A CHASTENED MODERNITY
Past and future wind energy, 2010. Source: 123RF.
The turbulent events of the twentieth century have disrupted the lives of many Europeans and twisted them in unforeseen directions. For instance, the Latvian fraternity student Victors Arajs formed an auxiliary police unit that collaborated in the Holocaust by killing hundreds of Jews and partisans. After going underground in West Germany, this anticommunist perpetrator was eventually caught and imprisoned. In contrast, the daughter of a prominent Jewish lawyer in Saxony, Irmgard Mueller, had to abandon her academic training, was forced into a labor battalion, and finally sent to Auschwitz. Having learned sewing and typing, she managed to survive by working in the camp laundry and administration, and eventually emigrated to the United States. Or take the Alsatian poet André Weckmann, who was dragooned into the Wehrmacht but deserted from the eastern front and joined the French resistance. As a high school teacher he nonetheless chose German as his subject and worked for European reconciliation after the war.1 Each in its own way, these lives were profoundly shaped by the Second World War and the Holocaust.
The story of such European encounters with modernity has been told as either a cautionary tale or an encouraging narrative. On the one hand, painful memories highlight the brutality of the world wars, the repressiveness of the dictatorships, and the race- or class-based genocides during the first half of the century. Projecting the image of a “dark continent,” this immense suffering and dying exhibits Europe as a giant cemetery, concentration camp, or pile of rubble. Its lesson is a grim warning against the evil potential of murderous modernity. On the other hand, satisfaction with the peacefulness, astounding prosperity, and growing integration during the second half of the century suggests a more positive picture. It focuses on the dynamic postwar renewal of the continent, creatively blending tradition with progress. Its message is the reaffirmation of faith in human recovery from catastrophe, showing the benign side of modernity.2 Instead of debating which of these representations is correct, it might be more constructive to reflect on how such opposite sides came to be part of the same coin.
The contrast of the public mood between 1900 and 2000 reflects some of the travails of the twentieth century that make it difficult to characterize the period in retrospect. In 1900, the London Times viewed the future with supreme confidence: “With such a [democratic] instrument of government, with our vast accumulations of wealth, widely diffused among the community, and, above all, with a people prosperous, contented, manly, intelligent and self-reliant we may look forward with good hope to the storms and conflicts that may await us.” By the dawn of the third millennium the outlook had become much bleaker owing to the immensity of human suffering that had taken place in the interval. “How does one look at the twentieth century? It is not a tragedy or a comedy. It is not an epic. No political manifesto captures it. Only a bureaucratic document can mimic its impersonality, its reality.” The Indian intellectual Shiv Visvanathan summed up his impression: “The twentieth century was the century of utopia, the utopia of plan, market and revolution. It was a century of nightmares.”3
The past one hundred years need to be interpreted as a long rather than a short century so as to grasp their entire trajectory. Since the concept of a century is only an artifact of the calendar, its boundaries are not numerical but rather depend on the choice of caesuras. Eric Hobsbawm’s thesis of a “short century” spanning from 1914 to 1991 has much to recommend it because it highlights the rise and fall of the socialist experiment, as manifested in Soviet communism. Nonetheless, this conception is too narrow, since it understates the impact of the rival fascist and democratic ideologies. Moreover, it surprisingly ignores the development of capitalism, which had already culminated in the 1890s with the second phase of the industrial revolution. It was not a coincidence that this was also the decade in which the notion of “modernity” became popular in artistic movements as a self-description of the revolt against tradition. Finally, whether to end the twentieth century with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, or the great recession of 2008 remains an open question because many of its developments are continuing into the present. With the period still lacking definitive closure, the full implications of the shift to a postindustrial and global modernity have yet to become clear.4
Most retrospectives characterize the twentieth century as an era of exceptional cruelty, perpetrated for largely ideological reasons. The atrocities began with the murderous practice of imperialism by its exploitation of labor and the suppression of native uprisings. The First World War continued the mass killing, since in terms of the chief losses it was an internecine conflict between European nation-states and empires that cost millions of lives. The casualties of the Soviet Revolution, the Civil War, the Holodomor in the Ukraine, the Great Purges, and other Stalinist projects undertaken in the name of a better future met or exceeded its toll. The Nazi-inspired Second World War was even more murderous, since it involved not just a war of annihilation but the systematic racial genocide of the Holocaust.5 Preoccupied with mourning their many dead, most Europeans have distanced themselves from mass murder during the second half of the century, helping to contain the Cold War short of actual bloodshed. But the killing did not stop—mass murder merely migrated to China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The surprising rebirth of Europe that restored democracy and civility after 1945 has received less attention, though this story is more encouraging. The prior suffering was so intense, affecting virtually every family, that many Europeans understood the necessity of changing course. The western countries had democratic traditions that could be renewed by being made more socially inclusive. Ironically, both American aid with the Marshall Plan and the threat of Soviet communism during the Cold War speeded the westernization of the former enemies. Moreover, the reluctant decolonization, which spawned several ugly wars but avoided universal conflagration, freed the continent from its colonial burdens so that it could concentrate on addressing its own social problems by extending the welfare state. The visionary initiatives of West European integration also helped to promote prosperity and stability and facilitated the Mediterranean transition. Finally, the overthrow of communism reunited the continent.6 The story of this European recovery casts the outlook of the second half of the century in a much brighter light.
Because of the period’s multiple ruptures, most Europeans experienced it as an era of accelerating change that reconfigured their basic sense of time. The increase in the speed of transportation from horse to car and the many technical advances from telegraph to smartphone allowed an escape from the past by accentuating the possibility of progress. Moreover, the experience of increasing social mobility, both vertical and horizontal, and the multiple regime changes made the future appear malleable, subject to human control, and society appear plastic, capable of being shaped according to ideological blueprints. This liberation from tradition and the emphasis on things to come fundamentally revised the notion of the present as escape from inherited bonds but not yet fulfilled promise, a suspended moment of choice between different trajectories. But disappointment in the results of social-engineering projects that tried to forge a better future ultimately produced a new cult of memory.7 For Europeans the twentieth century’s acceleration of time offered exciting possibilities as well as new insecurities.
MASTERING MODERNITY
The notion that described this transformation as a dynamic advance was the elusive concept of “modernity.” Claiming to act as beneficiaries of mankind, a group of self-proclaimed innovators championed the modernization of their societies against the fierce resistance of the guardians of tradition. At the turn of the twentieth century, only some advanced members of the upper and middle classes in the leading cities considered themselves modern and set out to convert their backward neighbors. With scientific, economic, and moral arguments, they promoted modernity among the lower orders as an idea and set of practices, promising to improve their lives. In the name of progress, these modernizers preached the bourgeois values of rationality, hygiene, and discipline throughout the countryside, in the small towns and villages. Far from being inevitable, the unremittent propagation of change created countless conflicts and yielded unanticipated results.8 The history of Europe in the twentieth century therefore offers an instructive record of the drive for modernization and the backlash against it.
Confident in progress, European elites while transforming their own countries simultaneously sought to spread the message of modernity around the globe so as to reshape the world in their own image. The prime conduit was imperialism, using science and technology for political control and economic exploitation rather than for improving the lives of indigenous people in different continents. Ironically, in the settlement colonies the process of transformation encountered fewer obstacles and could make more rapid progress, allowing the New World to overtake the Old Continent in size and efficiency of production. As a result, Americanization gradually replaced Europeanization as label for modernization, although both were often combined in the notion of westernization.9 The successful adoption of this model brought nationalist ideology, business practices, communication networking, and popular culture to Asian countries, starting with Japan and then spreading to Korea, India, and China, creating another center of rapid development. The encounter with such high cultures has produced regional amalgams between tradition and change, ultimately spreading the contest over modernity to the entire globe.
In the heat of the First World War, however, the loose alliance of progressive movements fragmented into competing ideologies that promoted alternate visions of progress, pluralizing the notion of modernity. During much of the nineteenth century the liberal, democratic, and socialist movements had often cooperated in order to defeat the so-called forces of reaction. But due to the strains of World War I, Lenin’s Bolsheviks broke away from the constitutionalism of the Provisional Government and proposed a revolutionary program of modernization for Russia and the world. Seeking to defend self-government and market competition, U.S. president Wilson countered with his democratic internationalism, centered on the creation of the League of Nations. Moreover, the disappointed Italian interventionists as well as the defeated German neoconservatives developed their own vision of an organic modernity, rejecting the Soviet and liberal versions. Many of the subsequent domestic and international conflicts revolved around the struggle between these ideological alternatives, with the fascists defeated by war and the Soviets by economic competition.10 Surprisingly enough, democracy ultimately prevailed by reinventing itself and broadening its social appeal.
Both dictatorial modernities of communism and fascism experienced a similar cycle of development that characterized their rise, institutionalization, and eventual defeat. Emerging from the struggle between the liberal and authoritarian versions of modernity during the First World War, the totalitarian alternatives to democracy started out as opposition movements, full of hope, appealing to the newly enfranchised masses as blueprints for a better future. After their seizure of power in the Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Italy, and Nazi Germany, they tried to create permanent institutional structures in order to realize their ideological aims. But the imperatives of stable government clashed with the need for acclamatory mass mobilization, leading to a series of internal conflicts like Lenin’s suppression of the Kronstadt revolt and Hitler’s decimation of the Brownshirts’ (Sturmabteilung) leadership.11 Ultimately the dictatorial versions of modernization failed in the task of reconciling administrative stability with dynamic self-renewal, while the major western democracies surprisingly succeeded in overcoming their crises by creating welfare states and evolving toward postindustrial modernity.12
Far from being a predictable process, the explosion of ever new facets of modernity during the past century produced a series of shock waves, whose impact ranged from peaceful progress to wartime destruction and back. The initial expectation of a better life was severely strained by the mechanized killing of the First World War, only to revive during the heyday of the 1920s. The communist effort at social revolution and the fascist project of racial genocide snuffed out this optimism, since Stalinist industrialization and the Holocaust showed the murderous consequences of social engineering. During the conservative Cold War recovery of stability, modernization once again gained a positive resonance due to the global competition for a better future between the communist “camp of peace” and the liberal democratic “free world.” But just when it seemed that liberal modernity had triumphed and communism collapsed, a cultural revolt and the shock of globalization produced new uncertainties in the transition to a postmodern and postindustrial order.13 The process of modernization in twentieth-century Europe was therefore full of ruptures and surprises, making it impossible to predict whether a benign or malignant version would win.
The inescapability of the modern condition suggests that the political challenge consists of finding a form for its dynamism that proves con- rather than destructive. Since science and technology are basically amoral, their innovations have to be harnessed to constructive purposes. The energizing force of market competition proves beneficial only if greed, speculation, and exploitation are sufficiently curbed. The creative impulse of individualism requires the counterweight of social solidarity so as not to shatter community with its egotism. Democratic institutions have to defend human rights lest they degenerate into populist props for dictatorship. Patriotism has to remain tolerant of foreigners so as not to turn into exclusivist chauvinism. Public administration needs to stay impartial in order not to become a deadening bureaucracy. Military preparedness has to focus on self-defense so as not to invite violent aggression. Finally, national pride and independence ought to be balanced by willingness for international cooperation.14 As the Faustian legend suggests, only when controlled by humanist ethics can the dynamic power of modernity truly become a force for good.
EUROPEAN METAMORPHOSES
During the twentieth century Europe experienced breathtaking transformations that took the continent from global hegemony to utter self-destruction and back to a surprising recovery. Though divided into competing empires and emerging nation-states, around 1900 Europeans collectively controlled the rest of the world, exploiting and governing a vast array of colonies in Africa and Asia. Considering themselves as the carriers of a superior civilization, they were spreading their understanding of progress with force or persuasion across their dependent territories such as India, forcing potential rivals like China, Japan, or the Ottoman Empire to reform themselves by adopting European technologies, organizations, and standards. No wonder that imperialists like Cecil Rhodes were confident that the white race in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States had reached the top of human development and that future advancement was assured. Only some critics among the colonized, the labor movement, or nervous intellectuals worried that the splendor of the Victorian age rested on shaky foundations.15
As the “seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century,” the First World War shattered the optimistic belief in the inevitability of progress and initiated the decline of European supremacy. The immense carnage of industrial warfare that killed a large proportion of male youths and maimed countless others depleted manpower in a literal sense. The concurrent destruction of entire regions that served as battlefields squandered wealth and obliterated their cultural heritage. The totalizing nature of the struggle that mobilized the home front burdened women working in factories, strained laborers, and impoverished middle-class families. While intellectuals volunteered for propaganda efforts, the horrendous descriptions of suffering by the “war poets” undercut the heroic image of combat and sowed doubt in the justice of one’s national cause.16 In order to end the struggle and prevent its recurrence, ideologues like Lenin, Wilson, and Mussolini developed competing blueprints of modernity with labels such as communism, democracy and fascism that competed for ascendancy during the subsequent decades.
The return of peace during the 1920s offered European powers a kind of Indian summer, suggesting that the prewar trajectory of liberal progress was about to be resumed. With the United States sulking in isolationism and the Soviet Union preoccupied with its own modernization, the traditional Great Power directory of the continent reasserted its control over the new institution of the League of Nations that strengthened international cooperation. Moreover, the principle of self-determination that broke up the ancient empires of the East heralded the advance of nation-states and democratic self-government over the entire continent. The revival of international trade and the recovery of economic growth promised to ease the burden of labor and restore prosperity to the middle class. At the same time modernist experimentation dominated high culture, while more popular styles of entertainment and consumption also made much headway.17 Europe seemed once again to be moving forward until the Great Depression stopped this momentum, turning the direction of development toward another, yet more devastating conflict.
The second stage of what Charles de Gaulle called “a thirty years’ war for or against world domination of Germandom” destroyed Europe physically and politically, ending its hegemony. This time there was no doubt that Hitler was the aggressor, seeking to reverse the prior defeat and intending to conquer living space for the Aryan race. Except for Britain, the Nazis succeeded in subduing the entire continent with lightning strikes, exploiting the defeated countries in the service of Greater Germany. Hitler’s attack on Russia turned the conflict into a “war of annihilation” with ethnic cleansing and racial genocide, culminating in the anti-Semitic Holocaust that ruptured all bonds of civilization. The defeat of the Nazis’ organic modernity required the unlikely cooperation of its communist and democratic rivals in a joint antifascist crusade that itself employed some morally questionable methods.18 As a result of World War II liberated Europe lay prostrate and lost control of its affairs, allowing the United States and USSR to exercise an uneasy condominium over the destroyed continent.
Visible proof of the European decline was the loss of the colonies, which took place with surprising speed between 1945 and 1975. In part, the impetus came from protests or insurgencies of westernized elites in the colonies, which pushed for formal independence from their masters. In part, the Europeans’ lack of resolve to prevent the end of empire was due to their war weariness and their vastly reduced means, which needed to be used for rebuilding their own cities. While the grudging and not always peaceful withdrawal of the colonizers was a triumph of anti-imperialist resistance, the challenges of economic development and political stability once again drew in Westerners, now in the role of advisers and financiers, thereby perpetuating unequal relationships in a different context. In the former metropoles, the blowback of native collaborators created a new problem of black or Islamic minorities. Ironically, the modernization imposed by the colonizers provided the slogans and weapons for independence.19
Instead of ushering in a peaceful modernity, the Cold War led to a bipolar division of Europe between the American and Soviet superpowers. With the National Socialist contender eliminated, the erstwhile allies now competed for control over the ruined continent, seeking to transform their respective parts according to their own ideological visions. Occupied Europe was forced to choose sides, gravitating in the end more toward the western model of liberal democracy than toward Soviet egalitarianism because the informal U.S. empire allowed more freedom than the Russian dictatorship. Fortunately the very lethality of nuclear weapons coupled with intercontinental missiles ultimately prevented their use. Spurred on by a massive peace movement, the European leaders sought to promote détente so that the continent would not become a nuclear or conventional battlefield.20 The peaceful ending of the second Cold War showed that it was possible to escape the logic of the arms race and avoid nuclear annihilation through negotiation from above and protest from below.
The amazing rise of Europe from the ashes of self-destruction ultimately reconciled West Europeans with embattled liberal modernity. Led by the Scandinavian and British extension of the welfare state, the western countries reinvigorated democracy and spread it to the defeated enemies. Of course, the help of the United States was crucial, since Washington provided advice, material aid, and psychological support for a mixture of tradition and innovation. In Germany, Ludwig Erhard’s promotion of a social market economy also contributed significantly to freeing economic competition while at the same time retaining a sense of societal solidarity. Under the heavier hand of the Soviets, the East European countries healed the wounds of the war and made some modest progress, but their drab smokestack industrialism eventually lost the competition with western consumer society. The glorious three postwar decades were a spectacular success in not only catching up to but exceeding prewar levels of prosperity until the challenge of globalization raised new concerns about the dangers of uncontrolled development.21
The final transformation of Europe, the construction of the European Union, ranked “among the most extraordinary achievements in modern world politics.” Through a series of crises and subsequent political bargains, the Europeans created a unique, multilevel transnational political system. During the fifties the Treaties of Rome laid the foundation, during the sixties the creation of the Common Market stimulated economic growth, during the seventies the invention of the European Monetary System stabilized currencies, during the eighties the Single European Act expanded the areas of competition, during the nineties the Maastricht Treaty invented a common currency, and during the two thousands the Lisbon Treaty streamlined decision making. The growth from the original six to the present twenty-eight members was a sign of the model’s attractiveness. Propelled by a mixture of idealism and economic interest and realized through intergovernmental bargaining, the partial pooling of sovereignty was an innovation that made unifying Europe into a powerful competitor in the global economy.22
LESSONS OF HISTORY
The bloody course of the twentieth century taught the Europeans a chastened outlook on modernity—a lesson some overconfident Americans have yet to learn. The world wars were so physically destructive, demographically murderous, and mentally devastating as to spur a fundamental reorientation of politics. While German military cemeteries in Normandy send a pacifist message, American war graves still extol national “competence, courage and sacrifice.” Except when confronting dictators, Europeans consider peace preferable, since even a winner is likely to be grievously damaged. The result of this experience is a social demilitarization, not only of the defeated fascists, but also among the winning Allies, which has diminished respect for uniforms, decreased defense budgets, and rejected recourse to arms when other alternatives were left. This rethinking inspired a reconciliation between erstwhile enemies like the Germans, the French, and the Poles, and, in contrast to the United States, a strong preference for working through international organizations.23 The development of the European Union, recognized by the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, testified to the extent to which the poison of nationalism had been neutralized.
A second point, driven home by the terrible impact of the Great Depression, was the need to manage the dynamism of capitalism in such a way as to maintain political stability. The liberal countries’ superior performance during the wars showed that the market was more productive than corporate cartels or state planning. But some European economists like John Maynard Keynes also realized that competition needed a framework of rules in order to prevent exploitation of labor and the recurrence of cyclical crises. In the West the reintroduction of free enterprise sparked the Economic Miracle, while in the East communist planning produced only a modest upswing. Since neither neoliberal deregulation nor socialist control seemed to offer the right answer, the continent eventually settled for the compromise of a social market economy, exemplified by Rhenish capitalism. In contrast to the American stress on unrestrained competition, this mixture of personal initiative and state guidance appeared preferable to Europeans, since they prized the common good as much as individual gain.24
Another imperative learned from the critique of the labor movement and the threat of communism was the need for social solidarity through public provision of welfare. At the beginning of the twentieth century most workers felt badly exploited, since their wages barely covered the minimum necessary for existence. As a result they organized powerful unions and created socialist parties that engaged in class warfare against the merciless capitalist bosses. When the Bolshevik Revolution scared the middle class while the moderate social democrats gained at the polls, the introduction of a welfare state became a necessary concession in order to pacify society. The moral critique of intellectuals and the experience of wartime solidarity also helped establish a sense of collective responsibility for those in need. Moreover, the Cold War competition with the Soviet Bloc hastened the postwar expansion of the welfare state.25 In contrast to the strong American streak of individualism, Europeans internalized a commitment to solidarity that defined a more social vision of modernity.
The finiteness of continental resources also encouraged an attitude of environmental stewardship, of thinking in terms of sustainability rather than the quick-profit orientation of American business. Having lived in the same places for several thousand years, Europeans were forced to learn that wasting materials like Mediterranean timber had deleterious consequences in denuding the countryside. Except for British and Norwegian oil and recent natural gas discoveries, the older precious minerals and coal deposits had largely run out. Less driven by quarterly profits than Americans, Europeans usually thought of passing a firm on to their children and therefore developed a more long-range strategy. That frame of mind made continental businessmen more receptive to ecological critiques, and citizens more willing to recycle and take public transportation instead of throwing things away and burning fossil fuels. Hence many Europeans embraced green technology, and the Germans even tried to end their use of nuclear energy.26 This ecological awareness proposed an alternate form of postindustrial modernity.
The repression by the left and right dictatorships finally illustrated the importance of reaffirming human rights and revitalizing democracy. The struggle for civil rights was part of the project of liberal modernization, but the failure of interwar democracy meant that participation remained circumscribed. Substituting acclamation, the communists privileged workers and intellectuals, persecuting their class enemies, while the fascists excluded Jews and blacks from the national community as racially unfit. Nazi oppression made the resistance realize that democracy had to broaden its social base and respond to demands for greater participation after the war. Moreover, the Soviet suppression of East European dissent helped create a new sensitivity to the importance of human rights as protection of individuals. While Americans and Europeans shared the goal of self-government, the continent’s system of proportional representation provided greater responsiveness to minority views.27 Both are now confronting the challenge of powerful transnational corporations and media empires that threatens the rise of a “postdemocracy.”28
THE EUROPEAN ALTERNATIVE
Doomsday predictions of the Anglo-American media notwithstanding, the ghosts of Europe’s bloody past are not returning and repeating previous catastrophes. On the one hand, ever since the outbreak of the euro crisis, with its excessive government debts and bank bailouts, even well-informed commentators have predicted the “collapse of the European economic and social model,” criticized the cumbersome nature of EU decision making, and decried German-imposed austerity.29 On the other, the impact of “casino capitalism,” the growth of social inequality, and the rise of right-wing populism have inspired members of the continental Left to revive theories of a “delayed crisis of democratic capitalism,” warning against its imminent demise.30 Even though the 2014 elections returned many Euroskeptics, the eurozone has not fallen apart, the euro kept trading one-quarter to one-third higher than the almighty dollar on the currency markets, and the joint leadership of Berlin and Brussels succeeded in stabilizing the international financial markets. Such polemical oversimplifications of both ideological camps betray a fundamental lack of understanding of the European alternative.
A more nuanced approach to the continental experience during the past century recognizes that Europe has been developing its own distinctive model of democratic and social modernity. No doubt the continent is confronting serious problems of aging, immigration, fiscal control, institutional structure, and global competitiveness—but they are ultimately solvable. Instead of being an imperfect clone of American modernity, Europe has different ideas about the role of religion, gun control, capital punishment, welfare support, public transportation, and international organization, just to mention a few.31 To many liberal Americans, these European solutions are more appealing than Tea Party prescriptions of military strength, unilateral intervention, unrestrained speculation, and social conservatism. In President Barack Obama’s words, a global “struggle for freedom and security and human dignity” continues to unite Europe and the United States. Since both would profit from closer cooperation in addressing worldwide challenges, a renewed transatlantic dialogue is needed to foster greater appreciation of the European lesson of a chastened modernity.32