Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (32 page)

In a
Times
editorial of July 1940 entitled “The New Europe,” E. H. Carr asserted that “if we speak of democracy, we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live.” This was the message which socialists across Europe had been repeating for years; the war gave it a new urgency and plausibility. Imprisoned by Vichy, the former French premier Léon Blum wrote: “A weak and perverted bourgeois democracy has collapsed and must be replaced by a true democracy, an energetic and competent democracy, popular instead of capitalist, strong instead of weak … This popular democracy will be, indeed can only be, a Social Democracy.”
⁷

The wartime reformist consensus, however, included other groups than the socialists. Liberal progressives, technocratic planners and newly assertive moderate conservatives were all keen to enlarge the
social and economic responsibilities of the modern state. None was happier than Keynes, for example, to seize the chance to assert the primacy of economics over finance and the bankruptcy of laissez-faire. He too had been frustrated by the retrograde nature of the British government’s initial attitude towards post-war goals. In the summer of 1940 he had turned down an invitation to broadcast a rebuttal of the economic aspects of the Nazi New Order on the grounds that he found much in them to admire. To Duff Cooper he wrote:

Your letter seems to suggest that we should do well to pose as champions of the pre-war economic
status quo
and outbid Funk by offering good old 1920–21 or 1930–33, i.e. gold standard or international exchange
laissez-faire
 … Is this particularly attractive or good propaganda?… obviously I am not the man to preach the beauties and merits of the pre-war gold standard.

In my opinion about three-quarters of the passages quoted from the German broadcasts would be quite excellent if the name of Great Britain were substituted for Germany or the Axis … If Funk’s plan is taken at face value, it is excellent and just what we ourselves ought to be thinking of doing. If it is to be attacked, the way to do it would be to cast doubt and suspicion on its
bona fides
.
⁸

At the beginning of 1941 Keynes did agree to draft a declaration of war aims in which he emphasized the need to ensure social security and to attack unemployment after the war. Never published, this memorandum marked the beginning of the British government’s move towards a commitment to full-employment policies. No less important was the pioneering work he carried out with two assistants in constructing the first official national income statistics. Here were the tools which made possible the post-war Keynesian revolution in fiscal management.
⁹

The wartime transformation of British social policy was far-reaching. Apart from Keynes’s work in economic policy, pioneering reforms were laid down in education, health and town planning. War saw the introduction of free school meals and milk. It brought the
1944 government White Papers on Full Employment and a National Health Service. Above all, it brought William Beveridge, whose 1942 report on “Social Insurance and Allied Services” laid the foundations of the post-war welfare state. Beveridge himself, converted by the war from a critic of welfare capitalism to a believer in planning for radical social change, even told Beatrice Webb in early 1940 that “I would very much like to see Communism tried under democratic conditions.”
¹⁰

This, then, was the man appointed reluctantly by the coalition government to investigate what it imagined would be the rather technical matter of social insurance reform. But Beveridge resolved—with enormous success—to see this work “as a contribution to a better new world after the war.” His subsequent investigations forced Whitehall to travel further down the road to full-employment policies after the war than it had originally intended. Common to both Beveridge and the government’s own White Paper was their insistence on the need for state planning for the social good and their denunciation of the iniquities of pre-war laissez-faire. “If the united democracies,” concluded Beveridge in 1942, “today can show strength and courage and imagination even while waging total war, they will win together two victories which in truth are indivisible.”
¹¹

The reception which greeted Beveridge’s reports attested not merely to his talent for self-publicity but to the very real public interest in post-war reconstruction. Like Beveridge himself, British popular opinion had shifted to the Left during the war. This could be seen in the interest aroused by a special
Picture Post
issue in January 1941 on “The Britain we hope to build when the war is over”; it was also reflected in the sales of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s best-selling 1942 Penguin Special,
Christianity and the Social Order
, and the emergence of Richard Acland’s Common Wealth Party. Beveridge’s proposals achieved international circulation through the BBC and underground publications, so much so that in the Third Reich his plan was regarded as “an especially obvious proof that our enemies are taking over national-socialistic ideas.”
¹²

This of course was not entirely fair. Rather, the challenge of Nazism was forcing democrats to look again at the question of social and national solidarity. The process had started already in the 1930s,
notably in Sweden, where the Social Democrats had pioneered an explicit alternative to the prevailing authoritarian model of coercive population policy. The Swedish welfare state which emerged in the late 1930s was a determinedly democratic programme, combining pro-natalist measures to encourage people to have more children with an affirmation that the decision whether or not to have children was an individual one which the state should respect. Sweden did maintain sterilization of the mentally ill, but it also supported birth control clinics, provided sex education in schools, liberalized abortion laws and protected the rights of working mothers at the same time that it introduced family allowances, universal free medical and dental care and school meals.

For one of the architects of these policies, Alva Myrdal, the Swedish model presented a contrast to the Nazi conception of the relationship between state and individual. It was—she argued in
Nation and Family
—a necessary amplification of the scope of modern democracy. Finishing her book in August 1940, Myrdal looked forward cautiously to a time when “the present calamity” would be over and “freedom and progress would again have a chance in Europe.” But, she warned, in what were fast becoming familiar terms,

Such an end of this war, even more than that of the earlier one, will present a challenge to democracy, again reasserted, to fulfill its social obligation. Political freedom and formal equality will not be enough; real democracy, social and economic democracy, will be exacted …

Europe will be impoverished. The fiscal structures of belligerent and nonbelligerent countries alike will seem bankrupt when measured by traditional norms of financial solvency. The rich will have seen their wealth taxed away. The masses will be hungry. When the structure of war-time economy breaks down, the dislocations of normal exchange and commerce will be left as enormous maladjustments. The demobilized millions will crave employment and security. Both courage and wisdom will be required to preserve orderly freedom and to avoid social chaos. These circumstances, however, will not prevent the undertaking
of social reforms; on the contrary, they will force reforms whether we want them or not.
¹³

All this formed part of the more general debate about social justice and democracy that the war had provoked. By 1942, Nazi visions of a more egalitarian New Order shielding Europe from the capitalist “plutocracies” had lost any allure they once possessed. It was their opponents who now stood for a fairer future. In France, for example, Léon Blum’s impassioned defence of the Popular Front during his trial at Riom in 1942 had won him many admirers. Another indication of disaffection with Vichy was de Gaulle’s call that November for a “New Democracy” against the reactionary regime of Pétain; by April 1943, the General was talking about the need to introduce state control of economic affairs and social security.
¹⁴

Evidence abounds for the radicalization of ordinary people across Europe living under Nazi rule. “The last thing we want is a return to the social conditions of 1939 with their economic chaos, social injustice, spiritual laxity and class prejudices,” wrote a young Dutch lawyer in an underground newsletter in 1942. In Greece, inflation and food shortages had led to “a veritable social revolution,” and “the veering towards the Left of elements of the public who, before the war, were among the most conservative.”
¹⁵

Resistance and underground movements were naturally responsive to this leftwards shift in popular attitudes, partly because many of their leading cadres were drawn from the Left and partly because resistance itself was an exercise in communal solidarity, whose values lent themselves to an egalitarian and morally elevated vision of the post-war world. After Stalingrad, people’s minds turned more and more to the future; “in the heat of the battle, amid the terror of the Gestapo and of Vichy,” proclaimed
La Revue libre
in late 1943, “essays, political theses, draft constitutions, programmes are springing up almost everywhere, circulating, being read and discussed.” The most unlikely groups now tried to expound an “ideology.”
¹⁶

It would be a mistake to insist too strongly upon the similarities of resistance ideologies across the continent: after all, resistance groups were fragmented, localized and poorly informed of one another’s existence;
they were drawn from very diverse political and social elements of the population; above all, they were wartime phenomena, with all the flux, uncertainty and ideological confusion which the conditions of the war produced. In Italy, where twenty years of Fascism had made state intervention in socio-economic affairs less of a novelty than in Britain or France, anti-Fascists stressed the themes of justice and liberty above those of planning; in France, faith in
dirigisme
was combined with a fervent patriotism only perhaps matched in Poland. Such differences of emphasis, however, cannot obscure the remarkable convergence of resistance aspirations. Whether interpreted in terms of nationalization of major industries and banks, of state planning through price and production controls, or of vague and unspecified demands for “social justice,” the goal of a fairer and “socialized” economy was shared by the vast majority of
résistants
. “Finance is at the service of the Economy,” declared the plan which Émile Laffon placed before the Conseil National de la Résistance in 1943. This was the dream of Keynes and all those who had seen the prospects for economic recovery in the 1930s sacrificed before the altar of the balanced budget.
¹⁷

Slower to respond to the new mood because of their greater distance from events, the exile governments of Europe also shaped their post-war aspirations to take account of the desire for a new domestic order. Norwegian foreign minister Trygve Lie stated that the war “has made necessary in all countries a national planned economy under the direction of the State.” The Dutch government was rather reluctant to consider what this might mean, but the Belgians, by contrast, quickly set up a Committee for the Study of Postwar Problems committed to the extensive use of “national planning”; an “organized national economy” would allow the state to banish mass unemployment. Edvard Beneš’s government was—rightly—proud of pre-war Czechoslovakia’s enlightened social policies but still envisaged the nationalization of banks, insurance companies and heavy industry and the introduction of a “planned economy.” What best reveals the extent of the wartime acceptance of radical social and economic engineering were the very similar pronouncements of conservative and traditionally inclined politicians like Poland’s General Sikorski, de Gaulle and the Greek Liberal prime minister Tsouderos.
They, too, committed themselves to sweeping reforms when the war was over. For social democrats like Beneš or Spaak the cause of economic planning and social intervention was scarcely new; but it was the winning over to such ideas of conservative Europeans—and the consequent convergence of Left and Right—which provided one of the preconditions for post-war political stability.
¹⁸

THE INDIVIDUAL AGAINST THE STATE

If one tendency in wartime thought was to stress the evils of pre-war economic individualism and laissez-faire and the need for greater state intervention in the interests of social harmony, another was to argue that the struggle against Hitler had revealed the importance of human and civil rights. In the legal and political sphere, in other words, the trend was to reassert the primacy of the individual vis-à-vis the state. The wartime rehabilitation and redefinition of democracy moved between these two poles.

Occupation raised the question of individual choice in the most direct and inescapable form. Experiencing the terrors of Nazi rule in Poland led the science fiction writer Stanislav Lem to a theory of chance where individual autonomy and power had vanished: it was mere contingency whether venturing out for food led to a premature death, forced labour in the Reich or a loaf of bread. In Yugoslavia, diplomat turned novelist Ivo Andrić saw the onset of civil war in terms of the power of historical forces and collective traditions over the individual. In his prophetic prizewinning novel
Bridge over the River Drina
, five centuries of Bosnian history dwarfed the individual protagonists.