German Hegemony and the Socialist International's Place in Interwar

02_EHQ 31/1 articles 30/11/00 1:53 pm Page 101 William Lee Blackwood German Hegemony and the Socialist International’s Place in Interwar European Diplomacy When the guns fell silent on the western front in November 1918, socialism was about to become a governing force throughout Europe. Just six months later, a Czech socialist could marvel at the convocation of an international socialist conference on post- war reconstruction in a Swiss spa, where, across the lake, stood buildings occupied by now-exiled members of the deposed Habsburg ruling class. In May 1923, as Europe’s socialist parties met in Hamburg, Germany, finally to put an end to the war-induced fracturing within their ranks by launching a new organization, the Labour and Socialist International (LSI), the German Communist Party’s main daily published a pull-out flier for posting on factory walls. Bearing the sarcastic title the International of Ministers, it presented to workers a list of forty-one socialists and the national offices held by them in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Poland, France, Sweden, and Denmark. Commenting on the activities of the LSI, in Paris a Russian Menshevik émigré turned prominent left-wing pundit scoffed at the new International’s executive body, which he sarcastically dubbed ‘the International Socialist Cabinet’, since ‘all of its members were ministers, ex-ministers, or prospec- tive ministers of State’.1 Whether one accepted or rejected its new status, socialism’s virtually overnight transformation from an outsider to a consummate insider at the end of Europe’s first total war provided the most striking measure of the quantum leap into what can aptly be described as Europe’s ‘social democratic moment’.2 Moreover, unlike the period after Europe’s second total war, when many of socialism’s basic postulates became permanently embedded in the post-1945 social-welfare-state con- European History Quarterly Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 31(1), 101–140. [0265-6914(200101)31:1;101–140;016197] 02_EHQ 31/1 articles 30/11/00 1:53 pm Page 102 102 European History Quarterly Vol. 31 No. 1 sensus that so profoundly transformed political culture throughout western Europe and helped pave the way for the death of ideology there, interwar Marxism, notwithstanding its undeni- able heterogeneity, still meant something.3 In 1848, during a ‘revolutionary moment super-national as none before or after’, Marx used The Communist Manifesto and the pages of Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung to advance what, at the time, was a novel argument about the relationship between national and international change (postulating, for example, that revolutions in Poland and Prussia would mutually reinforce one another, and that the combined Prusso-Polish revolution should then wage war against Tsarist autocracy, the bête noire in his analysis of the international system).4 Sixty years on from the spring of nations and amidst the seismic shifts caused by the First World War in the various societies, new-found socialist power at home did, true to Marx’s dictum, translate into an increased ability to affect developments abroad — with the notable differ- ence that now communism, not socialism, marched under the banner of international revolution. After 1918, the democratic left, in contrast, sought to transform the existing state structure from within, and, for the first and last time in the history of the entire left, the formulation and implementation of high diplomacy came to depend as much on parties that defined themselves as Marxist as it did on the more traditional venues of international politics. Whereas socialism remained a central domestic actor into the late 1930s, when the socialist–communist alliance forged in 1935 and known as the popular front became the great hope of anti-fascists everywhere, socialist diplomacy reached its apogee already in the mid-1920s. It was at this juncture that socialists tenaciously promoted Franco-German reconciliation at independent eastern Europe’s expense, and, in a perverse twist, created the most important, though heretofore almost entirely ignored, element of continuity between the hopeful mid-1920s and the much darker late 1930s. Not the radical right, communism’s extremist twin on the other end of the interwar political spectrum with its ruthless willingness to challenge the European status quo, but rather socialism set in motion a dynamic destined to render meaningful anti-fascism dead on arrival by the time the build-up to the Second World War began. Had socialism not pursued the type of pro-German diplomacy that it did after 1918 and thereby helped mightily to undermine the validity of the 02_EHQ 31/1 articles 30/11/00 1:53 pm Page 103 Blackwood, The Socialist International and Interwar Diplomacy 103 post-1918 settlement in the east for the sake of ‘saving’ German democracy, it is easy to argue that Hitler’s path to war, which began in earnest with the acquisition of Austria in March 1938, followed then in September by the infamous Munich accords and the final liquidation of independent Czechoslovakia one year later, would have been much more difficult, if not altogether unnegotiable. Socialism’s individual national histories between the wars, together with the popular-front era and the epic, internecine struggle on the left between communism and socialism, have garnered considerable attention. Yet the single most significant international aspect of Europe’s ‘social democratic moment’ remains largely unstudied, because practically no attention what- soever has been paid to socialism’s indispensable contribution to the foreign-policy agenda associated with the right-of-centre politician and foreign minister of the Weimar Republic from 1923 to 1929, Gustav Stresemann. In October 1925, Stresemann rehabilitated Germany as a great power by signing the Locarno accords, the seminal event in European diplomacy between the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919 and the Munich accords of October 1938. At Locarno, Germany traded security in the west for the possibility of pursuing territorial revisionism in the east. Locarno had been preceded in August 1924 by an American- sponsored economic stabilization package, the so-called Dawes Plan, which helped set the European economy on a more even keel by regulating the German reparations debt and opening a flow of short-term American loans to the beleaguered Weimar economy. As early as 1921, discussions among Europe’s socialists had staked out the contours of a Dawes-type response to the German economic crisis, though, to be sure, the critical driving force in this particular chapter of economic diplomacy was Wall Street’s anxiety about the chain linking German reparations to France to French payments on British loans to British debts in the United States. Locarno, however, was a purely political arrangement made by the Europeans themselves, and it never would have happened had it not been for two things: the tilt to the left in France’s internal politics in the summer of 1924, which enabled the Section Française de l’Internationale ouvrière (SFIO) to put its ideas about Franco-German reconciliation into practice, and, most crucially, the votes cast for the accords in the German parliament by the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutsch- 02_EHQ 31/1 articles 30/11/00 1:54 pm Page 104 104 European History Quarterly Vol. 31 No. 1 lands (SPD) at a point when it was the main opposition party to the centre–right cabinet then governing in Berlin. In anticipation of this collaborative enterprise, during the build-up to Locarno the French and German socialists collaborated to torpedo a com- prehensive security arrangement supported by British Labour that, by covering all of Europe, would have erected a strong barrier to German territorial revisionism in the east, one which would have remained in place after Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933. In the first half of the 1920s, German hegemony transformed the socialist International into the most effective tool available at the time to German foreign policy. This striking fact is tremendously important for an understanding of how interwar diplomacy worked and, ultimately, failed. Yet it has been all but ignored. On the other hand, it is a commonplace that the Kremlin’s bolshevik mandarins transformed the communist Third International into a blunt instrument of their international designs. In reality, however, European socialism was a much more effective pro-German force than communism ever could have been for Moscow. Socialism’s ‘Germanification’ became something of a commonplace well before the outbreak of the First World War. The left’s helplessness in August 1914 can and should be attributed, in part, to German-inspired passivity vis-à-vis the capitalist state’s plunge into the unanticipated slaughter. While important for an understanding of Marxist socialism’s history as a movement dedicated, in Karl Kautsky’s specious, intellectu- ally facile words, ‘to making revolution without being revolutionary’, German dominance within the pre-1918 International did not have a determinative impact on the course of European history.5 Because of the working class’s growing and, if you will, ‘negative’ integration into the bourgeois status quo, it is difficult to envision any outcome other than what actually transpired in August 1914, when workers and their leaders everywhere succumbed to war euphoria. After all, Lenin’s Zimmerwald appeal to wage war on war initially fell on deaf ears, and it

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