Postmark Europe

Mark Mazower, a young British historian, deliberately chose a provocative title for his account of modern Europe. “Dark Continent” commonly referred to Africa in the 19th century because so much of it was unknown, mysterious, harmful and far from the civilized norms that Europeans thought they could take for granted. But Europe’s 20th century was dark indeed, and though at its end there is hope and a sense that right did prevail, the success of freedom was never guaranteed. Assuming that democracy had to win, that today’s results were inevitable, is an example of how ideology distorts understanding and can be dangerous.

“Today a different kind of history is needed--less useful as a political instrument but bringing us closer to past realities--which sees the present as just one possible outcome of our predecessors’ struggles and uncertainties,” Mazower writes in his preface. He has performed a necessary, vital service. Despite the monuments, the films, the exhortations to honor the memory of victims, the complexity of the past is being forgotten. It is being reduced to false simplicity.

The facts of the Holocaust, for example, remain starkly vivid, but factors such as why the Nazis came to power, what their aim was, what their chances were and how much support they had are at risk of becoming obscure. There is a tendency to blame Hitler’s madness, some kind of collective German character flaw or an economic aberration, so that lucid analysis and recognition of deeper, more widespread, more distressing causes are avoided.

When then-President Ronald Reagan visited Bitburg, a German military cemetery from World War II, in 1985, he was criticized because there were almost 50 SS members among the war dead that he was honoring with reconciliation. But much worse than the sheer fact of the visit was the speech Reagan made in which he said that all these young men lost their lives because of one madman. This is a gross falsehood and the kind of twisted history that can make it easier for history to be repeated.

Mazower shows clearly how humiliations in the aftermath of World War I made Germans find Nazi promises appealing. It didn’t seem crazy to listen to fascists as they offered social services that the democrats ignored. Similar fascist movements began to emerge all over Europe in countries that were both victorious and vanquished in World War I.

“Like it or not, both fascism and communism involved real efforts to tackle the problems of mass politics, of industrialization and social order; liberal democracy did not always have all the answers,” Mazower notes. “It was not preordained that democracy should win out over fascism and communism, just as it remains still to be seen what kind of democracy Europe is able and willing to build.” Mazower’s book is a chronicle of “narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, not inevitable victories and forward marches.”

Now that the rubble of the collapse of communism, the other major 20th century ideology, is inescapable, the same is true about the communists. It is being forgotten that the strength of communism wasn’t only its police and propaganda. It did inspire true believers, it did deliver egalitarian satisfactions, and it did offer glimpses of noble vision. Nor was it only the totalitarian systems that deceived and disappointed. Capitalism and democracy also brought painful failures at various points in Europe’s century. Without understanding the allure of the utopias that eventually sank, it is scarcely possible to understand the challenge facing democrats in their attempt to preserve freedom. That is also why such resistance must continue. Scapegoats and demon theories drain away the substance of the real intellectual and social struggles that took place.

Much of Europe’s 20th century was so awful, so dangerous to the sheer survival of decent society, that it is imperative to learn its lessons. Mazower peels away the comforting myths and shows what went wrong and, more surprisingly, what went right in postwar Western Europe. After 1,000 years of major wars, affecting practically every generation, Western Europe achieved a real basis for peace and prosperity. This has been an extraordinary transformation of a culturally complex continent and offers hope that other lands will also emerge from what seemed the traps of history.

“Dark Continent” makes clear that communism’s own incapacities brought it down, although there was a time when its material challenge (Nikita Khrushchev’s “We will bury you”) was taken seriously. Mazower is weaker on his analysis of the implosion of the Soviet bloc and of the Soviet state itself than he is on the factors that led to the rise of both communism and fascism and the defeat of the latter. But at least he doesn’t dabble with simplistic theories--like Reagan’s Star Wars as the key to victory--and points out that, hard as they were to discern beneath the totalitarian surface, the weaknesses were accumulating until the structure could not sustain itself.

The emergence from dictatorship doesn’t help much to explain the severe, persistent trouble Russia is having today. It is true, as a Russian reformer pointed out recently, that for Eastern Europe the end of communism was a national liberation, while for Russia it was a collapse of empire and therefore could not bring the surge of energy that can accompany a sense of national fulfillment.

It can be argued that Russia’s reforms haven’t worked for a variety of specifically Russian historical reasons, or that the leadership never permitted them to be consistently and effectively carried out. So far the reforms haven’t worked, and life for most people is getting even worse. This can no longer be seen as a transition problem but must be recognized as a warning of real danger ahead. The parallel with Weimar Germany is haunting.

But Mazower focuses more on the Europe that is uniting and seeking solace and promise in its great new institutions: a NATO offering collective security and not just territorial defense; a European Union not only containing the strength of Germany but also guaranteeing the rights of smaller states. He sees it as the result of ideological exhaustion, not as the triumph of a better set of ideas. “Europeans accept democracy because they no longer believe in politics,” he says, explaining this enigma with the many signs of political apathy and wide variety of accommodation of regimes from left to right, from “grass-roots politics of Switzerland to near-dictatorship in post-communist Croatia.”

Mazower finds this quite acceptable, perhaps because of a particularly English skepticism as to whether Europe can ever really unite and combine its resources. “As the century ends, the international outlook is more peaceful than at any time previously,” he writes. “If Europeans can give up their desperate desire to find a single, workable definition of themselves and if they can accept a more modest place in the world, they may come to terms more easily with the diversity and dissension which will be as much their future as their past.”

Here I disagree. Europe isn’t becoming a nation like the United States, but it is growing and inventing a new form of multicultural community with enormous strength. It has found a way to transcend its past. This is a useful, important book that reminds us, at the right time, how hard it has been, and how much care must be taken to avoid the terrible old temptations.