Broadening the Boundaries of Democracy

Broadening the Boundaries of Democracy

A EUROPE OF CONSTITUTIONS: THE LEFT ENTERS THE NATION

the years 191423 stand out in modern European history as an exceptional moment of general revolutionary upheaval, certainly comparable to the French Revolution and Na- poleonic Wars. This momentousness began with the sheer scale of the military violence of the Great War and the societal efforts needed to wage it. The combatant societies were traumatized both by the mass killing at the front and by the privations at home, re- quiring large changes at the wars end if so- cietys cohesion was to be salvaged. But if vic- tory in Britain and France brought significant reforms during 191819, defeat for Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany spelled social and political disintegration. First the Russian Revolution toppled the tsarist empire, un- leashing an extraordinary chain of radicali- zation between February and October 1917, bringing socialists to power. Then the German and Austro-Hungarian states collapsed amid massive popular insurgencies. By the fall of

1918, the multinational empires previously dominating central and eastern Europe were gone.

This outcome completed the nineteenth- century processes of state formation, dramat- ically furthered by the 1860s, which formed Europe into a system of nation-states. If the

1860s had brought Italy and Germany onto the map, this new bout of constitution- making added the so-called successor states of east-central Europe, the Baltic states, and the Irish Republic, while rationalizing borders in the Balkans. But this political settlement

didnt simply revise territorial relations among states; it also involved rev- olutionary transformation. Political instability was so acute in east-central Europe because territorial changes occurred amid the collapse of existing political authority. It proceeded not through the readjustment of existing borders but by the making of completely new states, whose internal social and political arrangements had to be built up from the ground.

While the socialist Left was strong in some of these new states, especially Czechoslovakia and Austria, in the rest it was quickly marginalized and in Hungary brutally suppressed. But the revolutionary turbulence of 1918 was a broader pan-European phenomenon, resulting from the generic conse- quences of the warboth from the interventionist war economy and as- sociated changes in state-society relations and from popular resistance to the oppressiveness of the sacrifices. From 1918 to the early 1920s, large- scale working-class insurgencies blazed across Europes social and political landscapefrom the main storm centers of German-speaking Europe and Italy to the more dispersed and sporadic turbulence of the rest of Europe and from Spain to the various borderlands of the former Russian Empire. Behind these revolutionary outbreaks was a common dialectic of the Lefts tense and incomplete political integration. On the one hand, state- economy and state-society relations, country by country, became pro- foundly reshaped via the demands of war, bringing organized interests into new corporatist collusion with the state and hugely expanding the latters demands on its citizenry. Union officials and moderate socialists reaped big benefits from brokering popular acquiescence in this process, bringing them for the first time into government orbit. On the other hand, by 191718 war weariness had severely damaged popular belief in the governments, propelling rising numbers into protests of increasingly radical temper. In this sense, the new patriotic unities forged in the summer of 1914the overpowering appeals to national loyalty and common sacrificeproved a double-edged sword. If those appeals had initially defused the Lefts radi- calism by drawing socialist parties and their unions into an unprecedented national consensus, they could also backfire, giving the Left new moral- political leverage once the inequities of the wars hardships grew too hard

to bear. Thus the war changed the Lefts place in the nation. Compared to pre-

1914, when even the strongest socialist parties were kept in opposition,

1918 brought them to the brink of governing. In Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia they briefly captured government itself, charged with sta- bilizing new democratic polities amid widespread working-class insur- gency.¹ Socialists were clearly the beneficiaries of universal suffrage, ex- panding their electorates and forming coalitions with other parties willing to accept democracy. The resulting changes went far beyond the modest parliamentary constitutions that had prevailed in Europe since the 1860s. While parliamentary sovereignty and civil freedoms remained basic to dem- ocratic citizenship, other gains were now added, from an emergent package

of social rights to changing definitions of the public sphere. Extraparlia- mentary social movements decisively sustained this process, ranging from the massive trade union growth and associated industrial militancy to womens movements of various kinds and a wide array of single-issue cam- paigns, many of them locally based.

Altogether, this brought a massive increment of reform. In a big part of Europe, the Left emerged with unprecedented positions of strength, not just in the earlier social democratic core of north-central Europe where so- cialist parties cleared 20 percent of the vote in prewar elections but also in states where socialist votes had lagged behind, like France, the Low Coun- tries, and Britain. Yet, as I have shown, this strengthening of the Left came not from any breakthrough to socialism, certainly not in Bolshevik terms. It depended on the enlargement of parliamentary democracyvia universal manhood, and sometimes womens, suffragelinked to stronger citizens rights, an opening outward of the public sphere, a pushing forward of social services, and clear protections for unions under the law.

Socialists had often disparaged such gains in the past, implying that

real emancipation could only come from abolishing capitalism or, worse, that bourgeois democracy was merely the fig leaf for capitalist oppres- sion and a mask for ruling-class power, functioning as the best possible political shell for capitalism, in Lenins phrase.² Yet where revolutionaries scorned these formal rights, democracy suffered grievously as a result. Strong legal protections were indispensable for the democratic potentials organized by the stronger social democracies of the 1920s, whether in Ger- many and Austria, Scandinavia, or many local strongholds elsewhere. The achievements of Red Vienna and its counterparts were not imaginable with- out protection of the law. This was apparent no less from the demise of the German and Austrian republics in 193334, which spelled the destruc- tion of those labor movements, than from the republics birth, which first brought them to plausible national leadership. Indeed, the failures of cen- tral European socialists to break through to socialism during the revolu- tions of 191819 mattered far less than the new democratic capacities and legal resources that the improved constitutional frameworks now supplied. In the political outcomes of 1918, there was a vital difference between military winners and losers. If the war brought a general toughening of the state across the combatant countries, by 191718 it had catastrophically weakened those states that were defeatednamely, the Russian, Austro- Hungarian, and German multinational empires. To them may be added Italy, technically on the winning side but experiencing this victory largely as defeat. In these cases, the wars final stages destabilized authority to the point of general dissolution when the war was lost, producing stronger popular mobilizations and greater measures of reform. Where existing states remained intact, on the other hand, enhanced by the prestige of a military victory, as in Britain and France, the settlements proved more mod-

est on both crucial counts, namely, a less complete extension of the fran- chise and a compromised social deal.

On one vital front of democracy, the gendered dimensions of citizenship, the settlements fell profoundly short. Measuring womens citizenship mainly by their capacities as mothers counteracted their admission to citi- zenship in the vote, undermining political equality and fixing them in the domestic sphere. By the 1930s, the postwar gains had in any case been erased in most of central and eastern Europe, while womens greater visi- bility in the labor market and the public sphere attracted a vicious antifem- inist backlash. In Catholic Europe, women hadnt even received the vote. There, socialist support for womens emancipation was at best ambivalent or lukewarm.

THE MEANING OF OCTOBER: BOLSHEVISM AND NATIONAL REVOLUTION

As socialists in the West struggled to assert themselves within parliamentary frameworks, sometimes bolstered and sometimes undermined by extrapar- liamentary movements, the Russian revolutionaries faced the more mo- mentous tasks of advancing socialist goals in the East. Indeed, as the Bol- sheviks emerged successfully from their Civil War during 191920, the complexities of postrevolutioonary state-building were already presenting their sympathizers elsewhere with an acute political dilemma. Western so- cialists were being urged not just to endorse the Bolsheviks policies and behavior inside Russia but to take these as the best political model for their own societies needs.

Bolshevik success in making their revolutionin seizing state power, winning the Civil War, and consolidating a socialist regimehas under- standably dominated perceptions of these revolutionary years in Europe. The chances of revolutionary change elsewhere have usually been judged against this Bolshevik model, which implied armed insurrection, leadership by a disciplined revolutionary party, extreme social polarization, collapse of the liberal center, and a pitched confrontation between the Left and the recalcitrant forces of the old order, ending in the dictatorship of the pro- letariat or some equivalent of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet of 1919. The strongest insurgencies elsewhere, like the Italian occupation of the fac- tories in fall 1920 or the German and Austrian revolutions in 191819, are then judged by their failure to generate scenarios of that kind.

However, the Bolshevik model of social polarization and successful in- surrection was not the only or even the dominant pattern of revolutionary change. The dramatic instances of violent militancy in Italy and central

Europe, which partially mirrored the Petrograd mass actions of 1917, shouldnt obscure their national specificities. In fact, the far commoner pat- tern was one in which the fear of Bolshevism inspired major reformist departures, either by forcing the hand of a nervous government or by en- couraging farsighted nonsocialist politicians into large-scale preemptive ges- tures. The interaction of working-class militancy, massive union growth, and extreme government anxieties provided the strongest impetus for rad- ical change in the immediate postwar years. And of course in some cases, most notably Germany and Austria, the scene was initially set by a genuine revolutionary uprising.

The strongest reformismsthose capable of further extension during the 1920swere precisely the ones with some guiding social democratic vision or intelligence, where the parties concerned could build on a strong prewar parliamentary tradition, effectively brokering the relations of gov- ernment and people. The German, Austrian, and Scandinavian socialist movements did this, reemphasizing once again the importance of the north- central European social democratic core. The more fragile reformisms, on the other hand, occurred in societies without this mediating social demo- cratic intelligence, where the main push for radical changes during 1918

20 came from the more transient pressure of the postwar union expansion, as in France and Britain.

In other words, in parliamentary Europethe existing constitutional states of the west and north, plus the new national republics of central Europe and the eastsocialist politics expressed not the extreme social polarization and insurrectionary confrontation coming from Russia but the Lefts impact on much broader sociopolitical coalitions. Here, revolutions involved the prosaic but decisive institutional gains denounced by the Bol- sheviks as meaningless reformismnamely, the full array of democratic gains in the franchise, union rights and labor laws, welfare measures, more generous civil rights, and the strengthening of the public sphere. In that case, the most inspirational element of 1917 for the rest of Europe was less the Bolshevik call for confrontation with bourgeois democracy than the affirmation of the rights of peoples to national self-determinationwhether by creating entirely new democratic republics or by bringing the people of existing states into their rightful inheritance. In this sense, we can find four types of revolutionary context.

Most immediately, the western and southern peripheries of the former Russian Empire, from the Baltic states and Finland through Ukraine to Transcaucasia, produced separate revolutionary processes in 191720, dis- tinct from the main Petrograd-Moscow axis of the Bolshevik revolution and each with their own dynamism and integrity. Second, there came be- tween 28 October and 9 November 1918 a separate central European se- quence of revolution, collectively no less significant than events in Russia. This erected new republican sovereignties on the ruins of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies in a chain linking Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,

German-Austria, Hungary, Poland, West Ukraine, and Germany, with the socialist Left as major actors. During the founding period, the main pattern in these successor states was one of new parliamentary polities with a strong Left presence.

Third, the Bolshevik revolution accelerated the early stirrings of anti- colonial nationalist revoltin the Middle East and Central Asia, China, India, and over the longer term Latin America, Southeast Asia, and South Africa. Here, Russias economic backwardness and the overwhelmingly agrarian context of the Bolshevik revolution supplied the resonance, combined with Lenins prioritizing of the principle of national self- determination during 191718. For the longer future, this surpassed Bol- shevisms impact in Europe itself. For the first time, between the February and October revolutions, delegations of various extra-European peoples began appearing at the international gatherings of the Left in their own right. This was a momentous change.

Finally, the main pattern in the established national states of northern and western Europe was one of revolutionary pressure from within the existing institutional frameworks, in a setting of densely organized civil societies and emergent democracy. Here, the radical Left certainly gener- ated much revolutionary heat and light, though on a far more sporadic and localized basis than in central Europe and the south. But the main changes came from the bending of governments to radical pressure, acceding reluc- tantly to the logic of democratic growth. The resulting sociopolitical pack- ages amounted to a renegotiated social contract, producing not just exten- sions of the franchise, union recognition, and social laws but the toughening of civil society and the enhancement of the public sphere. In Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Britain, Switzerland, and France, this cre- ated a legitimate and structural place for the Left. Compared to the pre-

1914 situations, this was also a momentous change.

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND COMMUNISM: A HOUSE DIVIDED

Bolshevism overturned socialist assumptions about how revolution would occur. Second International theorists had expected it to come naturally, after ever-sharpening polarization of society and the amassing of unstop- pable working-class majorities in elections. Even as more apocalyptic vi- sions tacitly receded, most pre-1914 socialists still nourished this belief: capitalist accumulation would eventually make the economy ripe for so- cialist control, and once socialists dominated parliament it would fall log- ically into their grasp.

Democracy was essential here, both in allowing the socialist movement to grow and in delivering the mechanisms for bringing economies under control. In Germany, therefore, which contained Europes most dynamic

capitalism and most prestigious socialist party, everything seemed to de- pend on replacing the imperial governing structures with a full-scale par- liamentary republic. Once that democratic revolution was won, the gov- erning socialists could turn to socializing the economy, bringing its private power under public control and redistributing its abundance. In that sense, the German changes of fall 1918, and their equivalents in Austria and elsewhere, brought the long-awaited scenario to fruition. Yet there were three problems.

For one thing, pre-1914 social democrats systematically shied away from considering the issues involved in the actual exercise of power at the national level.³ They entered government in 191819 ill-equipped for de- cisive action and with no program for moving to socialism. Worse, they did so in Austria and Germany amid the chaos of national military defeat, where practical emergencies of food supply, epidemic disease, lawlessness, and demobilizing the troops overshadowed thoughts of socialist construc- tion, which in any case were increasingly consigned to rhetoric. Governing socialists, from the right-wing steadfastness of Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann in Germany to Otto Bauers troubled leftism in Austria, con- centrated on managing an orderly transition to elections, so that new con- stitutions could be written, the revolutions gains be approved by a grateful electorate, and the social democrats be duly elected, after which the real business of reform could begin.

Unfortunately, neither the SPD nor the SPO secured a lasting popular mandate, and by 1920 they were back in opposition. While the fundamen- tal democratic gains remained and vital enabling laws were passed, social democrats had failed to seize their time. The more radical spirits continued to advocate structural progress toward socialism, particularly those intel- lectuals schooled in Marxism and visionary cultural theorists. Their move- ments still pushed on the frontier of reform, especially in the economy and welfare state. But now change was pressed from within existing frame- works, and socialists spent their time increasingly defending the 1918 gains. Henceforth, socialist politics shriveled back into the parliamentary sphere, limiting any action to the new machineries of social administration and public education, forms of trade union corporatism, and ritual displays of movement support. Revolutionary expectations were shed.

This was a definitive constitutionalizing of social democracy. Its ef- fects were not entire and immediate, because most socialist parties retained wider cultures of militancy during the interwar years, with major upswings of extraparliamentary activism from time to time, especially during the Popular Front campaigning against the rise of fascism in the mid-1930s. But the shift to moderation had a strong and definite logic, capturing the official strategies of the parties concernedLabour in Britain, the SPD and SPO , the socialist parties of Switzerland, the Low Countries, and France. Only in Scandinavia did socialist parties keep a more open relationship to projects of structural transformation.

Second, however, this embracing of a strictly constitutional approach to further reform, which tied changes to the unambiguous verdicts of elec- tions, had to be forced through against the racing revolutionary desires of a burgeoning extraparliamentary movement. It was this doubled quality that defined the new social democracynot only its readiness to become a responsible party of government, cooperating with other parties and observing constitutional channels, but also its willingness to police any wider-reaching militancy, if necessary by suppressing revolutionary oppo- nents by force. This trapped social democrats into alliances with the dom- inant classes, stymied their radical will, and constantly pitted them against the very popular movements they had always claimed to represent. The most egregious case was the SPD, which repeatedly preferred the priorities of order over the endorsement of popular democratic energies, from its maneuvering in November 1918 itself through the suppression of the Spar- tacist Rising and the socialization campaigns in early 1919 to the repression of the renewed popular militancy that defeated the Kapp Putsch in 1920. Thirdand this was the really disastrous consequence of social democ- racys defense of law and orderthe extraparliamentary militancy of the revolutionary years was captured by a new rival on the Left, the freshly established Communist parties aligned with the Bolsheviks in Russia. So it was not just that social democrats condemned rank-and-file militancy and used troops to put it down, in other words; it was also that Communists

were now waiting to give such militancy voice. In fact, many socialists expressed acute misgivings at the rightward drift as it first occurred. Discouraged by the mood of anti-Bolshevism, some larger parties seceded from the Second International in late 1919, including the German USPD and the Austrian, Swiss, French, and Norwegian parties, joining the Italian Socialists who had left it in March. These departures reassembled the broader Zimmerwald grouping from 191617, suggesting that Lenins goal of reuniting revolutionaries around the nucleus of the Third International was in sight. To further this, Lenin published Left- Wing CommunismAn Infantile Disorder in spring 1920, which, by crit- icizing the ultra-Lefts extreme revolutionism sought to make the Com- munist parties into more attractive rallying points for disaffected socialists.⁴

Then, as the pan-European turbulence approached its height, the Twenty-One Conditions were adopted as the entrance ticket to the Third International, as a litmus test of revolutionary seriousness. By setting such stringent rules for joining, including extreme centralism of organization, the expulsion of pacifists and other heterodox radicals, and a willingness to submit to the discipline of the Third Internationals Executive, these Conditions played a vital part in defining the kind of movements the pu- tative Communist parties could become. Between October 1920 and Jan- uary 1921, substantial CPs were created by splitting existing socialist par- ties in Germany, France, and Italy (USPD, SFIO, and PSI); the Norwegian Labor Party joined the new International; there were mass CPs in Bulgaria

and Czechoslovakia; and a significant affiliate existed in Finland, though partially underground. In Britain and Ireland, the Low Countries, Denmark and Sweden, Switzerland, Iberia, and the rest of eastern Europe, on the other hand, CPs could only be established on a marginal basis.

The fateful significance of this new division cannot be overemphasized. If the ground was laid for distinctively revolutionary parties, these were held to a new standard of international conformity that contrasted starkly with the frustrating but capacious pluralism of the past. Of course, the breakdown of tolerance and an increasingly embittering divisiveness al- ready dated from the war, driven as much by right-wing social democrats as by the future Bolsheviks, and the counterrevolutionary violence of 1918

20 then whipped this further along. Moreover, the rampant adventurism of the new radicalisms exploding across industrial Europe made some de- cisive initiative to shape that militancy almost inevitable. Certainly by late

1920, as the Soviet regime became marooned in isolation and revolutionary activism contracted in the West, some means of stabilizing the far Left was urgently needed.

This didnt yet mean crude uniformity of line. In 192123, some Com- munists continued cooperating with other parts of the Left, especially in the large German and Czechoslovak parties, helped by the policy of United Front approved by the Third Internationals Fourth Congress in December

1922.⁵ By the Fifth Comintern Congress in July 1924, though, the collapse of Communist support in Europe tightened the pressure for conformity. A new policy of Bolshevization was adopted, which dragooned the CPs toward stricter bureaucratic centralism. This flattened out the earlier di- versity of radicalisms, welding them into a single approved model of Com- munist organization. Only then did the new parties retreat from broader Left arenas into their own belligerent world, even if many local cultures of broader cooperation persisted.⁶ Respect for Bolshevik achievements and defense of the Russian Revolution now transmuted into dependency on Moscow and belief in Soviet infallibility. Depressing cycles of internal rectification began, disgracing and expelling successive leaderships, so that by the later 1920s many founding Communists had gone. This process of coordination, in a hard-faced drive for uniformity, was finalized at the next Congress of the Third International in 1928.

Thus the extraordinary hopes of the years 191723 ended in disap- pointment. The Lefts exuberant breakout from prewar isolation had cul- minated in a rigidly policed standoff between mutually hostile camps: an avowedly reformist social democracy, certainly committed to strengthening democratic goods but aggressively rejecting any greater radicalism and jeal- ously guarding its new influence; and a dourly revolutionary Communism, digging itself down into redoubts of proletarian militancy, bitterly denounc- ing social democrats for betraying the revolution, and uncritically uphold- ing Soviet superiority. At the core of this divisiveness was the defining ex- perience of the revolutionary years themselves. On the one hand, social

democrats had refused to harness the momentum of a tremendous demo- cratic upsurge and on the contrary had endorsed its suppression; on the other hand, angry and fragmented working-class militancies, whose best impulses were thereby demonized and traduced, took their succor in Com- munism.

Under the circumstances, the new Communist parties discharged a dif- ficult task remarkably wellnamely, shaping the disorderly and localized radicalisms of the postwar years into lasting form by creating a focused continuity out of their revolutionary restlessness. But this also narrowed and simplified the possible trajectories, imposing an approved pattern whose rigidity was only sharpened by social democracys unbending anti- Communism. The popular democratic optimism of the revolutionary years became broken and demoralized in these pincers: revolution was first de- feated in the West; and its mantle was then captured by an ever-rigidifying Bolshevism. If 191723 was an exceptional time, a unique moment of pan- European insurrectionary revolution never to be repeated, then one of its consequencesthe split in socialismhad permanent twentieth-century effects.

STABILIZATION AND THE

WAR OF POSITION on 15 july 1943, Jacob Gens, Jewish dic- tator of the Vilna ghetto, met with the leaders of the United Partisans Organization (FPO), the ghettos underground resistance move- ment. While banking on ruthless compliance with Nazi demands to secure whatever Jewish survival was possible, Gens had been keeping lines open to the FPO from cynical self- interest of his own. The FPO dated from Jan- uary 1942, when the ghettos Communists and main Zionist groupings made common cause in preparing armed resistance. Finding agreement had not been easy: on the ghettos formation in September 1941 existing politi- cal leadership collapsed, and prewar enmities could only be painstakingly handled. The in- itiatives came from younger men and women, especially Abba Kovner (born 1918), who was in many ways the FPOs leading inspira- tion, even though a respected and somewhat older Communist, Itzhak Witenberg (born

1909), was made commander, partly because of his Communist contacts outside the ghetto. Unbeknownst to the FPO, Gens had a hid- den motive for calling the meeting. Some weeks before, the Nazis had broken the Com- munist underground cell in the city and se- cured knowledge of its contacts with Witen- berg inside the ghetto, though without suspecting his role in the FPO or even the ex-

istence of a Jewish fighting organization. On 8 July they demanded that Gens surrender Witenberg, who meanwhile had gone into hiding. Unable to fend the Nazis off any longer, Gens tricked the FPO Command into coming to his residence and had Witenberg arrested.

Events now moved very fast. Alerted independently to what was happen- ing, an FPO detachment ambushed the Lithuanian police escorting Witen- berg, who escaped into hiding. The remaining FPO leaders reconvened with Witenberg and agreed to defend him, if necessary by force. At 3 a.m. Gens addressed his ghetto police and the so-called shtarke (strong ones, the underworld thugs he used for coercing the ghetto), accusing Witenberg and the Communists of bringing the general population into danger. Unless Wi- tenberg was handed over, he claimed, the Nazis would liquidate everyone. The shtarke proceeded to attack the FPO refuge, backed by larger crowds whipped up by the police. The FPOs situation became impossible. They could only protect Witenberg and launch an uprising by firing first on their fellow Jews. Gens had successfully isolated Witenberg against the mass of the ghetto (by that stage some 20,000 inhabitants), who felt themselves imper- iled by his links to Communists outside. The Nazis now issued their own ul- timatum: surrender Witenberg alive, or they would enter the ghetto.

Gens sent a delegation of ghetto notables to negotiate directly with the FPO. After tortured discussions, the latter decided that Witenberg must surrender, a decision also reached earlier by the Communist group. Amid further anguish, after exploring all possible options, Witenberg agreed. Af- ter meeting personally with Gens, he was escorted to the ghetto gate, where the Nazis were waiting. It was the evening of 16 July. Overnight he com- mitted suicide with cyanide supplied by Gens.¹

Living under Nazi occupation during 193945 imposed intolerable de- cisions on Europes citizens, in ways becoming ever more brutalized and atrocious the further to the east one looks, reaching their unimaginable worst for the Jews. Political decisions were simultaneously elevated and compromisedreduced on the one hand to the most basic issues of every- day survival and infused with the most complex and momentous ethical meanings on the other. In the Vilna ghetto, any of the courses available to the Judenratmeeting Nazi demands in order to modify them, selecting certain categories of people for deportation over others, distributing welfare to the poor rather than radically collectivizing resources, and so onin- volved heavy moral expenditure.² The most useful of the ghetto leaderships protective measures, like the assigning of work papers, involved harming some to benefit others. No one was untouched by these dilemmas. Con- straints on ethical behavior were unimaginably hard. As Kovner, Witen- berg, and their comrades knew, the very act of resistance invariably pe- nalized ones immediate fellows rather than helping them. Success was minimal, reprisals ferocious.

Witenbergs dilemma was replicated endlessly across Europe. For ex- ample, Hanna Levy-Hass, a teacher in Montenegro, was active in the Yugo-

slav Communist underground when war broke out. When the Germans moved into the area formerly occupied by their Italian allies in the fall of

1943, she found herself in the village of Cetinje among 30 other Jews. She was preparing to join the Communist resistance in the mountains, when a deputation of three young Jews arrived. Can your conscience, they asked,

bear the thought that in order to go and join the partisans, you will be sacrificing thirty other people? If you go, we shall all be shot. She stayed, was imprisoned with the rest, and in the summer of 1944 was deported to Bergen-Belsen, where she barely survived.³

The rise of fascism in Europe not only put the democratic gains of the post-1918 period into jeopardy but threatened civilized human values per se. Defeating Nazism required not only the international anti-Hitler alliance but also a new breadth of coalition building for the defense and furtherance of democracy inside European societies, for which the growth of antifascist resistance during 194345 became the sign. Much as the Vilna ghetto fight- ers found common cause in the FPO, all across Europe Communists, so- cialists, radicals of many hues, liberals, and Christians proved willing to bury their enmities in the higher cause. A new democratic momentum de- veloped as a resulta less sectarian and more generous Communism, in- spired by ideas of national roads to socialism rather than the all-valid Bolshevik model; a reradicalized socialism; a liberalism more reconciled to democracys specific claims; and a Christian Democracy urgently repudi- ating the compromised and collaborationist conservatisms of the past.

These new formations were animated by a palpable shift in popular attitudes. As they emerged from the horrors of the war, Europes citizens expected better worlds to be built. There was enormous tiredness, relief, and a desire for the normal, the return of the predictable and reassuring everyday. But there was also great elation, an optimism, a belief in reach- able futures. There was a spirit in Europe, as the title of one idealistic tract put it.⁴ This was connected to the privations endured during the

1930s. These were partly politicalWitenberg had been active in the trade union movement, chairing the Leather Workers Union, with long experi- ence in the Polish Communist underground; his fellow Communist in the FPO Command, Sonia Madeysker (born 1914), had spent eight years in Polish prisons.⁵ But for the mass of Europeans a sense of righteous entitle- ment also fed on the Depressions social miseries. Europes post-1945 po- litical cultures fused both these powerful memories: sacrifices in common struggle and inequalities that were patently unjust.

by contrast with 18711914, when European peace was broken mainly by colo- nial violence overseas, 191839 was a time ofrevolutionary and counterrevolutionary strife, civil war, unprecedented economic de- pression, and renewed social polarization. State terror and acute international tension culminated in the Second World War and the genocidal destruction ofpeoples. But one huge fact stands out: 191721 was the last pan-European uprising ofthe peoples, a chain reaction ofbarricade revolutions on the classic nineteenth-century model, in which old regimes toppled and new orders promised to take their place. Particular insurgencies happened later onthe Spanish and French Popular Fronts in 1936, Balkan resistance struggles in the Second World War, the Hun- garian uprising of1956, the May events in Paris in 1968, the Portuguese Revolution of