On September 18, 2019, the European Parliament passed a resolution on
“the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe”. It
was a motion on condemning Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as
totalitarian regimes and for their supposed role in starting the Second
World War. Its second clause states it quite clearly:
2. Stresses that the Second World
War, the most devastating war in Europe’s history, was started as an
immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression
of 23 August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its
secret protocols, whereby two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal
of world conquest divided Europe into two zones of influence;…
The above clause reveals quite a lot of the fundamental assumptions
at work. While not getting into the debate about the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact’s rational or consequences, its comment on totalitarianism is very
suspect. It is a term with much historical ambiguity, and it therefore
has generally fallen out of favour with historians. Instead, here it
serves a polemical function, creating an antithesis to the European
Union by reducing wildly different political and social entities into a
historic nightmare we are all struggling to wake up from. Despite the
malpractice, this line of thought has deep roots in European
intellectual history, one of the many currents that tried to claim the
name of totalitarianism for their own ends.
The concept itself was coined by Italian journalist Giovanni Amendola in 1923. Declaring that
the most salient characteristic of
the fascist movement remains its totalitarian spirit. This spirit will
not allow any new day to dawn that has not rendered the fascist salute,
just as it does not allow the present era to know a conscience that has
not bowed the knee and confessed: “I believe”.
Here it emerges very much as the idea of a movement, or rather
ideology, forcing itself on all social practice, demanding total
compliance and devotion.
The term came to be appropriated by the Italian fascists as a
positive term of self-description, though only very initially in the
1920s and early 30s. It was adopted by Mussolini and his main court
philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, as referring to the aspiration of fascism
as a total movement that could mobilise all of society as an organic
whole. Some on the German right, like Carl Schmitt and Erich Ludendorff,
used it in a similar sense, but the Nazi party and regime abstained
from it.
The only one to use it positively on the left was Antonio Gramsci in his essay The Modern Prince,formulated
in his prison notebooks while detained by the fascist state in the late
1920s. Even though his ideas influenced decidedly non-Stalinists, he
himself remained a committed one. Gramsci called for a ‘totalitarian
party’ which could unify proletarian politics and culture as one
movement capable of overthrowing the state. This idea remains little
more than an interesting footnote however, as his notes would not be
smuggled out of prison until the 30s and many more decades would pass
until they were translated, not appearing in English until 1971.
This similar aspiration evident in fascism and Leninism is something I
would trace to very different, if structurally similar, tendencies.
Fascism embraced totalitarianism since it matched the aspiration of
fusing the nation and the state as a symbiotic, organic entity, while in
Leninism it comes from the desire of an organic unity between the
proletariat and its leading party. It is not for nothing then that the
concept of totalitarianism would, for the most part, be centred around
this idea of the total society. As a result, the history of
totalitarianism is essentially a history of damning systematic critiques
of various modernist societies. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be
anything unified at all, but rather a set of different, if very much
related, ideas ranging from right to left.
Amendola originated what would become the liberal tradition of
critique of totalitarianism. This is a rich and varied one, with plenty
of divergent opinions on the origins and function of totalitarianism,
from Karl Mannheim, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Fredrich Hayek to George
Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and François Furet. Regardless, they all share
the idea of totalitarianism as a rejection of the Enlightenment, with a
focus on its ideological function, and the terror used to instil its
compliance.
The tradition of Marxist critique of the concept, on the other hand,
is focused on capitalist origins of the system, and its corruption of
the Soviet Union. Prominent among them is the Frankfurt School’s work on
totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s as something emerging from
capitalism and the expansion of the grasp of the state into the
regulation of modern society. Herbert Marcuse, himself involved in the
school, and others on the New Left would go on to argue that the concept
of totalitarianism was an ideological weapon in the cold war, with
Marcuse going so far as to call liberal democracy itself totalitarian.
He argues that it emerges from the rationalising impulsive of ‘late
industrial society’, with technological forces pushing society towards a
one-dimensionality that is essentially totalitarian, homogenised, and
uniform.
The Trotskyist critique, on the other hand, is focused on USSR under
Stalin as having been reduced to a ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’,
creating an abomination that could lead in the ‘eclipse of
civilization’. This left-wing anti-totalitarianism took on new forms in
the Marxist and Marxist-inspired critiques of existing socialism in
central and eastern Europe. Pulling on various threads, it argued for
the tyranny and inadequacy of Soviet-imposed socialism, forming one of
the democratic currents that would bring it down. Especially noteworthy
among these was Vaclav Havel, who postulated the post-Stalin era as
‘post-totalitarian’, inspiring an auto-totality. The ruling system as
integrated with everyone and everything, stimulating an official
complacency and cynicism that was both the source of its longevity and
decay.
While stimulating, it is also easy to let these analyses separate
from the very political functions the concept has served in European
history. The idea of totalitarianism has largely been applied primarily
to fascism and communism, as initially they were both threats to the
faltering liberal hegemony of interwar Europe, with the focus clearly
shifting after the Second World War to be centred around anti-Communism.
This mapped unto an academic discourse in Soviet studies of
totalitarianism, one which still has a clear legacy. Even if the term
has largely been reduced to the Stalin era, research through the years
has revealed how reductive the term can be.
However, as Michael Scott Christofferson points out, this qualified
usage maintains the validity of the term, for which there is serious
room for doubt. Especially the liberal anti-totalitarianism, with its
focus on ideology and the use of state violence to impress it on the
population, is based around bold assumptions and poor study of how these
regimes truly operated. As more recent research has shown, Nazi Germany
was reliant on collaboration and self-policing, with the Gestapo being
woefully inadequate for surveillance. The same also applied to the
persecution of undesirables and the war effort, with the terror being
largely limited to those groups. This meant that people at large were
collaborating out of self-interest or compliance to authority.
Work on the Soviet Union, even under Stalin, has revealed similar
things with the likes of Moshe Levin arguing that the land
collectivizing was an improvised affair rather than an ideological act
of terror. The fact the regime apologised for the excesses of the purges
in the 30s indicates that totalitarian governments might not be so
different from their more conventional colleagues. A link between this
and oriental studies, and the idea of oriental despotism, of a timeless
east ruled by a despotism using religion to maintain their rule of the
terrorised and superstitious masses, also seems appropriate.
Another function of the concept of totalitarianism is its ability to
reduce perpetrators to victims. This was at the core of the New Left
social critique in West Germany, where talk of totalitarianism had
helped to absolve remaining civic and public figures, not to mention the
public at large, for their involvement with the Nazi regime; claiming
that they were the tyranny’s first victims, rather than active
collaborators.
With this inquiry in mind, it seems that the European Parliament’s
resolution grounds itself in Cold War tropes and terminology, with the
very political function that entails. It is difficult not to make a
parallel to the liberal critics of the 30s; like them, the European
Union had to argue for an increasingly fragile system when confronted
with both right and left opposition. Although, in both cases, the right
would be more prominent. The result is a glorified horseshoe theory,
where all ideological opposition is on the path to tyranny, whether they
know it or not. Even further than that, tyranny becomes
quintessentially anti-European, serving a critical function as
ideological cement to reign in more unwieldy members or oppositional
groups.
Totalitarian discourse also still serves a geopolitical purpose regarding Russia, this is evident from clause 15 which reads:
Maintains that Russia remains the
greatest victim of communist totalitarianism and that its development
into a democratic state will be impeded as long as the government, the
political elite and political propaganda continue to whitewash communist
crimes and glorify the Soviet totalitarian regime; calls, therefore, on
Russian society to come to terms with its tragic past;…
Here again, the perpetrator-victim pair pops up; creating room for
rapprochement, by the self-victimisation the discourse enables, or for
adversity, by stating that they have failed to reconcile with the past
and therefore remain as a perpetrator of sorts. Rather conveniently, the
ideology of totalitarianism, despite its flimsy historical foundations,
gives the EU ample room to manage Russia opportunistically, while
always being on sound moral foundations.
As unmistakably vain as the declaration is, it does lead one to
question what the historical foundations actually are for the European
Project, if it is truly is the culmination of the continent’s history
that it would lead you to believe. In any case, one probably should not
go looking in their resolutions for that.
Written by Inge Erdal
Bibliography
EU resolution
European Parliament resolution on the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe (18.09.2019), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2019-0097_EN.html [Accessed 18.11.2020].
Literature
Brown, Archie. The Rise and Fall of Communism. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2009.
Christofferson, Michael Scott. French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s. Oxford: Berghahn Books,2004.
Furet, François. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Isaac, Jeffrey C., ‘Critics of Totalitarianism’ in Terence Ball (ed.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Traverzo, Enzo. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
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