The Suspension-Bridge Argument
THE AGE OF SPANNING CONTRADICTIONS
To understand a certain obtuseness is required. One must be obtuse to understand. He likened it to needing big shoes to cross a bridge with cracks in it. One mustn’t ask questions.1
—THE PHILOSOPHER OETS KOLK BOUWSMA RECALLING A CONVERSATION WITH LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (ITHACA, NY, 1949)
Contradictions between theories show that these theories have reached their natural limits; they must therefore be transformed and subsumed under even wider theories in which the contradictions finally disappear.2
—GYÖRGY LUKÁCS, “WHAT IS ORTHODOX MARXISM?” (1919)
A Paradoxical Age
Adam Czartoryski’s Essay on Diplomacy was published in two editions: one in 1830 and another in 1864 (three years after his death). Both dates were significant: the first corresponded to the November Uprising against tsarist Russia, which Czartoryski headed for a short time before tsarist troops definitively crushed it. The second was the January Uprising of 1863–1864, also against tsarist Russia, which also ended in the decisive defeat of the insurgents. The previous arguments have noted a number of differences in the two editions of the Essay, but there is one difference they have overlooked. Although Czartoryski did not live to see the failure of the second uprising, there were some lessons he had drawn from the fallout of the first edition that found their way into the second. As we learned from the progressive argument, the question idiom was absent from the first edition—he had written it in 1823, before the age had begun in earnest—but was very present in the second, where many of the hitherto discussed features of the age (bundling, urgency, questions as a threat to European security, etc.) also figured prominently.3
With the new idiom, however, something was also lost. By the 1850s, the fickleness of public attention to the Polish question was already apparent, as was the decline in support—especially among liberal Germans—for Polish aspirations. The 1864 edition conceded that public opinion in Britain had little effect on policymaking, a pessimism that is not present in the 1830 edition.4 The near unanimous support of European public opinion for the 1830 uprising had not, after all, resulted in Great Power intervention on behalf of Poland. In fact, the Essay closed on a melancholy note: “Notre voix est trop faible, trop isolée pour en eveiller même l’espérance” (Our voice is too weak, too isolated to even awaken hope).5
The Essay was written in French, partly as it was meant to appeal to statesmen and astute readers across the continent. Even after the January Uprising was put down, there were those who still believed in the transformative capacity of public opinion, but they were more likely to be French than Polish. Around the same time the second edition of the Essay appeared, the Frenchman Alfred Briosne wrote on the Polish question, highlighting the “impotence of diplomacy” to prevent war and that public opinion of “civilized Europe” should be able to participate in international debates “irrespective of their nationality” in the interest of peace.6 The popular pedagogy of the querists had kept such a hope alive, but for the likes of Czartoryski, an essential promise held out by the question idiom and querists’ creation of the international public sphere—that international public opinion mattered in the resolution of questions—had proven illusory. It is telling that just as the idiom appeared in Czartoryski’s Essai, its very progeny, namely, his faith in the power of public opinion, disappeared. Thus we are confronted with yet another paradox of the age.
In addition to the paradox of the international public sphere, four other great paradoxes have emerged from the foregoing analyis. First, what gives coherence to the age of questions is its incoherence (namely, the age is defined by the chronic redefinition of questions). Second, the urgency and momentum toward a definitive solution that querists propounded was fully compatible with their belief that a solution was elusive or simply impossible. Third, the belief that there was something special about “now,” which made questions timely, came to coexist with the belief that they were also timeless. And fourth, the age of questions gave rise simultaneously to both the belief that a universal war would be the result of a failure to solve them and the belief that only a universal war could solve them.
Is there a system of rules that could be said to govern the age of questions in all its particular aspects, a pattern that integrates all disparate patterns, a chorus to unite the disparate voices heard thus far?
Automatism
In 1887, the American Unitarian reverend George Batchelor published his work on social equilibrium. He observed that “by the tremendous leap made by modern knowledge, a great chasm has suddenly been opened between our actual and our possibile condition,—a chasm which can be crossed only slowly, if we would go safely.”7 To that end, questions were like large shoes spanning the chasm: anyone who wore them had a heel on the real and a toe on the possible, existing in two places at once. Querists were prophets with one foot in the present and another in some imagined future. Technically speaking it is impossible to proceed quickly in large shoes, but since one is in a sense already with a toe in the possible, there is an illusion of speed and of momentum that underpins the urgent tone of the age, for as one advances, so does the possible.
In the negotiations of the Concert of Europe following the Congress of Vienna, and specifically at the secret meeting of the four Great Powers (Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain) at Aix-la-Chapelle on November 20, 1818, the signatories agreed to cooperate militarily in the event of further revolutionary convulsion in France. This nebulous conditional future event was refered to in the protocols as “the Question.” (“That resolutions derived from this overview of the Question will be recorded to this Protocol, provided that they relate to the casus belli et foederis, established by the Treaty of Nov. 20, 1815.”)8 The agreement literally underscored “casus foederis et belli,” where the “foederis” mandated concertedness in negotiation and action, and the “belli” the eventuality that such concerted action should entail making war. The “concert” was thereby bound to the “war” from the start.9
A solution to the Eastern question could easily be implemented, wrote an anonymous German pamphleteer in 1843, if the Great Powers were to unify to undertake it. But, “it could come quickly and automatically [freithätig] to the world conflagration [Weltkampfe] that certainly awaits us if we allow matters to continue in accordance with their own will.” This “world conflagration,” the author concluded, “will be all the more terrible the longer it is put off.”10 What is remarkable about this text is that the querist wrote of the threat of war in the simple future—this will happen—and the peaceful solution in the conditional: this could happen.
In November 1849, François Dumons, a French publicist who had in 1840 posited the necessity of solving the Eastern question by means of a complete transformation of the international system, pressed the case in even more general queristic terms. “The situation of Europe and France has perhaps never been more serious,” he wrote in an open letter to the French president. “[T]he most difficult and delicate social and economic questions imperiously demand prompt satisfaction.”11 The scope of his vision for their solution is evident from the title of the pamphlet itself: Situation: The Reconstitution of Europe and Social and Political Reorganization, or a New Governmental, Financial, Administrative, and Judicial System Submitted to the French People.
Dostoevsky, writing in 1877 on the uncanny “simultaneity” of questions, predicted that “something colossal … elemental and dreadful, and also changing the face of this world” would end “the present age.” The days when questions could be solved by “patches, little patches, and more little patches!” were nearing an end.12 The Eastern and Catholic questions, he continued, had already arisen “and are now being moved not by human wisdom but by their own elemental force, by their own fundamental, organic need; and they can no longer remain unsolved.”13 Theodor Herzl, in his 1896 The Jewish State, declared: “If … this attempt to solve the Jewish Question is to be designated by a single word, let it be said to be the result of an inescapable conclusion rather than that of a flighty imagination.”14
“Time presses,” wrote Coudenhove-Kalergi in Pan-Europe:
Tomorrow perhaps it may be too late for the settlement of the European Question; and it is better, therefore, to begin today. The rapidity of the movement toward the unification of Europe is quite as important as its existence: for it depends upon the rapidity of this movement whether Europe will be a union of states or a collection of ruins.15
The injunction of the age was to think backward from a future heap of ruins, quickly; to possess retrospective foresight.
And furthermore, the imagined “collection of ruins” appeared as both a threat and a promise, both the reason why question bundles needed to be resolved and the means by which they could be resolved:
For a universal war for the Freedom of the Peoples, We beseech thee, O Lord.16
Though the ostensible goal of “solving” questions—in a manner desirable to the querist—was peace, the threat of war was the necessary precondition for the “solution” of peace.17 Question bundling produced not one but two parallel and perfectly commensurable imperatives: federation and war. Neither the one nor the other is the “truest” manifestation of the age, for both exemplify the effect of bundling, which mandated a great omnibus solution, one that could only be achieved by a social and geopolitical reset on a massive social and geopolitical scale.
The federal “solution” to nineteenth-century questions neither precluded violence nor adhered exclusively to a leftist or even liberal ideological agenda.18 Joseph Conrad’s proposed solution to the Polish question, laid out in his 1916 Note on the Polish Problem, was a plea not for Poland’s independence but rather for the Polish territories of the three partitioning powers to be united under the Habsburg crown as part of a broader vision of a united Europe.19 And his appeal for European peace sounds a good deal more like a threat of violence.20 The Poles’ persistent “power of resistance” created a “moral obligation” to aid them, he wrote, as “[t]here is always risk in throwing away a tool of proved temper.”21 The Polish question, therefore, was a problem “justifying the employment of exceptional means for its solution … [T]here are psychological moments when any measure tending towards the ends of concord and justice may be brought into being.”22
Hitler also described a way to bring the states and peoples of Europe together. “To this end all the contradictions [Gegensätze] between the members of this community of interest [Interessengemeinschaft] must be eliminated, or at the very least neutralized. For that, it’s necessary to clarify a whole series of questions.” No stranger to “exceptional means” himself, Hitler then told the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov that he had found the “formula” to do just that.23
Even as that formula mandated universal war, advocates of Hitler’s “New European Order” rhetorically set peace and reconciliation between nations as the ultimate goal. In Article 1 of his proposal for the “Creation of the ‘European Union of States,’ ” formulated in March 1943, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop asserted that the primary objective of the union was “that wars should no more take place between European peoples.”24 All of these common and oft-repeated goals of federative scheming made for conflations of “liberal” interwar federative fantasies—such as Coudenhove-Kalergi’s “Pan-Europe”—with the Nazi plan.25 A Bulgarian specialist on international law, Georgi Genov, thus wrote in 1941 that “the idea … of a so called Pan-Europe, that [Europe] should turn into a single federation, stressing the solidarity of European nations [is] precisely what Germany is calling for today.”26 In his plan to create a “United Lands of Hungaria” the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi argued that confederation was necessary to preserve peace in the region.27
A Shift in Register
But once unity is achieved, a greater unity becomes thinkable, even necessary. Part of the story of the age is thus about how an idea of deliverance—for Slavs, Catholics, Poles, Jews, Serbs, Bulgarians, and/or Greeks—was transformed into an idea of Europe’s or the world’s deliverance. It began from the premise that the status of these peoples was everyone’s concern and was bound up with European or international peace by the transformation of the Eastern question into what Dostoevsky, writing in 1877, called a “world” question, “one of the principal divisions of the worldwide and imminent resolution of the fates of humanity, their new and approaching phase.”
We know that this matter concerns not only the East of Europe, not only the Slavs, the Russians, and the Turks, or, specifically, the Bulgarians over there, but that it concerns also the whole of the West of Europe, and not only in relation to the seas and the straits, access and egress, by any means; it is much deeper, more fundamental, more elemental, more necessary, more essential, more primary.28
As we learned from the federative argument, other questions soon followed a similar pattern. When Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, wrote The Jewish State in 1896, he described the “Jewish question” as a “political world-question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world.”29 Leon Trotsky wrote in 1914 that, unless promptly addressed, “the chaos at present prevailing in Southeastern Europe” around the Balkan question could spread “in fact through the whole of Europe.”30 “Europe cannot find peace before it has dealt properly with the Jewish question,” said Hitler.31
These assertions amount to a queristic fantasy turned grotesque mandate (“A great event occurs which gradually reconciles the most opposed sentiments. Who did it? No one and yet every one, not through any conscious desire preceding and preparing the issue, but through some need which demanded a solution and through the satisfaction of which greeted it when found. Powerful forces are at work, overruling the will of the masses as well as of the classes, and pointing to the influence of the laws which shape the conditions of human life … No one now leads the world, either from above or from below.”32), but also a shift in register. There is no more agonizing indicator of this shift than Coudenhove-Kalergi’s assertion in Pan-Europe that “[t]oday the European Question signifies to the world what for more than a century the Balkan Question signified to Europe: a source of endless insecurity and unrest.” With that claim, Coudenhove-Kalergi sought to transform Europe into a world problem, “not merely of local but of international import; until it is solved there can be no possibility of a peaceful development of the world.”33
In 1946, the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel (a.k.a. Germain), writing on the Jewish question in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust declared that “what Auschwitz and Maidanek mean for the Jews, the atomic bomb signifies for all humanity. The perspective of the disappearance of the Jews from the earth is part of the perspective of the destruction of the human species.” Thus, “if the Jewish tragedy is only the symbol and to a certain measure the ‘mirror of the future’ for humanity, the only way out which still remains open to humanity is at the same time the solution of the Jewish question.”34 This appeared in a subsection with the heading, “The Jewish Question Can Be Resolved Only as Part of the Solution of the World Crisis.”
Querists tended to seek a higher vantage: a grander question affecting everyone and a grander solution involving everyone. Insofar as many querists saw universal war as an alkahest to solve all questions, and the solution of all questions as a precondition of preventing universal war, they contributed in no small way both to federalist thinking and to what Carl Schmitt called the “manifest fraud” of a war to end all wars.35 Close study of the age confronts the historian with the history-moving power of large shoes spanning opposites, traversing a rickety suspension bridge of contradictions. Slowly, of necessity, and very fast, also of necessity and because the toe has already arrived where the heel has not yet been. By the age’s apex, the gait acquired a pointed silliness, a toe-heel: place the toe where you wish to be and the heel will follow.
There are many manifestations of this reversal. In Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europe and Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, the solution trades places with the question. Driven by his fascination with what he saw as the self-correcting essence of nature and biology, the Russian naturalist and philosopher claimed to have found both a perfectly reduced formula and an omnibus solution to the Eastern question. “If we look at Russian life,” he wrote, “we quickly see that it is not in complete health…. [The] curative events, from which … we will learn our saving lessons, have already appeared on the horizon of history, and are called: The Eastern Question.”36 The question itself provided the momentum toward solution, which for Danilevsky meant the creation of a Russian-dominated “[a]ll-Slavic federation” as “the only reasonable, intelligent solution” to the Eastern question.37
The reversal was also manifest in querists’ romantic fascination with the inexorable solution-seeking capacity of language itself, as in the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus’s intervention on the woman question from 1909: “Language decides everything, including the woman question”38; or Adolf Grabowsky’s insistence that “[o]nce the problems are comprehensively and clearly grasped … they will steer themselves toward solution”39 since “[l]anguage thinks in a very subtle manner here: it calls the correct answer to a question a ‘solution’; the unraveling is thus at once the achievement, and hence language views the amalgamation of successful unraveling toward a beneficial result as a completely natural achievement.”40
Finally, the reversal could also take the especially cynical form of placing the solution cart before the question horse, like Adolf Hitler’s admonition that “[i]n the handling of the Danubian problems, our generation must remember that not all the questions of rights which arise were successfully answered by the peace treaties. Any responsible statesman should, indeed must, leave his successor a whole drawer full of somewhat nebulous claims, so that the latter can be in a position, should the need arise, to conjure up these ‘sacred’ rights as the pretext for any conflict which may seem necessary.”41
In Two Places at Once
To observe a contradiction was to suggest the existence of a structure, as well as a way of spanning the components of the structure so as to overstep the contradiction. In the wake of the failed 1848 Revolution, the Hungarian statesman, József Eötvös, set out to write a history of the causes of the French Revolution. It became instead a two-volume work—published in Hungarian and German—on The Ruling Principles of the Nineteenth Century and Their Influence on the State.42 Among the “ruling principles” he enumerated were liberty, equality, and nationality, which “stand in contradiction with one another such that their realization must needs result in the undoing of every large state.”43
In 1865, Eötvös wrote his book on the nationality question, revisiting the theme of “ruling principles.”44 “Such principles,” he told his readers, “as have become general principles cannot be repressed, nor can their consequences be averted; and no one people or state, however powerful it may be, can close itself off from the impact of such principles.”45 The national idea, in his view, was naught but the result of frustrated attempts to achieve individual liberty and equality, so the subject nationalities should be granted these and the nationality question would disappear.46
Eötvös contemplated the future of Hungary, Austria, and Europe in a polemical field that seemed to him wholly hostile to Hungarian interests. Two other Hungarian politicians shared this view, Ferencz Pulszky and Anton Szécsen. Yet while their proposed solutions were very different, the structure of their proposals was remarkably similar. Pulszky, raising the specter of pan-Slavism, wanted Hungary to assume her place as “the heart of Europe, that never ceases beating for all that is great and good.”47 Szécsen, while making a distinction between organic reform and machinistic (revolutionary) overhaul, and as a conservative favoring the former, nonetheless argued for a great inner transformation, “a newly strengthened public spirit, a newly awakened sense for justice and truth.”48 Eötvös, while arguing that the threat posed by the national idea should not be ignored nor the debate around it silenced,49 and that the force of general principles—foremost among them nationality—could not be repressed, nonetheless believed that “in the great movement that is flowing around Europe’s holiest interests, we should stand our ground.”50
In each case, there is a desire to simultaneously go with the times and restrain them, to rush forward and hang back, to magnanimously give and selfishly hoard, in short, to take two directions at once. How else can we explain the fact that a critic of the French and Hungarian Revolution (Szécsen) and a champion of the same (Eötvös) were able to maintain a fundamental political opposition to one another while understanding not only events in the same terms (as ruling ideas born out of the French Revolution, and framed in the question idiom) but also solutions (favoring the “practical”)?51 The historian must pause in wonder at a time wherein such consensus on words, ideas, and their overweaning significance prevailed, yet wherein such intense and ever-fracturing differentiation filled a rhetorical field to overbrimming with contradictions and paradoxes, without threatening the coherence of the structures they had conjured to hold them in place. Small wonder it seemed possible to occupy two opposite positions at once.
The Function and Fiction of the Age
At roughly the same time that Hitler concluded that solving the social question was an imperative not unlike the abolition of serfdom in the eighteenth century, a character in Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities told an interlocutor who was going on about the social question to pipe down: “If that’s what we’re going to talk about, I’m out of here and going home; it bores me to death.”52 A question reached the status of ultimate legitimacy and well-acknowledged tedium simultaneously: an incontrovertible truth and a plaything of fiction. The assumption of the previous arguments has been that the age of questions was either in deadly earnest or a grand joke, either over or ongoing, either progressive or reactionary, either national or international, either timely or timeless. These are false dichotomies, but the age was also not simply “all of the above.” Its objective was to overcome contradictions, such that all of the aforementioned opposites found a common frame in the question idiom, a place where their opposition became part of the structure itself, what held it together. Virginia Woolf knew that to exist is to hold together contradictions. There is an essential historical reality to this feat. Insofar as there was an “age of questions,” perhaps this was its function.
It was a poignant wish. But there was also a physical world, real people, and events; and there was that word, that shoe that could extend so far and already be where one wanted to go. Those very large shoes that seemed to overstep distressing contradictions right and left often came down all the more squarely—and sometimes with deadly force—on the greatest of all question bundles and problem complexes: human beings.