivated a martial esprit de corps – the ‘esprit para’94 – that was reminiscent of the mentality found in the republic-hostile and anti-democratic attitude of the Freikorps of Weimar Germany.95 The extensive powers granted by the emergency laws enabled highranking officers to intervene more and more in French domestic policy. The striking climax of this ‘malaise de l’armée’,96 as the journalist Jean Planchais described it, was the open rebellion against the decision by President Charles de Gaulle to withdraw from Algeria. From 22–25 April 1961, the leading generals of the French army in Algeria – Maurice Challe, Raoul Salan, Edmond Jouhaud and André Zeller – assumed power by staging a military putsch and brought France to the brink of civil war.97 The Algerian army, endowed with special powers to protect the state, now threatened the existence of the French Republic itself, and the Paris government was forced to declare an état d’urgence in the metropole that it had originally brought into being to quell unrest in the periphery.98 Even after the putsch failed, the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS),99 a secret paramilitary organization founded by putschists, continued to fight against an independent Algeria under the motto ‘Algeria is French and will remain so’. They attempted to sabotage the peace negotiations between the FLN and the French government with a bloody wave of terror

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and staged several assassination attempts on the life of President de Gaulle. In Sartre’s view of the situation, terror had left Africa and settled in France, where crazy fanatics were now exacting a price in blood for the disgrace of having been defeated by ‘natives’ in Algeria.100 Yet it was not only the defectors’ plans for a coup d’état and the destructive frenzy of the OAS that threatened the existence of the democratic order in the metropole; even loyal civil servants finally started to defy all democratically constitutional norms. The reports on torture published in 1959 in the book La Gangrène clearly prove that arrested Algerians were severely mishandled in prisons and police stations in France.101 The ‘Algerian methods’ began to spread, noted the contemporary historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, like a cancerous tumour within the French democracy.102 Furthermore, on the orders of Police Prefect Maurice Papon, French police also used brute force against peaceful demonstrators while disbanding a pro-Algerian rally on 17 October 1961. They brutally bludgeoned people on the streets of Paris, thereby killing over 200 demonstrators, and some of the bodies were then simply thrown into the Seine.103 The blatant disregard for all principles of constitutional law and natural basic rights inherent in the anti-liberal policies first used in the periphery landed like a boomerang at the point of origin, the European metropole, and began to undermine the liberal order there. The approaching end of France’s will to hold onto its colonial empire at all costs was soberly observed by Sartre in February 1962: But in order to avoid the famous selling-off of our Empire, we have sold off France: in order to forge arms, we have cast our institutions into fire, our freedoms and our guarantees, Democracy and Justice, everything has burnt, nothing remains. Simply ending the fighting is not enough to reclaim our wasted wealth: we too, I am afraid, in a different area, will have to start from scratch.104

The anti-liberal policy of using force to defend colonial ambitions did not stop at the border to Europe but also called into question elementary principles of the rule of law in the European metropoles. After decolonization was completed, the critical self-reflection called for by Sartre did not truly occur. Instead, one clung to a culture of amnesty and amnesia, such as in France where, on 22 March 1962, immediately after the signing of the armistice in the Algerian War, an amnesty decree was issued that ensured unqualified immunity for all crimes committed in connection with the military operations in North Africa.105 Additional amnesty laws followed in France, and in November 1982, President François Mitterrand even reinstated the putsch generals Salan, Challe, Jouhaud and Zeller into the French army.106 In other former European colonial countries, collective mechanisms were also set into motion to suppress the past. These were thus responsible for the fact that the history of Europe’s anti-liberalism as it existed on other continents was fully marginalized or disappeared altogether from public awareness for a long time.107 Yet, from an anti-colonial perspective, this history represented a very significant chapter of the Continent’s past in

Europe as a Colonial Project61

which Europe had not been the stronghold and defender of liberal principles, but the starting point of collective aggression and colonial exploitation on other continents.

Notes   1. On Hitler’s concept of a ‘New Order’ in Europe, see especially M. Mazower. 2008. Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, New York: Penguin.   2. On the riots in Sétif, see J.-C. Jauffret. 1994. ‘Origins of the Algerian War: The Reaction of France and its Army to the Two Emergencies of 8 May 1945 and 1 November 1954’, in Robert Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945, London: Frank Cass Publisher, 19–22; J.L. Planche. 2006. Sétif 1945: Histoire d’un massacre annoncé. Paris: Perrin; Y. Benot. 2001. Massacres coloniaux 1944–1950: la IVe République et la mise au pas des colonies françaises, Paris: La Découverte, 9–19.  3. Benot, Massacres coloniaux, 14.   4. Kateb Yacine as quoted in D. Prochaska. 1990. Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône 1870–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 238.   5. On the multiple meanings of 8 May 1945, see D. Diner. 2006. ‘Reims, Karlshorst, Sétif: Die multiple Bedeutung des 8. Mai 1945’, in N. Frei (ed.), Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts? Göttingen: Wallstein, 190–195.   6. A. Horne. 2006. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, New York: New York Book Review, 28; Jauffret, Origins of the Algerian War, 22.   7. On the crucial importance of including the colonial perspective in writing European history see J. Osterhammel. 2004. ‘Europamodelle und imperiale Kontexte’, Journal of Modern European History 2, 157–181.   8. On the definition and core elements of the political concept ‘liberal’ see H.A. Winkler. 1979. Liberalismus und Antiliberalismus: Studien zur politischen Sozialgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 13–19.   9. At this point it is important to keep in mind the ambivalent role of liberal values in the historical context of colonialism. Especially during the nineteenth century European powers referred to liberal values for justifying their ‘civilizing mission’ and the related colonial expansion. On this topic see: J. Osterhammel. 2006. Europe, ‘the West’ and the Civilizing Mission, London: German Historical Institute London; J. Osterhammel. 2009. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Beck, 1,172–1,193; A. Conklin. 1998. ‘Colonialism and Human Rights: A Contradiction in Terms? The Cases of France and West Africa, 1895–1914’, American Historical Review 103, 419–442; A. Conklin. 1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 10. A. Memmi. 1991. The Colonizer and the Colonized, Boston: Beacon Press, 130. 11. This chapter is based on an extensive study of the literature and sources conducted in the course of my dissertation, published in Munich in 2009 with the title of Menschenrechte im Schatten kolonialer Gewalt: Die Dekolonisierungskriege in Kenia und Algerien 1945–1962 (the English edition of the book was published in 2013 as Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). I am very grateful to Tobias Grill for his suggestions and comments on this chapter.

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12. M. Echenberg. 1985. ‘Morts pour la France: The African Soldiers in France during the Second World War’, Journal of African History 26, 379. 13. Bourguiba as quoted in H. Grimal. 1978. Decolonization: the British, French, Dutch and Belgian Empires 1919–1963, London: Westview Press, 117. 14. The text of the Atlantic Charter as a press release by the U.S. State Department, 14 August 1941, NARA, RG 59.3, Records of Harley Notter, 1939–45, Lot File 60-D-224, Box 13. 15. W.F. Kimball. 1994. ‘The Atlantic Charter: “With All Deliberate Speed”’, in D. Brinkley and D.R. Facey-Crowther (eds), The Atlantic Charter, New York: Palgrave, 104. See also E. Borgwardt. 2005. A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights, Cambridge, Mass./London: Belknap Press. 16. See the speech by Roosevelt, 23 February 1942 on the occasion of George Washington’s birthday, in S.I. Rosenman (ed.). 1938–1950. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York: Macmillan, vol. 11, 115. 17. Address given by Roosevelt, 14 June 1942, NARA, RG 59.3, Alger Hiss Files, 1940–46, Lot File 61-D-146, Box 2. 18. Borgwardt, New Deal for the World, 34–35; B. Ibhawoh. 2007. Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourse of Rights and Liberties in African History, Albany: State University of New York Press, 142. On the origins of anti-colonial nationalism after the First World War, see especially E. Manela. 2007. The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. 19. N. Mandela. 1994. Long Walk to Freedom, Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 83–84. 20. N. Azikiwe. 1943. The Atlantic Charter and British West Africa, Lagos. See also, Ibhawoh, Imperialism and Human Rights, 152–155. 21. F.N. Nkrumah. 1943. ‘Education and Nationalism in Africa’, Educational Outlook, November, 8. 22. ‘Manifeste du Peuple Algérien’, in J.-C. Jauffret (ed.). 1990. La guerre d’Algérie par les documents, L’avertissement 10 février 1943–9 mars 1946, Vincennes, 38. 23. ‘Additif du Manifeste, 26 May 1943’, in Jauffret, La guerre d’Algérie, 40. 24. ‘Comité Central des “Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté”, Manifestation à l’occasion de l’armistice’, 4 May 1945, CAOM, 81 F768. 25. Minutes, Dawe, 22 September 1939, TNA, CO 323/1660/6281. 26. R. Smyth. 1985. ‘Britain’s African Colonies and British Propaganda during the Second World War’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 13, 78. 27. Ibhawoh, Imperialism and Human Rights, 157–160. 28. N. Sithole. 1959. African Nationalism, London: Oxford University Press, 23. 29. Sukarno as quoted in R.J. McMahon. 1981. Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence 1946–1949, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 95. 30. ‘Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 2 September 1945’, in B.B. Fall (ed.). 1967. Ho Chi Minh On Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–66, London: Pall Mall Press, 143. 31. ‘Speech Delivered in the First Days of the Resistance War in South Vietnam’, November 1945, in Fall, Ho Chi Minh On Revolution, 158. 32. M. Mazower. 1999. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, New York: Knopf, 210. See also T. Judt. 2007. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Pimlico, 278–299.

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33. Grimal, Decolonization, 135; F. Cooper. 2011. ‘Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa’, in M. Mazower, J. Reinisch and D. Feldman (eds), Post-War Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 196–210; N. White. 2011. ‘Reconstructing Europe through Rejuvenating Empire: The British, French, and Dutch Experiences Compared’, in Mazower et al., PostWar Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211–236. 34. J. Springhall. 2001. Decolonization since 1945: The Collapse of European Overseas Empire, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 31. 35. See P. Dennis. 1987. Troubled Days of Peace: Mountbatten and South-East Asia Command, 1945–46, New York: St. Martin’s Press; and C. Bayly and T. Harper. 2006. Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 137–189. 36. See also M.R. Madsen. 2004. ‘France, the UK, and the “Boomerang” of the Internationalisation of Human Rights (1945–2000)’, in S. Halliday and P. Schmidt (eds), Human Rights Brought Home: Socio-Legal Perspectives on Human Rights in the National Context, Oxford/Portland: Hart, 60–61. 37. G. Schwarzenberger. 1948. ‘The Protection of Human Rights in British State Practice’, The Review of Politics 10 (April), 187. 38. S. Hessel. 1995. ‘Un rôle essentiel dans la promotion et la protection des droits de l’homme’, in A. Lewin (ed.), La France et l’ONU depuis 1945, Condé-sur-Noireau: Editions Charles Corlet, 254; G. Marston. 1993. ‘The United Kingdom’s Part in the Preparation of the European Convention on Human Rights, 1950’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 42(4), 796–826. 39. Secret Circular 25102/2/49, 28 March 1949, TNA, DO 35/3776. 40. Letter, Colonial Secretary Creech-Jones to Governor Mitchell, 26 November 1949, TNA, CO 537/4581. 41. Letter, CO to the colonial ministers of France and Belgium, April 1949, MAE, NUOI Carton 385. 42. Secret Circular ‘Anglo-French Colonial Relations’ of the CO, 15 May 1952, TNA, DO 35/3842. 43. Paper, ‘Political Discussions with other Colonial Powers’ of the FO, 4 March 1957, TNA, FO 371/125312; letter, FO to the CO, 12 March 1957, TNA, FO 371/125312. 44. On the colonial talks, see report ‘Conversations Anglo-Franco-Belges sur les questions coloniales aux Nations Unies (Bruxelles, 30 juin et 1er juillet 1955)’, MAE, NUOI Carton 483; Note ‘Entretiens tripartis Franco-Anglo-Belges sur les questions coloniales (Londres 1er – 2 octobre 1956)’ MAE, NUOI Carton 483; Confidential report ‘Quadripartite Talks (with French, Belgians and Portuguese: Paris, July 1st–5th 1957)’ of the FO, TNA, FO 371/125313. 45. For the Cyprus conflict, see e.g. UN GAOR Document A/3616, letter, Greek UN delegates to the UN General Secretary, 15 July 1957; UN GAOR Document A/3616/ Add.1, letter with explanatory memorandum of the Greek UN delegates to the UN General Secretary, 13 September 1957, 3–4. For the Algerian War, see e.g. UN SCOR Document S/3341, letter from Saudi UN delegates to the President of the UN Security Council, 5 January 1955; ‘The Question of Algeria’, in United Nations (ed.), Yearbook 1955, 65–69; ‘The Question of Algeria’, in United Nations, Yearbook 1956, 115–121; ‘The Question of Algeria’, in United Nations, Yearbook 1957, 68–72; ‘The Question of Algeria’, in United Nations, Yearbook 1958, 79–81; ‘The Question of Algeria’, in United

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Nations, Yearbook 1959, 51–56; ‘The Question of Algeria’, in United Nations, Yearbook 1960, 132–136; ‘The Question of Algeria’, in United Nations, Yearbook 1961, 97–99. 46. Telegram, French embassy in London to the MAE, 1 October 1955, MAE, NUOI Carton 546. 47. Report ‘French North Africa’, FO, 24 July 1956, TNA, FO 371/124445. 48. Confidential report, FO, 17 September 1956, TNA, FO 371/119381. 49. Note ‘La question de Chypre devant les Nations Unies’ from MAE to the French embassies in London, Ankara and Athens, 4 March 1957, MAE, NUOI Carton 117; Report ‘Conversations franco-anglaises du 17 Septembre 1957: Chypre et l’Algérie’ from French ambassador in London, 18 September 1957, MAE, Secrétariat général, Série ‘entretiens et messages’ Carton 4. 50. Secret letter, Harold Beeley, British UN delegation, to FO, 8 July 1959, TNA, FO 371/138622. 51. Criticism of Europe’s colonial expansion has a long tradition reaching back to the sixteenth century. See M. Delgado. 1995. ‘Kolonialismusbegründung und Kolonialismuskritik: der Januskopf Europas gegenüber der außereuropäischen Welt’, in M. Delgado and M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds), Herausforderung Europa: Wege zu einer europäischen Identität, Munich: Beck, 153–170. See especially B. Stuchtey. 2010. Die europäische Expansion und ihre Feinde: Kolonialismuskritik vom 18. bis in das 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: Oldenbourg. With regard to Césaire, Memmi and Fanon, see here 387–390. 52. A. Césaire. 2000. Discourse on Colonialism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 37; F. Fanon. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 3; Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 70. 53. See e.g. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 31–33; Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 14–17; Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 3. See also Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks, which he published in 1952. F. Fanon. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 70, 72, 79 and 88. 54. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 31–36. 55. Ibid., 36. 56. Ibid., 37. 57. Ibid., 39–40. 58. Ibid., 44–45. 59. Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 130. 60. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 53. 61. Ibid., 57–58. 62. Ibid., 58. 63. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42. 64. Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 11. 65. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 2 and 38. 66. According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the state of emergency or the state of exception defines ‘a “state of the law” in which, on the one hand, the norm is in force but is not applied (it has no “force”) and, on the other, acts that do not have the value of law acquire its “force”’. For Agamben, the state of exception is a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations are deactivated, including the elementary rights of the individual. G. Agamben. 2005. State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 38 and 50.

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67. On the radicalization of colonial violence in the decolonization wars, see e.g. D. Anderson. 2005. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, London: W.W. Norton & Company; C. Elkins. 2005. Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, London: Pimlico; R. Branche. 2001. La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie 1954–1962, Paris: Gallimard; A. Horne. 2006. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, New York: New York Book Review. On the common European experience of violence in colonies, see R. Gerwarth and S. Malinowski. 2010. ‘Europeanization through Violence? War Experiences and the Making of Modern Europe’, in M. Conway and K.K. Patel (eds), Europeanization in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 192–197. 68. Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 130. 69. The terms ‘electricity’, ‘the bathtub’, and ‘the bottleneck’ refer to the widely used methods of torture used in the colonies with electricity, water, and the insertion of bottlenecks in the bodily orifices of the victims. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 70. 70. Ibid., 73. 71. Ibid., 75. 72. Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 147. 73. Ibid., 150–153. 74. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 235. 75. Ibid., 236–237. 76. Ibid., 238. 77. Letter, Brockway to Lyttelton, 13 September 1952, TNA CO 822/437. 78. J.P. Sartre. 2004. ‘Preface’, in F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, xlviii–xlix. 79. Ibid., liv. 80. Ibid., lviii. 81. Ibid., lix. 82. Ibid., lxi. 83. The signatory states were Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Turkey and Great Britain. Greece and Sweden signed the convention on 28 November 1950 in Paris. On the origins, see also M.R. Madsen. 2010. ‘“Legal Diplomacy”: Law, Politics and the Genesis of Postwar European Human Rights’, in S.-L. Hoffmann, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 62–81; Marston, ‘Preparation of the European Convention on Human Rights’, 800–826. 84. For the content of the ECHR, see M.R. Ishay (ed.). 2007. The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents from Ancient Times to the Present, New York: Routledge, 500–504. 85. See T. Buchanan. 2010. ‘Human Rights, the Memory of War and the Making of a “European” Identity, 1945–75’, in M. Conway and K.K. Patel (eds), Europeanization in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 157–171. 86. National Organization of Greek Cypriot Fighters. 87. For the decolonization conflict on Cyprus, see R. Holland. 1998. Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 88. See B. Simpson. 2004. Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 924–1,052. 89. France finally ratified the ECHR in 1974.

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90. See also the critical newspaper article by C. Bourdet, ‘La France qui donna les droits de l’homme à l’Europe … ’, France Observateur, 9 August 1959; ‘Note relative à la ratification éventuelle de la Convention Européenne de Sauvegarde des Droits de l’Homme et des libertés fondamentales’, 28 August 1961, CAOM, 81 F1023. 91. Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 62–64. 92. P.C. Pahlavi. 2004. La Guerre Révolutionnaire de l’Armée Française en Algérie 1954– 1961: Entre esprit de conquête et conquête des esprits, Paris: Harmattan, 95–98. 93. B. Stora. 1998. La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie, Paris: La Découverte, 83–85. 94. On ‘esprit para’ and its own particular rituals and prayers, see J.-P. Vittori. 1983. Nous les appelés d’Algérie, Paris: Temps Actuels, 81. 95. J. Talbott. 1980. The War without a Name: France in Algeria 1954–1962, New York: Knopf, 67; T. von Münchhausen. 1977. Kolonialismus und Demokratie: Die französische Algerienpolitik von 1954–1962, Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 219. On the hostile attitude of paratroopers towards the republic, see also H. Alleg. 1958. The Question, London: G. Braziller, 47. 96. See J. Planchais. 1958. Le malaise de l’armée, Paris: Plon. 97. R. Girardet. 1964. La crise militaire française 1945–1962: Aspects sociologiques et idéologiques, Paris: A. Colin, 200; Pahlavi, Guerre Révolutionnaire en Algérie, 99–108. 98. Law no. 58-487, 17 May 1958, Journal Officiel, Lois et Décrets, 17 May 1958, 4734; Decree no. 61-395, 22 April 1961, Journal Officiel, Lois et Décrets, 23 April 1961, 3843. 99. On the history of the OAS and its terrorism, see: A. Déroulède. 1997. OAS: Etude d’une organisation clandestine, Hélette: Curutchet; R. Kauffer. 2002. OAS. Histoire d’une guerre francofrançaise, Paris: Seuil. 100. Sartre, ‘Preface’, lxi. 101. See A. Belhadj, B. Bonnaza et al. 1959. La Gangrène, Paris: Minuit. This book was the first report by a contemporary on the torture in France during the Algerian War. 102. P. Vidal-Naquet. 1998. La torture dans la république: Essai d’ histoire et de politique contemporaines (1954–1962), Paris: Editions de Minuit, 101–114. 103. The involvement of Maurice Papon in crimes committed in the Algerian War came to light during the course of the 1997–98 trial against him as the organizer of the deportation of French Jews during the Vichy period. Particular attention was paid to his role as the Paris Police Prefect in the murder of more than 200 Algerian demonstrators. See J.-L. Einaudi, ‘Le Papon des ratonnades,’ L’Express, 2 October 1997; on the mass murder perpetrated by the state on 17 October in Paris, see especially O. Le Cour Grandmaison (ed.). 2001. Le 17 octobre 1961. Un crime d’Etat à Paris, Paris: La Dispute; J.-L. Einaudi. 2001. Octobre 1961 un massacre à Paris, Paris: Fayard; J. House and N. MacMaster. 2006. Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Postcolonial Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 104. J.-P. Sartre. 2001. ‘The Sleepwalkers’, in Colonialism and Neocolonialism, London/ New York: Routledge, 132. 105. Decree no. 62-328, 22 March 1962, Journal Officiel, Lois et Décrets, 23 March 1962, 3144. 106. See Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli, 281–283. On the amnesty issue and the role of historiography, see Branche, La guerre d’Algérie, 111–139. 107. On the handling of the colonial past and the current debates, see A. Prost. 1999. ‘The Algerian War in French Collective Memory’, in J. Winter and E. Sivan (eds), War

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and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 161–176; O. Dard and D. Lefeuvre (eds). 2008. L’Europe face à son passé colonial, Paris: Riveneuve éditions; B. Stora. 2005. ‘Der Algerienkrieg im Gedächtnis Frankreichs’, in V. Knigge and N. Frei (eds), Verbrechen erinnern: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 75–89; R. Raben. 2005. ‘Koloniale Vergangenheit und postkoloniale Moral in den Niederlanden,’ in V. Knigge and N. Frei (eds), Verbrechen errinern, 90–110; S. Howe. 2010. ‘Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France’, Histoire & Politique. Politique, culture, société 11 , last accessed 2 August 2014; A. Eckert. 2008. ‘Colonialism in the European Memory’, , last accessed 10 June 2013; A. Thompson. 2005. The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Harlow: Pearson Longman, 234–238; R. Aldrich. 2011. ‘Conclusion: The Colonial Past and the Postcolonial Present’, in Martin Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind. Volume Two, Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism, Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 334–356.

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Mandela, N. 1994. Long Walk to Freedom, Boston: Little, Brown, & Company. Manela, E. 2007. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Marston, G. 1993. ‘The United Kingdom’s Part in the Preparation of the European Convention on Human Rights, 1950’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 42(4), 796–826. Mazower, M. 1999. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, New York: Knopf. –––––––. 2008. Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, New York: Penguin. McMahon, R.J. 1981. Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence 1946–1949, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Memmi, A. 1991. The Colonizer and the Colonized, Boston: Beacon Press. Münchhausen, T. von. 1977. Kolonialismus und Demokratie: Die französische Algerienpolitik von 1954–1962, Munich: Weltforum Verlag. Nkrumah, F.N. 1943. ‘Education and Nationalism in Africa’, Educational Outlook, November. Osterhammel, J. 2004. ‘Europamodelle und imperiale Kontexte’, Journal of Modern European History 2, 157–181. –––––––. 2006. Europe, ‘the West’ and the Civilizing Mission, London: German Historical Institute London. –––––––. 2009. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Beck. Pahlavi, P.C. 2004. La Guerre Révolutionnaire de l’Armée Française en Algérie 1954–1961: Entre esprit de conquête et conquête des esprits, Paris: Harmattan. Planchais, J. 1958. Le malaise de l’armée, Paris, Plon. Planche, J.L. 2006. Sétif 1945: Histoire d’un massacre annoncé. Paris: Perrin. Prochaska, D. 1990. Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône 1870–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prost, A. 1999. ‘The Algerian War in French Collective Memory’, in J. Winter and E. Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 161–176. Raben, R. 2005. ‘Koloniale Vergangenheit und postkoloniale Moral in den Niederlanden,’ in V. Knigge and N. Frei (eds), Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 90–110. Rosenman, S.I. (ed.). 1938–1950. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York: Macmillan, vol. 11. Sartre, J.-P. 2001, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, London/New York: Routledge. Schwarzenberger, G. 1948. ‘The Protection of Human Rights in British State Practice’, The Review of Politics 10 (April), 174–189.

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Simpson, B. 2004. Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Sithole, N. 1959. African Nationalism, London: Oxford University Press. Smyth, R. 1985. ‘Britain’s African Colonies and British Propaganda during the Second World War’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 13, 65–82. Springhall, J. 2001. Decolonization since 1945: The Collapse of European Overseas Empire, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave. Stora, B. 1998. La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie, Paris: La Découverte. –––––––. 2005. ‘Der Algerienkrieg im Gedächtnis Frankreichs’, in V. Knigge and N. Frei (eds), Verbrechen erinnern: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 75–89. Stuchtey, B. 2010. Die europäische Expansion und ihre Feinde: Kolonialismuskritik vom 18. bis in das 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: Oldenbourg. Talbott, J. 1980. The War without a Name: France in Algeria 1954–1962, New York: Knopf. Thompson, A. 2005. The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Harlow: Pearson Longman. Vidal-Naquet, P. 1998. La torture dans la république: Essai d’histoire et de politique contemporaines (1954–1962), Paris: Editions de Minuit. Vittori, J.-P. 1983. Nous les appelés d’Algérie, Paris: Temps Actuels. White, N. 2011. ‘Reconstructing Europe Through Rejuvenating Empire: The British, French, and Dutch Experiences Compared’, in M. Mazower, J. Reinisch and D. Feldman (eds), Post-War Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211– 236. Winkler, H.A. 1979. Liberalismus und Antiliberalismus: Studien zur politischen Sozialgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

3 Facing the Future Backwards ‘Abendland’ as an Anti-liberal Idea of Europe in Germany between the First World War and the 1960s Vanessa Conze

It is fundamental for any discussion regarding ideas of Europe to accept that the history of the idea of Europe is, for much of the twentieth century, the history of ideas of Europe: a history marked by a broad plurality of ideas, models and concepts of European understanding and of the political and economic unification of the continent. In contrast to the now dominant idea of a democratic and pluralist Europe, until well into the 1950s ideas of Europe could cover much wider ideological ground. Only in recent years has this plurality of ideas attracted scholarly attention. Concepts of Europe that looked to its historical construction on foundations fundamentally different from the ideology of pluralist democracy were long ignored. What their place was in the prehistory of European integration on the one hand, and in the sense of Europe in Germany on the other hand, was a question that was rarely asked.1 But this narrow historical approach to the multiplicity of ideas of Europe derives from present-day convictions, and in the long run leads nowhere, the more so given the fact that in historical terms the democratic idea of Europe was a decidedly minority position up until 1945. In German politics and public opinion, the majority espoused other ideas of Europe – not necessarily ultra-nationalist, let alone racist in origin, yet not based on ideas of equal rights and pluralism. It is important to remember that, in the past, ‘Europe’ did not have the same more or less explicitly defined meaning that we now attach to it, based on immutable foundations of democracy, equality and pluralism. Instead, it makes sense to understand Europe historically in the same way as a ‘nation’ was understood in the nineteenth century.2 Up to the end of the Second World War and beyond, Europe was, so to speak, something hoped-for rather than actual, an empty shell that could be filled with the most

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incompatible ideas of the future. This multiplicity of ill-defined Europe-ideas was reflected in a linguistic or terminological plurality. Before 1945, the term ‘Europe’ denoted more than ideas of a European order alone, so that in order to get an adequate sense of the breadth of its meaning, we must also take account of a much broader semantic context. Thus ‘Reich’, ‘Mitteleuropa’, ‘Paneuropa’ and not least ‘Abendland’ – ‘the West’ – offered political, economic and social models that overrode national boundaries and looked towards the European arena. To speak of Abendland was in this context to engage primarily in a German debate about Europe.3 This was a conservative-Catholic concept of Europe, one that referred historically to those elements among the European peoples who shared an ancient heritage that had been remade in medieval Christendom. It was this image of the past that was supposed to reflect the future of Europe and that gave ‘Abendland’ its profoundly anti-liberal and anti-modern orientation. Between the end of the First World War and the end of the 1950s, this Catholicconservative concept enjoyed considerable currency and influence. In two waves, in the interwar period and then in the 1950s, it functioned as the ‘hegemonic ideology of integration’4 for Catholic Christian conservatives.5 But the way in which a set of ideas spanned these two periods and was transferred diachronically from one to the other must also not fail to take account of the intervening years of National Socialism, during which Catholic ideas of Europe and their protagonists engaged with National Socialist ideas about the reordering of Europe.

The Idea of ‘Abendland’ after the First World War The term ‘Abendland’ was a sixteenth-century coinage that emerged in the context of the Renaissance, the Reformation and humanism as a counter to the idea of ‘the Orient’ or Martin Luther’s concept of ‘Morgenland’ (Neues Testament 1522). Initially, it was applied geographically to Western Europe, but increasingly it acquired a cultural freight, with its current meaning emerging in the Romantic era. Here is the origin of a specifically German tradition in which the term ‘Abendland’ became heavily loaded ideologically – not for nothing has it been characterized as a ‘battle cry’ (Richard Faber).6 From then on, ‘Abendland’ referred to those European peoples who, as noted above, were marked by the dual heritage of antiquity and Christendom. This cultural and geographical restriction of the term to the Christian ‘nations’ of the Middle Ages gave it from early on a political and statist implication. In contrast to the term ‘Europe’, whose meaning was and still remains much more indeterminate, ‘Abendland’ denotes ‘a space that was laid down by history, and was therefore, unlike Europe, not open to expansion’.7 This represented a deliberate differentiation from the non-Christian ‘East’, and this meaning resonated through the entire history of Abendland as a concept right up through the twentieth century. Allusions to the Middle Ages as the

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‘golden age’ of the Abendland and ‘the model for our own present’8 were also decisive, and this association with the pre-Reformation era in turn explains why, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘Abendland’ was also associated with demands for a return to Catholicism and thus remained an almost exclusively Catholic project.9 The First World War and its ending led to the second great Abendlandwave since Romanticism; Heinz Gollwitzer even speaks of this as its real ‘breakthrough’.10 This was undoubtedly partly because of the huge influence of Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes, which became one of the central interpretive schemas of the Weimar era.11 But it was precisely the radical cultural pessimism of the book that provoked criticism, and among its critics were Catholics who objected to the book’s appropriation of the term Abendland, which they understood in narrow terms as an exclusively Catholic concept. Contributing to this in a considerable degree was the fact that German Catholicism saw the outbreak of the war and the events of 1918/19 as offering them real opportunities. They saw the collapse of the Prussian Protestant order as a chance ‘to present Catholicism as the vision of a better future’.12 Through this the idea of Abendland was able to become a leading category in campaigns for political, social and cultural renewal: a backwards-looking vision of a better future for Europe. From the milieu of the journal Abendland emerged a core group embodying and representing the idea of Abendland, to which the post-Second World War Abendland movement was to attach itself personally and ideologically. This journal – to give its full title, Abendland: Deutsche Monatshefte für Europäische Kultur, Politik und Wirtschaft [Abendland: Monthly Journal for European Culture, Politics and Economics] – was founded by Hermann Platz in October 1925. In several publications written in response to the French occupation of the Rhineland, Platz, a professor of Romance languages at the University of Bonn, proposed the idea of a European cooperation whose logic would derive from the Rhineland as the historic ‘core region of the Abendland’.13 Under the editorship of Friedrich Schreyvogel, the journal targeted a Catholic-academic readership. A whole list of well-known figures in the Weimar Catholic community helped with the journal’s development, either as members of its editorial board or as contributors, and later French writers were involved, too.14 The first few years were devoted in particular to sounding out the content of the term ‘Abendland’, to show that it could mean much more than simply a political and economic convergence of European states. ‘“Abendland” is not some kind of political invention, but the last mature fruit that has fallen from the tree of Christian knowledge as the conclusive formula for living together in society.’15 Central to this was a celebration of the Middle Ages as ‘the realization according to God’s will of the great idea of the civitas dei (the city of god).’16 It was only the dissolution of this ‘organic’, ‘God-willed’ order by the Reformation, the Enlightenment and nationalism that had made the First World War possible – an explanatory model that we will find again in an identical form after the

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Second World War. The aim ought to be to overcome nationalist reservations and arrive at another consciousness or ‘mindset’ that would ultimately enable other political realities. That this repeatedly invoked Abendland consciousness had to be the consciousness of Catholic Christianity – something that implicitly incorporated a demand for re-Christianization or re-Catholicization – gave the idea of Abendland a highly idealistic and romantic flavour. In essence, the aim was to overcome the age of liberalism by resurrecting a pre-liberal order. Later years saw a rise in the number of articles in Abendland with concrete and informative content, as the Abendland circle made efforts to actively contribute to the debates on international understanding and to the support of Stresemann’s policies, by reporting on political events in Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe. But proposals for the political shape of a future Europe were not in fact part of this project. At its core lay not political integration, but agreement among equal nations with equal rights. In this sense, the journal’s concept of international understanding was typical for the 1920s: it was understood primarily as a culture of communication among national elites. The idea was to disseminate knowledge about the alien nations to the west, and thereby also ‘to become conscious of what divided nations, as the aim and aspiration of international reconciliation’.17 But this stance, premised as it was on the basic principle of international understanding, became radically unstable by the end of the 1920s, above all because of the unresolved Rhineland question. A broad sense of scepticism developed, and more and more contributors to Abendland saw the contradictions among neighbouring states as no longer capable of resolution. The opportunity for ‘Abendland’ to be a project of international understanding had already passed its peak. Economic problems were now also supervening, and in 1930 the journal ceased publication.

The Idea of Abendland between 1930 and 1945 The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 finally brought to an end the first heyday of the Abendland project, and it was only after the end of the Second World War that a second wave was to emerge. It is harder to get a sense of Abendland between 1930 and 1945. Although the term ‘Abendland’ fell into the background in public discourse in the years of the Nazi regime, the idea itself did not entirely disappear. But it is hard to paint a generally valid picture of its intellectual history in this period, given that Nazi propaganda employed it as a slogan (especially in the final years of the war), and that it also found a place in the conservative opposition and a home of sorts in marginalized literary circles. If we look at the supporters and protagonists of the Abendland idea who also (re)emerged in the ‘Abendland Movement’ after 1945, it is clear that familiar patterns of behaviour under National Socialism were also broadly represented among its supporters, viz. exile, inner emigration, resistance. At the same time,

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numerous cases show that collaboration and ideological affinity with the regime were also possible responses to the National Socialist dictatorship. In these years, the Abendland idea oscillated in a fluctuating pattern, from Christian-democracy on the one hand to right-wing authoritarianism on the other hand, up to and including explicit National Socialism.18 The conditions for a possible convergence with National Socialism were established in the period between 1930 and 1933. After the journal Abendland had ceased publication in 1930, many of its erstwhile writers gravitated increasingly to publications in the ambit of the so-called ‘conservative revolution’, where the terms ‘Mitteleuropa’ and ‘Reich’ (empire) were central ideological concepts.19 Both of these terms enjoyed a growing appeal for supporters of the Abendland idea: for conservatives in the early 1930s, they represented something like an ‘agreed programme of principles’.20 The terms ‘Abendland’ and ‘Reich’ began to be used interchangeably as synonyms. In their Catholic usage, both concepts alluded to a glorified past, both were associated with ‘organic’ societies, both had transnational aspirations with respect to a (Mittel)Europa ordered by Germany and the Germans. Leaning towards the ideas of Othmar Spann, themes like ‘Volk’ and ‘race’ gained purchase on the thinking of these ‘imperial visionaries of Abendland’ (abendländische Reichsvisionäre). With this, however, the way was opened to a gradual process whereby ‘the universalist concept of a universal kingdom (Reich) in medieval thought … was yoked to an equally universal concept of ‘Reich’ which had, however, been robbed of its normative Christian content, to be replaced instead by the idea of the German people’.21 The developments of the early 1930s that followed the closure of Abendland did not merely mark an intellectual shift, however. The organizational structure of the Abendland movement also underwent some changes: notably, its geographical emphasis altered, loosening its deep roots in the Rhineland region. Instead, its proponents were increasingly to be found in other Catholic regions. Austria is a case in point: there, Abendland ideas began to be the subject of lively debate from the beginning of the 1930s, and not only in grossdeutsch (all-German) terms. Rather, against the background of ideas of an Austrian Christiancorporatist form of state under Dollfuss, this involved attempts to represent Austria as a ‘cradle of regeneration for the entire Abendland’. In marked distinction from National Socialism and the grossdeutsch longings within Germany, Austrian Abendland circles wanted to strengthen an independent Austrian identity vis-à-vis Germany: Austria appeared ‘chosen by fate to be a Christian bulwark against Bolshevism and National Socialism, to salvage true Germanness and Western civilization (abendländischen Kultur) as such’.22 Through this connection, both the concept of Mitteleuropa and legitimist ideas for restoring the Habsburg monarchy gained more prominence in Abendland thinking. Both elements were also to play a considerable role after 1945 in Abendland ideas in the Federal Republic of Germany, not least as a result of biographical continuities.23 The case of Austria shows particularly well how widely differing conclusions about National Socialism could be drawn from the same perspective of

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Abendland-based Catholicism. While Abendland adherents in Austria rejected National Socialism – and not a few émigrés from Germany were to be found contributing to their publications – a fair number of visionaries of ‘empire’ in Germany turned to National Socialism. A vocabulary of shared concepts, notably ‘empire’ and ‘Mitteleuropa’, led some Catholic associations into the orbit of National Socialism, including the Association of Catholic Academics (Katholischer Akademikerverband).24 Their spokesmen were neither able nor willing to recognize that the Nazis’ expansionist intentions went far beyond anything associated with ideas of empire in the Weimar Republic. But these ideas functioned as a transmission belt that ultimately, in the first years of the war, led ‘Abendland’ into the vicinity of the terms ‘Großraum’ and European ‘New Order’, and hence into the discursive realm of core National Socialist visions of a hegemonic European order. The military victories of the first years of the war thus seduced a number of Abendland proponents into seeing Mitteleuropa as a German sphere of influence that was no longer adequate. Once again, the Middle Ages and the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ were assigned particular significance. The medieval colonization of Eastern Europe helped to legitimize the invasion of Germany’s eastern neighbours, and supporters of the Abendland idea were also persuaded by the propaganda discourse of a ‘bulwark’ against the East. Alongside ‘empire’, anti-communism constituted the most important point of contact between Abendland and National Socialism. After 1941, it served as a key propaganda term, and in its slipstream ‘Abendland’ gained greater prominence in Nazi propaganda. If previously Abendland had more or less been absorbed by ‘empire’, now the formula of an ‘anti-communist defensive front’ foregrounded an intellectual association that for many conservatives facilitated their transition into the post-war world, and considerably eased their adaptation to the changed conditions of world politics. Not insignificantly, this was a mental model that was also acceptable to those who – in contrast to the conformists – had spent the years of the Third Reich in exile. Anti-communism thus represented one of the decisive consolidating elements in the historical trajectory of Abendland ideas after 1945.

Abendland Ideas after the Second World War After the end of the Second World War, there was no more talk of the hidden ideological proximity of ‘Abendland’ to empire and National Socialism. Instead, the Abendland idea experienced a second great boom.25 In the process of intellectual reorientation after the German collapse, given the absence of plausible alternatives and under the influence of a particular set of generational experiences, German society resorted to ideas of political order that had originated in the Weimar Republic and that seemed innocent of any ‘brown’ (i.e. Nazi) overtones.26 Such was the case with ideas of Europe: concepts like ‘empire’ and

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‘Mitteleuropa’ finally had the ground pulled from under them, and ‘Abendland’ offered itself in their place – a term whose meaning was ‘not exhausted, not discredited like nation and fatherland’. 27 This leaning towards Catholic ideas was rendered all the more powerful by a general need for a Christian direction in an era when the Catholic Church was widely accepted as the only institution to have been ostensibly uncompromised by National Socialism.28 As an example for the emerging discourse of Abendland we can cite the magazine Neues Abendland, a constituent of the flourishing landscape of new publications in the immediate post-war. This magazine – to give it its full title, Neues Abendland: Zeitschrift für Politik, Kultur und Geschichte [Neues Abendland: Journal for Politics, Culture and History] – was founded by the Catholic commentator Johann Wilhelm Naumann in 1946.29 Many of the writers who had contributed to the journal Abendland in the Weimar Republic soon gathered around this newly established publication,30 and in the first couple of years in particular they gave it the same kind of profile as Abendland had enjoyed in the mid-1920s. This was once again a time of fundamental debates about ‘the cultural unity of the West’ and the renewal of a transnational Christian community, about the recovery and reorientation of core Christian (i.e. Catholic) values. Concrete political ideas for European unification or for the political reintegration of Germany in the European political community were not at issue. Nevertheless, talk of ‘the West’, with its emphasis on the shared cultural values of European nations, legitimated Germany’s claim to a place in the ‘Western community’. As in the 1920s, allusions were again made to the medieval sacrum imperium – holy empire. The Christian cultural unity of Abendland realized in the Middle Ages provided a backward-looking utopia: as in the 1920s, this appeal to the Middle Ages again invoked an era in which a system of state and society ordained by God had been realized on a European scale.31 In 1945, as after the First World War, historical developments that had led to the catastrophe of a world war were again interpreted teleologically, as a process in which Enlightenment, secularization and the French Revolution had between them destroyed ‘the miraculously well-designed cosmos of the Western universitas’.32 According to this argumentation, none of the catastrophes of the twentieth century could have been avoided: they all stemmed from man’s turning his back on God and the God-given order of society, in favour of individualism and nationalism.33 The only remedy was asserted to be a systematic process of re-Christianization, a reversion to the religious foundations of ‘the family of peoples assembled in the kingdom of Christ’.34 ‘Only through Christian belief can Europe rise again’: this conviction represented the core idea of Abendland.35 In the 1940s, political argument in the narrow sense was absent from the Neues Abendland, but this changed around 1950, for two reasons. First, the new editor-in-chief, Emil Franzel, brought a new, more political focus to the magazine, a development that was to continue under his successor Gerhard Kroll.36 Around the same time, the organizational scope of the Abendland circle began to expand beyond the publication of a magazine: several sub-organizations were

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founded, including Abendland-Aktion, the Centre Européen de Documentation et d’information/Europäisches Dokumentations- und Informationszentrum (CEDI) and the Abendland Academy. In the early 1950s these organizations sponsored numerous conferences and lectures that attracted in particular members of conservative, mainly Catholic political circles in the young Federal Republic.37 Audiences and attendees at these events sometimes numbered several hundreds. A whole series of CDU/CSU politicians were represented in the committees in charge of these organizations, along with more than a sprinkling of aristocrats and clerics.38 Abendland ideas also extended beyond the bounds of West Germany alone: through the CEDI in particular, German proponents of the idea met several times a year with conservatives from various West European countries, especially Austria, France and Spain, in order to evolve in common a European concept of ‘the West’.39 The second reason was that the outbreak of the Cold War acted as the impetus for an explicit process of politicization within the pages of Neues Abendland. Clear positions were adopted on the Cold War, on the questions of ties with the West, European unification and the political system of the Federal Republic. Anti-communism now became more central than ever to the idea of ‘the West’: alongside the affiliation to Christendom, it became the intellectual bedrock of the movement. Numerous articles proclaimed that the Cold War essentially offered a choice between freedom and enslavement, between the Western Christian way of life and atheism. Contributors to the magazine saw the fact that the East represented a closed ideological system as a threat: against this the West had little to offer, given its renunciation of Christian values. In this way, the idea of a ‘two-front war’ emerged: externally, against the threats posed by a totalitarian ideological belief system, augmented by the military menace of the Cold War; and internally, the struggle against ‘liberal pluralism’.40 This militant anti-communism had by the end of the 1940s already led the magazine to call explicitly for the Federal Republic to align itself with the West, because ‘the persistence of the Cold War [represents] an immense danger to Germany as a no-man’s-land positioned between the fronts’.41 Added to this was an unequivocal plea for military strength and atomic deterrence, 42 as well as an early recognition of the ‘inevitability of a divided Germany’.43 The fact that the traditional conservative cultural rejection of the ‘American way of life’ was exempted from this alignment with the West is hardly surprising.44 For proponents of Abendland, after all, both East and West were equally ‘non-Christian’ ideas, and for them it was self-evident that ‘Christ … cannot opt either for the “West” or for the “East”’45 – a position that Axel Schildt has tellingly labelled a ‘tightrope walk between the Western option and anti-liberalism’.46 For the contributors to Neues Abendland, European unification also counted as one of the defensive strategies against threats from the East, despite all the appeals to Catholic Christian cultural unity. But concrete steps towards unification were met with scepticism, allusions to ‘formal democracy’47 and ‘a union of the drawing board’.48 Against this, the Abendland theorists began to propose

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their own ideas: rejecting the social contract, parliamentarism and supranationalism, they aspired to a hierarchical society with a recognized locus of authority. The model for this was furnished by the political systems of the Iberian Peninsula. The autocratic systems of Spain and Portugal seemed to embody exactly what Abendland circles expected of a ‘natural’ order: hierarchical social structures in which each would find ‘his’ place; no mass democracy, but elitist leadership by a charismatic personality with the ability to repress party interests and lobbyists; and a powerful church influence on state and society. This sense of fascination was indeed reflected in the organizational contacts with Spain cultivated by Abendland circles through CEDI since the beginning of the 1950s, by means of which CDU members of the Bundestag sought to improve GermanSpanish relations and achieve recognition of Franco.49 Alongside this enthusiasm for Spain and Portugal another model for contemporary German and European societies emerged, one that was explicitly linked to the period around 1930: the Austro-Hungarian version of Mitteleuropa. This reference back to the extinct Habsburg Empire served two purposes. On the one hand, it proposed the coexistence of diverse peoples under the Habsburg crown as a prototype for the future of Europe. On the other hand, it invoked sovereign personalities who emanated precisely that kind of God-given authority that Abendland circles felt was missing in the young Federal Republic – specifically, the person of Otto von Habsburg. They were not monarchists by conviction – for them it was more a question of authority – but they had a good deal of admiration for the son of the Austrian emperor. On top of this, the invocation of ‘Mitteleuropa’ carried reminiscences of a corporatist order which many in Abendland circles still saw as a putatively better alternative to ‘formal democracy’. Thus throughout the 1950s the geographical concepts of ‘Mitteleuropa’ and ‘the West’ faced each other as opposite poles, functioning as placeholders for the different models of political order they implied.50 This range of topics made it possible for the Abendland movement to become something approaching the ‘hegemonic ideology of integration’51 for the young Federal Republic in the first half of the 1950s. The movement proved compatible with a whole variety of groupings within West German conservatism. Catholics felt themselves to be addressed by its anti-modern world view; expellees appreciated its invocations of ‘Mitteleuropa’ and the memory of the ‘old homeland’, monarchists the homage to the Habsburg monarchy and Otto von Habsburg; those sceptical of democracy approved of the references to Iberian authoritarianism, South Germans applauded the anti-Prussian stance, supporters of European rapprochement the appeal to the transnational category of ‘the West’ – and all of them were united by their explicit anti-communism. The slogan of ‘Abendland’ was unique in its ability to bring together conservatives of very different stripes and mobilize them for far-reaching projects of change. But all this had vanished by the second half of the 1950s. The Abendland movement became the target of massive criticism in 1955, when Der Spiegel exposed its critical attitude to the constitution.52 The magazine Neues Abendland

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ceased publication in 1958, and although the movement was able to remain active by regrouping itself, this was on a far smaller scale than that of the early 1950s. Simultaneously, the advancing liberalization of West German society brought the purchase of the idea of Abendland to an end.53 It lost its role as a presiding concept for conservatives: the idea seemed too explicitly ideological, too Christian, too Romantic or simply too reactionary. A political alignment that leant on superseded traditions was no longer persuasive. ‘Abendland’ slowly but surely faded from public discourse. This marked the end of an epoch of intellectual history that had spanned a great arc stretching from the end of the First World War– with its recourse to even earlier ideas of political order from the Romantic era – to the end of the 1950s.54 In this period, ‘Abendland’ had extended its creative powers to a whole variety of different contexts. The evolution of ‘Abendland’ between the 1920s and 1950s fits exactly with an interpretive scheme in intellectual history that postulates this as a period of transformation, at the end of which ‘traditional’ ideas were forced into retreat and were increasingly superseded by ‘new’ patterns of thought. From this perspective, the 1950s appear as the ‘postscript’ to a historical period that as a whole was marked by ‘a desperate struggle by contemporaries for acceptable political models that could command consensus, but at the same time by a bitter conflict with opposing propositions from [elsewhere in] society’.55 The idea of Abendland was one type of political bid to model the future political and social structure of Germany and Europe. Yet – and this is decisive – it always appealed to a glorified past and remained deeply sceptical about the present. This fundamental stance was by the end of the 1950s no longer sustainable.

Notes I would like to thank Jane Caplan (St. Antony’s College) for the brilliant translation of the original manuscript.   1. This is especially the case with respect to the National Socialists’ nationalist and racist concepts of Europe, which are repeatedly described as ‘anti-Europe ideas’. See for example: W. Burgdorf. 1999. Chimäre Europa: Antieuropäische Diskurse in Deutschland (1648–1999), Bochum: Verlag Dieter Winkler. Peter Krüger speaks of a ‘counter-Europe’ (Gegeneuropa), in: P. Krüger. 1995. ‘Europabewußtsein in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in R. Hudemann, H. Kaelble and K. Schwabe (eds), Europa im Blick der Historiker, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 41.  2. Still relevant: B. Anderson. 2006 [1991]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition, London: Verso.   3. The English ‘occident’ and ‘West’ do not convey the specific Catholic-European dimensions of the German term ‘Abendland’, and for this reason the German term will be used throughout this chapter (translator’s note: I have followed this usage, despite the linguistic challenges its adjectival formations pose, except in a few contexts where ‘the West’ or ‘Western civilization’ seemed more appropriate).

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  4. A. Schildt. 2008. ‘Intellektuelle Konstruktionen (West-)Europas 1950’ available online from Clio – Themenportal Europäische Geschichte, , accessed 11 June 2013.   5. On ‘Abendland’ see e.g.: V. Conze. 2005. Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland zwischen Reichstradition und Westorientierung (1920–1970), Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag; on the concept of the Christian Abendland in literature and journalism in the post-war periods after 1918 and 1945, see H. Hürten. 1985. ‘Der Topos zum christlichen Abendland in Literatur und Publizistik nach den beiden Weltkriegen’, in A. Langner (ed.), Katholizismus, nationaler Gedanke und Europa seit 1800, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 131–154; J. Jost. 1994. ‘Der Abendland-Gedanke in Westdeutschland nach 1945: Versuch und Scheitern eines Paradigmenwechsels in der deutschen Geschichte nach 1945’, doctoral dissertation, Hannover: Universität Hannover; D. Pöpping. 2002. Abendland: Christliche Akademiker und die Utopie der Antimoderne 1900–1945, Berlin: Metropol-Verlag; A. Schildt. 1987. ‘Deutschlands Platz in einem “christlichen Abendland”: Konservative Publizisten aus dem Tat-Kreis in der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit’, in T. Koebner, G. Sautermeister and S. Schneider (eds), Deutschland nach Hitler: Zukunftspläne im Exil und aus der Besatzungszeit, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 344–369; A. Schildt. 1999. Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur westdeutschen Ideenlandschaft der 50er Jahre, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag; A. Schildt. 2000. ‘Eine Ideologie im Kalten Krieg: Ambivalenzen der abendländischen Gedankenwelt im ersten Jahrzehnt nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in T. Kühne (ed.), Von der Kriegskultur zur Friedenskultur? Zum Mentalitätswandel in Deutschland seit 1945, Münster/Hamburg/London: LIT, 49–63.   6. R. Faber. 1979. Abendland: Ein politischer ‘Kampfbegriff’, Hildesheim: Gerstenberg.   7. H. Hürten. 2009. ‘Europa und Abendland: Zwei unterschiedliche Begriffe politischer Orientierung’, in P.W. Hildmann (ed.), Vom christlichen Abendland zum christlichen Europa: Perspektiven eines religiös geprägten Europabegriffs für das 21. Jahrhundert, Argumente und Materialien zum Zeitgeschehen 65, Munich: Hanns Seidel Stiftung, Akademie für Politik und Zeitgeschehen, 14.  8. R. Anselm. 2009. ‘Abendland oder Europa: Anmerkungen aus evangelisch-theologischer Perspektive’, in P.W. Hildmann (ed.), Vom christlichen Abendland zum christlichen Europa: Perspektiven eines religiös geprägten Europabegriffs für das 21. Jahrhundert, Argumente und Materialien zum Zeitgeschehen 65, Munich: Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, Akademie für Politik und Zeitgeschehen 17.   9. On the ecumenical dimensions of the idea of Abendland in the twentieth century in particular, see: Pöpping, Abendland. 10. H. Gollwitzer. 1964. Europabild und Europagedanke: Beiträge zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: C.H. Beck, 15. 11. O. Spengler. 1973 [1918–1922]. Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, two volumes, unabridged special edition in one volume, Munich: C.H. Beck. 12. T. Ruster. 1994. Die verlorene Nützlichkeit der Religion: Katholizismus und Moderne in der Weimarer Republik, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 16. 13. H. Platz. 1925/26. ‘Abendländische Vorerinnerungen’, Abendland 1, 4. See also: H. Platz. 1924. Um Rhein und Abendland, Burg Rothenfels am Main: DeutschesQuickborn-Haus; H. Platz. 1924. Deutschland, Frankreich und die Idee des Abendlandes, Cologne: Verlag der Rhein.

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14. On the editorial group see H.-M. Bock. 2006. ‘Der Abendland-Kreis und das Wirken von Hermann Platz im katholischen Milieu der Weimarer Republik’, in M. Grunewald and U. Puschner (eds), Das katholische Intellektuellen-Milieu in Deutschland, seine Presse und seine Netzwerke (1871–1963), Bern: Peter Lang, 337–363. The fourteen editors included for example Goetz Briefs, Alois Dempf, Konrad Beyerle, Theodor Brauer, Ignaz Seipel or Hugo Graf Lerchenfeld. 15. F. Schreyvogl. 1925/26. ‘Kampf um das Abendland’, Abendland 1, 12. 16. G. Ebers. 1926/27. ‘Die Völkergemeinschaft’, Abendland 2, 80. 17. H. Arend. 1994. ‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Unvereinbaren: Verständigungskonzepte und kulturelle Begegnungen in den deutsch-französischen Beziehungen der Zwischenkriegszeit’, Francia 10, 140. 18. For individual biographical examples: Conze. 2005. Das Europa der Deutschen, 56–110. 19. On the discussion of Mitteleuropa that gathered momentum within Germany from the 1930s, see: J. Elvert. 1999. Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung (1918–1945), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag; P. Krüger. 1995. ‘Wirtschaftliche Mitteleuropa-Pläne in Deutschland zwischen den Weltkriegen: Anmerkungen zu ihrer Bewertung’, in R. Plaschka, H. Haselsteiner, A. Suppan, A. Drabek and B. Zaar (eds), Mitteleuropa-Konzeptionen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna: VÖAW, 283–303; H.C. Meyer. 1955. Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815–1945, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; J. LeRider. 1994. Mitteleuropa: Auf den Spuren eines Begriffes, translated from French by Robert Fleck, Vienna: Deuticke; P. Stirk (ed.), 1994. Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; C. Weimaer. 1992. ‘Mitteleuropa als politisches Ordnungskonzept? Darstellung und Analyse der historischen Ideen und Pläne sowie der aktuellen Diskussionsmodelle’, doctoral dissertation, Würzburg: Universität Würzburg. Cf. also J. Elvert. ‘The “New European Order” of National Socialism: Some Remarks on its Sources, Genesis and Manifestations’, in this volume. 20. K. Sontheimer. 1968. Antidemokratisches Denken: Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933, Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsgesellschaft, 223. See also: L. Kettenacker. 1996. ‘Der Mythos vom Reich’, in H. Berding (ed.), Mythos und Nation, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 261–298. 21. Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, 242. 22. R. Ebneth. 1978. Die österreichische Wochenzeitschrift ‘Der christliche Ständestaat’: Deutsche Emigration in Österreich 1933–1938 (Band 19 der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen), Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 8. 23. For example, Emil Franzel or Franz Klein (Robert Ingrim). Emil Franzel, b. 25 May 1901 in Haan (Bohemia), journalist and commentator, was as a young man a leading member of the Deutsche Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (DSAP) in Czechoslovakia. After leaving the party (and drawing close to the Nazis, something he denied after the end of the war) he became an active conservative and monarchist. After the end of the Second World War he was especially active on behalf of Sudeten German expellees, including as editor of Neues Abendland. He died on 29 June 1976. Robert Ingrim, known until 1946 as Franz Johann Klein, was born on 20 June 1895 in Vienna. After studying law he became active as a conservative monarchist journalist, including for the Christlicher Ständestaat. He emigrated to London in September 1938, and from there to the United States; there he was in close contact with the exiled monarchist circle around Otto von Habsburg, for which he edited the Voice of Austria. He returned to Europe in 1947, and lived in

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Switzerland until his death in March 1964. Up to then he was active as a journalist, including for Neues Abendland. 24. K. Breuning. 1969. Die Vision des Reiches: Deutscher Katholizismus zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur (1929–1934), Munich: Hueber, 238–253. 25. On ‘Abendland’ after the Second World War see e.g. Conze. 2005. Das Europa der Deutschen. Hürten, ‘Der Topos vom christlichen Abendland’; Jost, ‘Der AbendlandGedanke in Westdeutschland’; Schildt, ‘Deutschlands Platz in einem “christlichen Abendland”’; Schildt, Zwischen Abendland und Amerika; Schildt, ‘Eine Ideologie im Kalten Krieg’. 26. M. Broszat, K.-D. Henke and H. Woller, (eds). 1988. Von Stalingrad zur Währungsreform: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag; see, above all, the introduction. 27. Hürten, Europa und Abendland, 11. See also: D. von der Brelie-Lewien. 1990. ‘Abendland und Sozialismus: Zur Kontinuität politisch-kultureller Denkhaltungen’, in D. Lehnert and K. Megerle (eds). Politische Teilkulturen zwischen Integration und Politisierung: Zur politischen Kultur der Weimarer Republik, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 188–218. 28. B. von Schewick. 1981. Die katholische Kirche und die Entstehung von Verfassungen in Westdeutschland 1945–1950 (Band 30 der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen), Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 5–30. 29. Johann Wilhelm Naumann, b. 1897, was also editor of the Augsburger Tagespost from 1948. 30. For example, Ferdinand Kirchberger, Walter Hagemann, Helmut Ibach, Friedrich Zoepfl, Robert John, Anton Mayer (-Pfannholz), Wilhelm Schmidt, Hermann Port, Andreas Andrae and Werner Bergengruen. 31. Cf. G. Kroll. 1951. Grundlagen abendländischer Erneuerung: Das Manifest der abendländischen Aktion, Munich: Verlag Neues Abendland, 21–23. This kind of positive appeal to the Middle Ages was far from uncommon in Germany in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War. While reference to the Middle Ages was decreasing by the end of the 1940s in society at large as well as in Catholic circles, the adulation of medieval circumstances showed no such decline in Abendland circles but was sustained far into the 1950s. See, in relation to historiography, O.G. Oexle. 1996. Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter des Historismus (Kritische Studien zu Geschichtswissenschaft, Band 116), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 137–162; for Catholic reference to the Middle Ages see V. Bücker. 1989. Die Schulddiskussion im deutschen Katholizismus nach 1945, Bochum: Universitätsverlag Brockmeyer, 258. 32. ‘Politischer Universalismus’. 1946. Neues Abendland 1(6), 26–27. 33. Kroll, Grundlagen abendländischer Erneuerung, 10. 34. E. Schmittmann. 1947. ‘Demokratie als personale Volksordnung’, Neues Abendland 2, 3. 35. K. Speckner. 1948. ‘Rückkehr zu Europa’, Neues Abendland 3, 151. On efforts towards re-Christianization see especially H. Lübbe. 1965. Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber; W. Lück. 1976. Das Ende der Nachkriegszeit: Ein Untersuchung zur Funktion des Begriffs der Säkularisierung in der ‘Kirchentheorie’ Westdeutschlands, Bern/Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 36. On Emil Franzel see Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen, 71–85, and also the essay V. Conze. 2011. ‘“Gegen den Wind der Zeit?” Emil Franzel und das “Abendland” zwischen 1930 und 1950’, in A. Gallus and A. Schildt (eds), Rückblickend in die Zukunft: Politische Öffentlichkeit und intellektuelle Positionen in Deutschland um 1950 und um

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1930, Göttingen, 181–199. On the politicization of the Neues Abendland, see also D. von der Brelie-Lewien. 1986. Katholische Zeitschriften in den Westzonen 1945–1949: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Kultur der Nachkriegszeit, Göttingen: Muster-Schmidt Verlag, 207. 37. On the activities and events mounted by the Abendland movement: Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen, 111–206. See also Schildt, Zwischen Abendland und Amerika. 38. These included Heinrich von Brentano, Alois Hundhammer, Hans Hutter, Richard Jaeger, Hans-Joachim von Merkatz, Hermann Pünder, Hans Schuberth, Theodor Steltzer, Theodor Oberländer and Franz-Joseph Würmeling. The Abendland organizations used these well-known names to attract support, although except for HansJoachim von Merkatz and Richard Jaeger these politicians can probably not be counted as members of the narrower leadership group. This was composed of various members of the upper Swabian family of von Waldburg-Zeil, who also financed the Abendland organizations, the legal scholar Friedrich August von der Heydte, the journalist Emil Franzel, Georg Stadtmüller, a historian of eastern Europe, and Georg von GauppBerghausen, who as secretary to the Abendland Academy and the CEDI held the presiding organizational authority. A little later, from around the mid-1950s, Otto von Habsburg was another prominent personality to join the leading circle of Abendland activists. On the circle who formed the Abendland movement: Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen, 12, 133f. 39. On the activities of the CEDI cf: Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen, 169–206. See also: B. Aschmann. 1999. ‘Treue Freunde …?’ Westdeutschland und Spanien 1945–1963, Stuttgart: Fritz Steiner Verlag; P.-M. Weber. 1992. Spanische Deutschlandpolitik 1945– 1958, Saarbrücken: Verlag Breitenbach. 40. Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen, 135ff. 41. E. Franzel. 1949. ‘Pariser Konferenz’, Neues Abendland 4, 244. 42. See for example E. Franzel. 1950. ‘Ein notwendiges Nachwort’, Neues Abendland 5, 182. On this kind of argumentation see I. Stölken-Fitschen. 1995. Atombombe und Geistesgeschichte: Eine Studie der fünfziger Jahre aus deutscher Sicht, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 54–90. 43. E. Franzel. 1949. ‘Staatsform und geschichtlicher Raum’, Neues Abendland 4, 47–51. 44. On the general rejection of the ‘American way of life’ among conservative intellectuals in West Germany, see: A. Schildt. 1995. Moderne Zeiten, Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik der fünfziger Jahre, Hamburg: Hans Christian Verlag, 398–423. 45. W. Heilmann. 1951. ‘Christliches Gewissen zwischen Ost und West’, Neues Abendland 6, 602. 46. Schildt, Zwischen Abendland und Amerika, 40. 47. ‘Straßburger Europarat lustlos’. 1951. Neues Abendland 6, 391. 48. Kroll, Grundlagen abendländischer Erneuerung, 78. 49. On the activities of the CEDI see the references in note 39 above. 50. One could try to apply the opposition ‘liberal’/‘anti-liberal’ in a truncated form to geographical concepts of Europe, with ‘Mitteleuropa’, ‘Abendland’ and ‘Reich’ as geographical models of Europe for anti-liberal ideas of political order. But the term ‘Europe’ was interpretively less unambiguously fixed and offered scope to liberal and anti-liberal principles alike. When German ideas of Europe became limited to liberal-democratic and pluralist principles after 1945, this was accompanied by a semantic narrowing of the concept of ‘Europe’ as well.

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51. Schildt, ‘Intellektuelle Konstruktionen (West-)Europas 1950’. 52. Conze, Das Europa der Deutschen, 162–169. 53. On this process of liberalization see especially U. Herbert (ed.), 2002. Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. 54. P. Nolte. 2000. Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft. Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: C.H. Beck, 25. 55. ‘Postscript’ (Schwanzstück) is Schildt’s term: Schildt, Moderne Zeiten, 32. The rest of the quotation is from P. Nolte. 1997. ‘Gesellschaftstheorie und Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Umrisse einer Ideengeschichte der modernen Gesellschaft’, in T. Mergel and T. Welskopp (eds), Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Theoriedebatte. Munich: C.H. Beck, 285f.

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Bücker, V. 1989. Die Schulddiskussion im deutschen Katholizismus nach 1945, Bochum: Universitätsverlag Brockmeyer. Burgdorf, W. 1999. Chimäre Europa: Antieuropäische Diskurse in Deutschland (1648–1999), Bochum: Verlag Dieter Winkler. Conze, V. 2005. Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa in Deutschland zwischen Reichstradition und Westorientierung (1920–1970), Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag. –––––––. 2011. ‘“Gegen den Wind der Zeit”? Emil Franzel und das “Abendland” zwischen 1930 und 1950’, in A. Gallus and A. Schildt (eds), Rückblickend in die Zukunft: Politische Öffentlichkeit und intellektuelle Positionen in Deutschland um 1950 und um 1930, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 181– 199. Ebers, G. 1926/27. ‘Die Völkergemeinschaft’, Abendland 2, 79–82. Ebneth, R. 1978. Die österreichische Wochenzeitschrift ‘Der christliche Ständestaat’: Deutsche Emigration in Österreich 1933–1938 (Band 19 der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen), Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag. Elvert, J. 1999. Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung (1918–1945), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Faber, R. 1979. Abendland: Ein politischer ‘Kampfbegriff’, Hildesheim: Gerstenberg. Franzel, E. 1949a. ‘Pariser Konferenz’, Neues Abendland 4, 244. –––––––. 1949b. ‘Staatsform und geschichtlicher Raum’, Neues Abendland 4, 47–51. –––––––. 1950. ‘Ein notwendiges Nachwort’, Neues Abendland 5, 181–183. Gollwitzer, H. 1964. Europabild und Europagedanke: Beiträge zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich: C.H. Beck. Heilmann, W. 1951. ‘Christliches Gewissen zwischen Ost und West’, Neues Abendland 6, 597–606. Herbert, U. (ed.). 2002. Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Hürten, H. 1985. ‘Der Topos zum christlichen Abendland in Literatur und Publizistik nach den beiden Weltkriegen’, in A. Langner (ed.), Katholizismus, nationaler Gedanke und Europa seit 1800, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 131–154. –––––––. 2009. ‘Europa und Abendland: Zwei unterschiedliche Begriffe politischer Orientierung’, in P.W. Hildmann (ed.), Vom christlichen Abendland zum christlichen Europa: Perspektiven eines religiös geprägten Europabegriffs für das 21. Jahrhundert, Argumente und Materialien zum Zeitgeschehen 65, Munich: Hanns Seidel Stiftung, Akademie für Politik und Zeitgeschehen, 9–15. Jost, J. 1994. ‘Der Abendland-Gedanke in Westdeutschland nach 1945: Versuch und Scheitern eines Paradigmenwechsels in der deutschen Geschichte nach 1945’, doctoral dissertation, Hannover: Universität Hannover.

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Kettenacker, L. 1996. ‘Der Mythos vom Reich’, in H. Berding (ed.), Mythos und Nation, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 261–298. Kroll, G. 1951. Grundlagen abendländischer Erneuerung: Das Manifest der abendländischen Aktion, Munich: Verlag Neues Abendland. Krüger, P. 1995a. ‘Europabewußtsein in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in R. Hudemann, H. Kaelble and K. Schwabe (eds), Europa im Blick der Historiker, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 31–53. –––––––. 1995b. ‘Wirtschaftliche Mitteleuropa-Pläne in Deutschland zwischen den Weltkriegen: Anmerkungen zu ihrer Bewertung’, in R. Plaschka, H. Haselsteiner, A. Suppan, A. Drabek and B. Zaar (eds), Mitteleuropa-Konzeptionen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna: VÖAW, 283–303. LeRider, J. 1994. Mitteleuropa: Auf den Spuren eines Begriffes, translated from French by Robert Fleck, Vienna: Deuticke. Lübbe, H. 1965. Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber. Lück, W. 1976. Das Ende der Nachkriegszeit: Ein Untersuchung zur Funktion des Begriffs der Säkularisierung in der ‘Kirchentheorie’ Westdeutschlands, Bern/ Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Meyer, H.C. 1955. Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815–1945, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Nolte, P. 1997. ‘Gesellschaftstheorie und Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Umrisse einer Ideengeschichte der modernen Gesellschaft’, in T. Mergel and T. Welskopp (eds), Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Theoriedebatte, Munich: C.H. Beck. –––––––. 2000. Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft. Selbstentwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: C.H. Beck. Oexle, G. 1996. Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter des Historismus (Kritische Studien zu Geschichtswissenschaft, Band 116), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Platz, H. 1924a. Deutschland, Frankreich und die Idee des Abendlandes, Cologne: Verlag der Rhein. –––––––. 1924b. Um Rhein und Abendland, Burg Rothenfels am Main: Deutsches-Quickborn-Haus. –––––––. 1925/26. ‘Abendländische Vorerinnerungen’, Abendland 1, 4. ‘Politischer Universalismus’. 1946. Neues Abendland 1(6), 26–27. Pöpping, D. 2002. Abendland: Christliche Akademiker und die Utopie der Antimoderne 1900–1945, Berlin: Metropol-Verlag. Ruster, T. 1994. Die verlorene Nützlichkeit der Religion: Katholizismus und Moderne in der Weimarer Republik, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag. von Schewick, B. 1981. Die katholische Kirche und die Entstehung von Verfassungen in Westdeutschland 1945–1950 (Band 30 der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen), Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag. Schildt, A. 1987. ‘Deutschlands Platz in einem “christlichen Abendland”: Konservative Publizisten aus dem Tat-Kreis in der Kriegs und Nachkriegszeit’,

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in T. Koebner,G. Sautermeister and S. Schneider (eds), Deutschland nach Hitler: Zukunftspläne im Exil und aus der Besatzungszeit, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 344–369. –––––––. 1995. Moderne Zeiten, Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik der fünfziger Jahre, Hamburg: Hans Christian Verlag. –––––––. 1999. Zwischen Abendland und Amerika: Studien zur westdeutschen Ideenlandschaft der 50er Jahre, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag. –––––––. 2000. ‘Eine Ideologie im Kalten Krieg: Ambivalenzen der abendländischen Gedankenwelt im ersten Jahrzehnt nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in T. Kühne (ed.), Von der Kriegskultur zur Friedenskultur? Zum Mentalitätswandel in Deutschland seit 1945, Münster/Hamburg/London: LIT, 49–63. –––––––. 2008. ‘Intellektuelle Konstruktionen (West)Europas 1950’. Available online from Clio – Themenportal Europäische Geschichte , accessed 11 June 2013. Schmittmann, E. 1947. ‘Demokratie als personale Volksordnung’, Neues Abendland 2, 1–3. Schreyvogl, F. 1925/26. ‘Kampf um das Abendland’, Abendland 1, 12. Sontheimer, K. 1968. Antidemokratisches Denken: Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933, Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsgesellschaft. Speckner, K. 1948. ‘Rückkehr zu Europa’, Neues Abendland 3, 151. Spengler, O. 1973 [1918–22]. Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, two volumes, unabridged special edition in one volume, Munich: C.H. Beck. Stirk, P. 1994. Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stölken-Fitschen, I. 1995. Atombombe und Geistesgeschichte: Eine Studie der fünfziger Jahre aus deutscher Sicht, Baden-Baden: Nomos. ‘Straßburger Europarat lustlos’. 1951. Neues Abendland 6, 391. Weber, P.-M. 1992. Spanische Deutschlandpolitik 1945–1958, Saarbrücken: Verlag Breitenbach. Weimaer, C. 1992. ‘Mitteleuropa als politisches Ordnungskonzept? Darstellung und Analyse der historischen Ideen und Pläne sowie der aktuellen Diskussionsmodelle’, doctoral dissertation, Würzburg: Universität Würzburg.

4 The Call for a New European Order Origins and Variants of the Anti-liberal Concept of the ‘Europe of the Regions’ Undine Ruge

Inventing the ‘Europe of the Regions’ – Concept and Term There are lively ongoing discussions about a new narrative for Europe – a story to tell to make (more) sense of the European integration process and its institutional outcome, the European Union. This often goes hand in hand with the demand for ‘more Europe’. The call for ‘(more) Europe’ to rescue the Europeans (Civilization! The World!) is a constituent part of the history of ideas of Europe, and can often be interpreted as the sign of a current crisis. Yet, as clearly shown in this volume, the call for Europe is not necessarily rooted in democratic, liberal or progressive motives; the call for a new European order, differing from the already existing institutional framework, is quite often on the contrary European anti-liberal (even right wing) at the same time. In this chapter, I would like to draw attention to an originally anti-liberal concept of Europe: the ‘Europe of the Regions’. It is rooted in the so-called ‘integral federalist’ debates in France in the interwar period, namely the intellectual group Ordre Nouveau, and was further developed and differentiated after the Second World War. As in other cases of political concepts it is necessary to distinguish between the invention of the concept and the coining of the term: while the concept ‘Europe of the Regions’ dates back to the 1930s, the term ‘Europe of the Regions’ was only coined in the 1960s. My approach to writing a critical intellectual history of the concept ‘Europe of the Regions’ therefore draws on the Cambridge School of intellectual history

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and its North American pendant, Terence Ball’s ‘Critical Conceptual History’. Ball writes: ‘The task of the critical conceptual historian is to chart changes in the concepts constituting the discourses of political agents living and dead.’1 I also drew on Jean-François Sirinelli’s intellectual network analysis and his concept of an intellectual generation to fully grasp the intellectual relationships of the main protagonists.2 While pinning down the origins of both the concept and the term ‘Europe of the Regions’ in the twentieth-century Franco-German intellectual context, I will show the ideological content of this concept and its varieties – ‘Europe of the Regions’ and ‘Europe of the Ethnic Groups’ – from the 1920s through to the 1960s. I will first focus on the French intellectual group, Ordre Nouveau. This group is almost forgotten today3 but it was quite typical of interwar ideological debates on the one hand and quite influential in the history of ideas of and movements for Europe on the other. This is due mainly to its protagonists Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont who were active as intellectuals in the interwar period but became also activists in pro-European pressure groups after the Second World War.

From the Great Disorder to a European ‘Ordre Nouveau’ Much has been said and written about the First World War and its influence on the development of European politics and ideologies in its aftermath. Clearly, this experience of the first industrialized war can hardly be overestimated for the shaping of political ideas and Realpolitik in the interwar period, especially with regard to the growing awareness of the European dimension of politics. In the 1920s and early 1930s, there was a controversial and diverse debate about the possibility of reconciling Germany and France and – as a consequence – of uniting Europe. Of course, this period was, in the first instance, one of rising violence amongst extremist left and right activists in the streets and the beginning of the fascist movement in Germany (and other countries), while in France pacifism was a very strong intellectual and political idea. But still, there were influential intellectuals like Paul Valéry, André Gide, Robert Curtius and Thomas and Heinrich Mann, pressure groups like Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Paneuropean Union, politicians like Aristide Briand presenting in 1929 his famous plan ‘sur l’organisation d’un régime d’union fédérale européenne’, and economic leaders aiming at a Trade or Economic Union who, though representing only a minority in the political spectrum in Germany and France, all called – with different motives – for reconciliation, cooperation and more cultural, economic and political unity in Europe. Apart from these early ideas of European integration and existing alongside the politically dominant groups, there were certain groups of intellectuals in Paris who were questioning the ideological gap between the rightist Action Française and the leftist Cartel des gauches. They levelled fundamental criticism at the political and social structures in France. These ‘non-conformistes des

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années trente’4 gathered around journals like Esprit and L’Ordre Nouveau. Most of them were members of the so-called ‘generation of 1905’ (Jean-François Sirinelli). Their predominant impression was that of living at a time of great disorder. They disliked the pro-European ideas by Coudenhove-Kalergi or Briand. They described themselves as ‘ni droite, ni gauche’5 (neither right nor left) and they heavily opposed liberalism, capitalism, collectivism, rationalism, parliamentary democracy and the nation-state. The great disorder they perceived was not only political, institutional or economic; it represented, in their eyes, a crisis of civilization as such. Europe was, after the disaster of the world war, doomed to perish – unless Europe followed their rescue recipe for a new order: first a revolution aiming at the human ‘person’, then the abolition of nation-states and parliamentary democracies and finally the organization of Europe in an ‘integral federalist’ way. France should initiate the revolution and thereby fulfil its mission as a revolutionary model for the rest of Europe. It goes without saying that these ‘nonconformists’ disagreed deeply with Julien Benda’s argumentation in La Trahison des clercs.6 In their view, intellectuals were obliged to act as prototypes of what they called ‘la personne ou l’homme libre et engagé’.7 They should not abstain from political activities, they should take responsibility and lead the revolutionary movement for an overall change of society and politics in France (and Europe). The nonconformist intellectuals saw themselves not only as initiators of this personalist revolution (engagés) but also as the future leaders of a new order. Denis de Rougemont later complained that Jean-Paul Sartre had taken the word engagement from his and his friends’ writings: ‘I let him have the word, and I kept the thing [it refers to].’8 Looking more closely at these nonconformist ideas, I will concentrate on members of the group Ordre Nouveau. One of the most important thinkers of this group was Alexandre Marc, a Russian immigrant originally named Aleksandr Markovič Lipianskij, who was born in Odessa in 1904. He finished school in Paris because his parents had left Russia at the time of the revolution. Marc first studied at German universities (Jena and Freiburg) and was influenced by Max Scheler and William Stern, fathers of the so-called Personalismus; from 1923 on, he continued his studies in Paris and quickly became integrated in French intellectual life.9 Marc initiated several intellectual circles; in 1930 he founded Ordre Nouveau. Other members were Gabriel Rey, Arnaud Dandieu, Robert Aron and Henri Petitot. Marc was a gifted networker: He was also friends with Emmanuel Mounier, founder of the journal Esprit (until they had a falling out in 1934),10 as well as Denis de Rougemont. De Rougemont joined Ordre Nouveau in 1931. Born in 1906 in Couvet, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, he was an immigrant, too. He was a writer inclined to cultural pessimism, a Protestant personalist, a transnational intellectual and activist working for European federalism. It was de Rougemont who finally coined the term for the concept ‘Europe of the Regions’ in 1962.11

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Marc and his collaborators also wrote for other journals like Esprit, Plans, Hic et Nunc, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Présence, Mouvements or Jeune Droite and they continued to do so even as they started their own journal L’Ordre Nouveau in May 1933. Roughly speaking, the intellectuals of Ordre Nouveau called for a revolution centred on la personne to establish a decentralized new social and political order replacing the nation-state (called fédéralisme intégral); this new order should stretch towards a European level. Their way of thinking about the human being focused on the concept of personne. Characterizing themselves as personnalistes, the members of Ordre Nouveau tried to set themselves apart from the frequent ideological vocabulary of the 1930s (namely fascism, communism and liberalism). Their notion of person is opposed to the liberal concept of the individual perceived as atomized and to the totalitarian view of man counting only as a member of the community (or Volksgemeinschaft). The person as a (in a religious sense) spiritually rooted human being is seen as having a creative relationship to the community and having a strong sense of responsibility with regard to other men.12 Personalism sees itself as a philosophy of the ‘real’, of the ‘concrete’ human being. Society and politics have to subordinate to the person: only a society allowing humans to become persons is a legitimate society: Society, economics, politics are human realities, made by men, to serve men. … A disastrous evolution, for a long time now, has led to the human person no longer being anything more than a materialist schema, an abstraction, an anonymous element, a phantom. The liberals’ homo oeconomicus, the democrats’ homo politicus, the idealists’ homo sapiens, all of these are unreal schemas of a fundamental reality … We want the primacy of the human person over all other values and over all necessities.13

The nation-state, especially in its French version, is condemned by the members of Ordre Nouveau, it is the ‘enemy’14: ‘Yet wanting to make the nationstate the alpha and omega of human life [would mean] condemning man to rootlessness … ’15 Nation and state have, in their eyes, to be separated: the nation is merely a cultural and spiritual construct without fixed frontiers (it resembles the concept of Kulturnation by Friedrich Meinecke); the state can be but an economic and administrative instrument. Feelings of belonging and feelings of real patriotism can only evolve in the realm of small, ‘natural’, even ‘organic’ communities such as the family, communal entities, the region, and the profession or corporation: ‘True patriotism proceeds from the irreducible feeling of attachment to this milieu, from the spontaneous relationship built between a human being and the powers of soil and blood.’16 Therefore, the real Fatherland can only be the region – its size being neither big nor small, but just ‘humain’.17 This regional and natural identity of man should be taken seriously in a new political and social order. Only with such a personalist revolution could a new order be achieved that would then allow the person to be at the very centre of society.

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Political authority should be concentrated in communal councils and representations of corporations, legislative powers should be executed by a federal economic council and a federal administrative council. The highest and most independent organ would be a ‘Conseil Suprême’ to safeguard the observance of the personalist and federalist principles. The revolution towards the new order is aiming at constructing all relationships in a society – social, economic, political – in a federal way; this is why members of Ordre Nouveau called the basis of a new order ‘fédéralisme integral’. First used by Jean Jardin in 1933, Alexandre Marc took up the notion in 1934, and formulated a doctrine after 1945.18 The personalist and federalist revolution should spread throughout Europe, destroying the nation-states and enabling persons to build a subsidiary order bottom-up: communal entities – regions – European federation; hence, there it was, the concept ‘Europe of the Regions’ (without the term). This new order would, according to the intellectuals of Ordre Nouveau, lead to ‘l’Europe de paix organique et profonde’.19 To prepare this European federation, members of Ordre Nouveau tried to establish relations with groups in other European countries, namely in Germany, Belgium and Great Britain. They wanted to gain the hearts of the European youth for their federal revolution. In February 1932, a congress of the Franco-German Youth was organized in Frankfurt. Among the German participants were Otto Abetz, Otto Strasser and Harro Schulze-Boysen; among the participants from France were Philippe Lamour, Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont. Although there were some affinities between the German members of the so-called ‘Konservative Revolution’ and the French nonconformists, their definition of nation, their special perspective on regions and especially their vision of a federal Europe were significantly different; in the end, it did not allow for a real alliance.

Anti-liberal and Anti-totalitarian – The Ideas of the ‘Ordre Nouveau’ The intellectuals of Ordre Nouveau clearly start from an anti-liberal point of view; they share this attitude with many conservative or right-wing thinkers of their time (in France and Germany). For them, liberal thought is the source of right and left totalitarianism: ‘Thus, let us specify again: the first task of intellectuals who have understood the perils of totalitarianism (whether right wing or left wing) is not to “adhere” to any sort of anti-fascism, but to attack the way of thought that will necessarily give rise to fascism and Stalinism. And that is liberal thought.’20 They are baptizing the (French) state, its parliamentary democracy and party system, as liberal – and asking to reject it: ‘The regime of [political]

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parties leads to that of the single party; parliamentary disorder results in dictatorship. If one wants to escape from tyranny and the totalitarian state, one must fight the tyranny of the “liberal” state.’21 Some of the nonconformists take the North American model as the antagonist both of Europe and of their ideas of a new order: Fordism and Taylorism would lead to a marginalization and mechanization of human beings in the work process and in society.22 Against rationalism and the perceived abstract individual of liberal thinking who is unable to rely to others in the masssociety, they put forward their idea of the responsible person who is emotionally rooted in natural communities such as the family, the corporation and the region. Members of Ordre Nouveau also developed an anti-egalitarian discourse: ‘The peace that we want, the order that we want, the solidarity that we want, will be founded on this anti-egalitarian, personalist affirmation … : each person must be in his place.’23 It is not only the social order that is conceptualized in an anti-egalitarian way; the political structures of the integral federalist new order do not provide for elections or parties – on the contrary, they are rejected, too.24 The highest political organ should be the ‘Conseil Suprême’ consisting, by co-optation, of those nonconformist intellectuals who prepared the revolution for the new order. It is, in their eyes, the natural right of the best citizens to lead the others. In their appraisal for organic communities they follow the tradition of French conservative thinking à la Charles Maurras; they cooperated closely with the intellectuals of the Jeune Droite as well.25 The nonconformists also take up ideas of the French right-wing regionalism as represented, for instance, by J. Charles-Brun and his Fédération régionaliste française (or Mouvement régionaliste français), founded in 1900.26 With French conservative thinking they share anti-egalitarianism as well as anti-parliamentarism. Yet the nonconformists of Ordre Nouveau differ on two essential points from mainstream conservatism of that time: firstly in their opposition to the nation-state and ‘old-fashioned’ nationalism, and secondly in their support for an integral federalist revolution aiming at a ‘Europe of the Regions’ avant la lettre. With regard to the anti-liberal and yet anti-totalitarian impetus, the incorporation of right-wing and, to some extent, left ideas (mostly with regard to the organization of labour), it does not come as a surprise that the nonconformists reacted in different ways during the Second World War: some followed the route of Résistance (for instance, Alexandre Marc joined ‘Libérer et fédérer’, a Résistance group in Toulouse in 1942), some found an alignment with Pétain (like Jean Jardin and Robert Loustau), others chose exile, for example Denis de Rougemont who first agitated in the Résistance in Switzerland and then migrated to the United States. In any case, the concept of the ‘Europe of the Regions’ remained on the intellectual agenda of the main protagonists and was further differentiated in what I would like to call the two original variants of the ‘Europe of the Regions’.27

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Two Variants on One Concept – ‘Europe des Régions’ and ‘Europe des Ethnies’ After the Second World War, the central protagonists of the nonconformist movement, such as Alexandre Marc and Denis de Rougemont, developed their integral-federalist concepts further and sought to win acceptance for them in French groups in favour of a federal Europe. In the French debate, personalists and federalists discussed internal regionalization and advocated a European federation that they hoped would bring with it consequences for the French political system. The ideology of organic communities, as represented by integral federalism in France (and with specific functions in Germany, too), had clearly anti-parliamentary, anti-liberal, and ethnoregionalistic overtones that could already be recognized in the parallel personalist and federalist discourses in the interwar years.28 The aim was to save the human being as a person in an era of ‘massification’ from totalitarian regimes and ‘formal democracy’ by giving ‘organic’ communities greater importance in a federal system. The French integral-federalist discourse was directed against the nation-state. French integral federalism continued to develop and eventually produced two variations of the interwar concept that now were coined in words: the terms ‘Europe des Régions’ (Denis de Rougemont)29 and ‘Europe des Ethnies’ (Guy Héraud).30 The introduction of the term ‘Europe of the Regions’ in the 1960s and the discussions on the subject in the 1970s are to be seen against the background of what was perceived as a crisis of the nation-state in (Western) Europe. On the one hand, intellectuals (and others) of a federal and pro-European orientation31 observed stagnation in the process of European integration (toward a single state) that resulted from political opposition from de Gaulle and then from his successor, Georges Pompidou, and criticized the inability or reluctance of nation-states to participate in an integration that would encroach on their sovereignty. On the other hand, regionalist and new social movements posed an increasing challenge to the nation-state,32 thus seeming to confirm the theory of the integral federalists that it did not embody the ideal level of political organization (anymore). France, in particular, saw a mobilization of support for regionalism.33 In France in particular, this crisis in the legitimacy of the nation-state provided the background to a discussion of questions of decentralization or regionalization. Ideas for the centralization of France were initially based on a technocracy grounded in increased administrative efficiency and planning: these plans for functional regionalization in the increasingly territorialized welfare state preceded political regionalism. The new social movements did not fail to leave their mark on Denis de Rougemont who integrated demands made by the ecological and peace movements into his thought. The question of the regionalization of France occupied centre stage at the conference in Aix-enProvence in 1962 at which Denis de Rougemont finally coined the term ‘Europe des Régions’.34 Although he introduced the term to intellectual and political discourse about Europe as early as 1962, he did not publish detailed remarks

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in writing relating to the concept of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ until 1968.35 Denis de Rougemont himself said that he was surprised by the resonance that his concept of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ found: ‘These words awakened an echo that was for me most unexpected: they corresponded not only to the wishes of the conference organizers, who knew the needs of their region, but also to an entire movement of political thought that was already much broader with much stronger foundations than I even dared to hope.’36 At first, he sought to discuss the ‘Europe of the Regions’ with other intellectuals. In the 1960s, Rougemont had formed a workgroup on regionalism in which Guy Héraud was also involved. Their initial conclusions were then published in the form of articles in the Bulletin du Centre Européen de la Culture edited by Rougemont. In contrast to Rougemont’s remarks, there was also another variant of the concept of ‘Europe of the Regions’, developed by Guy Héraud at roughly the same time – his book L’Europe des Ethnies was published in 1963 – for a European federation based on ethic regions. Héraud, too, made reference to other authors, and his ethnofederalist ideas opposed to the nation-state were themselves frequently attacked. Guy Héraud’s concept, which he referred to with the term ‘Europe des Ethnies’, can be described as ethnic and opposed to the nation-state, and thus was an attractive point of reference for various groups. This model of integral federalism developed further as the dominant discourse in France from the 1960s to the 1980s, particularly in groups in favour of European integration and the ethnoregionalistic debates about ‘protecting minorities’. The integral ethnic federalism as opposed to the nationstate that Héraud decisively shaped found its way above all into European organizations for the protection of ethnic groups such as the FUEV and its organ, the journal Europa Ethnica. At the same time, there emerged a network of interpersonal discourse between German (primarily Bavarian), Austrian and French academics; activists and organizations for the protection of minorities; and German politicians and associations that took up the cause of displaced people. Ideas of a ‘Europa der Völker’ were discussed in this discourse. It is clear that integral ethnic federalism, with its debates about a ‘Europe of monoethnic regions’ or a ‘Europa der Völker’, embodied and continues to embody – the networks of the German-Austrian New Right and the French Nouvelle Droite included – a European and transnational discourse. Denis de Rougemont and Guy Héraud found themselves in an interpersonal discourse context and received (and criticized) each other’s work. Together with other integral-federalist authors – such as Alexandre Marc, for example – they published, offered university summer schools, and worked for federalist groups. From the beginning, the debate about a ‘Europe of the Regions’ was marked by the integral-federalist and personalist ideology of the interwar years and the leading figures within it. Even if the concept of ‘Europe of the Regions’ was formulated differently by de Rougemont and Héraud, both remained anti-liberal and opposed to the nation-state.

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‘Europe of the Regions’: Anti-liberal – What Else? The concept of ‘Europe of the Regions’ clearly derives from an anti-liberal starting point. Yet, what do we gain from defining pro-European ideas as anti-liberal apart from the fact that it helps us to better define and maybe defend liberalism?37 Taking the example of the intellectual group Ordre Nouveau, yes, its protagonists use many anti-liberal arguments to construct their personalist and integral-federalist model of an ideal European order. Yet some of the same intellectuals, namely Denis de Rougemont, developed a real Verantwortungsethik (‘ethics of responsibility’) for intellectuals when it was more à la mode to distance oneself from politics (cf. Julien Benda); and he did it with a clearly antitotalitarian, anti-nation-state and pro-European impetus. We clearly need to draw the whole picture of European ideas when talking about the history of European integration; anti-liberal concepts are part of it, and are worth being analysed in depth. Yet understanding whether some anti-liberal ideas of Europe helped or help to drive the European integration process forward or whether they are opposed to it due to, for instance, other ideological elements, is necessary for intellectual historians as well. The historical and comparative perspective of this volume, as well as its depictions of some old ideas in disguise, may help us to better understand current debates about more, less or different Europe – without doubt a challenging task for any ‘intellectuel responsable et engagé ’.

Notes   1. T. Ball. 1988. Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History, Oxford: Blackwell, 14.   2. Cf. J.-F. Sirinelli and P. Ory. 1986. Les Intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, Paris: A. Colin. J.-F. Sirinelli (ed.). 1987. Générations intellectuelles: Effets d’ âge et phénomènes de génération dans le milieu intellectuel français, Paris: C.N.R.S.   3. Michel Winock for example, who wrote an impressive study on the ‘century of the intellectuals’ in France only mentions it briefly. He does not recognize, in my view, its potential for the history of ideas on Europe. See M. Winock. 1997. Le siècle des intellectuels, Paris: Editions du Seuil (Collection ‘Points’).   4. Cf. J.-L. Loubet del Bayle. 1969. Les non-conformistes des années 30. Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française, Paris: Editions du Seuil.   5. Ordre Nouveau. 1933. ‘Premiers principes’, L’Ordre Nouveau 1, 0.   6. Cf. J. Benda. 1927. La Trahison des clercs, Paris: Editions Grasset.   7. See in more detail: U. Ruge. 2003. Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’: Kritische Ideengeschichte eines konservativen Konzepts, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 67–70.   8. D. de Rougemont. 1994. ‘L’Europe et les intellectuels’ (Réponses à Alison Browning), in D. de Rougemont. Œuvres complètes de Denis de Rougemont. Tôme III: Ecrits sur l’Europe (1962–1986), 2nd edition, Christophe Calame (ed.), Paris: Editions de la Différence,

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778. De Rougemont elaborated on the meaning of engagement in the context of personalism in his book Politique de la personne (1934, Paris: Editions Je Sers). See U. Ruge. 2006. ‘“Libre et engagé”: Der Intellektuelle als Person und Prophet im Denken Denis de Rougemonts’, in H. Bluhm and W. Reese-Schäfer (eds), Die Intellektuellen und der Weltlauf, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 211–229.  9. On the life of Alexandre Marc cf. M. Waechter. 2008. ‘Revolutionär, Föderalist, Europäer: Mensch und Gesellschaft bei Alexandre Marc’, Osteuropa 12, 125–135; Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, 70–74. 10. This was caused by the ‘Letter to Adolf Hitler’ which was written by Alexandre Marc and Henri Petitot and published in L’Ordre Noveau in November 1933 (cf. Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, 74). 11. See in more detail Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, 173–227. 12. Without going into detail it should be pointed out that this notion of ‘personne’ has a deeply spiritual or even religious rooting which once again relates it to the German discourses of the time, namely in the realm of the Abendland discourse; see also Vanessa Conze in this volume. 13. Ordre Nouveau. 1934. ‘Notre foi’, L’Ordre Nouveau 9, 7. 14. ‘L’état-nation, voilà l’ennemi … ’ D. de Rougemont. 1936. ‘Plésiscite et démocratie’, L’Ordre Nouveau 30, 25. 15. M. Glady (alias A. Marc). 1934. ‘A hauteur d’homme’, L’Ordre Nouveau 15, 8. 16. A. Marc. 1936. ‘Patrie – Nation – Etat’, L’Ordre Nouveau 32, 30. 17. See Marc, ‘Patrie – Nation – Etat’, 32. 18. See Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, 84–85. 19. R. Aron. 1934. ‘Solidarité Européenne’, L’Ordre Nouveau 15, 5. 20. D. de Rougemont. 1938. ‘Trop d’irresponsables s’engagent! (Responsabilités des intellectuels)’, L’Ordre Nouveau 42, 22. 21. M. Glady (alias A. Marc). 1936. ‘Pensées simples sur le parlementarisme’, L’Ordre Nouveau 30, 13. 22. Cf. A. Dandieu and R. Aron. 1931. Le Cancer américain, Paris: Editions Rieder. 23. D. de Rougemont. 1934. ‘Communauté révolutionnaire’, L’Ordre Nouveau 8, 18. 24. Glady, ‘Pensées simples sur le parlementarisme’, 9: ‘Pour rendre aux hommes le sens de leur responsabilité personnelle, il faut en finir avec le système électoral et parlementaire présent.’ 25. See Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, 77–82. 26. See Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, 63–66. 27. See Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, 94–119. 28. See Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, chapter 2.2. 29. For a more detailed analysis see Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, chapter 4.1. 30. For a more detailed analysis see Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, chapter 4.2. 31. Other non-governmental groups as well as the European Parliament developed plans for a European constitution in the years 1970 to 1984, aiming at building a European Federation. 32. Cf. M. Keating. 1988. State and Regional Nationalism: Territorial Politics and the European State, New York/London: Harvester Wheatsheaf; M. Keating and J. Loughlin (eds). 1997. The Political Economy of Regionalism, London/Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass. 33. See Ruge, Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’, chapter 4.

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34. D. de Rougemont and Centre Européen de la Culture (eds). 1963. Pour une métropole régionale Aix-Marseille-Etang de Berre: colloque tenu à Aix-en-Provence en juillet 1962, Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 22. 35. Cf. D. de Rougemont. 1994. ‘L’Europe des régions’ (Interview in Europa 5, 1968), in D. de Rougemont. Œuvres complètes de Denis de Rougemont, Tôme III: Ecrits sur l’Europe (1962–1986), 2nd edition, Christophe Calame (ed.), Paris: Editions de la Différence, 183–188. 36. D. de Rougemont. 1967/68. ‘Vers une fédération des régions’, Bulletin du Centre Européen de la Culture 12(2), 45. 37. Cf. the brilliant analysis by S. Holmes. 1996. The Anatomy of Antiliberalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Bibliography Aron, R. 1934. ‘Solidarité Européenne’, L’Ordre Nouveau 15, 3–5. Ball, T. 1988. Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History, Oxford: Blackwell. Benda, J. 1927. La Trahison des clercs, Paris: Editions Grasset. Dandieu, A. and R. Aron. 1931. Le Cancer américain, Paris: Editions Rieder. Glady, M. (alias A. Marc). 1934. ‘A hauteur d’homme’, L’Ordre Nouveau 15, 8–22. –––––––. 1936. ‘Pensées simples sur le parlementarisme’, L’Ordre Nouveau 30, 8–14. Holmes, S. 1996. The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Keating, M. 1988. State and Regional Nationalism: Territorial Politics and the European State, New York/Harvester Wheatsheaf. Keating, M. and J. Loughlin (eds). 1997. The Political Economy of Regionalism, London/Portland, Ore: Frank Cass. Loubet del Bayle, J.-L. 1969. Les non-conformistes des années 30. Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Marc, A. 1936. ‘Patrie – Nation – Etat’, L’Ordre Nouveau 32, 28–42. Ordre Nouveau. 1933. ‘Premiers principes’, L’Ordre Nouveau 1, 0. –––––––. 1934. ‘Notre foi’, L’Ordre Nouveau (9), 7–10. de Rougemont, D. 1934a. Politique de la personne, Paris: Editions Je Sers. –––––––. 1934b. ‘Communauté révolutionnaire’, L’Ordre Nouveau 8, 14–18. –––––––. 1936. ‘Plésiscite et démocratie’, L’Ordre Nouveau 30, 21–26. –––––––. 1938. ‘Trop d’irresponsables s’engagent! (Responsabilités des intellectuels)’, L’Ordre Nouveau 42, 19–22. –––––––. 1967/68. ‘Vers une fédération des régions’, Bulletin du Centre Européen de la Culture 2, 35–56. –––––––. 1994a. ‘L’Europe des régions’ (Interview in Europa 5, 1968), in D. de Rougemont. Œuvres complètes de Denis de Rougemont, Tôme III: Ecrits sur l’Europe (1962–1986), 2nd edition, Christophe Calame (ed.), Paris: Editions de la Différence, 183–188.

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–––––––. 1994b. ‘L’Europe et les intellectuels’ (Réponses à Alison Browning), in D. de Rougemont. Œuvres complètes de Denis de Rougemont. Tôme III: Ecrits sur l’Europe (1962–1986), 2nd edition, Christophe Calame (ed.), Paris: Editions de la Différence, 775–781. de Rougemont, D. and Centre Européen de la Culture (eds). 1963. Pour une métropole régionale Aix-Marseille-Etang de Berre: colloque tenu à Aix-enProvence en juillet 1962, Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière. Ruge, U. 2003. Die Erfindung des ‘Europa der Regionen’: Kritische Ideengeschichte eines konservativen Konzepts, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus. –––––––. 2006. ‘“Libre et engagé”: Der Intellektuelle als Person und Prophet im Denken Denis de Rougemonts’, in H. Bluhm and W. Reese-Schäfer (eds), Die Intellektuellen und der Weltlauf, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 211–229. Sirinelli, J.-F. and P. Ory. 1986. Les Intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours, Paris: A. Colin. Sirinelli, J.-F. (ed.). 1987. Générations intellectuelles: Effets d’âge et phénomènes de génération dans le milieu intellectuel français, Paris: C.N.R.S. Waechter, M. 2008. ‘Revolutionär, Föderalist, Europäer: Mensch und Gesellschaft bei Alexandre Marc’, Osteuropa 12, 125–135. Winock, M. 1997. Le siècle des intellectuels, Paris: Editions du Seuil (Collection ‘Points’).

part iii Anti-liberal Europe in Dictatorships and their Aftermath

5 The ‘New European Order’ of National Socialism Some Remarks on its Sources, Genesis and Nature Jürgen Elvert

National Socialist spatial policy has attracted scholarly research for decades. Many approaches to research have been tested and applied, with varying success.1 Works that focus on the National Socialist period tend to blind out certain elements that may demonstrate that National Socialist foreign policy was composed of a series of elements, some of them directly related to National Socialist ideology, others may well be considered as forms of expression of much longer lasting ideas. The U.S. historian Henry Cord Meyer was among the first to point out the impact of reflections on Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) for the emergence of a German Sonderbewußtsein in the nineteenth century, which in turn had significant impact on German reflections regarding reorganizing Europe before the Great War and also in the interwar years.2 In Meyer’s eminent study, which was published as early as 1955, the author describes a kind of German ‘Central European sense of mission’ that had developed in the course of the nineteenth century, coming from different sources. At the end of the nineteenth century it increasingly gained weight within the German political discourse on European affairs, and in 1914 it even served as the basis for the German debate on the aims of war. Therefore it is hardly surprising that this debate left significant traces in the German revisionist discourse of the 1920s as well as in National Socialist spatial planning later on.

The Nineteenth Century Among the sources contributing to the development of the specific German image of Central Europe on the eve of the First World War were those of

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economy, history, politics, constitutional law and ethnology. As an early example of reflections on Central Europe from an economic point of view, Friedrich List’s dream of a Central European economic sphere should be mentioned. He had been dealing intensively with the problem of intensifying German trade relations to the Southeastern European states since about the mid-1830s. Thus, from the point of view of a follower of the German national movement, he pursued a new approach in the search for an integrated German nation-state. E.g. in his principal work, ‘Das koloniale System der europäischen Ökonomie’ (1841), he discussed the possibility of an economic consolidation of the fast growing population on the territory of the German Federation. Due to North American hegemony in the Western sphere as well as the already existing British and French colonial empires in Asia and Africa, he considered colonial overseas expansion to be almost out of the question. In his opinion the only way to consolidate the future German nation-state economically was to expand on the European continent, which for List meant advancing towards Southeastern Europe, a comparatively underdeveloped region from an economic point of view. For him this area could be used both as a possible area of settlement for German colonists and as part of a Central European economic sphere ranging from the North and Baltic Seas as far as the Black Sea. Thus he declared all of Southeastern Europe (including parts of the Middle East) to be Germany’s natural yet undeveloped hinterland. For him, this area was as important for Germany as the then still undeveloped territories of the North American West were for the United States. List wanted to connect this area as closely as possible to the ‘motherland’ by creating a dense network of railroads and canals3 and to embed it at the same time into a political confederation which was also intended as a counterweight against a Franco-Russian alliance, which he anticipated.4 Even before List another group of German intellectuals had started to look for criteria with which to define a German nation-state. Many German Romanticists had recommended the medieval Imperium sacrum as a model and had taken it as the territorial frame for a future integrated German state. For the Brothers Schlegel, just as for Clemens Brentano or Joseph Görres, to name just a few, the Christian-occidental aspect had been the focus. They had been interested in re-establishing the unity of Christian Europe, in the centre of which a sovereign German empire was supposed to be the consolidating force.5 It should, however, be mentioned here that for example Joseph Görres had also assumed that a united German nation-state along the lines of the Romanticists would have a critical size within the European state system. As a consequence he had demanded the creation of suitable European structures simultaneously. More concrete political and institutional thoughts on Germany and its role in Central Europe had been debated in the wake of the revolutionary years of 1848/49, when a German national assembly in the Frankfurt Paulskirche again made efforts to establish a German nation-state. The parliamentarians were well aware of Germany’s Central European dimension. Nevertheless, some of them discussed ideas that included well developed suggestions for a Central European

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system of states under German hegemony. They were tied up, for example, with the concepts of the Prussian-Catholic statesman, Josef Maria von Radowitz, or of the Prussian diplomat, Josias von Bunsen. Although published after the defeat of the Paulskirche, they should nevertheless be commemorated as they both wanted to establish a Prussian-German hegemonic power in the heart of Europe as a substitute for the failed national endeavour of the parliament. Related ideas were backed by scholars in various disciplines, among them many influential historians. But ethnologists like Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl also contributed to the debate, when in the late 1850s he developed his concept of a close, quasi-organic relation between people and their Lebensraum. Subsequently related scholarly thinking and public debates intensified, all of them claiming a leading role (economic, political or cultural) for Germany in Central Europe. Thus, on the eve of the First World War, the majority of Germans considered Mitteleuropa as an area in which the Reich was able to implement its own concept of society and culture (the so-called ‘ideas of 1914’) against the ‘ideas of 1789’, viz. the socio-political models of French and British civilizations including their political cultures based on national, liberal, democratic and parliamentarian traditions. In contrast, the German ‘ideas of 1914’, regardless of their lines of argument (economic, paternalistic or simply imperialistic), had been consciously designed as non-liberal, non-parliamentarian but corporate alternative models.

Mitteleuropa as a German Objective in the First World War The catalogue of German war objectives was set up during the first weeks of the war. It clearly reflects the deep impact of the pre-war concepts of Mitteleuropa on the thoughts of the ranks and files of the German social, economic and political elites at that time. For example, in August 1914 Walther Rathenau, one of the Reich’s leading economists and head of the government’s KriegsRohstoff-Abteilung (Department of War-relevant raw materials), wrote a detailed memorandum on a Central European economic area. In it he emphasized that Germany, if it wanted to be on a par with Great Britain, the United States and Russia, needed to build up a hegemony over Central Europe. Mitteleuropa for Rathenau ranged from the North and Baltic Seas to Northern Italy, and from the Netherlands and parts of Northern France to a line from the Baltic provinces in the Northeast to the Balkans and the Black Sea in the Southeast. For him, the genesis of such a Central European dominion would have to start with the creation of a German-Austrian customs union. This union would generate a strong power of attraction, so that the neighbouring states would join it almost automatically. For Rathenau such an economic combine would serve as the nucleus for a federal political system in Central Europe. Its centre of gravitation would then be the ‘natural leading powers’, the German-Austrian block.6 Other leading industrialists thought in similar ways. Here for example Ludwig Roselius and Reinhold Mannesmann as well as Gustav Krupp von

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Bohlen und Halbach, Hugo Stinnes and August Thyssen must be mentioned. Mathias Erzberger acted as a liaison with the government for many of them as he, being a member of the Zentrum and a representative of the Thyssen holding, had good contacts on both sides. As early as September 1914, his partners from the industry had demanded, among others, the ‘disposal of the weak, supposedly neutral states on Germany’s borders’. Based on Erzberger’s influence their ideas made their way into the catalogue of German war objectives. This catalogue also included the demand for military authority over Belgium and wide parts of Northern France, the annexation of the French steel area, the ‘liberation’ of non-Russian peoples from ‘Moscow’s yoke’ by the German armed forces, the creation of a Polish kingdom under German control, as well as the extension of Austro-Hungarian rule on Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. Erzberger considered his ideas as the minimum requirements in the case of peace. Indeed, in comparison to the claims of his employer, August Thyssen, Erzberger’s concept was modest, as he imagined the creation of a Germancontrolled zone reaching from the Pas-de-Calais to the Caucasus, including the Baltic and the Crimea. In its centre a Mitteleuropäische Zollunion (Central European Customs Union) was supposed to provide a solid economic basis for the entire territory, which would only then be strong enough to successfully defy the British Empire, being the real enemy.7 These demands by German industrialists should not be mistaken as isolated economic plans to safeguard Central European market predominance. On the contrary: the industrialists’ ideas were enduringly supported by a number of influential societal lobbies. Under the leadership of renowned historians and national economists and accompanied by a powerful choir of influential publicists, the war was declared to be a deep, even fateful fight between ‘German spirit and culture’ on the one hand and Western European civilizations on the other. The latter had a priori been defined as hostile and were said to be exclusively interested in denying the German people an adequate place among the world powers. The ‘Declaration of the 93’ (leading German scientists) from October 1914 put this attitude in a nutshell by declaring the value of the war to be a ‘competition of moral ideas’.8 For the Strasbourg historian Martin Spahn for example, member of the Reichstag for the Zentrum with close contacts in industrial circles, there was no doubt that the Reich’s real war objective had to be the restoration of the medieval Imperium sacrum as the basis of future German world politics. Spahn appreciated the idea of a conflict with the United Kingdom, as his idol was Napoleon, who had once challenged Britain to a decisive fight for imperialist predominance, not due to lust for conquest but to the considerations of a statesman.9 This deeply irrational argument, far removed from political realism, achieved its objective during the first years of the war. It helped to mobilize the German public and to tie it to the German military and political elite. The lack of a generally valid definition of ‘Mitteleuropa’ proved to be helpful as it helped to file different concepts, actually contradictory to one another, under one name. So a

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broad variety of points of reference was created, allowing influential intellectuals such as Friedrich Naumann, Max Weber, Martin Spahn, Ernst Troeltsch or Franz von Liszt to connect their respective concepts of Mitteleuropa. All of them contributed to the development of broad public expectations that disqualified every attempt to achieve conciliation on the basis of rational political and military considerations as ‘cheap’ and ‘foul’ peace, in case these far-reaching objectives should not be reached.10 With respect to the competence afforded to the Reich and its allies, Walther Rathenau’s concept had been comparatively modern. Most other German plans for reorganizing Europe presented during the first weeks and months of the war were designed along far more aggressive lines. In total, they reflect a detailed picture of how Germany’s political, military and business elites wanted to achieve political and economic hegemony over Europe, in order to be able to use it as the starting point for securing world power status. The fact that German ideas regarding securing and extending power were not very different from those discussed among the French, British or Russian establishments may be mentioned here only as a matter of form. However, the course of the war was soon to show that all of these early concepts of European reorganization were wishful thinking and could hardly be put into practice and, moreover, also blocked possible peace initiatives. In so far as the German Reich was concerned, the course of the war also determined the contents of subsequent considerations regarding the reorganization of Central Europe. Having written this, I assume that these concepts also reflected public German opinion. The long-lasting impact of the Mitteleuropa discourse on the related interwar considerations can also be explained by the great success of Friedrich Naumann’s book on Mitteleuropa that was published in 1915.11 Naumann, originally a theologian, had been dealing from a liberal-imperialist point of view with the problem of a Central European economic area as the core of a Central European federation of states, which in the long run was supposed to lead to an alliance with France, and which in his opinion was the only construction to be able to appropriately resist British world rule. Hence, Naumann’s concept came closest to a liberal European discourse in Germany during the Great War. However, to support his theses Naumann discussed almost all Mitteleuropa concepts of the nineteenth century and thus revived them publicly at a time when Germany’s future was at stake. Thus it is not surprising that within a few months and in spite of shortages of raw materials his book was reprinted several times, so that by the end of the war more than 100,000 copies had been sold. By this we may conclude that in 1918 a great majority of politically informed and interested Germans were aware of Naumann’s compilation of the nineteenth-century Mitteleuropa discourse in Germany (and thus also the history of German concepts of Mitteleuropa in the nineteenth century). Nevertheless, and as a rule, their interpretation of suitable consequences differed significantly from Naumann’s essentially liberal suggestions; instead they wanted to exploit Mitteleuropa for the purpose of revising the obligations of the Treaty

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of Versailles by implementing a new Central European order along paternalisticcorporatist lines.

The Rediscovery of ‘Mitteleuropa’ in the 1920s After the Paris peace conference, and particularly after the enactment the Treaty of Versailles, the German perception of Mitteleuropa experienced a remarkable comeback. The great majority of Germans considered the peace treaty as unjustly enforced on them. They assumed that, after all, the victorious powers were continuing the war against the German Reich on other terms and conditions in order to achieve by international law what they had not achieved militarily: making Germany subject to the hegemony of the ‘ideas of 1789’. From this point of view, after 1919 just as during the world war Germany’s future was open to question, except that the scope for action in German politics and German political journalism was considerably different compared with the prewar period. The peace terms of Versailles, St. Germain, and Trianon had reduced the German Reich in the west, the north, and the east, and had completely dissolved the Habsburg monarchy. Central Europe, where until 1918 the German Reich together with the Austro-Hungarian monarchy had already established a kind of informal hegemony, had been completely reshaped. The application of the right of national self-determination from Northeastern Europe as far as the Balkans had created a series of new states, all of which were struggling against some essential problems: high expectations of national independence combined with an underdeveloped political culture, a fragile domestic policy and at the same time significant ethnic minorities with national ambitions of their own, furthermore insufficiently developed national economies but close trade connections with traditional trading partners, that is Austria or the German Reich. Moreover, the reduction or rather dissolution of German and Austrian territories had created a large German diaspora in Central Europe. This Central European German diaspora offered a variety of argumentative material for new concepts, drafted particularly during the first five years of the Weimar Republic, in order to shepherd the German Reich out of the misery of defeat. Not coincidentally Europa Irredenta, written by the national conservative sociologist and publicist Max Hildebert Boehm and published in 1923, counts among the earliest suggestions for a reorganization of Central Europe.12 For Boehm the predominance of the victorious Western powers after the end of the Great War was not only a clear humiliation of the defeated central powers, it was furthermore a threat for the future of all of Central and Eastern Europe. Taking over Western political ideas, particularly the transfer of liberaldemocratic parliamentarianism and centralism for him seemed not to be an adequate way out of the crisis but merely a short breather during Europe’s decline, which was driven on by the European irredenta – just as prophesized by Oswald Spengler in his Untergang des Abendlandes.13 As an alternative Boehm

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recommended ‘a common European turnaway from state absolutism of the past centuries’, a ‘voluntary self-restriction of the state’s absolute power’, as well as greater leeway for action for the ‘independent existence of the people’s cultures’ which were supposed to be freed from the ‘bonds of state mechanism’.14 He considered this as a way of defusing the dangerous and nationally explosive situations that formed political trouble spots, particularly in nationally mixed areas, as the Western-influenced rivalry of nationalism knew only one victor, and the suppression of other nations, which was inevitably connected to this, involved new cause for conflict. Instead, Boehm suggested a settlement by means of a ‘corporatist-European’ attitude, a fundamentally new occidental way of thinking, and the introduction of a constitution based on a ‘modern way of understanding classes’.15 For him, a particularly European corporatist structure with a terraced system of dependencies seemed to be a suitable means of resisting the ‘atomistic Western culture’.16 These reflections clearly place him in the tradition of pre-war German Mitteleuropa thought. Whether or not his concept was acceptable at all for the Central and Eastern European neighbours he did not analyse, instead he simply assumed such an acceptance. Thus he joined the feeling of doom that was widespread in Germany in the 1920s, and declared it to be absolute. From this claim of absoluteness he then drew conclusions and applied them to Central and Eastern Europe by the help of criteria that had been developed solely from the German point of view. According to Boehm, it was Germany’s task to organize Central Europe’s corporatist structure along historically grown ‘organic’ lines. For him, this seemed to be possible either in the broader context of the Habsburg monarchy or by way of the political or economic potentials of the German Reich, as both had already provided economic prosperity and political stability to this area and its inhabitants before the war. From the German point of view this argument seemed to be trustworthy, even more so as the spirit of the age suggested only one conclusion: a reorganization of Mitteleuropa under German or GermanAustrian leadership would on the one hand stabilize the political and economic situation there; on the other hand it would also contribute to a considerable increase of German political power, which was considered a legitimate correction of the Versailles peace order. Thus, the core message of the broad variety of drafts as presented in Germany between 1920 and 1933 is already roughly sketched. Almost all of the concepts from these years – as far as I know them – present the image of a mostly Greater German (that is German-Austrian) empire working as the organizing power in Central Europe, providing political and economic stability, and in return being awarded with absolute loyalty and allegiance by the Central European states that circled the ‘Greater German Reich’ like planets around the sun. It is not surprising that these ideas were particularly intensively discussed among circles of national conservative, anti-democratic and anti-republican intellectuals, the so-called ‘conservative revolutionaries’. For most of them the reorganization of Central Europe was essential for their arguments. Arthur Moeller van den

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Bruck’s for example sketched his Drittes Reich as the better alternative to the Weimar Republic. After all, it was to give the period of National Socialist rule its name. As early as 1923 Moeller van den Bruck was certain that this Third Reich would occupy a hegemonic position in Central Europe.17 Other publications from the conservative revolutionary spectrum went even farther. E.g. the magazine Volk und Reich quite officially pursued, as it was printed in every issue, the goal of solving the problem of national minorities and of re-establishing German political grandeur by way of a reorganization of Mitteleuropa. Its editors claimed that due to its particular history, Central Europe as the traditional area of German influence was supposed to be newly organized according to German concepts that were considered particularly suitable for this area, in order to increase German cultural impact and remove the influence of Western European civilization, which was perceived as disastrous. The latter seemed to be advisable already because the reorganization of Central Europe, as it had been done by the victorious Western powers, had for the time being only supported the particularistic forces in this area. The impact of these concepts of conservative revolutionary origin and their widespread impact should not be underestimated. The anti-democratic and antiliberal right-wing intellectuals of the Weimar Republic disposed of a remarkably influential network of magazines and other publications, addressing everyone from the specialized scientist to the politically interested amateur or the leisure time gardener. The situation was similar in the field of economic publicism. For the period from 1919 to 1943 the Mitteleuropa-Bibliographie by Korek and Stark, which was first published in 1935, gives 173 titles18 just on the subject of ‘Zoll- und Handelspolitik in Mitteleuropa – Das Problem des mitteleuropäischen Zusammenschlusses’ (Central European Customs and Trade Policy – the Problem of Central European Union), without claiming to be complete. As the publishers had to admit, while working on the volume the ‘literature on questions of Central European economy’ threatened ‘to go up and up’,19 although the even larger fields of humanities and cultural sciences had not been analysed. The number of titles published on this topic had been rising considerably, particularly since the mid-1920s. They were no longer dealing only with historic-political or economic questions, but increasingly also with cultural questions in the widest sense. This explains the broad acceptance of their ideas, including their suggestions regarding a reorganization of Central Europe, among the German population as a whole. And particularly given the sense of honour that had been hurt under the impression of defeat in war and in the terms of the peace treaty, the expectation of compensation by regaining hegemony over Central Europe seemed very tempting. Up until this point, hardly anybody cared about the question of whether or not these suggestions were appreciated in the immediately concerned Central European states, quite apart from the reactions such thoughts inevitably triggered off in Paris, London or Washington. On the contrary, from today’s point of view the debate in those days on reason and the necessity of reorganizing

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Central Europe as the prevailing condition for consolidating German power and grandeur seems to have been very closed and uncommunicative. However, it was symptomatic of the insufficient international discourse on politics and the lack of international crisis management of the time. Ernst Troeltsch’s demand for a European cultural synthesis20 – and thus implicitly for giving up on the previous idea of a German ‘special position’ in Central Europe – were swallowed by the roar of revisionist demands at home. However, there is no indication that there were attempts to overcome the psychological gap towards ‘German special thinking’ on the part of Western European nations. At the beginning of the 1920s, nowhere in Europe were thoughts on forms of overall European political or economic cooperation, or at least cooperation concerning Western and Central Europe, able to appeal strongly; nor even thoughts of integration, which would have made it easier to bridge the existing differences between the former enemies. Of course – particularly in France, but also in some other European states, with the exception of the German Reich – in order to avoid similar excesses of mass destruction, some voices condemned war as an ‘orgy of European self-destruction’ and demanded a recollection of the ‘European idea’ in the sense of Victor Hugo, that is a federal union of European states. Others clearly recognized that Europe-wide economic cooperation was the best way to overcome the disastrous results of the war. But these warning voices found themselves in the position of the ‘lonely voice in the wilderness’, for the relevant politicians in the European capitals were pursuing other objectives. They made sure that the continent persisted in an inability to act that was determined by nationalism.21 With respect to Germany, just one effect of this turned out to be fatal: in the second half of the 1920s at the latest, the intensity of the 1920s debate on a reorganization of Central Europe ensured that demands were considered as being appropriate in the public consciousness of the time. This was the case to the extent that after 1933 the National Socialist rulers were able to take up these ideas without a problem, without their foreign political objectives looking inadequate or extreme in the eyes of their contemporaries. And by doing so they presented themselves as putting into effect the catalogue of Central European objectives that had been drafted in previous years by the conservative revolutionaries. A closer look at the personnel structure of those conservative revolutionaries who were willing to cooperate, however, shows a remarkable speciality: first of all, they were those who had previously been dealing with Central European questions. Obviously, in comparison to their conservative ‘fellow revolutionaries’, who had rather been fixated on questions of reorganizing or newly constructing the German people and Reich, they found it easier to adjust to the new situation. The reasons for this cannot be given in full detail. But doubtlessly in this context the respective frame also plays a role within which the individual political position was staked. Thus it must be stated that right from the beginning attempts at defining the German role in the Central European context used

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much more concrete points of reference than the often vague but impassioned drafts on mankind, which like Wilhelm Stapel’s ‘Christian Emperor’ or Ernst Jünger’s ‘Worker’ were supposed to guarantee to rule the world ‘in a planetary style’, as they were humans of the technological age, beings of modernity.22 Such thoughts abducted the concept of Reich and rule into the realm of political metaphysics, something that was even explicitly welcomed by some contemporaries. Compared to this, Mitteleuropa was a group of states that were already dependent on Germany to a measurable degree. Even without final agreement on the composition of this group, most of the drafts on Central Europe from the period between 1918 and 1933 built on a foundation of definitely verifiable facts. Furthermore, the Reich’s foreign policy had a recognizable emphasis on Central Europe and thus contributed to making the appropriate ‘dreams about Central Europe’ of conservative revolutionary origin presentable. There may have been different opinions on the inner and outer shape of this German Central European Empire, but other than in the case of the ‘global models’, National Socialism offered concrete solutions for German Central Europeans, which looked entirely acceptable for them. This must be considered one reason why after the National Socialist ‘seizure of power’ from January 30th 1933, so many anti-democratic right-wing intellectuals decided upon cooperation and ‘inner collaboration’ with the National Socialist state, although during the years of the Weimar Republic they had rejected the NSDAP as proletarian and riff-raff. Being absolutely out of touch with reality, they believed that the National Socialist state would grant them the possibility of realizing their own ideals for a state. But after all it was the National Socialist state that succeeded in using the skills of the conservative revolutionaries for its own goals.

‘Mitteleuropa’ During the National Socialist Period A comparison of the further development of the debate on Central Europe during the 1930s with the role of ‘inner collaboration’ with different institutions of the National Socialist state shows two things: their misjudgement of the real nature of the regime, and their contribution to further consolidating National Socialist rule, which must not be underestimated. As they had already been discussing questions of Central Europe before 1933, they now thought the moment had come to realize their ideas. Thus they ensured the continuity of German ideas on Central Europe beyond January 30th 1933. They had developed their ideas while following the tradition of Germany’s ‘special role’ in Europe and of responsibility for Europe concluding from it. While doing so they wanted to design a new space where Germans were able to live, either as the majority within an integrated Staatsvolk or as a national minority together with another Staatsvolk. While consciously the values of the victorious Western European powers, which were perceived as hostile, were rejected, living conditions were

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to be protected by a model of state and society that was designed in accordance with German ideas and which, basically organized as a corporation, was based on the supposedly superior German culture. According to a conservative revolutionary understanding of the Reich, a Central European community of revisionists was supposed to be modelled as the bearer of an adequate political framework in the European centre. This way of understanding the Reich, however, was not at all the same as the reorganizational ideas of a large part of the National Socialist elite. However, these differences only became obvious on a closer look, as in both cases it was about the possibilities of reorganizing the European continent, the centre of which was Central Europe, with the German Reich as its driving force. The conservative revolutionary variants always insisted on upholding the interests of ‘foreign people’ besides those of ‘one’s own people’ in a paternalistic and wellmeaning sense, and thus a ‘Germanic-federal’ or ‘union’ order was strived for. However, in the context in which the German core empire was only granted the role of primus inter pares, the ‘imperialist’ models of those ‘Europeans’ being close to the party always started out from the primacy of the interests of the Reich as defined by the National Socialists, to which every other part of the appropriately reorganized continent had to take on a subordinate role. The political elite of the Third Reich, however, was careful not to point out this essential difference. This was particularly true for the years of the Second World War, when such a concept would not have been shared by the European Allies. The National Socialist satraps in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, as well as in East Central and Southeast Europe, rather counted on the federal or in other words ‘unionist’ concept of conservative revolutionary origin, as this granted them political power as pares sub primo within a ‘Germanic empire’, at least in those countries they were ruling. From the point of view of the ‘Germanic’ neighbours of the Greater German Reich, the idea that such an empire would be organized according to the model of one of its federal variants seemed to be suggested particularly by the growing influence of the SS with the administration in the German Reich, in whose specific kind of National Socialist ideology elements of conservative revolutionary thinking were sometimes found. Apart from such factors, however, the non-German followers of an authoritarian reconstruction of the continent were offered sufficient acceptable points of reference by the drafts of völkische or young conservative writings that were published between 1933 and 1939. Thus it becomes clear that constructing such concepts was definitely according to the wishes of the system, as they were perfectly suitable for winning over allies beyond the borders of the Greater German Reich. They were a prerequisite for the establishment of a ‘Germanic’ or even ‘Greater Germanic’ Reich after September 1st 1939. After all, from a different angle this sheds light on the disastrous role of the conservative revolutionary Europeans in the Third Reich. Even if they did not share the imperialist objectives of the National Socialist leadership and, while overestimating themselves to an extent that in retrospect looks more

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than naive, believed themselves able to pave the way towards a ‘better’ Europe by way of their writings, despite the obvious divergences from the party’s official way of understanding the Reich, they still served National Socialist imperialism and contributed to its strengthening, by hiding its true core and thus working towards stabilizing the system. An early and good example of this is provided by the prominent law expert and political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, who declaredly felt himself to be far superior to the leading National Socialists, and who wanted to provide the term ‘National Socialism’ with a meaning of its own. The fact that this imparted meaning was rooted in the conservative revolutionary thinking of the Weimar years is not only proven by his leading position among conservative revolutionaries of those days.23 His attempt from April 1939 to secure National Socialism’s foreign political success on the basis of international law, by creating a political Großraum dominated by the Third Reich, stating a ‘prohibition of the intervention of powers alien to the area’, gives testimony to the continuous influence of conservative revolutionary thinking of völkisch nature, far beyond January 30th 1933.24 Carl Schmitt counted among those conservative revolutionaries who after January 30th 1933 had made individual arrangements with the National Socialist regime, in order to be able to further contribute to the development of a Central European empire shaped according to conservative revolutionary basic principles – following this they will be called ‘inner collaborators’. These ‘inner collaborators’ tried to realize their ideals wherever they were serving institutions of the National Socialist state. We find them almost everywhere, however, most of all, they seem to have been convinced by the ‘Germanic’ approach of the SS, for the SS was able to ensure the support of the ‘inner collaborators’ (who had to leave behind their Central European ideals for this, and instead come increasingly close to the ‘Germanic’ European ideas of the SS) to the same extent to which the SS was able to establish itself within the National Socialist state. The SS intended a federally structured Europe of ‘Germanic’ nature, where ‘citizens of the Reich’ lived exclusively in areas with sufficient ‘Nordic substance’ (Greater Germany, the Netherlands, the Flemish Land (i.e. Belgium and Northern France), Denmark, Norway and Sweden, as well as the British Isles and possibly also parts of the Iberian Peninsula). Around the area inhabited by citizens of the Reich there would have been a belt of areas with less Nordic substance, for members of the Reich with restricted citizenship (Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, the Baltic States, Galicia, Belarus, and Ukraine). Citizens and members of the Reich would have ruled over neighbouring provinces inhabited by subjects of the Reich without civil rights of their own (Greater Russia, the Caucasus, Siberia, Palestine, and the African colonies of the now united former colonial powers).25 The National Socialist ‘imperialists’ around Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Goebbels did not want to hear of such ‘Germanic’ federations structured with so much subtleness. Even they had reached back to the pan-Germanic world of ideas from the end of the nineteenth century and had consciously used key terms

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coined by the rather traditionally arguing Mitteleuropäer. This way a conscious topical bridge was supposed to be built, even if the National Socialists picked up terms from the argumentative store of the conservative revolutionaries without being convinced by them. Other than for the anti-democratic right-wing intellectuals of the Weimar years, for them ‘people’ and ‘Reich’ were simply synonyms for National Socialist territory. However, the use of the same vocabulary resulted in a kind of semantic confusion during the first years of National Socialist rule, during which there still existed many different drafts on Central Europe and other parts of Europe that differed from each other only very slightly with respect to their terms, but were considerably different with respect to their contents. Incidentally, this semantic confusion has also made research on the National Socialist state and for some time after 1945 more difficult, and has contributed to the construction of particularly blurred images of history. Thus, during the first years of the Second World War two fundamentally different concepts for a reorganization of Europe competed with one another. One started out from creating a federally structured ‘Germanic Empire’ on European territory and included many approaches reminiscent of Central European concepts of a conservative revolutionary nature. In contrast to this, the ‘imperialist’ variant was striving for the creation of a centralist National Socialist European empire as a preliminary stage towards ruling the world. As long as the Wehrmacht was successful at the front line, the rulers of the National Socialist state favoured this variant. When, however, after the defeat at Stalingrad defeat started to become more common and the war of conquest became a defensive war, they swung round to the ‘Germanic’ line and tried to keep their allies happy with the prospect of creating a Germanic federation in Europe. Their allies, however, had long lost their faith in the integrity and feasibility of such concepts and remained well-disposed towards the National Socialist state only because this way they were able to delay their own decline for some time.

The ‘New European Order’ of National Socialism During the 1920s, the Mitteleuropa topos was developed into a widely accepted tool of German revisionism, used by politicians and intellectuals alike, mainly from the bourgeois and rightist political camp, but to a certain and limited extent also from the right wing of the Social Democratic Party. A closer look at the handling of this revisionist tool shows its double-tracked application: the intellectuals spread the word and thus prepared the ground on which politics could be tested and applied, with broad public support. However, a yet closer glance, particularly at the intellectual’s role, is necessary. Those who advocated the Mitteleuropaidee could be found in the ranks and files of the so-called ‘conservative revolution’. This umbrella term had been coined by Armin Mohler, a Swiss journalist, publicist and private scholar, also known as an apologist of conservative revolutionary thought, in his dissertation

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of 1949. His book is still on the market, now in its sixth edition, and can be considered as the standard work on this topic, in spite of its author’s questionable world outlook.26 Although several attempts have been made to introduce an alternative label for the conservative revolution, none have succeeded in replacing Mohler’s neologism. Basically it can be said that conservative revolutionary intellectuals tried to establish an anti-liberal and anti-democratic alternative to the German political system of the 1920s, guided by imperial visions of elitist, modernist, corporatist, paternalistic, authoritarian and decidedly anti-democratic embossment. Thus they bear responsibility for undermining the German political system of the 1920s, and preparing the ground for the NSDAP’s way to power. On the other hand it also has to be pointed out that a great number of conservative revolutionary intellectuals sneered at the Nazis as a bunch of illbred bruisers. With regard to the impact factor of conservative revolutionary thought among the German public in the 1920s reference can be made to a total of 409 periodicals, published in the conservative revolutionary sphere, with an average total circulation of nearly 2.5 million copies per printed edition. One of these periodicals, Volk und Reich: Politische Monatshefte was, as already mentioned, exclusively dedicated to Germany’s mission for Central Europe, but all the others regularly dealt with related topics, too, and thus helped to consolidate public perception in Germany, assuming that the Reich was bound to play a leading role in Central Europe.27 Although there was no general project plan on how this role should be played, the profile of ideas on this subject from throughout the 1920s up until the eve of National Socialist Germany leads to a graded system of intended control over Central Europe: 1) The eastern territorial cessions post-Versailles needed revision. 2) The Anschluß of Austria was considered as legitimate, justified and due. 3) As a consequence of the Anschluß some of the provisions of the Treaty of Saint Germain would need revision, too, in order to include a maximum number of Germans, who, as a consequence of Saint Germain, were now living outside German territory, but in the immediate vicinity. 4) The German economy with regard to its industrial ability and market absorption potential should deliberately be applied to the Central and Southeastern European states to make them, or at least the largest possible part of them, economically dependent on the Reich. Political dependence, or rather hegemony (from the German point of view), would then follow in due course. How did these concepts fit into National Socialist ideology? Obviously some of the main features of early National Socialist foreign policy towards Central and Southeastern Europe had been laid out in the 1920s, and especially between 1929 and 1933. A close examination clearly shows that the basic patterns of the Großdeutsches Reich of 1938 had already been set around 1930. Hitler thus simply put into practice what had been on the public and political German

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agenda post-Versailles by ruthlessly applying the revisionist tools as described above. From the institutional point of view this meant continuity: the revisionist foreign policy towards Central and Southeastern Europe had been conducted by the Foreign Ministry in the 1920s and remained, at least on first glance, relatively unchanged from the basic pattern after 1933. A personalized view of this concept’s transition period pre and post-1933 can be attached to two persons: firstly, Undersecretary of State Bernhard von Bülow, who was appointed to his post in the summer of 1930 and remained in office until his death in 1936 in spite of his personal disdain for Hitler, and secondly, Foreign Secretary Konstantin von Neurath. Both of these men stood for the revisionist German foreign policy of the 1920s. For them, the Central European tool had to be applied to create the Großdeutsches Reich as the ultimate goal. What they – and probably the majority of the German public, too – did not notice, at least not during the first years of National Socialist government, was an almost dramatic mutation of this ultimate objective under the impact of National Socialist ideology, especially when considered from the perspective of the ‘New European Order’ of National Socialism. What had originally been the final aim of revisionist policy was, after 1933, slowly but surely transformed into the starting position for National Socialist ideas on how Europe could be reshaped along the lines of the National Socialist ideology of race and space. The Großdeutsches Reich thus became the germ cell of the Großgermanisches Reich, which Hitler and his adepts wanted to establish. In 1933, however, there was no general project plan for such a Great Germanic Empire in the drawers of the National Socialist establishment. What can be verified, however, is, that immediately after the Hitler government was installed, several government and/or party institutions were commissioned to prepare policy plans, clearly targeted at a completely new approach in German foreign policy. As a consequence, a broad variety of concepts were prepared in different institutions as early as 1933/34. Although most of them – considered from the point of view of a new European order – were still relatively modest and, as a rule, only covered certain regional and factual aspects of this topic, they can in retrospect be regarded as the first building blocks of the ultimate goal, the creation of a Great Germanic Empire.

The Institutions Which institutions were involved in the early planning stages? Looking at the origins of National Socialist plans for a new European order, the Außenpolitisches Amt of the NSDAP can be taken as an example. Alfred Rosenberg, its leader and, according to Hans Adolf Jacobsen, ‘chief inquisitor of National Socialist ideology’, had since about the mid-1920s worked on his model of a European continent reshape along racist and Nordic criteria, in the centre of which, a

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dominant National Socialist German empire would play the role of protector towards the southern and southeastern parts of the continent. Some central elements of conservative revolutionary thought can thus be found here again, at least with regard to the anticipated federal European political framework. The Amt was quite in line with its chief officer. As early as October 1934 a memorandum on ‘Politics in Southeastern Europe’28 was issued by Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, the Amt’s Specialist on Southeastern and Scandinavian affairs. Roughly forty years later Duckwitz was appointed Undersecretary of State in the Federal German Ministry for Foreign Affairs and thus held quite a prominent position in the first social-liberal coalition government of Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, being involved in the German policy of détente towards Eastern Europe. In 1934 he was still working for the National Socialist party, although since the so-called Night of the Long Knives of June 1934 he had started to distance himself from the system. He thus can be considered as another element of continuity in the early stages of National Socialist foreign political thought. For him, the main target of German policy towards Southeastern Europe had to be regional hegemony, to be achieved by an active economic and cultural policy, as this part of Europe would be Germany’s economic concentration area and a future intellectual battleground with fascistic Italy. He therefore wanted to drive a wedge between the members of the Entente and Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia, and to push back French and Italian influence in this region by growing economic and even military cooperation with Yugoslavia and Poland. Against the background of Duckwitz’s growing discomfort about the National Socialist state he was probably not aware of the contents of Hitler’s speech to the echelons of the Reichswehr of 3 February 1933.29 He did, however, turn the spotlight on a region of strategic importance for Hitler’s policy of war preparation, as access to the region’s natural resources and basic materials was the precondition for German readiness for war in 1939. Thus the Duckwitz memorandum can be taken as another example of the transformation of the ‘Great German concept’ of German nationalist coinage turning from the ultimate goal into a starting point for the National Socialist ‘Great Germanic concept’. The main features of Duckwitz’s concept reflected ‘simple’ German nationalist thought of the 1920s, although some racist elements can be found in his memorandum – for example, when referring to the fatal impact of Hungarian Jewry. Although the Duckwitz memorandum was basically designed as a foreign policy concept it went nicely with corresponding considerations on the potential for German hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe that were simultaneously prepared by German economists. Regardless of whether these economists were supporters of the ideal of economic autarchy for the German Reich and its would-be satellites in Central Europe or adherents of free-trade principles, there was general agreement on the pivotal role of Central and Southeastern Europe for the German economic system. As early as 1933 the economist Wilhelm Gürge, a convinced free-trader, published an article on Deutschland und die Märkte in Südosteuropa.30 For him, Romania and Yugoslavia had to be considered as

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prominent trade partners for Germany due to their mineral resources, and as the gateway for an economic opening of the entire Danube basin for the German economy. Almost simultaneously Wulf Siewert, a disciple of geopolitics, published an article on Weltpolitik und Raumpolitik,31 which could be read as a step-by-stepplan for the German penetration of Central and Southeastern Europe – and which, as a matter of fact, retrospectively can be seen as a kind of guideline for German economic and foreign policy towards this part of Europe until 1938/39. His proposals recommended the following aspects: the Reich should actively try to subdue economic recovery in Central and Southeastern Europe; instead German policy should be targeted at aggravating the economic crisis in the heart of Europe in order to reduce French influence there. The political vacuum arising thereby should be filled out with German economic strength. The respective policy had to carefully observe that economic problems of this region did not get out of control as otherwise a total collapse of these states and, as a consequence, Bolshevist revolutionary developments could not be ruled out. Consequently the amount of German imports from this region should safeguard the political and economic survival of the exporting states. According to Siewert, Germany then simply had to exercise patience as due to pressing need, these states would agree to a sensible realignment of the political conditions of German provenance. The German foreign trade balances from 1934 to 1938/39 with the Central and Southeastern European states reflect that many of Siewert’s recommendations were accepted by the Reich’s competent authorities. Between 1933 and 1936 bilateral clearing conventions were signed between Germany and most of the Danube states. By safeguarding minimum export quantities to Germany they created a relationship of dependence of the Central and Southeastern European states on the German market. Eventually in 1936 the exploitation of this dependence became system-related, when Hermann Göring was appointed head of the four-year plan and economic policy was included in Hitler’s Lebensraum policy. Although Central and Southeastern Europe played dominant roles in German pre-war considerations they were not the only regions to be considered. In 1937, Werner Daitz, head of department for external trade of the Außenpolitisches Amt presented his ideas for the creation of a Zentralstelle für europäische Großraumwirtschaft (central office for European Großraumwirtschaft).32 His core argument was the assumption of the emergence of several large economic areas as the consequence of the world economic crisis, such as the British Empire, the Americas or a Sino-Japanese economic empire. For him the emergence of large transoceanic economic areas all over the world was both inevitable and a threat for the European economies. To avoid being crushed between the square stones of the new global economic order, the sole chance of survival for the European economies was a merger into a European Großwirtschaftsraum, in which the ‘liberty, honour and independence’ of European peoples and economies should be safeguarded. He wanted to create a space for a European economic cycle to reinforce European internal trade as a countermeasure for the passive European

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global trade balance. At first glance his concept might have been misunderstood as an altruistic proposal for the recovery of the European economies; on closer consideration, however, Daitz had presented a concept for a continental autarchy fully appropriate to National Socialist economic area thought. The adaptability of his concept to National Socialist ideology becomes obvious when Daitz’s concept of ‘freedom’ is scrutinized: according to him, Germany as Central European leading power had to grasp the mantle in the European Wirtschaftsgroßraum, not least because this concept was the configuration of National Socialist economic thought. In this context it is hardly surprising that the Zentralstelle of the European Großraumwirtschaft was to be installed in Lübeck, ancient capital of the Hanseatic League, considered by Daitz as the first attempt to establish a continental European economic cycle. By using the Hanseatic League as a point of reference Daitz had also broadened his perspective towards the Nordic countries, and thus not only largely extended the space taken into consideration by Scandinavia, but also made some references to National Socialist racist ideology. Daitz’s statements give ample proof that in the meantime a semantic shift towards the Großdeutsch topos had taken place in Germany. The großdeutsche solution had become a matter of course and was overdue; the Großraum argument had taken its place instead. Many related concepts can be found in the fields of geopolitics and economics; with regard to its legal dimension reference has once again to be made to Carl Schmitt. Since 1933, the National Socialist government’s ‘pride of law’ had made several attempts not only to justify a series of obviously criminal government measures, but also to legitimize the system’s spatial visions and to provide it with a coat of dignity. In his essay on Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung Schmitt compared the geopolitical role of Germany in Central Europe with that of the United States on the American continent. While the United States was, according to him, the leading power on the American continent and by this, according to international law, entitled to employ and implement certain measures for the whole continent, he claimed the same position and consequent rights for Germany as the leading power in Central Europe, being a Großraum comparable to the Großraum America. The central idea of his essay was the inadmissibility of external interventions in a Großraum, bound by an organizing principle. ‘External’ meant to him the undesired interference of the ‘universalistic’ League of Nations und its member states. All told, Schmitt’s essay has to be read as an attempt at identifying a large Great-German – North, Central and Southeastern European – Großraum exclusively dominated by Germany, in which no other power was legally entitled to interfere. Finally, the role of the SS in the context of National Socialist concepts on Europe also has to be taken into view. This can be considered as the bridge between peace and war, as the respective concepts prepared in the ranks and files of the SS became operative during the Second World War. The European concepts of the SS are important for our study as they obviously met with certain approval outside Germany, e.g. in France (Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and

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Robert Brasillach), Belgium (Léon Degrelle), the Netherlands (Anton Mussert) or Norway (Vidkun Quisling), to mention just a few. The non-German inventors of European concepts commissioned by the SS, especially its Germanische Leitstelle and later its Europaamt all belonged to those fascist intellectuals who were dreaming of a ‘fascist utopia’ and had set their hope on the military and organizational potentials of National Socialist Germany to implement it. Therefore the SS can be considered as a kind of interface between National Socialist and fascist Europeanism, not only via the Waffen SS and its impressive number of non-German members, but also as a kind of intellectual think tank, in which, in its Germanische Leitstelle and later on in its Europaamt Germanic, racist, fascist, anti-bourgeois and anti-communist blueprints on the potential design for a new European order flourished during the war. Although again there were a multitude of partly opposed concepts drafted between 1939 and 1945, some main features overlapped visibly. The ‘new Europe’ of National Socialist/ fascist coinage would have been composed of a Germanic nucleus state enriched with Scandinavia, the Benelux-countries, Switzerland and Großdeutschland, together with a union of the other European states. Due to its historic-political and geographic-economical potential Germany would have been the leading power of the nucleus state, although explicitly without hegemonic rights, and solely as a model for administrative reforms. Among the different labels for designs such as this one, the name ‘permanent federation of European Nordic peoples’ is one of the most informative. Obviously such a ‘Nordic federation’ had to ‘reflect the race and character traits of the Nordic people’. The constitutional framework for such a Nordic federation had to be coherent; some key policies like foreign affairs, war, colonies, economy, finance and traffic would need centralization. A gradual harmonization of affairs and labour was also considered desirable. Citizens’ rights would only be granted to the truly Nordic and/or Germanic inhabitants. The citizens of large parts of Central and Eastern Europe would not be granted full citizens’ rights; they would receive the status of imperial members and only limited autonomy instead. Russia, the Caucasus, Siberia and the neighbouring regions as well as Palestine and the French, Belgian and British colonies in Africa and elsewhere would be treated like colonies; their inhabitants would be ‘imperial subjects’ without any civil rights. Further information on this can be found in the archival material concerning the so called Generalplan Ost of 1941/42.33 Finally, it has to be mentioned that all concepts for a realignment of Europe drafted during the war years are characterized by a gradual shift from federal to more centralized plans, according to the German successes in the theatre of war. However, after the defeat of Stalingrad, this trend was reversed. Now the creation of the Festung Europa, the ‘Fortress Europe’ came to the fore, the ‘European civil war against Bolshevism’ was declared. Once again, the temporarily forgotten federal concepts were retrieved from the drawers, basically to keep the disillusioned European allies in line. The growing loss of reality in these concepts becomes evident with the final draft, prepared in the SS-Europaamt. It

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was completed on 3 April 1945, proposing a European federation along the lines of the Swiss model. While Alexander Dolezalek, the last head of the Europaamt, was writing his concept, he must have heard the rumble of the Soviet artillery, which at that time was only a few kilometres away from Berlin.

Concluding Remarks The German plans for Central Europe from the interwar period can only be understood against the background of historic development in the nineteenth century. In the context of the debate on war aims during the first weeks and months of the First World War, the previously rather disparate concepts for a reorganization of Europe were condensed into an already quite integrated political and economic-political overall plan whose widespread impact was due most of all to Friedrich Naumann’s book Mitteleuropa. After the defeat, for many Germans the recollection of the previously defined Central European ideals seemed to be an excellent way out of the crisis of their time. ‘New Germany’ was supposed to summon strength from predominance over Central Europe, the latter being an area in which specific German ideas of organizing a political system and of the conscious exclusion of Western European influence could be realized. The debate on Central Europe happened predominantly among right-wing, anti-liberal and anti-democratic circles, however it had considerable public effect and thus contributed at first to perceiving the National Socialist foreign policy of the 1930s as the legitimate implementation of an anticipated phased plan, which by way of the Anschluss of the German-speaking parts of Austria and the integration of the Sudetenland only created the conditions for the implementation of a further reorganization of Central Europe. Then – at least initially – the fact that the consolidation of German power over Central Europe meant only a first step towards gaining further power concluded from the first successes of the war. However, the debate over the internal organization of this territory showed that two fundamentally different models were competing with each other, a ‘Germanic’ model and an ‘imperialist’ model. Independent of which of these models would have pushed through in the case of victory – probably it would have been the imperialist variant – both were the conceptional products of an inhuman totalitarian system.

Notes   1. With regard to Anglo-Saxon literature on National Socialist foreign policy the eminent works of John Gillingham (e.g. J. Gillingham. 1985. Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe, London: Routledge), Mark Mazower (M. Mazower. 2009. Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, London: Penguin) or Shelley Baranowski (S. Baranowski. 2011. Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and

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Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) should be mentioned here.   2. H.C. Meyer. 1955. Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815–1945, The Hague: Nijhoff.  3. Meyer, Mitteleuropa, 12f.   4. On List’s various political models see: Meyer, Mitteleuropa, 13f.  5. H. Gollwitzer. 1964. Europabild und Europagedanke: Beiträge zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2nd edition, Munich: Beck, 208.   6. On Bethmann-Hollweg’s September programme and its origins see: F. Fischer. 1967. Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18, Düsseldorf: Droste, 90–95.  7. On this: J. Elvert. 1999. Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung (1918–1945), Stuttgart: Steiner, 35–39.   8. As a matter of form, it is worth noting the fact that German professors during the First World War were not at all a closed phalanx of annexationists. Klaus Schwabe showed how extended the variety of opinions on German war objectives were among university teachers. On this: K. Schwabe. 1969. Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral: Die deutschen Hochschullehrer und die politischen Grundfragen des Ersten Weltkrieges, Göttingen/ Zürich/Frankfurt am Main: Musterschmidt.   9. On this see: Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 54f. 10. Elvert, Mitteleuropa, 38f. 11. F. Naumann. 1915. Mitteleuropa, Berlin: Reimer. 12. M.H. Boehm. 1923. Europa Irredenta: Eine Einführung in das Nationalitätenproblem der Gegenwart, Berlin: Hobbing. 13. Boehm, Europa Irredenta, 317. In his explanations Boehm does not mention Spengler’s name, but clearly his writing is organized as a discussion of Spengler and due to its clear recommendations may be supposed to have been meant as a kind of alternative. 14. Boehm, Europa Irredenta, 318f. 15. Ibid., 318f. 16. Ibid., 318f. 17. A vast number of indications of Germany’s key position in Central Europe and its mission of order as a result of this are found in A. Moeller van den Bruck. 1933. Das Dritte Reich, 4th edition, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. 18. See V. Korek and J. Stark. 1935. Mitteleuropa-Bibliographie. Teil 1: Agrarfrage, Handelspolitik und Zusammenschlußbestrebungen in Mitteleuropa: Eine Übersicht des Schrifttums der Jahre 1919 bis 1934, Berlin, Vienna: Österreichischer Wirtschaftsverlag, 21–43. 19. Korek and Stark, Mitteleuropa-Bibliographie, XV. 20. E. Troeltsch. 1924. Der Historismus und seine Überwindung, Berlin: Heise. 21. Elvert, Mitteleuropa, 74f. 22. E. Jünger. 1932. Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. On this see also M. Meyer. 1990. Ernst Jünger, Munich, Vienna: Hanser, 200. 23. On Schmitt’s role as one of the progressive thinkers of conservative revolution see e. g. Meyer, Ernst Jünger, 101, 103f., 199, 205ff., 241, 295, 327, 336ff. 24. C. Schmitt. 1939. Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte. Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht, Berlin, Vienna: Deutscher Rechtsverlag.

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25. Memorandum by Kurt O. Rabl, a National Socialist jurist appreciated by Schmitt, who during the years of the Second World War had served the National Socialist system among others as the head of the Department for Legislation within the Reich’s Commissariat Netherlands. The text of the memorandum can be found in Institut für Zeitgeschichte FA 272, Rabl, K.O. 26. A. Mohler. 2005. Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch. 6th edition, Karlheinz Weißmann (ed.), Graz: Ares. 27. J. Elvert. 2005. ‘Mitteleuropa im Urteil der nationalkonservativen Publizistik der Weimarer Republik’, in H. Duchhardt and I. Németh (eds), Der Europa-Gedanke in Ungarn und in Deutschland in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 139–143. 28. Memorandum ‘Politik im Südosten’ (27 October 1934). Bundesarchiv-Koblenz [the German Federal Archives in Koblenz], NS 43, vol. 44, fol. 1–27. 29. ‘3. Februar 1933. Hitler spricht vor den Befehlshabern des Heeres und der Marine,’ in W. Hofer (ed.): Der Nationalsozialismus – Dokumente 1933–1945. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 180f. 30. W. Gürge. 1933. ‘Deutschland und die Märkte in Südosteuropa’, Volk und Reich 9(1), 107–117. 31. W. Siewert. 1933. ‘Weltpolitik oder Raumpolitik’, Volk und Reich 9(2). 32. ‘Denkschrift über die Errichtung einer Zentralstelle für europäische Großraumwirtschaft’, Institut für Zeitgeschichte MA 128/1. 33. See e.g. I. Heinemann. 2003. ‘Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas, Göttingen: Wallstein.

Bibliography ‘3. Februar 1933. Hitler spricht vor den Befehlshabern des Heeres und der Marine’, in W. Hofer (ed.): Der Nationalsozialismus – Dokumente 1933– 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Baranowski, S. 2011. Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boehm, M.H. 1923. Europa Irredenta: Eine Einführung in das Nationalitätenproblem der Gegenwart, Berlin: Hobbing. Elvert, J. 1999. Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pläne zur europäischen Neuordnung (1918–1945), Stuttgart: Steiner. –––––––. 2005. ‘Mitteleuropa im Urteil der nationalkonservativen Publizistik der Weimarer Republik’, in H. Duchhardt and I. Németh (eds), Der Europa-Gedanke in Ungarn und in Deutschland in der Zwischenkriegszeit, Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. Fischer, F. 1967. Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18, Düsseldorf: Droste. Gillingham, J. 1985. Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe, London: Routledge. Gollwitzer, H. 1964. Europabild und Europagedanke: Beiträge zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, 2nd edition, Munich: Beck.

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Gürge, W. 1933. ‘Deutschland und die Märkte in Südosteuropa’, Volk und Reich 9(1), 107–117. Heinemann, I. 2003. ‘Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas, Göttingen: Wallstein. Jünger, E. 1932. Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. Korek, V. and Stark, J. 1935. Mitteleuropa-Bibliographie. Teil 1: Agrarfrage, Handelspolitik und Zusammenschlußbestrebungen in Mitteleuropa: Eine Übersicht des Schrifttums der Jahre 1919 bis 1934, Berlin, Vienna: Österreichischer Wirtschaftsverlag. Mazower, M. 2009. Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, London: Penguin Meyer, H.C. 1955. Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action 1815–1945, The Hague: Nijhoff. Meyer, M. 1990. Ernst Jünger, Munich, Vienna: Hanser. Moeller van den Bruck, A. 1933. Das Dritte Reich, 4th edition, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. Mohler, A. 2005. Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch. 6th edition, Karlheinz Weißmann (ed.), Graz: Ares. Naumann, F. 1915. Mitteleuropa, Berlin: Reimer. Schmitt, C. 1939. Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte. Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht, Berlin, Vienna: Deutscher Rechtsverlag. Schwabe, K. 1969. Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral: Die deutschen Hochschullehrer und die politischen Grundfragen des Ersten Weltkrieges, Göttingen/Zürich/ Frankfurt am Main: Musterschmidt. Siewert, W. 1933. ‘Weltpolitik oder Raumpolitik’, Volk und Reich 9(2). Troeltsch, E. 1924. Der Historismus und seine Überwindung, Berlin: Heise.

6 Three Kinds of Collaboration Concepts of Europe and the ‘Franco-German Understanding’ – The Career of SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg Peter Schöttler

This chapter deals with the history of a single person, who is, however, interesting in a larger framework. He is hardly known, even by historians, except by specialists in one of the various areas in which he was active: FrancoGerman relations, broadcasting, the Second World War or prisoners of war (Heimkehrer). But even in relevant publications, Gustav Krukenberg (1888– 1980), is only referred to marginally – if at all: thus he is a background figure. But precisely because he is such a figure, because he appears again and again in very different places, he is perhaps almost representative in his incidental subtleness.1 But there is a problem: how does one speak or write as a historian about one’s own grandfather, above all when he was involved with National Socialism? My chapter is thus no more than an attempt: to finally formulate something that has accompanied me for some time, but that seemed to block itself against my own scientific reflection. Should I rather leave such an account to others? Or, on the contrary, could it not be an advantage to know the person you are dealing with relatively well, to have argued with him quite intensively, but also respected, perhaps even revered him? In the end I decided to use this possible advantage, well aware that I am running the risk of portraying my own relative either too mildly or too contemptuously.2 The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs who, in contrast to a currently dominant tendency, used to emphasize the ‘social frames of memory’, referred precisely to the fact that the figure of the grandfather ‘to the extent that it is quasi-endowed with everything that informs us about a past epoch or society, does not appear in our memory as some blurred physical appearance, but rather with the relief and the colour of a person

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who was at the centre of an entire painting that he sums up and condenses’.3 This could be an approach. A further preliminary remark refers to historical semantics: as is generally known, no clear program or even a clear area was or is circumscribed by the word ‘Europe’. Are we talking about the Occident or the West, Central Europe or Pan-Europe or even Eurasia, whereby each would refer to a different dimension? And the same holds true for descriptions of actions like ‘rapprochement’, ‘coopération’ or even ‘collaboration’, whereby initially – and totally value-neutral – the fact of ‘cooperation’ was simply converted into French. Misunderstandings arise from all of this. Occasionally you even have the impression that they are intentional. Only because of their semantic ambivalence can certain concepts be applied today – or again today – that were already used ‘back then’: often with dire connections. But doesn’t that hold true beyond the terminology also for the thing itself? Or, to put it differently: how crudely or subtly do we have to look at things to convince ourselves that they are in accordance with their concept? At what point do we say in surprise or distress: that is not the same! They are two different things! Or even three different things! Having said this I would like – using the example of Krukenberg – to delineate three types of European or GermanFrench ‘collaboration’: the Weimar Republic, the Naziera and the post-war period. In doing so we have to discuss what potentially connects them with one another. Was there a leitmotif? Or were they totally detached constellations, thus in fact three different things?

First Constellation: The Weimar Republic The first constellation deals with the years 1926–1930, thus Krukenberg’s role in the so-called ‘German-French study committee’. This binational body, also called the ‘Mayrisch Committee’, has been researched quite well in the meantime.4 It was a committee founded by the Luxemburg steel magnate Emile Mayrisch and made up of prominent Germans and Frenchmen – of industrialists, politicians and, as they already said back then, ‘intellectuals’ – that met two or three times a year and had two bridgeheads: an office in Paris and an office in Berlin. Whereas the Berlin office was headed by a Frenchman, Pierre Viénot (1897–1944), the Paris office was headed by a German, precisely this Krukenberg. As opposed to Viénot, who was considered to be the initiator and driving force of the whole project and who later married the daughter and heiress of the deceased Mayrisch, Krukenberg has up to now received little attention in historical research – at most a long footnote. Of course, this asymmetry could be justifiable with respect to the big picture, because observed from a distance Viénot is without a doubt the more interesting figure. From today’s perspective he is also more sympathetic. Politically he moved to the left, became a socialist and a comrade-of-arms of Léon Blum

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during the Popular Front, fought in the Resistance and was finally de Gaulle’s ambassador to the English government. He died shortly after the liberation.5 When studying history, however, it is not always sufficient to look only at those in the spotlight – and Viénot was only too happy to be in the spotlight. Occasionally it could be just as interesting to observe more closely those in the second row who represent almost the banality of politics. So who was this Krukenberg? How did he come into this committee that is today often considered to be a key institution of Franco-German rapprochement and thus a seed of European unification?6 Gustav Krukenberg was born in the year 1888 in Bonn on the Rhine. His father, scion from a family of doctors, was a gynaecologist, had a private clinic and was associate professor at the university. However, he died of blood poisoning in 1899. Thus the three sons, Gustav and his two younger brothers grew up under the care of their mother, who was the daughter of the Berlin archaeologist Alexander Conze, who was above all famous as the supervisor of the Pergamon excavations.7 Elsbeth Krukenberg-Conze (1867–1954) was not allowed to go to the university – it was Prussia after all – but as a disciple of Helene Lange she joined the women’s movement very early.8 She began to publish books and hold talks and finally moved together with her partner Lina Hilger (1874–1942) to Bad Kreuznach, where Hilger became the founding director of the girls’ school.9 In other words, Gustav and his brothers grew up in a household with only women, and with a literary, feminist, and lesbian mother.10 All the more peculiar is therefore Krukenberg’s decision to study law and become a professional soldier. He studied in Lausanne, Freiburg, Berlin, Bonn and Heidelberg, belonged to a fraternity (Hasso Borussia zu Freiburg) and also to the Wandervogel.11 He received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1911 and dedicated his dissertation about the Imperial military tax administration to his mother.12 One year later he married a rich heiress whose mother, Charlotte Schumm-Walther (1860–1947), was also active in the women’s movement.13 In the First World War, which he experienced both in the East and in the West (3rd Guards Infantry Division), he was, among other things, the Ordinance Officer for General Litzmann.14 He advanced to the rank of captain in the General Staff and lastly moved in the circles of the German Armed Forces Command in Berlin. In this manner he more or less glided from position to position: first he was an adjutant to the Senior Quartermaster for War History, General Mertz von Quirnheim, who prepared the establishment of the Potsdam Reichsarchiv,15 then he joined the Freikorps Reinhard that brutally put down the Spartacus uprising at the beginning of 1919;16 from there he reached the German Armed Forces Ministry, where he functioned as press relations officer, and the Foreign Office where he was private secretary for the ministers Simons and Rosen. After that he changed to the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (National Association of the German Industry) – mediated by its president, Hermann Bücher – which sent him to the Geneva Economic Conference in 1922, and Rapallo was – as is well known – not far away.17

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In short, the officer with a doctorate – politically a conservative und economically a liberal – proved to be a flexible diplomat, and after an interlude as business manager in Amsterdam for a trading company from Bremen, he came into a position where he himself could play a bit of a role: secretary of the Mayrisch Committee with an office in Paris. What did Krukenberg’s job consist of? Franco-German rapprochement to be sure, but concretely that meant above all – let’s not fool ourselves – promoting a revision of the Versailles obligations and advertising the products of the German industry, thus the ‘atmospheric’ initiation of business partnerships, in particular in the steel and chemical industry (see Table 6.1). Today we would call it ‘lobbyism’. At that time it was something new: foreign policy outside the ministries – but, naturally, with their approval, and in continual consultation with the respective government.18 Table 6.1. Members of the Mayrisch Committee 1926–1930 Emile Mayrisch (president; died 1928) Aline Mayrisch (honorary member) Aloys Meyer (honorary member, president of ARBED; treasurer) German group President: Alfred von Nostitz-Wallnitz (former Minister of the State of Saxony) Delegate in Paris: Dr. Gustav Krukenberg (later: Régis de Vibraye); secretary: Marc Poupard (later: Paul Rabouse, Karl-Heinz Pfeffer, Frank Rümelin). Beckerath, Erwin von (professor of political economy) Bergsträsser, Arnold (professor of social and political science) Bruhn, Bruno (Krupp AG [steel industry]) Bruns, Victor (director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht [professor of Law]) Bücher, Hermann (Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie; Allgemeine Elektrizätsgesellschaft AEG [organization of employers and machine industry]) Curtius, Ernst Robert (professor of romance languages) Deutsch, Felix (Allgemeine Elektrizätsgesellschaft AEG [machine industry]) Diehn, August (Deutsches Kohlensyndikat [mining companies]) Frowein, Abraham (Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie [organization of employers]) Glum, Friedrich (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft) Haas, Wilhelm (professor of philosophy) Hagen, Louis (president of the Chamber of commerce of Cologne) Hatzfeld-Wildenburg, Hermann zu (former Ambassador) Haniel, Karl (Gutehoffnungshütte [steel industry]) Hellpach, Willy (former President of the State of Baden; professor of philosophy) Mendelssohn, Franz von (Handelskammer Berlin; president of the Deutscher Industrieund Handelskammertag DIHT [association of chambers of commerce]) Müller-Orlinghausen, Georg (Reichswirtschaftsrat [national council of economy]) Oberndorff, Alfred von (former Ambassador) Oncken, Hermann (professor of history) Papen, Franz von (member of the Prussian parliament)

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Poensgen, Ernst (Vereinigte Stahlwerke [steel industry]) Praschma, Hans von (representative for Upper Silesia in the Reichsrat [federal council]) Schlubach, Hermann Edgar (Handelshaus Schlubach, Thiemer & Co., Hamburg [wholesale trade]) Schmitt-Ott, Friedrich (former Minister of State; president of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft [national science council]) Schreiber, Hermann (Catholic Bishop of Berlin) Simons, Walther (former Minister of Foreign Affairs; president of the Reichsgericht [supreme court]) Simson, Ernst von (former State secretary; IG Farben [chemical industry]) Stauss, Emil Georg von (Deutsche Bank) Stimming, Carl (Norddeutscher Lloyd [ocean carrier]) Thyssen, Fritz (August-Thyssen [steel industry]) Warburg, Max (banker) Wilmowsky, Thilo von (Krupp AG [steel industry]) Wolff, Otto (industrialist, steel industry) French group President: Charles Laurent (former Ambassador; Banque du Nord; Société Internationale du Canal de Suez) Delegate in Berlin: Pierre Viénot (later: Dr. Max Clauss); secretary: Dr. Sydney Jessen (later: Paul Ravoux) Broglie, Maurice de (physicist) Castel, Etienne du (railways) Chardon, Henri (Conseil d’État [supreme court]) Dal Piaz, John (Compagnie Transatlantique; Armateurs de France [union of ship owners]) Debrix, René (Société Générale Alsacienne de Banque) Dubrulle, Maurice (Comité Central de la Laine [wool industry]) Duchemin, René-Paul (Confédération Générale de la Production [chemical industry]) Fontaine, Arthur (International Labour Organization; mine council of the Saar region) Fougère, Etienne (Association Nationale d’Expansion Économique and Syndicat Fabricants de Soieries [silk industry]) Jaloux, Edmond (writer, former diplomat) Julien, Eugène (Catholic Bishop of Arras) Kempf, Paul (Union Syndicale des Tissus [textile industry]) Laederich, Georges (Syndical Général de l’Industrie Cotonnière [cotton industry]) Laurent, Théodore (Comité des Forges [steel industry]) Lichtenberger, Henri (professor of German) Lyautey, Pierre (Association de l’Agriculture et de l’Industrie) Marlio, Louis (Chambre Syndicale des Forces Hydrauliques [water supply companies]) Mercier, Ernest (Compagnie Française du Pétrole) Nicolay, Antoine de (Société des Agriculteurs de France) Ormesson, Wladimir d’ (journalist [Le Temps]) Peyerimhoff, Henry de (Comité des Houillères [coal mining industry]) Retz, Pierre de (Mines de Potasse d’Alsace [potash industry) Rist, Charles (professor of political economy)

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Robert, Henri (Ordre des Avocats [bar council]) Romier, Lucien (Société d’Économie Nationale; journalist [Le Figaro]) Schlumberger, Jean (writer and publisher [Gallimard]) Serruys, Daniel (Ministry of Commerce) Seydoux, Jacques (Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas) Siegfried, André (professor of political science) Sommier, Edmé (Raffinerie Sommier [sugar industry]) Vogüé, Félix de (Société des Agriculteurs de France, Banque de France) Note: As a rule, membership was limited to 25 persons for each group, but there was some fluctuation. Sources: Typescript with handwritten corrections by Krukenberg (ca. 1960s), Krukenberg estate. See also L’Huillier, pp. 167–171; Sonnabend, pp. 127–128.

Thus in their rooms on the Boulevard Haussmann, Krukenberg and his wife received the French partners – industrialists, politicians etc. – as well as German politicians and industrialists when they visited the French capital. In addition Krukenberg cultivated contacts with the French press and anyone who could be important for public opinion: authors, professors, dignitaries of all kinds. And Pierre Viénot did the same in Berlin. He also continually interceded and worked the corridors of the German government, the economic associations and the press in favour of France.19 The project of the Mayrisch Committee collapsed after only a few years.20 The accidental death of Emile Mayrisch in 1928 played a role in this; but Viénot, who saw himself to be the pacesetter of the entire project,21 also fell out with the president of his own French committee. As he additionally got wind of all sorts of intrigues against him on the German side, he resigned at the end of 1929. As the upshot of his experiences – and also as something of a reply to Friedrich Sieburg’s publication Gott in Frankreich? that had just appeared and was receiving quite a bit of attention22 – he published a small book, whose title would later become proverbial: Incertitudes Allemandes.23 In this book he developed the thesis that following the First World War and particularly in the current political and economic crisis, Germany had lost its certitude: ‘The average German is hesitant and perplexed when confronted by a world that has been called into question. It is as if the reactions of their faculties of judgment are paralyzed; even the feeling for their own advantage, which is rooted in good common sense, is only half functioning.’24 This incertitude explains the fluctuation of German politics at home and abroad, leading up to the ‘bacillus of National Socialism’, which Viénot considered however to be less a ‘political’ than a ‘cultural’ fact: here you can find ‘an expression of the German trepidation in tangible form’.25 What was peculiar about this book was the total absence of a connection to French politics. Although Viénot emphasized in the last sentence that France’s behaviour towards Germany was above all dependent on the picture that the French had of their own country,26 Versailles, as a permanent subjugation and a provocation for revenge, remained entirely unmentioned.

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Figure 6.1. Krukenberg in Paris, late 1920s.

Krukenberg, who neither harmonized well with Viénot programmatically nor personally,27 never commented on this book in public, as far as I know. But naturally he strictly rejected the criticism of the German lack of orientation and German nationalism that was formulated in it. Whereas Viénot was an emphatic supporter of ‘understanding’ (Verständigung) – a term that the German side met with mistrust28 – and thus saw himself more and more forced to the left, also in France,29 Krukenberg represented conservative politics without illusions, that were entirely oriented on German interests – especially those of the industry. What this meant concretely can be seen in a speech that he made in January 1931 in the Berlin Hotel Kaiserhof about the ‘Psychology of German-French Relations’. In this speech he declared outright that the previous policy had failed: ‘Our pressure on and currying favour with France in the last few years hurt more than it helped.’30 This is because ‘the Frenchman doesn’t think about Europe, but only about France. Economic arguments also do not make an impression on French industry. France does not want a revision and also Briand’s European policy, like Locarno, only serves the French to galvanize the treaties.’ Essentially the entire French entente policy of the Briand era has only aimed at ‘using friendliness to convince us to do without a revision’. Krukenberg warned against ‘every attempt to gloss over these facts’, and saw it ‘to be a mistake of German politics that

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they had until today done nothing to point out the irreconcilable contradiction between Germany and France’. Whereas Krukenberg had previously launched some critical reports on French foreign policy in the German press from Paris, after his return in the summer of 1930 he had fewer diplomatic considerations. He not only made speeches, but also published his own articles, e.g. in the young-conservative journals Die Tat or Der Ring, where he digested his Parisian impressions and frustrations.31 Based on German-French diagnoses, like the books by Sieburg and Bergstraesser as well as on the analysis of the French party scene by André Siegfried,32 he contrasted Viénot’s ‘uncertain Germany’ with a backwards-looking and self-righteous France that was – despite all its rhetoric – the ‘greatest hindrance for peace’ (Sieburg). Thus he felt the need to warn against ‘all too high hopes’: ‘Germany’s situation makes it impossible to separate the internal questions from the external ones. We cannot accept that the treaties that were imposed on us a decade ago will remain fixed in all of their details for all time.’ And he added: ‘Wasn’t it supposed to be the idea of Locarno to find a way out through productive cooperation with France?’ But ‘despite our patiently waiting’ in Paris they ‘did not travel this path with us’. France thus ‘missed the moment that will not return so easily’.33

Second Constellation: National Socialism After his return from Paris and a freelance period of transition, in which he gave speeches and wrote articles for magazines, Krukenberg’s involvement in the border zone between diplomacy and business again paid off: under Franz von Papen’s government he became a consultant for the Broadcasting Director (Reichsrundfunkkommissar) in the Ministry of the Interior, and when Hitler came into power, he then slipped into the position of the Broadcasting Director and head of the National Broadcasting Society (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft).34 Suddenly he was now in the spotlight – also literally, as he can be seen in countless newsreels and film sequences from that time.35 This advancement was apparently possible because Krukenberg, who was already excellently ‘networked’ thanks to countless club memberships,36 had already joined the NSDAP during the election for the president of the German republic in April 1932. At that time, he also published a small book – albeit anonymously – with the title ‘Who will become president of the German Reich?’ that contained a fairly obvious plea for the candidates Hitler and Frick.37 Thus the new Nazi Minister of the Interior, Frick, knew quite well who he was dealing with, and also Gauleiter Goebbels appeared at first to consider Krukenberg as a useful specialist. However, when Goebbels built up and restructured his new Propaganda Ministry (founded in March 1933) and conducted a complete ‘cleansing’ of the broadcasting system, and thus wanted to remove the all too lukewarm conservatives from positions of power, Krukenberg proved to be a hindrance.38 ‘Trouble with Krukenberg’ became a common entry in

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Goebbels’s diaries, until a triumphant entry on July 7th: ‘Yesterday I fired Krukenberg. Now I have the broadcasting system pure.’39 After that, something remarkable took place: Krukenberg did not take on any new public office, neither in a ministry nor elsewhere. Instead he became the business manager of a small chemical company in Berlin-Plötzensee – in fact until the war started.40 In view of the general wave of political optimism among the Nazis and the multitude of career chances for a member of the party, the SA and the SS – this was definitely a setback. Or was it perhaps a retreat out of the firing line? Did he want to keep a low profile due to his personal closeness to ‘reactionaries’ like Papen,41 with whom he had been connected since the days of the Mayrisch Committee, or the Duke of Cobourg,42 whom he served as a voluntary ‘staff director’ and with whom he travelled to Italy as a founding member of the ‘Society for the Study of Fascism’?43 Was he, like his patrons, on one of the black lists that were circulating in the summer of 1934?44 We don’t know. In any case, a few years later, as Himmler was apparently considering Krukenberg’s reutilization, the security service of the SS initiated an ‘investigation’ that led to an extremely negative assessment. Reinhart Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst, accused Krukenberg of having bitterly opposed the centralization of the broadcasting council that was carried out after the ‘takeover of power’45: ‘He was of the opinion that the individual broadcasting stations should continue to be at the disposal of the individual states and interest groups.’ Other conflicts arose after the takeover of the broadcasting system by the new Propaganda Ministry: ‘The party was of the opinion from the beginning that the broadcasting system must above all be an instrument of political and ideological propaganda and should also be used and developed correspondingly. During the propaganda campaign with speeches by the Führer and the national leaders (Reichsleiter) that took place immediately after the takeover of power, Krukenberg held the position that at all costs the individual interest groups (representatives from industry, trade, agriculture etc.) must also get a chance to speak.’ Conclusion: ‘Without a doubt Krukenberg only joined the party to benefit from the boom. He was removed from the broadcasting society in August 1933 through the personal intervention of the Reichsminister Dr. Göbbels [sic] above all because of his staffing policy and his un-National Socialist behaviour … All in all, it must be said that there are serious doubts against him both because of his character and because of his world view.’ However, Krukenberg never became an opponent of the Third Reich. He attempted rather to adapt himself. This can be seen both in his involvement as a ‘business leader’ (Betriebsführer)46 and also later in the war, which he again experienced at almost every front: in Poland, in France (it was he who showed Himmler around in Paris on June 17, 1940),47 in the Netherlands, in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia.48 Most of the time he served as a quartermaster, that is as the person responsible for the organization and supplies, but also for the prisoners.49 The list of some of the places he was stationed: Latvia, White Russia, Croatia, Latvia again, indicates that he spent a number of years very near the sites of German mass crimes.50 So he undoubtedly knew about them and maybe even

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participated in them. But he later never spoke about this period,51 and he was never prosecuted.52 In the course of the Second World War we again see a career advancement for Krukenberg. After he was transferred – at his own wish – to the Waffen-SS, the opportunity arose at last to advance to the rank of general.53 In September 1944 he was promoted to SS-Brigadeführer (brigadier general) and appointed ‘inspector’ of the newly formed French SS division, the ominous ‘Charlemagne’. The – short – history of this unit has up to now only been dealt with superficially and generally apologetically.54 From our point of view it is above all its policy objectives that are interesting, and namely the ‘European’ character, as expressed in its name. German propaganda summoned up the topic of Europe early, especially in occupied France: La croisade contre le bolchévisme.55 After Stalingrad the Nazis no longer only fought for the ‘Greater German Reich’, but rather, as Himmler said in Kharkov in March 1943, for the ‘great fortress of Europe’.56 ‘Europe’ thus became an emblem and a substitute for an otherwise nonexistent or still denied international community.57 Franz Alfred Six, a leading ideologist in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, wrote a fitting book on this in which he asserted: ‘The defensive struggle against the Bolshevist authoritarian state transcends at the same time as the age of internal European wars and moves the phase of European unifying wars towards its conclusion. The formerly antagonistic nations of Europe find themselves in the struggle against the common threat from the East. The proclamations of the political leaders of the nations to take leave from their legions of volunteers are proclamations of the new Europe.’58 The ‘European unity’ will soon become a ‘new political myth’ and a ‘new type of man’ will emerge ‘from the graves and battles in the East’: the figure of the ‘European freedom fighter.’59 Indeed it was a myth. The ambiguity was already apparent in the formation of the Charlemagne Division in Frankish Wildflecken. Frenchmen with totally different motivations came together here60: first, former members of the LVF (the Légion des volontaires français, who had up to then fought in the ranks of the German army)61; second, volunteers from the SS Sturmbrigade Frankreich who had legally joined the Waffen-SS after July 194362; and third, members of the milice, the fascist police troop, who were supposed to be sent to the eastern front in the fall of 1944 after the Pétain government had fled from France.63 Many disputes arose from this, whereby above all the fundamental question, whether these soldiers shouldn’t perhaps also be deployed in the West, thus fighting against American and French troops, was posed time and again by Laval and other members of the Vichy government in Sigmaringen. Krukenberg continually refused this – and Himmler supported him – but in their hate for de Gaulle and the Résistance many of the French officers of Charlemagne were thoroughly willing to do this.64 As we now know, this dreadful phantom lasted only a few months. The Charlemagne Division was almost totally annihilated in Pomerania, its French commander killed. Krukenberg allowed the survivors to decide whether they

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Figure 6.2. Krukenberg, far right, at Wildflecken, 1945; in the centre: Léon Degrelle.

wanted to end the fight and try to make their way to the West. He himself was ordered to go to Berlin where he was to take over the remnants of the SS division Nordland from the army group Steiner. So it happened that in the end around 90 Frenchmen, together with Danes, Dutch and other non-Germans defended the centre of the encircled city.65

Third Constellation: The Post-war Era Krukenberg came out of Soviet imprisonment in 1956, so very late.66 Neither Germany nor Europe had ceased to exist. On the contrary: whether in the European Defence Community or in the European Common Market the unification of the continent was on its way. Krukenberg was now of retirement age, but he was in a precarious situation until his right to a pension had been approved. Did old comrades help him? Or his new friends in politics and the Church (like many former Nazis he converted to Catholicism while he was a prisoner). I don’t know. One thing is for certain, that he became an editor at the Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft and at the same time developed an active speaking career that took him across the entire Federal Republic. His main topics were – no surprise – Europe and the Franco-German rapprochement.67 He was involved in a number of associations, above all, however, in the Verband der Heimkehrer (VdH) (the association of former prisoners of war) that had several hundred thousand members and its own newspaper at the time.68 Soon he became a member of the executive committee of the VdH.

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Krukenberg’s estate contains countless articles and speech manuscripts from more than two decades that give an insight both into his view of the world and his concept of Europe that corresponded basically to that of the Adenauer government: ‘German-French reconciliation as the core of a European peace framework’, ‘reestablishment of European and thus also German unity in peace and freedom’, etc. All of this was based on a Christian conception of history that totally omitted the years between 1933 and 1945 and instead invoked the ‘culture of the Occident’ (Abendland) and the positive approaches of the 1920s, i.e. the Mayrisch Committee. In addition to representing the social and political interests of former prisoners, the VdH also pursued an active European propaganda that was both a policy for peace with regard to the future and a ‘policy of the past’ (Norbert Frei), which meant peace, reconciliation and the common struggle against communism. As return service, they asked for amnesty, a statute of limitations for the prosecution of war crimes, and an end to what they called ‘snooping around with regard to convictions’ (Gesinnungsschnüffelei).69 The slate should be wiped clean: all former war participants should now be comrades, including – this was never in question – the Waffen-SS. Even if the VdH remained somewhat more discreet in this regard than the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS (HIAG, Reciprocal Help Association for Members of the Former Waffen-SS),70 the SS was never excluded by the Heimkehrer, but, as various SS generals already emphasized in Nuremberg, made a ‘part of the Wehrmacht’. Anything else would also have been illogical because nothing but former NDSAP members and high-ranking SS officers, like for instance the physician, Professor Ernst Günter Schenk (the so-called ‘nutrition inspector of the Waffen-SS’)71 and namely Gustav Krukenberg, were in control of the association.72 In addition, the VdH naturally demanded the equal treatment of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS with regard to old age benefits.73 Although as far as I know Krukenberg never belonged to a right-wing extremist party or association – like many other former generals – but probably was a member of the CDU,74 and although he always appeared moderately conservative, he could never escape his own biography. Thus he not only spoke and wrote about questions of European rapprochement – current and historical – but occasionally also about the end of the war and the Battle for Berlin.75 In this he was very much concerned with portraying the desperate defence (and thus destruction) of Berlin and Hitler’s command centre as quasi-normal war occurrences in view of the advancing Red Army. In the context of the anti-communist zeitgeist this apparently appeared neither surprising nor scandalous. On the contrary: Western integration, NATO membership and rearmament, thus the cornerstones of governmental policy, were also directed against the same old enemy and ‘Europe’ again offered as the connecting catchword. Whenever Krukenberg went up and down the country and made the big link – from the Mayrisch Committee to the European Coal and Steel Community and then to the European Common Market of his time – he never forgot to evoke the communist danger and the

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willingness of the West to defend itself. But at the same time, he almost never talked about National Socialism; at the most it was an example of ‘radicalism’ and a ‘militant democracy’ had to defend itself against that.76 At no point in his published or unpublished manuscripts does he mention the murdering of the Jews. It also never came into his mind (at least not in a written record) that he could have made a horrible mistake with his life – for example compared to his brothers, who were not Nazis,77 or compared to other men from the same sociocultural milieu, who at some point in the course of the war realized that they had been drawn into crime.78 Yet another facet can now be determined from his estate: it can be shown that after his return from imprisonment he was not only able to rapidly make new contacts in the city of his birth, which had become the capital in the meantime, but he also reactivated old contacts that reached back to the time before 1945. He soon was frequently exchanging letters – albeit somewhat formally – with diverse politicians (like Papen, Schacht or Coudenhove-Kalergi), with former Wehrmacht and now Bundeswehr Generals (Speidel, Kielmannsegg) or with institutions whose activities he was especially interested in: this applies naturally in the case of the VdH, but also for the prisoners of war inquiry, which the historian Erich Maschke carried out on behalf of the federal government,79 as well for the activities of diverse German-French societies.80 At the same time, and that is somewhat surprising, he also corresponded with prominent collaborators like the Dutch fascist Count d’Ansembourg81 and above all with former members of the Division Charlemagne.82 His contact was especially intensive with some of his last officers, Hauptsturmführer Fenet (38 letters), Rottenführer Soulat (34 letters) and Obersturmbannführer Raybaud (24 letters).83 With respect to these ‘comrades’ who looked up to and revered him – many letters begin with the address ‘Brigadeführer!’ – Krukenberg did not express any distance from or even criticism of what took place during the war or the Nazi period. Instead he time and again evoked a secret continuity between the struggle back then and today’s struggle for Europe: ‘Europe can only be created starting from below. We were the first to recognize it and to fight for it,’ can be found for example in a letter from 1974.84 The fact that such a consciousness of ‘European’ continuity was not unusual among former collaborators is well known.85 What is astonishing here though, is a certain degree of duplicity, if not to say the double life that Krukenberg lived, in which, on the one hand, he took part in the democratic life of the Federal Republic of Germany and kept a distance from every type of Neo-Nazi politics (he was apparently not a member of the HIAG, but had countless contacts there),86 on the other hand, however, he belonged, almost in secret, to a kind of network of former French collaborators who generally still belonged to the radical right and denied the Holocaust.87 He met these men, who had long been constructing their own mythology,88 time and again in West Germany and also in France, until shortly before his death – he died in 1980 – it came to an éclat because members of the French prisoners’ association (Association des anciens prisonniers de guerre, ACPG) found out about his presence at a banquet for former SS

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soldiers and denounced it publicly.89 Now the German Verband der Heimkehrer was being criticized as well and its entire reconciliation discourse appeared to be called into question. Of course, the VdH reacted as was the custom back then, with a counter-denunciation. All this was just communist ‘harassing fire from the Seine’.90 The German Heimkehrer should not let themselves be fooled by these ‘agitation articles’, that were ‘obviously meant to open the gates of the European Parliament for Euro-communism’ to the extent that they defame the ‘GermanFrench friendship’: ‘Our Europe will be another one – not a Europe from the day before yesterday, not one from yesterday, not a Europe of continually manipulated resentments, not a Europe of the winners and losers from 1945.’ The goal is rather the ‘Europe of those who know the value of freedom better than all others’: all former prisoners. Interestingly, Krukenberg himself said nothing to all this, but he carried on an agitated correspondence.91 And when, shortly after, a French association – namely the Association Robert Schuman ‘Pour l’Europe’ – suggested to the Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg to award Krukenberg the Robert-Schuman-Medal,92 he asked them explicitly not to do this, because it could only attract the wrong type of public attention.93 A few months later he died – in a panicky diffuse fear of persecution. As his grandson I was there.

Conclusion Using the example of Gustav Krukenberg we can observe three types of FrancoGerman ‘collaboration’, but one of them had to be suppressed and concealed for a long time. Why? The answer appears to be obvious: the ‘Europe’ of the SS is not the Europe of the Common Market or of our current European Union. Additionally, the specialists insist that the idea of Europe was of no use to Hitler and Goebbels and was even something that they despised or at best only used tactically. But perhaps we should keep in mind that precisely this dismissive attitude of Hitler or Goebbels – with the simultaneous omnipresence of European mythology in National Socialist war propaganda, and particularly in the propaganda of the Waffen-SS – makes it easier for a ‘realistic’ nationalist like Krukenberg to later integrate his anti-liberal picture of Europe into the public discourse of the Cold War and the new Western European alliance politics.

Notes   1. The portrait of a marginal or background figure does pose some specific problems with regard to sources. This has been discussed in the last decades above all in regard to ‘micro-history’ and the subject of ‘extraordinary normality’ (Eduardo Grendi). In the present case I drew on Krukenberg’s estate (cited hereafter as ‘Krukenberg estate’, in the possession of the author) as well as on countless archived items and printed materials.

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Further source research remains to be carried out. For critical comments I would especially like to thank Dieter Gosewinkel and Jan-Holger Kirsch.   2. There is no lack of interesting attempts to write about a National Socialist father or grandfather. Among the most important is: D. von Westernhagen. 1987. Die Kinder der Täter: Das Dritte Reich und die Generation danach, Munich: Kösel. Also relevant in our context: K. Meyer. 1998. Geweint wird, wenn der Kopf ab ist: Annäherungen an meinen Vater ‘Panzermeyer’, Generalmajor der Waffen-SS, Freiburg: Herder. Recently a fellow historian has reported about his Nazi father: G. Botz. 2005. ‘Nazi, Opportunist, “Bandenbekämpfer”, Kriegsopfer: Dokumentarische Evidenz und Erinnerungssplitter zu meinem Vater’, in G. Botz (ed.), Schweigen und Reden einer Generation: Erinnerungsgespräche mit Opfern, Tätern und Mitläufern des Nationalsozialismus, Vienna: Mandelbaum, 135–159.   3. M. Halbwachs. 1997. La mémoire collective, edited by G. Namer and M. Jaisson, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 112 (here and thereafter all translations are my own.).  4. F. L’Huillier. 1971. Dialogues franco-allemands 1925–1933, Strasbourg: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg; H.M. Bock. 1994. ‘Kulturelle Eliten in den deutsch-französischen Gesellschaftsbeziehungen der Zwischenkriegszeit’, in R. Hudemann and G.-H. Soutou (eds), Eliten in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Strukturen und Beziehungen, vol. 1, Munich: Oldenbourg, 73–91; O. Burgard. 2000. Das gemeinsame Europa – von der politischen Utopie zum außenpolitischen Programm: Meinungsaustausch und Zusammenarbeit pro-europäischer Verbände in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1924–1933, Frankfurt am Main: Neuer wissenschaftlicher Verlag; G. Müller. 2005. Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee und der Europäische Kulturbund, Munich: Oldenbourg.   5. See G. Sonnabend. 2005. Pierre Viénot (1897–1944). Ein Intellektueller in der Politik, Munich: Oldenbourg; as well as several essays from H.M. Bock, who emphasizes Viénot’s ‘actuality’ for the early twenty-first century. See H.M. Bock. 2005. Kulturelle Wegbereiter politischer Konfliktlösung: Mittler zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 249ff. and 365ff.   6. Cf. for example T. Grosbois. 2009. ‘Mayrisch, Émile’, in P. Gerbet, G. Bossuat and T. Grosbois (eds), Dictionnaire historique de l’Europe unie, Brussels: André Versaille, 651–655.   7. Cf. S.L. Marchand. 1996. Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 92ff.  8. Cf. E. Krukenberg-Conze. 1903. Über Studium und Universitätsleben der Frauen, Gebhardshagen: Maurer-Greiner; E. Krukenberg-Conze. 1905. Die Frauenbewegung, ihre Ziele und ihre Bedeutung, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr; E. Krukenberg-Conze. 1910. Die Frau in der Familie, Leipzig: Amelang. Cf. also U. Baumann. 1992. Protestantismus und Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1920, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 149ff.; Iris Schröder. 2001. Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt: Frauenbewegung und Sozialreform 1890–1914, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 160ff.  9. Hilger was forced to retire by the National Socialist school administration in 1933; two years later she moved with her partner to Bad Teinach. Cf. H. Silbermann. 1993. ‘Lina Hilgers Aussscheiden aus dem Amt der Schulleiterin am Städtischen Lyzeum Bad Kreuznach im Jahre 1933’, Landeskundliche Vierteljahrsblätter 39, 77–98. 10. Cf. in this context her vehement plea against extending the homosexuality paragraph to ‘female persons’: Elsbeth Krukenberg. 1910/11. ‘§175’, Monatsschrift

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für Kriminalpsychologie und Strafrechtsreform 7, 612. See also M. Pieper. 1984. ‘Die Frauenbewegung und ihre Bedeutung für lesbische Frauen (1850–1920)’, in Michael Bollé and Berlin Museum (eds), Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850–1950, exhibition catalogue, Berlin: Fröhlich & Kaufmann, 116–124. In addition, Krukenberg wrote two quasi-autobiographical novels (E. Krukenberg. 1920. Von Sehnsucht und Reichtum: Aus dem Leben der Hertha Wieser, Leipzig: Amelang; E. Krukenberg. 1938. Zwischen Jung und Alt: Aus dem Leben Luise Königs und ihrer Söhne, Berlin: Bott) and left behind her memoirs (‘Aus deutscher Vergangenheit’, unpublished manuscript, Krukenberg estate). 11. Cf. G. Krukenberg. 1968 (undated). ‘Wie auf einem anderen Stern’, in H. Speiser (ed. on behalf of the Freundeskreis der alten Heidelberger Wandervögel), Dein Hans Lissner: Ein Erinnerungsbuch, Wunstorf: Oppermann & Leddin, 22. 12. G. Krukenberg. 1911. Die Haftung des Reichsmilitärfiskus (doctoral dissertation, Dr. jur., University of Heidelberg), Borna-Leipzig: R. Noske. 13. In 1899 she was one of the founders of the ‘German Protestant Women’s Association’ (‘Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund’) and published among other things: C. SchummWalther. 1932. Berta Lungstras, ein rheinisches Frauenleben in christlicher Fürsorge, Neuwied: Genossenschaftsdruckerei Raiffeisen. 14. Karl Litzmann (1850–1936) was one of the German military heroes of the First World War. As he was an early supporter of the NSDAP, Hitler granted him a state funeral, to which Krukenberg was also invited as a ‘last adjutant’. In 1940 the Polish city of Łódź was renamed as ‘Litzmannstadt’. Until 1964, there was a General Litzmann Barracks in Hamburg. 15. Cf. K. Demeter. 1969. Das Reichsarchiv: Tatsachen und Personen, Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe, 9ff.; M. Pöhlmann. 2002. Kriegsgeschichte und Geschichtspolitik: Der Erste Weltkrieg. Die amtliche deutsche Militärgeschichtsschreibung 1914–1956, Paderborn: Schöningh, 69ff. 16. Cf. G. Krukenberg. 2002. ‘Am Rande des Kapp-Putsches’, in E. Könnemann and G. Schulze (eds), Der Kapp-Lüttwitz-Ludendorff-Putsch: Dokumente, Munich: Olzog, 614–622 (original manuscript 24 pages, Krukenberg estate). 17. In the 1960s, Krukenberg gave several accounts about the Treaty of Rapallo between the German Reich and the Soviet Union in lectures, television interviews and newspaper articles (Krukenberg estate). But since the 1920s he never fostered ‘national Bolshevik’ sympathies; his main goal was simply to undermine the Treaty of Versailles. In regard to the explosive nature of ‘Rapallo’, cf. C. Fink, A. Fron and J. Heideking (eds). 1991. Genoa, Rapallo and European Reconstruction in 1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 18. Cf. at length: L’Huillier, Dialogues, 39ff.; Müller, Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen, 81ff. 19. Cf. Müller, Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen, 81ff. and especially Sonnabend, Pierre Viénot, 109ff. 20. Although the committee officially continued to exist until 1939, it only played a minor role after 1931. The offices in Berlin and Paris were closed. 21. Sonnabend, Pierre Viénot, 132. 22. F. Sieburg. 1995 [1929] Gott in Frankreich? Ein Versuch, Berlin: Ullstein; French transl., F. Sieburg. 1930. Dieu est-il français? Paris: Grasset (most recent edition 1991); English transl., F. Sieburg. 1931. Is God a Frenchman? London/Toronto: Cape. Jeanne Alexandre, the sister of Maurice Halbwachs, already drew a parallel between Sieburg and Viénot in her review for the magazine ‘Libres propos’ (1931, 5, 511ff.).

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23. P. Viénot. 1931. Incertitudes Allemandes : La crise de la civilisation bourgeoise en Allemagne, Paris: Valois; German transl., P. Viénot. 1931. Ungewisses Deutschland: Zur Krise seiner bürgerlichen Kultur, Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag (newly edited by H.M. Bock, Bonn: Bouvier, 1999); English transl., P. Viénot. 1931. Is Germany finished? London: Faber & Faber. 24. Viénot, Ungewisses Deutschland, edited by Bock, 154f. 25. Ibid., 155f. 26. Ibid., 222. 27. The former army officer was not only disturbed by Viénot’s drug dependence (possibly due to the war), but above all by his homosexuality. In fact, Viénot already belonged to the homoerotic periphery of the later Marshal Lyautey during his formative years in Morocco (before 1914) (cf. Sonnabend, Pierre Viénot, 43ff.), and he was also active in the homoerotic intellectual milieu in Berlin, as documented e.g. in the letters of Pierre Bertaux. P. Bertaux. 2001. Un normalien à Berlin  : Lettres franco-allemandes 1927–1933, edited by H.M. Bock, G. Krebs and H. Schulte, Asnières: Presses universitaires Sorbonne Nouvelle. In addition to Bertaux, among others André Gide, Ernst Robert Curtius, Golo Mann and not least the Prussian culture minister, Carl Heinrich Becker, belonged to this group. For Krukenberg and apparently also for other members of the Mayrisch Committee this was profoundly decadent and scandalous. On Berlin as ‘European capital of homosexuality’, cf. F. Tamagne. 2000. Histoire de l’ homosexualité en Europe. Berlin, Londres, Paris 1919–1939, Paris: Le Seuil. 28. Cf. the study of the committee member Arnold Bergsträesser (1896–1964), A. Bergsträesser. 1930. Sinn und Grenzen der Verständigung zwischen Nationen, Munich/ Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, where he emphasized that entente can only be the path and not the goal (p. 90): ‘How far we can go on this path or – perhaps with sacrifices – we will have to go, depends on the concrete situation.’ But ‘if it is made a doctrine, the idea of understanding (Verständigung) will become a danger of the weakening of the political will’ (p. 91). The goal is alone the ‘strengthening’ of one’s own country (Vaterland). 29. After his return to Paris, Viénot drew increasingly nearer to the socialist left in the 1930s and eventually also became a member of the SFIO. The fact that his wife, Andrée Viénot (nee Mayrisch, 1901–1976), had been an active socialist before surely contributed to this radicalization. Cf. G. Martin and J. Raymond. 1993. ‘Viénot, Andrée’ and ‘Viénot, Pierre’, in J. Maitron and C. Pennetier (eds), Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français. Quatrième partie: 1914–1939. De la Première à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, vol. 43, Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 206–211. 30. Anon. [G. Krukenberg] ‘Zerstörte Illusionen’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 24 January 1931. The following quotes also come from here. 31. G. Krukenberg. 1930. ‘Gott in Frankreich?’, Der Ring 3(46), 805ff.; Christian Reil [Gustav Krukenberg]. 1931. ‘Die Wahrheit über Frankreich’, Die Tat, 23(1), 59–62. He also gave a speech on this topic in the famous Düsseldorf Industrie-Club on December 15, 1930. 32. A. Siegfried. 1930. Tableau des partis en France, Paris: Grasset. Siegfried (1875–1959) was a professor at the Institut des Etudes Politiques in Paris and a member of the Mayrisch Committee. 33. Krukenberg, ‘Gott in Frankreich?’, 807. Krukenberg’s proximity to Sieburg, whose highly ambivalent attitude towards France he shared (cf. M. Taureck. 1987. Friedrich Sieburg in Frankreich: Seine literarisch-publizistischen Stellungnahmen zwischen den

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Weltkriegen im Vergleich mit Positionen Ernst Jüngers, Heidelberg: Winter), is documented in countless letters, postcards and dedications in books from Krukenberg’s estate. 34. Anon. 1933. ‘Dr. Krukenberg, der neue Reichsrundfunkkommissar’, NS-Funk 1(5), 4. Cf. also A. Diller. 1980. ‘Die Rundfunkpolitik im Dritten Reich’, in H. Bausch (ed.), Rundfunk in Deutschland, vol. 2. Munich: DTV, 56ff. 35. See, e.g., Das Goebbels-Experiment, DVD, directed by Lutz Hachmeister, 2005, Germany: Polyband Medien (107 minutes), 00:38:09–00:38:17. 36. Among the many such organizations to which Krukenberg belonged were the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft 1914’, the ‘Nationalklub Berlin 1919’ (member of the executive committee), the ‘Weltwirtschaftliche Gesellschaft zu Berlin’ (member of the executive committee), the ‘Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft (founded by Ribbentrop in 1935) and the famous ‘Herrenklub’. 37. Anon. [G. Krukenberg]. 1932. Wer wird Reichspräsident? Das Wahlverfahren, die Kandidaten und ihre Aussichten, Oldenburg: Stalling. 38. Cf. D. Mühlenfeld. 2006. ‘Vom Kommissariat zum Ministerium: Zur Gründungsgeschichte des Reichsministeriums für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda’, in R. Hachtmann and W. Süß (eds), Hitlers Kommissare: Sondergewalten in der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur, Göttingen: Wallstein, 72–92; D. Mühlenfeld. 2006. ‘Joseph Goebbels und die Grundlagen der NS-Rundfunkpolitik’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 54, 442–467. 39. E. Fröhlich (ed.). 1987. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, Teil I. Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, Band 2, Munich: Saur, 222. See also diary entries for 18 May 1933, ‘Krukenberg has to go’ and ‘trouble with Krukenberg’ (ibid., 188); entry for 10 June 1933, ‘Krukenberg has to go’ (ibid., 203); and also the entry for 11 July 1933, ‘Krukenberg’s disastrous legacy’ (ibid., 225). The longstanding Nazi broadcasting expert, Horst Dressler-Andress, became Krukenberg’s successor (Diller, Rundfunkpolitik, 98). 40. See the company’s festschrift, ‘10 Jahre und länger… Standard Lack Werke GmbH’, Berlin, 1936. 41. In the post-war period, Krukenberg’s closeness to Papen is documented in lengthy correspondence (Krukenberg estate). 42. Cf. H. Sandner. 2010. Hitlers Herzog: Carl Eduard von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha. Die Biographie, Aachen: Shaker Media, 222ff. The city of Coburg in Saxony was an early stronghold of the NSDAP; the swastika flag already waved above it in 1931. 43. The Duke of Coburg, a grandchild of Queen Victoria, was the chairman of this society, founded in 1931. Krukenberg was one of the founding members. See M.Wichmann. 2008. ‘Die Gesellschaft zum Studium des Faschismus. Ein antidemokratisches Netzwerk zwischen Rechtskonservativismus und Nationalsozialismus’, Bulletin für Faschismus und Weltkriegsforschung 31/32, 1–33; K. Gietinger. 2009. Der Konterrevolutionär: Waldemar Pabst – eine deutsche Karriere, Hamburg: Nautilus, 297ff. 44. The fact that Krukenberg was threatened for a while can also be seen in an unsigned entry in his files from 1933 or 1934 that states: ‘The entire broadcasting policy of the NSDAP was disturbed in the moment of its most intense struggle by the outrageous behaviour of the so-called “party member” Krukenberg. The mood in party circles was so desperate that they seriously considered using force to get rid of Krukenberg’ (Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, SS personnel files, ‘G. Krukenberg’, p. 340). 45. Undated letter from Reinhard Heydrich to Heinrich Himmler (receipt stamp 9 March 1937); Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, SS personnel files, ‘G. Krukenberg’, pp. 338f.

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Heydrich’s entire ‘Krukenberg dossier’ consisted of 17 pages. The following quotes are from Heydrich’s letter, a photograph of which can be found – strangely enough – on the internet with the remark ‘this item has been sold’: (last accessed August 2013). 46. In 1937, for example, he founded a Hitler Youth home with the name ‘GeneralLitzmann-Heim’ on his company’s property. See the report in the Völkischer Beobachter, 26 June 1937, and a thank you letter from Baldur von Schirach to Krukenberg of 8 January 1937 in Krukenberg’s SS personnel file. 47. Cf. M. Moors and M. Pfeiffer (eds.). 2013. Heinrich Himmlers Taschenkalender 1940. Paderborn: Schöningh, 277. 48. Krukenberg’s military deployments can be reconstructed from his SS personnel files and countless documents and notes from his private estate. See also A. Schulz, G. Wegmann and D. Zinke. 2005. Deutschlands Generale und Admirale. Teil V/vol. 2: Die Generale der Waffen-SS und der Polizei. Hachtel–Kutschere. Bissendorf: Biblio Verlag, 619–630. 49. In terms of how they were treated see C. Streit. 1997. Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945. Bonn: Dietz. With regard to Krukenberg’s most important superior, Eduard Wagner (1894–1944), who played a central role in the policy of exploiting and starving out the Soviet Union but later also participated in the attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, see C. Gerlach. 2000. ‘Militärische “Versorgungszwänge”, Besatzungspolitik und Massenverbrechen: Die Rolle des Generalquartiermeisters des Heeres und seiner Dienststellen im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion’, in N. Frei, S. Steinbacher and B.C. Wagner (eds), Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik, Munich: Saur, 175–208; D. Pohl. 2008. Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944, Munich: Oldenbourg, 92ff. 50. In order to check this out more closely it would be necessary to do more specific research in Eastern archives, which I could not carry out until now. Cf., for White Russia, C. Gerlach. 1999. Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition (Krukenberg is referred to marginally on pp. 160, 316 and 370); for Latvia, S. Jungerkes. 2010. Deutsche Besatzungsverwaltung in Lettland 1941–1945. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (no reference to Krukenberg). With regard to his place of deployment Croatia (Division ‘Prinz Eugen’) cf. H. Sundhaussen. 1971. ‘Zur Geschichte der Waffen-SS in Kroatien 1941–1945’, Südostforschungen 30, 176–196; T. Casagrande. 2003. Die volksdeutsche SS-Division ‘Prinz Eugen’: Die Banater Schwaben und die nationalsozialistischen Kriegsverbrechen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus (no reference to Krukenberg). 51. To his family members he referred at the most to the battles in 1944/45. 52. I would like to thank Michael Wildt, who checked this out in the central archive of the State Justice Administrations for Clearing up National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg. Also the GDR State Security (Stasi) could not find anything incriminating against him, as can be seen in a report by the ‘Committee of Anti-fascist Resistance Fighters of the GDR’ for the documentation centre of the GDR Ministry of the Interior on 14 April 1977 (Archiv des Bundesbeauftragen für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR, AB 1485). 53. With regard to the characteristics of this troop, it was – as is generally known – declared in Nuremberg to be a ‘criminal organization’, whereas they considered themselves to be an elite, comparable to the American Marines; cf. B. Wegner. 1997. Hitlers politische

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Soldaten: Die Waffen-SS 1933–1945, 5th expanded edition, Paderborn: Schöningh; R. Rohrkamp. 2010. ‘Weltanschaulich gefestigte Kämpfer’: Die Soldaten der Waffen-SS 1933–1945. Organisation – Personal – Sozialstrukturen, Paderborn: Schöningh. From a French perspective: Jean-Luc Leleu. 2007. La Waffen-SS: Soldats politiques en guerre, Paris: Perrin. 54. E.g. the trilogy by Jean Mabire which is novel-like and very apologetic: J. Mabire. 1973. La Brigade Frankreich: la tragique aventure des SS français, Paris: Fayard; 1974. La Division Charlemagne : Les combats des SS français en Poméranie, Paris : Fayard; 1975. Mourir à Berlin : Les SS français derniers défenseurs du bunker d’Adolf Hitler, Paris: Fayard. The same is true for some autobiographically coloured books that Philippe Carrard has recently analysed: P. Carrard. 2010. The French Who Fought for Hitler: Memories from the Outcasts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Here we also find a critical commentary on the countless publications of Anglo-American military historians; consider e.g., R. Forbes. 2006. For Europe: The French Volunteers of the Waffen-SS, Solihull: Helion & Co; T. Le Tissier. 2010. SS-Charlemagne. The 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the SS, Barnsley: Pen & Sword. On the other hand there are a few works without any false fascination: A. Merglen. 1977. ‘Soldats français sous uniformes allemands 1941–1945: LVF et “Waffen-SS” français’, Revue d’ histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale 27(108), 71–84; H. Rousso. 1984. Pétain et la fin de la collaboration : Sigmaringen 1944–1945, Brussels: Complexe, especially 201ff.; P. Giolitto. 2007. Volontaires français sous l’uniforme allemand, Paris: Perrin, 259ff. 55. Cf. B. Bruneteau. 2003. ‘L’Europe nouvelle’ de Hitler, une illusion des intellectuels de Vichy, Monaco: Du Rocher; J. Prévotaux. 2010. Un Européisme nazi. Le Groupe ‘Collaboration’ et l’ idéologie européenne dans la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Paris: F.X. de Guibert; A. Cohen. 2012. De Vichy à la Communauté européenne, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, as well as D. Gosewinkel’s introduction in this volume. 56. A recording of this speech exists on the internet: (last accessed 14 September 2013). 57. Cf. O.G. Oexle. 2004. ‘Leitbegriffe – Deutungsmuster – Paradigmenkämpfe: Über Vorstellungen vom “Neuen Europa” in Deutschland 1944‘, in H. Lehmann and O.G. Oexle (eds), Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 2, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 13–40. For a more recent study on Nazi plans concerning Europe, cf. T. Sandkühler. 2012. ‘Europa und der Nationalsozialismus: Ideologie, Währungspolitik, Massengewalt’, Zeithistorische Studien/Studies in Contemporary History, 9, 428–441. 58. F.A. Six. 1944. Europa: Tradition und Zukunft, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 115f. (One chapter of this book was even published as a brochure in French.) In regard to Six, who was transferred from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt to the Foreign Office in 1943, cf. L. Hachmeister. 1998. Der Gegnerforscher: Die Karriere des SS-Führers Franz Alfred Six, Munich: Beck. 59. Six, Europa, 117. With regard to Europe as an ‘emergency alliance of the peoples’ cf. also the polemic by Krukenberg’s successor in the Mayrisch Committee, Max Clauss (1901–1988): M. Clauss. 1943. Tatsache Europa, Prague: Volk und Reich. Both Six and Clauss were disciples of Bergsträsser (cf. note 28 above). 60 This has now been documented in a dictionary of all French Waffen-SS members that was put together by an amateur historian: G. Bouysse. 2012. Waffen-SS Français, two volumes, Lulu (books on demand). But a real prosopographic study of squads and officers’ corps, to whom in addition to Krukenberg other Germans also belonged, like the

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later (liberal) literary scholar Hans Robert Jauss (1921–1997) or the journalist and (right wing) politician Franz Schönhuber (1923–2005), is a desideratum. For a general sketch of foreign SS units see Wegner, Hitlers politische Soldaten, 207ff. 61. Cf. Giolitto, Volontaires, 7ff. 62. Ibid., 389ff. The Vichy government legalized the recruiting of French citizens in a law on July 22, 1943. 63. Cf. Rousso, Pétain, 201ff. 64. G. Krukenberg. 1958. ‘Aufgaben des Inspekteurs der 33. Pz. Gren. Div. der W-SS “Charlemagne”, 1944/45’. Typescript from October 1958 (Krukenberg estate). 65. Ibid. 66. Cf. certificate of discharge from 26 April 1956 (Krukenberg estate). In November 1947 Krukenberg was convicted by a Soviet military court to 25 years in a work camp for ‘damage to the Red Army’. Until 1950 he was detained in a Soviet prison in Bautzen (solitary confinement), after that in a GDR penitentiary in the city of Brandenburg, and from 1952 to 1956 in a communal cell (Bundesarchiv Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten, StVE K227, A 4, 1003f., 1014f.). 67. Here are the titles of some of his speeches: from 1959, ‘Europäische Zusammenschlüsse’, ‘Die Notwendigkeit, die “Freie Welt” auch ideologisch zu verteidigen’, and ‘Psychologische Probleme der europäischen Zusammenarbeit’; from 1960, ‘Europa – menschlich-pädagogisches Problem’ and ‘Europa – Institutionen oder Menschen?’; from 1962, ‘Die europäische Zusammenarbeit als menschlich-pädagogisches Problem’ and ‘Europa und die atlantische Partnerschaft’; from 1963, ‘Frankreich – England und die EWG’ and ‘Kulturelle Außenpolitik’; from 1964, ‘Europas Weg zur Einigung und zur atlantischen Partnerschaft’, ‘Wie sieht die Welt die Deutschen?’; from 1965, ‘Deutschland zwischen Ost und West – 1918–1965, Erlebte Geschichte’; from 1966, ‘Der deutsch-französische Gegensatz in der Vergangenheit’; from 1967, ‘Émile Mayrisch, der erste praktische Europäer’ and ‘Kulturaustausch als Mittel der Völkerverständigung’; from 1968, ‘Europäisches Gedankengut bedeutender Denker und Politik’; from 1973, ‘Europa – die neue alte Welt’; from 1976, ‘Zurückliegende Gegensätze, historische Wende – der Elysée-Vertrag und das deutsch-französische Jugendwerk’. 68. The periodical, Der Heimkehrer, was issued every two weeks and had a circulation of up to 250,000. In regard to the history of the Verband der Heimkehrer (VdH) and the former prisoners of war in post-war Germany cf. F. Biess. 2006. Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press; B. Schwelling. 2010. Heimkehr – Erinnerung – Integration: Der Verband der Heimkehrer, die ehemaligen Kriegsgefangenen und die westdeutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft, Paderborn: Schöningh; C. Wienand. 2010. Performing Memory: Returned German Prisoners of War in Divided and Reunited Germany, PhD dissertation. London: University College London (to be published in 2014 by Camden House). 69. Verband der Heimkehrer. 1955. ‘Mehlemer Programm’, quoted in Der Freiwillige, 2(2), 10. Cf. also Schwelling, Heimkehr, 39 ff. 70. Cf. K. Wilke. 2011. Die ‘Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit’ (HIAG) 1950–1990: Veteranen der Waffen-SS in der Bundesrepublik, Paderborn: Schöningh (with regard to the Occident and Europe rhetoric, e.g., pp. 38 and 210). 71. With regard to Schenck, cf. G. Elsner. 2010. Heilkräuter, ‘Volksernährung’, Menschenversuche: Ernst Günther Schenk (1904–1998): Eine deutsche Arztkarriere, Hamburg: VSA; C. Kopke. 2008. ‘Die “politisch denkende Gesundheitsführung”: Ernst Günther Schenck (1904–1998) und der Nationalsozialismus’, doctoral dissertation.

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Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin. Schenck and Krukenberg apparently got along rather well together. Schenck wrote the following dedication to him in his book from 1970, Ich sah Berlin sterben. Als Arzt in der Reichskanzlei, Herford: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung: ‘To Dr. G. Krukenberg/birds of a feather/in war,/in confinement/and after returning’ (Krukenberg estate). 72. In 1966 Schenck was awarded the ‘Friedlandpreis’ of the VdH, while Krukenberg was named honorary member in 1972. In 1978 he received the ‘Greater Europe Medal’ of the VdH with the inscription: ‘Europe is calling!’ (Krukenberg estate). 73. Der Heimkehrer, 10 January 1957, cited in Der Freiwillige, 2(2), S. 9. As the personnel administrations of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS were totally separated, it came inevitably to a dispute after the war as to whether careers in the Waffen-SS should be recognized as normal career brackets – after all, the Waffen-SS was classified in Nuremberg as a ‘criminal organization’. Therefore Krukenberg, who left the Wehrmacht in 1943 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, had to fight quite a while for his pension as ‘major general’. 74. An inquiry by the author in this regard to the Federal Committee of the CDU remained unanswered. Krukenberg was also in contact with FDP politicians like Ernst Achenbach (Head of the Political Department in the Paris embassy from 1940–1945 and thus responsible for the deportation of the Jews), but his Christian-European ideology probably would have stood in the way of a membership. 75. Cf. G. Krukenberg. No date. ‘Kampftage in Berlin, 24.4.–2.5.1945’, 48 pages, annotation ‘beginning of 1964’ (Krukenberg estate). Despite encouragement from his cousin, the historian Werner Conze, and a request by Professor Hans Rothfels on behalf of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Krukenberg could never decide to write down his memoirs. 76. With regard to this concept of ‘militant democracy’ and personnel continuities in the civil service after 1945, cf. D. Rigoll. 2013. Staatsschutz in Westdeutschland: Von der Entnazifizierung zur Extremistenabwehr, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. 77. Ernst Krukenberg (1889–1972, Dr. med.) was a general practitioner in Rinteln on the Weser; in 1945 he, together with other citizens, saved the city from destruction. See (accessed August 2013). Werner Krukenberg (1895–1945, Prof. Dr. phil.) was an educator; after he was dismissed as director of the Leipziger Volkshochschule in 1933, he studied theology and was later the director of the Evangelische Jugend und Wohlfahrtsamt in Düsseldorf. He was killed in an air raid a few days before the end of the war. Cf. E. Siegel. 1948. ‘Werner Krukenberg’, Die Sammlung 3(6), 764–768. 78. Cf. G.R. Ueberschär (ed.). 2000. NS-Verbrechen und der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler, Darmstadt: Primus. 79. Cf. the final report: E.Maschke. 1974. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, vol. 15, Bielefeld: Gieseking. The fact that it came to a break between the historians and the VdH is interesting, because in the eyes of the former prisoners the ‘witnesses’ were not sufficiently involved; cf. Schwelling, Heimkehr, 166 ff.; R.G. Moeller. 2001. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 177 ff. In this question, Krukenberg took side with the historians against the POW’s critique and referred to his experiences at the Reichsarchiv in 1918/19, but a corresponding article was rejected by the editors of the Heimkehrer (note from October 10, 1963; Krukenberg estate).

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80. He was a member of several German-French associations and the head of the board of trustees of the Committee of German-French associations from 1971 to 1977. On these associations cf. B. Gödde-Baumanns. 2010. ‘Bürgerschaftliche Basis der Annäherung: Die Deutsch-Französischen Gesellschaften – Einblicke in die Praxis’, in C. Defrance, M. Kißener and P. Nordholm (eds), Wege der Verständigung zwischen Deutschen und Franzosen nach 1945, Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 137–157. 81. Cf. G. Hirschfeld. 1984. Fremdherrschaft und Kollaboration: Die Niederlande unter deutscher Besatzung 1940–1945, Stuttgart: DVA, 167 ff., 276. 82. According to my count, Krukenberg was in contact with at least 22 former ‘Charlemagne’ soldiers (Krukenberg estate). 83. Krukenberg estate. He also corresponded regularly with former Standartenführer Zimmermann (1897–1995), who took command over the remains of the ‘Charlemagne’ on April 24, 1945, when Krukenberg was ordered to report to the ‘Nordland’ Division. 84. Letter from Krukenberg to Henri Fenet dated October 21, 1974 (Krukenberg estate). In 1959 he had already voiced the same question in a letter to a former soldier of the Charlemagne as to whether one could erect a memorial to the dead comrades, ‘as you could say with a good conscience that they died for the idea of defending Europe against the communist imperialism, whose danger has been recognized all over the world today’. To this end he wanted to make contact with Father Pire (Nobel Peace Prize in 1959) – ‘whom I know well’ (letter dated July 31, 1959; Krukenberg estate). 85. Cf. F. Taubert. 2007. ‘La mémoire d’une autre réconciliation: le récit des anciens collaborationnistes au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale’, Cahiers d’ histoire, 100, 51–65. 86. This can be gathered from letters to him by the executive committee of HIAG (Krukenberg estate). In 1976 he took part on a meeting of comrades from the ‘Horst Wessel’ and ‘Charlemagne’ divisions in Würzburg (Deutsche Volkszeitung, September 30, 1976). In contact with the author he emphasized however, that he was never a member of such comradeships (letter dated November 22, 1976). 87. That holds true e.g. for Henri Fenet (1919–2002), who was convicted by French courts for Holocaust denial (verbal information from Henry Rousso, Paris). While the former French members of the Nazi army had no chance to legally form an association for a long time, there now exists since 2009 a Cercle des descendants et amis des vétérans français du front de l’Est (1941–1945) with its own website: (accessed August 2013). 88. An especially good indication of this mystification is the pseudo-medieval insignia of the division which has appeared everywhere in the meantime – not least on the internet. Actually it was a post-war invention, designed in 1967 by a former member of the Charlemagne, Jean-Pierre Lefèvre, and sold for the price of 5 francs in order to fill the ‘caisse d’entr’aide’ of the veterans. For the price of 3 francs one could also buy an imitation of the blue-white-red insignia that were actually worn in 1944/45 (circular letter by Jean-Pierre Lefèvre, September, 24, 1967; Krukenberg estate). 89. The public denouncement took place at the congress of the Paris regional association of the Association des anciens prisonniers de guerre (ACPG) on 15–16 April 1978. On the conflict-laden history of the French associations of prisoners of war in regard to the German-French reconciliation after 1945, cf. F. Cochet.1997. ‘Le rôle des anciens prisonniers et des anciens déportés français dans le rapprochement franco-allemand (1945–1965)’, in A. Fleury and R. Frank (eds), Le rôle des guerres dans la mémoire des Européens, Bern: Peter Lang, 123–135; A. Roessner. 2010. ‘Les anciens combattants et

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le rapprochement franco-allemand jusque dans les années 1960’, in C. Defrance, M. Kißener and P. Nordblom, Wege der Verständigung zwischen Deutschen und Franzosen nach 1945, Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 73–88. 90. ‘Störfeuer von der Seine’, Der Heimkehrer, 15 June 1978. The following quotes also come from this article. 91. In one of the letters with regard to the incriminating banquet Krukenberg noted that it was merely a ‘lunch in a public restaurant’ and that it was ‘a private invitation from a doctor and his wife from Grasse’ with ‘a total of 6–7 persons’ taking part in it (Krukenberg estate). 92. Since the 1930s the Hamburg businessman Alfred Toepfer’s foundation has offered countless prizes and scholarships that were initially awarded to German-nationalist or German-friendly persons. After the war the focal point shifted gradually towards a European emphasis, but remained strictly conservative. Cf. J. Zimmermann. 2000. Die Kulturpreise der Stiftung F.V.S. 1935–1945: Darstellung und Dokumentation, edited by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung Freiherr vom Stein, Hamburg: Christians-Verlag; M. Fahlbusch. 2012. ‘Schweizerkreuz und Hakenkreuz: Das Stiftungsvermächtnis der Gebrüder Toepfer in der Schweiz’, L.I.S.A., Wirtschaftsportal der Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung, (accessed 29 May 2013). The condolence letter from Toepfer to Krukenberg’s second wife reveals that the contact with his patron was of longer standing: ‘I was glad’, Toepfer wrote on November 6, 1980, ‘that I could give Dr. Krukenberg a new courage to face life and a healthy freshness after his release from the GDR prison as my guest for a lengthy visit in the Lüneburger Heide’ (Krukenberg estate). 93. Letter from Krukenberg to the president of the Association Robert Schuman ‘Pour l’Europe’, Joseph Schaff, dated 10 October 1979 (Krukenberg estate). Instead of Krukenberg, the Greek prime minister Karamanlis received the medal.

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–––––––. 1905. Die Frauenbewegung, ihre Ziele und ihre Bedeutung, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. –––––––. 1910. Die Frau in der Familie, Leipzig: Amelang. –––––––. 1920. Von Sehnsucht und Reichtum: Aus dem Leben der Hertha Wieser, Leipzig: Amelang. –––––––. 1938. Zwischen Jung und Alt: Aus dem Leben Luise Königs und ihrer Söhne, Berlin: Bott. L’Huillier, F. 1971. Dialogues franco-allemands 1925–1933, Strasbourg: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg. Leleu, J.-L. 2007. La Waffen-SS: Soldats politiques en guerre, Paris: Perrin. Le Tissier, T. 2010. SS-Charlemagne. The 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the SS, Barnsley: Pen & Sword. Mabire, J. 1973. La Brigade Frankreich: la tragique aventure des SS français, Paris: Fayard. –––––––. 1974. La Division Charlemagne: Les combats des SS français en Poméranie, Paris: Fayard. –––––––. 1975. Mourir à Berlin: Les SS français derniers défenseurs du bunker d’Adolf Hitler, Paris: Fayard. Marchand, S.L. 1996. Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. Martin, G. and J. Raymond. 1993. ‘Viénot, Andrée’ and ‘Viénot, Pierre’, in J. Maitron and C. Pennetier (eds), Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français.Quatrième partie: 1914–1939. De la Première à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, vol. 43, Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 206–211. Maschke, E. 1974. Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, vol. 15, Bielefeld: Gieseking. Merglen, A. 1977. ‘Soldats français sous uniformes allemands 1941–1945: LVF et “Waffen-SS” français’, Revue d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale 27(108), 71–84. Meyer, K. 1998. Geweint wird, wenn der Kopf ab ist: Annäherungen an meinen Vater ‘Panzermeyer’, Generalmajor der Waffen-SS, Freiburg: Herder. Moeller, R.G. 2001. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Moors, M. and M. Pfeiffer (eds.). 2013. Heinrich Himmlers Taschenkalender 1940, Paderborn: Schöningh. Mühlenfeld, D. 2006a. ‘Joseph Goebbels und die Grundlagen der NS-Rundfunkpolitik’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 54, 442–467. –––––––. 2006b. ‘Vom Kommissariat zum Ministerium: Zur Gründungsgeschichte des Reichsministeriums für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda’, in R. Hachtmann and W. Süß (eds), Hitlers Kommissare: Sondergewalten in der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur, Göttingen: Wallstein, 72–92. Müller, G. 2005. Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee und der Europäische Kulturbund, Munich: Oldenbourg.

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Oexle, O.G. 2004. ‘Leitbegriffe – Deutungsmuster – Paradigmenkämpfe: Über Vorstellungen vom “Neuen Europa” in Deutschland 1944’, in H. Lehmann and O.G. Oexle (eds), Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 2, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 13–40. Pieper, M. 1984. ‘Die Frauenbewegung und ihre Bedeutung für lesbische Frauen (1850–1920)’, in Michael Bollé and Berlin Museum (eds), Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850–1950, exhibition catalogue, Berlin: Fröhlich & Kaufmann, 116–124. Pohl, D. 2008. Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944, Munich: Oldenbourg. Pöhlmann, M. 2002. Kriegsgeschichte und Geschichtspolitik: Der Erste Weltkrieg. Die amtliche deutsche Militärgeschichtsschreibung 1914–1956, Paderborn: Schöningh. Prévotaux, J. 2010. Un Européisme nazi. Le Groupe ‘Collaboration’ et l’idéologie européenne dans la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Paris: F.X. de Guibert. Rigoll, D. 2013. Staatsschutz in Westdeutschland: Von der Entnazifizierung zur Extremistenabwehr, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Roessner, A. 2010. ‘Les anciens combattants et le rapprochement franco-allemand jusque dans les années 1960’, in C. Defrance, M. Kißener and P. Nordblom, Wege der Verständigung zwischen Deutschen und Franzosen nach 1945, Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 73–88. Rohrkamp, R. 2010. ‘Weltanschaulich gefestigte Kämpfer’: Die Soldaten der Waffen-SS 1933–1945. Organisation – Personal – Sozialstrukturen, Paderborn: Schöningh. Rousso, H. 1984. Pétain et la fin de la collaboration: Sigmaringen 1944–1945, Brussels: Complexe. Sandkühler, T. 2012. ‘Europa und der Nationalsozialismus: Ideologie, Währungspolitik, Massengewalt’, Zeithistorische Studien/Studies in Contemporary History, 9, 428–441. Sandner, H. 2010. Hitlers Herzog: Carl Eduard von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha. Die Biographie, Aachen: Shaker Media. Schröder, I. 2001. Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt: Frauenbewegung und Sozialreform 1890–1914, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Schulz, A., G. Wegmann and D. Zinke. 2005. Deutschlands Generale und Admirale. Teil V, vol. 2: Die Generale der Waffen-SS und der Polizei. Hachtel–Kutschere, Bissendorf: Biblio Verlag. Schumm-Walther, C. 1932. Berta Lungstras, ein rheinisches Frauenleben in christlicher Fürsorge, Neuwied: Genossenschaftsdruckerei Raiffeisen. Schwelling, B. 2010. Heimkehr – Erinnerung – Integration: Der Verband der Heimkehrer, die ehemaligen Kriegsgefangenen und die westdeutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft, Paderborn: Schöningh. Sieburg, F. 1995 [1929] Gott in Frankreich? Ein Versuch, Berlin: Ulstein (French transl., F. Sieburg. 1930. Dieu est-il français? Paris: Grasset; English transl., F. Sieburg. 1931. Is God a Frenchman? London/Toronto: Cape).

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Siegel, E. 1948. ‘Werner Krukenberg’, Die Sammlung 3(6), 764–768. Siegfried, A. 1930. Tableau des partis en France, Paris: Grasset. Silbermann, H. 1993. ‘Lina Hilgers Ausscheiden aus dem Amt der Schulleiterin am Städtischen Lyzeum Bad Kreuznach im Jahre 1933’, Landeskundliche Vierteljahrsblätter 39, 77–98. Six, F.A. 1944. Europa: Tradition und Zukunft, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. Sonnabend, G. 2005. Pierre Viénot (1897–1944): Ein Intellektueller in der Politik, Munich: Oldenbourg. Streit, C. 1997. Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945, Bonn: Dietz. Sundhaussen, H. 1971. ‘Zur Geschichte der Waffen-SS in Kroatien 1941–1945’, Südostforschungen 30, 176–196. Tamagne, F. 2000. Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe. Berlin, Londres, Paris 1919–1939, Paris: Le Seuil. Taubert, F. 2007. ‘La mémoire d’une autre réconciliation: le récit des anciens collaborationnistes au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale’, Cahiers d’histoire, 100, 51–65. Ueberschär, G.R. (ed.). 2000. NS-Verbrechen und der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler, Darmstadt: Primus. Viénot, P. 1931. Incertitudes Allemandes: La crise de la civilisation bourgeoise en Allemagne, Paris: Valois German transl., P. Viénot. 1931. Ungewisses Deutschland: Zur Krise seiner bürgerlichen Kultur, Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag (newly edited by H.M. Bock, Bonn: Bouvier, 1999). English transl., P. Viénot. 1931. Is Germany finished? London: Faber & Faber. Wegner, B. 1997. Hitlers politische Soldaten: Die Waffen-SS 1933–1945, 5th expanded edition, Paderborn: Schöningh. Westernhagen, D. von. 1987. Die Kinder der Täter: Das Dritte Reich und die Generation danach, Munich: Kösel. Wichmann, M. 2008. ‘Die Gesellschaft zum Studium des Faschismus: Ein antidemokratisches Netzwerk zwischen Rechtskonservativismus und Nationalsozialismus’, Bulletin für Faschismus und Weltkriegsforschung 31/32, 1–33. Wienand, C. 2010. Performing Memory: Returned German Prisoners of War in Divided and Reunited Germany, PhD dissertation. London: University College London. Wilke, K. 2011. Die ‘Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit’ (HIAG) 1950–1990: Veteranen der Waffen-SS in der Bundesrepublik, Paderborn: Schöningh. Zimmermann, J. 2000. Die Kulturpreise der Stiftung F.V.S. 1935–1945: Darstellung und Dokumentation, edited by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung Freiherr vom Stein, Hamburg: Christians-Verlag.

7 Communist Europeanism A Case Study of the GDR Jana Wuestenhagen

Introduction Even in 2004, when the eastern enlargement of the European Union was on the political agenda, not much was known about the former Eastern Bloc states’ concepts of Europe.1 Meanwhile, several studies have shown that there was not just one united picture of Europe in the Eastern Bloc.2 Nevertheless, political leaders’ official positions remained remarkably stable in their rejection of Europe as a supranational unity, leading to a rather stiffened political sphere from the 1950s to the mid-1980s. In the cultural sphere, however, in opposition discourses and in the minds of the people, diverse ideals and images of Europe existed. In current research, this has led to an emphasis on a continued, uninterrupted mental belonging of the socialist East to (Western) Europe.3 With regard to the question of anti-liberal thinking in Europe posed by this volume, it seems reasonable to try first to find these concepts in the Eastern Bloc’s political and operative elite. However, the European enlargement process since the end of the Cold War has brought to the surface significant differences in opinions concerning the future of the union between so-called Old and New Europe. This could be seen as an indication that the communist conception of Europe did have an impact on the Eastern European people.4 ‘Having grown up in the East’, said the well-known British historian Tony Judt shortly before his death in 2010, Angela Merkel ‘evidently does not have the slightest appreciation of the essence of the EU and the price paid for its neglect.’5 Against this background, arguments emerged asking to what extent present EU policies of the new Eastern European members can be explained by the ‘historical baggage’ they brought into the established community of (Western)

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Europe. Thus, several studies set themselves the objective of locating guiding principles (Leitbilder) for Europe that had been developed in Eastern Europe since the medieval era.6 This chapter aims to outline the concepts of Europe developed and discussed within the so-called Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. Focusing on the example of the GDR whose people were the first ‘to move houses’ the presentation highlights both official and non-official conceptions. In doing so, the study aims to record ideas of Europe that both do and do not fit in with the canon of values of European integration, and that therefore might be of significance for the current discourse concerning the integration of Europe. As Dieter Gosewinkel has outlined in his introduction to this book, economic liberalism based on constitutional civil liberties formed the core of the process of European integration after the Second World War. One might point to the fact that the development of a free market, freedom of trade movement and employment, civil and political rights such as the freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, etc. became the liberal core only in the Western part of Europe, while on the other side of the Iron Curtain the story goes quite differently. Thus, to a historian who writes GDR history the answer to questions about non-liberal conceptions of Europe in that state’s performance seems to be obvious. East Germany was a dictatorship ruled by a party that claimed totalitarian leadership. Based on a totalitarian ideology it aimed for a comprehensive social dedifferentiation ‘that deprived the economical, scientific, judicial and cultural subsystems of their autonomy, invalidated their specific rational criteria, and super-imposed them by a political ideology.’7 This is the very antithesis of liberal thinking that empathizes with the concept of freedom and individual liberty. Nevertheless, the GDR’s leadership considered its state a legitimate and irreplaceable piece of Europe’s political (and geographical) map. Given the division of the continent during the Cold War it is therefore a promising issue to ask how Europe was imagined ‘behind the curtain’. What conceptions were state and party institutions developed on? How did socially marginalized circles such as civil rights and other opposition groups perceive Europe? And finally, what did East Germans know about the ‘other’ Europe they were cut off from by their own government?

Forever Divided, Never United: The SED’s Concept of Europe The official images of Europe propagated inside and outside the GDR by the ruling Communist Party (SED) cannot be looked at without having in mind two major factors that intrinsically summed up the SED’s conception of Europe throughout its entire existence.8 On the one hand, the GDR depended, probably more than any other Eastern Bloc country upon the approval of the Soviet leadership. On the other hand, West Germany exerted an immense attraction for the East German people. Now, sandwiched in the middle of the continent

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between Soviet hegemony and the pull of West Germany, the SED leadership propagated a conception of Europe aimed at legitimizing its own state and governance. Furthermore, the East-West conflict embedded this constellation and determined the foreign policies and imaginations of Europe for all actors. During the forty years in which the SED ruled the country, the official East German concept of Europe remained remarkably stable in its core. It consisted of a set of ideas rooted in communist ideology and Cold War policies that the SED leadership clung to until the very end. Thus, just as the world was divided into the East and the West, so was Europe, too. This dichotomy was based on Soviet perceptions according to which either communism or capitalism would win the final fight over the future of the world. Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and most of the functionaries in the SED Politbureau had been deeply and permanently influenced by these dogmas. Even in September 1989, when thousands of people fled the country every day, Honecker insisted on a concept of Europe based on the principles of the Helsinki conference that were: two German states in a Europe divided into two main blocs that coexisted peacefully. It can be stated at this point that the strong perception of national sovereignty that stood behind this model remained a prominent factor in both official and non-official imaginations of Europe in all (smaller) Eastern European countries.9 Being a matrix for almost all visions of Europe it worked like a corset that limited the scope of imaginations and hindered the East German actors ‘from thinking the unthinkable’ – the fall of the Iron Curtain. With regard to the SED leadership one outstanding example can be found in the notion of a ‘Common European Home’ propagated by Soviet leader Mihail Gorbachev since the mid-1980s, and sympathetically received by many Western Europeans, too. To Honecker, this home served as a role model for a panEuropean security order that, first and foremost, consisted of two German states. In the SED leader’s mind, the ‘common home’ was a duplex house imagined as two halves neatly separated by doors and windows that could be closed tightly if things inside the family, that is inside the Eastern Bloc, had to be discussed.10 However, beyond this ‘national’ priority there were also considerable changes within the Eastern Bloc with regard to both the perception of Europe and the policy towards the European Community. During a first phase that lasted from the late 1940s until 1962 the West European integration process had been rejected at all costs. Not surprisingly, this was rooted (apart from political guidelines set by the Cold War system) in ideological reasons. According to Marxism/Leninism only unification among socialist countries could function, while imperialistic associations had no future. As paradoxical as it might sound nowadays, this conviction led to a rather spontaneous examination of the West European integration and its institutions by the SED and the state’s ministries.11 It was only in 1962, when the Soviet World Economic Institute in Moscow recognized the Common Market, the centrepiece of the European integration process, as a reality that had to be taken into consideration in the present, as in the future. Afterwards, the Soviet Union tried to push the so-called socialist

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economic integration within the Council for Mutual Assistance (COMECON). But all attempts to establish supranational structures within the Eastern Bloc countries failed, not least because the GDR (besides Romania) in fact took an attitude that Ralf Ahrens once called ‘aversion against integration’.12 One of the reasons for the SED’s sticking to national sovereignty in Europe can be found in the need to legitimate its own power and its state’s existence before both the East German people and the Federal Republic. Another explanation – directly linked to the existence of two German states – could be seen in the special economic relationship to the European Community the GDR held through the intra-German trade. With regard to the first point, one should keep in mind that by no later than the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, confessions to German unity made by East German political leaders had been irrelevant. From then on, the existence of two German states formed the core of the SED’s conception of Europe. The message was clear: without the GDR, there would be no peace in Europe. Both party and state leaders, Walter Ulbricht and later Erich Honecker, used the widespread need for security in Germany and in Europe to portray the GDR as a warranty for the security of the whole continent, while West Germany was depicted as a risk factor aiming to finalize what Hitler could not finish: German hegemony over Europe. In the 1950s and 1960s, these arguments found support especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, but finally with the so-called Ostpolitik (policy towards the East) of Willy Brandt this threat scenario lost ground. Consequently – and unlike the other smaller Eastern Bloc countries – the SED leadership shifted its public focus from the Federal Republic almost exclusively on to security policy issues once it had gained full international recognition at the beginning of the 1970s. Here, it developed substantial concepts for all-over European cooperation. On the other hand – and this refers to the second point made above – it rejected considerably more keenly any rapprochement between the economic blocs COMECON and Common Market than the other smaller Eastern Bloc countries.13 This choice of priorities was also possible because of the intra-German trade, namely the supplementary protocol that made the GDR a quasi-member of the Common Market.14 Compared to its allies who lacked a similar agreement, it left space for the SED leaders to reject longer and harder the establishment of supranational relations between Eastern and Western European economic (and political) institutions.15 Especially in the context of the Helsinki process (CSCE) it also referred to a common, undividable European culture that was rooted in ancient Greek and Roman history and began to disperse over the continent through Christian religion. However, compared to references made with regard to the political and institutional development of Europe (NATO, Warsaw Treaty, Comecon, Common Market/EC), cultural as well as geographical references were rather subordinated. If made, then they described the limits of the continent in a traditional way, that is from the Atlantic coast to the Ural Mountains. Thereby, the Asian part of the Soviet Union was excluded. However, as far as we know,

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the belonging of the USSR to Europe was never questioned. For Ulbricht and for Honecker the Soviet Union remained the main power of social progress and peace in Europe and worldwide, while the United States was to be kept away from the continent.16 Insofar as the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) leadership’s notions of Europe did not place sovereign nations in the foreground, they showed them in their efforts to mobilize the working classes in all European countries for the realization of their political ideals. ‘The unity of Europe’s workers is announcing itself; we will support it’, proclaimed a GDR pamphlet in the mid-1970s. Along with a pledge for international solidarity with the oppressed around the globe, collective action was to be directed against multinational corporations in particular and capitalism in general.17 However, these notions were also subordinate to Honecker’s political goal of lasting European peace in which both political blocs could continue to coexist peacefully. Thus when Gorbachev began to develop his ideas of a ‘Common European Home’ in the mid-1980s, Erich Honecker saw his convictions upended. The ‘family’, as he had always seen the socialist states, fell apart and the European Home, which he had imagined with walls and doors separating the two blocs along with their differing values, began to look more and more like an open building in which friend and foe could encounter each other without restraint.18 As a consequence of this, the SED leadership retired from the European scene. In the course of the Helsinki process, initial involvement transformed into hesitation and partial rejection, particularly concerning human rights,19 a sector that belongs to the core of liberal values of Western European integration. With regard to the subject discussed in this book it makes sense to point to the fact that especially opposition groups, dissidents and people who wanted to leave the GDR for the West (by applying for emigration) referred to human rights as defined by Part 3 of the Helsinki Agreement in 1975. Nearly all of them were supervised by the Staatssicherheit (Stasi) and experienced a wide range of varieties of repression that was frequently also extended to their families. This should also be kept in mind while noting that leading SED officials continued to refer to Helsinki including a socialist German state in Europe.20 The conditions had nevertheless changed fundamentally since the mid1980s. The SED regime now saw itself challenged on two European fronts: on one side, as ever, was the economically and politically stronger Federal Republic. On the other side, with much more potential impact, the most important allied power was faltering. The movement that had started to develop in its own camp since Gorbachev’s perestroika would eventually cause the end of the GDR. The SED leadership responded by shutting off from the West and, in a new state of affairs, the East. While Honecker prophesied to West Germany that the wall would still be standing in a hundred years,21 SED Politburo member Kurt Hager opposed a ‘change of scenery’ (Tapetenwechsel) coming from Moscow, meaning a perestroika in East Berlin.22

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Only with this background of power struggle and conflicting interests did the SED leaders begin to advocate pan-European ideas, especially in matters of environmental protection, energy and economic cooperation.23 This did not, however, mean a political or even supranational continental unity that would also include debates on common values and guiding principles: they chose instead to insist on the territorial and political European status quo as laid out in Helsinki. The imaginations of Europe detected within the top level of party and state bodies are also similar within research institutions. Nevertheless, they are often quoted in order to prove a plurality of opinions that were allegedly developed beyond the narrow circle of the SED leadership.24 Generally, and this goes for all Eastern Bloc countries: what it was possible to say out loud in the cultural sphere was not possible in political discourse. Thus, the framework of alternative concepts for the future – in our context for European alternatives – shrunk to a minimum.25 Only within the framework of the official ‘socialist European policy’ dictated by the party could alternative European visions such as the ‘floor for the Balkans’, suggested by the Bulgarian communist leader Todor Shivkov, or a storey for the North and Central European countries be discussed.26 In these concepts ‘Europe’ was used as a political category. Therefore, pan-European visions referred to predefined political targets such as environmental protection, energy policy, scientific and technical cooperation, etc. In doing so, neither party nor state institutions showed a unique or new performance. On the contrary, according to Wolfgang Schmale the hidden meaning of images of Europe hardly altered in the course of centuries. In general, they were used to make certain profits.27 Thus, SED leadership’s appellations to Europe aimed at legitimizing and strengthening their government, their state, and the so-called ‘socialist German nation’ they dreamed of. The party’s almost manic compulsions to distance East Germany from West Germany made it link Europe’s security inextricably with the existence of its own state and reject any idea of a European identity without nations. However, according to Rolf Petri, just as the Manichaean division of societies into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ belonged to century-old European thought patterns, the dichotomy of Europe did, too.28 If he is right to assume that the substance of modern Europe consists of a variable set of quotations and crossreferences rather than specific geographical conditions, then the SED leadership had performed a typical European action by choosing the desired pieces from the European building kit. Up to this point, quite little has been said about the economic dimension of the ‘liberal core’ of projects for Europe. Dieter Gosewinkel has also pointed to this in his introductory remarks. One reason can be found in the fact that there is still quite little known about the ‘culture of plan’ (Kultur des Plans), that determined the economy in the different Eastern European countries after 1945. In Cold War times the contradiction of a ‘free market economy’ on the one side and a state-controlled centrally planned economy on the other formed a key

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topic for liberal criticism of socialism. However, as recent studies have shown, planning cannot be attributed to just one determined location, time or ideology. Nevertheless, it did develop a specific character in socialist societies. The basically open future horizon of Western societies differed fundamentally from the teleological concept of planning that would lead within a certain historical time to a final goal: socialism and then communism. Schulze Wessel pointed to the fact that until well into the 1960s planning also had positive connotations in various Western countries, thus shaping Western modernity, too.29 For the GDR, André Steiner had demonstrated that even the reform period in the 1960s launched to establish a ‘New Economic System’ including some free market elements not only failed in 1970/71, but always remained within the all-over concept of a centrally planned economy.30 The same is true for Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries such as Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union. Remarkably enough, the political leaders stopped economic liberalization when they feared for their totalitarian claim to power.31 These findings have questioned the seriousness of this kind of liberalization attempt.32 As the rest of the chapter will mainly deal with political and cultural aspects of European concepts within opposition groups and among the people in Eastern Europe, it shall be added at this point that – as far as we know – the system of a centrally planned economy not only discredited the political regimes in all Eastern Bloc countries, but also the concept of ‘plans’ in general.33 Furthermore, having in mind that at the end of the 1980s the plan became an element of stagnation even for the political leaders in the Soviet Union, it seems plausible to assume that, after decades of centrally planned economies, the vast majority of the people in all Eastern Bloc countries took a rather positive attitude towards the free liberal market philosophy. However, with regard to the European enlargement process after 1989/90, Faraldo has made a remarkable point by stressing the ‘positive’ outcomes of the centrally planned economies at the end of the Cold War. He notes: ‘Despite the economy of scarcity, a consumerist society developed in Eastern Europe after 1956 … “Eventually, the GDR and Czechoslovakia were on the same level as Ireland and Spain.” Modern ideas of consumerism thus developed very similarly in the East and in the West. This probably promoted the structural unification of divided Europe more than the numerous EU policies that were intended to bolster transfers and cooperation.’34

A United Europe of Nation-states: Oppositional Conceptions of Europe With regard to the objective of this compilation, that is, to trace anti-liberal or non-liberal concepts of Europe, it might seem odd to look at dissidents and opposition activists in Eastern Europe since as they developed conceptions of Europe they defined themselves as alternatives to official state and party

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conceptions. However, the effort should be made, not least because recent studies often conclude that these ideas paved the path for Eastern Europe’s ‘return to Europe’. As Domnitz put it, ‘they contributed to a reorientation of the Eastern Bloc’s societies to the West and to their emancipation from Soviet domination’.35 Given both the constraints that state socialism put upon the public spheres in all Eastern Bloc countries and the persecution of any political opposition, it might be interesting to ask how images of Europe developed by underground circles competed with official conceptions. Increasingly in the GDR since the mid-1970s opposition and civil rights groups began to develop alternative ideas of Europe. Several factors encouraged the trend. On the one hand, the SED regime consolidated after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The (brief) economic and intellectual liberalization period that characterized the East German society at the beginning of the 1970s was a symbol of the increased self-confidence that the SED leadership had (re-) gained since the ‘shock’ of the people’s uprising in June 1953. On the other hand, a shift in the methods of repression exerted by the Staatssicherheit took place: from open repression in the 1950s and 1960s to ‘softer’ methods such as the extension of a net of confidential informants infiltrating all parts of society. Also, the efforts of Protestant church leaders to integrate their institutions into socialist society (thus widening the possibilities for opposition groups to act under the Church’s protection), and the ever growing peace movement in Western Europe in the 1980s must not be neglected. Finally, this possibly being the most important factor, there were substantial congruities between the conceptions and images of Europe propagated by official sources and the ideas that circulated in underground groups.36 Associated with the Helsinki process, one coincidence can be found in the appellations to a culturally united Europe based on common religious and humanistic traditions of the Occident. The idea of Europe as a place of ‘distinction’ (Abgrenzung) can be considered a second similarity. Thirdly, opposition groups and official concepts met in the mobilization of a European peace movement ‘across the blocs’.37 With regard to the enlargement process of the European integration after 1989 the most remarkable consensus can be found in the concept of nation. This was not only true for the GDR. As Domnitz has shown, both dissidents and party elites also strongly favoured a ‘Europe of the nations’ in Poland and Czechoslovakia.38 Until today, both ‘nation’ and ‘Europe’ form an integral part of the ‘New Europeans’’ self-portrayal. From their point of view the confession to the concept of nation does not contradict the vision of a united Europe. On the contrary: the preservation of the nation and the ‘return’ to a united, first and foremost economically-healthy Europe go hand in hand.39 However, the idea of Europe based on nation-states proved to be neither singular nor limited to Eastern Europe. We find a telling example of this in France, where Charles de Gaulle stood with his ‘Europe of Fatherlands’ against supranational concepts aiming at the integration of Western Europe.

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Now, do the congruities mentioned above make the oppositional thinking of Europe anti-liberal, virtually tainted by their official counterpart? To answer this question one should have a look at the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe. Based on their ideas developed long before the revolutionary changes, dissidents and opposition activists were the first to claim in public free elections and political participation by questioning the leading role of the communist parties and the planned economy. While in Poland a relatively free (liberal) discourse about Europe was possible, the Czech opposition remained in the fragmented (underground) sphere until very late.40 The same applies for the GDR. According to former East German State officials, especially Protestant churches claimed the protection of civil rights against state authorities as agreed on in Helsinki, whereas civil rights activists did so only in exceptional cases.41 Nevertheless, the small groups of GDR oppositionists distanced themselves from official party statements. While the SED leadership insisted on the existence of two German states, they broke this taboo. Partly, they built on European post-war plans that described a neutral, de-militarized Germany. Even though a divided Germany also remained vivid in their visions of Europe it was imagined in a way that differed fundamentally from SED’s conceptions. However, one should not overestimate the impact that oppositional ideas had outside their ‘niches’, but it should be noted, that – focusing on human and civil rights such as the freedom to travel, the freedom of opinion, environmental protection, etc. – they made liberal (West) European values visible that were absent in the East German reality.42 If it can be evaluated at all, neither opposition and civil rights groups, nor official press and media43 nor West German television were able to convey a realistic image of Europe. In 1989/90, there was hardly anyone in East Germany who had concrete knowledge about the integration process in Western Europe. 81 per cent of young people aged 15 to 24 felt inadequately prepared for the European Union.44 For reasons of space it cannot be discussed here what this meant for a European identity that is usually based on some kind of confession to certain values.45

A Blurred Image: Europe in the People’s Mind To find out what images and concepts of Europe people kept in their mind while living for decades in a system that impeded a pluralistic public discourse will be probably the most challenging task imposed on research. Recent publications prove, however, that a major part of Eastern European citizens cultivated an idealized image of ‘the West’ nurtured by Western press and media. In these imaginations the Western European integration process stood first and foremost for a higher standard of living and consumerism.46 The ‘dark’ side of this ‘liberal wealth’, i.e. unemployment and its consequences

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for the individual were often blocked out. Therefore, the confrontation with the real Western world after 1989 came as a shock for quite a lot of Eastern Europeans.47 Probably, this is even truer of East Germans as only a relatively small number of them could travel to Western Europe and see it first hand. Consequently, West German television became one of the steadiest sources of information. Thus, amalgamating West German commercials, entertainment and news, East Germans created a parallel world at home, in which West Germany became a role model for the economic and political prospects that ‘The West’ provided to its people.48 Nevertheless, it would be too one-sided to view the enthusiasm with which the Eastern European people and new governments were pushing towards the European Union in 1989 solely as seeking an economic advantage. As Vrääht Öhner and others have put it: European integration was, above all, also a mental process.49 In the state socialist societies dissidents, opposition activists and underground intellectuals competed with official concepts of Europe, aiming at shaping the mental dispositions of a broader public.50 However, measured against the extension official statements could reach due to the (anti-liberal) constraints the system put on the public sphere their scope remained rather limited, at least until well into the 1980s. Therefore, it might be promising to have a look at fictional literature (belletrists), not least because East Germany, the focus of this study, was reckoned as a ‘country that reads’ (Leseland). Thus, leaving the official political sphere attention will be paid to the (official) cultural sphere. Taking a look at publishing houses will allow us to track down images of Europe in a societal sector that is often quoted as having ‘brought Europe and the world to the imprisoned population of the GDR’.51 In 2003 and 2004 an exhibition – ‘Europe in the Mind’ – was shown in Brandenburg’s Eisenhüttenstadt that dealt with the ideas of Europe offered to readers in the GDR through fictional literature.52 The focus of the show was the publishing house Volk und Welt. Founded in March 1947, it was seen by large parts of the population in the GDR as the leading publisher for fictional literature from all around the world.53 If one follows the authors of the exhibition catalogue, the status of these books mainly came from the breaking of social taboos and censorship rules. This could be an act as small as mentioning Western places, as in the eyes of the SED leadership these were home to the ‘dark’ side of power. Influenced by the regime’s Soviet exile following 1933, it viewed the West suspiciously. The socalled West emigrants – communists or social democrats who had emigrated to Paris, London or the Americas during National Socialism – were thus discriminated against in the early SED. Many such emigrants could be found in cultural institutions such as the publishing house Volk und Welt, mentioned above (for example Stephan Hermlin and Walter Czollek, who later became chief editor). Both their research and their publishing policy are considered visionary counters

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to the introspective German navel-gazing of the time, which framed the ideas of Europe that were to be fitted into the official political principles described above. However, one must not forget that the GDR’s (official) publishers did not exist as separate, autonomous entities that could communicate with other social subsystems or slip into antagonistic dissent with state and society. The infiltration by the Stasi necessarily helps to recall the socio-political context that constrained their space of action. As of 1982, the Union publishing house, an institution of the East CDU and thus a platform for Christian literature, was also connected to the Stasi through its director. Furthermore, through policies such as printing authorization and a panel of supervising experts, the SED’s party and state officials disposed of decisive control over the publication of desired or undesired authors.54 Thus, the role played by the GDR’s publishing houses in the dissemination of European literary ideals in opposition to official representation should not be overstated. In fact, literature in the GDR was a highly politicized issue. This meant that books from Europe, about Europe, from around the world or about the world, could be published or not depending on their political premise. Volk und Welt published no books from Yugoslavia for many years after 1948, no writings from Hungary after 1956, and later stopped printing works from Albania, China, Czechoslovakia and Poland. French literature was censored as it was considered a ‘breeding ground’ for the dreaded ‘literary modernism’, Denmark and Sweden arose suspicion due to the alleged ‘Scandinavian sexwave’. Titles from the Balkans were judged too nationalistic and drastic in their depiction of the atrocities of the Turkish and partisan wars by the head office for publishing companies and literary retail of the GDR’s ministry of culture.55 In the mid-1950s, the SED government requested that the publishing companies expand their West programmes but by 1958 this ‘thawing up period’ was already over. Censorship was intensified, funds for acquisitions cut. The consequence was a severe decline in Western imports. In 1958, Volk und Welt published 69 West German books, in 1959 there were 32, and in 1963 Germanlanguage literature from the BRD, Switzerland and Austria shrunk to a mere eight new publications.56 However, the GDR’s literary scene also picked up on the SED’s idea of a cultural Europe: ‘Yes, there is a European community!’ In this manner Günther Wirth, editor-in-chief of the Union publishing house, stood in line with the SED leaders in style and content. He rejected the reduced European ideology and politics of Western Europe allegedly represented by Adenauer, Churchill and Truman in which the Nazis’ European dreams were fused with their own anti-Soviet goals.57 Along with such politically motivated statements, East German publishing houses also rejuvenated antique myths of Europe as a way of grappling with the themes of war and peace.58 Finally, Europe – in the minds of many intellectuals and artists of the GDR – was also a concept that could be related to the ideas of socialism, if not communism, as a historical progression. This showed the far-reaching unifying

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power of the communist utopia, which linked intellectuals in the GDR with a regime whose reality they approached critically.59 It is also a useful reminder that liberal concepts as manifested in the Western European integration process were not welcomed per se as the only possible way to the future. The attempt to find pan-European images in the arts was made in 2002 by an exhibition in the ‘European City’ of Karlsruhe. Under the slogan ‘Across Europe – Art in the Sixties’ (Europaweit – Kunst der sechziger Jahre), the creators of the exhibition were led by a geographical interpretation of Europe and selected paintings from all over Europe. An artistic Europe as a whole, however, barely formed in the reality of the Cold War. On the contrary, a lack of interest and to some extent rejection, but especially ignorance, characterized relations even into the 1980s. Artists from Eastern Europe felt isolated, especially in the Soviet Union, where contacts were scarce. This finding applies in principle even to the two German states, at least after the erection of the wall in 1961. The official prejudice against the art of the ‘Other’ was strong, thus hampering alternative concepts coming from ‘the West’ from gaining importance. Socialist realism, which was established as the ideal for all artists by the SED at the beginning of the 1950s, stood in strong opposition to the diversity of the West. Despite Kurt Hager, director of the Ideological Commission of the SED’s Politburo, affirming the diversity of socialist art in the mid-1960s, Western pop art culture and abstract painting of that period seemed a chaotic, unrealistic and decadent form of individual expression to the party leadership. Even though artistic diversity was given a little more recognition by the SED in a streak of liberalization at the beginning of the 1970s, Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in November 1976 showed that the Unity Party hadn’t relinquished its totalitarian aspirations.60 The suppression and surveillance apparatus remained in place until the end. This should also be kept in mind when recent studies argue that, what was not feasible in the political sphere was possible in the cultural sphere.61 Against this background, there is at least some justified doubt about intents to construct a so-called ‘Common market of the mind’ that had allegedly linked the different imaginations of Europe across the blocs.62 Indeed, even in the GDR an alternative art scene was established that also maintained relations with groups in Western Europe. Nevertheless, contacts remained very limited. Indeed, thoughts are free (Die Gedanken sind frei), but as many artists retreated, just like the vast majority of East Germans, to their individual niches (Nischengesellschaft) we still know relatively little about the images of those who read (and dreamed) about Europe in East Germany.

Conclusion In the GDR, there were a great number of confessions to democratic principles such as the freedom of opinion (officially, there was no censorship), human

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rights (in the Communist hymn, the ‘Internationale’, they even are the ultimate goal), economic and political participation (through elections and the principle of democratic centralism). Appellations of that kind can be found in SED and state publications and their media as well as in papers and Samizdat sources created by opposition and civil rights groups. However, under the dictatorship the meaning of the terms was very different from what was meant when they were used in the Western context.63 Thus, when the GDR leadership talked of a new and united Europe or a common, undividable European culture it must not be confused with Western European notions. Even more disturbing, some concepts essential to the integration process in Western Europe can hardly be found in Eastern European sources. Thus, neither in East Germany nor in any other Eastern Bloc country do we know of federal conceptions of Europe. Even when the word ‘federation’ was used, it referred to a confederation or a loose federation of nation-states, with the emphasis on national sovereignty rather than on a federal state.64 Generally, the euphoric and highly emotional notion of Europe that had accompanied the revolutions of 1989/90 and the fall of the Iron Curtain vanished and was replaced by (among other things) a widespread disinterest towards its institutions. More than twenty years after the fall of communism, 47 per cent of Poles and 43 per cent of Czechs would not care if the EU, a term that is often used as a synonym for Europe, were to disappear tomorrow.65 Nevertheless, these are just the countries that develop remarkable original ideas about the ‘return to Europe’, an approach that is missing in Germany, probably because of the specific way that East Germans took to the European Union. Images and metaphors play an important role in the debate. Frequently there has been built, however, only a new façade covering old clichés that remain within the national framework.66 This must not be seen per se as non-liberal/anti-Europe thinking. As Domnitz based on Bo Sträth and others have pointed out: ‘Until today and all over the continent, narrations of Europe evolved in national arenas. Identifying with Europe thus does not necessarily eliminate national perceptions and perspectives.’67 The British economic historian Alan Milward has even argued that since 1945 the concept (and the rescue) of the nation-state has been inextricably linked with the integration process in Western Europe. According to him, it was no paradox that Jean Monnet, ‘the arch-saint of integrated Europe was also the founding father of French national planning …’.68 Having in mind the fundamentally different political and economic conditions, it is doubtful whether the approaches available for examining the West European integration process (either Milward’s economic perspective or Andrew Moravcsik’s Liberal Intergovernmentalism, to name only two influential concepts) can be applied to the integration process in Eastern Europe at all. Above all, Soviet political and economic hegemony prevented the smaller Eastern Bloc countries from pursuing national interests. One might only remember the violent Soviet interventions in Berlin (1953), Budapest (1956)

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or Prague (1968). When this chapter argued above that Europe was used as a way of rescuing the East German state by its leaders, one must not forget that for the GDR the scope of national action was even smaller than for the rest of its allies. The existence of East Germany did not depend on Europe or the COMECON but on the Soviet Union’s approval. Its end is a telling example of this. As Dieter Gosewinkel has pointed out in his introduction, this volume not only tries to record the historical appearance of concepts that do not seem to correspond with the tradition of the idea of Europe. It also aims to pursue their significance for the current discourse of the European integration process. According to the Spanish historian José M. Faraldo, Eastern European images of Europe based on national sovereignty could become a burden for today’s Europe.69 He might be right. At least in the GDR we find few alternative conceptions of Europe. While Polish and Hungarian dissidents imagined various concepts of Central Europe, the small East German opposition hardly developed any similar European visions superseding political blocs. Instead, they focused on East German realities and aimed at implementing human and basic civil rights such as the freedom of movement, of speech and of assembly. However, in doing so they built on genuine liberal demands that offered suitable points of departure for an approach to pan-European values – just as the Peaceful Revolutions of 1989/90 in the former Eastern Bloc countries did. Yet, the diary entry of an East German psychology professor in Dresden offers another approach. On 3 October 1990 – the day German reunification took place officially – he noted: ‘To me the idea of the “European house” is more important. One Europe without borders, with only one currency and a unified economic territory, with the same legal principles and competent regional administrations (Länderverwaltungen). No national armies (Nationalarmeen), no national states any more … To get there it will be a long way. The egoism of the human being will not steer clear of European policy.’70

Notes I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve the manuscript and Dieter Gosewinkel for his persistent encouragement. I am also grateful to the anonymous student who struggled with my German English in the original version of this paper. Mihaela Petkovic helped with critical comments on an earlier version of the article.   1. Being the first country of the former Eastern Bloc to become a member of the EU as a result of German reunification, the GDR naturally became the first focus of research on this topic. See e.g. K.-P. Schmidt. 1991. Die Europäische Gemeinschaft aus der Sicht der DDR (1957–1989), Hamburg: Kovac.  2. For examples see J.M. Faraldo, P. Gulinska-Jurgiel and C. Domnitz (eds). 2008. Europa im Ostblock: Vorstellungen und Diskurse, Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau.

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L. Bluche, V. Lipphardt, K.K. Patel (eds). 2009. Der Europäer – ein Konstrukt: Wissensbestände, Diskurse, Praktiken, Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag.  3. See J.M. Faraldo, ‘Europa war immer dort: Erfahrungen und Bilder im sozialistischen Osteuropa’, in S. Steinberg, D.K.W. Trepsdorf and C. Wielepp (eds). 2011. Nach dem Umbruch: Transformationen in europäischer und globaler Perspektive, Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 31–38.   4. Ibid., 33.   5. Quotation translated by Florian Pieront. T. Judt. 2010. ‘Wir brauchen eine ethische Weltsicht’, Die Zeit 33, 12 August 2010, 44. Faraldo also points to this source in ‘Europa war immer dort’, 37. Judt article available online at (accessed 30 April 2012).  6. See A.V. Wendland. 2009. ‘Bei Euch in den Europas: Europäische Leitbilder in Osteuropa’, in J. Elvert and J. Nielsen-Sikora (eds). Leitbild Europa? Europabilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 208–219.   7. Author’s translation. See S. Meuschel. 1993. ‘Überlegungen zu einer Herrschaftsund Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19, 5–14.  8. Many of the findings presented in this paper were published in J. Wüstenhagen. 2008. ‘Europabilder in der DDR 1949–1989: Zwischen Visionen und Realpolitik’, in Faraldo et.al., Europa im Ostblock, 165–187.   9. C. Domnitz. 2008. ‘Europäische Vorstellungswelten im Ostblock: Eine Topologie von Europanarrationen im Staatssozialismus’, in Faraldo, et al., Europa im Ostblock, 80f. For the controversial debate on supranational structures with regard to the so-called socialist integration inside the Eastern Bloc see J. Wüstenhagen. 2001. Blick durch den Vorhang: Die SBZ/DDR und die Integration Westeuropas (1946–1972), Baden-Baden: Nomos. 10. See the statement given by Honecker, recorded in spring 1990. E. Honecker. 1994. ‘Mr. Lonely’ (track 1), Das War mein Lebensexil, ©1994 Nebelhorn Musik/Buschfunk Musikverlag. Compact disc. 11. For a detailed study see Wüstenhagen, Blick durch den Vorhang. 12. R. Ahrens. 2008. ‘Spezialisierungsinteresse und Integrationsaversion im Rat für Gegenseitige Wirtschaftshilfe: Der DDR-Werkzeugmaschinenbau in den 1970er-Jahren’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook: Wirtschaftliche Integrationsprozesse in West und Osteuropa/Economics and Integration in Western and Eastern Europe after the Second World War, 2/2008, 73–92. Nevertheless, one must keep in mind that the SED’s leaders had rather opted for an economic integration within the Eastern Bloc than the ever extending trade relations with the West. But the relatively weak economies of the other smaller socialist countries made it impossible. See for the shift in the SED’s European policy J. Wüstenhagen. 2004. ‘Zwischen Parteidoktrin und Realpolitik: Die DDR und die Westeuropäische Integration 1957–1989’, in M. König and M. Schulz (eds), Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die europäische Einigung 1949–2000: Politische Akteure, gesellschaftliche Kräfte und internationale Erfahrungen, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 495–509. 13. See in detail Wüstenhagen, Blick durch den Vorhang. 14. For an adverse position see for example P.E. Fässler. 2006. Durch den ‘Eisernen Vorhang’: Die deutsch-deutschen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen 1949–1969, Cologne: Böhlau, 11. 15. See Wüstenhagen, ‘Zwischen Parteidoktrin und Realpolitik’.

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16. Ibid. 17. See DDR-Komitee für Europäische Sicherheit und Zusammenarbeit (ed.). 1978. Werktätige Europas, vereinigt euch für die Sicherheit, die Zusammenarbeit und den Frieden in Europa, Basel: Schweizerische Friedensbewegung, 17. 18. See Wüstenhagen, ‘Zwischen Parteidoktrin und Realpolitik’, 505–506. 19. See the memoires of Peter Steglich and Günter Leuschner. As East German officials they took part in the Helsinki process. P. Steglich and G. Leuschner. 1996. KSZE – Fossil oder Hoffnung? Berlin: edition ost. 20. It is amazing to see the interest that statements of this kind receive until well into our days. See E. Honecker. 2012. Letzte Aufzeichnungen, 3rd edition (edited by Frank Schumann), Berlin: Verlag Das Neue Berlin (edition ost). The book reached its third edition within the first three months of 2012! See also the recent publication by Honecker’s wife, Margot, former East German Minister of Education, M. Honecker. 2012. Zur Volksbildung: Gespräch [mit Frank Schumann], Berlin: Verlag Das Neue Berlin. 21. Neues Deutschland (yr. 44, issue 17) 20 January 1989. Schlussbemerkungen Erich Honeckers auf der Tagung des Thomas-Müntzer-Komitees, p. 5. 22. Neues Deutschland (yr. 42, issue 85), 10 April 1987. Kurt Hager beantwortete Fragen der Illustrierten ‘Stern’, p. 3 23. F. Oldenburg. 1989. ‘Die DDR im Haus Europa’, Berichte des Bundesinstituts für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien 11, Cologne: Bundesinstitut für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien, 52–55, available online from (accessed August 2013). 24. One prominent example is the East Berlin Institute for International Politics and Economics (IPW). M. Schmidt and W. Schwarz, 1988. ‘Das gemeinsame Haus Europa – Realitäten, Herausforderungen, Perspektiven (II)’, Berichte des Instituts für Internationale Politik und Wirtschaft [IPW-Berichte], 17(10), 1–11. 25. See M. Schulze Wessel. 2010 ‘Zukunftsentwürfe und Planungspraktiken in der Sowjetunion und der sozialistischen Tschechoslowakei: Zur Einleitung’, M. Schulze Wessel and Christine Brenner (eds), Zukunftsvorstellungen und staatliche Planung im Sozialismus: Die Tschechoslowakei im ostmitteleuropäischen Kontext 1945–1989, Munich: Oldenbourg, 18. 26. See Schmidt and Schwarz, ‘Das gemeinsame Haus Europa’. 27. See W. Schmale. 2005. ‘Visualisierungen Europas: Ein historischer Überblick’ in V. Öhner, A. Pribersky, W. Schmale and H. Uhl (eds), Europa-Bilder (Querschnitte: Einführungstexte zur Sozial-, Wirtschafts-, und Kulturgeschichte, Band 18), Innsbruck/ Vienna/Munich/Bozen: Studien Verlag, 13–34. 28. R. Petri. 2004. Europa? Ein Zitatensystem, in Comparativ 14, vol. 3, 15–49. 29. For further sources see Schulze Wessel: ‘Zukunftsentwürfe’. 30. See A. Steiner. 2004. Von Plan zu Plan: Eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR, Munich: DVA. 31. See the contributions in C. Boyer (ed.). 2006. Sozialistische Wirtschaftsreformen: Tschechoslowakei und DDR im Vergleich, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, and C. Boyer (ed.). 2007. Zur Physiognomie sozialistischer Wirtschaftsreformen: Die Sowjetunion, Polen, die Tschechoslowakei, Ungarn, die DDR und Jugoslawien im Vergleich, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

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32. See for instance D. Hoffmann. 2007. ‘Rezension zu: Boyer, Christoph (Hrsg.): Zur Physiognomie sozialistischer Wirtschaftsreformen: Die Sowjetunion, Polen, die Tschechoslowakei, Ungarn, die DDR und Jugoslawien im Vergleich, Frankfurt am Main 2007’, book review, in H-Soz-u-Kult, 06 December 2007, available online from (accessed 5 May 2012). 33. See Schulze Wessel, ‘Zukunftsentwürfe’, 1–2. 34. Quotation translated by Florian Pieront. Faraldo, ‘Europa war immer dort’, 36f. 35. See C. Domnitz. 2011. ‘From Underground to the Official Sphere: Narratives of Europa on the Eve of 1989’, in Steinberg, et al., Nach dem Umbruch, 39. 36. See Wüstenhagen, ‘Europabilder’, 176–179. 37. See Domnitz, ‘Europäische Vorstellungswelten im Ostblock’. 38. See for example Domnitz, ‘From Underground to the Official Sphere’, 44. 39. See J.M. Faraldo. 2008. ‘Europavorstellungen im Ostblock: Zwischen Aneignung und Ablehnung’, in Faraldo et al., Europa im Ostblock, 17. 40. Domnitz, ‘From Underground to the Official Sphere’, 49. 41. See Steglich and Leuschner, KSZE – Fossil, 272. 42. See Wüstenhagen, ‘Europabilder’, 176–177. 43. For the media in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR see P. Gulinska-Jurgiel. 2010. Die Presse des Sozialismus ist schlimmer als der Sozialismus: Europa in der Publizistik der Volksrepublik Polen, der CSSR und der DDR (Herausforderungen, Band 19), Bochum: Winkler. 44. See T.R. Henschel. 1993. Europabewusstsein Jugendlicher in West- und Ostdeutschland 1992 (Arbeitspapiere der Forschungsgruppe Jugend und Europa, Band 1), Mainz: self-published, 11. 45. According to a survey recently conducted by the prestigious Allensbach Institute, 40% of all Poles living in Germany feel they are Europeans rather than Poles or Germans. See R. Köcher. 2009. ‘Vorstellung des Allensbacher Jahrbuchs “Die Berliner Republik”’, table 13. Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach. Available online from (accessed 6 May 2012). Unfortunately, East Germans were not included in the questionnaire. 46. For a further example (in addition to Poland and Czechoslovakia, both of which have been cited several times in this study), consider Hungary: E. Kovács. 2005. ‘Wie wird Europa in Ungarn kommuniziert?’ in Öhner et al., Europa-Bilder, 106. 47. See S. Klunkert, B. Lippert and H. Schneider (eds). 1996. Europabilder in Mittel und Osteuropa: Neue Herausforderungen für die politische Bildung, Bonn: Europa Union Verlag, 236. 48. See S. Wolle. 2009. Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Herrschaft und Alltag in der DDR 1971–1989, 3rd revised edition, Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. 49. See V. Öhner, A. Pribersky, W. Schmale and H. Uhl. 2005. ‘Foreword’ in Öhner et al., Europa-Bilder, 7. 50. See for a more detailed insight into the Polish and Czech societies, Domnitz, ‘From Underground to the Official Sphere’, 39. 51. Quotation translated by Florian Pieront. S. Lokatis. 2003 ‘Nimm den Elefanten – Konturen einer Verlagsgeschichte’, in S. Barck and S. Lokatis (eds), Fenster zur Welt: Eine Geschichte des DDR-Verlages Volk und Welt, Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 15. 52. Vgl. B. Dahlke, M. Langermann, T. Taterka (ed.). 2000. Literatur Gesellschaft DDR: Kanonkämpfe und ihre Geschichte(n), Stuttgart/Weimar: J.B. Metzler.

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53. See for the following Wüstenhagen, ‘Europabilder’, 180–185. More sources can be found there. 54. See for sources Wüstenhagen, ‘Europabilder’, 181. 55. Lokatis, ‘Nimm den Elefanten’, 19. 56. Ibid., 20. 57. See G. Wirth. 1966. ‘Gemeinsame Geschichte – Gemeinsame Verantwortung’ in Friedensrat der DDR (ed.), Europa: Chronischer Wetterwinkel oder Friedenszone, Berlin: self-published, 24. 58. Wüstenhagen, ‘Europabilder’, 182 with sources. 59. Ibid., 183. 60. Ibid., 184. 61. See for one example Schulze Wessel, ‘Zukunftsentwürfe’, 17. 62. See S.A. Laird. 1995. ‘Promoting “the Common Market of the Mind”: Book Translation in East and West Europe’, Logos, 6(4), 195–200. Available online from (accessed 6 May 2012). 63. Recent research aims to ‘translate’ the different codes and metaphors that stood behind the official perceptions. For an example see the project network ‘Lost in Translation? How images of Europe are Translated’, (accessed 6 May 2012). 64. See Domnitz, ‘Europäische Vorstellungswelten im Ostblock’, 80f. 65. K. Hanshew. 2006. ‘Europa: banal, fatal oder einfach egal’, in W. Koschmal (ed.), ‘Europabilder und Europamethaphern’, forost Arbeitspapier 37, Forschungsverbund Ost- und Südosteuropa (forost), 7–18. 66. In the Czech Republic, for example, there are metaphors comparing Harry Potter characters with several member states of the EU. Ibid., 14–15. 67. Domnitz, ‘From Underground to the Official Sphere’, 42. 68. A. Milward. 1992. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 344. 69. Faraldo, ‘Europavorstellungen im Ostblock’, 17. 70. Author’s translation. ‘Für mich zählt die Idee vom Haus Europa mehr. Ein Europa ohne Grenzen, mit einer Währung und einem einheitlichen Wirtschaftsgebiet, mit gleichen Rechtsprinzipien und kompetenten Länderverwaltungen. Keine Nationalarmee, keine Nationalstaaten mehr. … Dahin wird ein langer Weg sein. Der Egoismus der Menschen wird um die Europapolitik keinen Bogen machen.’ Quoted after A. Waitzmann and J. Scheunemann. 2010. ‘Erwartungen und Projektionen: Die deutsche Einheit in Tagebüchern 1989–1991’ in T. Klemm and C. Lotz (eds), Zerreissproben: Erwartungen an die deutsche Einheit und an eine europäische Integration, Magdeburg: Meine Verlag, 21.

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Hoffmann D. 2007. ‘Rezension zu: Boyer, Christoph (Hrsg.): Zur Physiognomie sozialistischer Wirtschaftsreformen: Die Sowjetunion, Polen, die Tschechoslowakei, Ungarn, die DDR und Jugoslawien im Vergleich, Frankfurt am Main 2007’, book review, in H-Soz-u-Kult, 06 December 2007, available online from (accessed 5 May 2012). Honecker, E. 1994 [recorded in spring 1990]. ‘Mr. Lonely’ (track 1), Das War mein Lebensexil, ©1994 Nebelhorn Musik/Buschfunk Musikverlag. Compact disc. –––––––. 2012. Letzte Aufzeichnungen, 3rd edition (edited by Frank Schumann), Berlin: Verlag Das Neue Berlin (edition ost). Honecker, M. 2012. Zur Volksbildung: Gespräch [mit Frank Schumann], Berlin: Verlag Das Neue Berlin. Judt, T. 2010. ‘Wir brauchen eine ethische Weltsicht’, Die Zeit 33(2–3). Available online from (accessed April 2012). Klunkert, S., B. Lippert and H. Schneider (eds). 1996. Europabilder in Mittelund Osteuropa: Neue Herausforderungen für die politische Bildung, Bonn: Europa Union Verlag. Köcher, R. 2010. ‘Vorstellung des Allensbacher Jahrbuchs “Die Berliner Republik”’, table 13. Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach. Available online from (accessed 6 May 2012). Kovács, E. 2005. ‘Wie wird Europa in Ungarn kommuniziert?’ in: Öhner et al. (eds), Europa-Bilder (Querschnitte: Einführungstexte zur Sozial-, Wirtschafts-, und Kulturgeschichte, Band 18), Innsbruck/Vienna/Munich/ Bozen: Studien-Verlag, 103–118. Laird, S.A. 1995. ‘Promoting “the Common Market of the Mind”: Book Translation in East and West Europe’, Logos 6(4), 195–200. Available online from (accessed 6 May 2012). Lokatis, S. 2003. ‘Nimm den Elefanten – Konturen einer Verlagsgeschichte’, in S. Barck and S. Lokatis (eds), Fenster zur Welt: Eine Geschichte des DDRVerlages Volk und Welt, Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 15–30. ‘Lost in Translation? How images of Europe are translated’, (accessed 6 May 2012). Meuschel, S. 1993. ‘Überlegungen zu einer Herrschafts- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19, 5–14. Milward, A. 1992. The European Rescue of the Nation-State, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Neues Deutschland (yr. 42, issue 85) 10 April 1987. Kurt Hager beantwortete Fragen der Illustrierten ‘Stern’, p. 3. Neues Deutschland (yr. 44, issue 17) 20 January 1989. Schlussbemerkungen Erich Honeckers auf der Tagung des Thomas-Müntzer-Komitees, p. 5.

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Öhner, V., A. Pribersky, W. Schmale and H. Uhl. 2005. ‘Foreword’, in V. Öhner, A. Pribersky, W. Schmale and H. Uhl (eds), Europa-Bilder (Querschnitte: Einführungstexte zur Sozial-, Wirtschafts-, und Kulturgeschichte, Band 18), Innsbruck/Vienna/Munich/Bozen: Studien-Verlag, 7. Oldenburg, F. 1989. ‘Die DDR im Haus Europa’, Berichte des Bundesinstituts für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien 11, Cologne: Bundesinstituts für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien. Available online from (accessed August 2013). Petri, R. 2004. ‘Europa? “Ein Zitatensystem”’, in Comparativ 14(3), 15–49. Schmale, W. 2005. ‘Visualisierungen Europas: Ein historischer Überblick’ in V. Öhner, A. Pribersky, W. Schmale and H. Uhl (eds), Europa-Bilder (Querschnitte: Einführungstexte zur Sozial, Wirtschafts, und Kulturgeschichte, Band 18), Innsbruck/Vienna/Munich/Bozen: Studien-Verlag, 13–34. Schmidt, K.-P. 1991. Die Europäische Gemeinschaft aus der Sicht der DDR (1957–1989), Hamburg: Kovac. Schmidt, M. and W. Schwarz. 1988. ‘Das gemeinsame Haus Europa – Realitäten, Herausforderungen, Perspektiven (II)’, Berichte des Instituts für Internationale Politik und Wirtschaft [IPW Berichte] 17(10), 1–11. Schulze Wessel, M. 2010. ‘Zukunftsentwürfe und Planungspraktiken in der Sowjetunion und der sozialistischen Tschechoslowakei: Zur Einleitung’, in M. Schulze Wessel and C. Brenner (eds), Zukunftsvorstellungen und staatliche Planung im Sozialismus: Die Tschechoslowakei im ostmitteleuropäischen Kontext 1945–1989. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1–18. Steglich, P. and G. Leuschner. 1996. KSZE – Fossil oder Hoffnung? Berlin: edition ost. Steiner, A. 2004. Von Plan zu Plan: Eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR, Munich: DVA. Waitzmann, A. and J. Scheunemann. 2010. ‘Erwartungen und Projektionen: Die deutsche Einheit in Tagebüchern 1989–1991’, in T. Klemm, C. Lotz (eds), Zerreissproben: Erwartungen an die deutsche Einheit und an eine europäische Integration, Magdeburg: Meine Verlag, 7–29. Wendland, A.V. 2009. ‘Bei Euch in den Europas: Europäische Leitbilder in Osteuropa’, in J. Elvert and J. Nielsen-Sikora. (eds), Leitbild Europa? Europabilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 208–219. Wirth, Günter. 1966. ‘Gemeinsame Geschichte – Gemeinsame Verantwortung’, in Friedensrat der DDR (ed.), Europa: Chronischer Wetterwinkel oder Friedenszone, Berlin: self-published, 23–31. Wolle, S. 2009. Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Herrschaft und Alltag in der DDR 1971–1989, 3rd revised edition, Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. Wüstenhagen, J. 2001. Blick durch den Vorhang: Die SBZ/DDR und die Integration Westeuropas (1946–1972), Baden-Baden: Nomos.

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–––––––. 2004. ‘Zwischen Parteidoktrin und Realpolitik: Die DDR und die Westeuropäische Integration 1957–1989’, in M. König and M. Schulz (eds), Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die europäische Einigung 1949–2000: Politische Akteure, gesellschaftliche Kräfte und internationale Erfahrungen, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 495–509. –––––––. 2008. ‘Europabilder in der DDR 1949–1989: Zwischen Visionen und Realpolitik’, in J.M. Faraldo, P. Gulinska-Jurgiel, and C. Domnitz (eds), Europa im Ostblock: Vorstellungen und Diskurse, Vienna/Cologne/ Weimar: Böhlau, 165–187.

Afterword The Limits of an Anti-liberal Europe Martin Conway

Can there be right and wrong Europes? Europe has never been neutral, and one of the principal strengths that a distinctively historical perspective can bring to the analysis of European unification is to emphasize the way in which all such processes – be they those of Napoleon, of Versailles, of the wartime Third Reich or of the EEC – have always been indelibly marked by particular sets of values. Seen in this way, the role of historians is to subvert teleologies of integration focused on the present day by exploring both the historical genealogy of contemporary ideas of Europe, and by locating the process of European (re-)construction that occurred across the second half of the twentieth century within a much larger undergrowth of projects, ideologies and dreams that failed to happen, or simply failed.1 That wider purpose has, however, a specific and more obviously historical value in helping to understand the remarkable reshaping of Europe that occurred during the middle decades of the twentieth century, from the early years of the Second World War to the early 1960s. A great deal had indeed changed in the realities of Europe as a consequence of the outcome of the war. The demise of a German-centred Europe amidst defeat and partition, as well as the westward orientation of the continent brought about by the Cold War marked a radical historical caesura, as well as the invention of a new space, Western Europe, redefined as the essence of a Europe that had lost to Soviet control many of its former lieux de mémoire.2 Tied to the United States through mutual links of military and political alliance, as well as by the rapid post-war acceleration in North American economic influence, this new Western Europe was no longer entirely sovereign. Nor did it remain an empire for long. The dismantling – partly willed from Europe and partly imposed from outside – of those sinews of imperial control that had formerly projected European power into large areas of the globe ensured that by the 1970s, apart from a few exotic outposts, Europe for the first time in the modern era was also only Europe.

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These changes forged what was indisputably a new (and, as a consequence of the rapid economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, ever newer) Europe, but people, policies and ideas were rather slower to change. As the chapters in this collection well demonstrate, Europe did not start after the Second World War. Instead, the ways in which Western Europe was conceived, organized and ultimately staffed as a political entity during the post-war decades remained influenced by what contemporaries tended to regard as the ‘lessons’ of the immediate past. The idea that Versailles, Weimar, the Nazi Machtergreifung, diplomatic appeasement and the military defeats of 1939–1940 formed a body of experience from which Europeans must learn if they were to prevent their repetition constituted a pervasive reference point for European post-war political and intellectual life.3 It was evident in national politics in the concern that Bonn should not repeat the errors of Weimar, and that the French Fourth Republic must not replicate the failings of its pre-war predecessor4; as well as in the similarities perceived between the Stalinist Communism of today and the Nazism of yesterday. But it was also engrained in the way in which European political leaders approached the unavoidable challenges of transnational cooperation and integration. Democracy, as Camus said as early as 1947, had to be international if it was to endure,5 and, for all of its somewhat obsessive language of modernization, efforts at West European cooperation remained dominated in the 1950s by allusions, be they explicit or sometimes more guarded, to the recent past. Only if Europe could discover from within itself the means of overcoming the internecine conflicts – political, ideological, ethnic and economic – that had dominated the continent since 1914 was it believed that it could escape from the twin dangers of internal collapse and external colonization. Not only were the discourses and mentalities rooted in the recent past; so too were the tools. Much recent work, notably that of Philip Nord, has rightly focused attention on the continuities that linked state reform in the 1930s, the projects of reform developed in German-occupied Europe as well as in exile in London, North America and Algiers, and the state planning that prepared and accompanied liberation from Axis occupation.6 But European integration was in many respects the next link in that chain. It took many of the tools of state planning, of economic rationalization and of apolitical (and often rather anti-democratic) governance that had been developed in interwar international organizations and in wartime bureaucracies and applied them to the socio-economic problems of the post-war era.7 This often proved to be very effective. By removing decision making from the more partisan contexts of national politics, the institutions of European integration enabled the implementation of policies that liberated Europe from its dependence on outmoded industrial structures, as well as encouraging a new ethos of activist planning and reform at the national and more local levels of government. But, as a number of the chapters in this volume well demonstrate, there was little in the making of European policies that had not been implemented or attempted in different contexts over previous decades. European integration was built on an accumulated body of past

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experiment and experience, which had marked the transition from the structures of parliamentary government – of charismatic leaders, of grand oratory and at times of street violence – that had dominated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the more impersonal and professional bureaucratic governance of the mid-twentieth century. None of this is of course unfamiliar from the recent historical literature on European integration. The debt that the ‘makers of Europe’ owed to their pre-war and wartime predecessors has become ever more evident as historians have burrowed deeper into the details of European policy-making.8 However, by focusing attention on the tangled pre-history of European unification in interwar authoritarian dreams, projects of a Mitteleuropa, of a Catholic Abendland and the improvisations of the wartime Nazi empire, this volume also brings a distinctly German perspective to bear on this wider context. Just as European integration owed much to anti-democratic currents in pre-war and wartime France and Italy, so the post-war engagement of the Federal Republic with Europe carried the baggage of previous German projects of transnational and imperial governance. But the larger challenge, for historians, and indeed for all those concerned with understanding the dynamics of European integration, posed by this collection – and most arrestingly by its title – is how we choose to interpret such continuities. Were they simply the remnants of past experiences, or did they define the nature of the new Europe that emerged, a way by which an authoritarian past was smuggled into the democratic Europe of the post-war decades? In sum, was Europe anti-liberal? The shortcomings of such a label are perhaps more immediately apparent than its advantages. Most obviously, any attempt to categorize liberal and antiliberal projects of European integration raises a whole series of questions as to how one should define liberalism, a term that assumed very diverse meanings in the different intellectual cultures of Europe across the second half of the twentieth century.9 Moreover, such a binary division would obscure the irreducible diversity of impulses that underlay processes of European integration from the 1930s to the 1960s. Where, to take perhaps the most striking case, should one place the Christian, often Catholic, movements and political parties that were such a prominent feature of European initiatives during the years following 1945, and which drew on a strong heritage of Catholic hostility to individualist liberalism while at the same time constructing much of the liberal edifice of economic and political integration?10 But how too should one categorize those socialist groups and subsequently political movements that from the 1960s onwards saw in the ideal of an integrated Europe the best means of constructing a social alternative to liberal capitalism while at the same time guaranteeing social justice and individual rights?11 Historians (unlike citizens), as Dieter Gosewinkel rightly warns in his introduction to this volume, cannot choose between different versions of Europe.12 Europe has to be analysed en bloc, and that requires confronting both its liberal and its anti-liberal elements, as well as a good deal else besides. Indeed, one of

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Figure 8.1. ‘Races of Europe’ map, taken from Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning and the Quest for a New World Order 1937–1943 by Christopher D. O’Sullivan.

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the most striking features of projects of European integration, at least until the 1960s, was the way in which it remained a highly flexible formula that could be adjusted to the pragmatic needs of statesmen, as much as to the dreams of a wide variety of heretical or marginal intellectual traditions. Take for example the case of a figure such as Alexandre Marc: born in Odessa in 1904, he was active in the Socialist Revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution, before moving to France in the 1930s where he was a member of various right-wing groups and the co-author of a tract Jeune Europe published in 1933, in which he repeated the anti-liberal clichés of the age in order to present himself as the spokesman for a young generation of intellectuals who sought a European Ordre Nouveau.13 In the early post-1945 years, he re-emerged as the advocate of a united Europe, this time denouncing the ‘monstre étatique’ of mass democracy in favour of a radical and essentially unclassifiable vision of a federal Europe based on devolved Proudhonian principles.14 The merit of the formula for an anti-liberal Europe therefore lies not so much in the specifics of the template that it might impose on the historical genealogy of Europe, as in the way that it focuses historical attention on the frontiers between the liberal and the anti-liberal, or non-liberal, in the history of projects of European integration. This remains in many respects a relatively unexplored subject. As the terse formulae of the founding treaties well demonstrated, the Europe of the post-war decades lacked the rhetoric to accompany its own creation. The sincere desire of the founding generation of politicians and bureaucrats to transcend the competitive nationalisms of previous decades constituted in that respect a poor substitute for the powerful statements that had accompanied previous turning points in modern European history. This was not accidental: the thin reserves of a rather vapid Europeanist rhetoric had been effectively exhausted by the multiple declarations, conferences and manifestos issued over the fifteen years preceding the treaty of Rome. Moreover, the logics of European integration all too evidently lay not in grand statements of history or of fundamental values, but in the pragmatic calculations that made the collaboration between the leaders of the West European states possible.15 This absence of poetry did, however, have more fundamental origins. Europe’s post-war foundation coincided not only with Daniel Bell’s announcement in 1960 of the end of ideology,16 but also with the substantial demobilization of a distinctively Catholic attitude to modern society through the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965, and the reformist evolution of the principal European socialist parties symbolized by the SPD’s Bad Godesberg declaration of 1959. To seek cause and effect in these largely simultaneous events would be mistaken, but, taken together, and supplemented offstage so to speak by the acceleration of the process of extra-European decolonization and by the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic in France amidst the chaos of the conflict in Algeria, they constitute a distinctive moment in the consolidation of the West European democratic order. The war was over, but so too were the ideological frontiers within which that war had acquired its definition.

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Liberalism, liberal values and liberal institutions formed an integral part of that process of European consolidation. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the liberal and democratic identity of Western Europe had been reinforced on almost all sides by the definition of the West as a place of freedom set against the oppression in the communist East, by the slow development of a greater understanding of the moral horror of Nazism, and by the engagement of intellectuals and others with the new states (and social and political systems) emerging in the non-European world to the south.17 As a consequence, liberal values were acquiring a wider currency, transcending the limited contours of liberal parties and electorates, and becoming part of how West Europeans recognized and communicated with each other. This was of course a liberalism with limits, constrained within the often unspoken hierarchies of gender, class, education and race that defined social and political citizenship. But the languages of liberalism, as expressed in the increasing concern with human rights and social and intellectual freedoms, had broadened the rather formal reinauguration of democracy that had followed the Second World War.18 While the mentality in the immediate post-war years had been rigorously defensive – defending a fragile political system from its enemies and often from the people themselves19 – this had given way by the end of the 1950s to a broader definition of a democratic society, and also of the democracy that remained to be built through social reforms, increased welfare provision and structures of mass education.20 Europe, as an identity and as an institution, stood rather awkwardly within this liberal world. On the one hand, the new discourses of liberalism invested Europe with a certain ideological identity. Especially among the burgeoning intelligentsia of the post-war decades, liberal values – some of which had ironically been promulgated initially within Atlanticist (and American-funded) institutions such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom21 – now constituted a common store of political reference points, undermining national frontiers of ideological difference, and creating a shared political language that could be used variously to defend and to denounce the Western European sociopolitical order. On the other hand, however, Europe formed part of what the liberal discourses of the 1950s and 1960s were seeking to escape, or at least to transcend. For many, especially on the left but also in Catholic ranks, the idea of Europe had become tainted by its associations with a nostalgic fortress definition of the Continent, at a time when the forces of political liberation in states such as India, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam were demonstrating the limits of Europeans’ own liberal values. The new Western Europe, as it took institutional shape over the post-war decades, was not therefore a place with which everyone wished to be associated. A European identity offered an escape from complex and contested national pasts; but the limited West European territory of Cold War Europe was also associated with dependence on the military alliance with the United States, the capitalist structures and consequent social inequalities of European society and the awkward legacies of Europe’s wartime and colonial crimes.22

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A similar ambivalence surrounded Europe’s institutional structures. The Western Europe that had given birth to NATO, the ECSC and the EEC (as well as myriad more ephemeral transnational organizations) was the product of the political alliance generated at the international level between Christian Democrat and socialist leaders by the immediate emergency of the communist danger as well as by the way in which European institutions emerged as the means of resolving socio-economic problems that could not be addressed effectively at the national level. There was little within this agenda that was consciously liberal, or even democratic. Indeed, though the context of the Cold War imposed a rhetoric of freedom on all of these institutions, and their self-presentation through propaganda,23 European institutions were in character and spirit, consciously non-democratic or post-authoritarian institutions. They were intended in the mentality of the nascent class of European bureaucrats who staffed them to provide a forum for rational decision making removed from the paralysing pressures of mass politics, parliamentary intrigues and self-interested lobby groups. This did not exclude a liberal spirit. Indeed, the very remoteness of transnational European institutions from national politics enabled them to act more clearly as a vehicle for a certain economic and social liberalism, prompting the current President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy to describe how the European Union had become ‘the civilization of democracy, of individual rights, of the rule of law’.24 But the lack of a direct democratic mandate (until 1979), and the evident reluctance of national state officials and governments to accord them the autonomy that such a mandate would provide,25 ensured that the institutions of the EEC developed in a protected sphere that was largely immune from the social and political changes that occurred during the 1960s. This reinforced the rather out-of-time character of the institutions. Even as the EEC acquired through the logic of its own mandate and the accelerating integration of the European economy, a greater centrality in the decision making of West European states, the post-war political template of rather limited representative democracy on which it was based was being increasingly challenged at the national level. Time, or at least politics, did not move on as rapidly at the European level as it had done at the national level, creating a décalage between European and national politics, the consequences of which would gradually become apparent in the emergence of populist anti-European movements at the end of the twentieth century. Europe, it seemed, had become the refuge of the established elites, against coalitions of neoliberal movements, a resurgent popular nationalism, and the fears generated by economic and social change. Placed in a broader historical context, the anti-liberal origins of Europe serve therefore less as a means of using the past to condemn the present-day failings of the European Union than as a way of exploring the complex fusion of methods and ideologies of government that occurred during the refounding of Europe around its mid-century moment. The Europe established at that time faced challenges that led it to draw on the innovations of the recent past. In particular, the

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triptych of transnational planning, economic modernization and social development that constituted its initial programme was a demonstration of the lessons learnt from the previous decades as well as of the radical increase that had occurred in the ambitions and capacities of government through the war and beyond it. It was also a method of government that appeared to work, at least in the short and medium term, enabling European institutions consequently to acquire an unanticipated centrality in the process of government in the thirty years following the Treaty of Rome. That success, however, also worked to fix European integration in the era of its initial establishment. Europe, it seems, was never quite as modern as it appeared to be.

Notes  1. M. Conway and K.K. Patel (eds). 2010. Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.  2. For an interesting example of the redefinition of Western Europe, see the textbook written in Cold War America by a German Jewish exile born in Berlin: G. Mosse. 1988 [1963]. The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 3rd edition, London: Westview Press. See also his memoirs: G. Mosse. 2000. Confronting History: A Memoir, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.   3. V. Depkat. 2007. Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden: deutsche Politiker und die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Oldenbourg.   4. F.R. Allemann. 1956. Bonn ist nicht Weimar, Cologne/Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch; F. Goguel. 1946. La politique des partis sous la IIIe République, two volumes, Paris: Editions du Seuil.   5. A. Camus. 2006. ‘Democracy and Modesty’ (30 Apr. 1947) in J. Lévi-Valensi (ed.), Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–1947, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 287–288.   6. P. Nord. 2010. France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Post-war Era, Princeton, N.J./ Oxford: Princeton University Press; P. Mioche. 1987. Le plan Monnet: genèse et elaboration, 1941–1947, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne; M. Conway. 2001. ‘Legacies of Exile: The Exile Governments in London during the Second World War and the Politics of Post-War Europe’ in M. Conway and J. Gotovitch (eds), Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain, 1940–45 New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 255–274.   7. P. Clavin. 2013. Securing the World Economy: the Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946, Oxford: Oxford University Press.  8. K.K. Patel and P. Clavin. 2010. ‘The Role of International Organizations in Europeanization: The Case of the League of Nations and the European Economic Community’ in Conway and Patel Europeanization in the Twentieth Century, 110–131; K.K. Patel. 2011. ‘The Paradox of Planning: German Agricultural Policy in a European Perspective, 1920s to 1970s’, Past and Present CCXII, 239–269.  9. See notably J.-W. Müller. 2011. Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in TwentiethCentury Europe, New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press. See also Freeden in this volume. 10. W. Kaiser. 2007. Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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11. See for example C. Bruclain. 1965. Le socialisme et l’Europe, Paris: Editions Complexe. The name of the author was a pseudonym for a group of younger French socialists. 12. See D. Gosewinkel ‘Anti-Liberal Europe: A Neglected Source of Europeanism’, in this volume 13. R. Dupuis and A. Marc. 1933. Jeune Europe, Paris: Focale, especially p. xiv. 14. A. Marc. 1955. Civilisation en sursis, Paris: Pion. Regarding Marc, I am indebted to the interesting study by B. Veyssière. 2003. ‘Alexandre Marc: les idées personnalistes au service de l’Europe’, in G. Bossuat (ed.), Inventer l’Europe: Histoire nouvelle des groupes d’ influence et des acteurs de l’unité européenne, Brussels: P.I.E. – Peter Lang, 383–401. For similar intellectual trajectories, into and out of a Europeanist rhetoric, see C. Bailey. 2013. Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. 15. A. Milward. 2000 [1992]. The European Rescue of the Nation State, 2nd edition, London: Routledge. 16. D. Bell. 2000 [1960]. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bell’s theses owed much to the ideas of Raymond Aron as expounded in his lecture series of 1957–1958, subsequently republished as R. Aron. 1965. Démocratie et totalitarisme, Paris: Gallimard. 17. M. Conway and V. Depkat. 2010. ‘Towards a European History of the Discourse of Democracy: Discussing Democracy in Western Europe, 1945–1960’, in Conway and Patel Europeanization in the Twentieth Century, 132–156. 18. T. Buchanan. 2010. ‘Human Rights, the Memory of War and the Making of a ‘European’ Identity, 1945–73’ in Conway and Patel Europeanization in the Twentieth Century, 157–171; S. Moyn. 2011. ‘Personalism, Community and the Origins of Human Rights’ in S.-L. Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 85–106. 19. See for example the concept of Karl Loewenstein of ‘disciplined democracy’: K. Loewenstein. 1946. Political Reconstruction, New York: Macmillan, 126–129. 20. O. Ruin. 1990. Tage Erlander Serving the Welfare State, 1946–1969, Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 208–221; R. Kreichbaumer. 1990. Parteiprogramme im Widerstreit der Interessen: Die Programmdiskussion und die Programme von ÖVP und SPÖ 1945–1986, Österreichisches Jahrbuch für Politik Sonderband 3, Vienna/ Munich: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 330–334; Parti Socialiste Belge. 1965. Programme pour les élections législatives de 1965: adopté par le Congrès extraordinaire des 3 et 4 avril 1965, Liège: Biblio. I have written about this in M. Conway. 2002. ‘Democracy in post-war Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model’, European History Quarterly XXXII, 59–84; and M. Conway. 2004. ‘The Rise and Fall of Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1973’, Contemporary European History XIII, 67–88. 21. P. Grémion. 1995. Intelligence de l’anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris, 1950–1975, Paris: Fayard; P. Coleman. 1989. The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, New York/London: The Free Press; F. Stonor Saunders. 1999/2000. Who paid the piper? The CIA and the cultural Cold War, London: Granta Books. 22. Much of the anti-colonial critique of Europe was associated in the early 1960s with the writings of Frantz Fanon. See, for example, F. Fanon. 2007 [1961]. Les damnés de la terre, Paris: Découverte, especially the influential preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. 23. L. Risso. 2011. ‘Propaganda on Wheels: The NATO Travelling Exhibitions in the 1950s and 1960s’, Cold War History XI, 9–25; F. Gerits. 2012. ‘Taking off the Soft Power

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Lens: The United States Information Service in Cold War Belgium 1950–1958’, The Journal of Belgian History I, 10–49. 24. H. Van Rompuy. 2012. ‘Europe, Political Democracy and the Flux of Time’, in R. Senelle, E. Clément and E. Van de Velde (eds), The Road to Political Democracy: From Plato to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, Brussels: ASP – Academic & Scientific Publishers, 1,007–1,014. 25. For example, the proposals of the socialist parties of the European Communities in 1962 for a democratization of the European institutions remained unanswered: G. Devin. 1989. ‘L’Union des Partis Socialistes de la Communauté européenne: le socialisme communautaire en quête d’identité’, Socialismo Storia 2, 271.

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Notes on Contributors

Martin Conway is Fellow and Tutor in History at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He is the author of a number of books on the history of Belgium, notably The Sorrows of Belgium: Liberation and Political Reconstruction (Oxford, 2012), as well as of studies of Europe more generally in the twentieth century. He is currently working on a book on concepts of democracy in Western Europe after 1945. Vanessa Conze is Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Giessen, Germany. Her research concentrates on the political and intellectual history of Germany and Europe. She is finishing a study about political loyalty and the civil service in nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany.Her publications include Das Europa der Deutschen: Ideen von Europa zwischen Reichstradition und Westorientierung (Munich 1920–1970) (2005), Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi: Umstrittener Visionär Europas (Göttingen 2005), ‘Unverheilte Brandwunden in der Außenhaut des Volkskörpers: Der deutsche Grenz-Diskurs der Zwischenkriegszeit (1919–1939)’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig (Hg.), Ordnungen in der Krise: Zur politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1900–1933 (Munich 2007), and ‘Treue schwören: Der Konflikt um den Verfassungseid in der Weimarer Republik’ in Historische Zeitschrift 296/4 (2013). Jürgen Elvert is Jean Monnet Professor for European History at the University of Cologne and Senior Fellow at the Center for European Integration Studies, Bonn. His research interests range from modern European history to the history of ideas and institutions, maritime history and theory and methodology of historical sciences. His publications include: Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Planungen zur Neugestaltung Europas (1918–1945) (Stuttgart 1999), Die Europäische Integration (2nd ed., Darmstadt 2012), and Geschichte Irlands (5th ed., Stuttgart 2015). Michael Freeden is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham and Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Oxford. His main interests are the nature of political thinking, the analysis of ideologies, and liberal thought from the nineteenth century onwards. His books include The New Liberalism: An

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Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914–1939 (Oxford, 1986); Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996); Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and 20th Century Progressive Thought (Princeton, 2005); The Political Theory of Political Thinking (Oxford, 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (co-edited, Oxford, 2013). He is the founder-editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies. Dieter Gosewinkel is Professor of Modern History at the Freie Universität Berlin, researcher and co-director at the Rule of Law Center at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). His main interests are the history of modern Germany and France, European constitutional history, the history of citizenship and civil society. His books include Adolf Arndt: Die Wiederbegründung des Rechtsstaats aus dem Geist der Sozialdemokratie (1945–1961) (Bonn, 1991); Einbürgern und ausschließen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2nd ed., Göttingen, 2003); Die Verfassungen in Europa 1789–1949: Eine wissenschaftliche Textedition (co-edited with Johannes Masing, Munich, 2006); Wissenschaft, Politik, Verfassungsgericht (co-edited with Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde Berlin, 2011). Fabian Klose is Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz, Germany. His research focuses on the history of imperialism, decolonization, human rights and humanitarianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has recently published Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Pennsylvania, 2013). Currently he is working on a new project, ‘In the Cause of Humanity’: Humanitarian Intervention, the International Public Sphere, and the Internationalization of Humanitarian Norms in the Nineteenth Century, and is preparing an edited volume on the emergence of humanitarian intervention, The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge University Press, winter 2014). Undine Ruge is working in the division dealing in particular with EU Institutional Issues in the German Federal Chancellery. She has received her PhD in Political Science in 2002 from the University of Göttingen. She has published on the history of ideas and European Studies. Her publications include Die Erfindung des ’Europa der Regionen’: Kritische Ideengeschichte eines konservativen Konzepts, (Frankfurt (2003), and she has co-edited with Daniel Morat Deutschland denken: Beiträge für die reflektierte Republik, (Wiesbaden 2005). Peter Schöttler is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and Professor of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin. He has published widely on French and German history and historiography. Most recently he edited Geschichtsschreibung als

Notes on Contributors193

Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945 (Frankfurt, 1997), Marc Bloch – Historiker und Widerstandskämpfer (Frankfurt, 1999), Siegfried Kracauer, penseur de l’histoire (with Philippe Despoix Montréal, 2006), Marc Bloch et les crises du savoir (with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger Berlin, 2011), Epistemology and History. From Bachelard and Canguilhem to Today’s History of Science (with Henning Schmidgen and Jean-François Braunstein, Berlin, 2012), Fernand Braudel, Geschichte als Schlüssel zur Welt: Vorlesungen in deutscher Kriegsgefangenschaft 1941 (Stuttgart, 2013). Jana Wuestenhagen holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Martin-LutherUniversity, Halle-Wittenberg. Before joining the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam in 2007, she taught contemporary history in Halle for almost ten years. Since 2012, she has managed the web-communication unit at the Center for Civic Education in Potsdam/ Brandenburg. Her publications include books and articles on European integration, East German foreign policy, the two German states during the Cold War, and the international strategies of German pharmaceutical companies.

Index

A Abbas, Ferhat, 49, 50 Abendland -Aktion, 78 concept of, 72–81, 85n50, 99n12, 139, 181 Abendland. Deutsche Monatshefte für Europäische Kultur, Politik und Wirtschaft, 74, 75, 78 Abetz, Otto, 94 Achenbach, Ernst, 149n74 Action Française, 91 Adenauer, Konrad, 16, 167 Africa, 49–51 Agamben, Giorgio, 64n66 Algeria, 47, 50, 53–55, 57–61 Angola, 57 Ansembourg, Count d’, 140 anti-communism 77, 79 anti-Europe, 7, 17 anti-liberal, anti-liberalism concept, 5, 6, 17, 33–42, 92, 98, 113, 118, 124, 158, 183 anti-liberal Europe, 48, 60, 141, 179, 181, 185 concept, 90 colonialism, 47–61 history, 8 anti-modern, 73, 80 Aron, Raymond, 187n16 Aron, Robert, 92 Asia, 51 Association des anciens prisonniers de guerre (ACPG), 140 Atlantic Charta, 12, 40–42, 49–51 Austria, 76–80 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 49, 50

B Ball, Terence, 91 Beeley, Harold, 53 Belgium, 53, 94 Bell, Daniel, 183 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 48 Benda, Julien, 92 Bergstraesser, Arnold, 135 Bernstein, Eduard, 36 Beyerle, Konrad, 83n14 Biermann, Wolf, 168 Blum, Leon, 129 Boehm, Max Hildebert, 110, 111, 125n13 bolshevism, 16, 76, 123, 137 Bourguiba, Habib, 49 Brasillach, Robert, 123 Brauer, Theodor, 83n14 Brentano, Heinrich von, 85n38 Briand, Aristide, 3, 91, 92 Briefs, Götz, 83n14 Britain, Great Britain, 36, 38, 41, 48, 50, 52, 56, 57 Brockway, Fenner, 57 Bülow, Bernhard von, 119 Bulletin du Centre Européen de la Culture, 97 Bunsen, Josias von, 107 C Camus, Albert, 180 capitalism, 16 Cartel des Gauches, 91 Catholicism, Catholics, Catholic 12, 73–81, 181, 183 CDU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany), 79

196

Centre Européen de Documentation et d’Information, 78 Césaire, Aimé, 54, 58 Challe, Maurice, 59, 60 Charlemagne (Waffen-SS division), 137–41 Charlemagne (brigade of Waffen-SS), 15 Charles-Brun, J., 95 China, 36 Christianity, 73, 74, 78–81 Churchill, Winston, 49, 167 civilization 12, 54 civilizing mission, 40 civil society, 39 Code Napoléon, 8 Cold War, 16 collaboration (under National Socialist Rule), 15, 129, 140, 141 colonialism, 9, 12, 33, 34, 40, 42, 47–61, 106 criticism, 9, 12, 41, 42, 47–61 European, 9 ‘Common European Home’, 159 communism, communist, 13, 16, 167, 185 concept of Europe, 157–70 See also Europe; Communist concepts conservatism, 73, 76, 79, 80 Conservative Revolution, 13, 16, 76, 94, 111–24 constitutionalism, constitutional state, 12, 37, 39, 40, 42, 48, 60 corporatism, 76, 80, 107, 110 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus von, 4, 91, 92, 140 Council for Mutual Assistance (COMECON), 160 Creech-Jones, Arthur, 52 cultural Europe, 16 Curtius, Robert, 91 Cyprus, 41, 53, 55, 58, 59 Czechoslovakia, 16 Czollek, Walter, 166 D Dandieu, Arnaud, 92, 99n22 Daitz, Werner, 121 Decolonization, 48, 51–61, 183 Degrelle, Léon, 123 democracy, 72, 80 Dempf, Alois, 83n14 Dönitz, Karl, 10 Dolezalek, Alexander, 124 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 76

Index

Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 122 Duckwitz, Georg Ferdinand, 120 Duke of Coburg, 145n43 Dutch, 37, 52 E East, concept of, 73, 77, 79 Eastern Bloc, 157, 158, 164 dissident concepts of Europe, 164 Eastern Europe, 157–70 elite, elitist, 80 empire, colonial, 40, 77 enlightenment, 78 Erzberger, Mathias, 108 ‘Esprit’, 92, 93 ‘europäischer Weltbürgerkrieg’, 7 Europa Ethnica, 97 Europe, model artistic, 168 Christian, 106 community of fate, 10 concepts, 7, 141, 166, 167 conservative, 13 continuity, 140 economic model 163 economic space, 121 ethnocentric, 13 federal, 183 historiography, 179 idea, 7, 17, 72, 85n50, 164, 166 image, 157, 165–68 integration, 5, 90, 180, 183, 186 political concept, 162 semantics, 129 in state socialism 157–70 values, 3, 17, 34, 48, 57, 141, 161, 165, 179, 184 ‘Europe of the nations’, 164 ‘Europe of the regions’ concept, 13, 90–98 ‘Europe des ethnies’, 96–97 European Common Market, 138, 139, 160 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), 48, 58, 59 European Economic Community, 5, 11, 15 Europe, Jeune, 183 European Political Community, 3, 4 European Union, 42 Europeanization, concept, 7 experience, 7, 8 extremism, 14

Index197



illiberal, 9, 17 National Socialist Occupation of Europe, 11 planning of, 11 reflexive, 10 right wing, 14

F Fanon, Frantz, 54, 56, 57, 187n22 Faraldo, José M, 163, 170 fascism, 13, 59, 123 federal conceptions, 169 federalism, 92, 94, 96 federation, 169 Fédération régionaliste française, 95 force, 41 fortress Europe, 16, 123, 137, 184 France, 4, 8, 13–15, 35, 37, 38, 47–61, 79, 90–98, 128–41 Franco, Francisco, 80 Franzel, Emil, 78, 83n23, 85n38 Freeden, Michael, 6 freedom, 49, 50 Frick, Wilhelm, 135 G Gaulle, Charles de, 59, 60, 96, 137, 164 Gaupp-Berghausen, Georg von, 85n38 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 16, 157–70 Germany, 4, 15, 37, 38, 72–81, 91, 94, 128–41 Gide, André, 9 Goebbels, Joseph, 116, 135 Göring, Hermann, 121 Görres, Joseph, 106 Gollwitzer, Heinz, 74 Gorbachev, Mihail, 159, 161 Gosewinkel, Dieter, 162 Greece, 37, 53, 58 großdeutsch, 76 Großraum (greater European space), 11, 14, 77, 116, 122 Gürge, Wilhelm, 120 H Habsburg, 80 Habsburg, Otto von, 80, 85n38, 83n23 Hager, Kurt, 161, 168 Halbwachs, Maurice, 128 hegemony, 39, 51, 80, 107, 109, 110, 112, 120, 122, 160, 169

Héraud, Guy, 13, 96, 97 Hermlin, Stephan, 166 Heydrich, Reinhart, 136 Heydte, Friedrich August von der, 85n38 Hic et nunc, 93 hierarchy, 80 Himmler, Heinrich, 136, 137 Hitler, Adolf, 47, 54, 116, 118, 135 Hobhouse, L.T., 36 Ho Chi Minh, 51 Honecker, Erich, 159, 161 Hugo, Victor, 113 humanitarianism, humanity, 12, 50 human rights, 12, 16, 34, 35, 39–41, 52, 54, 58, 59, 161, 169 Hundhammer, Alois, 85n38 Hutter, Hans, 85n38 I India, 49 individualism, 78 Indochina (French), 52, 54, 59 Indonesia, 55 integral federalism, 90, 92 integration, European, 17, 33, 38, 39, 72, 77, 90, 98 Italy, 38 J Jaeger, Richard, 85n38 Jardin, Jean, 94, 95 Jebb, Gladwyn, 53 Jeune Droite, 93, 95 Jouhaud, Edmond, 59, 60 Judt, Tony, 157 K Kenya, 41, 55, 57 Keynes, John M., keynesianism, 36 Kielmansegg, Johann Adolf Graf von, 140 Kimball, Warren, 49 Klein, Franz Johann, 83n23 Koenig, Marie-Pierre, 49 Kroll, Gerhard, 78 Krukenberg, Gustav, 15, 16, 128–41 Krukenberg-Conze, Elsbeth, 130, 142n10 Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Gustav, 107 L La Nouvelle Revue Française, 93

198

Lamour, Philippe, 94 Lattre de Tassigny, Joseph de, 49 law, rule of law, 35, 39, 60 Leclerc, Jacques-Philippe, 49 Lerchenfeld, Hugo Graf von, 83n14 liberal, liberalism, concept, 4, 5, 11, 12, 33–42, 158, 170, 179, 183, 184, 185 Europe, 4 ideal-type, 11 liberalization, process, 81, 163 lieux de memoire, 179 Lipgens, Walter, 10 List, Friedrich, 13, 106 Litzmann, Karl, 143n14 Loustau, Robert, 95 Luther, Martin, 73 Lyttelton, Oliver, 53 M Madagascar, 55 Maghreb, 49 Mandela, Nelson, 50 Mann, Heinrich, 91 Mann, Thomas, 91 Mannesmann, Reinhold, 107 Marc, Alexandre, 91–97, 183 market, market society, 35, 36 Maschke, Erich, 140 Maurras, Charles, 95 Mayrisch Committee, 129, 131, 133, 136, 139 Mayrisch, Emile, 129, 133 Mazower, Mark, 10, 14 Memmi, Albert, 54, 55, 56, 59 Merkatz, Joachim von, 85n38 Middle Ages, 73, 74, 77, 78, 84n31 Milward, Alan, 169 Mitteleuropa (Central Europe), 13, 73, 76, 78, 85n50, 105–24, 170, 181 anti-liberal, 109 bibliography, 112 semantics, 117 Mitterand, François, 60 modernity, 5 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 112 Mohler, Armin, 117 Monnet, Jean, 15, 169 Mounier, Emmanuel, 92 Mouvemements, 93 Mussert, Anton, 123

Index

N Napoléon I, 9, 179 nation, 164 nationalism, 12, 38, 51, 75, 78, 183 national socialism, 10, 13, 14, 73, 75, 76, 77, 81n1, 105, 114–24, 128, 133, 135 national sovereignty, 159, 160, 169, 170 nation-state, 11, 13, 16, 93, 94, 96, 97, 106 Naumann, Friedrich, 13, 109, 124 Naumann, Johann Wilhelm, 78 Nazi, 181 neo-liberalism, 15 Netherlands, 52 Neues Abendland: Zeitschrift für Politik, Kultur und Geschichte (journal), 78, 79, 80 Neurath, Konstantin von, 119 New Europe, 13 New Europe (concept), 8, 9 ‘New European Order’, 13, 47, 77, 117–24 Nkrumah, Kwame, 49 ‘non-conformistes’, 91, 92, 94 Nord, Philip, 180 ‘nouvelle Europe’, 15 O Occident (‘Abendland’), 12, 13 Öhner, Vrääht, 166 ordoliberalism, 15 Ordre Nouveau, 90–98, 183 organicism, 96, 111 Overländer, Theodor, 85n38 P Paneuropa, 4, 73, 91 Papen, Franz von, 135, 140 Papon, Maurice, 60, 66n103 parliamentarism, 38, 80 personalism /Personalismus, 13, 92–94, 96–98 Pétain, Philippe, 95 Petitot, Henri, 92 Petri, Rolf, 162 Pflimlin, Pierre, 53 plan, planning, planning policy, 11, 15, 162, 163, 180, 186 Planchais, Jean, 59 Plans, 93 Platz, Hermann, 74 Poland, 16 Pompidou, Georges, 96 Présence, 93

Index199

property rights, 37 Protestant, Protestantism, 74, 92, 164 Pünder, Hermann, 85n38 Q Quisling, Vidkun, 123 R race, racism, 54, 76 Rathenau, Walther, 107 rationality, 38 Rechtsstaat, 35 Reich, 73, 76, 85n50 Religion, 12, 35 Rey, Gabriel, 92 Rhineland 74, 75, 76 Rhodesia, 54 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 116 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 107 rights, individual, 48, 58, 60 romanticism, 73, 74, 75, 81 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 49, 50 Roselius, Ludwig, 107 Rougemont, Denis de, 13, 91–98, 99n8 S Saint-Simon, Henri de, 38 Salan, Raoul, 59, 60 Sartre, Jean Paul, 57, 92 Schacht, Hjalmar, 140 Scheler, Max, 92 Schenk, Ernst Günther, 149n72 Schildt, Axel, 79 Schmale, Wolfgang, 7, 162 Schmitt, Carl, 14, 116, 122, 125n23 Schreyvogel, Friedrich, 74 Schuberth, Hans, 85n38 Schulze-Boysen, Harro, 94 science, 38 secularization, 78 Seipel, Ignaz, 83n14 self-determination, 40 semantics of liberalism/anti-liberalism, 6, 85n50 Senegal, 49 Shivkov, Todor, 162 Sieburg, Friedrich, 135 Siegfried, André, 135 Siewert, Wulf, 121 Sirinelli, Jean-Français, 91 Six, Alfred, 137 social democracy, 36, 37

socialism, 38 South Vietnam, 51 Soviet Union, 14, 159–70 Spahn, Martin, 108 Spain, 79, 80 Spann, Othmar, 76 Spengler, Oswald, 74, 110 Speidel, Hans, 140 Spiegel, Der (journal), 80 Stadtmüller, Georg, 85n38 Steiner, André, 163 Steltzer, Theodor, 85n38 Stresemann, Gustav, 3, 75 SS concept of Europe, 122–24, 137–38 state, state intervention, 39, 93 Stern, William, 93 Stinnes, Hugo, 108 Strasser, Otto, 94 Sukarno, Ahmed, 51 supranationalism, 80 Sweden, 36 Switzerland, 95 T technocracy, 15 Teitgen, Pierre-Henri, 58 Thyssen, August, 108 totalitarianism, totalitarian 50, 94, 95, 124, 158 Troeltsch, Ernst, 113 Truman, Harry, 167 U Ulbricht, Walter, 159, 161 United Nations, 48, 49, 53, 54, 57 United States of America (USA), 14, 15, 37, 49 V Valéry, Paul, 91 Verband der Heimkehrer (VdH), 138 Vidal-Naquel, Pierre, 60 Viénot, Pierre, 129, 133, 144n27, 144n29 violence, 41, 42, 48, 56, 60, 61 W Waffen-SS, 15, 137–41 Weber, Max, 35 welfare state, 35, 37, 38 ‘West’, the concept, 73, 78, 80, 81n3, 184 Wirth, Günther, 167

200

Würmeling, Franz Joseph, 85n38 Y Yacine, Kateb, 48

Index

Z Zeller, André, 59, 60