By AZAR GAT
Liberal–parliamentary Britain was the first industrial nation, after already figuring among the pioneers of commercial capitalism during early modernity. There was a close connection, and well recognized at the time, among all these aspects of her evolution. And during much of the nineteenth century, as Britain’s epoch-making leap into modernity was transforming the world and commanding universal attention, her model constituted the paradigm against which all future development would be judged. No less than admiration and envy, this paradigm inspired deep apprehension and resistance, both within and outside the west. The disappearing virtues of traditional society were widely lamented, contrasted with the alienating rule of mammon. Traditional agrarian elites and autocratic regimes feared the inevitable loss of power. However, rejection of industrialization and its corollaries would have meant a hopeless falling behind in terms not only of wealth but also of inter-state power, as experienced by the Ottoman and Chinese Empires, the very existence of which became jeopardized. This realization was starkly expressed in the slogan of the Meiji reformers–revolutionaries who put an end to the Tokugawa regime in Japan: ‘rich country and a strong army.’ Thus nineteenth-century conservative–autocratic European great powers east of the Rhine, such as Germany, Austria, and Russia, as well as Japan, and many other countries— then and later—sought to embrace industrialization and carry out the necessary social and political reforms that went with it, while also preserving as much as possible their autocratic–aristocratic regimes and traditional values.
The inherent tensions, if not contradictions, within that programme were—and have since been—acutely felt by the old elites, making them variably pessimistic about the success of their ‘rearguard’ action. Whether or not such sociopolitical regimes could have survived and prospered in some powerful and advanced industrial societies (such as Germany, Russia, and Japan) without necessarily converging into the liberal model cannot be told, because this historical experiment was cut off by war and the rise of totalitarianism that mainly replaced autocratic–conservative regimes in their home countries. Rooted in modern developments, the new totalitarian regimes claimed to be more in line with modernity than either old conservatism or parliamentary liberalism, and were far more militant.
In either its left- or right-wing brands (the differences are addressed later), totalitarianism was a distinctly new type of regime, different from earlier historical autocracies and becoming possible only with the advent of the twentieth century. It was rooted in what contemporaries since the late nineteenth century universally and acutely felt to be the defining development of their time that we now take for granted: the emergence of mass society. Nothing compared in the social consciousness of the time with the prominence of this new reality: to repeat, the crowding of semi-educated masses—until then dispersed in the countryside out of sight and out of mind—in the metropolitan centres of power, where they could no longer be ignored. Henceforth, any regime had to be a ‘popular’ regime, that is, derive legitimacy from one form or another of mass consent. As a result, old liberal parliamentarism was itself transformed. Historically suspicious of the masses, apprehensive that political equality would threaten individual liberty and private property, and limiting the franchise to the propertied classes, it was now obliged to democratize. By the 1920s universal franchise had become the norm in liberal–parliamentary societies. Liberal democracy came into being, a hybrid that was almost as novel as the totalitarian regimes that emerged during that same time.
Already in the nineteenth century, more advanced communications— newspapers, the railway, and electric telegraph—gave rise to popular plebiscitean autocracy on a country scale, akin to the popular brand of tyranny that until then had been mostly limited to city-states. Pioneered by Napoleon I but exemplified by Napoleon III in France, it is labelled Bonapartism or Caesarism. By the twentieth century yet newer breakthroughs in communication technology further enhanced mass society, even in countries that lagged behind in urbanization. To the popular press were added cinema (and newsreels) and, by the 1920s, radio, with their reach into remote corners of a country. Telephone and the automobile gave police a similar reach within hours if not minutes. Controlling and harnessing mass education and mass media, and suppressing all opposition to a degree as yet not known, the new totalitarian regimes assumed unprecedented control over both public and private spheres, achieving very high levels of material and spiritual mobilization, in contrast to traditional despotism.58
Indeed, although massive and ruthless terror was central for achieving social mobilization and obedience, terror alone, as in the past, would never have been sufficient for generating the sort of fanatical commitment exhibited by most totalitarian societies. A sweeping popular ideological creed was indispensable for firing and motivating the masses, for eliciting the sense of participation in something that concerned them directly and deeply, without which true mobilization has never been possible. Comprehensive ideologies of virtue and salvation—secular religions of conflicting brands— now largely replaced (or supplemented) older religious ideologies. On these grounds both left- and right-wing totalitarianism, led by a vanguard of the party elite, successfully claimed to be more truly representative of the people than parliamentary liberal democracy. Both offered a sweeping alternative to liberal ideology and society.
Communism rejected both the market system, with its social inequality and antagonist social relations, and liberal parliamentarism, which it regarded, even in its democratic forms, as a thin disguise for the actual rule of capital. It projected a salvationist vision based on social ownership and social planning that would liberate people from both material want and spiritual alienation. This was a most powerful mobilizing creed; yet if only because realities in communist regimes fell so short of the ideal, all communist regimes in time of crisis successfully evoked indigenous nationalism (which they had ideologically and officially dismissed) as the supreme mobilizing agent. Nationalism was, of course, the dominating theme in right-wing totalitarianism. Although retaining capitalism, right-wing totalitarianism aimed at recasting society in a radical antithesis to liberal society. Indeed, right-wing totalitarianism, too, represented nothing less than an out-and-out reaction and revolt against what was widely regarded as the ills of the liberal model: rampant capitalism; endemic social strife; divisive party politics; erosion of communal identity and sense of common purpose; alienating individualism; shallow materialism, lack of spirituality, and the disenchantment of life; and vulgar popular culture, humanitarian weakness, and decadence. Within the right-wing totalitarian mix, capitalism was to be efficiently regulated, the poor were to be provided for and disciplined, and a cohesive national community was to be created and infused with a sense of brotherhood and purpose—domestically and against outside rivals.59
As liberal democracy, fascism, and communism, the three great secular ideologies that vied among themselves over the question of how the new mass industrial society should be structured, each came to rule more than one of the great powers during the twentieth century, a new ideological rivalry, much more intense than anything experienced during the nineteenth century, reinforced old great power competition. This blending of ideology and power politics in the context of specific contingent circumstances produced various combinations. Communism was ideologically committed to the destruction of the capitalist world. At the same time, however, the Soviet leaders exhibited pragmatic cautiousness, because: the Soviet bloc was inferior in power to the capitalist world; they believed that that world was heading for inevitable internal collapse as a result of its inherent contradiction; and the huge Soviet Union was economically self-sufficient and its leaders believed that they could afford to bide their time. By contrast, both Nazi Germany and radicalizing imperial Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s manifested these countries’ acute sense of economic insufficiency within their narrow territorial confines, from which both regimes strove to break out once and for all by military means. In both countries, traditional warrior ethos and deep-rooted resistance to west European humanitarian liberalism now evolved into a cult of violence, belligerency, heroic sacrifice, and perpetual struggle for domination. Inextricably these were deemed both necessary for national survival and good in themselves.
The interrelationship between ideological rivalry and power politics was therefore intricate and mutually affecting. The great powers’ struggles assumed global dimensions because one’s span of control meant greater aggregate power—economic access and military force—which was also subtracted from or denied to the other. Obviously, as already seen with respect to the colonial race, some gains in the poorest parts of the world might actually prove to be a liability. Still, it was not always clear in advance which countries might develop into assets over time; the geography of security in terms of frontiers, troop disposition, and bases has an inherent tendency to expand; and considerations of morale and prestige militated against any loss, lest a ‘domino effect’ be created. Ideological antagonism, the carving out of the world economy, and the ‘security dilemma’ inevitably reinforced each other.
Within two decades of the Second World War, the west European liberal democratic powers lost their vast colonial empires in Asia and Africa. At the moment suffice it to say that this involved little fundamental loss for the liberal democracies in terms of power and wealth. Industrially undeveloped countries were of scant economic significance anyway; countries that successfully underwent industrialization, such as those of east Asia, were absorbed into the capitalist global economy (even though usually developing behind protectionist walls), while being shielded by western military power; and countries that possessed critical raw materials, most notably the oil-producing Persian Gulf states, were similarly shielded, while their domestic stability was fostered by the techniques of informal imperialism. It is erroneous, however, to hold, as many do on the basis of western experience, that conquest is untenable or does not pay under modern conditions. As an excellent recent study strikingly demonstrates, for non-liberal, especially totalitarian great powers in the twentieth century, wide-scale conquest proved tenable in both developed and undeveloped countries, while being highly advantageous in the former.60 Industrially developed countries (never ruled by liberal empires) were controlled by and incorporated within totalitarian empires with relative ease, once occupied. Although the conquered were mass societies imbued with a strong sense of nationalism, their complex and integrated modern economies made them highly susceptible to ruthless pressure, to the extent that occasional demonstration rather than actual application of such pressure was usually sufficient to keep them under the yoke.
The most notable case in point is the countries of north-western Europe, which Nazi Germany overran in 1940 and harnessed to her war economy almost as successfully as Germany’s own national economy. Compared with 1938, Germany’s economic–military power thereby increased by maybe a half by her western annexations alone.61 Germany controlled the more agrarian and economically less valuable countries of eastern and southeastern Europe with almost equal ease. Only in Yugoslavia and some occupied parts of the Soviet Union did resistance in difficult terrain prove more successful; yet, had Germany won the war and been able to apply more force to these troublesome spots, her genocidal and semi-genocidal methods would have most probably prevailed there too. From its inception, the Soviet Union suppressed the peoples of the old Russian Empire— Russians and non-Russians alike—with far greater brutality than its predecessor had ever done. It continued to do so more or less successfully also in the countries that it had occupied in eastern Europe during the Second World War, down to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc in 1989–91 for reasons other than the national. Only in desolate Afghanistan did the invading Soviet forces fail to curb local guerrilla resistance during the Empire’s wane. Imperial Japan was similarly able to develop and harness the economic potential of Taiwan (occupied in 1895), Korea (1905), and Manchuria (1931) under her rule, as she very likely would have been able to do throughout her ‘East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’ had her empire survived the Second World War.
Yet it was the liberal-democratic camp that emerged victorious from all of the three gigantic great power struggles of the twentieth century. What accounts for this decisive outcome? It is tempting to look for its roots in the special traits of the opposing systems, all the more so in a structural study such as this one. Did the liberal democracies more than compensate for their inferior repression capabilities abroad with a greater ability to elicit co-operation through the bonds—and discipline—of the global market system? This is probably true with respect to the Cold War but does not seem to apply to the two World Wars. Did liberal democracies succeed because ultimately they always stuck together? Again this may have applied mostly to the Cold War, when the democratic–capitalist camp was in any case greatly superior, while also profiting from the growing antagonism within the Communist bloc between the Soviet Union and China. During the First World War, however, the ideological divide was much weaker than it would later become. The Anglo-French alliance was far from preordained, being above all a function of the balance of power rather than the fruit of liberal co-operation. Only shortly earlier, power politics had brought these bitterly antagonistic countries to the brink of war and had made Anglo-German co-operation a strong possibility. Liberal Italy’s departure from the Triple Alliance and joining of the Entente despite her rivalry with France was a function of that realignment, as Italy’s peninsular location precluded conflict with the leading maritime power, Britain. During the Second World War, France was quickly defeated, whereas the right-wing totalitarian powers fought on the same side. Dedicated general studies of the alliance behaviour of democracies tally with these observations.62
If it was not the structure of their international behaviour, was it then inherent domestic advantages that gave the liberal-democratic great powers victory in the three great struggles of the twentieth century? Did the liberal democracies, despite their strong initial reluctance to engage in war and lower levels of peacetime mobilization, ultimately prove more effective in mobilization? All the belligerents in fact proved highly effective in mobilizing their societies and economies for total war. During the First World War conservative and semi-autocratic Germany committed her resources as intensively as her liberal-parliamentary rivals. After her victories during the initial stage of the Second World War, Nazi Germany’s economic mobilization proved lax and poorly co-ordinated during the critical years 1940–2. Well positioned at the time fundamentally to alter the global balance of power by destroying the Soviet Union and striding across all of continental Europe, Germany failed because her armed forces were meagrely supplied with the military hardware necessary for a task that proved to be far more demanding than expected.63 The reasons for this fateful failure are not easy to explain, but are at least partly attributed to structural problems of competing authorities inherent in Germany’s totalitarian regime. However, from 1942 on (when it became too late), Germany’s highly intensified mobilization levels caught up with and surpassed those of the liberal democracies (although not, of course, their production volume—that is, that of the USA). Imperial Japan’s levels of mobilization during the Second World War, and those of communist Soviet Russia, similarly grew higher than those of the liberal democracies by means of ruthless efforts. Indeed, one historian recently concluded that the totalitarian regimes demonstrated greater ability than the liberal democracies to mobilize for war, which gave them a considerable military advantage.64
Only during the Cold War did the Soviet communist economy exhibit deepening structural weaknesses, made all the more evident when compared with an increasingly sophisticated and globalizing market economy. Although excelling in the regimentalized techniques of military mass production during the Second World War and keeping abreast militarily during the Cold War, the Soviet system’s rigidity and inherent lack of incentives proved ill-equipped for coping with the more diversified economy of the information age. Ultimately, the Communist bloc practically dismantled itself, as both Communist China and the Soviet Union, independent of each other, progressively found their system inefficient, almost irrespective of their militarized conflict with the capitalist–democratic world.
By contrast, there is no reason to suppose that right-wing, capitalist, totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and imperial Japan would have proved similarly inferior. The inefficiencies that arise in such regimes from a lack of accountability and favouritism might very well have been offset by higher levels of social mobilization. Nor is there a good reason for the comforting belief that these brutal regimes (obviously Germany stands here far above Japan) would have collapsed because of their brutality, even if some future mellowing was certainly possible. Contrary to claims by some scholars, these regimes proved more inspiring than the democracies, and their soldiers, if anything, fought better. During the 1930s and early 1940s, fascism and Nazism were the exciting doctrines that generated massive popular enthusiasm, whereas the democracies stood on the defensive ideologically, appearing old and dispirited. While France collapsed like a pack of cards in 1940, Germany and Japan (and the Soviet Union) fought desperately to the last.65 As a result of their more efficient capitalist economies, the right-wing totalitarian powers, Germany and Japan (again, particularly the former), can now be judged to have constituted a more viable challenge to the liberal democracies than the Soviet Union; Nazi Germany was so judged by the western powers before and during the Second World War. It should be noted that the liberal democracies did not even possess an inherent advantage over Germany in terms of economic and technological development, as they did in relation to their other great power rivals.
In the end, the right-wing totalitarian powers were defeated in war simply because they came against a far superior but hardly preordained economic–military coalition that combined the liberal democracies and the communist Soviet Union (with the latter taking the brunt of the war during the most critical years). In the collapse of the communist world structural factors played a much greater role: whereas the capitalist camp, which in the wake of 1945 expanded to include all the rest of the developed world, possessed much greater infrastructural power than the Communist bloc, the inherent inefficiency of the communist economies prevented that bloc from ever catching up despite its potentially vast resources. Together the Soviet Union and China were potentially larger than the democratic–capitalist camp and, had they succeeded economically, other countries would have followed. Witness also the staggering difference in development between North and South Korea.
A generalized structural explanation of the success of the liberal democracies can also be misleading because of the small number of cases involved, which may suggest heightened contingency: only three liberal parliamentary great powers, the USA, Britain, and France (Italy during the First World War barely qualifies, particularly the status of great power); three conservative and variably autocratic great powers, Germany, Austro- Hungary, and (on the opposite side) Russia, during the First World War; two right-wing, capitalist, totalitarian great powers, Germany and Japan, during the 1930s and 1940s (Italy barely qualified, again mainly on the second count but arguably also for the totalitarian category, the application of which to the Second World War Japan also requires some stretching beyond the European models); and one communist great power, the Soviet Union (with China, more ambivalently, during the Cold War). Contingent factors may have played as significant a role as, or even a more significant role than, structural factors in causing the triumph of the capitalist liberal democracies and the demise of the totalitarian challengers. The most obvious and decisive of these contingent factors was the USA.
After all, it was little more than a chance of history that this scion of English liberalism would sprout on the other side of the Atlantic, institutionalize its liberal heritage with independence, and then expand across the most habitable territories of the Americas, thinly populated by tribal natives, while sucking in massive immigration from Europe. It was but a chance of history that by far the world’s largest concentration of economic–military power was thus created. Obviously, the liberal regime and other structural traits of the USA had a lot to do with that country’s economic success (consider Latin America) and even with its size, because of its attractiveness to immigrants; and yet, if the USA had not been located in a particularly fortunate and vast geographical–ecological niche, it would scarcely have achieved its great magnitude in population as well as territory, as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand demonstrate. And location, of course, although crucial, was not everything, but only one necessary condition among many for bringing about a giant and, indeed, united States as probably the paramount political fact of the twentieth century.
Thus, even if its liberal system was a crucial precondition for the gigantic growth of the USA, contingency was at least as responsible for the fact that it emerged at all in the newly discovered territories of the New World, and thereby would ultimately be there to ‘save the Old’. That huge power concentration, always greater during the twentieth century than the next two great powers combined, decisively tilted the global balance of power in favour of its allies. The liberal democracies possessed greater aggregate resources than their rivals because of that crucial fact as much as because of their advanced economies (which, again, were not more advanced than Germany’s). The victory of liberal democracy was anything but preordained in either 1914 or 1939, although it may have been more secure in 1945; yet, if any factor gave the liberal democracies their edge, it was above all the actual being of the USA rather than any inherent advantage of liberal democracy. This ‘United States factor’ is widely overlooked in studies of the victory of democracy during the twentieth century.66 Put differently, if it were not for the existence of the USA the liberal democracies would most probably have lost the great struggles of the twentieth century. This is a sobering thought, making the world created by these struggles appear much more contingent—and tenuous—than unilineal theories of development and the Whig view of history and Progress would have us believe.
58. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1958;
Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Of these two classic studies
Arendt rightly emphasizes the rise of mass society, while being less attentive
to the new communication technologies stressed by Friedrich and Brzezinski.
59. For a comprehensive bibliography, see Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War,
pp. 4–6; incorporated in id., A History of Military Thought, pp. 522–4.
60. The following is based on Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The exploitation
of occupied industrial societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996,
which is both refreshingly original and sound.
61. Ibid. p. 43; Harrison, The Economies of World War II, p. 7; I apply the same
compound of GNP and GNP per capita suggested previously.
62. The democratic success in war attracted considerable attention in the study of
international relations and is the subject of the following: Dan Reiter and Allan
Stam, Democracies at War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. I
agree with some of this book’s conclusions, among other things that alliances
were not the reason for the success, while differing with quite a few of its other
conclusions, as seen later. More on alliance choices: Randolph Siverson and
Julian Emmons, ‘Birds of a feather: Democratic political systems and alliance
choices’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1991; 35: 285–306; Michael Simon and
Erik Gartzke, ‘Political system similarity and the choice of allies’, Journal of
Conflict Resolution, 1996; 40: 617–35. For a summary of the literature, see Bruce
Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, interdependence, and
international organizations. New York: Norton, 2001, pp. 59–60, 66–8.
63. At times given to hyperbolic overstatements, Overy’s is the most focused
presentation of this point: Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won. New York:
Norton, 1996, Chapters 1, 6, and 7.
64. Ferguson, The Cash Nexus, p. 404; for the data, see also pp. 42–3, 46–8;
Harrison, The Economies of World War II, pp. 20–1, 47, 82–3, 88–9, 157–9, 257,
287. The high mobilization rates of modern authoritarian–totalitarian regimes
have also been noted by Mann, The Sources of Social Power, p. 60.
65. Overy’s suggestion (Why the Allies Won, Chapter 9) that the Allies were aided
by their holding of the moral high ground is belied by the telling quotation
that he chose as the motto for his chapter (p. 282). Although for better and for
worse highly statistical in nature, Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, conclude,
curiously without providing any evidence at all, that democracies proved
superior in war largely because democratic troops were better motivated and
therefore fought better than their rivals. At least with respect to the World
Wars, by far the most crucial for the fate of democracy, this conclusion finds
little support in reality.
66. For example, this factor is not specified among the reasons for the global gains
of democracy during the twentieth century in: Robert Dahl, On Democracy.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 163–5. Nor is it mentioned
in Ferguson, The Cash Nexus, Chapter 12, despite the chapter’s title ‘The
American wave: Democracy’s flow and ebb’ and his vision of future American
imperialism. Also, implicitly, Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism,
liberalism, and socialism. New York: Norton, 1997, pp. 269–70, 277. More confusingly,
Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, p. 136, although actually recognizing
that it was the participation of the USA that tilted the scales in both Europe
and the Pacific, reject this as an explanation for the democracies’ military
success with the curious comment that one should not generalize from a single
case, apparently not even if this ‘single case’ involves by far the greatest global
power, whose participation decided the twentieth century’s mightiest military
conflicts and the fate of democracy. By contrast, Huntington is well aware of
the international context, including the victories in the two World Wars,
although he does not discuss the reasons for the democracies’ victories in these
wars: Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma, 1991. And see Tony Smith,
America’s Mission: The United States and the worldwide struggle for democracy in the
twentieth century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, especially
pp. 10–12, 147.
