governments against their own citizens, a fundamental break with previous interna- tional customary law, which since the 1648 Westphalian peace accord to end the Thirty Year War had recognised the internal, absolute sovereignty of states as the pillar of the international system. This system revolves around the regulation of relations between states, including guaranteeing their inviolable sovereignty.42 The more or less intentional consequence of the sovereignty principle is that sovereign states have traditionally been able to act as they please towards their own citizens, as long as they were able to maintain control of their territory. The UN broke with this principle by establishing limits to acceptable state behaviour.
As already mentioned, the Cold War paralysed the organisation in its early years, restricting the consequences of the newly established limits to state sovereignty. The major powers could veto Security Council resolutions, and did so if their own or the interests of their friends were at stake. For years, it was primarily the Soviet Union that exploited this method, but as the number of member states exploded with decolonisation, the US and other Western Powers increasingly had to threaten a veto when they were in the minority. The result was a near-paralysis of the world organisation from which it apparently only recovered in the 1990s. How that came about and the difficulties it is encountering at the beginning of the 21st century are not at issue here. Instead, I am concerned with the changes in values that signalled this transformation of the international, and inter-national, rules of the game as they have come to be expressed in European cooperation.
THE HOLOCAUST AND THE REHABILITATION
to “rise from the ruins”, as went the national anthem of the successor state in the East, the GDR, which makes it logical that many in this state favoured the Stunde Null thesis. Almost one fourth of dwellings had been destroyed, the infrastructure either did not work or worked only poorly, and shortages of food led directly to widespread starvation. Yet, according to the historian Helge Nielsen, the Stunde Null thesis is neither materially nor spiritually accurate.43 With relatively new and sophisticated plants, a well-organised and efficient war industry survived until the last months of the war, and 80 to 90 percent of German industry remained intact until spring 1945. Allied bombardments mainly destroyed civilian targets and capacity reserves. Thus the potential of German industry was greater than in most other European countries, which the Nazi regime had plundered and exploited.
Nor did the relationship to the German past constitute a Stunde Null according to Helge Nielsen.44 Only a minority experienced the collapse as liberation – the majority viewed the defeat of Nazism as their own loss. Hence, the most common explanations were not explanations, but excuses. It was not until as late as 1961 that the Israeli trial against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem spurred any real debate in West Germany about the responsibility for the murder of Jews and many other victim groups. This debate continued throughout the 1960s, leading to the student movement’s criticisms of their parents’ generation for not telling them about Hitler and Nazism, as well as Willy Brandt’s kneeling in Warszawa in 1970 in honour of the victims of Nazism, and culminating in 1979, when a huge German audience watched the American TV series Holocaust.
The opening of the extermination camps – Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, followed by Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Neuengamme, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and many others in April and May of that year, with their terrible testimonies – left no doubt, except among the most fervent deniers. The images of piles of corpses and of famished, skeletal survivors became burned into the minds of the politically responsible population. What was not imprinted this way was systematically taught later on, especially in the Western occupation zones, where Americans in particular initiated a systematic “re-education” of the German popu- lation in democracy. Many cynical jokes surrounded this program, such as the concept of the Persilschein, which denoted the white-washed documents that the occupation authorities issued to certify completed de-Nazification. What the critique got right, of course, is that not everything went smoothly in West Germany, where considerations concerning reconstruction and rivalry with the East prevented the removal of all Nazi experts from public life.
43 Finsen et al., 1992: 233-5.
44 Finsen et al., 1992: 233.
At the same time, communists in the German Democratic Republic defined their state as “anti-Fascist”, thus attempting to make a guilt-free break with Germany’s
“militarist” past. Instead they had some success in the placing the full responsibility for Hitler and Nazism on the West Germans. The result was evident at the reuni- fication of the two Germanies in 1990, when it became apparent that East German youth had not learned the lessons of Nazism the same way that their West German cousins had. In the history of the world, the Federal Republic of Germany is one of the few cases where a whole people has learned from history and accepted responsibility for the misdeeds of the nation, if not immediately during the 1950s, then certainly later by virtue of the youth rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s. The result has been that the efforts to learn from the Second World War have mainly become a West German specialty, known as the Bewältigung der Vergangenheit, and demonstrated in the popular backing of Germany’s participation in European cooperation from the earliest possible moment.
The rest of Europe was also in the midst of crisis, however. Because of the euphoria of the liberation, people only realised the depth of the crisis much later, though the political elites were well aware of it, and in the last months of the war and immediately after liberation many of the resistance movements drafted plans for a new federal Europe.45 The immediate result of the European civil war that culminated in World War II was the partition of the continent between the US and the Soviet Union after 1946 by an “Iron Curtain from Trieste to Stettin”, as Winston Churchill so lyrically put it in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946. However, the feeling of impotence only became pervasive throughout Europe in the course of the 1950s and the accompanying defeats in colonial wars.
The end of the 1930s and the early 1940s marked the lowest point for the European nation states, as economic crisis, unemployment and massive class antagonisms let the German war machine sweep across country upon country without much difficulty. In 1940 the very idea of the nation state was in crisis because of internal contradictions. Most countries were preparing for civil war between the forces that wanted to cooperate with German Nazism in a reorgani- sation of Europe and those whose socialist or conservative-nationalist leanings led them to resist and align themselves with Great Britain (and later the US). In addition, communists assumed outright leadership of the resistance struggle in many places after the attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, as in Yugoslavia, or else achieved a dominant position, as in Italy, France, Greece and, to some extent Denmark.
45 See Østergård, 2004b.
The resulting more or less openly waged civil wars threatened the existence of the nation states in a way that was unprecedented since the principle of the nation state first spread throughout Europe in 1848. Thanks to the allied victory, the nation state survived as a principle in both the East and the West. In Western Europe the old elites made a quick recovery after shorter or longer intermezzi of shared rules with the resistance movements. In Eastern and Central Europe the Red Army quickly placed communist-controlled regimes in power, culminating in Czecho- slovakia in 1948 (which for particular historical reasons saw the greatest popular support for the communist regime in any country). The results were more or less nationally oriented communist regimes that could be characterised as national- communist, however unpopular.46
Thus, though nation states survived the crisis of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe, fear was in their blood in both the East and the West, which continued to flow well into the 1950s, despite relative economic consolidation. As the British historian Alan Milward has persuasively argued, it was not until the explosive economic growth of the late 1950s and 1960s that the Western democracies were able to consolidate themselves.47 As they did so, the communist regimes in the East lost any legitimacy they might have enjoyed with the repressions of the GDR in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1968, 1971 and 1980. In the West growth and optimism led to the somewhat naïve but well-intentioned youth rebellion at the end of the 1960s. The optimism of 1968, however, easily obscures the widespread pessimism in Europe in the 1950s. Literature was the first outlet for expressions of feelings of crisis, whether inspired by a radical or individual existentialism or by traditional conservatism, as with the review Heretica in Denmark. Only with the American-inspired youth and student rebellions towards the end of the 1960s did the critique of the European cultural heritage come into its political own, as a near-total rejection of the entire heritage and of the pragmatic, institutionalised cooperation within the European Community.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre expressed these views very clearly in the preface to what soon became the most important anti-colonial manifest, Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth from 1961. In it, Sartre rejected the whole of European civilisation. He found nothing worth preserving in Western rationalism and humanism, even though he himself was a product of these! In this text, written at the height of the French debate about the colonial war in Algeria, Sartre condemned the whole European cultural heritage with the words: “Formerly our continent had other pontoons: Parthenon, Chartres, human rights, the Swastika.
46 Okey, 1982.
47 Milward, 1992.
Now we know its true value; and then you can only save us from shipwreck through our Christian guilt. We are finished, as you see: Europe is leaking everywhere. What has happened? Quite simply, we used to be the ones to make history, and now we are the material of others’ history making. The power relationship has been reversed, decolonisation is in progress; all our soldiers can do is to delay its completion.”48 All the lofty Western ideals were swept aside with the words: “What race: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour, fatherland, and what do I know? All of this did not prevent us from simultaneously delivering speeches full of racial prejudice about dirty Negroes, dirty Jews, and dirty Arabs. Elevated minds, liberal or merely soft-hearted – neo-imperialist across the board – claimed shock at the incongruity: either they were mistaken or spoke against their better judgment:
nothing is of greater consequence than racist humanism, as the European has made himself human only by fabricating slaves and cripples.”49
The occasion for Sartre’s condemnation of all of European civilisation as racism and genocide was decolonisation. But his reaction was a response to the dismal decline of “European values” signalled by the Nazi and Fascist war against demo- cracy, liberalism, socialism, enlightenment philosophy and Christianity in the name of a totalitarian and racist ideology. This crisis was Europe’s own Stunde Null, ground zero. Implicitly, this recognition motivated the references to Europe and European civilisation in the preambles to the treaties of European cooperation from the 1957 Treaty of Rome to the current constitutional treaty for the EU. Their differences notwithstanding, Sartre’s total rejection and the vague celebration of the treaties share a perception of “European values” as relatively unambiguous, to be embraced or rejected en bloc. In truth they are nebulous and have led to Auschwitz and the nuclear bomb as well as to human rights and democracy. Janus-faced values, one might call them: one can’t be without the risk of the other tagging along. In the 1990s that lesson became increasingly well understood, as Europe was faced with the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia.
On the other hand, communist and third-world dictators have found that in the long run industrial development and economic growth inevitably lead to popular demands for democracy. Conversely, the West, especially Europe, has learned that the heritage of European civilisation comprises not only beauty and kindness from the Parthenon in Acropolis and the cathedral in Chartres to human rights, but also the Swastika, exterminations in Auschwitz and the ultimate weapon of mass destruc- tion, the nuclear bomb. Rephrased, the lesson reads: no democracy without risk of genocide and populist racism. Evidently the explication of this lesson in inter-
48 Sartre in Fanon, 1961: 23-4.
49 Sartre in Fanon, 1961: 22-3.
national treaties and conventions is insufficient. Apparently every generation must recognise anew the possibility of systematic evil. Experiencing it once and enshrining it in binding international law does not suffice. Again and again we must face it in order to counter the risk of populist, authoritarian degeneration, even in seemingly rock-solid democracies such as the Nordic countries. Yes, perhaps even more so in these states, as evidenced by today’s political climate, namely the Real- politik of the Moralpolitik, or the new international politics of the Stockholm process.