Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I 9781400873708

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Preface to the 2016 Reprinting
Preface to the 1988 Reprinting
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: From Bourgeois to Corporatist Europe
PART I: THE CONTAINMENT OF THE LEFT
Chapter 1: The Dimensions of Social Conflict at the End of World War I
The Language of Class Anxiety (1900−1925)
Elites―Resilient and Vulnerable
Business Accommodation in Germany and France
Chapter 2: Politics among the Victors: Issues and Elections in November 1919
Bourgeois Cohesion in France
Bourgeois Disarray in Italy
Chapter 3: The Limits of Economic Restructuring
The Evolution of Leftist Objectives
Strategies of Bourgeois Defense
The Coal Crisis
PART II: THE FAILURE OF THE PARLIAMENTARY CENTER
Chapter 4: The Politics of Reparation
The Wager on "FuIfillment"
Reparation, Taxes, and the Demands of German Heavy Industry
The Bankruptcy of Moderation (1922)
Chapter 5: The Attrition of the Liberal Regime in Italy
The Political Ecology of Fascism
From Giolitti to Mussolini: The Liberals' Search for Order
PART Ill: PATHS TOWARD CORPORATIST STABILITY
Chapter 6: Between Nationalism and Corporatism: The Ruhr Conflict
Inflation, Social Democracy, and the Challenge to Sovereignty in Germany
Corporatist Forces versus Poincaré and Stresemann
Chapter 7: Majorities without Mandates: Issues and Elections in the Spring of 1924
The Limits of Mussolini's Majority
The Limits of Social Democratic Eclipse
The Limits of the Cartel des Gauches
Chapter 8: Achieving Stability
Inflation, Revaluation, and the Decomposition of Parliamentary Politics
Iron, Steel, and the International Organization of Capitalism
Corporative State in Corporatist Europe
Conclusion: The Structure and Limits of Stability
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

RECASTING BOURGEOIS EUROPE

RECASTING BOURGEOIS EUROPE • STABILIZA TION IN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND ITALY IN THE DECADE AFTER WORLD WAR I

• 'WITH A NEW PREFACE

• CHARLES S. MAIER

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press Preface to the 1988 reprinting copyright © 1988 by Princeton University Press Preface to the 2016 reprinting copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fourth paperback printing, and first paperback reprinting with a new preface by the author, 2016 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-16979-8 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PuBLICATION DATA

Maier. Charles S Recasting bourgeois Europe. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Europe-Politics-1918-1945. 2. Europe-Economic conditions-1918-1945 .. I. Title. D727.M236 1975 320.9'4'051 73-2488 ISBN 0-691-05220-4

ISBN 0-691-10025-X (phk.)

This book has been composed in Linotron Caledonia

∞ Printed on acid-free paper. 00 Printed in the United States of Amelica America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents

CONTENTS Preface to the 2016 Reprinting

ix

Preface to the 1988 Reprinting

xix

Preface

XXVll

Abbreviations

xxxi

Introduction: From Bourgeois to Corporatist Ellrope PART

I:

:3

THE CONTAINMENT OF THE LEFT

Chapter 1: The Dimensions of Social Conflict at the End of World War I The Language of Class Anxiety (1900-1925) Elites-Resilient and Vulnerable Business Accommodation in Germany and France

39 53

Chapter 2: Politics among the Victors: Issues and Elections in November 1919 Bourgeois Cohesion in France Bourgeois Disarray in Italy

88 91 109

Chapter 3: The Limits of Economic Restructuring The Evolution of Leftist Objectives Strategies of Bourgeois Defense The Coal Crisis

135 136 153 194

PART

11:

THE FAILURE OF THE PARLIAMENTARY CENTER

Chapter 4: The Politics of Reparation The Wager on "FuI611ment" Heparation, Taxes, and the Demands of German Heavy Industry The Bankruptcy of Moderation (1922) Chapter 5: The Attrition of the Liberal Regime in Italy The Political Ecology of Fascism From Giolitti to Mussolini: The Liberals' Search for Order PART

19

22

Ill:

233 233

249 272 305

305 322

PATHS TOWARD CORPORATIST STABILITY

Chapter 6: Between Nationalism and Corporatism: The Ruhr Conflict Inflation, Social Democracy, and the Challenge to Sovereignty in Germany Corporatist Forces versus Poincanl and Stresemann vii

355 356 387

CONTENTS

Chapter 7: Majorities without Mandates: Issues and Elections in the Spring of 1924 The Limits of Mussolini's Majority The Limits of Social Democratic Eclipse The Limits of the Cartel des Gauches Chapter 8: Achieving Stability Inflation, Revaluation, and the Decomposition of Parliamentary Politics Iron, Steel, and the International Organization of Capitalism Corporative State in Corporatist Europe

421 422 440 458 481 483 516 545

Conclusion: The Structure and Limits of Stability

579

Bibliography

595

Index

609

viii

PREFACE TO THE 2015 REPRINTING

The republication of Recasting Bourgeois Europe, and perhaps of any work of history after forty years, calls for some sustained self-reflection. What should be the claim on today’s possible readers after so long an interval? The documentary record continues to advance; recent scholarship must modify findings; alternative interpretations claim consideration and often revision. Historical studies, however, can retain values that do not depend on the state of knowledge at the point they are written. Recasting sought to assert a continuing claim by virtue of its ambition to compare three national experiences in a crowded and fraught era that often surprised by unexpected outcomes. It challenged the still prevailing historicist notion, which was then the basis of professional graduate “training,” that national uniqueness and difference trumped any shared attributes in accounting for what actually happened. Without abandoning a narrative format, it pursued lines of research and argument that had previously been neglected and tackled the recurrent issue of how large national societies riven by tensions achieve political settlements.1 Like all works of history, Recasting Bourgeois Europe reflected the issues of its time. In the preface to the 1988 reprinting I explained how the developments of the 1970s, a decade of inflation and statesupervised political bargaining between representatives of organized labor and business, had shaped my understanding of the model of corporatist stabilization that I ascribed to the 1920s. In fact, Recasting had a longer evolution and began as a dissertation project during the academic year 1963–64, when I was concerned less with parallel trends in the contemporary world than with the challenge of how to undertake focused comparative history. It was submitted in 1967 as a more limited study that described how the countries in question got beyond the immediate post-World War I turbulence. Only as I extended the work forward in time (and into book form) over the next seven years did I develop the explanatory framework that appeared in print. The formation of young scholars today does not usually allow such an extended labor without professional catastrophe. It is appropriate in 2015 to address two new questions. The first is the obvious one: how might I revise my scholarly approach if I were reI have prepared this preface without explicitly addressing the useful retrospective critiques prepared by the distinguished participants in a round-table discussion of Recasting Bourgeois Europe for the Italian historical journal Contemporanea (Vol XVI, nr. 3, July-October 2013): pp. 443–474. Some of my own thoughts on how Recasting might be recast today coincide with their diverse suggestions (e.g. the role of empire). Other critiques probably reflect persistent choices of approach, such as the evaluation of explosive violence within regimes that I analyzed in terms of class and state transactions. See “Alle origini dell’Europa corporatista: Recasting Bourgeois Europe di Charles Maier a cura di Ilaria Pavan. Intervengono Adam Tooze, Kathleen Canning, Annemarie Sammartino, Laura Cerasi, Mariuccia Salvati.”

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preface to the 2016 reprinting searching and writing the book today? Such a reworking would involve more than just bringing research up to date with new archival findings or the results of new scholarship. If my interpretations of the 1920s, proposed in the 1970s, reflected then current developments, what new perspectives might seem compelling in the light of trends since the seventies? Not that I would retract interpretations proposed forty years ago—they still make sense to me—but four decades of packed history since the original publication could well mandate an expanded agenda for examining the years after the First World War. The second new question is one that I have actually been asked quite often in the intervening years: why did I never write a Recasting II for the years after the Second World War? To be sure, the fact that I never produced an equivalent large-scale work reflected a succession of intervening intellectual interests that arose to claim my attention: the origins of the Cold War, controversies over Holocaust historiography and so-called collective memory, the collapse of Communist regimes in Europe, the trajectories of empire, and the evolving nature of state power, among others. All these inquiries were prodded by unfolding contemporary experience as much as by “pure” historical curiosity. But evolving interests were not the only deterrent to attempting a large-scale multinational study of the years after World War II. If the objective of a Recasting II were to parallel the first—that is, if it were to seek some unifying conceptual basis to account for post-1945 political outcomes—the interpretive key was elusive. The concept of “bourgeois” Europe no longer made sense. After World War I, “bourgeois” served to describe the rallying of anti-collectivist forces; it was a term used at the time to describe the opposition to Social Democrats as well as to Marxists further left. But after World War II, the corresponding centrist coalitions depended on social-democratic participation to oppose what they identified as a Communist threat. The notion of “bourgeois” also conjured up a view of a hierarchical order with a social elite that the Second World War seemed to have decisively broadened. Yes, there were and there remain other familiar concepts available to serve as an overarching theme, most notably the impact of the Cold War or progress toward European integration. These stories, though, have been well told many times. Although I worked on many aspects of Cold War politics and political economy, I did not believe I could justify a new synthesis on that basis. The theme of collective memory—of fascism, or of the Left-Right divisions of the 1930s and 1940s, or of the Holocaust—has also served, most notably perhaps in the late Tony Judt’s impressive narrative, Postwar. But to focus on Europe’s collective memory did not seem to allow enough emphasis x

preface to the 2016 reprinting on the act of simply leaving the past behind, that is, just to say “moving on,” which also made a significant contribution to postwar reconstruction. Still, despite all the difficulties of identifying an adequate unifying trend, perhaps it is time to address the problem again. Return briefly to the first question posed above: how would I tackle Recasting Bourgeois Europe if rewriting from our current vantage point? Although tracking three national experiences was daunting enough, I might today actually extend the geospatial arguments of the work. This would not be a question of adding another country or two, but of examining the global or extra-European dimensions of the processes underway. As the title was meant to suggest, Recasting focused on issues of economic and sociopolitical confrontation within each of its countries. Although it followed the domestic ramifications of the post1918 reparations issue, it gave no attention to the role of the colonial world—important for France and Britain and soon after for Italy, if no longer for post-1919 Germany. It did not follow the ambitious efforts of the League of Nations, not only to construct an international order, but to intervene in the social and economic domain. Today I would revisit those issues. The renewed historiography of the League—its role in social and economic governance, in serving as a forum for minority discontents, in setting at least discursive limits on colonial exploitation—suggests that it was the focus of a global effort at stabilization that I might profitably have placed alongside the dimensions of class compromise and American capital. The international ambitions of the Fascist regime probably merited a closer look as well. West European stabilization never rested on European factors alone. Nor did it rest just on the new active role of the United States in financing West European international payments after World War II, which I compared with the shakier effort in the 1920s in an essay that followed the book.2 Recasting Bourgeois Europe did recognize that processes of stabilization and regime readjustment within borders depend upon processes outside them, but today I would describe the interaction in more encompassing terms. As an undergraduate student of Arno Mayer, I certainly understood how domestic ideological divisions impacted international politics, but I have always insisted that this process is reciprocal. Historians and social scientists understand this when it comes to revolutionary transformations, which usually provoke foreign interventions and thus entail an effort to strengthen state power interna“The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe,” American Historical Review, vol. 86, no. 2 (April 1981): 327–352, and “Reply”: 363–367. On the post-1945 period, see also Maier, “The Making of ‘Pax Americana’: Constitutive Moments of United States Ascendancy,” in R. Ahman, A. Birke, and M. Howard, eds., The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918–1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press and London: The German Historical Institute, London, 1993), pp. 390–434.

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preface to the 2016 reprinting tionally. But this connection of internal and international politics holds true for epochs of equilibrium as well. The co-involvement of foreign and domestic politics—indeed they are hardly separable spheres of activity—further suggests why epochs of domestic equilibrium are brief and fragile. The negotiation of social compacts within countries is a process that entails continual input from outside national territory, whether extraction of resources from less developed societies, outright subsidies from wealthy ones, reentering available markets, or just ideological encouragement. Domestic stabilization is never just stabilization at home; it is a process of utilizing a favorable extra-national “environment.” But this process is not infinitely renewable; it generates resistance. At best, it conceals, and indeed often generates, the sources of the next “crisis.” The book of forty years ago, if revised today, might be more sensitive to that recurrent dialectic. Indeed it may be that stabilization is the rarer achievement, and that societies “normally” are involved in social processes that rarely produce moments of collective equilibrium or “order,” even if as individuals and families we can survive the systemic turbulence around us. This reflection brings me back to the second question above—usually posed, albeit gently, as an implicit reproach: why did I never write Recasting II? I initially did plan to undertake such a study once I completed my study of the twenties. I carried out extensive archival work on the years after 1945 in Paris, Koblenz, Rome, Lausanne, London, Washington, the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, labor union collections in Detroit, Madison, Düsseldorf, and Turin, industrial archives in France and Germany, and at diverse other repositories. I produced many pieces that treated aspects of post-1945 reconstruction and the fraught historiography of the Cold War, along with efforts to see the two postwar periods as a whole. But I did not produce a synthetic book-length interpretation of the post-Second World War. Some of the reasons derived from the continuing intrusion of new scholarly concerns, but other challenges also arose. I had envisaged the project as an archivally based book, not just a work of synthesis built on the specialized research of others. The mass of sources for the last years of the Second World War (when the political outcomes of the postwar era were already emerging) and extending until the end of the l940s or the early 1950s was daunting. It was clear, too, that the narrow selection of countries made in the first book made less sense for the second. The postwar order was created with the full participation of the United States, whose policies and vast troves of private and public documentation might easily have claimed their own book-length treatment. Britain was a major partner in events, and the political classes in the Low Countries played xii

preface to the 2016 reprinting a continuously strategic role. Teams of researchers in many universities were systematically working through the documentation with a thoroughness that I despaired of emulating, among them the students whom my friend Alan Milward directed so productively at the European University Institute. But in a way, these reasons were just excuses. Most basically I did not have my own clear concept of what new principles of sociopolitical order had emerged in Western Europe after 1945. Recasting Bourgeois Europe argued that after a period of severe social discontent and upheaval, the elites of France, Germany, and Italy had worked out a new equilibrium for politics and the economy that supplemented democratic and parliamentary procedures (or authoritarian dictatorship in the case of Italy) with direct bargaining among the “corporatist” forces of industry and labor. Contrary to many hopes and fears, a relatively conservative social settlement resulted. Stabilization, as I used the term, meant neither the rigorous exclusion of social change nor counter-revolution, but widespread acceptance of electoral results and negotiated social settlements at home without continuous recourse to open protests or repression. I was less certain about summarizing the principles of settlement for the capitalist world in the decade after 1945. In the 1960s and 1970s a leftist historiography labeled the results as a “restoration,” largely engineered by the United States. It was true that the leading statesmen who had strong visions for postwar Western Europe, whether de Gaulle and Churchill at the outset, Konrad Adenauer or Alcide de Gasperi later on, were conservative. The plans for the socialization of industry, which had seemed so inevitable in 1944–45, largely burnt themselves out or yielded bureaucratic agencies that hardly seemed to democratize the economy. The spokesmen for allegedly radical change, such as the Actionists and Socialists in Italy, the left wing of the Social Democrats in Germany, and equivalent enthusiasts elsewhere, were soon marginalized. Indeed, my first impulse when thinking about a postwar “Recasting” was to tell a story of capitalist restoration along the lines of what seemed to have resulted in the 1920s, but that, I soon realized, was an inadequate explanatory framework. In fact, the underlying principles transcended stabilization. The world that opened up in Western Europe was no mere restoration. The celebration of continuing economic growth, or what I termed the “politics of productivity,” displaced the struggle over economic shares that had undermined democracy in the depression of the 1930s. Still, the story of post-World War II Europe could not simply end with the stabilization of two halves of Europe, under American and Soviet hegemonies, by 1948–49. For the West at least, it could not have been just xiii

preface to the 2016 reprinting the story of America’s Europe. The countries of the continent brought their own recuperative forces into play; even Germany could recover prewar liberal and democratic traditions, whose proponents, returning from exile or so-called inner emigration, now had the chance to rebuild two-thirds of a prewar country. Italians, too, would have to reconstruct a polity from an even wider spectrum of contending secular and religious traditions. The debates in both countries and in the other West European societies remained vigorous far beyond the 1940s and early 1950s. The postwar world brought about a genuine democratization in many ways. This was true not only in Western Germany and Italy, where party pluralism, free trade unions, and contested elections clearly replaced the National Socialist and Fascist dictatorships, but in England where the electorate had voted in a Labour Government that instituted significant institutional change. Women also entered politics, as voters in France and Italy, and as actors everywhere. Welfare systems and labor rights were reaffirmed and expanded often under the auspices of Christian Democrats. It was difficult to draw a historical balance. Capitalism demonstrated a renewed vigor. The domestic Left retreated, in effect, into entrenched defensive positions, whether in local governments or in cultural redoubts, such as newspapers, the world of theater, or institutes to enshrine the history of the Resistance. Nonetheless, postwar Europe was a more open and less polarized society, even though it lived through deep ideological conflicts that often spilled out into the streets. The challenge was how to evaluate a sociopolitical structure that could encompass so many contradictions: for example, industrial relations, educational systems, and of course distributions of property often remained basically hierarchical—but was it reasonable to expect that to change? Moral issues were even more vexing. Deeply compromised political figures, judges, professors, leaders of industry survived quite handily in all countries. The judicial reckoning with collaborators or convinced authoritarians was spotty and imperfect; but was that the price of postwar consensus? Fighting the cultural Cold War involved occult subsidies but was defended by intellectuals I knew and admired. I felt torn as a would-be belated participant and stymied as a historian. As every historian knows, where one begins a story and where one ends it must establish much of the interpretation for the period in between. The phases of reconstruction or reorganization might superficially resemble those after the First World War: a period of potential radical upheaval (1944–45), a triennium of contestation (1946–48), a half-decade of consolidation (1949–53/55), and then a plateau of institution building after the mid-1950s, happily, and unlike the interwar xiv

preface to the 2016 reprinting era, uninterrupted by a catastrophic economic crisis.3 But at the end of the 1960s the explosive student-led upheavals revealed (or created) discontents for which no one was prepared. The movements of 1968 require reflection for what they suggest about the second postwar era. It is easy to say that they had local causes and that the Prague Spring testified to discontents far more profound than the rebellion in Paris; likewise the movements in the United States could be interpreted as products of the Vietnam War and America’s racial issues. But it seems to me that the upheavals transcended the local and also the specifically generational discontents of postwar youth who now had access to a vastly expanded system of higher education. They also suggested that the diagnoses of theorists such as Otto Kirchheimer, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset, who were pointing to the decline of ideological parties in the late 1950s were premature. How were the explosive challenges of the 1960s related to the stability that seemed to mark the 1950s? Would not a Recasting II have to take account of them by asking what principles of post-Second World War society they were rebelling against?4 These are questions that led me to defer an equivalent attempt to account for Europe’s second postwar era. But certain answers, or interpretations, seem plausible if one examines the period, as Recasting attempted for the 1920s, with a half-century of distance. As already suggested, a history of the post-Second World War would have to invoke a geospatial architecture of stability different from the framework of the twenties, although as noted above, reconsideration of the 1920s today would benefit from an expanded geographic framework. The most obvious differences perhaps would reflect the encompassing rivalry we term the Cold War. The “West” or the “Atlantic” community—the concepts are still applicable as bounded historical constructs—emerged because the “East” (not Asia, but the Communist world, which had its own diversity) enjoyed a contingent period of influence and power as a result of the Second World War. Many of the economic and political conflicts within Western Europe that might have been far more costly in terms of social peace were displaced onto the geopolitical conflicts of the Cold War that Washington helped pay for and that domestic electorates accepted as necessary. The conflict imperfectly labeled as bourgeois versus socialist after World War I I sketched out a periodization in”I fondamenti politici del dopoguerra” (“The Political Foundations of the Postwar Era”), in Perry Anderson, Maurice Aymard, Paul Bairoch, Walter Barberis, and Carlo Ginzburg, eds., Storia d’Europa, vol. I, L’Europa Oggi (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1993), pp. 313–372. 4 For an effort to identify the sources of discontent in “Conclusion: 1968–Did It Matter?” in Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia, Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed. (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011), pp. 413–433. 3

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preface to the 2016 reprinting morphed into another, also imperfectly labeled as democratic or capitalist versus communist after World War II. A second dimension of international transformation followed on decolonization. Its impact remains hard to measure: a case can be made for its profound effect, but an argument for a relative easy superseding of empire is also possible. Decolonization entailed an unwilling renunciation of grandeur and “mission” to be sure. But it did not rupture all privileged economic ties. Perhaps, too, the ragged end of colonialism became ultimately accepted by all but the hardcore Right because Cold War confrontations sanctioned anew the military values that European empire had earlier nurtured. A third geopolitical reconstruction involved the construction of the (West) European Community and Union, which as Alan Milward emphasized, suited individual country agendas, but also allowed a group of small and weakened states to assert their collective weight between the superpowers. Having to reenter history, so to speak, as a post-colonial community required West Europeans to enlarge their political and social visions beyond the earlier inherited divisions, such that the 1950s and 1960s did not recapitulate the interwar era. Indeed these cumulative changes meant that the post-1945 story did not find a ready closure, but spilled into continuing transformations across decades and boundaries. But I believe that there were other internal evolutions as well that have been hitherto imperfectly described. Kirchheimer, Bell, and others were correct in seeing the transformation of parties in the Europe of the 1950s and 1960s. But what they may have missed was the displacement of political and ideological conflict from parties and indeed from constituted political and even social forces. In the 1920s, as Recasting argued, interest groups and economic organizations had taken over the process of sociopolitical bargaining from parliaments. Observers of the Left and Right (such as Carl Schmitt) had taken note of this transformation. The post-1945 changes were also transforming party governance, but no longer just by strengthening what seemed to emerge again in the 1970s as “neo-corporatism,” the more recent version of what I found in the 1920s. That phenomenon, which influenced my thinking about the 1920s, also needs refined analysis. Watching the political strains of recent years, I would suggest that a paradoxical transformation took place after 1945, not just the advance of corporatist politics with its movement from parliaments to organized economic interests that I pointed out for the 1920s, but a longer term dissolving of solidarities and even a longer-term unmooring from organized “civil society.” Given the benevolent role ascribed to civil society in undermining Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe in the xvi

preface to the 2016 reprinting 1980s, such a statement may seem puzzling. Given, too, the proposals for expansive social programs inscribed in “charters” of the Resistance, the Beveridge Plan in Britain, and early postwar party platforms, this interpretation may seem perverse. Any potential for the attenuation of solidarities was not evident in the earnest Europe of the 1950s, when “good” Europeans—believers in social compacts, organized unions, and progressive entrepreneurs—sought to reconstitute the solidarities attacked by fascism, the economic capital destroyed in the war, and likewise the idealized gender and family norms that wartime had so visibly suspended. Still, the more prosperous and democratic Europe retrieved and reconstructed from the war through the 1950s facilitated what an Italian sociologist would call the individualistic mobilization of society.5 And so, too, when Margaret Thatcher observed a generation later, “There is no such thing as society,” she had a point. This potential for the erosion of traditional solidarities and traditionally prescribed social affiliations became evident in the 1960s with its youth culture, the expansion of universities, and the growing uneasiness with the discipline required by postwar capital reconstruction and the continuing East-West conflict. Aspirations changed: less the renunciation of the present to reward the future; rather the hope of allowing more self-fulfillment (which did not preclude great collective orientations around counter-cultural heroes of music and revolutionary heroes of a Third World peasantry). Oddly enough, as Europe reconstructed a more durable and open democracy, it in effect unglued the structures of stability, silently and unwittingly, to allow more individualist orientations to prevail. But is this the story of recasting or renewing Europe after the Second World War? What it may suggest is that the historical actors of the late 1940s and 1950s took more from the surviving impulses of the interwar than we imagine, and that the sea change of European politics in the twentieth century came later, in the 1960s and 1970s. From the mid-1930s into the late 1950s, European leaders and European public accepted political and economic tasks that required great collective discipline: preparing for another war, struggling through World War II, living through austerity for the goals of economic reconstruction, accepting the long East-West conflict. But at the same time, the natural contrary impulses of individual fulfillment in the present also began to return and, by the 1960s, even liberate collective and private life from the cohesion that democracy, as much as authoritarianism, had seemed to entail for a generation. If there is a difficulty in finding an adequate portmanteau concept for Europe’s second postwar era, Alexander Pizzorno suggested this trend (but noted its limits) in his essay, “The individualistic Mobilization of Europe,” in A New Europe, Stephen R. Graubard, ed. (c. American Academy of Arts and Sciences Deadalus (winter 1964) and Boston, Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 265–290.

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preface to the 2016 reprinting it is because its intellectuals and leaders and citizens harbored plural and contradictory impulses hard to accommodate with one leading concept. Western Europe’s political achievement was measured by the fact that much of what its leaders claimed to seek after World War II might seem too demanding or irrelevant for its citizens within a decade. Understanding the era after 1945 requires a long view. Charles S. Maier May 2015

xviii

PREFACE TO THE HJ88 HEPHINTING

Republication of a book almost fifteen years after its completion provokes an obvious question: How would the author have written it differently today? I chose the dissertation topie that eventually hecame Recl/sting Bourgeois Europe because 1 aspired to capture more than a single national experience; I wanted to do comparative history. But I hoped to use comparative history in the way Mare Bloch had proposed: as a method that would insist on national specificity even as it presented transnational developments.' The line between comparative history and historical sociology is a difficult one: ultimately the historian insists on the uniqueness of the individual cases, while the sociologist seeks to explain the overarching tendencies. For this reason, the comparative historian will often he chided by colleagues who say that the comparison does not really work. The cases are too dissimilar. The more valid objection might be that if the comparison does illuminatc, it is because only variants of one common phenomenon arc under discussion: the true subject should be considered the common process-sblbilization in the case of Recasting-not the three societies. Does the hook really involve comparative history? Otto Hintze pointed to the dilemma when he wrote concerning the feudal preconditions of representative governmeut "that wc must not speak herc of a general sociological law but of a Singular historical process, extending throughout the entire West ."2 Hintze insisted on the singular process because he did not wish to sacrifice what the German historicist tradition taught was the defining attribute of the historian, the concern It))" an individual process or experience. In his sense there can bc no comparative history strictly speaking. Hilt common usage still deems the narrative analysis of common developments within diHt'rent contcxts to be comparative history, and this was the effort undertaken. Such a defense of comparative history does not claim that any particular comparison succeeds. As the Introduction suggcsted, validity, as with any historical interpretation, can be judged only retrospectively and in the context of a wider community of researchers. Does the comparison help to orient continued scholarship? Not every comparison is valid; successful comparison lIlust contillue to t()CUS Oil thc specific differences as well as the common e1cments , and it must refer to real historical phenomena, not merely arbitrary definitions ..1 The 1

Marc Flloch. "Pour line histoire compan>e des societes europeennes" (1928). now in

Mli/allges historiqlles (Paris, 19(13). pp. 16...40. o Otto lIintze, ''The Preconditions of Representative Government in lhe Context of

World History," in The lIistorieat Essays of Otto Ilillt::e, Felix Gilbert, ed. (New York, 1975), p. :353. :1 J have explored these conditions further in The Unmasterable Past: History, HO/OCUlist, (/1/(/ German Natiollalldentity (Cambridge, Mass., HJ88). xix

PREFACE TO THE

1988 'REPRINTING

comparison can provoke dissent and disproof, but it should serve as a serious beginning for ongoing analysis. The comparative model of corporatism that the book suggested as the common denominator of stabilization efforts in the 1920's, it is now evident, reflected the circllmstances of the late 1960's and the early 1970's.4 I found myself writing ahout an era of postwar inflation at the very moment Western societies were entering over a decade of sustained price rises for the third time in the century. Lyndon Johnsol1's inRationary financing of the Vietnam War, the renewed militance of European labor movements in the late 1960's, President Nixon's abandonment of the Bretton Woods system, and the OPEC oil price rise were background events as I worked on this book. This period of inRation and of weakening American economic ascendancy was marked hy various efforts at wage and price controls and social contracts with powerfullabor unions. A book testifies to its era: I was all the more alerted to efforts at labor-management collaboration that began in similar inRationary experiences during and after the First World War, and that seemed to characterize the general tendency of twcntieth-century politics. 5 In the late 1970's many pessimistic commentators felt that a continuing trend toward inflation had become endemic in the structure of modern democratic capitalism. The claims on national income by contending social groups were greater than societies could satisfy. Only inflation allowed these demands to be met in nominal, though of course not in real, terms . For conservative critics sllch tendencies toward overburdened democracy seemed the inevitable result of allluence, longterm growth, the guarantees of the welfare state, and societal permissiveness. Critics on the Left felt that continuing inequality had eroded the moral legitimacy of market outcomes. Both sides of the political spectrum thus tended to believe that chronic inflation was built into the system. The economic turnabout of the early 1980's, however, revealed the danger of attributing inevitability and permanence to any economic cycle. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Heagan confronted unions, accepted harsh stahilization crises, and helped employers face down workers' demands. Levels of unemployment that would have been 4 Ellis Hawley. The Great War alld the Search jl)r a Modem Order (New York, 1979). found it IJseful for contemporary American e vents; and Keith Middle mas. Politics ill Industrial Society: The British System since 1911 (London. 1979), extende d a similar analysis to British politics. 5 I have dealt with these political aspects of inflation suhseque ntly ill "The Politics of Inflation ill the Twentieth Century," in The Political Fconolll!l of Inflation, Fred Hirsch and John H. Goldthorpe, eds. (London and Cambridge. Mass., 1978), now included in Maier, III Search of Stability: Fxploraliol1s in IIistorical Political Economy (New York. 1987). pp. 187-224; also in The Politics of Inflation and Economic Stagnation. Leon Lindberg alld Charles S. Maier, eds. (Washington, D.e . . 1911.5), pp. 3-24 .

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deemed scandalous in the 1960's were accepted as natural noninAationary rates, Labor was weakened as a collective actor hy the loss of jobs in mining and industry. Even as national income levels rose anew after the recessions of the early 1980's, unemployment persisted. To be sure, some inflationary pressures also persisted, if not in the labot' and commodities market, certainly in the markets for assets: stock shares, housing, paintings, and so f()rth. Some of these pressures abated only with the collapse of the stock markcts in October 1987. In general , the world economy went from a preoccupation with inflationary dangers to a concern ahout catastrophic deflation. Corporatist arrangements, negotiated during inflationary eras, seem less inevitable in the current period of labor weakness and concern about reeession . \Vould corporatist tendencies also have seemed less salient during the 1920's were I writing today? "Vas the reading of the twenties merely an artifact of the late ] 96()' sand 1970's'? I do not think so. It was lIot merely inflation that produced neocorporatist bargaining. The great exertions of the First World \Var and the subsequent social upheavals would have led to the negotiation (or the authoritarian imposing) of social compacts regardless of price changes. Corporatist stabilization was an answer to class divisions exaccrbated, if not creafed, by industrial employment. The book endeavorec! to show a moment of national interrogation about the nature of social hierarchy and inequality whe n the threat posed by working-class politics seemed acute. I was wrong in 1975 to write as if corporatist arrangements-thc direct bargains between interests, whether or Hot supervised by the statesimply succeeded parliamentary representation of interests. The book probably suggested too unilinear a model. In subsequent essays I have argued that corporatist arrangements and parliamentary institutions supplement each other in changing proportions as methods for representing organized and cmerging interests . Especially since World War 11, once fascism had lost its political appeal, parliamentary representation was rcquired for legitimacy. If the 1920's demonstrated that parliaments could not resolve some painfill distributive problems (who was to pay for the aftermath of the war), the 1960's and 1970's revealed that corporatist bargains could not always command social assent. (j Critics often objected to the vagueness of the concept of corporatism . As I was writing, political scientists were refining more precise concepts of corporatism or neocorporatism (the post-1945 process that especially r, See Charles S. l'vl