chapter 7 Socialism and Foreign Policy

Introduction

Immediately after coming to power in November 1918, the Council of People’s Representatives accepted the policy recommendations of the officials they had inherited from the previous era, the SPD members wholeheartedly, the USPD with some reservations. The People’s Representatives wanted to secure an agreed peace with the West, and engage in active hostility against Soviet Russia in the East. As Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau,1 the new German Foreign Minister, pointed out in February 1919: ‘We are in fact in a state of war with Russia’. Hugo Haase, speaking for the USPD, claimed later that the government of which he was a member had followed a socialist foreign policy, but there appears to be no trace of this. Continuity with the previous regime was dem- onstrated both in the cautious and conciliatory approach taken to the armed forces (for which see Chapter Eight) and in the setting of foreign policy objec- tives (7.4). But a sense of the reality of military defeat and the impossibility of resisting the demands of the victorious Entente Powers compelled the Social Democrats to modify their position on this. Philipp Scheidemann resigned rather than sign the Versailles Treaty; but his successor as Chancellor, Gustav Bauer, was also a member of the SPD and he did sign it. In subsequent years the SPD pursued a pro-Western orientation in foreign policy, although this did not rule out the objective of revising the Versailles Treaty, which they had in common with most of German opinion. The way to revise Versailles, the SPD said, was through peaceful negotiations with the West, while maintaining friendly relations with all the powers. This meant that they opposed any attempt to forge a separate alliance against Versailles with Soviet Russia. As Hermann Müller put it in 1921 ‘We are placing our hopes on the revision of the treaty, not on intrigues’ (7.8). The KPD, in contrast, naturally favoured a Soviet alliance, as did the extreme right (for different reasons). The Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 caused consid- erable indignation among most, perhaps all, Germans. ‘A cry of indignation rose up from the whole German nation’, wrote Otto Braun, ‘and it had a strong impact on me as well, although I was always accustomed to judging political

1 Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau (1869–1928), German Foreign Minister 1918–19, Ambas- sador to Moscow 1922–28.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004271081_��9 202 chapter 7 events with calm sobriety’.2 The SPD was out of office at the time, but the Cuno government was keen to involve the Party, and the trade unions, in its policy of passive resistance to the occupiers. The left of the SPD was hesitant about join- ing hands with the nationalist Right in this way, but by mid-January the Party leaders had won the day and the SPD decided in favour. Breitscheid went so far as to describe the passive resistance as a ‘proletarian class struggle’, adding that ‘the French policy of violence would be defeated by the non-violence of the working class’.3 The KPD saw the foreign policy crisis as a political opportunity. It was considered that the rising German nationalist agitation could somehow be converted into a revolution against the bourgeois republic, or at least that nationalist revolutionaries (including the Nazis) could be turned into com- munists by appealing to the common foreign policy interests of Germany and the Soviet Union in destroying the hated Versailles Treaty. The Bolsheviks also shared this view. Karl Radek, with his equally strong Russian and German con- nections, was the ideal person to put the idea forward (7.10). He later explained the ‘Schlageter line’ succinctly in an article in the Party newspaper: ‘It would be ridiculous to think that Fascism could be defeated solely by the force of arms. One must fight against it politically . . . by showing the petty-bourgeois masses the true road of struggle for their own interests. They are fighting against Germany’s enslavement by the Versailles Treaty’. But the KPD is fight- ing for the same thing, he added. Hence ‘the German communists are obliged to do all they can to convince the petty-bourgeois Fascist elements that com- munism is not the enemy but a shining star pointing the way to victory’.4 If ‘victory’ had been achieved in 1923, however, it would have been either a com- munist victory over Fascism, or a Fascist victory over communism, not a joint victory by both sides. There seems, however, to have been no opposition within the KPD to Radek’s idea, although Hermann Remmele did note the irony of engaging in friendly negotiations with people who ‘murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg’.5 This curious episode in communist history did not last long, but it had a certain significance, first in that it paralleled the continuing secret Soviet-German collaboration in undermining the military provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and second in that it pointed the way to the return to a ‘national populist’ line by the KPD in 1930. After the storms of the French occupation of the Ruhr and the hyper- inflation had died down, the SPD consistently supported the policy of Gustav Stresemann, now a permanent fixture as Germany’s Foreign Minister (until

2 Braun 1949, p. 122. 3 Feucht 1998, p. 253. 4 Die Rote Fahne 1923, 27 July 1923. 5 Speaking on 12 August 1923 in Stuttgart (Weber 1969, vol. 1, p. 49, n. 105.)