Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (33 page)

Yet others reached quite different conclusions: faced with the choice between collaboration and resistance, everything boiled down not to fate but to a stark individual decision. In
Uomini e no
, the Italian novelist Elio Vittorini insisted that both resistance and Nazi brutality were the result of human choices. “He who falls, rises also. Insulted, oppressed, a man can make arms of the very chains on his feet. This is because he wants freedom, not revenge. This is man. And the Gestapo too? Of course!… Today we have Hitler. And what is he? Is he not a man?”
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“To render myself passive in the world,” wrote Sartre in
Being and Nothingness
(1943), “is still to choose the person I am.” The experience of occupation had a powerful effect on the development of existentialist thought. Sartre denounced the fatalism of his fellow-intellectuals—men like Drieu, Brasillach or even Emmanuel Mounier—who had chosen to collaborate because—they argued—history and destiny had chosen Hitler’s Germany as the way of the future. Writing one of his
Letters to a German Friend
in July 1944, Albert Camus argued similarly: “You never believed in the meaning of this world and therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s wishes … I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has meaning and that is man.”
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To enter into resistance was often a profoundly personal act. What Alban Vistel called the “spiritual heritage” of the resistance emerged from the sense that Nazi values were an affront to “the individual’s sense of honour.” For many insurgents this was bound up with the passionate sense of patriotism and their desire for liberty and led them naturally to stress the importance of individual freedom. “The ideal which motivates us,” declared a founder of the French MRP, “is an ideal of liberation.” Resistance thus demonstrated that collective action could serve to defend individual liberties.
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Inside Hitler’s Germany, too, the experience of Nazi rule encouraged a revaluation of the role of the individual on a smaller, more restricted and private scale. After the war, the German-Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer would try to explain to his students in the ruins of Dresden that the Third Reich had devalued the meaning of wartime heroism by turning it into part of the propaganda machine of the regime. The real hero, he went on, had been the lonely individual, isolated and apart from the adulation of the state. Heroes in the Nazi pantheon were borne aloft on a spurious tide of public acclaim; even activists in the anti-Nazi resistance had had the support of their comrades; for Klemperer the model of true heroism was his non-Jewish wife, who courageously stood by him through the Third Reich, despite the misery this had brought her, alone and with no support or recognition for her courage.

To religious thinkers, this reassertion of the individual conscience
was perhaps the outstanding intellectual development of the war. At the same time as the Church rediscovered its social mission—whether Anglican in Britain, Catholic or Orthodox—so it reasserted the primacy of the human spirit over totalitarian demands for total loyalty to the state. Emmanuel Mounier’s flirtation with Vichy, prompted by the desire to pass from “bourgeois man and the bourgeois Church,” led him and other religious reformers into a spiritual cul-de-sac. Pointing to a way out was Jacques Maritain, a fellow Catholic intellectual. Like Mounier, Maritain believed that social reform was urgently needed; but unlike him he argued that it was possible within a democratic context. In
Christianisme et Démocratie
(1943), Maritain insisted that the inter-war retreat from democracy could now be seen to have been a mistake: “It is not a question of finding a new name for democracy, rather of discovering its true essence and of realizing it … rather, a question of passing from bourgeois democracy … to an integrally human democracy, from abortive democracy to real democracy.”
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Here in embryo was the source of post-war Christian democracy, at least in an idealized form. In his 1942 work,
Les Droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle
, Maritain developed the idea that the full spiritual development of an individual demanded contact with society. The person existed as an “open whole,” and found fulfilment not in isolation but in the community. “I have stressed … the rights of the civic person,” wrote Maritain, “of the human individual as a citizen.” This conception of social responsibility as an individual duty, and of such behaviour as a condition of political freedom, can be encountered among other religious groups as well. Greek Orthodox Archbishop Damaskinos called for less selfishness and a greater sense of solidarity in the face of the famine in Greece. William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, cited Maritain approvingly and echoed his call for a generous “Democracy of the Person” as opposed to an egotistical “Democracy of Individuals.”
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The new emphasis upon the worth of the individual reached beyond the sphere of moral philosophy and religion into that of the law. Starting with Churchill’s bold declaration on 3 September 1939 that the war was being fought “to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual,” Allied propaganda emphasized the sanctity of rights. “In the course of World War Two,” wrote the distinguished
international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht, “ ‘the enthronement of the rights of man’ was repeatedly declared to constitute one of the major purposes of the war. The great contest, in which the spiritual heritage of civilization found itself in mortal danger, was imposed upon the world by a power whose very essence lay in the denial of the rights of man as against the omnipotence of the State.”
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It was all very well, however, to proclaim a crusade in defence of rights, but which rights were at issue and for whom? Quincy Wright was reflecting liberal American thought when he hazarded a definition which focused upon civil liberties, equality before the law, and freedom of trade. But others objected that this ignored the new social demands generated by the war. Nazi occupation, according to the Pole Ludwik Rajchman, “was a process of levelling down entire populations, which creates a psychological atmosphere for compelling authorities, the powers that will be, to accept very far-reaching reforms.” He argued that hundreds of millions of people were “thinking today in terms of the future exercise of human rights, which cannot but include the right to a minimum standard of social security.” Thus at the outset we find the debate under way between broad and narrow conceptions of human rights: starting during the war, this argument would gain in intensity during the Cold War and after, as the Soviet bloc and the Third World attacked the minimalist view of the Western powers.
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The new commitment to rights raised knotty problems of race and empire. In the late 1930s, lawyers had witnessed the development of a body of Nazi jurisprudence which consciously attacked liberal notions of individual autonomy in the name of the interests of the race and the state. Now they argued that anti-Semitism inside Germany had paved the way for the racist ambitions which led to the Nazi conquest of Europe, as well as to the extermination of millions of Jews discussed openly and in detail by Maritain and others by 1943. Yet Western intellectuals—not to mention governments and public opinion—hesitated to make any connection with the ideas of racial superiority still very much current in their own societies.
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Noting that this was “an ideological war fought in defense of democracy,” Swedish Social Democrat Gunnar Myrdal observed that “in this War the principle of democracy had to be applied more
explicitly to race … In fighting fascism and nazism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial tolerance and cooperation and racial equality.” Some white Americans were increasingly uncomfortable at the hypocrisies involved in fighting Hitler with a segregated army. Black Americans commented upon “this strange and curious picture, this spectacle of America at war to preserve the ideal of government by free men, yet clinging to the social vestiges of the slave system.” “The fight now is not to save democracy,” wrote Ralph Bunche, summing up what was probably the dominant view among African-Americans, “for that which does not exist cannot be saved. But the fight is to maintain those conditions under which people may continue to strive for realization of the democratic ideals. This is the inexorable logic of the nation’s position as dictated by the world antidemocratic revolution and Hitler’s projected new world order.”
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British attitudes were marked by similar hypocrisies. Dudley Thompson, a Jamaican volunteer arriving in England to join the RAF, was asked: “Are you a pure-blooded European?” George Padmore, the remarkable journalist imprisoned in 1933 by the Nazis for attacking Hitler’s racial policies, spearheaded the efforts of the Pan-African movement to force the British to extend their democratic crusade to the empire. Under Churchill, the archetypal romantic imperialist, this was never likely to happen. Hard though it may be now to credit it, the British government actually launched its own Empire Crusade in late 1940 to whip up support for the war. Whitehall’s feeble effort to spread a “dynamic faith” among the public contrasted Nazi efforts to build a “slave empire” with the British version: “The British Empire is exactly the opposite. There has been nothing like it in the world before; it is a commonwealth, a family of free nations—linked together by a loyalty to one king. It stands for progress; it is the hope of the future.”
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That the Empire Crusade turned out to be a complete flop may tell us something about the attitude of Europeans to their empires. During the war this seems to have been based largely on indifference, at least in Britain and France (though not perhaps in the Netherlands). In all these countries, domestic matters were of much livelier concern than questions of imperial government. The cause of empire beat weakly in British hearts. But so too did anti-imperialism. Most Europeans
seemed scarcely aware that any inconsistency was involved in defending human liberties at home while acquiescing in imperial rule overseas. One examines the resistance record in vain for indications of an interest in the predicament of colonial peoples. In Italy, for example, the retention of colonies was a question of
amour propre
. In France, there was much discussion of remodelling the empire but virtually none of dismantling it; the Left more or less ignored the issue, and their silence at the Brazzaville Conference on imperial reform in early 1944 was entirely characteristic. Queen Wilhelmina simply offered to turn the Dutch Empire into a commonwealth which “would leave no room for discrimination according to race or nationality.” To the Indian Congress Party’s demands for British withdrawal, Whitehall countered by arresting Gandhi and offering Dominion status.
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To astute and sensitive observers of the Allied war effort, the ambiguity of European attitudes to race was one of the most striking features of the war. The American anthropologist Robert Redfield remarked on how, faced with Nazi theories, democracy had been forced to a “self-examination” of the inconsistency between what it professed and practised: “The ideal is now asserted as a program for an entire world—a free world,” Redfield noted. “And yet the leaders who announce this program are citizens of the countries in which racial inequality is most strongly applied.” Redfield predicted in the future “a moderate reaction favourable to intolerance” with a “corresponding postponement of the resolution of the inconsistency.” This was not far from the truth: if the war, with its renewed stress on racial equality and human rights, did eventually contribute to the ending of European imperialism, it did not do so automatically: Europeans (and white Americans) remained largely unmoved by the drama of their own racial problems. So long as colonial subjects were willing to fight on their behalf, they had little incentive to alter the structure of power in a radical fashion. But here too, in ways largely invisible to British, French, Belgian and Dutch eyes, the war itself was the catalyst of change: Ho Chi Minh continued the struggle he had begun against the Japanese—against the French; Asian, African and Caribbean servicemen—Kenyatta and Nkrumah among them—returned home from fighting in Europe prepared to continue the struggle which had been started against Hitler.
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THE NATION-STATE AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER

In 1944 the international lawyer Raphael Lemkin called for the United Nations, by their victory, to impel the Germans to “replace their theory of master race by a theory of a master morality, international law and true peace.” But it was not only Lemkin who believed that the revival of international law was essential to any future world peace and moral order. The racial basis of Nazi jurisprudence and Germany’s abandonment of the accepted principles of international law had been regarded since the late 1930s as among the principal causes of the breakdown of order in Europe. Nazi aggression had undermined the very existence of an “international community.” At the same time, Nazi treatment of the Jews persuaded many people that if the individual was to be protected against the state, the traditional doctrine of state sovereignty in domestic affairs would have to be reconsidered. A revival and reinvigoration of international law thus emerged as the natural adjunct to liberal concern for world peace and, in particular, for the safeguarding of human rights.
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“Effective international organisation is not possible,” wrote Quincy Wright in 1943, “unless it protects basic human rights against encroachments by national States.” Wright observed that, unlike Poland or Czechoslovakia, Germany had not been obliged to conclude a minorities treaty with the League of Nations, with the result that “there was no formal ground on which the League of Nations could protest against the beginning of the persecutions in Germany. It was a general principle that a State was free to persecute its own nationals in its own territory as it saw fit.”
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