Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century 9781400885329

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AF TE R S H OCKS

PRINCETON STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS Series Editors G. John Ikenberry, Marc Trachtenberg, and William C. Wohlforth For a full list of books in this series, see http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/psihp.html

Recent Titles Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century by Seva Gunitsky Why Wilson Matters: The Origin of American Liberal Internationalism and Its Crisis Today by Tony Smith Powerplay: The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia by Victor D. Cha Economic Interdependence and War by Dale C. Copeland Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations by Keren Yarhi-­Milo Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict by Vipin Narang The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics by Marc Trachtenberg Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order by G. John Ikenberry Worse Than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia by Thomas J. Christensen Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft by Peter Trubowitz The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510–2010 by John M. Owen IV

Aftershocks Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century Seva Gunitsky

PRINCETON UNIVE RSIT Y PRESS P R I N C E TO N A N D OX F O R D

Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket image: “Gardening amid ruins in front of the Reichstag,” 1947. © David Seymour / Magnum Photos All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-­0-­691-­17233-­0 ISBN (pbk.) 978-­0-­691-­17234-­7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963000 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Text Pro and Gotham Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  vii Preface and Acknowledgments  ix 1

Introduction: A Century of Shocks and Waves  1

2

From Crests to Collapses: The Sources of Failure in Democratic Waves  33

3

The Alchemy of War  60

4

A Low Dishonest Decade  101

5

Two Ways of Life  152

6

The Winds from the East  198

7

Conclusion: Beyond the Great Plateau  231 Appendix 1: Regime Classifications, 1900–2000  245 Appendix 2: Regime Impositions  247 Bibliography  253 Index  279

v

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 1.1. Global levels of democracy, 1900–2000

2

1.2. Communist and fascist shares of global power, 1900–2000

3

1.3. Causal mechanisms linking hegemonic shocks to regime waves

5

1.4. Average hegemonic volatility, 1900–2000

9

1.5. Impositions of their own regimes by great powers, 1900–200014 1.6. External impositions, 1900–2000, classified by type

15

2.1. Hegemonic shocks as drivers of democratic “overstretch”

35

2.2. The number of closed autocracies, hybrid regimes, and liberal democracies, 1970–2000

42

2.3. The interaction of counterwave forces in Kenya

51

3.1. The postwar democratic wave, 1900–1930 (Polity IV)

62

4.1. The hegemonic shock of the Great Depression

103

4.2. The fascist wave: global proportion of fascist states, 1930–1945104 4.3. Latin American trade with Nazi Germany, 1933–1938

145

5.1. North and South Korean GDP, 1990–2007

154

5.2. North and South Korean GDP, 1946–2007

155

5.3. Soviet share of hegemonic power, 1930–1960

158

5.4. American share of hegemonic power, 1930–1960

161

5.5. The communist wave

164

5.6. The number of communist states as a proportion of all states in the international system

165

5.7. The second democratic wave

178

vii

viii I llu s tr ati o n s

5.8. The number of democratic states as a proportion of all states in the international system

179

6.1. Average level of democracy in sub-­Saharan Africa, 1980–2000 (Polity IV)

213

6.2. Factors contributing to the African democratic wave of the 1990s222 Tables 1.1. Hegemonic Shocks and Regime Outcomes in the 20th Century

10

3.1. Female Suffrage Expansion, 1917–1924

86

4.1. German Trade with Southeastern Europe, 1933 and 1939

143

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is about the evolution of the modern state. Unlike most theories of domestic change, I examine twentieth-­century state transformations through the prism of major global cataclysms. I argue that the success and failure of modern regimes—most notably democracy, but also fascism and communism—have hinged on the outcomes of tectonic clashes between great powers. These hegemonic shocks, or moments of abrupt rise and decline of leading states, create waves of domestic reforms that sweep across borders and deeply alter the paths of state development. As a result, domestic change during the twentieth century often cannot be explained by the particularities of local revolts from below or elite concessions from above. Instead, regime reform was often embedded in a broader global process—a decades-­long confrontation between hegemonic rivals who embodied and promoted competing regime types. Transformations of the international system, not just the internal attributes of states, have been major and often underexamined drivers of globe-­ spanning regime change. By linking hegemonic shocks to institutional waves, this book combines two strands of scholarship that have remained largely apart—the literature on great power transitions in international relations, and the literature on democratization in comparative politics. Power transition theory has generally neglected the effects of hegemonic transitions on domestic institutions, focusing instead on the causes of major wars and their effects on the foreign policy of great powers.1 The study of democracy, by contrast, has traditionally been the province of comparative scholars who explore the domestic dynamics of regime change, focusing on internal factors like economic development, civil society, or class relations. As this book shows, the synthesis of these two large bodies of work can help us understand domestic transformations from a truly global perspective. In the course of writing the book I have drawn upon a number of primary sources such as memoirs, newspapers, and government documents. This book, 1. Ikenberry 2000 is a partial exception, focusing on the effects of hegemonic transitions on global orders rather than on domestic reforms. The classic texts are Organski 1958 and Gilpin 1981. See also Friedman and Chase-­Dunn 2005 and W. Thompson 2009. ix

x P r e fac e a n d Ac k n ow le d g m e nt s

however, is primarily a work of theoretical synthesis rather than original history, and therefore relies upon a vast secondary literature that cannot be properly covered in a single volume. My goal here, however, is not to offer a synoptic history of the twentieth century but to present a specific theoretical lens through which this turbulent period can be reimagined. Focusing on hegemonic shocks and institutional waves is only one of many ways to examine the evolution of global politics since World War I. Parts of the book appeared as an article in International Organization in 2014 (“From Shocks to Waves: Hegemonic Transitions and Democratization in the Twentieth Century” International Organization 68(3): 561–97, copyright © The IO Foundation). These parts are reprinted here with permission from Cambridge University Press. The article used a number of statistical tests to demonstrate that shifts in hegemonic power have a strong effect on the likelihood and content of domestic reforms. This influence remained strong even when accounting for other factors associated with regime type, such as economic growth, institutional history, and neighborhood diffusion. In this book I focus on historical case studies linking hegemonic shocks to domestic transformations, but readers interested in the quantitative component of the argument are welcome to refer to the article. This book began as a dissertation at Columbia University, where I received invaluable guidance and support from Jack Snyder, Kenneth Waltz, Tanisha Fazal, and Robert Jervis. Ken Waltz was an inspiration not just through the clarity and power of his work but also through his constant generosity of spirit. Parts of the book were completed during a fellowship at Princeton University, where Mark Beissinger and Andreas Wimmer provided a welcoming and stimulating research environment. The manuscript benefited from conversations with a number of my colleagues at the University of Toronto, especially Adam Casey and Lucan Way. Pavel Shmatnik provided excellent research assistance. Special thanks to John Owen for providing detailed comments and sharing his data on foreign impositions. Thanks also to Eric Crahan and the great staff at Princeton University Press, and to Molan Goldstein for her careful copyediting; any stylistic deviations from her advice are the results of my own preferences. A number of people provided useful comments and suggestions along the way: Carles Boix, Sarah Bush, Miguel Centeno, Peter Gourevitch, Ryan Griffiths, Peter Hall, Susan Hyde, Eli Jellenc, Robert Keohane, Walter Lippincott, Jim Mahon, Pat McDonald, Kurt Weyland, and many others at various conferences and workshops. Thanks also to my family—my parents Leon and Mila, my brother Daniil, and of course my wife Caroline, to whom this book is dedicated.

1 Introduction A CENTURY OF SHOCKS AND WAVES

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. — EDWARD G I B B ON , D E C LI N E A N D FA L L O F T H E R O M A N E M P I R E , 17 76

The twentieth century was shocking in its volatility. It witnessed the greatest creation of wealth in human history, and the subjugation of millions into unimaginable misery. According to the calculations of some economists, if we take life in the bleak sixteenth century as the baseline level of 100, during the twentieth century the Earth’s average standard of living rose from 700 to 6,500—the sharpest increase ever recorded, by far. During the very same period, the number of people who perished from war, genocide, and other forms of politically organized carnage totaled between 160 and 200 million people— making it the bloodiest chapter on record.1 The paradoxical, Janus-­faced nature of modern life has been defined by peace and bloodshed, abundance and famine, progress and barbarity all coexisting within the same brief span of civilized existence. It is only appropriate, then, that the evolution of domestic institutions in the twentieth century has also been exceptionally volatile. Since the end of World War I, the expansion of democracy around the world has been driven by democratic waves—turbulent bursts of regime change that quickly sweep across national borders (see figure 1.1).2 Moments of dramatic upheaval, not 1. De Long 1998 and the appendix in Ferguson 2006 offer a detailed discussion of the numbers. 2. The global average is measured using the Polity IV index (rescaled from 0 to 100; see Mar1

2 C H A P TER 1

Global level of democracy

70

60

50

40

30 1900 FIGURE 1.1.

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Global levels of democracy, 1900–­2000.

steady and gradual change, have been the hallmark of democratic evolution. Nor is this pattern of fits and starts limited to democracy: both fascism in the late interwar period and communism after World War II expanded through abrupt cross-­border surges that quickly transformed the global institutional landscape (see figure 1.2).3 Why does democratization occur in waves that cluster in space and time? And what does the looming persistence of these institutional waves, both democratic and nondemocratic, tell us about the nature of domestic reforms in the twentieth century? After all, a number of powerful theories have been put forward to explain the causes of democratization. Many of these, however, focus on some element of the country’s internal environment that can help or hinder reforms—economic development, class relations, or civil society, to name just a few. These domestic explanations cannot tell us much about waves of regime change, which by definition defy and transcend national influences. Understanding the sources of these waves requires stepping outside the state and focusing on the international system as a whole. In this book I offer an explanation for the timing, intensity, and content of regime waves during the twentieth century. My central argument is that abrupt hegemonic shocks—moments of sudden rise and decline of great powers—act shall and Jaggers 2007). A similar pattern shows up using other measures of democracy, including dichotomous indices like Boix, Miller, and Rosato 2013. 3. While nondemocratic regimes (currently) lack detailed measures like Polity, figure 1.2 charts fascist and communist waves by measuring the relative share of world power held by these states. National power is calculated via the Composite Index of National Capabilities (CINC), an aggregate of five indicators: total and urban population, iron and steel production, energy consumption, military expenditure, and military personnel. See Singer 1987. The full list of communist and fascist states is presented in appendix 1.

A C e nt u ry o f Sh o c k s a n d Wav e s 3

Share of global power (%)

40

Fascist states 30

Communist states

20

10

0 1900 FIGURE 1. 2.

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Communist and fascist shares of global power, 1900–­2000.

as powerful catalysts for cross-­border bursts of domestic reform. These intense geopolitical disruptions not only alter the global hierarchy of leading states but also shape the wave-­like spread and retreat of democracy and its rivals. As a result, the volatile evolution of domestic regimes during the twentieth century has been closely linked to sudden tectonic shifts in the structure of global power. The relationship between the international and the domestic is often obscured by the vivid particularities of local transformations—the despised tyrant, the crowds in public squares, the seemingly unique social forces and historical contingencies that shape each country’s institutional trajectory. But as I show throughout the book, the aftermath of hegemonic shocks creates powerful incentives for domestic reform even in countries that have little to do with the great powers themselves. The case studies, focusing on the four hegemonic shocks of the twentieth century, explore periods of domestic change that were deeply embedded in larger international shifts and in fact could not have occurred without them. While rare and fleeting, hegemonic shocks have left a lasting footprint on the path of modern institutional development. Though each regime wave was unique, its broad contours were shaped by predictable material and social changes in the global order forged by the hegemonic transition. Namely, there are three recurring mechanisms that connect shocks to waves—hegemonic coercion, inducement, and emulation. First, hegemonic shocks produce windows of opportunity for regime imposition by temporarily lowering the costs and raising the legitimacy of foreign occupations. The communist wave in Eastern Europe, for example, was made possible by the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War and its postwar ascent to superpower status. In fact, great powers act very differently

4 C H A P TER 1

in the immediate wake of hegemonic shocks—they become much more likely to intervene in other states, and when they do so they are much more likely to impose their own regime than in periods of “normal” politics. The outcomes of foreign interventions are therefore contingent on the effects of hegemonic shocks in a way that studies of regime imposition have not yet fully appreciated. Second, hegemonic shocks enable rising great powers to quickly expand their networks of trade and patronage, exogenously shifting the institutional preferences of many domestic actors and coalitions at once. In this way, rising powers are able to shape the regimes of other states by swiftly altering the incentives and opportunities for the adoption of particular domestic institutions. Inducement therefore operates through a variety of measures that allow great powers to alter the costs and benefits of institutional reforms. Such inducements can be quite direct, taking the form of sanctions and foreign aid, technical assistance, military exchanges, or diplomatic support. Others are more subtle, operating through the rules of new international institutions created by hegemons, through policies that indirectly empower particular domestic groups, or even through cultural propaganda campaigns. While hegemons continuously seek ways to shape the incentives of weaker peers, their ability to do so rises dramatically after hegemonic transitions in which they emerge triumphant. By contrast, countries that suffer a sudden decline will be diminished in their capacity to exercise influence beyond their borders. The Soviet collapse, for example, disrupted patronage networks throughout Africa in the early 1990s, undermining the basis of stable rule for many of the continent’s despots. Third, hegemonic shocks inspire emulation by credibly revealing hidden information about relative regime effectiveness to foreign audiences. By producing clear losers and winners, shocks legitimize certain regimes and make them more attractive to would-­be imitators. Material success, in these cases, often creates its own legitimacy: regimes become morally appealing simply by virtue of their triumph in a tense struggle. By contrast, hegemons whose fortunes suddenly decline will find their regimes discredited and abandoned by former followers or sympathizers. Success is contagious, in other words, but only failure demands inoculation. The interaction of coercion, inducement, and emulation produces powerful waves of regime change in the wake of hegemonic shocks (see figure 1.3). And since hegemonic competition is a game of relative gains and losses, the rise in the status of one great power is necessarily accompanied by the decline of another. In the wake of shocks, rising hegemons are able to impose their regimes on others through brute force, to influence the institutional choices of these states more indirectly through patronage and trade, or to simply sit back and watch the imitators climb onto the bandwagon. The declining hege-

A C e nt u ry o f Sh o c k s a n d Wav e s 5

Coercion

Hegemonic shock

Inducement

Institutional wave

Emulation International FIGURE 1.3.

Domestic

Causal mechanisms linking hegemonic shocks to regime waves.

mons, meanwhile, face an equally powerful but countervailing set of forces: their capacity to coerce erodes, their ability to influence others through various levers of economic and political inducement declines, and the legitimacy of their regime as a model for emulation evaporates, revealed to be inadequate under duress. But explaining the sources of waves does not tell us the full story. As figure 1.1 shows, every democratic cascade has also been defined by some degree of failure after an initial burst of success. This failure can be total, as in the short-­ lived wave after World War I, or partial but persistent, as in the African wave following the Soviet collapse. If my first question engages the causes of waves, the second focuses on the sources of reversals that follow democratic waves. Why do democratic transitions associated with waves so often roll back, leading to failed regime consolidation and autocratic reassertion? Put simply, why do the waves crest and collapse? The two questions are in fact linked. The democratic failures that follow waves stem from the very same forces that create waves in the first place. Hegemonic shocks create extremely powerful but temporary incentives for democratization. In the short term, a wide variety of states experience immense pressures to democratize, and these pressures can override the domestic constraints that hinder reforms in times of normal politics. Countries with strained class relations, ethnic tensions, low levels of economic development, and no history of democracy suddenly find themselves swept up in the euphoric momentum of the democratic wave. This can help explain the puzzling finding that while democratic consolidations require a few well-­ established prerequisites, democratic transitions can occur at all levels of development.

6 C H A P TER 1

In their initial intensity, hegemonic shocks create episodes of “democratic overstretch”—the regime version of a stock market bubble, in which systemic pressures create an artificially inflated number of transitions. The strong but vaporous pressures that allow the wave to spread also ensure that at least some of these transitions take place in countries that lack domestic conditions needed to sustain and consolidate democracy.4 As the pressures of the shock pass and the difficult process of democratic consolidation moves forward, domestic constraints reassert themselves and contribute to failed consolidation. Democratization that takes place during a wave is therefore systematically more fragile than democratization driven purely by domestic forces. ——— While shocks enable rising powers to build new global orders, this process rarely attains the clear-­eyed neatness of purpose implied in the term. The “building” of orders is rarely strategic or even conscious; it is often unintentional, half-­blind, and halting, swayed by chance and circumstance, and shaped by amorphous and misinformed interests. Even Dean Acheson, an architect of the century’s most sustained and purposive effort to build a new global order, confessed in his memoir: “The significance of events was shrouded in ambiguity. We groped after interpretations of them, sometimes reversed lines of action based on earlier views, and hesitated long before grasping what now seems obvious.”5 The construction of global orders is thus rarely an orderly process. Great powers do not always set out to transform domestic regimes, and when they do so their efforts may face failures and unintended consequences. Moreover, it is not always the active exercise of hegemonic power that shapes regime choices after shocks, but the mere existence of the hegemon itself. By the virtue of their recent success, rising hegemons not only alter the cost-­benefit calculus of national reforms but also force a deep normative reevaluation of which domestic institutions are considered discredited or desired, laudable or repulsive, legitimate or obsolete. As John F. Kennedy noted, “Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.”6 Hegemonic power can indeed coerce and intimidate, but it can also cajole, inspire, and repel—sometimes without the hegemon’s desire or even awareness. 4. The “overstretch” argument only applies to democratic waves, since their nondemocratic counterparts were upheld by the continued use of force. 5. Acheson 1969:3–4. 6. Kennedy 1963.

A C e nt u ry o f Sh o c k s a n d Wav e s 7

The effects of hegemonic transitions therefore cannot be reduced to the foreign policies of great powers. Hence the emphasis, in this book, on hegemonic shocks as a structural source of regime change, rather than only on great-­power strategies as such. Of course, emphasizing large-­scale structural determinants of political change involves inevitable trade-­offs. History—as historians are quick to point out—unfolds through people rather than structures. Structures don’t wage wars, raze cities, or protest in the streets. The people who do so, however, act in ways that are always and everywhere constrained—by their position in society, by their access to material resources, by their inclusion or exclusion from social groups, and by their underlying (and often unacknowledged) beliefs and assumptions. As Kenneth Waltz argues, structures do not mechanistically determine outcomes but can act as powerful constraints on individual action.7 By increasing the salience of systemic pressures, hegemonic shocks raise the general probability of regime transitions. Yet the outcomes of individual transitions are still contingent on the domestic circumstances within each country. Except in very rare cases, states are not merely passive conduits of external influence.8 Systemic forces are inevitably mediated through domestic conditions and filtered through local opportunities. At the same time, there are moments when systemic pressures have important and long-­lasting effects on the evolution of domestic regimes, and such moments are the focus of this book. My goal here, therefore, is not to downplay the importance of domestic influences but to examine how they interact with the crucial and often-­ignored consequences of hegemonic shocks. Not all regime waves are caused by hegemonic transitions. The Arab Spring of 2011, for example, was largely disconnected from any broader shifts in the global distribution of power. These kinds of waves, as I discuss in the next chapter, are driven by horizontal cross-­border linkages rather than vertical impulses, and thus fall outside the scope of the argument. The twentieth century, however, was dominated by waves that were forged by great power transitions. In fact, every hegemonic shock of the twentieth century produced a wave of domestic reforms. (Shocks are therefore a sufficient but not necessary condition for waves.) In the democratic waves that followed World War I and the Soviet collapse, the fascist wave of the 1930s, or the twin waves toward democracy and communism after World War II—in each case, shifts in the distribution of hegemonic power produced bursts of reform that affected many 7. Waltz 2000:21. Thus in the seven decades of ideological conflict that followed World War I, argues Owen (2010:251), “norms entrepreneurs were hard at work proposing reforms that would soften or end the conflict, yet the conflict endured as long as each regime type had a successful exemplar.” 8. Even in coercive cases like postwar Japan, “both elite and ordinary Japanese played active roles not only in interpreting American goals, but in shaping them to meet local needs” (Schaller 2000:109).

8 C H A P TER 1

countries around the world. Theories of democracy, therefore, cannot dismiss such intrusions into domestic politics as mere anomalies, since they constitute an important and recurring element of modern regime evolution more generally. How democracy spreads can tell us a lot about the nature of democracy itself. I begin by defining hegemonic shocks, then examine each of the three mechanisms that link shocks to regime waves, and conclude by briefly discussing how the interaction of these forces produces cascades of domestic change. Defining Hegemonic Shocks The word hegemon is used ambiguously in international politics, referring to either a single paramount state or one of several great powers. In this book I adopt the latter definition of a hegemon as a state that comprises a pole in the international system.9 I define a hegemonic shock as a sudden shift in the distribution of relative power among the leading states in the international system. The term builds on the concept of “hegemonic war” to include nonmilitary shocks like global economic crises or imperial collapses—any period in which the power of one hegemon rises or declines significantly against the others.10 By producing clear winners and losers, shocks clarify the global distribution of power and allow opportunities for the creation of new international orders. In doing so, they become the graveyards and incubators of competing domestic regimes. Selecting cases of hegemonic shocks requires an index of hegemonic volatility. This was defined as the average annual change in relative power among hegemonic states, using the Composite Index of National Capabilities (CINC) (see figure 1.4).11 This index captures hegemonic shocks by tracking how 9. I thus follow Keohane’s (1984:32) simple definition of a hegemon as a state with a “preponderance of material resources,” reserving the possibility that several states can fulfill this criterion. Following the general view that the system was multipolar until World War II and bipolar until the Soviet collapse, great powers between 1816 and 2000 are labeled as follows: United States 1898–2000; Russia/Soviet Union 1816–1991; Great Britain 1816–1945; France 1816–1941; Germany 1871–1945; and Japan 1905–45. See, e.g., Waltz 1979 or Kennedy 1987. 10. On hegemonic war, see, e.g., Gilpin 1981. Beyond incorporating nonmilitary shocks, this argument diverges from the power transition literature by focusing on the regime consequences of hegemonic shocks, rather than on the causes of major wars. 11. This was operationalized by summing the absolute values of annual changes in the CINC score (see note 3) among great powers. More precisely, average hegemonic volatility (HV) in year t is defined by the formula: n

Σ|CINC HV = i=1

t

i,t

– CINCi,t–1| n

where n is the number of hegemonic states in that year.

A C e nt u ry o f Sh o c k s a n d Wav e s 9

Average hegemonic volatility

.03

.02

.01

0 1900 FIGURE 1.4.

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Average hegemonic volatility, 1900–­2000.

quickly the distribution of relative power among major states changes over time.12 The figure reveals three immediately visible spikes of volatility: 1917–1922, 1940–1947 (with some reverberations into the 1950s), and 1989–1995. These represent the three hegemonic shocks of the world wars and the Soviet collapse. A fourth, the Great Depression, is added to the analysis for two reasons. First, because of the way CINC is constructed, it is likely to underestimate economic change in favor of military and geopolitical factors. Second, consistent with the demands of the theory, even when measured via CINC, relative US power declines dramatically after 1929, while German power rapidly increases after Hitler’s ascent to leadership in 1933 (see figure 4.1). The period of the Great Depression thus offers a case study of a democratic hegemon in decline, offering greater variation on both the dependent and independent variables. Table 1.1 identifies the rising and declining powers for each of the four hegemonic shocks of the twentieth century, as well as the regime waves associated with each transition. In each case, the regime type of the rising hegemon shaped the content of the institutional wave that followed the shock. After World War II, for example, both the United States and the Soviet Union emerged with their relative power and global prestige greatly strengthened by the triumph over the Axis powers. Despite the profound differences in their content, both regime waves propa12. In doing so, the index offers a more fine-­grained measure than using dichotomous variables to mark predesignated shock years (see Gates et al. 2007, for example). As with any measure of power, the CINC index has potential drawbacks (see, e.g., Wohlforth 1999), but also offers the advantages of easy replicability and internal consistency over time.

10 C H A P TER 1

TABLE 1.1.

Hegemonic Shocks and Regime Outcomes in the 20th Century

Hegemonic Shock

Rising Hegemon(s)

Institutional Wave(s)

Declining Hegemon(s)

Declining Regime Type

1. World War I

United States

democracy

Germany

monarchy

fascism

2. Great Depression

Germany

United States

democracy

3. World War II

United States democracy Soviet Union communism

Germany

fascism

4. Soviet Collapse

United States

Soviet Union

communism

democracy

gated through a mixture of coercion (through occupation and nation building), influence (via the expansion of trade, foreign aid, and newly built international institutions), and emulation (by outsiders impressed with the self-­evident success of the two systems). While both countries fought to prevent political backsliding in their European zones of influence, in the West this was achieved by economic development and social stability, rather than the suppression of dissent and the continued threat of force. For the United States, various levers of economic inducement quickly became the primary way of solidifying its own informal empire. By contrast, the primary mechanisms of Soviet hegemonic engagement were coercion in Eastern Europe and emulation in the developing world. Stalin was skeptical of non-­Europeans’ faith in Marxism and dismayed by the prospect of potential Titos, so inducement remained a modest element of the Soviet repertoire until after his death in 1953.13 Europeans felt a range of sentiments about American postwar involvement, which the French disdained and the Austrians cheerfully accepted. Still, by and large, America’s presence in Western Europe comprised what Lundestad called “an empire by invitation.”14 The fear was not too much American involvement, but too little. On the continent’s eastern half, Soviet presence was also initially welcomed by local populations, but this feeling quickly dissipated once they saw what this presence actually entailed. The periodic Soviet incursions into Eastern Europe testified to the fragility and artifice of local communist support. In this respect, the American presence was distinctly different. American domination sometimes brought unease, cultural anxiety, or feelings of inferiority; Soviet domination brought tanks into the street—an unease of a qualitatively different sort. “I think that only the most paranoid of politi13. Rubinstein 1988:18,46. 14. Lundestad 1986:263. Maier (1977:630) calls the postwar West European economy a “consensual American hegemony.”

A C e nt u ry o f Sh o c k s a n d Wav e s 11

cians,” argued Howard in 1985, “would allege that American influence in Western Europe is dependent on their military presence.”15 Yet portraying the struggle of the Cold War as a battle between good and evil is as misleading as claiming an equivalence between the two sides. The Soviet story possessed enormous political and ideological clout, particularly in developing states. The industrialization of a backward, illiterate, agrarian state; the dramatic defeat of a feared military juggernaut; a swift rise to the status of an anti-­imperialist, anti-­Western superpower: for new states shedding colonial bonds, everything in this narrative suggested a virtuous shortcut to modernity. A mixture of coercion, inducement, and emulation was therefore common to both waves, particularly in the early stages of the Cold War. To present the early postwar period “as a struggle between Soviet tyranny and American freedom is to simplify reality and distort the way most peoples around the world understood events,” argues Leffler. “In the cauldron of postwar national and transnational politics, the appeal of liberal capitalism was anything but certain.”16 As one of the two beneficiaries of the hegemonic shock, the USSR offered both the promise of material might and a vision of a better world. Its sudden emergence as a superpower, Furet writes, “combined the two gods that make or break historical times: power and ideas.”17 The sudden global prestige of the Soviet model was therefore not just a product of its universalizing ideological claims—which had remained largely unchanged since the Communist Manifesto—but a consequence of its changing hegemonic status. Noting that World War II created “a great upsurge” of communism in the Middle East, Laqueur contends that the major factor behind this growth was Soviet success in its defeat of fascism.18 In that region as elsewhere, the hegemonic shock appeared to offer a clear and credible demonstration of the military and industrial superiority of communist institutions. In the absence of a hegemonic shock, ideas could inspire movements but were incapable of generating institutional waves. This was the case for fascism until 1933 and for communism until 1945. In each case, ideas could create consequential real-­world precedents, in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution or the March on Rome. But they could not forge institutional change until their visions of a modern state were incarnated in the regimes of indisputably successful great powers. The immense impact of hegemonic shocks stems from a potent synthesis— compelling ideas combined with dramatic material success. In this way the 15. Howard 1991:128. 16. Leffler 1995:189. 17. Furet 1999:349. 18. Laqueur 1955:17.

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jostling of great powers that accompanies hegemonic shocks fundamentally (if temporarily) transforms both material and ideological motivations and opportunities for domestic reforms. Despite the vivid contrasts between the democratic, communist, and fascist waves of the twentieth century, each stemmed from similar underlying mechanisms that originated from the unique circumstances of hegemonic shocks. I examine each below. Hegemonic Shocks and Mechanisms of Coercion The first way in which shocks lead to waves is by increasing the likelihood of external regime impositions by rising great powers. By producing stark but temporary disparities in relative power, shocks create windows of opportunity for rising hegemons to impose their regimes abroad. Moreover, by discrediting the defeated elites, hegemonic shocks resulting from major wars temporarily increase the legitimacy of foreign occupations. Shocks can thus fundamentally alter the dynamics and outcomes of forcible interventions. Great powers face a variety of incentives to export their regimes.19 Nevertheless, forcible promotion is a risky and costly endeavor. In most cases, if ideological imitation cannot be secured, loyalty will suffice. Democracy promotion is rarely altruistic; it is “opportunistic, not principled,” or contingent on low expected costs.20 Hegemonic shocks change the preferences of the imposing states precisely because they temporarily lower the costs of foreign intervention. In the aftermath of military hegemonic shocks, the coercive apparatus needed for occupation has already been mobilized, and thus the fixed cost of mobilization required for territorial control has already been met. And in suspending the normal rules of the international order, hegemonic shocks provide a window of legitimacy for foreign military occupations. As John Dower argues in his book Embracing Defeat, the success of the postwar occupation of Japan was made possible at least in part by the nature of the war that proceeded it, and by the decisive defeat that brought the war to its end. People “at all levels of society quickly blamed their own militaristic leaders,” he writes, “for having initiated a miserable, unwinnable war.” The dramatic discrediting of wartime leadership gave the US occupation of Japan a legitimacy absent in its occupation of Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere.21 Japan’s vast institutional transformation, argue Ikenberry and Kupchan, became possible because “the pre-­war system had been discredited by the disastrous consequences of Japanese expansion and aggression.”22 19. See, e.g., Owen 2010 and Bader, Grävingholt, and Kästner 2010. 20. Narizny 2012:346. 21. Dower 1999; Dower 2003; Dower 2012:258. 22. Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990:306.

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Likewise, the US occupation of Germany encountered little native opposition at least in part because of the nature of the war and the total defeat that accompanied its conclusion. Both the Germans and the Japanese, “having seen the vainglorious dreams of their leaders turn to ashes,” writes Ian Buruma, “were receptive to changes that were partly encouraged and partly imposed by the victorious Allied occupiers.”23 These occupations were therefore afforded a measure of legitimacy through the unique circumstances created by the hegemonic shock. These conditions are not unique to democracies. The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after World War II was also initially legitimized by the USSR’s military and moral victory. Before it became an instrument of oppression, the Red Army was welcomed as a force for liberation and social progress. In 1945, Milan Kundera recalls, the people of Czechoslovakia “showed great enthusiasm for Russia—which had driven the Germans from their country—and because they considered the Czech Communist Party its faithful representative, they shifted their sympathies toward it.”24 In the weeks after liberation, the Poles “eagerly absorbed the Communist slogans.”25 Early Soviet reforms in Hungary and elsewhere focused on land reforms desperately desired and therefore welcomed by the rural population. For the first time since the introduction of serfdom in 1514, “the rigid social system started to move,” wrote the political theorist István Bibó, “and move in the direction of greater freedom.”26 While the Nazi occupations had obliterated pre-­existing orders, postwar social conditions in the region produced an intense desire for change, creating a space where radical transformation was possible, even welcomed.27 As the diplomat Silviu Brucan recalled in his memoirs: “We in Romania, gullible dupes and faithful believers in the new Soviet Man, proclaimed with pride: We brought about the revolution and with but little help from the Red Army.”28 Outside the region, the circumstances of the hegemonic shock also legitimized the Soviet presence for some Western observers. “The clock of history has struck the Slavic hour,” declared a Le Monde editorial. “It was great Russia that saved the Slavs from servitude or destruction, and it is normal that they now show their gratitude toward it by grouping under its aegis.”29 23. Buruma 2013:8. 24. Kundera 1979:8. 25. Micgiel 1997:96. 26. Quoted in Kenez 2006:107. 27. Judt 2005:199; Milosz 1953:viii; Vinen 2000:339. 28. Brucan 1993:ix. For Romanian anti-­fascists, he writes (1993:33), communism offered “an essentially fantastic or mystical faith” that inspired courage in the face of struggle. Yet this faith was also emboldened by the brute calculus of power: “[W]hat counted most was that under German occupation our only hope was the Red Army.” 29. Quoted in Revel 1983:255.

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Great-power imposition of own regimes (promotion intensity)

30

20

10

0 1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Impositions of their own regimes by great powers, 1900–­2000. See appendix 2 for the full list of impositions and their classifications, as well as a discussion of the measures.

FIGURE 1.5.

Shocks therefore create both material and normative opportunities for impositions of the hegemon’s own regime. These factors simply do not come into play with interventions that occur in the absence of hegemonic transitions. Studies of external impositions, however, generally do not distinguish between impositions that occur in the wake of shocks and those that occur in the course of normal politics. If they did, we might expect that military hegemonic shocks should temporarily increase the likelihood that great powers would choose to promote their own regime. This can be tested empirically by looking at the rates and types of regime promotions over the twentieth century. As figures 1.5 and 1.6 show, the likelihood of great powers’ imposing their own regimes increases significantly in the wake of military hegemonic shocks.30 During the twentieth century, great powers were responsible for 72 of the 121 external impositions (about 60 percent). However, great powers nearly monopolize regime promotion in the wake of military hegemonic shocks, when they are promoters in 31 of 34 cases. Moreover, great powers are far more likely to promote their own regimes in the wake of shocks (94 percent of cases) than at other times (66 percent).31 30. Intervention types are classified according to Owen 2002 and 2010, and supplemented by several cases excluded from his list: Soviet Union in Mongolia (1921), United States in Guatemala (1954), United States and Britain in Iran (1953), and United States in Chile (1973). 31. The two exceptions are Japan’s intervention in Russia (1918) and the Soviet Union’s in Austria (1945).

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Impositions during non-shock years Other regimes

Own regime

2

17

29

n=87

Nonhegemonic

Nonhegemonic

Other regimes

14

27

Hegemonic

Hegemonic

Own regime

Impositions during shock years

29

1 2 n=34

External impositions, 1900–­2000, classified by type. Impositions are classified according to two variables—­whether they were undertaken by a great power (dark gray) or not (light gray) and whether the imposers installed their own regime (left column) or not (right column). Hegemonic impositions of their own regimes dominate impositions in post-­shock years. Years following hegemonic shocks are counted as the last year of the hegemonic war and the subsequent two years: 1918–­1920 and 1944–­1946. The area of each rectangle is proportional to the number of observations in each category.

FIGURE 1.6.

Throughout its long history of external interventions, the United States has promoted democracy only about a third of the time.32 During the Cold War, the United States intervened repeatedly to install or prop up dictatorships in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, and many other states. Yet nearly all US interventions in the wake of hegemonic shocks have involved attempts to build democracy, however unsuccessfully.33 In the long list of failed American attempts to impose democracy by force, Germany and Japan stand out as prominent exceptions. Their exceptionalism, it has been argued, derives from rare domestic circumstances—economic development, national unity, and past experience with democracy—that aided democratization. More generally, stud32. Peceny 1999:9. 33. Korea in 1950 and Somalia in 1993 being two possible exceptions.

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ies of foreign impositions often focus on domestic factors in shaping their success.34 Yet the importance of domestic forces may be contingent on the broader geopolitical environment in which these occupations take place. As Owen has argued, foreign impositions often have their roots in broader systemic forces. The presence of rival ideologies, he argues, produces geopolitical insecurity that raises the strategic significance of regime imposition.35 Like him, I find that external impositions cluster in waves, suggesting that systemic factors play an important role. However, at least in the case of the twentieth century, regime impositions have been shaped not only by ongoing ideological rivalries but also by the brief opportunities created by hegemonic shocks, which both heightened and reflected these rivalries. It is true that “a majority of forcible regime promotions in the twentieth century was part of the long transnational contest among advocates of liberal democracy, communism, and fascism.”36 Yet this period also saw wide variation in the intensity of foreign interventions, despite the near-­constant presence of ideological rivalries. The ideological contest of the twentieth century was not a continuous struggle but a fight with critical junctures whose outcomes changed the dynamics of external interventions. The key qualities of intervention were therefore shaped not only by ideological clashes but also by the decreased costs and increased legitimacy of occupations that accompanied hegemonic transitions. During the past decade or so, inspired by America’s experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the literature on democracy promotion has been pessimistic about the effect of foreign impositions on democratization.37 And if successful impositions require great-­power shocks, then most impositions are indeed doomed to fail. In a study of external impositions since the Napoleonic Wars, Edelstein finds that foreign occupations have historically led to democratization under only two conditions.38 First, occupations require a sustained and serious commitment by the occupying power to build democratic institutions. A second condition is legitimacy: the occupiers must convince the local population that their overwhelming presence is justified. Since these prerequisites are difficult to fulfill, occupations rarely succeed. Hegemonic shocks, however, temporarily make both conditions more likely. Post-­shock interventions occur at a time when rising great powers are not only most committed to reshaping other regimes but also when they are 34. See, e.g., Downes and Monten 2013, who point to economic development, social homogeneity, and past experience with representative government as crucial for stable occupation-­led democratization. 35. Owen 2010:24,27. 36. Owen 2010:166. 37. See, e.g., Berger et al. 2013, Downes and Monten 2013, Peic and Reiter 2011. 38. Edelstein 2004.

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most capable of doing so. Moreover, the political space created by a major defeat provides a measure of legitimacy to the occupying forces. Examining twenty-­four cases of occupation since 1815, Edelstein finds that only seven were successful—and that six of these took place in the aftermath of World War II.39 In sum, the material and ideational costs associated with external impositions can change significantly in the wake of hegemonic shocks. Future research on foreign-­imposed regime change might benefit from examining not only the domestic determinants of impositions but also their links to hegemonic orders, and to the international system more broadly. Hegemonic Shocks and Mechanisms of Inducement A second way in which shocks produce regime waves is by enabling rising great powers to shape the institutional preferences of foreign actors through a variety of inducements. These can sometimes take the form of sanctions and foreign aid, technical assistance, military exchanges, or diplomatic support. Sometimes the threats and promises of certain inducements are sufficient. “[W]e will hold in our hands the powerful weapon of discontinuance of aid,” wrote a US State Department official about the Marshall Plan, “[if ] any country fails to live up to our expectations.”40 Some inducements border on coercion—fomenting revolutions, supporting insurgent armies, or covertly sponsoring electoral candidates. Others unfold through more subtle channels of socialization, like cultural propaganda or the sponsorship of literary magazines. Inducement can therefore also be quite indirect. Rising hegemons may use their power to shape the preferences of domestic groups, who then put pressure on states to change their institutions accordingly—what Scott James and David Lake call “the second face of hegemony.”41 Whatever the specific method, hegemonic shocks temporarily magnify the importance of these hegemonic inducements. By producing new disparities in power, they create windows of opportunity for rising powers to exogenously shift the capabilities and institutional preferences of many domestic actors and coalitions at once. Rising hegemons may empower domestic actors that push for institutional reforms, or lower the willingness of opposition groups to con39. The occupation of France after the Napoleonic Wars—another case of a great power defeated in a hegemonic shock—is the other success story. 40. William L. Clayton, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, quoted in Lens 1971:352. Truman threatened to reduce Italy’s aid if the communists won the 1948 elections (Barnes 1981:412). 41. James and Lake 1989. For them, the “first face” is shaping the choices of states directly through sanctions or foreign aid; the “third face” is using ideology and propaganda to shape mass and elite opinion in other states. All three fall into the category of inducement as defined here.

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tinue resisting such reforms. Fascist regimes of the 1930s, for example, metastasized not only through imitation by impressed observers but also through the inducements created by growing German power. The country’s economic expansion drew states into its orbit and attracted converts through the expansion of trade ties, especially in regions lacking stable relations with Western powers like Latin America and south-­central Europe. Trade with Germany appealed to the vast peasant populations of these largely agricultural nations, who had a ready market for their product at prices well above world levels. As German power grew, neutrality became an increasingly difficult proposition, creating opportunities for Germany to extend its political influence.42 A Romanian businessman warned that “If we continue a laissez faire policy, Germany will achieve the conquest of Romania à la mode hitlerienne, that is to say, without a fight.”43 Conversely, in cases of sudden decline, shocks swiftly undermine the hegemon’s ability to wield influence in other states through aid, patronage networks, or international institutions. In doing so, they shift domestic groups’ institutional preferences away from the hegemon’s regime. The Soviet collapse, for example, led to a number of changes in the incentives of both African elites and external actors with ties to African regimes. The implosion of the communist lodestar decisively undercut the legitimacy of state-­led development as a viable path for African states. These countries now faced a stark choice between, as Timothy Garton Ash put it, “a set of ideas whose time had come” and “a set of ideas whose time had gone.”44 Meanwhile, the elimination of Soviet patronage damaged the neopatrimonial elite networks that had already suffered from the economic crises and structural adjustment of the 1980s.45 As a result, the collapse of the USSR had the most pronounced initial effects on African countries closely aligned with the former superpower.46 For all but a 42. As Hirschman (1945) argued, growing trade dependence increases the costs of potential conflicts and thereby leads to convergence on foreign policy. Examining the effects of Nazi Germany’s growing trade with Eastern European states, he concluded that these states’ creeping dependence on Germany led directly to their (sometimes willing) capitulation to Nazi policies in the years before the war. 43. Quoted in Hoisington 1971:480. “The economic stranglehold once established, Germany could use it for other than economic ends,” writes Seton-­Watson (1945:384). “Commercial and technical missions could provide useful cover for political and military espionage, and German buyers could use opportunities for political propaganda among the peasantry.” 44. Ash 1990:136. 45. By mid-­decade, “almost all sub-­Saharan African countries introduced some measure of political liberalization, and a majority permitted competitive elections” ( Joseph 1997:368). 46. Bratton and Van de Walle 1997:241. As Decalo (1992:18, 25) notes, “African states financially or militarily dependent upon the Soviet Union began collapsing first, as their patron withdrew its support. . . . [T]he more African autocracies resembled in their features the discredited regimes in Eastern Europe, the greater the challenge from below for total change, and a purge of

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few stubborn holdouts, the USSR’s disintegration represented the total exhaustion of communism as an alternative model of development. At the same time, the Soviet collapse also transformed the nature of Western inducements dealing with foreign aid and security assistance. During the Cold War, geopolitical objectives reduced the credibility of Western conditionality, since threats to withhold aid might lead to loss of pliant clients in the developing world. After the collapse of the Soviet system, powerful states such as the United States no longer had to prioritize anticommunism over democracy promotion, thereby increasing pressure on African autocrats who had used superpower rivalry to stave off reforms. At the same time, international financial institutions and aid donors became more focused on supporting accountable government, making outside assistance contingent on democratic reforms. The surprisingly successful democratization of Benin—a country with a tiny middle class, no history of democracy, and a fragmented elite—was not driven by domestic factors; rather, the country “could no longer resist demands for comprehensive reforms by the external agencies.”47 By the early 1990s, democratization “had become a precondition for credit-­worthiness” in the global market.48 As a result, Dunning notes, the end of the Cold War “marked a watershed in the politics of foreign aid in Africa.”49 Since powerful donors like the United States were no longer bound by geostrategic considerations that had previously undermined conditionality, the end of the Cold War enhanced the credibility of threats attached to foreign aid. Outside assistance became a more effective tool for inducing domestic reforms in the wake of the Soviet collapse. In this way, the hegemonic shock greatly increased material pressures upon dictatorial elites even as it undermined the ideological basis of their rule. As Levitsky and Way argue, “Western liberalism’s triumph and the Soviet collapse undermined the legitimacy of alternative regime models and created strong incentives for peripheral states to adopt formal democratic institutions.”50 Shifts in hegemonic power create opportunities to fundamentally restructure class coalitions and institutional preferences within states. Immediately after World War II, for example, communist parties appeared to be gaining ground across Western Europe. “For many Europeans,” argues Martin Walker, “the wartime feats of the Red Army blended with the still bitter memories of capitalism’s failures during the Great Depression and the mass unemployment

the past.” Early reforms did not guarantee regime turnover—in three of the above cases (Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique), the ruling coalition managed to retain power. 47. Joseph 1997:369. 48. Simensen 1999:401. 49. Dunning 2004:409. 50. Levitsky and Way 2002:61.

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of the 1930s.”51 The result was a leftward shift in European politics, with the United States and Great Britain remaining “the only major nations in which Communism is negligible as a political force.”52 According to a 1947 US State Department official, “The trend in Europe is clearly toward the Left. I feel that we should try to keep it a non-­communist Left and should support Social-­ Democratic governments.”53 It was this sentiment that made the prospect of Soviet influence a real threat to American policy makers, necessitating the Marshall Plan. These statesmen fully understood the appeal of communist ideas, even if they rarely stated so publicly. Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson told a Senate committee that the Europeans “have suffered so much, and they believe so deeply that governments can take some action which will alleviate their sufferings, that they will demand that the whole business of state control and state interference shall be pushed further and further.”54 The continent’s dollar shortage prevented it from buying American goods, endangering the recovery and opening the way to communist-­led discontent. United States officials agreed that “long-­ term American prosperity required open markets, unhindered access to raw materials, and the rehabilitation of much—if not all—of Eurasia along liberal capitalist lines.”55 At its core, the Marshall Plan was an unprecedented use of hegemonic inducement to secure the consolidation of regimes that copied the American model of capitalist democracy. The plan’s biggest impact was not through the aid itself but through the conditions attached to its disbursement—the dismantling of market controls, the imposition of exchange rate stability, and the liberalization of trade. Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen argue that the Marshall Plan was in fact the world’s “most successful adjustment program.”56 Beyond providing money for short-­term reconstruction, it fundamentally changed the institutional environment of European politics by shifting elite preferences away from centralized planning and toward American-­style market allocation within a mixed economy. Along with collaborators in Western Europe, US aid officials sought to prevent national politicians “from being tempted to fall back on state intervention, planning, and closed economies.”57 By pulling center-­left parties from communism to 51. Walker 1994:30. 52. Hicks 1946:540. Even in Britain, the shift led to the replacement of Churchill with a Labour government that promised greater state involvement in society. 53. Quoted in Maier 1981:346. The war’s aftermath, writes Lowe (2012:278), saw “an explosion of left-­wing expression that was effectively the rebirth of everything that had been so brutally suppressed during the Nazi occupations.” 54. Quoted in Leffler 1999:519. 55. Leffler 1984:358. 56. De Long and Eichengreen 1991. 57. De Grazia 2005:345–46. Lens (1971:358) describes American aid as a “mechanism for pushing the political center of gravity to the right.”

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social democracy, the plan fortified American-­friendly regimes while curbing Soviet influence.58 It was “an economic program but the crisis it averted was political,” writes Judt.59 By 1948, with the influx of American money and i­nstitutional infrastructure, communist parties had lost much of their support. Major domestic party realignments have often been shaped by the inducements and opportunities created by hegemonic shocks. The Marshall Plan had a moderating effect on postwar German politics; the collapse of the fascist alternative weakened the radical right, while American influence limited the impact of the radical left. After 1947, American aid focused on preventing communist influence as part of a broader agenda of containment. As a result, Germany’s party system transitioned from fragmentation to moderation, with the Catholics and socialists transforming “from their previous confessional and class politics into national parties with mass appeal”—the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.60 Likewise, Latin American party realignments of the 1930s and 1940s repeatedly reflected the shifting contours of hegemonic relations. The Soviet-­ American alliance against Hitler led to the creation of broad anti-­Axis coalitions and a general moderation of radical politics. (Communist parties reached their peak of power in 1945–46, and were not only legal but openly accepted as partners in government.) The end of the war led to a brief swell of democratic reforms empowered by temporary US support of democratization. But the defeat of a common enemy created a split in these fragile wartime alliances, and as the thrust of US policy shifted from anti-­fascism to anti-­communism, the reassertion of power by right-­wing elites excluded the left by force.61 The US policy of aiding or tolerating undemocratic anti-­communist forces culminated in the 1954 covert coup in Guatemala, by which point the democratic aspirations of the early postwar period had been all but forgotten. As in Eastern Europe after World War I, a brief but powerful wave of democratization proved unsustainable in the face of waning hegemonic support and unfavorable domestic conditions. Comparative analyses of democratization often focus on the evolving nature of class cleavages and domestic coalitions. But in the wake of hegemonic shocks, such coalitions are themselves shaped by larger geopolitical shifts, often through the actions of great powers seeking to bolster or undermine particular domestic groups in order to further their influence. In these periods, 58. As a State Department official argued in 1946: “It is definitely in the interest of the United States to see that the present left movement throughout the world, which we should recognize and even support, develops in the direction of democratic as against totalitarian systems.” Quoted in Ikenberry 2000:202. 59. Judt 2005:97. 60. Reynolds 1996:660–1. 61. Mainwaring and Pérez-­Liñán 2013; Smith 1994.

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changing hegemonic inducements are refracted at the domestic level through shifting group rivalries and party realignments. Shocks also provide a window for expanding hegemonic influence through the creation of new international institutions.62 By destroying old hierarchies and suspending existing relations, hegemonic transitions enable rising powers to reconstruct the global institutional architecture through which they exercise and maintain their power. While such institution building is normally a slow and inertia-­laden process, the brief periods after hegemonic shocks temporarily wipe the slate clean, facilitating and intensifying the creation of new global orders. As a 1942 Council on Foreign Relations report put it, “the period at the end of the war will provide a tabula rasa on which can be written the terms of a democratic new order. The economic and political institutions of 1939 and before are clearly in suspension and need not be restored intact after the war.”63 In the wake of the war, both the Soviet Union and the United States used their rising power to construct new institutional frameworks that helped them perpetuate control and influence over the states embedded within it. Shocks therefore temporarily increase rising great powers’ ability to manipulate the preferences of domestic actors via both bilateral and indirect influence, but also through the conduits of newly reconstructed global institutions. Hegemonic Shocks and Mechanisms of Emulation A third way through which shocks create waves is by encouraging states to adopt the domestic institutions of the rising great power. Institutional emulation is the process whereby a state deliberately and voluntarily imitates particular domestic institutions of successful and powerful states. Though great powers frequently attempt to persuade others of their virtues, shocks are unique in dramatically demonstrating which regimes perform better under duress, and thus credibly reveal hidden information about relative regime efficiency to foreign audiences. In doing so, they legitimize certain regimes and make them more attractive to would-­be emulators. Abrupt great-­power transitions therefore encourage imitation by both highlighting successful regime models and offering a way to gain favor with a rising hegemon. “If the Danubian States begin now to put on the Nazi garb,” wrote the British Home Secretary in 1938, “it will be because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and because they want to ingratiate themselves in 62. Ikenberry 2000. He also argues that the hegemon’s regime influences its capacity to build international orders as much as its material power, with democracies more capable of the strategic restraint required for building stable legitimate orders. 63. Quoted in Maier 1977:619.

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time with their future master.”64 By contrast, great powers whose fortunes suddenly decline because of a hegemonic shock will find their regimes discredited and abandoned by former followers and sympathizers. As a Zambian communist put it shortly after the Soviet collapse, if the “originators of Socialism” have rejected their own tenets, then “who were African imitators” to take up the cause?65 Smaller states may imitate rising great powers for both self-­interested and ideological reasons. Hegemonic shocks make both reasons more likely. They not only credibly demonstrate the real-­world effectiveness of competing regimes but also legitimize the regimes of victorious great powers by virtue of their dramatic success, inspiring admiration and mimicry. As a Brazilian newspaper declared in 1945: “The moral and political atmosphere of the world has been decisively transformed” by “the triumph of the democratic systems.”66 As a learning strategy, emulation can be a path toward both internal strengthening and external bandwagoning. First, emulation can be used to internally strengthen the state against both domestic and external threats. Emulating states hope to repeat some of the rising hegemon’s dramatic success and thereby improve their own institutional fitness.67 The economic ascent of Nazi Germany attracted imitators who were repelled by its ideology but admired its ability to rearm and eliminate unemployment. As an economist noted at the time, fascism allowed “a central will capable of quick decision and armed with supreme authority” combined with “a highly disciplined organisation of the productive forces of the whole economy.”68 Even the staunchly liberal Economist presented the country as a potential model for emulation in Britain: “The one great lesson that can be drawn from German economic experience in the past three years,” it argued in 1939, “is that well-­organised control can secure the maximum utilisation of a country’s resources for the piling up of armaments.”69 Second, imitating a powerful peer can allow a state to curry favor with it and to participate in the international system that the hegemon creates and maintains. In that sense emulation is a strategy of external bandwagoning, though a looser one than signing treaties or forging official alliances. As Markoff puts it, “Weak states depend on stronger ones and may bid for favor by 64. Hoare 1937. 65. Quoted in Decalo 1992:18. 66. Quoted in Bethell 1992:35. 67. This effect differs from inducement because there is no direct attempt by the great power to manipulate material preferences—instead, it alters institutional choices merely by its successful existence. In this way, shocks produce emulation even without a conscious effort by the hegemon. 68. Guillebaud 1939:215. 69. Quoted in Imlay 2007:1.

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mimicking their political structures.”70 Instrumental emulation may be less likely to be consolidated, since the norms associated with the regime are not internalized. Superficial transitions, as in some post-­1991 “Potemkin democratizations” in Gabon or the Ivory Coast, are more likely to fail when emulation is done for the sake of cosmetic or self-­interested bandwagoning rather than any true desire for regime reform.71 But institutions adopted for instrumental reasons may also acquire moral or material inertia over time. Even rigged elections, argues Lindberg, improve the chances of democratic transitions in Africa by imbuing societies with basic democratic norms.72 Yet emulation, as the diffusion of best practices, is an ongoing historical process. Why should hegemonic shocks make such emulation more likely? They do so by removing uncertainty about the relative effectiveness of competing regime types. Despite the potential benefits of reforms, leaders face considerable uncertainty when choosing to rebuild their domestic institutions. Shocks encourage such reforms by dramatically demonstrating which regime types perform better under duress. In bargaining theory, war is said to reveal private information about actors’ capability and resolve—information that cannot be credibly verified through ex ante cheap talk. Similarly, hegemonic shocks reveal information about the relative strength of competing regime types. Hidden vulnerabilities become obvious, failed institutional models lose their legitimacy, and the giant’s clay feet are revealed for all to see. In this way, hegemonic shocks intensify opportunities for emulation by creating political space for domestic reforms. As Ikenberry and Kupchan argue, socialization becomes particularly likely after “periods marked by international turmoil,” when domestic elites seek alternatives to discarded and discredited ideas.73 Great powers often attempt to attract followers by proclaiming the superiority of their regime, but in the absence of crises these claims are likely to be taken as cheap talk. During the Cold War, for example, both sides extolled the virtues of their regimes to encourage converts from Third World states. But the true condition of Soviet domestic institutions, and the country’s ability to uphold a communist system outside its borders, did not become apparent to world audiences (and most scholars) until after the system’s dramatic collapse. Similarly, both 70. Markoff 1996:32. “Political change in small powers is not understandable merely as adaptation to socioeconomic change within narrow political boundaries, but must be seen as adaptation to the interest and rules of hegemonic powers in international regimes” ( Janos 2000:411). 71. Many cases of African democratization, Schmitter (1994:60) argues, “may be more usefully viewed as improvisations by rulers who are buying time, waiting for the international climate to change so they can engineer a regression to autocracy.” 72. Lindberg 2006. In this way, the logic of consequences invisibly morphs into the logic of appropriateness. 73. Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990:283.

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world wars offered a large-­scale test of war-­fighting effectiveness between democratic and nondemocratic states. In both cases, democratic victories repudiated Tocqueville’s often-­echoed assertion that democratic regimes would prove inferior to centralized ones on the field of battle. “If the Axis had prevailed in World War II,” argues Starr, “it would have confirmed the ancient belief in the weakness and incompetence of democracies.”74 The outcomes of shocks thus provide compelling and credible demonstrations of regime quality to self-­interested outside observers. When Turkey ended a long period of single-­party rule in 1945 and began a stormy transition to multiparty democracy, future premier Adnan Menderes explained the shift in terms that clearly revealed the informational consequences of hegemonic shocks: “The difficulties encountered during the war years uncovered and showed the weak points created by the one-­party system in the structure of the country,” he declared. “No country can remain unaffected by the great international events and the contemporary dominating ideological currents. This influence was felt in our country too.”75 Hegemonic emulation is therefore not only a process of normative socialization; it also can be a conscious response to changed material incentives. For Waltz, in fact, socialization—defined as learning from the failures of others—is a key driver of change in international politics.76 Yet emulation also cannot be reduced to a byproduct of quasi-­rational updating. While hegemonic shocks decrease uncertainty and create opportunities to learn from the successes and failures of others, this does not mean the correct lessons will be learned. Institutional mimicry often leads to imperfect transplantations, and successful hegemons may be venerated without cause. But the perception of a link between regime type and success—a link that appears especially incontrovertible in the wake of shocks—is often more important for emulation than the actual presence of such a link.77 The widespread acceptance of a Nazi economic miracle, as I discuss in chapter 4, contributed to the imitation of German institutions around the world, regardless of whether the recovery was real or had its roots in Nazi reforms. The outcomes of hegemonic shocks serve as signals about the effectiveness of competing regimes. Whether the signals are correctly interpreted, or 74. P. Starr 2010:55. 75. Quoted in Karpat 1959:140. 76. The other driver of change being interstate competition. For the often-­overlooked emphasis on emulation and socialization in Waltz, see 1979:74–77, 92, 118–19, 127–28. 77. As a German student leader of the 1968 movement (and later Marxian sociologist) Ulf Kadritzke noted, “Illusions, insofar as they guide political action, can have real historical consequences” (quoted in Müller 2011:172). Likewise, reflecting on the trend toward autocracy in the 1930s, Aldous Huxley (1937:65) noted that “nothing succeeds like success—even success that is merely apparent.”

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whether they accurately reflect the factors that created the outcome, is a different matter.78 Hegemonic triumphs raise the prestige of the hegemon’s institutions even if the victory had less to do with its particular institutions and more with the resources at its disposal. The result is unsuccessful emulation, or emulation by unlikely followers. The dramatic nature of hegemonic shocks changes both the cost-­benefit calculations and the normative perceptions of the legitimacy of particular regimes. The jubilant celebrations of democracy that accompanied Wilson’s triumphant tour of Europe seemed to reflect not just a desire for American aid but a sincere belief in the emancipatory moral appeal of self-­determination. For a brief moment, Wilson appeared to be “transfigured in the eyes of men,” writes H. G. Wells. “He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.”79 This normative authority quickly spread beyond the continent. In Korea, leaders of the March First movement drafted their own version of the Declaration of Independence; Ho Chi Minh’s 1919 petition to Wilson (which Wilson duly neglected) to restore self-­r ule in French Indochina also made its case with quotes from the American declaration. The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore dedicated a new volume of his works to Wilson. And Chinese students in Beijing massed outside the US embassy, chanting “Long live President Wilson!”80  Yet even such earnest admiration of democracy’s virtues was undergirded not only by its inherent appeal but also by the power it now wielded through its American paragon. “The United States is the one who won the war,” an Egyptian journalist was told by a friend. “Therefore, she will enforce the right to self-­determination and enforce the [British] withdrawal.”81 Likewise, Indian nationalists repeatedly argued that their country’s success at the peace conference was “intimately tied to the recent ascendancy of the United States and its president in world affairs.”82

78. For a prominent example of “irrational” or dysfunctional emulation, see the “world society” literature, e.g., Meyer et al. 1997. Unlike them, however, I do not view emulation as a process of convergence on a single model, not only because of the inevitable mutations that accompany mimicry but also because hegemonic shocks repeatedly alter the legitimate standards of emulation. 79. Wells 1933:82. 80. Manela 2007:55, 103. 81. Quoted in Manela 2007:63. As he notes (2007:71), “[t]he perception of Wilson’s prominence and power in the international arena led Egyptian nationalists to turn directly to him for support in their campaign against British intransigence.” 82. Manela 2007:95–96. As he concludes (2007:10), America’s moral and material appeal was intertwined; its stature was “just as important as the content of the president’s wartime proclamations in creating the impact of the Wilsonian moment in the colonial world.” As a result, the

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Motivations of power and prestige are often linked in cases of emulation. Sharp hegemonic defeats, military or otherwise, create both material and ideological incentives for reform. Ayse Zarakol, for instance, argues that Turkey after World War I, Japan after World War II, and Russia after the Soviet collapse—all cases of great-­power defeats—were especially susceptible to institutional reform “meant to signal an understanding and acceptance of international norms that stigmatized them.”83 Defeated states change both as a response to rational incentives and because they seek to reestablish prestige and respect. However, even when states are motivated by nonmaterial factors like prestige, status, respect, and acceptance, the pursuit of these goals makes reforms more likely only in the wake of material decline and defeat. In the cases above, embracing fundamental transformation required not just fresh ideas but material catastrophe. In most cases, therefore, institutional emulation in the wake of shocks involves the pursuit of both efficiency and legitimacy, power and prestige, rational learning and normative socialization. The overall effect is that hegemonic shocks intensify both learning and socialization, contributing to the subsequent regime wave. And while democracy has been the default model of emulation in recent decades, states have admired and mimicked any regime that emerges triumphant in a great-­power struggle. Until 1939, the interwar wave of fascism was driven not by conquest but by the increasing appeal of fascist institutions. This appeal, in turn, stemmed from the elimination of unemployment and economic growth in Nazi Germany, particularly at a time when the major democratic states were plagued by crisis and corruption. As Schivelbusch writes: In the wake of global economic disaster, there was no particular reason to prefer the political system most closely associated with capitalism—liberal democracy—to new systems that promised a brighter future. On the contrary, people were more inclined to ask themselves whether democracy was inevitably doomed by the economic breakdown of liberal capitalism.84 “The 1930s and 1940s were the period of fascist success,” writes the historian Hugh Seton-­Watson. “Inevitably fascist policies and institutions were aped by others.”85 Such imitation extended to democracies as well. Berman concludes that several “critical ‘innovations’ championed by fascists and national “story of the Wilsonian moment in the colonial world is one about the role of power, both real and perceived.” 83. Zarakol 2011:12. 84. Schivelbusch 2006:11. 85. Seton-­Watson 1979:365.

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socialists—such as the notion of a ‘people’s party’ and an economic order that aimed to control but not destroy capitalism—became central features of Europe’s postwar order.”86 Similarly, the Soviet Union inspired followers after World War II because its victory over Nazi Germany, “a country most observers had seen in 1939 and 1940 as an industrial giant, suggested that the Soviet system had considerable real-­world vigor.”87 This victory, which “legitimated and reinforced the Stalinist system,”88 played a key role in communism’s attraction in the years following the war. As Raymond Aron observed in 1944, its performance in the war “has refuted some classical arguments on the inevitable decadence inherent in a bureaucratic economy.”89 The victory seemed especially impressive because the Red Army was “universally underestimated” before the start of the war.90 The general staffs of both Britain and the United States expected a swift defeat, a view reinforced by Russia’s poor performance in the 1939 winter war against Finland. Churchill predicted that the Soviets would “assuredly be defeated,” while British commander Alan Brooke did not expect them to resist for more than a few months.91 The low expectations of communist military efficiency both dampened the regime’s appeal in the 1930s and bolstered it after the war’s end. “Stalin had emerged from his victory over Hitler far stronger than ever before,” writes Judt, “basking in the reflected glory of ‘his’ Red Army, at home and abroad.”92 The outcome of the hegemonic shock allowed the USSR to credibly present itself as an enticing alternative to capitalist democracy in a way that no Soviet exhortations could have done before the war. The Soviet victory over fascism lent communism a moral authority lacking before the war, transforming the regime into “a viable form of political modernity, as significant a threat to democracy as fascism had ever been.”93 This gave the rising hegemon the power not only to coerce but also to attract, whether the source of the attraction was ideology or material success. “No one can deny [that] the ruthlessness of the Soviet leaders paid dividends,” wrote Hicks, a lapsed Marxist who had renounced communism after the Molotov-­Ribbentrop pact. “I grow impatient with those who argue that the Soviet regime must be virtuous because it triumphed in war, but there can be no argument about its power.”94 86. Berman 2006:151. 87. Stokes 1993:8. 88. Strayer 1998:57. 89. Aron 1944:194.  90. Haffner 1978:30. 91. Ferguson 2006:415. 92. Judt 2005:174. 93. Smith 1994:186. 94. Hicks 1946:537.

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The Varieties of Hegemonic Engagement The three mechanisms examined above clearly do not operate in isolation, but can interact and reinforce each other. Openness to emulation creates the opportunity for inducements, and vice versa. But they can also operate at cross-­ purposes. Reliance on coercion can weaken the impetus for emulation—as was the case in Eastern Europe after 1945, when the fastest way for a young believer to reject communism was to experience it. The relative importance of mechanisms has also varied across cases. The democratic wave after World War I, for example, was driven primarily by emulation, as the United States remained largely unwilling to engage in direct inducements or to impose democracy by force. The fascist wave culminated in coercive impositions but began through inducement and emulation—encouraging philofascist movements, pulling states into the fascist camp through German trade expansion, and serving as a successful alternative to an apparently stagnant democracy. In the years after World War II, the United States relied primarily on various mechanisms of inducement while the USSR, after a brief postliberation honeymoon in Eastern Europe, employed coercion in that region and emulation elsewhere. After the Soviet collapse, emulation and inducement were the primary mechanisms of democratization, the latter through various levers of economic statecraft, such as aid conditionality, and the former through the ascendancy of capitalist democracy as the only “legitimate” remaining regime model. For rising great powers, emulation is perhaps the least costly mechanism of post-­shock engagement, since it requires little hegemonic inducement beyond some encouraging rhetoric and cultural diplomacy. Emulation alone, therefore, is unlikely to produce sustained democratic reforms, as proved to be the case after World War I. Inducement, on the other hand, requires a greater degree of hegemonic engagement, since it requires rising powers to actively involve themselves in other regimes through a variety of economic, political, and diplomatic measures ranging from bilateral treaties to development assistance to the creation of international organizations. Coercion, finally, is the most resource-­intensive form of post-­shock engagement, since it requires the physical occupation of foreign countries, and sustained economic and political effort to reshape their domestic regimes. Conditions of low constraint and low threat, as was the case for the United States after the Soviet collapse, pulled incentives for hegemonic engagement in opposite directions. On one hand, the United States now encountered fewer limits in its ability to shape other regimes through its foreign policy. Set loose from geopolitical constraints, it was now free to apply substantial diplomatic and economic pressures on regimes around the world. On the other hand, the end of Soviet-­American rivalry also removed any critical threats to the United

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States, weakening the need to pursue aggressive foreign engagement. The result was a moderate level of post-­shock engagement in which the United States focused primarily on economic and diplomatic methods of regime change. This phase of its foreign policy ended with the attacks of 9/11, which led US policy makers to see themselves as now living in a low-­constraint, high-­threat world—a combination that engendered a more aggressive policy of global hegemonic engagement, including the policy of shaping foreign regimes through unilateral imposition. In general, a low-­constraint, high-­threat world results in intense post-­shock engagement, as was the case for both superpowers after World War II. Both the United States and the USSR faced few constraints on the exercise of their power (particularly in their respective zones of influence, but also in contested regions like Asia), and both felt that the other represented a serious threat to their interests.95 As a result, during the Cold War, both countries undertook aggressive hegemonic engagement, employing a broad spectrum of measures that included a variety of tools of coercion and inducement. These factors may also help explain why the United States did not undertake another Marshall Plan to overhaul the international system after 1991: the unipolarity that followed the Soviet collapse resulted in fewer constraints on American behavior but also produced far fewer threats, dampening American incentives for intensive engagement or fundamental institutional rebuilding.96 The “translation” of shocks into waves is therefore far from an automatic process, since it depends not only on choices made by rising and declining great powers but also on the structural consequences of the shock, and the filtering of these consequences through domestic circumstances. The overall effect of shocks is to increase the propensity for regime transitions, but the relative salience and effectiveness of coercion, inducement, and emulation will still depend on a number of factors. Coercion, for example, has been effective only under narrow circumstances: where the state is weak or defeated after a war, and where the previous regime has been decisively discredited. The effectiveness of inducement is likely to depend on the distribution of power among domestic groups: where pro-­democracy groups are strong, external factors are likely to be reinforcing but superfluous. Where pro-­ democracy groups are weak and incumbent forces are strong, external influence is unlikely to overcome domestic constraints. But where the balance of domestic forces are relatively even, external influences can provide the critical 95. As Richard Overy (1998:312) puts it, the “hardening of Soviet attitudes to the West” after 1946 was “a product of Soviet vulnerability as much as Soviet strength.” 96. The implosion of communism “at once vindicated liberalism while removing the strategic imperative that had pushed a liberal variant of development into an important role in U.S. strategy” (Ekbladh 2010:258).

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push toward democratization. Emulation has accompanied every hegemonic shock, as a natural byproduct of dramatic triumphs, but in the absence of hegemonic engagement or other material incentives, emulation by itself appears unlikely to create lasting democratization. Conclusion Over the course of the twentieth century, democracy spread from a few isolated outposts to most corners of the world. But it would be a convenient mistake to accept the victory of democracy as a historical morality play, the foreordained triumph of good over evil. Democracy’s ascent, notes Mazower, is “a story of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, not inevitable victories and forward marches.”97 The twentieth century was one of nearly constant struggle—a protracted and world-­defining conflict between democratic, fascist, and communist visions of the modern state. The outcomes of hegemonic shocks became the critical junctures of this struggle, creating waves of domestic reforms that reshaped prevailing conceptions of modernity. The legacies of hegemonic shocks demonstrate that democratic optimism cannot rely on the intrinsic moral appeal of democracy. Robert Conquest, for example, dismisses fascism and communism as “mental aberrations.”98 But to do so ignores the status they had achieved as ideological and material examples of success. Communism, for instance, captured the imagination through a seductive and materially potent promise of a universal utopia. As Arnason writes, it was “a distinctive but ultimately self-­destructive version of modernity, rather than a sustained deviation from the modernizing mainstream.”99 Since both fascism and communism are now dead, “we have trouble recalling a time when they were far more credible than the constitutional democracies which they jointly despised,” writes Tony Judt. “Nowhere was it written that the latter would win the battle of hearts and minds, much less wars.”100 Their attractions were real, and this means rescuing them from what E. P. Thompson, referring to the English working class, calls “the immense condescension of history.”101 Their appeal, moreover, was deeply linked to the changing structure of hegemonic power. Laying bare the connections between hegemonic shifts and domestic reforms can therefore allow us to examine not only the spread and retreat of democracy, but also the fundamental forces that shaped the massive ideological battles of the twentieth century. 97. Mazower 1998:xii. 98. Conquest 1999:3. 99. Arnason 2000:61 100. Judt 2012:395. 101. Thompson 1963:12.

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PLAN OF THE BOOK

In the next chapter, I examine the causes of failed consolidation embedded in democratic waves. These failures, I argue, happen because the same systemic pressures that create powerful bursts of regime change also spread to countries that are unlikely to sustain any reforms once the shock passes. That chapter therefore combines two large but rarely intersecting literatures—on democratic waves and on democratic reversals—into a single explanatory framework. Chapters 3 through 6 present case studies of the four hegemonic shocks of the twentieth century. Chapter 3 examines how the outcome of the Great War demonstrated democracy’s effectiveness on both the battlefield and the factory floor, leading to a short-­lived but intense period of democratization on the European continent and beyond. I then examine how the overstretch of the postwar wave contributed to the collapse of democracy and set the stage for a series of confrontations between rival institutional arrangements. Chapter 4 examines the crisis of liberal capitalism and the fascist cascade of the late interwar period. The wave of fascism that swept the world after 1933 was the result of a growing disparity in relative power between the declining democratic powers—Britain, France, and especially the United States—and their vibrant nondemocratic rivals, with Nazi Germany at the forefront. During these years, fascist institutions penetrated the governments of many self-­ proclaimed authoritarians but also left a lasting legacy on the structure of modern democratic regimes. Chapter 5 examines the early Cold War period, focusing on how the two triumphant superpowers oversaw institutional waves that embodied their competing visions for the world. Chapter 6 looks at the democratic wave that accompanied the dissolution of the Soviet system, its consequences for democratic legitimacy, and its ambiguous long-­term effect on modern hybrid regimes. The concluding chapter examines the argument’s consequences for today’s global order. Since the mid-­1990s, and despite occasional outbursts, democratization seems to have reached a Great Plateau. For some observers, democratic capitalism is in the process of being supplanted by state capitalism—a rival regime embodied by China and characterized by a capitalist system of production combined with state ownership and guidance. I examine China’s potential rise from the historical perspective of shocks and waves, and end by discussing the argument’s broader implications for democracy and the global order.

2 From Crests to Collapses THE SOURCES OF FAILURE IN DEMOCR ATIC WAVES

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement, but it passes away from them. . . . Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success. —J OSE P H CONRAD, 1 9 1 11

Serious accidents are a major cause of change in safety, even though the change is not always sustained. —TREVOR KLET Z , 1 9 932

As Europe began its long recovery from the destruction of World War II, another democratic dawn appeared to be rising across the Atlantic Ocean. Throughout Latin America, countries that had never held elections were suddenly throwing dictators out of their palaces, adopting new liberal constitutions, introducing agrarian and welfare reforms, and expanding political rights. In some countries, like Guatemala and Argentina, transitions happened after popular uprisings; in other cases, like Cuba and Brazil, democratization came at the ballot box. As one observer noted in 1946, the war’s end “brought more 1. Conrad 1911:133. 2. Kletz 1993:70.

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democratic changes in more Latin American countries” than any period since the wars of independence of the previous century.3 In 1943 only four countries in the region could be considered democratic— Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Over the next five years, twenty-­five newly democratic regimes sprung up in the region in. And yet less than a decade later, euphoria had given way to disappointment. Military coups overthrew fledgling democracies in Peru, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Countries that remained nominally democratic saw a decline in political openness and a shift toward autocratic conservatism. By 1954, the wave had fully rolled back; once again, only a few countries in the entire region could be considered democratic.4 Despite the immense pressures for reform after the war, the experiment proved to be short-­lived. In that regard, Latin America was not unique. All three democratic waves of the twentieth century experienced failures shortly after their peak: a catastrophic reversal after 1918, a severe one after 1945, and a partial but persistent one after 1991. Explaining democratic waves therefore requires taking into account the inevitable counterwave—the tendency for democratic waves to collapse, subside, and roll back. Even more than theories of democratic transition, theories of democratic consolidation rely on domestic factors like divisive class cleavages, anti-­democratic elites, or the absence of a stable middle class. But, as I argue in this chapter, the failures of consolidation that follow democratic waves also stem from the consequences of hegemonic shocks. Hegemonic shocks in which democracy emerges victorious, as in 1919, 1945, and 1989, create extremely strong yet temporary incentives for democratization. In the short term, states experience immense external pressures for reforms, both from the democratic hegemon and from their own populations. These intense pressures help spark the initial wave by forging powerful but unwieldy pro-­democracy coalitions, overturning unsuspecting incumbents before they have a chance to react, and spreading hopes of regime change to opposition movements in countries where reforms are usually blocked. In this way, hegemonic shocks temporarily override the domestic constraints that hinder democratic transitions in times of “normal” politics. As a result, some states undergo democratic transitions despite the absence of internal conditions generally needed to sustain and consolidate democracy: a well-­established middle class, economic stability, ethnic cooperation, or past experience with democratic rule. Domestic factors that normally prevent democratization—institutional inertia, societal cleavages, or elite fears of asset redistribution—all fade into the background, overwhelmed by the structural pressures of the shock, only to resurface when the shock passes. With time, 3. Quoted in Bethell and Roxborough 1992:5. 4. Mainwaring and Pérez-­Liñán 2013:72.

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REGIME TRANSITIONS Systemic factors dominant

REGIME CONSOLIDATION Domestic factors dominant

Number of transitions Institutional wave

Counterwave

Hegemonic shock

Time FIGURE 2.1.

Hegemonic shocks as drivers of democratic “overstretch.”

the international pressures that initially drive the wave either disappear or transform into the reassertion of traditional geopolitical interests. In the absence of continued external support for reforms, extraordinary reform coalitions that push for democratic reforms in a moment of crisis dissolve as their disparate interests come to the fore. Failures of consolidation are therefore inherent in the aftermath of hegemonic shocks. While the initial post-­shock period creates strong incentives for forging powerful pro-­democracy alliances, this unity becomes difficult to maintain during the arduous post-­transition process of governing and distributing patronage. Meanwhile, anti-­democratic elites learn from the experiences of others and begin to repress, preempt, or co-­opt further democratization. The initial optimism of opposition movements dims and gives way to disappointment and repression. And successful opposition movements, driven by a spirit of post-­ shock democratic optimism, adopt institutions ultimately unsuitable for their country’s level of social, economic, or political development. The democratic wave provokes the conditions for its own decline by creating strong but short-­ lived incentives that disappear as the shock fades. Both democratic cascades and subsequent democratic reversals are part of a process through which hegemonic shocks temporarily intensify external incentives and opportunities for reform. In sum, democratic rollback is not just a common side effect of democratic waves but an intrinsic component of the process through which shocks create waves. Hegemonic shocks lead to “democratic overstretch” in which shocks create an artificially high number of transitions that begin to fail as the process of democratic consolidation moves forward (see figure 2.1). Most studies of democracy’s diffusion across national borders emphasize positive feedback as the central element of the process, focusing on the self-­

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reinforcing tendencies that lead to transnational cascades. Elkins, for example, defines democratic diffusion as an instance where “a democratic transition in one country increases the probability of transition in a neighboring country.”5 And discussing the cross-­border spread of democracy, Brinks and Coppedge focus on neighbor emulation, defined as the process by which “countries tend to become more like their immediate geographic neighbors over time.”6 Yet democratic waves never take the form of the unilinear process often portrayed by scholars of diffusion. The spread of democracy that follows hegemonic shocks inevitably triggers resistance to democratic diffusion as the shock passes, and the interaction of these opposing forces fundamentally shapes both the strategies of the actors and the eventual regime outcomes. The cross-­border bursts of democracy therefore cannot be understood apart from the resistance provoked by this spread, in the same way that the advance of globalization cannot be understood apart from resistance to globalization. In the latter case, universalism provokes particularism; in the former, contestation provokes repression. Democratic waves are therefore better understood as the complex interplay of positive feedback brought on by the hegemonic shock and negative feedback brought on by the fading of hegemonic pressures as the shock passes. To suggest, as Oliver and Meyers do, that democratic diffusion “is the process whereby past events make future events more likely” is to miss this crucial interplay.7 The rollback that follows waves originates from the very same pressures that generate the initial cascade. In post-­1945 Latin America, to return to our opening example, both the initial wave of democratization and subsequent democratic failures stemmed directly from the changing dynamics of the hegemonic shock. The Soviet-­ American alliance against Hitler led to the formation of broad antifascist coalitions in Latin America. The result was a union of center-­left and center-­right parties, the exclusion of the radical right, and the moderation of the radical left. In this period, the communists advocated “class collaboration, moderation of labor demands, and, at its most extreme, the dissolution of the Communist party and no-­strike pledges for the duration of the war.”8 In the immediate wake of the Allied victory, the United States made a strong push for regional democratization.9 While geopolitical interests and fears of communism would soon reassert themselves, “for a brief interlude the policy of supporting dictators lost most of its force the day World War II 5. Elkins 2008:42. 6. Brinks and Coppedge 2006:464. 7. Oliver and Meyers 2003:174. 8. Collier 1993:6. 9. Mainwaring and Pérez-­Liñán (2013:87), for example, argue that US foreign policy strongly favored democracy promotion between 1944 and 1947, compared with other periods.

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ended.”10 The postwar period created intense but temporary pressures for democratization driven by the American victory, the formation of broad pro-­ reform coalitions, the spirit of democratic optimism, and the American support for democratization. The workers of Nicaragua, for example, marched against their regime under the slogan “Roosevelt Has Said that the Tyrants of the Earth Will Be Wiped Out.”11 The end result, as in Europe three decades earlier, was a period of democratic overstretch. With the onset of the Cold War, the fracturing of the Allies into the Soviet and American camps was reflected at the domestic level by the split of broad wartime coalitions into the pro-­communist left and the pro-­ democratic center-­right. “Insofar as a window of opportunity for political and social change in Latin America had opened at the end of the Second World War,” write Bethell and Roxborough, “it had been firmly slammed shut by the end of 1948.”12 As the heightening of the Cold War sharpened domestic rivalries, the left was suppressed or excluded from the region’s governing coalitions. As George Kennan wrote in 1950: “It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.”13 In this way, the nature of hegemonic rivalry was replicated in the changing structure of domestic coalitions across Latin America. It was this geopolitical contest, rather than the peculiarities of domestic circumstances, that shaped the region’s general interparty realignments in the wake of the war. The outcome of the war created strong but ephemeral pressures for democratization, leading to rollback as the democratizing incentives associated with the shock faded. The first half of this chapter outlines the four recurring mechanisms that create counterwaves—shifting hegemonic pressures, collapsing ad hoc coalitions, autocratic adaptation, and bounded rationality. The second half examines the book’s arguments in light of some alternatives, particularly domestic explanations and theories of diffusion. Shifting Hegemonic Pressures In the aftermath of shocks, systemic factors temporarily assume a key role in shaping domestic institutions. In cases of democratic waves, hegemonic pressures for democratization reach their intensity immediately after the shock, creating opportunities for cascades of reform. Yet these hegemonic pressures 10. Schoultz 1998:316. 11. Rabe 2016:26. 12. Bethell and Roxborough 1992b:327. 13. Quoted in Reynolds 2000:104.

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are unstable—as the shock passes, they either shift to prioritizing geopolitical interests at the expense of democracy or fade away entirely. At the same time, internal forces like the composition of class coalitions or the domestic economy begin to reassert their primacy. The Soviet collapse, for instance, initially created extremely powerful pressures for autocrats to adopt the trappings of democracy across Africa. Yet two factors associated with the shock led to a slackening of these democratizing impulses. First, while the end of the Cold War removed the need to prop up dictators, it also reduced the incentive to pursue democracy promotion with any sustained intensity. This was especially true for countries with weak or absent linkages to the West.14 Ake, for example, noted that Africa’s “economic and strategic marginalization” might now “make the West too indifferent” about pushing for democratic reforms on the continent.15 Especially with the attention surrounding Eastern Europe, African states came to be regarded as “irrelevant international clutter.”16 Economically, the United States had little at stake on the continent at the end of the Cold War: exports to Africa accounted for approximately 2 percent of the US total, while imports amounted to just over 2.5 percent.17 In the decade after the Soviet collapse, the United States was reluctant to engage itself too deeply in in the developing world, stung in part by its experience in Somalia, and thus focused on “the symbolic and visible aspects of democratization,” like elections.18 By the mid-­1990s, an increasingly insular United States saw dramatic cuts to aid flows. From an all-­time high of $17.9 billion in 1990, official development assistance fell to an all-­time low of $9.25 billion in 1997.19 The brief moral commitment to democracy promotion that followed the Soviet collapse was short-­lived for states with few ties to the West. In these countries, the United States was now free to impose more robust aid conditionality but also had less of a reason to do so. For example, among the twenty-­ six post-­communist states, Turkmenistan was the only country that did not adopt a formal multiparty system in the immediate wake of Soviet disintegration. But the level of Western linkages among these countries varied widely, contributing to divergent institutional outcomes in the post-­Soviet space. In Eastern Europe, the prospect of EU membership provided crucial (and sustained) external incentives for democratic consolidation. But outside of the Baltics, the impossibility of EU membership for these states meant the quick fading of external pressures, opening up space for autocratic retrenchment. 14. Huntington 1991a:15. 15. Ake 1991:43. 16. Decalo 1992:17. 17. Duignan and Gann 1994:18. 18. Gros 1998:13. 19. OECD, http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/data.htm.

Fro m C r e s t s to Co ll a p s e s 39

Weaker linkages with the West meant that pressure for democracy has been “softer and more sporadic” in the former Soviet states compared with Eastern Europe, argues Way, and as a result, foreign aid has been “only weakly tied to democracy” and ineffective under pressure.20 If the first source of declining external pressures was weak or absent linkages, the second was its opposite. In countries with substantial linkages with the West, the ideological commitment to democracy promotion was soon overtaken by more traditional concerns about commercial interests and postcolonial influence. Western states with the largest interests in fragile new democracies took care to protect those interests in part by shielding their client states from political pressures. This was especially true of former colonial powers, who “tended to take a gentler and more nuanced approach to demands for political reform.”21 “Whatever their degree of attachment to democratic rule in Africa, all Western governments have other priorities in the continent,” wrote Bratton and van de Walle. “Where they have commercial interests, Western governments are also less likely to stand on principle.”22 Like sanctions, effective aid conditionality requires a level of international coordination that proved difficult to sustain in the face of competing interests. Where economic and geopolitical considerations overtook normative aspirations, the rhetoric of democracy promotion soon began to decouple itself from aid conditionality. As Gros noted in 1998, “diplomatic wrangling” between the United States and former colonizers like France led to disunity among donors. As a result, the promotion of democracy “has not been matched by greater financial commitment to those countries that have advanced the furthest in the process.”23 Moreover, the elimination of the common Soviet threat made policy coordination between Europe and the United States less urgent and thus more difficult to sustain. While the end of the Cold War ended superpower rivalry, it heightened competition between Western countries who, no longer bound by a geopolitical straitjacket, could compete among themselves in Africa. As a result, donor pressures have been conflicted and inconsistent. In countries where commercial interests competed with ideological ones, the result was an increasingly uneven application of aid conditionality as a tool of reform. Countries like Kenya, whose leader threatened to crush the democracy movement “like rats,” continued to receive aid.24 For Britain, trade and diplomatic interests “overrode ostensible commitments” to aid as a lever of reform.25 After 20. Way 2015:7. 21. Clapham 1996:200. 22. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:241–42. 23. Gros 1998:13. 24. Quoted in Ake 1991:40. 25. Robinson 1993:94.

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the Nigerian military annulled the country’s elections in 1993, the United States suspended its aid program and imposed travel bans on military officials. Yet other countries like France, Germany, Japan, and (later) Britain did not follow suit, and as a result Nigerian officials were able to continue investing abroad without feeling pressured by the West. The French commitment to democracy promotion was especially brief, given its desire to maintain its influence in Francophone Africa. After declaring staunch support for political conditionality in November 1990, President Mitterrand delivered a visibly more diluted message at the next Francophone Summit. In 1992 the French prime minister announced that democratization was now his country’s third priority on the continent, behind security and economic development.26 The French government held a series of meetings discussing ways to protect its sphere of influence against the growing possibility of American incursions. Countries that actually underwent democratic transitions (like Benin) saw declines in French aid, while others that managed to remain autocratic (like Togo, Cameroon, or Zaire) saw increases in aid over the same period.27 In some cases France refused to support opposition parties in its former colonies and turned instead toward loyal ruling regimes. In Cameroon, concerned that the Anglophone challenger might endanger France’s position in the country’s oil industry, French officials supported the incumbent Paul Biya.28 Despite extensive evidence of fraud that led to the suspension of American aid, France endorsed his 1992 election victory and welcomed him during a state visit to Paris the following year.29 “It is likely that had the French backed the call for a national conference, Biya would long have organized one,” argues Mentan. Instead, French officials took the position that supporters of a national conference “were seeking to wield power before elections—a position quite concomitant with that of the Biya regime.”30 While Biya was forced to briefly democratize in the early 1990s by legalizing opposition parties, he has remained the country’s president to this day, winning subsequent elections by large margins despite widespread allegations of fraud. In Cameroon, the opportunity for reform created by the hegemonic shock could not be sustained in the face of inconsistent external pressure. This pattern repeated itself in other resource-­rich former colonies that maintained commercial ties with France, such as Gabon and the Central African Republic. Gabon’s Omar Bongo, for example, was soon able to avoid French pressure for democratic reform “because France was faced with a situation where impor26. Schraeder 1995:553. 27. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:241–42. 28. Clapham 1996:203. 29. Clapham 1996:203. 30. Mentan 1998:45.

Fro m C r e s t s to Co ll a p s e s 41

tant economic interests were at stake (i.e., oil) in a regime that had served these interests relatively well.”31 As a result, the ideological thrust of aid conditionality was quickly contaminated by more practical concerns. The United States reasserted its commitment to maintaining and extending economic and military dominance, which conflicted with its ability to promote sustainable democratization. These priorities manifested themselves in large aid flows to countries with dismal human right records, like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Between 1992 and 1996, Turkey received over $2 billion in US military assistance and another $400 million for economic development, despite its repeated violations of civil liberties. In Azerbaijan, democratic consolidation was impeded by the waning of external pressure as concern for democracy promotion soon took a backseat to securing energy supplies.32 While systemic forces played a role in the initial transitions, “it cannot be assumed that external powers will continue to support democratic consolidation,” wrote Clapham and Wiseman in 1995. “Western pressure for democratization is likely to be ephemeral, and there are already plentiful indications that it is on the decline.”33 A decade later, two scholars concluded that the international climate for nascent democracies has shifted. Whereas the early 1990s saw international players—notably Western governments and international financial institutions—openly supporting democracies, by the close of the decade, outside efforts to promote democracy in Africa had backtracked.34 The decline of external pressure was not uniform across the post-­Soviet wave. In Eastern Europe, the prospect of EU membership served as a powerful tool of democratic consolidation; in Latin America, US democracy promotion has also continued to exercise a largely positive influence on democratization since the 1980s.35 But in other regions, systemic pressure for democracy proved fickle, either because of weak linkages (as in the post-­Soviet space) or from countervailing external incentives (as in parts of Africa). These shifting external pressures contributed to reversals in some of the countries that undertook democratic transitions following the Soviet collapse. The rise of hybrid regimes after the Soviet collapse can also be seen as the byproduct of these shifting pressures. These regimes experienced enormous external pressures to democratize after 1991 but quickly discovered the fickle31. Messone and Gros 1998:142. 32. Gahramanova 2009:778. 33. Clapham and Wiseman 1995:228. 34. VonDoepp and Villalón 2005:4. 35. Mainwaring and Pérez-­Liñán 2013:86–87, 300–302.

42 C H A P TER 2

150

100

Closed autocracies Hybrid regimes

50

Liberal democracies 0 1970

1980

1990

2000

FIGURE 2. 2. The number of closed autocracies, hybrid regimes, and liberal democracies, 1970–­2000. Based on the dataset by Møller and Skaaning 2013.

ness of these pressures once the initial euphoria wore off. Rulers soon found a way to sideline the opposition, governing coalitions collapsed under the weight of competing interests, and optimistic reformers found themselves outmatched by the constraints of their circumstances. While the hegemonic shock of the Soviet collapse led to partial democratization in many states, shifting external pressures contributed to democratic stagnation and rollback. The reversal was tempered this time by the lack of any true alternatives to democracy, thus ensuring that breakdowns would lead to a democratic plateau rather than a complete reversal. Still, one of the major long-­term consequences of the post-­Soviet wave has been the proliferation of hybrid regimes—countries that adopted the trappings of democracy to satisfy the immense post-­ shock pressures for reform, yet learned to infuse them with autocratic rule as the pressures for democracy faded. As a result, the long-­term historical legacy of the Soviet collapse may be not the triumph of democracy but the decline of overt despotism, accompanied by the rise of the gray zone in the form of competitive autocracies and hybrid regimes (see figure 2.2). Shifting hegemonic pressures mean that even sustained linkages with the West may not always encourage democratization.36 While the absence of ties discourages democracy promotion, extensive linkages produce a set of perverse incentives that elevate commercial and political interests above democratization. Both very weak and very strong linkages discourage democratization, albeit for different reasons. In the case of weak linkages, the impulse for 36. Levitsky and Way 2010.

Fro m C r e s t s to Co ll a p s e s 43

external pressures soon fades because the West has little interest in pursuing sustained democracy promotion. In the case of strong linkages, commercial and geopolitical interests soon begin to take precedence over ideological ones. The relationship between the extent of Western linkages and democratic success may thus resemble an inverted U curve rather than a simple positive correlation. The end result is the same—the fading of systemic pressures for democratization after the early stages of the democratic wave. The Collapse of Ad Hoc Coalitions The fervor of a democratic wave creates a powerful uniting force. It brings together diverse social and economic groups in pursuit of a single goal—the overthrow of the status quo, now suddenly possible. Such unity is especially prevalent in the immediate wake of the hegemonic shock, when both domestic and systemic forces combine to make the prospect of reform both viable and appealing. Historically, democratic waves are characterized by the creation of extraordinary pro-­reform coalitions, composed of social groups whose disparate preferences are set aside during the revolutionary moment. In the African democratic wave of the 1990s, for example, pro-­reform movements were often a “loose, multiclass assemblage of indigenous protest groups.” Likewise, Wiseman notes that African democracy movements “represented a remarkable coalescence of political participation by all levels of society from elite to mass level.”37 But while the initial post-­shock period forges broad, multiclass coalitions, their unity often disintegrates after the moment of transition. Domestic reform coalitions function much like victorious alliances in international politics— once their purpose in defeating a common enemy has been achieved, these alliances struggle to maintain cohesion and collapse. Diverse and contradictory group interests begin to reassert themselves, making democratic consolidation an increasingly tenuous process. The unity of revolutionary opposition quickly splinters over the divisive issues of quotidian governance like taxation and minority rights.38 The aftermath of the Great War, for example, saw the creation of extraordinary domestic alliances that supported democratic reforms. The hegemonic shock of the war seemed to validate the value of democracy as an efficient and ideologically attractive regime, forging domestic alliances that supported democratic transitions. Yet these ad hoc coalitions could not be sustained once 37. Bratton and van de Walle 1992:420; Wiseman 1995:5. 38. Goldstone 2011:14. “Politics is not the same as a revolution,” says protestor Khalid Abdallah in The Square, a documentary about the Egyptian uprising. “If you want to play politics, you have to compromise. And we’re not good at this—at all.”

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the immediate crisis had passed and Europe entered what Karl Polanyi called the counterrevolutionary phase of the postwar period. “[H]ardly had the acute danger of dissolution passed and the services of the trade unions became superfluous,” he wrote, “than the middle classes tried to exclude the working class from all influence on public life.”39 Fear of radical upheaval created favorable conditions for cross-­class alliances between labor and capital immediately after the war. In this period, Charles Maier notes, “major industrialists found it advantageous to secure economic immunities by astute alliances with the trade-­union leaders.”40 But these uneasy partnerships fell apart as the fear of revolution faded and labor’s help was no longer crucial for national survival. The brief postwar push toward democratization stemmed from “an unstable coalition of international and domestic forces which was now breaking down across much of the continent,” argues Mark Mazower.”41 By temporarily increasing the incentives and opportunities for ad hoc coalitions, hegemonic shocks make the post-­transition collapse of these coalitions more likely. Ironically, the very breadth of mass mobilization that makes transitions possible in early stages of the wave also leads to the failure of democratic consolidation. Even as the initial stage of transition binds domestic factions together, the postrevolutionary phase pulls them apart. The ephemeral nature of ad hoc coalitions suggests that wave-­driven democratization may be more likely to fail than democratization pursued by entrenched domestic groups, as in the case of protracted peasant rebellions.42 The collapse of postrevolutionary coalitions is not unique to waves and can also occur in revolutions driven purely by domestic causes. But these coalitional collapses become even more likely during waves, because hegemonic shocks temporarily intensify external incentives for reform, enlarging the unwieldy pro-­democracy opposition and thus making it more likely to fall apart in the wake of the regime’s overthrow. Autocratic Adaptation Autocrats threatened by democratic waves rarely remain passive in the face of pressure for reforms. The start of a wave often catches nondemocratic incumbents by surprise, leading to increased opportunities for successful regime transitions. Yet each instance of successful democratization accomplishes two 39. Polanyi 1944:196. 40. Maier 1975:54. 41. Mazower 1998:23. 42. During the Third Wave, Smith (1994:187) argues, “Democratic forces were weakest where, as in China in 1989, they were largely an imitation of events transpiring elsewhere. When democracy enjoyed strong indigenous bases in established political groups and procedures . . . its prospects were more promising.”

Fro m C r e s t s to Co ll a p s e s 45

opposing tasks—it informs other pro-­democracy movements about effective tactics and organizational strategies, but it also reveals to elites which strategies of suppression will or will not succeed, and how seriously they ought to prepare for the threat. Learning from the fates of their peers causes autocratic elites to update their beliefs about the necessity of suppressing the protests. In the years immediately after the end of the Cold War, for instance, pressure to democratize represented a significant challenge to authoritarian elites. But by the mid-­1990s, argues Bratton, they had “discovered ways to control the process of competitive elections so that they can win a grudging stamp of approval from Western donors but still hang on to political power.”43 After the defeat of Kaunda in Zambia in 1991, African leaders “began to advise each other on how to hold democratic elections without being voted out of office.”44 Kaunda had reportedly advised Kenya’s leader to take a harsher stance against opponents since “in his hard-­won experience, gradual political openings led inexorably to the ouster of incumbent leaders.” Likewise in Cameroon Biya was able to disrupt his country’s national conference by learning from the outcomes of conferences in Benin and Congo. As African rulers soon realized, failure to adapt led to defeat. Malawi’s Hastings Banda, for example, “refused to acknowledge the changes within the continent and in the global order” and lost the 1994 election.45 No leader wanted to become the African Hoenecker (or worse, the African Ceauşescu.) The result was a scramble to fragment, co-­opt, or disarm political opposition without recourse to overt violence that might invite sanction from the West. Elite learning and adaption have been major components of post–Cold War democratic rollback, and key sources in the rise of hybrid regimes. Facing pressures to reform, nondemocratic elites have often been able to subvert the process for their own purposes—building the facade of democracy to mollify external and domestic demands without fundamentally restructuring their regimes. The result is a Potemkin democracy, where the existence of formally democratic institutions “masks (often in part to legitimate) the reality of authoritarian domination.”46 By the early 1990s, cunning leaders like Omar Bongo of Gabon and Houphouet Boigny of the Ivory Coast proactively took steps to co-­opt, divert, and dilute democratic principles. These leaders “faked conversion to democracy and imposed on their populations bogus transition programs.”47 Scholars of democratic diffusion have often pointed to the contagion effects of a democratic wave, in which a successful transition inspires and facilitates 43. Bratton 1998:168. 44. Nwokedi 1995:202. 45. Ihonvbere 2003b:248. 46. Diamond 2002:24. 47. Isumonah 2003:121.

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transitions in other countries. But while “demonstration effects” produce self-­ reinforcing dynamics in the initial stages of the waves, autocrats soon begin to learn how to adjust to their new circumstances, leading to a countervailing process of negative feedback. Even democratic successes in one country “can induce established rulers elsewhere to prepare against challenges and thus stifle replications.” As a result, “many emulation efforts end up failing, and the reaction they provoke can exacerbate repression and set back the cause of democracy.”48 Bounded Rationality The spread of a democratic wave is not just a rational response to changed incentives. It is also a period of revolutionary euphoria, a moment of intense hope about the prospects for a democratic rebirth. The early period of transitions inflates the hopes of opposition leaders and reform movements, leading them to undertake attempts at democratization in countries where they have negligible chances of success.49 In its initial stages, this optimism reinforces the momentum of diffusion by increasing the expectations of success among reform movements and their leaders. As Kurt Weyland has persuasively argued, the initial excitement generated in the early stages of a democratic wave is soon tempered by harsh political realities. “[T]he enthusiastic hope that often erupts during waves of regime contention—‘If they managed to do it, we can do it too!’ can be misleading,” he writes.50 In these cases, revolutionary leaders pursue democratic reforms in part because of cognitive heuristics that cause them to misinterpret other examples and overestimate their own chances of success. Movements may learn the wrong lessons from the hegemonic shock or lack the capacity to achieve their goals and become suppressed by conservative rulers.51 Research in political psychology, for example, has repeatedly shown that statesmen and political actors learn from the most dramatic examples rather than the most appropriate ones (availability bias), overestimate the importance of recent events in lieu of a historical perspective (recency bias), and misjudge their own effectiveness at bringing out the desired political reforms.52 They 48. Weyland 2010:1155. 49. Weyland 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014. 50. Weyland 2010:1155. 51. Weyland (2016) also argues that cognitive biases play a great role in the initial diffusion of a wave; counterdiffusion by the elites, on the other hand, tends to be more deliberate and thus more successful, contributing to the collapse of waves. 52. Goldsmith (2005), for instance, argues that prestigious or high-­profile examples are more likely to serve as learning models for policy makers, rather than cases whose circumstances are more applicable to their own, and this bias can decrease the effectiveness of learning. Russia,

Fro m C r e s t s to Co ll a p s e s 47

tend to overestimate their similarity to successful cases and underestimate their similarity to unsuccessful ones.53 As Jack Levy notes: “People often pick superficial or perhaps even irrelevant analogies, minimize the differences between the analogy and the current situation, fail to search for alternative analogies, and stick with the analogy in spite of increasing evidence of its flaws.”54 Moreover, political elites like leaders of protest movements may be particularly prone to overconfidence.55 They consistently overestimate their chances of getting a desired policy outcome, or the correctness of their interpretation of a complex situation. In democratic waves, these cognitive biases contribute to increased emulation in the wake of a hegemonic shock. But they also lead to the failed consolidations that follow, as overly optimistic leaders attempt democratic reforms in states where domestic conditions are not conducive to democratic consolidation. In cascades of revolutionary contention, argues Weyland, euphoric protestors often act “quickly and rashly,” confronting entrenched regimes despite lacking information or gauging their “chances for successful replication.”56 The rashness of revolutionary waves is not just a product of limited information or bounded rationality—it is also an emotional process in which joy, solidarity, and indignation inflame the spread of protests. The heady and hope-­ filled early period of the wave leads pro-­reform movements to learn the wrong lessons from the hegemonic shock and to overestimate their chances of overthrowing autocratic regimes. The result is attempts at democratization in countries that have negligible chances for success, contributing to democratic failure in the subsequent stages of the wave. The collapse of high expectations exacerbates the frustration and dismay of the counterwave. As Roberts writes about the post-­WWI period, “Initial optimism only intensified dissatisfactions and disappointment felt with constitutional and liberal government in Europe when it seemed to fail.”57 The Interaction of Counterwave Mechanisms The mechanisms of rollback interact and work together to produce counterwaves. Describing the wave of democratization in Africa during the 1990s, for example, Joseph notes the combined influence of fading external pressures as a result, sought to learn too many lessons from the United States, leading to policy failure in the early 1990s. 53. See, e.g., Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982; Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman 2002; or Jervis 1976. 54. Levy 1994:294. 55. Hafner-­Burton, Hughes, and Victor 2013:373. 56. Weyland 2010:1152. 57. Roberts 1999:312.

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and the collapse of pro-­reform movements in newly democratic states. As the transitions continued, opposition forces fragmented into ethnic and personalist groupings, while external powers were often obliged to reduce their pressure for change because of their own rivalries, as well as concerns about the upsurge of armed conflicts, collapsed states, and humanitarian emergencies.58 Kenya’s trajectory since the Soviet collapse offers a clear example of interaction among forces of failed consolidation. External pressures played a key role in the country’s initial democratization. Contagion from Eastern Europe inspired domestic opposition: in early 1990, one of Kenya’s religious leaders denounced the regime’s patrimonial corruption, comparing it to the failed communist states. The conclusion of Cold War rivalry allowed the United States to actively push for the country’s democratization. “The end of Soviet involvement in Africa,” noted the Economist, meant that “pressure can be put on President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya to hold elections because Kenya is no longer seen as a bastion of anti-­communism in East Africa.”59 Throughout the year, the US ambassador repeatedly urged the regime to undertake liberalizing reforms. In November 1991, a group of international donors met in Paris to suspend aid to Kenya and laid out explicit conditions for future assistance. A week after the meeting, the regime repealed the ban on opposition parties and promised to hold elections the following year, the country’s first since 1966. As a result, the major reform movement, the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD), transformed itself into a formal party, a united opposition that enjoyed “tremendous domestic and international support.”60 In these early stages, therefore, Kenya offered “the most decisive evidence of the new conditionality in Anglophone Africa.”61 These early gains quickly unraveled, however, as the opposition grew increasingly fractured in the run-­up to the December 1992 elections. FORD was unable to name a candidate and soon broke down along personal and ethnic lines, splintering into the Asili and Kenya factions. Moi quickly moved to capitalize on the opposition’s weakness. Throughout the year, ethnic violence in western Kenya and the Rift Valley claimed the lives of hundreds, allegedly at Moi’s instigation, in order to create an atmosphere of fear before the December elections and further fracture the opposition. He also took steps to ensure that elections were tilted in his favor—handpicking electoral commission members, enacting election rules that favored the incumbent, and pressuring civil ser58. Joseph 1997:376. 59. Economist 12/26/1992. 60. Brown 2001:728. 61. Diamond 1997:350.

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vants to support his regime or lose their jobs. He used control of the media to receive favorable coverage from the state-­monopolized radio and TV stations and spent $60 million to buy votes through cash and food bribes.62 These measures were facilitated by waning external pressures from donors, who stressed the need for elections above all, despite potential problems and irregularities. When the opposition parties called for a boycott due to Moi’s manipulation of the electoral process, they were faced with donor opposition. After spending over $2 million on elections, donors were “determined to see them take place, even under grossly sub-­optimal conditions,” notes Brown. The US ambassador expressed “a common feeling that it was better to lose and be represented in parliament than not be represented at all. The idea of a boycott was quickly dropped.”63 Facing seven opposition candidates, Moi won with 37 percent of the vote. Despite reports of electoral irregularities, Western states acquiesced to the results. Following the election, external concerns placed “much more importance on stability and economic reform than on democracy.”64 The subsequent mistreatment of opposition candidates received “barely a word of protest from outsiders.”65 While external pressures initially mobilized the opposition and forced the incumbent to liberalize, these pressures soon proved inconsistent, enabling the incumbent to rig the electoral game in his favor. Moi quickly discovered what would soon become clear to many of his peers—that there was a wide gap for autocratic maneuvering between the bare prerequisites of donors and the comprehensive prerequisites of a functioning democracy. Opposition parties can compete without winning, civil society can exist without effecting reforms, and elections can be held without threatening incumbents. Moi’s opposition quickly fractured, external pressures waned, and the incumbent adroitly adapted to changed political realities. The interaction of these countervailing forces led to the failure of democratization. The factors driving failed consolidation in democratic waves can thus create something of a vicious circle (see figure 2.3). Fading external pressure enables autocrats to expand their repertoire of entrenchment, tailoring domestic changes to the needs of external actors without undertaking fundamental reforms. This in turn increases their ability to apply pressure upon the domestic opposition, finding ways to weaken, co-­opt, or domesticate reform coalitions. When the optimism of the early stage of transition fades, these coalitions lose their unifying purpose and splinter into disorganized ethnic or personalist 62. Brown 2001:726–27. 63. Brown 2001:732, 731. 64. Brown 2001:732. 65. Gros 1998:13.

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fractions crippled by internecine squabbles. Such fragmentation, which often brings the threat of instability, in turn causes external pressures for democracy to subside even further. Outside powers, Joseph notes, “were often obliged to reduce their pressure for change because of their own rivalries, as well as concerns about the upsurge of armed conflicts, collapsed states, and humanitarian emergencies” that resulted from the fragmentation.66 Kenya’s story illustrates how a hegemonic shock can create real opportunities for reform but also contributes to their demise. In Kenya’s case, initially powerful but waning external pressures allowed political space for adaptation by Moi, who used it to successfully intensify the pressures upon opposing coalitions. The fragmentation of opposition groups that resulted from this strategy in turn helped to further weaken external pressures for reform, as Western concerns about stability and state collapse began to take precedence over democracy promotion. While Kenyan opposition leaders were unable to reach a democratic breakthrough, these elements of counterdiffusion were present in a number of initial success cases—that is, instances where opposition movements managed a democratic transition but could not create a consolidated democracy. In Zambia, for example, the opposition group—the Movement for Multi-­Party Democracy (MMD)—defeated the Kaunda dictatorship in the 1991 elections. In the early 1990s, the country seemed poised to be a potential success story on the African continent. Yet the MMD represented a typical case of Beissinger’s “negative coalition”—a group that unites not due to common beliefs but because they share a common enemy.67 It was a hodgepodge of “disparate elements and interests”68 that included businessmen, religious leaders, students, and workers united by a single common factor—their desire to discredit, delegitimize, and defeat the Kaunda regime. But once that task had been accomplished, the party fell into disarray. Plagued by contradictions, internal conflicts, and scandals, the party steadily lost both its legitimacy and its ability to pursue political reforms. Within a few years Chiluba had regained the dictatorial mantle held by his predecessor. Similar dynamics played out elsewhere; in countries ranging from Belarus to Malawi, seemingly successful democratic transitions that formed a part of the post-­Soviet wave gave way to failure and rollback. In sum, both democratic cascades and later democratic reversals are part of a single linked process through which hegemonic shocks temporarily intensify external incentives and opportunities for reform. Having examined how shocks shape these dynamics, I now briefly turn to some alternative explanations of regime waves. 66. Joseph 1997:376. 67. Beissinger 2013. 68. Ihonvbere 2003a:66.

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More space for autocratic maneuvering

Elite adaptation Co-option and suppression of the opposition

Waning external pressures

Collapse of reform coalitions

Fear of state collapse and instability FIGURE 2.3.

The interaction of counterwave forces in Kenya.

Alternative Explanations Despite the vast literature on democratization, there are surprisingly few attempts to explain the causes of democratic waves. This shortfall stems in part from the literature’s traditional roots in comparative politics. Early studies of political development were rooted in the formative experiences of a few countries in Western Europe, particularly England and France.69 Later scholars expanded their geographic scope first into Latin America and then into Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Yet the method of analysis remained largely the same—breaking down the global phenomenon of democratization into individual cases by country or region, and analyzing commonalities or patterns within those cases while at the same time emphasizing the differences that set the country or region apart from others. These domestic approaches have focused on a country’s economic development, elite pacts, mass movements, civil society, party coalitions, electoral systems, national culture, federalism, colonial legacies, ethnic and linguistic diversity, class relations, and civil-­military relations—to name just a few of the more prominent explanations. While these theories offered a number of powerful theories of institutional change, they left democracy’s relationship with the international system largely unexplored. As a result, proponents of systemic explanations of democracy have accused comparativists of neglecting the international sources of democracy—what Pridham called the “forgotten dimension” of democratization.70 69. Munck 1994. As he notes, a common criticism of the early democratization literature was its implicit treatment of Europe as the “default” course of long-­term institutional development. 70. Pridham 1991:18. According to Markoff (1996:20), the study of democratization “has ob-

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As Carles Boix has noted, “the impact of the international order on constitutional outcomes and the expansion of democracy has received little theoretical attention.”71 In traditional comparative explanations, external forces are sometimes treated as atheoretical anomalies. In his seminal article on democratization, for example, Dankwart Rustow argues that in studying regime change “we may leave aside countries where a major impetus came from abroad,” due to the “conventional division of labor” between comparative and international politics.72 Yet this distinction appears increasingly untenable. Any explanation of domestic reforms must account for the relative importance of both external and domestic factors, which shifts over time. The comparativist rejoinder that international influences are “always mediated through domestic state-­society relations” is both true and trivial.73 The crucial question is not whether domestic factors or external factors are more important but how their relative importance varies over time and how their interaction shapes institutional outcomes. The impact of external forces is shaped both by the strength of linkages among states and by the nature of domestic forces within them. As a result, hegemonic impulses rarely operate in isolation from the internal environment through which they propagate, and the impact of diffusion is inevitably filtered through the domestic conditions of particular countries. Hegemonic shocks do not exercise their effects equally on all states; rather, their impact is shaped by the strength of a country’s ties and linkages to great powers as well as by the capacity of domestic actors to resist external pressures for change. Domestic factors may be crucial at many points—perhaps even during much of a country’s history—but the aftermath of hegemonic shocks begins a period when external forces become uniquely prominent. By linking seemingly different episodes of domestic reforms into a common explanatory framework, this book highlights the parallels among institutional waves and shows how these commonalities can be traced back to the consequences of hegemonic shocks. By focusing on international transformations as drivers of institutional reform, this book adds to a growing body of research that emphasizes external influences and cross-­border linkages as drivers of domestic reforms.74 But in contrast to much of this “second-­image reversed” literature, I focus on the scured the profoundly transnational dimension of democratization.” A decade later, Beissinger (2007:260) lamented that “much of the comparative politics literature on democratization continues to treat cases as if they were entirely independent of one another.” 71. Boix 2011:814. 72. Rustow 1970:348. 73. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:33. 74. See, e.g., Greenhill 2016; Hafner-­Burton 2005; Hyde 2011; Johnston 2008; Kayser 2007; Kelley 2012; Kier and Krebs 2010; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2008; Marinov 2005; Milner and

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sources of democratic waves rather than external democratization in general. The intensity of many external factors, as I argue throughout the book, is itself contingent on the outcomes of hegemonic shocks. Over the past two decades, for example, numerous studies have examined the growing importance of economic statecraft—sanctions and foreign aid—as drivers of political and economic reform inside states. But while foreign aid undoubtedly conditions domestic reforms, it cannot explain the post-­1989 clustering of regime transitions without recourse to some other factor. That is, even if we stipulate that foreign aid affects domestic development, the presence of waves suggests that this influence varies over time—and this itself remains a puzzle to be explained. The answer, in this case, resides in the changing nature of hegemonic inducement that followed the Soviet collapse. The end of the Cold War enhanced the credibility of threats and conditions attached to foreign aid, since powerful donors such as the United States were no longer bound by geostrategic considerations that had previously undermined conditionality. Outside assistance thus became a more effective tool for promoting domestic reforms in the wake of the Soviet collapse.75 The impact of foreign aid on democracy, in other words, was itself contingent on the outcome of a hegemonic shock. While this book aims to tell a largely self-­contained story of shocks and waves, in doing so it touches upon other debates about domestic regimes and international orders. Previous studies, for example, have also examined the role of great powers in shaping domestic regimes. John Owen argues that great powers have consistently intervened in less powerful states to shape their domestic regimes.76 Samuel Huntington argues that American power has been a major force for democratization in the world (though he does so by taking an entirely benign approach to US foreign policy).77 Kevin Narizny traces the spread of democratization to efforts by Great Britain and the United States to conquer, colonize, and create client states that adopt democratic institutions— a process he calls the “international genealogy” of democracy.78 And Carles Boix finds that the global proportion of liberal democracies peaks when democratic hegemons manage the international system, and decreases under authoritarian hegemons, such as during the Holy Alliance.79 In sharing an emphasis on hegemonic power as a driver of regime change, the book follows closely upon this literature. But I also seek to disaggregate the notion of “great-­power influence” into the underlying mechanisms that Mukherjee 2009; Narizny 2012; Owen 2010; Pevehouse 2005; Simmons 2009; Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2006; and Wright 2009. 75. Meernik, Krueger, and Poe 1998; Dunning 2004; Bearce and Tirone 2010. 76. Owen 2010. 77. Huntington 1982. For a similar but less sanguine view, see Smith 1994. 78. Narizny 2012. 79. Boix 2011:809.

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drive domestic reforms, and specify the conditions under which those mechanisms are likely to be especially salient. That is, rather than examining the role of great powers more generally, I focus on the influence produced by transformations in the structure of global hegemony. It is during these junctures that international forces become key for understanding the evolution of domestic regimes. Are theoretical generalizations about waves even possible? Huntington, after all, did not seek to provide a theory of democratic waves but only to describe what he thought were the varied sources of the last bout of reforms. As he wrote in the introduction, the book was “an explanatory, not a theoretical work,” and though the argument was “enticing in scope and seductive in its pretense,” noted one reviewer, “its eclecticism does not give way to theoretical integration.”80 The Third Wave, Huntington argued, was caused by a combination of factors, and both of its antecedents also resulted from unique historical circumstances.81 History stubbornly resists the straitjacket of generalization.82 As Thomas Huxley noted long ago, many beautiful theories have been killed by ugly facts.83 But abandoning the search for lawlike regularities in human behavior does not mean that all attempts to theorize about the social world must be rejected. As Mark Twain put it, history may not repeat itself but it does rhyme. The goal of this book is to focus on such historical rhymes—to offer a theory of waves by focusing on recurring patterns produced by abrupt global transformations. In doing so I seek to reconstruct the topography of the twentieth century from the perspective of shocks and waves. Democratic Diffusion and Weber’s Umbrella By far the most common alternative theory for explaining democratic waves is regime diffusion. In theories of diffusion, regime change is seen as taking place in a network of strategic, social, and continuously interacting units. Waves generally occur through a process of contagion, when a spark of protest or revolution spreads across national borders through shared linkages and ties. A “regime wave” is defined by two components—a temporal or spatiotemporal cluster of regime transitions, and causal linkages among the transitions 80. Huntington 1991b:xiv; Munck 1994:357. 81. The “combination of causes generally responsible for one wave of democratization differs from that responsible for other waves.” Huntington (1991b:38). 82. This skeptical view was summed up by the British historian H.A.L. Fisher: “Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency upon another as wave follows upon wave.” Quoted in Fukuyama 1992b:5. 83. Huxley 1870.

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within that cluster.84 The early literature on diffusion focused on large-­n aggregative statistics, often employing sophisticated quantitative techniques and spatial models.85 This scholarship focused on the first component at the expense of the second, seeking to demonstrate the statistical importance of regime clustering but saying little about the causal mechanisms that linked the cases. In this way the early studies of democratic diffusion resembled the early literature on the democratic peace—a powerful empirical regularity seeking a theoretical explanation. Since the 1990s, studies of diffusion have moved beyond aggregative statistics to focus on the specific drivers of diffusion, usually by outlining particular mechanisms—such as coercion, promotion, emulation, competition, learning, or socialization—that drive the process.86 In most cases, diffusion propagates through shared neighborhood networks and regional effects. The process then becomes self-­reinforcing—as more countries experience upheaval, opposition leaders and embittered masses elsewhere update their beliefs about the possibility of success, or simply become inspired by the efforts of others, and join in the wave—a process that occurred, most recently and dramatically, in the Arab Spring. By identifying the mechanisms that link hegemonic shocks to institutional waves, this book shares important commonalities with the literature on diffusion. Hegemonic shocks act as conduits for a particular type of vertical diffusion, so in fact my argument could be defined as a subset of the diffusion literature more broadly.87 Though I don’t have strong feelings about the precise taxonomy, I do want to highlight four ways in which my approach departs from traditional models of democratic diffusion. 84. Clustering by itself is insufficient evidence of a wave, since it may be the result of parallel but independent developments. Huntington (1991b:15) defines democratic waves only by the first component, describing them as “a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that period.” 85. See, e.g., Brinks and Coppedge 2006, Leeson and Dean 2009, O’Loughlin et al. 1998, Starr 1991, and Starr and Lindborg 2003. 86. For examples of mechanism-­focused studies of democratic diffusion, see Beissinger 2007, Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2006, Solingen 2012, Weyland 2010. 87. For some scholars, diffusion cannot include vertical impulses if it is defined as a process lacking coordinated coercion. Elkins (2008:43), for example, describes diffusion as a process of uncoordinated interdependence, “uncoordinated in the sense that a country’s decision to democratize is not imposed by another.” However, a number of key diffusion studies include both vertical and horizontal elements in their analysis. Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett (2006) for example, include “coercion” and “promotion” as two intrinsically vertical mechanisms of diffusion, in which asymmetries of power catalyze cross-­border change, while Gilardi (2013:454) notes that “a significant portion of the literature considers coercion integral to diffusion.” Elsewhere, Elkins (2010:981–82) concedes that “the transmission of policies across vertical as opposed to horizontal networks is a common theme in the diffusion literature.”

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First and most obviously, unlike much of this literature, I emphasize the impact of vertical influences and shifts in the global distribution of power, rather than “horizontal” neighborhood contagion or regional cross-­border spillover. Vertical mechanisms operate through asymmetries of power, while horizontal ones are rooted in the shared linkages that create channels for institutional spillover. The distinction between horizontal and vertical diffusion was well captured by Max Weber: “If at the beginning of a shower a number of people on the street put up their umbrellas at the same time,” he writes, “this would not ordinarily be a case of [social] action, but rather of all reacting in the same way to the like need of protection from the rain.”88 In cases of vertical diffusion, an exogenous shock creates a wave of transitions by shifting the institutional preferences and incentives of many domestic actors simultaneously. Or, as Way puts it, the 1989 revolutions were not primarily the product of a domino effect, in which revolution in one country triggered regional spillover. Rather, the revolutions were made possible by the abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine inside the USSR, producing a major shift in the geopolitical structure of the region.89 Instead of a horizontal process in which a single domino triggered a democratic cascade, the dominoes fell because the table itself was beginning to shake. Models of horizontal diffusion help shed light on waves that unfold in the absence of broader geopolitical shifts—such as the 1848 Spring of Nations, the 1980s wave in Latin America, the Color Revolutions, or the Arab Spring. They are less helpful, however, for uncovering the causes of vertical waves, which stem from hegemonic transitions and are the focal point of my argument. A second difference is that diffusion models neglect the factors that spark diffusion in the first place, and thus cannot explain the timing of institutional waves.90 This book locates the origins of diffusion in hegemonic shocks. Third, theories of diffusion neglect the causes of rollback that inevitably accompany democratic waves—the forces of counter-­diffusion that lead democratic waves to crest and collapse. It is not simply the case that democratic rollback is common. Rather, rollback stems from the same mechanisms that create the initial wave of transitions, is an inherent component of democratic waves, and should be theorized as such. Fourth, theories of diffusion overwhelmingly focus on the spread of democracy (despite some recent growth in research on autocratic diffusion and autocracy promotion). A focus on hegemonic shocks offers a framework for examining both democratic and autocratic waves, since both are driven by similar forces originating from geopolitical transitions. 88. Weber 1922:23. 89. Way 2011. 90. Jacoby 2006.

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Conclusion In this chapter I’ve argued that failed democratic consolidations are often linked to the same forces that produce democratic waves. Hegemonic shocks create a sort of Icarus Effect, in which systemic pressures encourage democratic optimism, overstretch, and ultimately failure. For example, both the world wars and the Soviet collapse produced extreme but temporary systemic pressures for democratization. At the start of a wave, these can help override domestic constraints that prevent democratization, forge powerful pro-­reform coalitions, and bolster the optimism of opposition groups. But as the shock passes, pro-­reform systemic pressures fade, incumbent elites learn to adapt (perhaps by reforming just enough to pacify external donors), fragile pro-­reform coalitions fall apart as parochial group interests reassert themselves, and optimistic reformers spearhead movements that have little chance of producing a successful democratic consolidation. Once geopolitical realities and the opportunity costs of regime promotion reassert themselves, hegemonic pressures inevitably fade. The disappearance of these external pressures, the collapse of reform coalitions, adaptation by incumbent elites, and overoptimism on the part of reformers all combine to reverse the initial momentum for change. Together, these factors help explain a persistent puzzle in the study of democratization—why waves of democracy inevitably lead to partial or total rollback and collapse. The failures of consolidation that follow democratic waves are linked to the causes that enabled the initial spread of the wave. Democratic diffusion, in other words, is rarely a unilinear process but an interplay of positive and negative feedback. The study of domestic party alignments has largely remained the task of comparative scholars. Yet the repeated intrusion of hegemonic shifts upon these alignments suggests avenues for productive bridge building between domestic and systemic theories of regime change. Dan Slater, for example, argues that the rise of durable autocratic regimes in Southeast Asia grew from elite fears of revolutionary communist movements. The fear of violent domestic upheaval led by such movements caused the region’s elites to enter into protection pacts that supported the maintenance of a strong autocratic state.91 Missing from his otherwise compelling analysis is the role of external factors in shaping the likelihood of communist contention—and, by extension, elite support for strong states as bulwarks against violent class conflict. After all, it was the end of World War II that sparked the rise of violent communist movements across the region, leading to the revolutionary contention that threatened local elites and induced them to enter into pacts with state leviathans. 91. Slater 2010.

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Extending the argument, the end of communism would have reduced elite fears of left-­wing class warfare, splintering their support for leviathans and leading to democratic openings (but perhaps also creating weaker states in the process). If the decline of communism has diminished the threat of violent class warfare, we might expect to see a loss of elite support for overbearing states, and the weakening of elite pacts to keep them in place.92 In this case and others, the interaction of hegemonic shocks and domestic forces is one of synthesis rather than crude juxtaposition. Theories of “transitology,” for example, argue that democratic transitions happen when splits develop between the hardliners and the moderates within the elites. A series of pacts between the state and opposition members creates democratic openings.93 Hegemonic shocks, however, can also create or exacerbate these elite splits by discrediting or empowering ruling groups and changing their incentives for supporting or rejecting reforms. Similarly, Rueschemeyer, Stevens, and Stevens argue that democracy is the product of class struggle, in which various social classes shift from opposition to collusion to co-­option in their pursuit of institutional reforms.94 Collier succinctly summarizes their argument: “Democracy is an outcome of the struggle between the dominant and subordinate classes and hence an outcome of the balance of class power.”95 Democratization happens when the democracy-­denying elites are no longer able to reject the demands of the working class, or else choose to co-­opt these demands to pacify a threat of revolt from below. A basic contention of this book is that the factors affecting the influence of these domestic groups—their ideological and material capacity for change— have themselves been profoundly shaped by the outcomes of hegemonic transitions. Shocks dramatically alter the balance of power among dominant and subordinate classes, thereby creating opportunities for the domestic struggles so persuasively analyzed by comparative scholars. World War I, for instance, shifted political power toward working classes by making their participation essential for continuing the conflict, thereby creating space for political liberalization. The war’s outcome “has established the fact of democracy,” wrote the Boston Daily Globe in 1918. “No single class can claim to have won it. If the shared burden of a common effort does not spell democracy, then nothing does. No single class in Germany can ever keep all the power after the huge sacrifices of all.”96 92. Englehart 2012:440. 93. E.g., O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986. 94. Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992. 95. Collier 1999:10. 96. Boston Daily Globe 01/02/1918.

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Given the ubiquity of autocratic rollback that follows cascades, studies of democratic waves might examine more closely the elements of institutional failure baked into the dynamics of transnational regime cascades. The traditional view of democratic waves as unilinear and self-­reinforcing processes captures only half of the story. For countries that democratize during waves, failures of consolidation are often built into the factors that enabled their initial transitions in the first place.

3 The Alchemy of War The year 1918 marked a bright and conspicuous date in the annals of our history. After a series of successes which seemed to forecast their eventual triumph, our aggressors suddenly foundered in a cataclysm which at a single blow destroyed the oldest monarchies of Europe. — GUSTAVE LE B ON , 1 9 2 11

Purged and humbled, democracy presents itself for revision. —T. V. SM IT H , 1 9 27 2

As the Great War neared its conclusion in the fall of 1918, a group of dignitaries from central Europe gathered in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. The mood in the auditorium was cautiously optimistic: many of the visitors had come from countries that did not exist only months ago and now seemed poised to lead Europe into a new age of freedom. To the peal of a replica Liberty Bell, the group’s chairman—Tomáš Masaryk, soon to become Czechoslovakia’s first president—announced a new Declaration of Independence for Middle Europe. The “sufferings of the world war shall not have been in vain,” he proclaimed, promising that democratic principles would soon be “incorporated in the organic laws of whatever Governments our respective peoples may hereafter establish.”3 The declaration’s rousing message, coming in the closing months of a conflict that had killed millions and devastated a continent, reflected the remark1. Le Bon 1921:9. 2. Smith 1927:665. 3. New York Times 10/27/1918. 60

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ably high hopes for a postwar democratic rebirth. The vast empires of Germany, Russia, Austro-­Hungary and the Ottomans had all collapsed, and from their fragmented ruins rose a number of new nations that welcomed democracy as a way to modernize their societies, legitimize their rule, and harness the volatile spirit of nationalism. Between 1918 and 1922, over a dozen new states adopted democratic institutions including independent parliaments, civil liberties, and universal suffrage. At the same time, semi-­democracies like Britain and Belgium expanded voting rights to previously excluded groups like women and working-­class men. The spirit of postwar democratic optimism was so strong, in fact, that the British politician and historian James Bryce wondered whether the “trend toward democracy now widely visible is a natural trend, due to a general law of social progress.”4 The recent centenary of the Great War has generated a flood of new histories about the culprits that started it, the battles that prolonged it, and the diplomatic wrangling that followed it.5 Yet few of these have examined the war’s effects on Europe’s brief but startling democratic transformation—the immense democratic surge that passed through the continent shortly after the armistice. And in retrospect, the democratic wave does appear as an inevitably doomed attempt, a brief aberration before the darkness of the interwar years. Yet for a moment democracy appeared not merely ascendant but inevitable, and this transformation was directly linked to the hegemonic transition that accompanied the war’s end. For a number of European states, this became their first experience with democratic governance; beyond Europe, it sowed the seeds of decolonization that flowered after the next world war. Given the subsequent demise of democracy in the 1930s, it is astonishing to recall that in 1920, twenty-­six out of twenty-­eight European states were democracies.6 (See figure 3.1.) A bloody and confused conflict “suddenly produced a decisive outcome that trumped all that had gone before it,” writes David Runciman. Here was the clarifying effect of the hegemonic shock at work: “A complicated story became simple again. The principles of democracy had triumphed.”7 To be sure, the end of war did not mean the end of violence. On the eastern half of the continent, the fragile experiment with democracy unfolded among bloody civil wars and ethnic strife, and this instability would soon contribute to democracy’s decline in the years to come. But in the immediate wake of the armistice, no conflict seemed powerful enough to restrain the democratic im4. Bryce 1921:24. 5. Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace, and Adam Tooze’s The Deluge represent notable examples of each type of emphasis, respectively. 6. Bermeo 2003a:21. Michael Mann (2004:37–38) puts the number at 27 out of 28. By contrast, on the eve of the war, notes Norman Davies (1996:943), continental Europe had only three republican governments—France, Portugal, and Sweden. 7. Runciman 2013:58.

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Global level of democracy

12

11

10

9 1900 FIGURE 3.1.

1910

1920

1930

The postwar democratic wave, 1900–­1930 (Polity IV).

pulse. In the space of a few years, the alchemy of war had transformed the laborer into a union worker, the housewife into a suffragette, the emperor into a relic. A poet writing in 1919 declared that he could no longer “dare to speak of kings and queens—Democracy is now the card.”8 Returning to America after his triumphant European tour, Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that democratic principles had now “penetrated to the heart and understanding” of both the people and their rulers.9 In his foundational classification of democratic waves, Samuel Huntington argued for the idea of a “long first wave” that begins with the American Revolution and culminates in the mid-­1920s.10 But lumping all these transformations into an uninterrupted 150-­year stretch understates the decisive importance of the hegemonic shock of 1919. To be sure, the war unleashed forces that fed on pre-­existing grievances, such as the threat of militant labor. But it also, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, created new and unique conditions for democratic change—conditions that were directly linked to postwar shifts in hegemonic power. By some measures, the US economy had surpassed Britain’s as early as 1870, yet America’s leadership status did not become obvious until the war. The war’s outcome did not merely intensify previous trends; it completely overturned accepted notions of legitimate government. In prewar Europe, intellectuals like Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès, and Heinrich von Treitschke argued that monarchy was critical for the effective governance of a 8. De Gallienne 1919:761. 9. Quoted in Ikenberry 2000:158. 10. Huntington 1991b:16.

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modern state. Far from being a dying vestige of premodern Europe, fin-­de-­ siècle monarchy in fact experienced a noticeable rise in popularity.11 The outcome of the war showcased a defining characteristic of hegemonic shocks— their ability to clarify the balance of power and dramatically shift perceptions of relative regime effectiveness. The hegemonic transition, more than any gradual social developments, conclusively and irretrievably dissolved the myth of potent absolutism. The divine right of kings was transformed from commonplace to absurd in a matter of months. The war’s outcome dramatically raised the prestige of democratic institutions inside old and new states alike. It made democratic regimes more powerful, more able to exercise global influence, and more normatively appealing all at once. It was the Great War, argues Fritz Stern, “that saw the elevation of democracy into a universal ideal.”12 The unexpected defeat of autocratic monarchies demonstrated that democratic institutions were an effective way to organize modern society. This conclusion seemed far from obvious in 1914. The conventional wisdom of the day argued that democracy was paralyzed by checks and balances and stymied by fickle public opinion. Its prewar record had not been impressive. Republican France saw forty-­three coalition governments and twenty-­six prime ministers between 1890 and 1914. Sure enough, French conservatives blamed the country’s decline on its rejection of monarchism. Nor was the United States yet a serviceable role model, tainted by a painful civil war and the corruption of its Gilded Age. Before the Great War, America’s grand experiment “had attracted mixed reviews,” notes Tooze, and as a result “the stability of democratic republics was still in question.”13 Thomas Mann contemptuously described democracy as a series of “affairs, scandals,” and “magnificent crises.”14 As Woodrow Wilson himself wrote in 1901, the world was “no more convinced of the benefits of democracy” in his time than it had been a century ago.15 Democratic defeatism has been a recurrent theme in political discourse, surfacing whenever democracy’s fortunes appear to wane. Alexis de Tocqueville, E. H. Carr, George Kennan, and Walter Lippmann all shared the belief that democratic institutions could slow economic progress and perpetuate corruption, political deadlock, and instability. Over the nineteenth century, 11. Spellman 2001:232–33. In 1914, monarchs controlled 84 percent of the world, and monarchy “was one of the institutions simply taken for granted by the overwhelming majority of the people” (Spellman 2001:227, 229).  12. Stern 1997:15. 13. Tooze 2014:41. 14. Quoted in Runciman 2013:51. 15. Wilson 1901:289.

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according to Hybel, “few political leaders and analysts believed that democracies could function as effective entities in a competitive international system.”16 Tocqueville argued that in conducting foreign affairs, democracies were “decidedly inferior to other governments.” Because democratic leaders had no recourse to secrecy, he wrote, a democracy “can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles.”17 And because democracies equivocated, their disadvantages would be especially pronounced in war, which demanded the speedy mobilization of men and resources by a resolute and centralized state. “This war will result in greatly strengthening the opposition to democracy,” proclaimed a German academic in the New York Times in 1917, by unmasking the system’s incompetence in the face of crisis.18 Beyond its dilatory squabbles, democracy was thought to reward incompetent panderers. Shortly after the Allied failure at the Dardanelles, the London Times published a series of letters arguing that democracies were inevitably disadvantaged in military leadership. “A monarchy or bureaucracy knows its men and their achievements and can make judicious selection as it pleases,” wrote a former colonial administrator. Democracies, on the other hand, were not so sagely meritocratic, choosing leaders who were well-­born, skillful demagogues, or simply “because they are good fellows.”19 Even democracy’s supporters admitted that its benefits “are not secured without very considerable sacrifices,” as a US official wrote in 1916. “As a political system it is clumsy and inefficient in all material ways.”20 A 1917 article in Harper’s voiced a common concern when it questioned whether democracy could compete with autocratic rule: [A]re the democratic masses capable of intelligent self-­direction, or must they in self-­defense surrender the control of government to the superior ability of the trained and exceptionally gifted few? . . . Does democracy then stand discredited? Has it been demonstrated that national efficiency and popular government are irreconcilable? 16. Hybel 2001:45. 17. Tocqueville 1835:234–35. 18. New York Times 02/04/1917. “Anxiety about the inadequacies of democracy reached its peak in early 1918,” argues Runciman (2013:43). “Were the democracies ruthless enough to compete with their rivals in a fight to the death?” 19. Quoted in Runciman 2013:333. H. L. Mencken (1917) likewise expressed admiration for Germany’s ability to reward merit rather than popularity. Ludendorff, whom Mencken profiled in a sympathetic 1917 Atlantic piece, and who began his career as a lowly colonel, was the embodiment of this meritocratic ideal. 20. Hopkins 1916:60.

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“Today the great war is being waged between German autocracy and English science under democratic control,” concluded the author. “We shall not know until after the terms of peace have been announced which of the two is the more efficient.”21 The vision of the war as a test of fundamentally opposed political orders was shared by many contemporaries. As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge noted in 1915, “if democracy is not both able and ready to defend itself it will go down in subjection before military autocracy because the latter is then the more efficient.”22 The vital test of any regime, wrote the historian and diplomat George Beer in 1916, is not the character of its internal politics but its ability “to survive in a struggle imposed by others. Were European democracy to fail in this crisis, its fate would be sealed.”23 And as a 1917 British War Cabinet report noted, America’s entry into the war had widened the conflict from a fight over the European balance of power “into a world-­wide struggle for the triumph of free civilization and democratic government.”24 Woodrow Wilson likewise saw the war as a contest between two competing visions of the future. In a 1918 speech, he described the United States as the “practitioner of the new creed of mankind” and Germany as the “most consistent practitioner of the old.” The war, he said, was a “battle to determine whether the new democracy or the old autocracy shall govern the world.”25 As the United States entered the fight, American sociologist Franklin Giddings summed up the stakes: “So, at last, the giant democracies of western Europe and the giant absolutisms of central Europe confronted each other on the fields of France and Flanders in life and death grapple. . . . Democracy or dynasty will be sovereign, from this time on.”26 The war thus provided the century’s first Manichean confrontation between two rival ideologies of the modern state. At the start of the century, monarchy was not a quaint anachronism but a viable challenge to democracy and the default form of government for new states. Norway chose a king after gaining independence from Sweden in 1905, as did Albania when it seceded from Turkey in 1912. Prewar Europe was marked by “the apparently persistent legitimacy of monarchy,” argues Müller, and it remained “the obvious way of organizing and legitimating rule in emerging polities.”27 With the exception of France and Switzerland, until 1914 continental Europe remained monarchical. 21. Bruère 1917:821, 825. 22. Lodge 1915:210. 23. Beer 1916:80. 24. Quoted in Bruère 1919:293.  25. Quoted in Ikenberry 2000:127. 26. Giddings 1917:86. 27. Müller 2011:14, 15.

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——— The century’s first democratic wave was therefore a direct consequence of the postwar hegemonic transition. America’s entrance onto the stage as a great power, along with the collapse of the monarchical alternative, had an immense and immediate impact on the institutional preferences within European states. The war’s outcome not only drastically undermined the power and legitimacy of monarchy but also demonstrated that democratic institutions could be efficient and resilient in a crisis and could challenge and even defeat modern autocracies. In the wake of the conflict, rulers and citizens across Europe thus came to see democracy as a way to acquire both domestic and international legitimacy, as well as to attract American support and protection. As with subsequent cases, the hegemonic shock transformed both the material and ideological incentives for domestic reforms. For the reformers, America now became the obvious model of imitation: “We accept the American principles as laid down by President Wilson,” declared the Czechoslovakian leaders in their own 1918 Declaration of Independence, “of governments deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.”28 Beyond its role as an institutional model, the United States also shaped postwar regime choices more indirectly. As countries realized soon after the initial stalemate, uninterrupted production was a necessary ingredient for waging a prolonged, materiel-­heavy conflict. For the first time since the Napoleonic wars, fighting hinged on rallying the disenfranchised. The modern battlefield demanded mass armies even as industrial production absorbed massive amounts of labor. Victory, therefore, would require the cooperation of the working class. For labor, this newfound importance offered an opportunity to generate political concessions. The war thus strengthened labor’s organizational power and forced the ruling classes to strike a reciprocal bargain—if workers’ acquiescence led to victory, they would be rewarded with enfranchisement and welfare expansion.29 The legitimacy of this strategy, however, was contingent on the outcome of the war. As contemporaries noted at the time, Germany and the United States possessed two contrasting mobilization strategies: state-­led democratic capitalism versus Ludendorff ’s centralized military dictatorship.30 American participation in the war did not merely facilitate an impending Allied victory but reversed a series of German offensives that nearly enabled the Reichswehr to capture Paris in mid-­1918. By ensuring an Allied victory, American participation affirmed the mobilization strategy of the reciprocal bargain, rather than 28. Quoted in Mazower 1998:6. 29. An arrangement that Johnson (2001:41) calls the strategy of the “signed post-­dated cheque.” 30. Tooze 2014:200–202; Kier 2010.

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the more coercive model of the Axis powers. In doing so, it opened up more political space for liberalization in the postwar years, when suffrage was extended to previously excluded groups whose participation had made victory possible. The outcome of the hegemonic shock therefore created the conditions for the postwar wave in several related ways. First, it functioned as a credible demonstration of democratic effectiveness while discrediting monarchical autocracy. Second, the Allied victory, made possible by American participation, cemented the wartime bargain and made the expansion of political rights inevitable in the short term. Third, it generated an ideological spirit of democratic optimism driven by “the Wilsonian moment.”31 And fourth, it created temporary incentives for democratization as a way to secure American assistance and trade. But few of these influences proved durable. Given America’s reticence to use force or even material influence to promote democratic regimes, the post– World War I wave was driven almost entirely by emulation. And for a short while, this seemed sufficient. “For a brief interval Wilson stood alone for mankind,” wrote H. G. Wells. “Millions believed him as the bringer of untold blessings; thousands would gladly have died for him.”32 America’s embrace of self-­ determination sparked movements far beyond Europe—in Egypt’s 1919 revolution, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in India, China’s May Fourth movement, Korea’s March First uprising, and elsewhere. The postwar wave was thus unprecedented in both the scope of its aspirations and the near-­complete failure of these aspirations in the face of later crises. Europe’s democratic reversals of the interwar years are often linked to the crisis of confidence caused by the Great Depression. But even in countries where economic collapse was the final nail in democracy’s coffin, problems began well before 1929.33 The optimistic period after the war, Ikenberry writes, “was a democratic high tide rather than a gathering flood.”34 The interwar crisis of democracy thus unfolded through two distinct stages, separated by the hegemonic shock of the Great Depression: first, the bursting of the postwar democratic bubble in the 1920s; and second, the turn toward modern autocracy in the 1930s. The first failure was a consequence of the democratic overstretch that followed World War I, while the second stemmed from the hegemonic shift (detailed in the next chapter) that followed the global economic collapse.35 31. Manela 2007. 32. Wells 1933:82. 33. Fledgling democracies fell in Russia (1917), Hungary (1919), Italy (1922), Bulgaria (1923), Poland (1926), Portugal (1926), Lithuania (1926), and Yugoslavia (1929). 34. Ikenberry 2000:155. 35. Democratic reversals in the two stages therefore stemmed from fundamentally different

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The early democratic failures, as with subsequent reversals, had their origins in the same factors that initially created the wave. The war’s aftermath brought together extraordinary domestic alliances that supported democratic reforms. These ad hoc coalitions could not be sustained once the immediate crisis had passed, and the new states reverted to old ethnic and class-­based antagonisms. The war’s outcome created immense incentives for democratization inside countries that lacked domestic preconditions for democratic consolidation—a large and powerful middle class, economic stability, or previous history with democratic governance. Caught up in the wave of democratic optimism, leaders of these restive and ramshackle new states adopted institutions that had little chance of being sustained in an atmosphere of economic uncertainty, political fragmentation, and ethnic strife. (In some cases these institutions were imposed externally as a condition for statehood, as in the case of minority rights.) “The new states hatched at Versailles,” writes Tony Judt, “were fragile and somehow impermanent from the very start.”36 Parliamentary coalitions everywhere were short-­lived, unstable, and ineffective. Interwar Romania, for example, saw coalitions fall on average every sixteen months.37 Instead of acting as focal points for deliberation and compromise, parliaments intensified national divisions, like a lens “magnifying rather than resolving the bitter social, national and economic tensions in society at large.”38 Cobbled from the remains of fractious empires, most of the new states contained sizable minorities who readily served as scapegoats for Europe’s economic problems. Conflict between labor and capital also resumed anew—their fragile postwar alliances, prompted by fear of radical socialism, began to fray as the threat of crisis passed. As the decade wore on, “there were, simply, fewer and fewer committed democrats.”39 Moreover, the international pressures for democratization quickly faded as the European powers resumed their traditional jostling for influence, and promoting democracy became secondary to building alliances and establishing spheres of influence. In contrast to 1945 and 1989, conflicting great-­power strategies contributed to instability that further undermined democratic consolidation. France sought to cripple Germany, while Britain sought to restore the continent’s traditional balance of power (in part by aiding German recovery). Italy, Japan, and a number of smaller European states pursued territorial dynamics. It is misleading, therefore, to speak of a single interwar “reverse wave,” as characterized by Huntington (1991b:16) and others. 36. Judt 2005:195. 37. Janos 1970:207. 38. Mazower 1998:18. 39. Mazower 1998:23.

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aggrandizement; and the United States sought the creation of a collective security framework resting on liberal capitalism. Yet the failure to join the League meant the United States would have no institutional mechanisms for engaging with the continent; it eschewed bilateral arrangements and retreated into a policy of noninterference in European affairs. A brief but drastic recession in 1920–21 further encouraged the country to withdraw from Europe. By joining the democratic camp, the new states had hoped to secure American financial assistance and security guarantees. When they realized that no such assistance was forthcoming, the incentives to maintain and consolidate democratic rule quickly evaporated. In 1930, the anti-­fascist writer Emil Müller-­ Sturmheim wrote a book titled Without America It Doesn’t Work, but by then it was too late. Unlike the newly formed states, the states of western and northern Europe that had been semi-­democratic before the war successfully expanded their suffrage and developed the first elements of the welfare state. In contrast to their eastern and central European peers, states like Canada, Belgium, and Great Britain managed to consolidate their postwar democratic gains with few internal reversals. These states lacked the sorts of economic and social difficulties facing eastern and central Europe. Even territories most affected by fighting, like Belgium and northern France, saw the rapid resumption of economic activity.40 Most of these states also had substantial experience with democracy and a large middle class that moderated political volatility. In these countries, the major shift toward autocracy came two decades later, during the Nazi occupation at the beginning of World War II. By contrast, the new offspring of old empires were “poor, unstable, insecure—and resentful of their neighbors.”41 While the short-­term effect was a burst of democratization, the main long-­term effect was to make proto-­democracies more democratic without creating any sustainable new democracies.42 The wave did, however, give many countries a preview of democratic institutions that would return later in the century after World War II and the Soviet collapse. The hegemonic shock thus set the stage for initial transitions but could not guarantee democratic consolidations in new democracies. The abrupt ascent of a democratic hegemon create incentives for reforms that are powerful yet temporary, especially in the absence of sustained hegemonic engagement. Once the unique pressures created by the shock began to fade, domestic factors increasingly shaped the viability of European institutional reforms.

40. Frieden 2006:138–39. 41. Judt 2005:4. 42. Of the thirteen new democracies created by the war, only three—Czechoslovakia, Ireland, and Finland—managed to survive the interwar years relatively intact.

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The Postwar Power Transition As the war began, Imperial Germany represented the epitome of enlightened monarchy. On the eve of the war, Paul Kennedy notes, Germany was the only great power that combined “the modern, industrialized strength of the western democracies” with the autocratic “decision-­making features of the eastern monarchies.”43 It was widely admired even by democracy-­minded contemporaries as the model of a scientific and highly organized state.44 Urging the United States to prepare for a tough fight, a journalist in 1916 described Germany as typifying “the greatest military efficiency the world has ever seen.”45 Reporting the march of the German army through Belgium at the onset of the war, an American correspondent described it as “a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steam roller.”46 Beyond its military reputation, Germany’s prestige extended into the management of economic affairs. As the US Secretary of Commerce William Redfield argued in 1915, Germany “presented a spectacle of organized competence, utilizing her resources in men and material more effectively than anyone else.” British commerce, by contrast, “lacked the application of science to work. It was not highly organized in the German sense.” And while he was optimistic about American’s entrepreneurial and innovative spirit, Redfield conceded that the United States “did not use the scientific methods of Germany, and our commerce as a whole lacked organization.”47 This Teutonic capacity for management was often linked to the centralized nature of the German state. Thorstein Veblen, in his 1915 book Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, sought to explain Germany’s “industrial advance and high efficiency.”48 How, Veblen asked, did the country achieve such a dominant economic position on the continent in so brief a time? The answer was to be found in Germany’s late adoption of industrialization and the “dynastic” nature of its system. England’s industrialization was achieved slowly, haltingly, and with the accumulation of wasteful cultural practices like 43. Kennedy 1989:214. Levy (1985:368) argues that Germany was the strongest European power before the war. 44. The admiration of Wilhelmine Germany among American scholars is documented in Oren 2003, ch. 1. Prominent prewar academics like John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson greatly admired Germany’s bureaucratic and industrial efficiency, and the decisive break with the Germanophile tradition came only as a result of the war. 45. Villard 1916:217. Resende-­Santos (2007) notes that imperial Germany served as the model of military emulation for Japan and much of South America. 46. Davis 1914. 47. Redfield 1915:1–2. 48. Veblen 1915:v.

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conspicuous consumption by the elites. As a latecomer, Germany was able to borrow proven practices and technology, quickening the pace of economic development. Germany’s preeminence before the war made its defeat all the more momentous, its disgrace all the more visible. It lost the war, the empire, and any prestige it had gained during its rise over the past five decades. Its economy was in ruins, its political leadership discredited. Just before the war, the German economy “had reached a stage of wonderful development,” wrote the president of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce in 1920. But the war “brought the powerful machinery of our commerce to a sudden stop.”49 In the same year, an advisor to the German government reported that the country’s agricultural production had dropped to 40 percent of its prewar levels. The loss of the Saar region and Alsace-­Lorraine deprived it of 75 percent of its ore, while the physical deterioration of plants in wartime reduced industrial efficiency by half.50 In the course of a few years, Germany “plunged from a position on the world market that was second only to Britain, and threatening to replace it,” writes the economic historian Paul Hehn, “to almost a second-­or third-­class power.”51 Its political transformation epitomized the sudden extinction of monarchical legitimacy. For decades “the center of resistance to the Western democracies,” the kaiser’s empire was now transformed into the democratic Weimar Republic.52 If the war offered a powerful test of rival regimes, its outcome supplied a clear and dramatic answer. Monarchical empires dissolved “in a feverish explosion of centrifugal nationalism,” and their demise signaled “a much deeper loss of confidence in the very principle of hereditary leadership.”53 Kings had failed to inspire the loyalty of their subjects and proved ineffectual as military leaders. As the war came to its end, monarchy was “losing whatever aura might have remained,” writes Müller. “[W]here monarchs did not act, they were seen as ineffective; where they acted, they revealed themselves incompetent.” As a result, the divine right of kings “effectively disappeared as plausible means of legitimating political rule.”54 The sole new royal line established in Europe during the interwar years was in Albania, where King Zog—a paranoid gold hoarder who only ate his mother’s cooking—epitomized the bankruptcy of the monarchical ideal. Only democracies had endured the conflict with their political systems intact. The Big Three—France, Britain, and the United States—dominated the 49. Witthoefft 1920:96. 50. Bonn 1920:106. 51. Hehn 2002:395. 52. Sontag 1970:1. 53. Hochschild 2011:338; Spellman 2001:240. 54. Müller 2011:17, 16.

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Versailles negotiations, producing the only postwar settlement in history forged exclusively by democracies. In the wake of the war, according to Markoff, “the power and prestige associated with democratic institutions were greatly enhanced.”55 A Weimar parliament member extolled the advantages of democracy on the floor of the Reichstag: Germany was defeated in the war by parliamentary countries . . . [that] could take steps in good time to deal with symptoms of corruption. . . . Crises occur under the parliamentary system and they also occurred in the Western democratic countries . . . but in our case these crises were much more malignant in character. In our case they were secret crises that took place behind the scenes.56 Though communism was to become the most important long-­term ideological innovation of the war, in the 1920s it was not yet a serious rival to democracy as a legitimate alternative model. Hungary and Bavaria saw desultory attempts at communist revolutions that were quickly crushed. It had been a stillborn revolution and by mid-­1919 “the worst fear of revolutionary contagion had passed.”57 Communism’s failure to spread between 1917 and 1919 demonstrates that a regime innovation, no matter how ideologically seductive, is not sufficient for creating an institutional wave unless it is coupled with a hegemonic rise to lend it prestige and material backing. Russia was in a dismal state, an unruly pariah ravaged by the mass terror of Lenin’s “war communism” policies. For the first few years of its existence, the Bolshevik hold on the USSR was seriously challenged by internal war and foreign occupation. With the brief exception of Hungary, neither voting nor violence enabled communists to gain office outside Soviet borders. Even for sympathetic onlookers, the turmoil accompanying the revolution was more of a cautionary tale than an inspiring example. By 1920, the worker and soldier councils that had sprouted around Europe after the revolution had either fallen apart or were reabsorbed into the political system.58 Except in France, the communists remained on the 55. Markoff 1996: 74. 56. Quoted in Lutz 1934:249. 57. Tooze 2014:236. Kurt Weyland (2014) has argued that the wave should be located in the Russian Revolution of 1917, rather than the end of the war itself. And indeed, the threat of revolution provided another incentive for suffrage expansion and democratization. Yet with the exception of Hungary this threat did not lead to any actual regime turnovers. The first wave was thus a product of Wilson’s moment more than Lenin’s; as Weyland (2014:125) notes, more than a year elapsed between the ostensible triggering events of 1917 and actual reforms. Fear of communism would come to play a greater role in the subsequent democratic counterwave of the interwar period than in the initial democratic cascade. 58. Müller 2011:50.

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political fringes, and found themselves “on the losing side of all electoral battles of the inter-­war years.”59 The initial ideological purity of the revolution seemed to fade as well— Lenin’s war communism was a conscious imitation of Germany’s war socialism, while the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s borrowed heavily from capitalism. Ideologically, NEP was a large step backwards toward petty capitalism, and its success only seemed to underscore the weakness of communist ideas. As a result, writes Lukacs, “Russia and things Russian had no prestige, no attraction among Russia’s neighbors.”60 Throughout the decade, Russia was “ostracized, isolated, and self-­absorbed,” and by 1927 Charles Beard could safely conclude that no one was imitating “the Bolshevik political design.”61 For all its ideological appeal, communism lacked the key ingredient: indisputable hegemonic power. This was a state of affairs that the USSR could not rectify until 1945. American power, on the other hand, proved decisive in the European theater and now loomed large across the continent. Among the victors, the United States was the greatest beneficiary of the war—in fact, the only great power besides Japan to benefit from the fighting.62 “The new postwar distribution of power,” argues Ikenberry, “left the United States as the preeminent state.”63 This shift in the global hierarchy was widely noted by contemporaries. “The change since 1914 in the international position of the United States,” wrote the financial editor of the New York Times in 1926, is “perhaps the most dramatic transformation of economic history.”64 Between 1914 and 1917, American exports nearly tripled from 2.3 to 6.2 million dollars, while US gold supplies climbed from 1.9 to 3.1 million dollars, amounting to nearly half of the world supply.65 “We are taking part in one of the most rapid shiftings of fortune that the world has ever seen,” wrote a French observer shortly after the war. “By an astonishing turn of affairs, Europe, mother of so many colonies, is becoming a field for American colonization.”66 The war forced Europe to rely on American capital, loans, technology, supplies, and political leadership. “The war devastated Europe but made the United States the world’s principal industrial, financial, and trading power.”67 59. Sassoon 1996:36. 60. Lukacs 1993:95. 61. S. G. Marks 2003:38; Beard 1927:683–84. 62. Kennedy 1987:327. 63. Ikenberry 2000:119–20. 64. Quoted in Frieden 2006:129. 65. Demangeon 1921:28–29; Walworth 1977:4. 66. Demangeon 1921:26–27, 157. 67. Frieden 2006:132.

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The volume of American exports increased sharply. The US secretary of commerce described the massive changes in near-­mystical terms: That which was strange is becoming familiar. Peoples whom we did not intimately know are borrowing large sums from us and tendering us large orders. A new spirit has come into our commercial life; a new sense of relationship to others and of our power to help them and of our ability to supply them.68 As the volume of exports increased, the United States became a capital-­ exporting nation and the center of international finance shifted from London to New York. As Keynes wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Wilson possessed “a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequaled in history”: In addition to this moral influence the realities of power were in his hands. The American armies were at the height of their numbers, discipline, and equipment. Europe was in complete dependence on the food supplies of the United States; and financially she was even more absolutely at their mercy.69 The economic power of the United States, already apparent by the turn of the century, increased dramatically during the hostilities and became a decisive factor in the global economy. America nearly tripled its manufacturing production during the war. By the end of the conflict, it was producing almost 40 percent of the world’s coal and accounted for more than half of the world’s industrial production.70 Untouched by wartime deprivations, it possessed a relatively high standard of living and enjoyed the advantages of a large internal market that enabled massive economies of scale. In population, agricultural and industrial output, available investor capital, raw resources—“in all these areas, the United States was unrivaled in size and efficiency.”71 America’s industrial base allowed it to quickly catch up to Europe in military strength, which had been relatively small compared with a Europe at the end of a decade of enormous military spending. During the time of its direct involvement in the war, between April 1917 and November 1918, the United States produced an immense supply of munitions and materials.72 In 1915, the 68. Redfield 1915:9. 69. Keynes 1920:38. 70. Roberts 1999:340. Kennedy (1987:328) notes that in the 1920s the United States had a larger industrial output than the other six great powers combined. 71. Ikenberry 2000:120. 72. Production of war materials peaked at 270,000 rifles; 35,000 machine guns; 410 artillery units; 2,700 tons of toxic gas; and 3,850 airplane engines per month. Ayres 1919.

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American army had just 100,000 soldiers and 112,000 national guardsmen, one-­twentieth the size of the German army. By the end of the war, it had mobilized over 4.2 million people through universal conscription. Of those, just over 2 million reached France and 1.4 million saw active combat.73 The injection of American power proved to be a decisive turnabout in what increasingly appeared to be a German victory. In 1917, with Russia’s surrender and the collapse of the Italian army, the balance of forces had shifted toward the Axis. The punitive treaty of Brest-­Litovsk greatly eased the German burden on the eastern front and launched a westward shift of troops, so that by the spring of 1918, German divisions actually outnumbered the Allied ones 192 to 178.74 The French army, meanwhile, saw widespread mutinies in 1917. By this time, Germany’s new blitzkrieg tactics, perfected in the next war, began to be launched with great success. Their first use, in Riga in September 1917, led to a total collapse of the Russian line. Six weeks later at Caporetto, the German army captured a quarter million Italians and advanced the front by sixty miles. “By the end of 1917,” writes Morris, “the only thing that mattered was caving in the Western Front before too many Americans arrived.”75 In mid-­1918 Germany launched a series of devastating offensives, rolling its armies within thirty-­seven miles of Paris. With the British pushed against the Channel, the country considered evacuating all of its troops from the continent, and Lord Haig was forced to issue his Special Order to “fight on to the end.”76 In expectation of a looming Axis victory, confidence in democracy reached another low by mid-­1918. The growing sentiment was that “in the final struggle between autocracy and democracy, autocracy was proving itself the stronger,” writes Runciman. Meanwhile, Russia’s failure to protect its fragile democracy from the Bolshevik Revolution “seemed to confirm the old prejudices about democratic ill discipline and recklessness.” 77 America’s entry into the war therefore made the critical difference not only in deciding the war’s outcome but also in resuscitating the prestige of democracy as a legitimate model. The German wave of attacks ran up against a quickly expanding American presence, which had reached 750,000 by mid-­1918 and was growing by 200,000 every month. The United States “was throwing its weight behind Britain and France at the very moment that attrition and a focus 73. Nicholson 2001:248. 74. Whereas a year before the ratio of Allied to German soldiers was 3:2, by early 1918 it had reversed to 3:4 (Hochschild 2011:310). 75. Morris 2014:253. 76. Reynolds 2014:251. “We must be prepared for France and Italy both being beaten to their knees,” wrote Sir Alfred Milner, a leading member of the war cabinet. (Quoted in Hochschild 2011:327.)  77. Runciman 2013:36, 41.

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on the east were beginning to work for Germany,” argues Morris.78 As a result, the US entry irrevocably shifted the balance of military power. “The threat of an American Army gathers like a thunder-­cloud in the rear of other enemies,” recorded a German officer in his diary.79 Through loans, supplies of material, and finally its armies, the United States had determined the outcome of the war and now appeared poised to shape its aftermath. “Victors, vanquished, and neutrals admitted that American intervention had decided the conflict.”80 Its power loomed large on the continent, and the American model appeared to offer a potent combination of stability, legitimacy, and strength. Its role now shifted “from a passive observer of the slow collapse of the classical order to an active leader of attempts to reconstitute it.”81 It was now “a power unlike any other,” writes Tooze. “It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-­state’, exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world. . . . No other power had ever wielded such global economic dominance.”82 The rise in US material capabilities complemented and reinforced Wilson’s democratic rhetoric, whose “ostentatious purity” provided the ideological basis for the reforms.83 Convinced that America’s power would be more than enough “to command the acquiescence of the exhausted combatants in Europe,” Wilson saw America’s dramatic rise as an opportunity to spread its institutions to the Old World.84 “When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking,” he told Colonel House in 1917, “because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.”85 American power inspired democratization by its success, while the prospect of American support encouraged even cynical converts. Wilson was “the prophet of a new world,” dubbed by George Bernard Shaw “a Great Man standing for a Great Idea.”86 He “occupied a lone eminence, enjoyed a universal prestige,” and on his European tour in early 1918, he was received “as the man who would lead civilization out of its wasteland.”87 78. Morris 2014:251. 79. Quoted in Hochschild 2011:330. 80. Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 2002:687. 81. Walworth 1977:4. 82. Tooze 2014:6, 12. The war had “ratified the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy,” he adds (2014:211). “In their struggle to defeat Germany, the Entente entered into an unprecedented period of dependence on the United States.”  83. Roberts 1999:283. 84. Walworth 1977:17. 85. Quoted in Link 1979:80. 86. Ingram 1946:11; quoted in Runciman 2013:66. 87. Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 2002: 687–88.

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From the Ashes of Empires: World War I and the New Democracies Observing the radical democratic innovations across postwar eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia’s new president Tomáš Masaryk called it “a laboratory atop a vast cemetery.”88 The rest of century would prove him right, with the region becoming an unwilling test subject for the radical social experiments of both Hitler and Stalin. In the years following the war, however, the experiment was of a more benign (though not always less bloody) nature. The defeated Russian Empire, like an old map peeling at the edges, shed a number of territories along its periphery. The February Revolution revealed the full weakness of the imperial government and inspired a number of independence movements. In the north, Finland finally gained full autonomy, while all three Baltic states declared independence. Even traditionally Russian-­held territories of Ukraine and Belarus had seceded for a brief spell of sovereignty, while the Cossacks elected their own assembly and chief. Poland was reconstituted as a democratic republic after more than a century of absence. Its boundaries were expanded into historically German, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian regions by the postwar settlement, creating a multiethnic state in which a third of the population was not ethnically Polish. Like its neighbors, Poland began with a constitution “which contained almost every conceivable guarantee of democratic government and almost every promise of social reform.”89 In the Caucasus, the Russian collapse created the democratic republics of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. These states aspired to adopt the best practices of democratic rule; Azerbaijan, for instance, became the first Muslim nation to grant female suffrage, and adopted a parliament that was elected through proportional representation and included members from Jewish and Armenian minorities.90 In Finland, after a four-­month civil war and a brief experiment with monarchy, a democratic republic was established in early 1919. A century of semi-­ autonomy within the tsarist empire had provided the country with an aristocratic leadership, mostly Swedish in origin, that sought the creation of a social democracy marked by land redistribution, cooperative movements, and agricultural development. The republic’s founding elections were held in December 1918 at the local level, followed by a parliamentary election several months later. Nearby, the three Baltic states all declared independence in 1918 and quickly moved to put in place constitutions, parliaments, and universal suffrage (all three granted women the right to vote the same year). Their constitutions 88. Quoted in Smith 1994:102. 89. Sontag 1970:67. 90. Armenia adopted female suffrage in 1921, three years after Georgia and Azerbaijan.

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provided for proportional representation, legal equality, and minority rights. The states supported the cooperative movement, and the private estates of Baltic Germans were transferred to landless peasants.91 By 1925, for example, more than 70 percent of rural Latvians were landowners. The economic trajectory in these states appeared to be toward traditional capitalism. The Austro-­Hungarian empire was separated into its two successor states as well as two new multiethnic states: Czechoslovakia for Northern Slavs (Czechs and Slovaks), and Yugoslavia for Southern Slavs (Slovenians, Croats, and Serbs). “The overwhelming majority of the population is in favour of the republican form of state,” noted the police commissariat of Austria’s Neubau district in late 1918, adding that “[d]ynastic settlement has disappeared because of the war being lost.”92 In November 1918, Johann Hauser, the leader of the provisional Austrian government “strongly repudiated any idea of a centralist constitution,” instead calling for a decentralized federal system modeled after the United States. Upon the declaration of the armistice, as a large crowd gathered in Wenceslas square, shouts of praise for Masaryk and condemnations of the Habsburgs commingled with cries of “Long live Wilson!”93 After the Entente powers blocked German-­Austrian unification, Austria became a democratic socialist republic. Free elections in February 1919 brought together a coalition of urban socialists and rural Christian socialists, though support for communists remained negligible.94 Germany’s transformation from a monarchy to a republic symbolized the changes sweeping across central and eastern Europe. If Wilhelmine Germany was the template of a centralized monarchy, the Weimar Republic became “a model blueprint for a liberal parliamentary democracy.”95 Its 1919 constitution “was supposed to embody all the best features of the American constitution.”96 It granted the entire adult population the right to vote (as well as procedures for recalls, referenda, and ballot initiatives) and created a legislative chamber—the Reichsrat—modeled largely after the American Senate.97 It was, “on paper, the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the twentieth century had seen.”98 The emulation of American principles extended beyond Europe in the wake of the war, especially among colonial subjects who perceived the Fourteen Points as a clarion call for national independence and saw democracy as 91. Sontag 1970:67. 92. Quoted in Carsten 1972:30. 93. Carsten 1972:27, 50. 94. Sontag 1970:62–63. 95. Osborne 2011:190. 96. Johnson 2001:110. 97. Ingram 1946:32. 98. Shirer 1960:56.

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both a valuable organizing principle and a way of securing America’s help in breaking the colonial yoke. As Manela points out, the adoption of American principles by anticolonial nationalists was not merely ideological but driven by the recognition of American power and the desire to ensure American aid. “Your moral outlook,” wrote the Indian leader Lajpat Rai to Wilson in 1919, “assures us of your sympathy; your position, the most commanding in the world today, gives you the power . . . to protect all who suffer under alien and undemocratic rule.”99 This view was shared by independence movements in China, Korea, Egypt, Vietnam, and elsewhere—all of which saw the rise of American power as crucial for their self-­a ssertion. The call for self-­ determination was obviously compatible with the moral and ideological elements of anticolonialism. As an American public relations officer stationed in China observed, “my work was very simple,” since Wilson’s speeches “provided ideal propaganda material.”100 At the same time, according to Manela, the Wilsonian moment in the colonial world centered on “the role of power, both real and perceived.” Wilson’s proclamations found a keen audience because “they came from a man­widely viewed at the time as the most powerful leader in the world arena, whose influence on the shape of the postwar international order, it was assumed, would be decisive.”101 Outside of Europe, however, the United States failed to assert itself even in rhetorical terms, as it quickly became clear that national self-­determination applied only to the “civilized” people of Europe. Wilson’s rhetoric was universalist in content but particular in intent, as his refusals to meet with anticolonial leaders at Versailles quickly demonstrated. “We at once awoke to the fact that foreign nations were still selfish and militaristic and that they were all great liars,” recalled a Chinese student, lamenting that “we could no longer depend upon the principles of any so-­called great leader like Woodrow Wilson.”102 And as an Egyptian journalist wrote: “Here was the man of the Fourteen Points, among them the right to self-­determination, denying the Egyptian people its right to self-­determination. . . . Is this not the ugliest of treacheries? Is it not the most profound repudiation of principles?!”103 As in Europe, the ideological ascendance of democracy, coupled with the rapid rise of American power, created conditions in which both moral and material considerations favored a democratic wave. But in the absence of hegemonic support for its would-­be fellow travelers, these aspirations were quickly abandoned, sometimes with a bitterness that lingered for decades and 99. Quoted in Manela 2007:93. 100. Quoted in Schmidt 1998:6. 101. Manela 2007:10. 102. Quoted in Schmidt 1998:16. 103. Quoted in Manela 2007:149.

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drove postcolonial leaders into the Soviet camp. The failure of democracy in the colonial world was thus a harbinger of Europe’s own travails in the years to come. Where the postwar wave proved most successful (and most durable) was not in the proto-­states of the colonial world, or in the new states of central and eastern Europe, but in the established semi-­democracies that had found themselves on the winning side of the conflict. It is to them that I now turn.. Democracy and Mobilization for Total War In established democracies like Canada, Britain, or Belgium, the war furthered democratization mainly through the expansion of suffrage and granting of political rights to excluded groups. The necessities of wartime mobilization gave women and working-­class men an unprecedented opportunity to gain political power and press for social reforms. Mass conscription and the wartime economy shifted the balance of power within European societies toward the working classes, producing what Hobsbawm called the “strange democratization of war.”104 In return for their lives in the trenches and their labor on factory floors, these groups demanded political concessions like voting rights and welfare provisions. Here, the role of the rising hegemon was less direct, though no less important: by ensuring the victory of the Entente, the United States helped to validate and cement the wartime bargain between states and their citizens. Bellicist explanations, which focus on the influence of wars upon regime development, make conflicting predictions about war’s effect on democracy. Otto Hintze and John Seeley, members of the so-­called German historical school, stressed that a country’s geopolitical environment affects its mobilization strategy, which in turn shapes its regime type. Hintze, a scholar of the Prussian state, argued that constant preparation for war led to a standing army and a centralized state, while the relative safety provided by mountains and oceans dampened state militarism and created the opportunity for democracy.105 Seeley likewise argued that the hostility of the external environment shaped the state through the need for universal military conscription. A relatively secure, thalassocratic state like Britain or the United States avoided universal service in the formative years of their history and therefore adopted relatively democratic institutions.106 Mobilization for war, Raymond Aron writes, is inevitably autocratic: [T]he citizen-­soldier is part of a vast machine over which he has no control. Group autonomy and liberty of opinion and expression become a luxury 104. Hobsbawm 1994:49. 105. Hintze 1906. 106. Seeley 1896.

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that a country in danger cannot easily afford. . . . The liberal bourgeoisie fades away; the masses are ruled by soldiers and organizers. Total mobilization is close to totalitarianism.107 According to this version of the bellicist argument, then, war leads to centralization of authority and despotism, with the corollary that relative isolation from interstate conflict produces democracy.108 Yet an opposing school of thought has long argued the opposite—that war in fact produces democratization. “Throughout history, warfare has been a major democratizing force,” argues Rustow, “because it has made necessary the marshaling of additional human resources.”109 Likewise, North and Weingast argue that the need for increased wartime revenue forced the English monarchy to cede important political rights to the Parliament.110 Despite this limitation on his sovereignty, the king was soon able to greatly increase his extraction capacity, since the credible protection of property rights by a legislature made wealth holders more willing to lend and invest their capital. Similarly, French wars in the eighteenth century eventually forced the bankrupt king to gather the Estates-­General, sparking the events that led to the French Revolution. The democratizing potential of war became especially pronounced in the Napoleonic Wars, which required national mobilization on an unprecedented scale. Gianfranco Poggi, in his study on the development of the modern state, argued that the wars of 1792–1815 helped create a century of great-­power peace in Europe because they had demonstrated to European rulers the “threatening connection” between sustained, large-­scale modern warfare and social revolution.111 In this version of the bellicist argument, mobilizing for war can produce democracy by forcing states to grant rights to previously excluded social groups in exchange for their participation in the fight.112 By placing demands upon the people, mass conscription acts as a catalyst for liberalization and franchise expansion. The bellicist literature is therefore ambiguous about the effects of conflict on domestic reforms. As a result, Bermeo notes, the “association between wars and democracy seems important, but it is regrettably underspecified,” even though half of all democracies created after 1945 were established in the aftermath of wars.113 How can this contradiction be resolved? The first step, as Krebs argues, is to disaggregate the effects of warfare into three components—the threat of 107. Aron 1951:151. 108. See, e.g., Downing 1992 or Thompson 1996. 109. Rustow 1970:348. 110. North and Weingast 1989. 111. Poggi 1978:91. 112. See, for example, Andreski 1968 or Marwick 1974. 113. Bermeo 2003b:162.

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war, mobilization, and warfare itself.114 Each, he notes, may have varied effects on regime outcomes. A constant threat of war may indeed produce effects consistent with the “Hintze-­Seeley law,” leading to decreased civil liberties and a powerful, paranoid, unaccountable state. Actual mobilization, however, may open up space for political representation by giving citizens leverage over the state and unleashing powerful democratizing forces. The democratizing effects of war are therefore more likely when mobilization is total—that is, when citizen participation is absolutely crucial to victory. Limited wars, waged by small professional forces, are less likely to produce the same demands for political inclusion and accountability. But focusing on mobilization strategies reveals only a part of the story. While the bellicist literature has emphasized the democratic effects of mass mobilization, it has tended to ignore the all-­important factor of the outcome of the war—the missing fourth component of Krebs’s typology. Crucially, it was the outcome of the hegemonic shock that validated the wartime bargain. While mobilization opened up opportunities for reform, whether those reforms were adopted was contingent on which regime actually won. A German victory, in other words, would have made postwar democratization—whether inside Germany or in Europe as a whole—much less likely. As Elizabeth Kier has argued, combatant states pursued a variety of mobilization strategies during the war. One strategy was to coerce workers into participation through martial law and harsh enforcement of labor regulations, closing off opportunities for democratic reform.115 Another strategy, however, is to bargain with labor by offering workers political rights.116 In World War I, Germany and the United States represented these opposing mobilization strategies, and the latter’s victory vindicated the bargaining approach, allowing wartime mobilization to result in postwar liberalization. The Axis mobilization strategy, which rejected class inclusion, ultimately proved inferior, leading to food shortages and mass strikes. “The inability of the Central Powers to enforce a more equitable sharing of the burdens of war,” writes Sondhaus, “demoralized their home fronts and left fewer of their citizens confident that the war could be won or would lead to a better future.”117 Where hegemonic outcomes matter, therefore—and where the bellicist theories link to the theory of hegemonic shocks—is in vindicating or discrediting the mobilization strategies chosen in wartime. “The workers in the mass,” wrote the editor of the London Observer in 1919, 114. Krebs 2008:182–83. 115. The German Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law of December 1916, for example, made employment compulsory for male nonsoldiers. 116. Kier 2010. 117. Sondhaus 2011:350.

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had to be assured a thousand times that in the event of victory of their freely-­ accepted discipline over the more forced and serf-­like drill of the German system, unprecedented efforts would be made to raise the common people to an altogether higher level of intelligent, responsible, and well-­conditioned citizenship.118 The granting of political rights was therefore contingent on a favorable outcome for those states that adopted the bargaining (rather than the coercive) strategy of mobilization. This outcome was in turn dependent on American involvement. By ensuring an Allied victory, America’s participation justified the democratizing mobilization strategy. An Axis victory, on the other hand, would have discredited the Allied mobilization strategy, confirming the often-­ repeated suspicion that democracies are less effective at mobilizing their populations for major war. As in the Napoleonic conflicts a century before, the mass mobilization of society created a leveling impulse in all aspects of social and political life. Working-­class soldiers demanded suffrage with the slogan: “One man, one gun, one vote.”119 Mass conscription for the trenches drained workers from the factories and created constant labor shortages. At the same time, the voracious consumption of new and deadly firepower led to chronic shortages of supplies, producing a tremendous increase in demand for factory labor. Like never before, war had “extended its tentacles deep to the rear, spreading from the trenches into the fields, the mines, and the factories.”120 The American industrialist Howard Coffin noted that modern war “demands that the blood of the soldier must be mingled with three to five parts of the sweat of the man in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms.”121 Even as the state intruded into the business of daily life, the demands of the people increasingly intruded upon the conduct of the wartime state. “The waging of modern war presupposes and imposes a great increase in social discipline,” argues Titmuss; but such discipline “is only tolerable if—and only if—social inequalities are not intolerable.”122 Mass conscription and the wartime economy thereby strengthened the unity and organization of labor, men and women alike, shifting the balance of power within European societies. “In fighting for democracy abroad we are gaining two of the biggest democratic principles at home,” wrote a member of the US Council of National Defense in 1918. “The first is the recognition of the rights and dignity of labor, and the other is women’s freedom, because never before have we so clearly realized 118. Quoted in Halperin 2004:159, emphasis added. 119. Downing 1992:253. 120. van Creveld 1989:163. 121. Quoted in Kier 2010:139. 122. Titmuss 1958:85.

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that the output of the machine is just as essential to victory as the gun at the front.”123 The need for mass armies also contributed to the push for democratization. “Conscription has made a vital difference,” wrote an American observer in 1919. “The State demanded the men it chose and sent them to Europe; it cannot deny them a fair measure of freedom and happiness.”124 As the Ulster Union leader Sir Edward Carson proclaimed: “If a man is good enough to fight for you, he is good enough to vote for you.”125 As a result of these forces, writes Markoff, “powerholders became increasingly sensitive to the continued allegiance of the men in the trenches and the women and men in the factories. Talk about extending the right to vote flourished.”126 In Britain, a Lord Landsdowne became so concerned that continuing the war with Germany might release democratizing forces (or in his words, “spell ruin for the civilized order”) that in 1917 he urged a peace settlement to halt this process.127 The reciprocal bargain forged by the war undermines the oft-­repeated claim that working-­class participation in the war effort demonstrated the triumph of nationalism over class solidarity. During the war, labor conflicts continued and in some cases intensified as the workers became emboldened by realization of their newfound importance. The war in fact proved to be a turning point in the evolution of organized labor in Europe. Far from demonstrating labor’s submission to nationalism, working-­class participation in the war offered an opportunity to generate political concessions and reflected a growing desire for political representation and a higher standard of living. The postwar democratic reforms, argues Charles Tilly, came about when citizens “who bore the terrible costs of war bargained with war-­battered states for rights they had previously lacked, which their military and civilian service visibly justified.”128 In Britain and other countries, it was widely recognized that the war could not be won without the support of the workers. Their participation had been “for the first time the critical condition for victory,” and it had been “felt to be so by politicians, civil servants, trade unionists, and the press.”129 At the end of the war, labor was more unified, better organized, and, as Halperin notes, “in a position to back its demands with threats.” Given their new status, workers had reason to believe—and in some cases were promised—that “through their patriotism and sacrifices, they might win 123. Harriman 1918:80. 124. Rogers 1919:112. 125. Quoted in Reynolds 2014:57. 126. Markoff 1996:85. 127. Quoted in Kier 2010:161. 128. Tilly 2007:64–65. 129. Abrams 1963:46.

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the rights for which they had struggled for over a century.”130 As a Weimar MP declared in 1927: The average man, who was everywhere undervalued, disdained, and slighted and yet called upon to render the same services in the field and at home, suddenly ceased to accept this and regarded electoral reform in Prussia simply as the expression of the appreciation of the plain man; and this desire for self-­assertion which forces its way out was quite natural.131 In short, mobilization for war produced great hopes for social and political change, but it was the war’s outcome that validated these claims and led to increasingly vehement demands for reform. By the early 1920s, their participation vindicated through democratic triumph, labor movements and socialist parties found themselves in a position of unprecedented power. In Weimar Germany, Austria, Sweden, and other states, socialist parties and coalitions led their people’s transitions to new governments; Labour took power in Britain in 1923, and the left won in France in 1924. By bringing labor parties to the forefront of political action, the war helped usher in a number of social reforms. Government insurance schemes, eight-­hour workdays, and other elements of the welfare state were becoming more common. Britain expanded its unemployment insurance provisions in 1922. In Sweden, which did not even take part in the hostilities, the German defeat led to the capitulation of the conservatives, who had been stalling political reforms. Unlike their counterparts in Germany, the Swedish right did not have the option of allying with a powerful landed upper class and were therefore politically isolated. After the war they agreed to the introduction of universal suffrage and a parliamentary government in return for the preservation of the monarchy. In Belgium, workers had organized several major strikes in support of universal suffrage in the three decades before the war. All of these had been put down, often with force. During the war, however, the government needed labor’s support and gave the socialist party a ministry. At the end of the war Belgium adopted universal male suffrage and introduced its first welfare legislation. The war had a similarly powerful effect on female suffrage. Only two European countries, Finland and Norway, had allowed women to vote before the war. But between 1917 and 1924, over thirty countries adopted female suffrage, making it the “most conspicuous innovation” of the postwar period.132 Charles Beard, writing in 1927, noted that World War I, “supposed to demonstrate manly valor at its highest pitch, accelerated the movement for woman suffrage. 130. Halperin 2004:171, 154–55. 131. Quoted in Lutz 1934:275. 132. Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 2002:744.

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TABLE 3.1.

Female Suffrage Expansion, 1917–­1924

Year

Country

1917

Canada, Russia

1918

Austria, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Great Britain*

1919

Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden, Ukraine, Albania, Isle of Man, Belarus

1920

Czechoslovakia, United States

1921

Burma, Sweden, Armenia

1922

Ecuador, Ireland

1924

Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Saint Lucia, Tajikistan

* Suffrage extended to women over age 28; full female suffrage extended in 1928.

Nearly all the new states created after that conflict conferred on women the right to vote.” He concluded: “The feminist genie is out of the bottle.”133 The war had drawn women into the labor force and demonstrated their capacity to perform traditionally male roles. The insatiable need for troop replacements meant that women now streamed into offices and factories. In the United States, the Council of National Defense appointed a Women’s Committee to advise the government on how to use women in the workplace, prompting journalist Ida Tarbell to write that “this was the first time in history that a government had called a country’s woman-­power into co-­operation. The summons made its impression. It was ‘recognizing’ women. The women rose to the recognition.”134 Women received the right to vote in all the new states created by the war except Yugoslavia, as well as in Great Britain, Canada, United States, Sweden, Belgium, and other countries (see table 3.1). As with other postwar reforms, the role of the war was crucial in furthering their cause; its influence is particularly visible, for example, in Canada’s expansion of the franchise, where the vote was first extended to women in uniform, then to women with close male relatives in the military, and finally, at the end of the war, to all female citizens.135 The expansion of female suffrage was therefore not just the culmination of fin-­de-­siècle suffrage movements and sociocultural modernization within states. The timing and clustering of suffrage expansion suggests that both world wars played a key role in this shift via the wartime mobilization of women, 133. Beard 1927:681. 134. Tarbell 1917:842. 135. Markoff 1996:85.

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which led to broader changes in social norms surrounding female political participation. The early expansion of female suffrage may have been the unintended consequence of societal disruptions required for industrial warfare. The Democratic Counterwave Well before the Great Depression sparked the authoritarian wave of the 1930s, despots and dictators began ascending to power across Europe and around the world. Fledgling democracies fell in Russia (1917), Hungary (1919), Italy (1922), Bulgaria (1923), Poland (1926), Portugal (1926), Lithuania (1926), and Yugoslavia (1929). In addition, the new states of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, which had also adopted democratic institutions, were reabsorbed into the Russian empire by 1922, this time under a communist aegis. The optimistic period after the war, Ikenberry writes, “was a democratic high tide rather than a gathering flood.”136 The causes of these failed democratic consolidations stemmed from factors inherent in the dynamics of the initial wave. Democratic institutions spread into countries that lacked the domestic preconditions for democratic consolidation—factors like a large and powerful middle class, economic stability, or previous history with democratic governance. As Raymond Aron writes: In countries restored or created by diplomatic decision, the model was the Western-­type democracy that had needed a century to take root even in France. But these new countries were riven by nationalist conflicts. Their middle classes, with the sole exception of Czechoslovakia, were small and had no experience of power. So it was not surprising that the large number of parties, adding parliamentary quarrels to the underlying causes of division, soon proved inimical to the survival of the state.137 “The trouble with the new nations,” noted an American newspaper shortly after the war, “is that they have the old quarrels.”138 Europe roiled with deeply held antagonisms that the postwar settlement did little to resolve. The newly created states were “to a large extent accidents of the war.” None of them, with the exception of Poland, represented “a deeply felt, long-­maturing, or widespread revolutionary settlement.”139 Despite what Roger Brubaker calls the great “unmixing of peoples” that accompanied the war, post-­1919 Europe remained a kaleidoscopic jumble of nationalities—pockets, enclaves, exclaves, 136. Ikenberry 2000:155. 137. Aron 1951:146. 138. Quoted in Bailey 1944:35. 139. Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 2002:745.

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and scatterings of insecure minorities.140 Croatians complained of Serbian mistreatment in Yugoslavia, Magyars decried Romanian mistreatment in Transylvania, and so on. States born from the war “were as divided within their new frontiers as they had been within the old,” writes Furet. “The Allies had miniaturized national hatred in the name of the principle of nationhood.”141 Nationalism, the malicious twin of self-­determination, was a shaky basis for training new democrats. Self-­determination was a concept “loaded with dynamite,” warned Wilson’s secretary of state. “Will it not breed discontent, disorder, and rebellion?”142 Walter Bagehot, writing about the French Third Republic, noted that parliamentary government often fails because it requires “that a nation should have nerve to endure incessant discussion and frequent change of rulers.”143 For the states of interwar Europe, such nerve required, in the words of Fritz Stern, “a psychological stamina for ambiguity and uncertainty,” an attitude that that could not retain enough adherents in the interwar period.144 Throughout Europe, most cabinet coalitions endured less than a year—eight months on average in Germany and Austria, five in Italy, and less than four in post-­1931 Spain. Even in France, which had already experienced unstable parliamentary coalitions under the Third Republic, average cabinet duration fell from ten months in 1870–1914 to four months in 1932–1940.145 With the disappearance of strong pro-­democracy class coalitions, and the absence of domestic prerequisites conducive for its consolidation, the momentum for democratization simply could not be sustained. Russia, for example, began its revolutionary path in 1917 with a turn to moderation and democratic rule, personified by the liberal, centrist figure of Alexander Kerensky, leader of the Provisional Government. As in Germany and elsewhere, the transition itself was only made possible by the extraordinary shock of the war, which brought together a coalition of domestic actors that ordinarily would not have shared the overthrow of monarchy as a common goal. The role of the army in this improvised coalition was particularly decisive. In the failed 1905 revolution, it was used to suppress revolts, but after the battlefield defeats of 1917, “the dissolution of the army and the deepening of agrarian revolt became intertwined. Former soldiers returned to the villages to join in, and often lead, the land seizures.”146 A magazine article from that time noted the broad assent for reforms at all levels of the army, where the 140. Brubaker 1995. 141. Furet 1999:58. 142. Quoted in Hoff 2007:47. 143. Quoted in Stern 1997:19–20. 144. Stern 1997:20. 145. Mazower 1998:19. 146. Skocpol 1979:136.

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revolutionary movement made unexpected headway among officers as well as the rank and file: “[T]he ease with which aristocratic regiments were won over to the cause of democracy,” it noted, “was as much of a surprise to the revolutionists as it was to the Czar.”147 In February 1917 the troops in St. Petersburg mutinied, accompanied by strikes and riots throughout the city, leading to the nearly bloodless revolution and the establishment of the Provisional Government. The initial goal was a liberal-­democratic state with civil liberties and local autonomy.148 A 1917 observer described the Duma committee that had assumed power as “composed chiefly of Liberals and Moderates.” Only two were socialists, while the ultraconservatives, the so-­called Blacks, were not represented at all.149 Western observers welcomed the revolution as a triumph of democracy. “Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?” asked Woodrow Wilson in an April 1917 speech to Congress.150 But the war would undermine the provisional government, just as it did the monarchy that preceded it. Urban workers demanded industrial reform, national minorities demanded greater self-­determination, famers demanded the seizure of estates and land redistribution, and the military pushed for a peace treaty. The Provisional Government ignored every one of these demands and in doing so lost all hope of unified support. “With hindsight, it is clear why Russia’s democratic revolution failed,” writes Merridale. “Euphoria was wonderful, but it could not cover up the nation’s differences for long.”151 The government itself could not speak with a single voice (split as it was among various left factions ranging from the centrist Kadets to the radical Bolsheviks), let alone accommodate the social groups outside it—the hungry peasants, the disgruntled conscripts, and the frightened bourgeoisie. Because the government failed to exit the war, the army withdrew from the pro-­government coalition. Because the government failed to undertake industrial and land reforms, it lost the laborers and the farmers. Fractionalism brought empty debate and a vacuum of power, and by November the situation had become so untenable that the Bolsheviks were able to step in despite lacking support outside of a few isolated urban pockets. Promising peace for soldiers and bread for peasants, the Bolsheviks were able to undertake a successful and largely bloodless coup in November 1917. The democratic coalition that formed Russia’s govern147. Cahan 1917:47. 148. Skocpol 1979:207; Bobbitt 2003:27–28. 149. Cahan 1917:47. 150. Quoted in New York Times 04/03/1917. 151. Merridale 2013:273.

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ment in February dissolved in the face of uncertainty, poor decisions, and lack of middle-­class support, replaced nine months later by a radical faction that exalted democracy in theory and immediately began to dismantle it in practice. The new states that sprang from Russia’s periphery proclaimed the ideals of democracy and national self-­determination, but their existence was conditional upon the temporary decline of Russian power. In January 1920, the Allied Supreme Council formally recognized the new states, but by that point Russia had begun to reassert its former territorial claims. The Red Army occupied Azerbaijan in April 1920, Armenia (with Ottoman forces) in December 1920, and Georgia in March 1921, ending those states’ brief attempts at democratization. The hegemonic shock had temporarily weakened a losing great power, leading to the creation of sovereign democracies along its borders. But as the country stabilized itself after a civil war, these new territories were rapidly reabsorbed into the old empire. As the decade wore on, the choice for many states increasingly appeared to be “between supine, democratic conformism and national self-­assertion driven by a new form of domestic authoritarianism.”152 Across eastern and central Europe, new countries were plagued by weak and fragmented parliamentary systems. Party “factionalism”—the bugbear of the 1930s and a catalyst for the autocratic turn of that decade—was a problem for many of these states from the start. Fragmented legislatures composed of a number of small parties led to ephemeral governing majorities and short-­lived coalitions. Poland was among many states experiencing crippling party factionalism in the postwar years, and the country increasingly came to be ruled by Marshal Józef Pilsudski, widely admired for his role in restoring Polish independence and in the war with the new Soviet Union. Pilsudski acted as the country’s chief of state until 1922, withdrew from politics in the following year and seized dictatorial power in 1926, ruling until his death in 1935.153 Hungary was another case in which a weak parliament created the space for an authoritarian turn, although in this case the collapse was much quicker. The country lost portions of its lands to Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Serbia as punishment for allying with the Axis powers. In November 1918, the Chrysanthemum Revolution brought to power Mihály Károlyi, a liberal count who established the Hungarian Democratic Republic. As in Russia, the moderate democratic government was unable to deal with demands from competing groups and was replaced five months later by a Bolshevik “Republic of Councils.” The parliamentary government generated widespread discontent among the elites by preserving a prewar-­size civil service that operated on a greatly 152. Tooze 2014:408. 153. Sontag 1970:67.

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reduced budget. Károlyi’s governing coalition ruled in parallel with local revolutionary councils, composed of Social Democrats, which resembled the Russian Soviets, creating a condition of dual power similar to Russia’s fatal dvoevlastiye in 1917 that inhibited the Parliament from exercising its authority in both countries. Hungary’s Social Democrats, for instance, prevented Károlyi’s initiative of transferring land to peasants on the grounds that it would promote capitalism. Mass unemployment, inflation, refugee flows and a punitive armistice quickly drained public support for the new regime, until a revolutionary communist dictatorship was established in March 1919, only five months after the revolution. This in turn resulted in foreign intervention and a counterrevolution by the conservative forces of Admiral Horthy, who led an offensive by the Hungarian military and installed himself as regent of a permanently vacant monarchy. The system that emerged under Horthy was semi-­authoritarian, outlawing the communist party and limiting Jews’ access to universities. In Bulgaria, postwar politics were dominated by the Agrarian Union until its overthrow by a military revolt in 1923. The Union was a movement led by Alexander Stamboliyski that pursued economic and political policies on behalf of the peasants, who made up nearly 80 percent of the population. Despite his popularity with the peasants, Stamboliyski found no support among either the small middle class or the military. His party formed its own militia, called the Orange Shirts, who intimidated the political opposition. As one of the Central Powers in the war, Bulgaria was subject to a harsh peace treaty that reduced its territory, limited its army to twenty thousand men, and forced it to pay a hundred million pounds in reparations. As executor of the treaty, Stamboliyski became increasingly unpopular with right-­wing factions and the army, who finally carried out a coup in June 1923. While Stamboliyski pursued a peaceful foreign policy and genuinely sought to secure the political rights of the Bulgarian peasantry, his rule exhibited a heavy hand in dealing with those who disagreed with his policies. As with other countries in the region, Bulgaria’s political atmosphere was too volatile to maintain even a semblance of democracy, though in this case, the downfall came from a rather low starting point. Democracy failed not only in new states but also in places like Portugal, which had some history with liberal constitutional rule (although of the oligarchic rather than democratic sort). For a few years after the war, the Republican parliamentary regime plodded along, experiencing cabinet instability, inflation, and anemic economic growth. As in Bulgaria, Poland, and Lithuania, a weak and fragmented parliamentary system in combination with a lack of social and economic preconditions for democratic development led to an intervention by the military, which seized power in a nearly bloodless coup in May 1926. Nationalist tensions in new multiethnic states also undermined the consolidation of democratic rule. The system of parliamentary democracy, reliant

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on consensus and compromise, was not suited for the fractious, multiethnic politics of Yugoslavia after 1919. It had existed since that time under the name of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as a multiethnic parliamentary state (though not a true democracy) dominated by Serbs. Despite Croatian resistance, it “managed a chaotic semblance of parliamentary rule until 1929,” when King Alexander—himself a Serb who found governing increasingly difficult as the decade wore on—renamed the country Yugoslavia and established a dictatorship.154 If Yugoslavia exemplified the absence of domestic conditions needed to sustain democracy, the failure of democracy in Germany showed the immense but temporary power of the war to create pro-­democracy coalitions that dissolved as the crisis passed. In Germany’s case, the extraordinary coalition was forged by two—the hope for a US-­led settlement favorable to German interest, and the fear of revolutionary instability induced by the pressures of the war. Both inducements were the outcomes of the hegemonic shock, and both faded away as the shock passed. In his push for making the world safe for democracy, Wilson made the end of hostilities contingent upon German democratization (unlike the French, who demanded unconditional surrender). As German defeat began to seem more inevitable, the country’s leaders began backing democratic reforms in the hopes of securing a more favorable agreement with the United States. In September 1918, General Erich Ludendorff proclaimed his support for a German parliamentary government. Ludendorff was far from a liberal, having been in charge of the military dictatorship that ran the country during the last two years of the war. He anticipated, however, that influence exerted upon the Allies by the United States would allow Germany to conclude a more favorable postwar settlement if it made a transition to democracy. In October 1918, the kaiser asked the liberal Prince Max von Baden to take up the chancellorship and begin settlement negotiations. As a signal of his democratic intentions, the prince appointed a government that included representatives from the Social Democrats for the first time in German history. During this period, Wilson continued to push for democracy as a precondition for an armistice. As Peceny notes, “this external pressure helped generate the incremental steps” taken by the Max von Baden government to liberalize Germany in late 1918, shifting power to the elected Reichstag.155 Germany’s industrialists and military officers also supported democratic reforms as way to stave off revolution brought by the pressures of the war. As Richard Evans argues, the General Staff agreed with the majority Social Democrats “that the threat of the revolutionary workers’ and soldiers’ councils would 154. Tilly 2004:230–31. 155. Peceny 2010:11.

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best be warded off if they worked in tandem to secure a stable parliamentary democracy. . . . [T]his was an act of expediency, not of faith.”156 Business interests likewise stood behind democratic reforms for reasons that were bound to disappear as the communist threat receded. “Like other elements of the Wilhelmine establishment,” writes Evans, “big business accepted the Republic because it seemed the most likely way of warding off something worse.”157 The industrialists, argues Feldman, “were fully conscious of the advantages which their alliance with labor had brought them, and they knew they had gotten off cheaply.”158 In a meeting of the industrialists in November 1918, a speaker urged the attendants “to be happy that the unions still find themselves ready to deal with us in the manner in which they have, for only through negotiations with the unions . . . can we prevent—call it what you will—anarchy, Bolshevism, rule of the Spartacists, or chaos.”159 The crisis of the war thus generated two powerful incentives for a pro-­ democracy coalition—fear of revolution and hope for an American-­led settlement—that were bound to disappear in the postwar years, undermining the effort to sustain German democracy. The fragile alliance of army officers, aristocracy, and liberal parties embraced democratization with the hope that American influence would lead to more tolerable surrender terms. The stability of this arrangement, however, hinged on a successful postwar agreement dominated by the United States. After the war ended, Wilson saw his bargaining leverage decline both among the Allies and within the US Congress. France now insisted upon punitive indemnities and the dismantling of the Reich as a way to prevent another attempt at German hegemony. The push for democracy in central and eastern Europe also fell by the wayside as France began to advocate strong regional alliances, regardless of their internal regimes, to thwart any future expansion of German influence. Britain’s Liberal Party was more sympathetic to Wilson’s cause, but the December 1918 elections brought in a conservative coalition that also demanded a punitive peace. Wilson lost even the support of his own Congress, as the Republicans won both houses in midterm elections days before the signing of the Armistice in November 1918. During the election, the Republicans had accused Wilson of being soft on Germany and campaigned for unconditional surrender. Likewise, the fear of revolutionary upheaval was also a temporary byproduct of the hegemonic shock. As the threat of a communist revolution faded, the interests of industrialists, the aristocracy, the army, and the forces of democracy inevitably began to diverge. “The widespread feeling after 1923 that 156. Evans 2004:97. 157. Evans 2004:112–13. 158. Feldman 1966:527. 159. Quoted in Feldman 1966:528.

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the threat of a Bolshevik revolution had receded,” writes Evans, “meant that the bourgeois parties were no longer so willing to compromise with the Social Democrats in the interests of preserving the Republic as a bulwark against Communism.” The army also lost its interest; as the prospect of upheavals faded, “the need for compromise with the forces of democracy seemed to many leading officers to have lost its urgency.”160 As the participants in this uncomfortable union became more dissatisfied, “the social partnership decayed, and the union leaders and the industrialists retreated into their old slogans and attitudes,” argues Feldman.161 Between 1919 and 1933, the country saw twenty different cabinets, each lasting on average less than eight months. Unstable coalitions created constant squabbles and weakened the Parliament’s ability to govern, “since all they could settle on was the lowest common denominator and the line of least resistance.”162 While the anticipation of beneficial American influence provided a temporary incentive for reforms, such influence did not materialize in the aftermath of the war, fatally crippling the Weimar government. “The liberal democracies scattered throughout the world by the peace settlement of 1919,” wrote E. H. Carr in The Twenty Years Crisis, “were the product of abstract theory, stuck no roots in the soil, and quickly shriveled away.”163 Across much of Europe, democracy “had to operate in a world in which it had many enemies, old and new,” writes Roberts. “It had not been a widespread form of government before 1914 and many Europeans were soon regretting the passing of the regimes under which they had previously lived.”164 The political and economic instability in the newly created states further undermined democracy’s chances. Missing in all this upheaval was any attempt by the United States to support the fragile edifice for which it had so loudly advocated. America’s vision of the new European order was a gilded ruin—shining odes to democracy with no supporting foundation to keep it in place. Wilson’s Fourteen Points “provided a splendid propaganda platform,” writes Sally Marks, but “were too ambiguous to serve as the basis for a settlement.” Upholding the settlement was predicated upon an American engagement that failed to materialize; Wilson’s abdication of hegemonic leadership, she concludes, “caused first great uncertainty and then acute dislocation of the entire settlement.”165 America became, as one British observer put it, “the ghosts at all our feasts.”166 160. Evans 2004:96,97. 161. Feldman 1966:532. 162. Evans 2004:83. 163. Carr 1939:27. 164. Roberts 1999:284. 165. Marks 2003:2, 28. 166. Quoted in Tooze 2014:516.

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“It is to Great Britain and America that the democracy of Central and Eastern Europe must turn for advice, for material aid, and for all hope in this time of their travail,” opined a New York Times columnist in early 1919. And yet, in these countries, “opinion is in a sad state of perplexity and loss of direction as regards conditions in Europe.”167 A Supreme Economic Council was established in February 1919 to streamline Allied cooperation, but as Aldcroft argues, “its activities and powers were very limited” and “its mandate ran out at the end of the Armistice period.” In the end, “international efforts to promote reconstruction in Europe were awfully inadequate,” he concludes. “A coordinated plan for the reconstruction of Europe was never conceived at any stage and what relief was given was very inadequate.”168 Wilson’s vice president likened America’s role to a “man who rushed into his neighbor’s house to beat off a burglar, and then rushed back home, leaving the victim bleeding to death on the floor.”169 In the beginning, even those who “lacked a principled commitment to liberal democracy embraced the liberal creed because they thought Wilson and the victorious Allies would provide material benefits to those who jumped on the democratic bandwagon,” writes Peceny. “Over time, the failure of the liberal great powers to reward other states for embracing liberal institutions . . . led those who only had a contingent commitment to democracy to abandon that commitment.”170 Wilson had hoped that Europe would accept his vision for the world “more by moral and ideological appeal,” as Ikenberry puts it, “than by the exercise of American power or diplomatic tact.”171 In the end, that hope proved elusive. In the aftermath of the war, the United States offered little more than inspiring rhetoric, choosing to turn inward during the isolationism of the 1920s. As Peceny puts it: [T]he post–World War I democratic transitions should not be considered examples of efforts to impose democracy through force. The victorious Allies made almost no explicit efforts to insist upon the development of democratic institutions and practices in target states. None of the architecture of democracy promotion so common today was present in 1919 Europe.172 It would be an exaggeration to describe postwar US policy as total disengagement or outright isolationism. Instead, America pursued a policy of selective engagement, though one lacking strategic cohesion. It stationed troops in 167. New York Times 04/07/1919. 168. Aldcroft 1977:60, 63. 169. Quoted in Bailey 1944:360. 170. Peceny 2010:3. 171. Ikenberry 2000:155. 172. Peceny 2010:2–3.

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the Rhineland and used military force to intervene in Russia after the revolution. Its pro-­democracy rhetoric was backed by institutional tools of public diplomacy. Toward the end of the war, the United States established the Committee for Public Information (CPI), a propaganda outlet that celebrated America as “the trustworthy champion of democracy.”173 America’s most concrete lever of influence in the postwar years was its food aid program. Like the Marshall Plan two decades later, it was designed to blunt the appeal of radical revolution and thus bolster democratic consolidation. Herbert Hoover, the newly appointed secretary of commerce, arranged for food aid to western Europe through the American Relief Organization. Yet the program was short-­lived, and official relief funds were sharply cut by 1920. The end of official aid came “long before the problem of hunger and poverty had been solved,” argues Aldcroft. Coordination between America and the Allies was poor, and “the whole relief exercise was hastily improvised.”174 The American lack of commitment to reconstruction both undermined the prospects for democracy and weakened Wilson’s hand in pushing for his agenda. As Hirschman points out, one of the most important factors behind the defeat of Wilson’s policies “was the premature breaking up of the agencies of Allied economic collaboration . . . which could have been turned to the tasks of relief or reconstruction.”175 The failure to jumpstart the European economies had direct political consequences in the years after the war. Without supplies of raw materials, industrial productivity stagnated, driving up unemployment. The lack of foreign credits led to currency depreciation, which in turn created temporary export booms that boosted inflation, shrank real incomes, and produced capital flight. For several countries, these export bubbles “led to the disintegration of the whole economic and social fabric of several countries.”176 Wilson’s rhetoric, Ikenberry writes, “was not backed up by offers of economic and military assistance that might have made his settlement ideas more attractive and credible”177—and, perhaps, more durable. This was a mistake that US policy makers explicitly sought to correct after World War II. The consolidation of fragile regimes was made all the more difficult by the absence of material support from the rising hegemon. The power of America’s example and the inspiration produced by the promise of self-­determination was insufficient in the face of the stupefying odds facing the hopeful reformers. The domestic troubles of new democracies were thus exacerbated and reinforced by the fading of compelling external pressures to sustain liberal re173. Schmidt 1998:1. 174. Aldcroft 1977:59. 175. Hirschman 1945:67. 176. Aldcroft 1977:64. 177. Ikenberry 2000:155.

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forms. Democracy’s “international backers were less supportive as time passed,” argues Mazower.178 America’s inward turn undermined its messianic call for a new world; Britain and France turned on battling for influence and defeating communism. In the wake of the shock, Markoff notes, some new leaders adopted a democratic facade merely “to appease challenging social movements and appear respectable within the international community.”179 Once social movements collapsed or turned their wrath upon democratic inefficiency, and once the international community lost its interest in promoting democracy, the facade quickly collapsed. Such democratic overextension— placating the temporary pressures created by the shock while biding time for an autocratic resurgence—would resurface in each of the subsequent democratic waves, most prominently among the backsliding African autocrats of the mid-­1990s. “The hungry expect us to feed them, the roofless look to us for shelter, and the sick of heart and of body depend upon us for a cure,” Wilson told George Creel, head of the US Committee of Public Information. “What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment.”180 Wilson’s preemptive regret is especially puzzling because he was perfectly placed to correct the tragedy through American involvement, but chose to rely on rhetoric and an illusory legalist promise of the League. As an orthodox liberal, Wilson sought to resolve conflicts between labor and capital by forging “a larger harmony based on the public interest,” argues the Wilson scholar Gordon Levin. His vision was utopian or, less generously, hubristically naive and stubborn. Seeking a classless consensus, Wilson pursued “a moderately reformist” agenda that opposed socialism and imperialism while upholding a liberal-­capitalist system.181 As a result, argues Maier, the United States sought to build an international order “only through private capitalism, not public funding, and even less through a security system.”182 No radical transformation of America’s role in the world could flow from that belief. Wilson’s vision for postwar hegemonic engagement was to be pursued not through unilateral engagement but through the collective security framework of the League. For Wilson, the League legitimized US involvement in international affairs because it sidestepped the dirty ancient politics of secret alliances.183 When US involvement in the League failed, so did any chance of substantial American engagement with the continent. Wilson had been a crusader armed with a banner instead of a sword 178. Mazower 1998:23. 179. Markoff 1996:87. 180. Quoted in Knock 1992:209. 181. Levin 1969:116, 117. 182. Maier 1975:xiii. 183. Levin 1969:126.

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The lack of US engagement after World War I was partly a result of structural factors, namely the geopolitical squabbling of remaining great powers and the lack of obvious incentives for American involvement. But it was also exacerbated by a series of mistakes and miscalculations by the thin-­skinned and impetuous Wilson. Some of these were easily avoidable, like his choice to ignore the Republicans in setting the agenda for peace negotiations, or his refusal to insert the Lodge reservations into Senate approval of US League membership—a choice that Wilson scholar Arthur Link called “an error of tragic magnitude.” As Link concludes, in his actions, Wilson “spurned the role of statesman for what he must have thought was the noble role of prophet.” Prophets make poor politicians but tend to be remembered kindly by history, since it is their very lack of compromise that creates failed short-­term politics and compelling long-­term visions. Thus, it is “Wilson the prophet who survives in history, in the hopes and aspirations of mankind.”184 In the absence of hegemonic engagement, the systemic pressures pushing for democratization in the immediate wake of the war soon waned, undercutting both the ideological and material appeal of democracy across Europe and beyond. While the outcome of the war propped up democracy on the pedestal of universal acclaim, reality soon showed that these hopes had created the democratic version of a stock market bubble on the European continent, one that was bound to burst as the decade set in. “Freedom? Many people smile at the word,” proclaimed Italian politician Francesco Nitti in 1927. “Democracy? Parliaments? There are few who do not speak ill of Parliaments.”185 In the absence of strong pro-­democracy coalitions, domestic conditions in economically and socially undeveloped states could not maintain the push for democratization. The spirit of compromise and consensus required for parliamentary governance could not be sustained in an environment of quarreling ethnic and social groups brought together in artificially bounded territories born from the hegemonic shock. Conclusion The first democratic wave of the century found an unexpected origin in the immense destruction of the Great War. The war forged the century’s first democratic wave by demonstrating democracy’s effectiveness to rulers, creating new states on the ruins of autocratic empires, and increasing the organizational power of women and working-­class men. “The war broke the old land empires of Europe, while inspiring dreams of new ones,” wrote the historian 184. Link 1969:146, 147. 185. Quoted in Mazower 1998:3.

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Timothy Snyder. “It replaced the dynastic principle of rule by emperors with the fragile idea of popular sovereignty.”186 In 1919, power and ideology combined to create a moment when democracy appeared to be the only way forward. Nearly all of the new states that were created (or resurrected, in Poland’s case) by the war adopted democratic institutions, such as parliaments, universal suffrage, and proportional representation. The dramatic shift in the distribution of power among the major states was accompanied by a shift in public rhetoric about the value of democracy. The sudden collapse of monarchical regimes “made many people optimistic about the prospects for democratic government,” argues Roberts.187 The alternatives appeared either moribund (in the case of monarchical absolutism) or volatile (in the case of communism). A fledgling communist regime had appeared in Russia after the country’s brief flirtation with liberal democracy, but it was the product of a war-­born, minority-­forged coup facing a bitter civil war and foreign invasions, a “tyranny nourished by misery” rather than a viable path for economic and political development.188 The outcome, as is generally the case with hegemonic shocks, appeared unambiguous. Democracies were the “obvious victors,” writes Markoff, while autocracies were “the great losers.”189 Such widespread consensus on the attraction of democracy would not resurface until the Soviet collapse seven decades later. Democracy seemed to offer a path to both domestic and international legitimacy, and for those rulers who saw little value in such trifles, it was a way to modernize, strengthen, and stabilize their own fragile new states and societies. The flowering of democratic regimes on the European continent was a period of hope born from tragedy, a moment of crisis transformed into opportunity. This cascade of postwar reforms was intense, widespread, ambitious—and ultimately unsuccessful. The defeat of autocracies and the emergence of the United States as a new global hegemon produced a brief moment when democracy appeared to be the way forward. Yet the fundamental premise of the Versailles treaty—the idea of democracy as the answer to the problems of modernity—was not solidified by the postwar settlement. It was, in retrospect, an ill-­fated victory. The democracies that emerged from the war were “never secure in their claims of legitimacy in those states where this legitimacy was most closely tested.”190 The Soviet Union after 1923 and Germany after 1933—two states excluded from the negotiations at 186. Snyder 2011:1. 187. Roberts 1999:283. 188. Sontag 1970:1. 189. Markoff 1996:87. 190. Bobbitt 2003:40.

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Versailles—would in time offer their own visions of the modern state. In the 1920s, classic conservatives moved away from democracy to preserve the old order and exclude the masses from political life. But by the next decade, new revolutionary conservatives sought to demolish the old order, to bring the masses into politics, and to fundamentally transform relations among social and economic classes. The democratic wave depended on a halfhearted and humiliating peace. It sowed the seeds of its own demise as rulers and coalitions, swept up in the postwar momentum, adopted liberal institutions in countries that lacked the social cohesion, political preconditions, or economic stability necessary for democratic consolidation. Pro-­reform coalitions that initiated the changes dissolved as the crisis passed. Rulers who saw democratization as a way to climb on the American bandwagon were met with empty rhetoric instead of economic assistance and security guarantees. The spirit of postwar enthusiasm inflated unrealistic expectations in countries where prospects for democracy faced a number of tough challenges. With external pressures shifting away from democracy, the disappearance of ad hoc pro-­democracy coalitions and the absence of favorable domestic conditions meant that the momentum for democratization could not be sustained. By producing a period of democratic overstretch, the postwar hegemonic transition shaped both the democratic wave and its disappointing aftermath. In failing to resolve the major dilemma of the twentieth century—the design and legitimacy of the modern nation-­state—World War I was the first in a series of confrontations between democracy and alternative institutional arrangements. Its outcome inaugurated a struggle for influence and legitimacy that ended only when the last remaining alternative imploded in 1991.

4 A Low Dishonest Decade It is as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. — GEORGE ORWELL , 1 9 4 01

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter published his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Now remembered chiefly as a paean to the “creative destruction” of capitalism, the book was actually a eulogy for what Schumpeter saw as a dying system. While the ever-­evolving nature of capitalism made it the best way to increase productivity and living standards, Schumpeter did not believe it could survive the radical challenges of fascism and socialism. Capitalism, he argued, produced an atmosphere “of almost universal hostility to its own social order.” The replacement of the petite bourgeoisie by giant corporations sucked “the life out of the idea of property,” and this sickly form of absentee ownership could no longer “call forth moral allegiance as­the vital form of property did.” And since democracy for Schumpeter was a byproduct of the capitalist process and therefore associated with its failure, their decline would be simultaneous and mutually reinforcing.2 Written in the late 1930s, the end of W. H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade” and the nadir of modern democracy, Schumpeter’s anxieties echoed the views of many of his contemporaries. In the wake of the Depression, democracy suddenly appeared moribund and corrupt. Its failure, writes Arthur Schlesinger, 1. Orwell 1940c:15. 2. Schumpeter 1942:142. 101

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aroused “contempt for parliamentary dithering,” for “bourgeois civility and cowardice, for pragmatic muddling through.”3 As an American economist lamented in 1933, “democracy is neither very expert nor very quick to action,” and cannot resolve “group and class conflicts easily.”4 The Great Depression was the only hegemonic shock of the twentieth century in which democracy did not emerge as one of the winners. Instead, it was widely perceived to be both its culprit and its victim. Amidst the decay of the period, Nazi Germany emerged as an alternative model for elites and masses alike. It had loudly rejected the conventional politics and economics of democratic states, and achieved great success in doing so. In the public imagination, Hitler’s headstrong pursuit of these policies transformed him from a flouncing martinet into the prophet of a new age. Over the course of the 1930s, argues Haffner, he “astonished friends and enemies alike with a series of achievements which hardly anyone would have thought him capable of.”5 He had “admirers around the world, many of them in democratic nations,” argues Hamby.6 As even Orwell admitted in a review of Mein Kampf: “The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.”7 If 1989 was the great turning point for modern democracy, 1933 would prove to be the fascist annus mirabilis. The ascent of the National Socialists inaugurated a long period of German recovery, economic expansion, and the swift end of unemployment. By 1939 the country had a labor shortage of two million people, while industrial production had more than doubled. The late interwar years thus witnessed a rapid hegemonic transition in which German power quickly matched and threatened to overtake a stagnant United States (see figure 4.1).8 The wave of institutional reforms of the 1930s closely followed the contours of this hegemonic shift. As the relative power of democratic regimes declined, democracy was increasingly seen as outdated, inefficient, and undesirable. At the same time, as Germany began to increase its share of relative power and eliminate unemployment, other states began to look toward fascism as a model for emulation. The fascist wave was therefore a direct result of the rise in Germany’s relative power. As Hobsbawm argues, [W]ithout the international standing of Germany as an evidently successful and rising world power, fascism would have had no serious impact outside 3. Schlesinger 2005:107. 4. Lorwin 1935:116, 117. 5. Haffner 1978:25, 28. 6. Hamby 2004:376. 7. Orwell 1940bc. 8. “In 1933 Germany was a disarmed and isolated power,” writes Sontag (1970:261), but “by 1939 all Europe trembled in fear of German power.”

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25

Share of global power (%)

United States 20

15

10

Germany 5 1930

1935

1940

FIGURE 4.1. The hegemonic shock of the Great Depression: German and American shares of global power (as measured by CINC) between 1930 and 1941.

Europe, nor indeed would non-­fascist reactionary rulers have bothered to dress up as fascist sympathisers, as when Portugal’s Salazar claimed in 1940 that he and Hitler were “linked by the same ideology.”9 By the late 1930s, the global number of democratic regimes reached a new low after its brief postwar peak.10 The number of democracies around the world declined both in absolute terms and as a percentage of all states. Their total number fell steadily from twenty-­seven to seventeen between 1919 and 1943, and their proportion fell from 40 percent to just under 25 percent of all states.11 The number of fascist regimes, meanwhile, increased rapidly after 1935 (see figure 4.2). Germany’s ascent thus led to a sharp increase in the global appeal and legitimacy of fascist institutions. As Paul Johnson argues, by the middle of the 1930s “many intelligent people believed that fascism was likely to become the predominant system of government in Europe and perhaps throughout the world.”12 Foreign observers saw Germany’s economic miracle as the result of specifically Nazi innovations, which had set the regime apart from the stagnating liberal democracies. At the outset, Britain and France focused on conven9. Hobsbawm 1994:117. 10. Of the seventeen countries that adopted democratic institutions between 1915 and 1931, only four managed to retain them through the end of the decade. Huntington 1991b:17. 11. Similarly, by Hybel’s count (2001:87), the number of democracies declined from 35 to 12 between 1920 and 1944. 12. Johnson 2001:306.

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Proportion of fascist states (%)

30

20

10

0 1930 FIGURE 4. 2.

1935

1940

1945

1950

The fascist wave: global proportion of fascist states,

1930–­1945.

tional measures like cutting public spending. But as Goering declared: “We do not recognize the sanctity of some of these so-­called economic laws.”13 Instead, the Nazis pursued an active policy of massive state intervention in the economy, including deficit spending and mass employment. “The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious,” wrote Orwell in 1941. “In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen. However horrible this system may seem to us, it works.”14 As a result of its successes, according to Judt: [F]ascism was not only respectable but—until 1942—the institutional umbrella for quite a lot of innovative economic thinking. It was uninhibited about the use of the state, bypassing political impediments to radical policy innovation, and happy to transcend conventional restrictions on public expenditure.15 In the preface to the 1936 German edition of his General Theory, Keynes himself suggested that his policies were “much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state” than to a democracy.16 In 1940 he rejected an offer to broadcast a critique of the Nazi economic plan, finding himself sympathetic to many of its suggestions. “In my opinion about three-­quarters of the passages quoted from the German broadcasts would be quite excellent if the name of Great Britain were substituted for Germany or the Axis,” he 13. Quoted in Vinen 2000:179. 14. Orwell 1941:80, 81, original emphasis. 15. Judt 2012:170. 16. Quoted in Frieden 2006:212.

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wrote in response. “If [Nazi economic minister] Funk’s plan is taken at face value, it is excellent and just what we ourselves ought to be thinking of doing.”17 The crisis of the Great Depression meant that authoritarian leaders could no longer remain content with the classic conservative-­authoritarian model. Instead of merely defending the status quo, the government now had to step in to stimulate the economy with welfare programs and deficit spending. The mobilization of popular support replaced the innate authoritarian distrust of mobs and rallies; staid hierarchy gave way to charismatic, energetic leadership that promised action on a mass scale. The populist authoritarian regimes of the 1930s moved away from their conventional law-­and-­order counterparts of yesteryear by borrowing elements of fascist institutions. Where traditional authoritarian leaders sought inspiration for reforms, the fascist model presented a natural path for development. Germany’s growing power led nominally nonfascist regimes to adopt what Payne calls “varying degrees of ‘fascistization’—certain outward trappings of fascist style—to present a more modern and dynamic image, with the hope of attaining broader mobilization and infrastructure.”18 This process was not synonymous with fascism, but as he notes “it would be grossly inaccurate to argue that this process proceeded independent of fascism.”19 It had borrowed the public aesthetics, the choreography, and the semiotics of fascism, along with a new approach to political economy that emphasized the primacy of political will over the national economy. Fascists and authoritarians had common enemies—big business, liberalism, Jews, and communists—categories that often overlapped in the muddled rhetoric of the times. Common goals led to “numerous instances of tactical alliances” between fascists and conservatives, “and sometimes even cases of outright fusion, especially between fascists and the radical right.”20 The kings of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia “ruled with the support of local fascists,” writes Frieden, and this relationship was symbiotic, since the traditional conservatives “needed the fascists’ mass base; the fascists needed the conservatives’ credibility with big business.”21 And although the new authoritarians of the 1930s rarely approached the Third Reich’s “total coordination of all political, economic, intellectual and biological activities,” they nevertheless “borrowed features of fascism, establishing a corporative state, outlawing independent labor organizations, and forbidding strikes.”22 17. Quoted in Mazower 1998:186. 18. Payne 1995:290. 19. Payne 1995:15. Even when authoritarianism did not mean fascism, he notes, “it became common for authoritarian regimes to imitate certain aspects of the fascist style.” Payne 1995:290. 20. Payne 1995:16. 21. Frieden 2006:210. 22. Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 2002:800.

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In interwar democracies, meanwhile, the diffusion of fascist institutions manifested itself not in the often-­small vote shares of fascist movements but in the absorption of their ideas by mainstream political parties. In these countries, Germany’s ability to achieve full employment and social cohesion attracted a great deal of interest and admiration. As sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote in 1940: “Competition with [the totalitarian] states compels the democracies to make use of some, at least, of their methods.”23 And Aldous Huxley lamented that calls for resistance to fascism were accelerating democracies’ own transformation “into the likeness of those Fascist states they so much detest.”24 In some cases, political leaders adopted fascist institutions while simultaneously rejecting its ideological underpinnings. National labor services designed to relieve unemployment, state-­directed economies, systems of social welfare, mass political mobilization, and strong executive rule were all hallmarks of statist innovations that took hold in the 1930s and later became essential components of modern mixed economies. Nazi Germany was the first to forcefully experiment with Keynesian countercyclical demand stimulus—most prominently, via deficit spending through public works. By the mid-­1930s, this approach had spread to the United States and elsewhere.25 The ideas promulgated by fascists were therefore incorporated even into states whose citizens would now vehemently reject the fascist label. Fascism showed a way to restrain capitalism and bend it to the national will, rather than opting to destroy it entirely in the Soviet fashion. The shock of the Great Depression, and the authoritarian solutions offered in response, permanently refashioned modern capitalist democracy in a more statist mold. As Sheri Berman argues, postwar democracy borrowed several crucial institutional elements from fascism. The first was an embrace of the primacy of politics over economics, in opposition to both Marxism and classical liberalism, coupled with a willingness to use political power to reshape both society and economy. Second was fascism’s appeal to communal solidarity and a collective good that transcended selfish democratic individualism. Third, parties in modern democracies drew on the Nazi model to create mass-­based political organizations that presented themselves as “people’s parties.” Finally, democracies adopted a middle ground toward capitalism—“neither hoping for its 23. Mannheim 1940:338. 24. Huxley 1937:66 25. Gourevitch (1984:101–2) traces this policy to Germany in 1933, and then to the US, Sweden, and France after 1936. The “first country to try demand stimulus and make it work was, sad to say, Germany under the Nazis” (Gourevitch 1984:112). Laqueur (1997:67) likewise calls the Nazi strategy a “primitive Keynesian strategy” of public works and deficit spending. Even if Nazi policies were not Keynesian in intent, argues Peter Temin (1990:303, original emphasis), “it is still true that the Nazi fiscal expansion had Keynesian effects.”

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demise like Marxists nor worshipping it uncritically like many liberals, but seeking a ‘third way’ based on the belief that the state could and should control markets without destroying them.”26 Undoubtedly, not all of these innovations originated with fascism, but during the 1930s, their close association with fascism helped to spread their appeal.27 Even the United States, democracy’s citadel in the interwar years, was not immune to such mimicry. The only categorically fascist party in the country was the German-­American Bund, an organization whose members never stood any chance of winning political office. Yet during this period fascist policies attracted praise not only from American scholars and intellectuals but also from policy makers, government bureaucrats, and senior political leaders, including Roosevelt himself. The result was open interest in adapting successful Nazi institutions. The United States observed the fascist successes, “absorbing and learning when possible,” argues Katznelson.28 Respectable contemporaries praised Hitler as a bulwark against godless communism, an efficient administrator, and a man with admirable ideas about economic reforms. I examine the American case in more detail below; for now, a few examples will suffice. Rexford Tugwell, a key member of FDR’s brain trust, openly expressed his admiration for both Soviet planning and fascist corporatism. Decrying the ideological foundation of fascism, Tugwell nevertheless described it in his diary as “the cleanest, neatnest [sic], most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.”29 As late as 1938, Roosevelt ordered a report on the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the German labor service, “not to procure propaganda material against the Third Reich,” he noted, but as “a source of information and inspiration.”30 Thanking the American ambassador in Berlin for the report, he wrote: “All of this helps us in planning, even though our methods are of the democratic variety!”31 These comparisons are inevitably loaded with ideological baggage—FDR’s right-­wing opponents, both in the 1930s and today, frequently drew such parallels in order to discredit his reforms. My goal in doing so is not to suggest that the New Dealers secretly harbored fascist fantasies in their overhaul of the 26. Berman 2006:16–17. 27. Prewar social democracy, whose intellectual history predates fascism, did not borrow these elements from fascism, though it developed them in tandem. But social democracy in the interwar years was confined to a few Scandinavian anomalies, and its influence in that period was limited. Instead, what the hegemonic transition demonstrates is that postwar democracy drew upon fascist influences as well as social democratic ones, in significant and often conveniently overlooked ways. 28. Katznelson 2013:53. 29. Quoted in Namorato 1992:139. 30. Gotz and Patel 2006:62–63. 31. Quoted in Gotz and Patel 2006:63.

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government. On the contrary, many sought to preserve what they saw as American traditions of individual freedom. Yet their interest in Nazi methods and institutions serves to highlight the immense power of hegemonic shifts in shaping institutional reforms, even within ideologically opposed rivals. Unsurprisingly, such borrowing became politically toxic after the beginning of the war, and any hint of German influence was expunged from official statements. For example, when the administration publicly discussed the adoption of Nazi labor institutions in 1938, and actually integrated some of its elements into the Civilian Conservation Corps, “there was no public outcry,” note Gotz and Patel, which only three years later “would have been unthinkable.”32 Fascist institutional influence has remained mostly ignored in American consciousness and historiography, for predictable if self-­serving reasons. After the war, argues Schivelbusch, “memories of the New Deal’s common roots with its enemies were repressed, and postwar America was free to enjoy a myth of immaculate conception of the liberal-­democratic welfare state.”33 Beyond inspiring emulation, German economic expansion also drew states into its orbit. The country’s growing economic power meant that it could gain converts through the expansion of trade ties, especially in regions lacking stable relations with Western powers, like Latin America and central Europe. In Latin America, for example, Germany’s share of imports more than doubled from 7 percent to 16 percent between 1932 and 1938.34 This enabled Germany to intervene in the economic affairs of its trading partners; as German power grew, neutrality became an increasingly difficult proposition. Germany and Italy also extended their influence through the financial support of fascist movements in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. The onset of the war began the last, coercive phase of the fascist wave, as Germany and Japan set up a number of tutelary regimes across Europe and Southeast Asia. Thus all three pathways of emulation, influence, and coercion—in that general order—contributed to the fascist wave. In this period, a number of states adopted fascist institutions and expressed admiration for fascist innovations in the social, economic, and political spheres. At its height in the summer of 1942, the fascist order—fascist states, their fellow travelers, occupied territories, colonies, satellites, and puppets—included nearly half the world’s population, stretching from the Bay of Biscay to the Black Sea. With the benefit of historical hindsight and an instinctual moral revulsion to fascism, it is difficult to appreciate just how much sway this ideology held in the 1930s. As Raymond Sontag writes: 32. Gotz and Patel 2006:65, 71. 33. Schivelbusch 2006:14. 34. Elsenhans 1991:279.

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When we read of Lloyd George returning from a talk with Hitler filled with praise for his host; when we recall the kind words Churchill had for what Nazism was doing within Germany even while he was warning of the menace of Nazi foreign policy; when we reconstruct the many laudatory things Lord Halifax, so kindly and decent a man, said in his conversations with Hitler in 1937; and when we note that the same enthusiasm can be found in supposedly discerning observers from other countries, then we marvel, because we see, marching endlessly to their death, the millions of victims of Nazi racism.35 Here the prism of history again distorts just as much as it clarifies. Until the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Sontag notes, the Nazi revolution was a largely bloodless affair, with only a “few easily ignored victims.” Few inside Germany had actually been killed or imprisoned, and even physical persecution of Jews was “sporadic” until the Kristallnacht of November 1938.36 This relatively peaceful rise stood in stark contrast to Stalin’s Great Purges, which took the lives of millions. During the 1930s, “what was happening in the Soviet Union in terms of scale and repressiveness was incomparably worse than anything being done in Nazi Germany,” argues Tim Snyder.37 While both regimes were repressive, the Soviet Union was arbitrarily so. Except in its dealings with Jews and interparty intrigues, Germany remained a Rechtsstaat with clearly defined (though limited) bounds of acceptable behavior—a luxury not afforded to the victims of Stalin’s capricious show trials. Many gullible Westerners took these grotesque purification rituals at face value; others, like the American journalist Eugene Lyons, were left “limp with the impact of horrors half-­glimpsed.”38 If the allegations were true, one observer noted in 1946, then the Soviet system “must be riddled with treason and not nearly so stable as its advocates alleged.” And if they were false, “then so violent a purge was inexcusable.”39 Whatever the case, argues Mazower, “the coercive powers of the state were never nearly as much in evidence in peacetime Nazi Germany as they were in Stalin’s Soviet Union.”40 Moreover, the German economic recovery appeared far more successful than Stalin’s ruthless push for industrialization. Soviet-­style economic planning gained many disciples throughout the West, with Hitler basing his own four-­ 35. Sontag 1971:265. 36. Sontag 1971:266. Snyder suggests that until the war, the Nazis were responsible for “at most” 10,000 deaths ( Judt 2012:190). Katznelson (2013:52) argues that the German camp system numbered 60,000 prisoners in 1939, compared with 1.7 million in the USSR. 37. Judt 2012:191. 38. Lyons 1937:117. 39. Ingram 1946:79. 40. Mazower 1998:38.

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year plan on the Soviet example. But the forced collectivization of the countryside was a disaster, leading to the deaths of millions of peasants and the collapse of agricultural production. As a result, in the mid-­1930s, Stalin presided over “the most precipitous peace-­time decline in living standards known in recorded history.”41 The single-­minded focus on heavy industry necessarily came at the expense of basic consumer goods, making scarcity both dire and commonplace outside the oases of Moscow and St. Petersburg. “By contrast,” argues de Grazia, “the Fuhrer publicized his Volkisch standard of living in no uncertain terms as the paradigmatic European alternative to the American way of life.”42 For all these reasons, outside of the intellectual class the Soviet Union was slower to attract serious imitators in the 1930s. Most political leaders sought to reform capitalism in the fascist mold, not to destroy it in the Soviet one. “The history of the past seven years has made it perfectly clear that Communism has no chance in western Europe,” wrote Orwell in 1941. “The appeal of Fascism is enormously greater. In one country after another the Communists have been rooted out by their more up-­to-­date enemies, the Nazis.”43 Between 1928 and 1930, even as the communist vote in Germany increased by over 40 percent, the Nazi vote increased by over 1,000 percent.44 Culturally, “the surface of German national life had a color and enthusiasm absent from Russian life.” Geopolitically, “the shift in the international position of Germany was more obvious than the rise of Russian national power.”45 As Judt notes, [A] very significant number of visitors from the democracies traveled to Nazi Germany and found no fault with it. Indeed, they were rather charmed by its successes. To be sure, there were deluded Western travelers to the Soviet Union too. But Nazi Germany did not have to put on a show. It was what it was, and many people quite liked it. The Soviet Union, by contrast, was largely unknown and decidedly not how it described itself.46 The mass appeal of communism was blunted by its failure to transform theory into practice outside of the USSR. “Neither communism nor liberal democracy had had anything like the reproductive and expansionary success of fascism,” argues Frieden.47 An ideology founded upon iron laws of history necessarily lent itself to dogmatism. As the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch pointed out, the communists consistently failed to understand the needs of 41. Nove 1969:207. 42. De Grazia 2005:124. 43. Orwell 1941:92. 44. Howe 1953:362–63. 45. Sontag 1970:268. 46. Judt 2012:191, 47. Frieden 2006:215.

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the peasantry by grouping them into the same economic class as the urban industrial proletariat. While their socioeconomic conditions may have been similar, the peasants retained a preindustrial mindset undisturbed by proletarian consciousness. Their grievances thus found expression in “a romantic, anti-­ modern longing for the past,” writes Müller, and this longing was channeled much more effectively by fascist nostalgia for a mythical past than by Marxist discourses about the “objective interests” of the underclass.48 This ideological clumsiness was compounded by repeated self-­sabotage through their “often inappropriate and vacillating approaches to issues of territorial revisionism, to the agrarian question, and to the peasantry as a class.”49 In interwar Eastern Europe, therefore, communist parties remained politically anemic. They suffered from their links with the USSR—a historic foe, a credible military threat, and an atheist sanctuary (the latter an especially big obstacle for the region’s Catholics). Most European political leaders and property-­holding elites felt more threatened by the far left than by the far right, and so tended to persecute communist parties with more zeal. “They were ruthless towards the extreme left,” argues Vago, and were thus “more inclined to overlook the extreme right.”50 As a result, communist parties across the region were banned everywhere except in Czechoslovakia, and unable to attract mass support beyond members of the peasantry and the working class. Even among these groups, support varied considerably, with peasants in Romania, for instance, lending their support to the extreme right. In Italy, communists had become so marginalized by the early 1930s that Mussolini felt charitable enough to release their former leaders from jail to mark the tenth anniversary of his March on Rome.51 These trends were part of a general rightward shift in political discourse. By the 1930s, argues Mazower, the left “had been vanquished or forced onto the defensive nearly everywhere west of the Soviet Union, and all the key political debates were taking place on the Right.”52 Even in relatively stable interwar England, the Depression “destroyed the political Left,” according to Judt; conservatives governed from 1931 to 1945, and during much of this time the left “was not just out of office but utterly separated from the exercise of power.”53 Across Europe, the fear of communism mobilized people more than its appeal, just as fears of falling dominos drove foreign-­policy decision-­making during the Cold War more than any actual falling dominoes. This fear clarified 48. Müller 2011:77. 49. Rothschild 1974:18–19. 50. Vago 1975:22. 51. Hobsbawm 1994:105. 52. Mazower 1998:4. 53. Judt 2012:50.

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and intensified the appeal of fascism. The prospect of a Bolshevik revolution “tended to drive all of Europe’s relatively privileged or well-­to-­do groups and elements into one antirevolutionary coalition,” argues Halperin. As a result, fear of communism “precipitated the growth of fascist parties and movements throughout Europe.”54 In France, argues Isaac Deutscher, the apparent strength of Communism “struck fear into the hearts of the middle classes, stirring latent sympathy for fascism and fanning distrust of Russia.”55 In many states, there was implicit agreement among all but the diehard left that “if a choice must be made, Nazi rule would be less horrible than Soviet rule”—a view shared not only by the middle and upper classes but even by the workers and peasants, who “found little to envy in the convulsive changes going on in Russia.”56 This sentiment extended to the democracies: “Faced with the alternatives of fascism and bolshevism British conservative statesmen always regarded fascism as the lesser of the two evils,” argues Ingram. “Fascism might threaten the empire, but it was a system which at least retained some of the familiar social landmarks.”57 Until 1945, communism’s most receptive audiences in the West were intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw or Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Yet their sympathy could not be converted into institutional reform. In the 1930s, communism was capable of winning minds but not elections, let alone revolutions.58 Until the end of the war, it created communist admirers but never communist states. As a result, during the 1930s, it was not the red flag but “the deepening shadow of German power which lay on central and southeastern Europe.”59 What about Italy? Mussolini seized power in 1922, although his regime was not consolidated until several years later and opposition newspapers continued until 1925. But as with the Russian Revolution of 1917, a new ideology alone could not inspire a fascist wave without an accompanying transition of hegemonic power. Although a number of imitators sprung up in Mussolini’s wake, few of these movements achieved any measure of popularity until after 1933. “Without the triumph of Hitler in Germany in early 1933, fascism would not have become a general movement,” argues Hobsbawm. “In fact, all the fascist movements outside Italy that amounted to anything were founded after his 54. Halperin 2004:192. As Tocqueville (1862:192) had observed: “The insane fear of socialism throws the bourgeois headlong into the arms of despotism.” 55. Deutscher 1949:423. 56. Sontag 1970: 269–70. 57. Ingram 1946:70. 58. Raymond Aron (1954:230–31) argued that during the interwar period, “no Communist Party anywhere in Europe had the slightest chance of overthrowing the state.” 59. Sontag 1971: 269–70.

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arrival in power.”60 Even movements personally cultivated by Mussolini, like the Croatian Ustashi, did not gain many followers or even develop a radical fascist ideology until the 1930s, when they began to look to Germany for patronage and inspiration. In France, the right was not radicalized until 1933, transforming from nationalist Poincare loyalists to Nazi followers seeking direct linkages with Germany.61 Likewise in Romania, Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael did not develop any significant following until the mid-­ 1930s. For several years after its founding in 1927 it remained “a tiny sect,” notes Payne, which was “a common experience for most fascist movements in the 1920s.”62 But 1933 brought increasing Nazi influence and popular support, and by mid-­decade the Legion was one of the largest fascist movements in Europe. Likewise in Hungary, fascist mobilization efforts failed during the 1920s but succeeded in the next decade. Until the early 1930s, argues Vago, the country’s extreme right was “still in its infancy, without mass support.”63 Gyula Gömbös, Hungary’s most prominent representative of the radical right, was forced to moderate his views to such an extent that Miklos Horthy, the country’s regent for most of the interwar period, comfortably co-­opted him as the defense minister in 1929. But as elsewhere, Hitler’s ascent to power rejuvenated the movement; Gömbös began to move both the party and the state toward fascism, and the country as a whole drifted into the German orbit.64 Within a month of Hitler’s election, Gömbös rushed to Berlin “to assure the Nazi Fuhrer of Hungary’s loyalty and traditional friendship toward Germany.”65 Economic agreements tying the country closer to Germany soon followed; in 1935 Gömbös told Göring that Hungary would be transformed into a nationalist-­socialist state within three years.66 (His plans were disrupted by his sudden death in 1936, whereupon the focus of Nazi activity shifted away from the state and toward the Arrow Cross.) The timing of the fascist wave highlights the immense importance of hegemonic power in shaping institutional waves. While fascist movements “of consequence” arose in the 1920s in Italy, Spain, and the Balkans, notes Harrington, it was the rise of Nazism after 1933 that “suggested the existence of the new, totalitarian mass.”67 In that year quantity turned into quality, and as 60. Hobsbawm 1994:116. Outside of Italy, notes Paxton (2004:91), the “early fascist movements, offspring of crises, shrank into insignificance as normal life returned in the 1920s.” 61. Ingram 1946:98, 99. 62. Payne 1995:282. 63. Vago 1975:10. 64. Argentieri 2007:216. 65. Borsody 1980:51. 66. Payne 1995:270. 67. Harrington 1965:220. “Throughout the 1920s dictatorships like that of Mussolini were

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German power grew its example eclipsed all others. By 1938, argues Kohn, the German variety of fascism “became so predominant that it impressed its peculiar character upon all other (and even upon the older) forms of fascism.”68 Noting the weakness of philofascist groups in the 1920s, Payne concludes that “the major diffusion of fascist movements throughout Europe occurred during the following decade, in the aftermath of Hitler’s triumph.”69 As Hobsbawm concludes, “without Hitler’s triumph in Germany, the idea of fascism as a universal movement . . . would not have developed.”70 This is not to dismiss the allure of Mussolini’s “gentler” brand of fascism, which proved especially palatable to democratic imitators.71 Yet Italy lacked a crucial ingredient: it did not match its ideological innovation with a hegemonic ascent, or even with material success. In fact, just the opposite: in the 1920s, as other countries enjoyed a period of relative stability, “the condition of the Italian masses under Fascism went from bad to worse,” notes Howe. The country never balanced its budget after 1925, averaging an annual deficit of a quarter billion dollars. The number of bankruptcies rose steadily from less than 4,000 in 1922 to over 8,500 in 1926 and more than 11,000 in 1929. Between 1926 and 1928, unemployment nearly tripled. Meanwhile, living standards never rose above prewar levels, and in 1930 the League of Nations reported the country’s real wages as among Europe’s lowest.72 Absent the compelling magnetism of material accomplishment, the ideological reach of Italian fascism was bound to remain limited. Because the fascist wave often proceeded by piecemeal borrowing of fascist institutions, it is important to define what constituted a fascist regime. More than any other ideology of the twentieth century, it eludes a concise definition. Payne calls it “the vaguest of the major political terms” while Furet describes it as “a fuzzy, autodidactic amalgam.”73 Although fascism at its peak drew many intellectuals into its orbit, it lacked the theoretical and intellectual tradition of its democratic and communist rivals.74 In the decades since the war, still very much the exception and confined to the periphery” (Tooze 2014:515). “The starting dates of the fascist organizations clearly show that the early thirties were the most likely time for fascism to gain a foothold” (Merkl in Larsen, Hagtvet, and Myklebust 1980:755). 68. Kohn 1949:154–55. This dominance was manifested, for example, by the grudging adoption of official racism in Italy and Japan in the late 1930s. 69. Payne 1995:290. 70. Hobsbawm 1994:116, original emphasis. 71. The historian John Diggins (1966a:487) has argued, for example, that Mussolini’s regime “drew more admiration from democratic America than from any other Western nation.” 72. Howe 1953:303. 73. Payne 1995:3; Furet 1999:3. 74. Fascism did have a truncated canon in the anti-­capitalist and anti-­Enlightenment writings of Simmel and Heidegger. Intellectuals such as Bruno Freyer, who rejected racism and anti-­

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the term itself has acquired a vapid plasticity, less an ideology than an easy insult. Yet it had always been a vague philosophy, even to its foremost practitioners. Such ambiguity was partly self-­imposed, since fascism rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It “glorified will, intuition, and sentiment,” writes Müller. “One could feel it, but one couldn’t define it.”75 Like communism, it possessed elements of the numinous—a political religion in which salvation arrived through mass political mobilization. Like communism, it rejected both the autonomy of the economic sphere and the rights of the individual, subordinating both to the general political will. But unlike its sworn nemesis, fascism saw the basic divisions of human communities shaped by national boundaries rather than by socioeconomic classes. Most importantly for its long-­term influence on the modern state, it never went so far as to abandon the idea of private property. Indeed, it held up the protection of private property as a defense against both communism and large-­scale finance capitalism, and found many supporters among small landowners. As fascism saw it, communal ownership and collectivization of the land presented a threat from the left, while monopolies and large landowners threatened the small-­property owners from the right.76 Capitalism would be tamed, not destroyed; capitalists would be allowed social status and a measure of profits, so long as they continued to abide by the rules set by the political leadership and submitted themselves to the greater national good. Unlike the prewar conservatives who fetishized tradition, fascists sought a break from the old ways of rule. Masses would be mobilized rather than suppressed. The sentiments that led to mass uprisings in nineteenth-­century Europe would now be vented into new expressions of civic patriotism through spectacular rallies. In this the fascists combined modern mass politics with a reactionary mindset. They promoted traditional values through the untraditional mobilization (and thereby co-­option) of popular discontent. They rejected a vulgar and decadent modernity even as they sought to forge their own version of a hypermodern state. Fascism was therefore both a refutation of the past and the embrace of a pastoral, idealized simulacrum of that past. While communism too sought a radical break from history, fascism promised a return to a mythical prelapsarian age, free of the vices of modern decadence. Its practitioners were revolutionary conservatives, elitist populists, nihilistic utopians, and pastoral industrializers—and in such contradictions resided fascism’s paradoxical, amorphous appeal. Semitism, nevertheless found in Nazism “an escape from what they regarded as the moral dead end of capitalism.” (Muller 2002:276.) 75. Müller 2011:92. 76. Brunstein and Berntson 1999:174.

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While lacking a doctrinal body of thought, fascism therefore found a complicated genealogy in the dislocations of modernity. It was covetous of an imagined past and reverential of the violence used to restore it. It was above all a negation of the world in which it resided—Hitler was, in the words of lapsed Nazi writer Hermann Rauschning, “a prophet of nihilism”—that also sought to rebuild the world anew.77 It was a nationalist, deeply exclusionary creed that nevertheless found countless imitators in countries and colonies around the world.78 It managed to combine a broad populism with a belief in the power of a select oligarchy, and fused a premodern cult of the leader with the hyper-­modern use of mass media to perpetuate that cult. To highlight its paradoxical motives is not to dismiss fascism as a meaningless pastiche of half-­formed hatreds. To do so would reduce it to a form of malevolent sophistry, “a work of propaganda” without “a serious programme,” in the words of A.J.P. Taylor.79 Such contradictions were also present in fascism’s rivals: the United States preached the virtues of democracy while denying it to its minorities; the Soviet Union trumpeted an egalitarian utopia while cultivating a rarefied oligarchic class. As the history of ideas repeatedly shows, the strength of ideologies derives not from their intellectual clarity but from their transhistorical certitude. Fascism was a response to the failures of liberal capitalist democracy, which survived in part by borrowing from fascism the solutions to those failures. To dismiss it as a moral aberration or an institutional detour ignores the fact that fascism comprised a critical stage in the development of the modern state. As Michael Mann argues, fascism must be taken seriously—not only because of the influence it exercised in the interwar years but also because of the residue of that influence inside the modern constitutional state.80 Liberal observers of the 1930s repeatedly called for a synthesis of democracy with fascist principles, like centralization of executive power and greater state control over the capitalist economy. “[S]ome of the measures adopted by the totalitarian regimes are excellent, and we would do well to imitate them,” wrote Raymond Aron in 1944.81 And as Australian economist H. W. Arndt wrote in the same year, the Nazis had “developed a number of economic techniques—in the sphere of Government finance, planned State intervention, exchange control and the manipulation of foreign trade—which mutatis mutandis may well be 77. Quoted in Furet 1999:187. 78. In 1928 Mussolini famously declared that fascism was “not for export” before embarking, a few years later, on an ambitious program to do exactly that. By 1934 he was openly promoting the ideology of “universal fascism.” 79. Taylor 1976. 80. Mann 2004. 81. Aron 1944:174.

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applicable in a worthier cause.”82 These observers constantly stressed that such syncretic melding was necessary not to replace democracy but to save it.  Fascists offered plausible, enticing, and (for a time) successful solutions to concrete policy problems like unemployment, but also to the more abstract yearnings for an organic sense of national identity. Despite its seemingly insular nationalism, fascism was able to transcend borders because it was “not a national attitude in the sense that it is confined to certain nations,” argued Kohn, but “a general attitude which can be found everywhere” that was driven by “a feeling of disillusionment and cynicism in the postwar generation after 1914.”83 This general dread of modernity helps to explain the paradoxically transnational appeal of a rabidly nation-­bound ideology. “Fascism is no longer an isolated incident in the individual history of a few countries,” wrote an observer in 1937. “It has developed into a universal movement.”84 Fascism constituted a broad but nevertheless distinct family of authoritarian institutions bound by a shared philosophy of the state’s relation to the economy and the individual. Common candidates for inclusion in the family include Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Turkey, although debates can be had about nearly all of the above. In addition, Falangist movements saw a growth in power across in Latin America, and philofascist movements expanded their influence in the Middle East. Yet during the 1930s, certain leaders called themselves fascists without embracing any of its institutional features, while others rejected the label even as they assiduously cultivated fascist institutions. There were important differences even within the two archetypal states, Italy and Germany. The German authoritarians were, strictly speaking, Nazis rather than fascists. Whereas for Italian fascism economy and society existed to serve the state, for Nazis the state was merely the paramount instrument through which culture, politics, and economics served to exalt the Aryan race. While this distinction was more than cosmetic, its practical consequence in both cases was the total subjugation of the individual to the state apparatus. In this chapter I use the term “fascism” to refer to both variants, following Payne’s advice to treat the word as “as a 82. Arndt 1944:152. 83. Kohn 1949:152. 84. Loewenstein 1937:417. According to Michael Oakeshott (1939:xxii), fascism “claims a universal character; it has a message for the world as well as for Germany.” As one of the leaders of the British Union of Fascists wrote in 1934: “Fascism as the expression of the European will-­ to-­renewal is essentially a Pan-­European movement” (Drennan 1934:219). Like communism and democracy, fascism “offered a coherent, all encompassing doctrine, a solution to the postwar European crisis. In this respects its message was universal, and the fascist experiment could be successfully exported to other countries” (de Caprariis 2000:151). And Kocka (1988:13) notes that “National Socialism was part of a European phenomenon, an aspect of a more general challenge to liberal democracy in the inter-­war period.”

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general type or generic phenomenon for heuristic and analytic purposes.”85 Such a heuristic is useful insofar as it captures common regime traits, grouped by an overarching and distinct (if labile) philosophy. The interwar years defined “a certain family relationship between a number of political movements which played a leading part in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s,” argues Seton-­ Watson, “and which historians ought to see in their relations to each other.”86 Even at the peak of German power in 1941, fascism was not a united phenomenon. Neither was democracy in its social versus liberal variants, nor communism in its Maoist, Titoist, or Soviet iterations. We do not consider the notion of capitalism incoherent because there exist different varieties of capitalism. There were many forms of fascism too—clerical fascism in Austria and Romania, the monarcho-­fascism of late 1930s Greece, the top-­down fascism of Japan, racial fascism in Germany, corporatist fascism in Italy, and so forth. But each shared crucial commonalities within the family, and after 1933 Germany became the successful model for all these varieties. Fascist ideas were filtered through local conditions and circumstances, and leaders always looked to reshape the state within their own pre-­existing conditions. Possessing vessels of different shape, they sought to fill them with a similar substance.87 Marxists reduced fascism to a putrescent form of capitalism. However, this was a fundamental misunderstanding of both fascist goals and the impact their reforms would have upon the modern state. Fascism displayed its greatest influence in the way it reorganized relations between the society and the economy, and this was the distinctive trait that would later be adopted and absorbed by liberal democracy—transforming it, in the process, into the social democracy of today. A major difference between fascist or quasi-­fascist regimes and countries like France, Sweden, or the United States was that the latter chose to retain civil liberties and co-­opt the labor movement rather than destroy both. But the fundamental transformation of the economy’s relationship with the state nonetheless borrowed heavily from fascist innovations—namely, the establishment of a mixed economy in which the state would regulate economic activity in order to avoid the excesses of capitalism. “Despite the horror of the Nazi period, or rather because of it, the parallels between the German experience and those of other countries are important,” writes Peter Gourevitch.88 As Schivelbusch notes, the policy discussions in the world’s remaining 85. Payne 1995:4. 86. Seton-­Watson 1979:357. 87. “We need a generic term for what is a general phenomenon, indeed the most important political novelty of the twentieth century,” argues Paxton (2004:21). “The wide diversity among fascisms that we have already noted is no reason to abandon the term.” Likewise, according to Roger Eatwell (1996:xvii, 14), fascism is a “coherent body of thought” that “preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-­national radical Third Way.” 88. Gourevitch 1986:140.

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democracies “show how willing many people within the liberal camp were to try to save the situation by jettisoning liberal ballast. Some suggested reintroducing state-­directed economies, like those during World War I; others proposed imitating various Fascist models.”89 Many traditional right-­wing dictatorships lacked important components of fascism. Horthy and Salazar did not seek to rule through personal charisma or permanent mass mobilization. Instead of fascist quasi-­paganism of the sort promoted by Alfred Rosenberg, autocrats often emphasized traditional Christianity—like Austria’s Chancellor Dollfuss, who led paramilitary marches behind a giant crucifix.90 No state, in short, tried to imitate Nazism wholesale, though a number sought to adopt some of its key institutional features, and many others expressed sincere admiration for what Germany had managed to accomplish. This imitation was often partial but widespread, and its influence proved both far-­reaching and long-­lasting. The Hegemonic Transition after 1929 Since the crisis began in the United States, the Great Depression was instantly associated with the faults of the American system. Between 1929 and 1933 American income fell by half, national product fell by a third, and unemployment surged from 1.5 million to 12.8 million.91 Industrial production also suffered—by 1938 the country’s share of global manufacturing had dropped to its lowest levels since 1910. For the first time in the nation’s history, more people were leaving the United States than entering it.92 France and Britain, the other erstwhile members of the postwar Big Three, did not fare much better. After staving off disruption for several years, the French economy began to crumble steadily after 1933. Over the rest of the decade France vacillated between eleven premiers and seventeen cabinets.93 Britain saw a decade of stagnation and increasing colonial unrest; its “ailing economy was shaken to its roots by the world-­wide slump after 1929,” argues Kennedy.94 In the 1930s Britain entered what Richard Overy calls its Morbid Age—a period of gloom and unease about its global leadership and the competence of its economic system.95 For both countries, material decline was exacerbated by domestic politics that favored disarmament. In the mid-­1930s 89. Schivelbusch 2006:11–12. 90. Müller 2011:93. 91. Ferguson 2006:192; Fearon 1993:114–15. 92. Tzouliadis 2008. 93. Hamby 2004:377. 94. Kennedy 1987:316. 95. Overy 2009.

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both states were cutting military expenditures even as Germany pursued a massive program of rearmament. Germany was not exempt from the initial downturn. Like most of Europe, it was mired in unemployment and discontent; between 1929 and 1933, industrial production declined by nearly a half, while national income fell by a third. In 1933, with the country on the verge of economic collapse, more than six million Germans—over a third of the labor force—were unemployed.96 Yet its decline in the late 1920s made Germany’s rise after 1933 seem all the more spectacular. Every indicator that mattered seemed to be moving in the right direction. Unemployment plummeted from six million when Hitler took power in January 1933 to four million only a year later, and to under two million by 1937. By 1938 Germany was producing more steel than Britain, France, and Italy combined.97 And all this growth had been accomplished without inflation. Just as America’s decline was associated with the failure of democratic capitalism, Germany’s rise was closely associated by contemporary observers with Nazi policies and institutional reforms, and particularly with the leaders’ eagerness to abandon the economic and political orthodoxies associated with liberal democracy. Until late in the decade, argues Mann, the Nazis had “more of a positive impact on the economy than almost any other contemporary government.”98 Facing a balance-­of-­payments crisis in 1934, the Nazi government decisively rejected the conventional approach of devaluation and instead embarked on a program of economic nationalism focused on price and import controls. As the academic journal Wirtschaftsdienst argued at the time, the choice “marked a fundamental divide between the liberal economic policies of countries such as Britain and a newly emerging system of National Socialist economic management.”99 The novelty of these programs consisted in redefining the government’s relationship with the economy. In stark contrast with the laissez-­faire approach, the market would be made subservient to political demands. The Nazis possessed “an ideological conviction that economic policies should be integrated with an overall concept of the role of the state,” argues Garside.100 A major element of this economic platform was the elimination of unemployment through an intensive program of job creation. Unemployment was the most visible manifestation of the Depression—the London Times described it as “the most widespread, the most insidious, and the most corroding malady 96. Berman 2006:141; Sontag 1970:261. 97. Tooze 2006:48; Hybel 2001:93; Hamby 2004:376. 98. Mann 2004:182, original emphasis. 99. Quoted in Tooze 2006:83. 100. Garside 1993:20.

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of our generation.”101 For that reason, the Nazis’ success in eliminating it proved crucial to their global appeal, offering them “a very important weapon in their propaganda for a promised new order.”102 The destruction of labor unions was an important step in this process. Job security came at the expense of choice. Collective bargaining ended in 1933, and even switching jobs became difficult by the end of the decade. Employers were ordered to cut wages and received subsidies for new hires. The destruction of labor eliminated the threat of inflationary wage increases, and helped stimulate recovery by sending a strong signal to businessmen that their problems were over. As Frieden writes: “no more strike waves; no more Bolshevik threat; no more political instability.” The result was an increase in business investment as capitalists “brought money out of mattresses and foreign bank accounts and sank it into a now-­hospitable business climate.”103 Between 1933 and 1936, gross corporate earnings steadily increased from 6.3 million to 11.3 million Reichmarks; over the same period, corporate profits steadily increased from 360 million to 590 million Reichmarks.104 An often forgotten element of National Socialist reforms is that they were truly socialist. Hitler’s policies “benefited around 95 percent of all Germans,” argues the German historian Götz Aly, and many of them saw Nazism not “as a system of tyranny and terror but rather as a regime of social warmth, a sort of ‘warm and fuzzy’ dictatorship,” complete with social reforms and the “real possibility for social advancement.”105 These reforms included free higher education, help for families and children, pensions, health insurance, and a general expansion of the welfare state. In addition to dealing with unemployment, the regime provided extensive funding for apprenticeships and job training programs. As a result, notes Tooze, for many working-­class families Nazi rule was “a period of real social mobility” within the blue-­collar hierarchy.106 The Cambridge economist W. C. Guillebaud concluded in 1939 that “it is incontrovertible that the standard of living” for both the employed and the unemployed “has risen very materially since 1932,” adding that National Socialism “has worked hard to enhance the self-­esteem of the worker.”107 Despite the emphasis on military production over consumer goods, the 1930s also saw the state-­sponsored proliferation of household durables, like cars (from under half a million in 1932 to 1.2 million in 1938) and radios, even though ownership levels still remained far below those of England or the 101. Quoted in Arndt 1944:250. 102. Basch 1941:167. 103. Frieden 2006:203, 212. 104. Guillebaud 1939:184. 105. Quoted in Berman 2006:147. 106. Tooze 2006:144. 107. Guillebaud 1939:211, 202.

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United States.108 Hitler had “transformed a chaotic society into an orderly one,” argues Hamby. “Most of all, he had given Germans a sense of collective pride.”109 The political correspondent William Shirer, posted to Berlin in the summer of 1934, noted that Germans did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.110 The end result was the emergence of a command economy—government controls over prices, wages, jobs, foreign trade, and the money market. Government spending rose from 18 percent to 28 percent of national income between 1928 and 1938.111 In a liberal democracy, such aggressive stimulus policies would not have been possible without threatening serious inflation. But as Germany’s finance minister proclaimed, “National Socialism introduced in Germany a state-­regulated economy which made it possible to prevent price and wage increases.”112 Though sometimes denounced as draconian, these measures were successful in restoring the economy without the threat of an inflationary bubble. The “stabilization of wages and prices must be regarded as a very remarkable achievement,” wrote Guillebaud in 1939. “It is certainly unique in economic history down to the present time.”113 By the middle of the decade, after an initial burst of repression at home and aggression abroad, the Nazi regime appeared to be settling into relative “respectability,” argues Tooze: “In its fifth year, Hitler’s regime could present itself as the model dictatorship. Unemployment had fallen to negligible levels. The economy was booming. Life for millions of German households was returning to something like normal.”114 The Nazi recovery was far from the unqualified miracle that many contemporaries perceived it to be. Subsequent generations of economic historians have engaged in intense debates about its extent and causes, questioning whether the economic miracle was an illusory artifact of fascist propaganda, and whether a similar recovery would have taken place under any regime. And in fact the real success of Schacht’s New Plan should not be overestimated. As Tooze argues, for millions of Germans the economic miracle was 108. Tooze 2006:148–50. 109. Hamby 2004:212. 110. Shirer 1960:231. 111. Garside 1993:21. 112. Quoted in Frieden 2006:203. 113. Guillebaud 1939:218. 114. Tooze 2006:204.

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“a highly ambiguous experience.”115 Its primary purpose, especially after 1935, was military rearmament rather than the welfare of ordinary Germans. The rapid decline in unemployment, moreover, was driven in part by statistical duplicity: women were excluded from labor statistics, as were Jews, stripped of citizenship in 1935. Conscription was introduced in the same year, taking hundreds of thousands of young men off the unemployment rolls. Even at their peak, work-­creation programs accounted for only a third of the reduction in unemployment. “The simplistic cliché, which sees the Germans as having been won over to Hitler’s regime by the triumphs of work creation,” Tooze concludes, “is simply not borne out by the evidence.”116 But regardless of domestic sentiments, foreign audiences saw only improving trends trumpeted by Nazi propaganda. To outsiders, Germany’s emphasis on rearmament was not a liability but a signal of the regime’s ability to raise living standards while simultaneously ensuring the country’s security. In the space of only six years it had gone from a small army and no air force to “the strongest military and air power in Europe,” writes Haffner, an achievement that “produced amazement and admiration” across Europe even as it increased anxiety among its leaders.117 Whatever the empirical reality of the recovery, the Nazi narrative found resonance among contemporary observers. The ending of unemployment “seemed to be [a] major Nazi achievement,” notes Mann, and it was this perception that mattered most for spurring foreign imitation.118 By mid-­decade “the success of the First Four-­Year Plan was no longer in doubt,” wrote Guillebaud in 1939. “Recovery was no longer on paper; it was there for everybody to see.”119 Moreover, the elimination of unemployment was not just a bookkeeping trick or a byproduct of propaganda. “The scale of the Nazi economic achievement should not be underestimated,” writes Ferguson; it was “real and impressive.”120 Few observers cared whether the jobs were productive or could be linked directly to Nazi policies—what mattered was that they were created in the first place. The country’s labor service was successfully promoted “as a true symbol of National Socialism,” bolstering the regime’s prestige abroad.121 Goebbels had made sure that the drastic decline in unemployment would produce “astonishment and admiration throughout the Reich and far beyond Germany’s borders,” as a German newspaper put it.122 As Tooze concedes, 115. Tooze 2006:33. 116. Tooze 2006:62, 65, 96. 117. Haffner 1978:30. 118. Mann 2004:182, original emphasis. 119. Guillebaud 1939:101. 120. Ferguson 2006:245. 121. Gotz and Patel 2006:57, 59. 122. Quoted in Silverman 1993:128–29.

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“what is unarguable is that the recovery as it actually occurred bore the clear imprint of Hitler’s government.”123 It gave a strong impression “that a real miracle was being accomplished,” argues Haffner, “and that the man who accomplished it, Hitler, was a miracle worker.”124 “The Best of All Possible Worlds”: Interwar Emulation of Fascism Germany’s unexpected renaissance sharply set the country apart from the stagnating democracies. In his 1937 book The Third Reich, Franco-­German intellectual Henri Lichtenberger described the Nazi regime as “animated by a powerful dynamism, in possession of a military establishment of formidable efficiency,” and headed by a “leader who disposes of an immense popularity.”125 Even would-­be liberals were persuaded by the seemingly miraculous German recovery. “In my view what China needs is an able and idealistic dictator,” wrote a Chinese political scientist in 1934: There are among us some people, including myself, who have undergone long periods of liberal education. These people naturally find undemocratic practices extremely distasteful. But if we want to make China into a strong modern nation, I fear there is no alternative except to throw aside our democratic conviction.126 Likewise, the Japanese theorist of fascism Nakano Seigo argued that democracy had “lost its spirit and decayed into a mechanism which insists only on numerical superiority without considering the essence of human beings,” and asserted that the Italian and German models offered “a form of more democratic government going beyond democracy.”127 As a result, the statist features of the Nazi economy became increasingly attractive to outside observers. It “offered the best of all possible worlds,” argues Mosse: “[O]rder and hierarchy would be maintained, private property would not be expropriated, but social justice would be done nevertheless.”128 Fascism, according to Berman, “charged onto the stage, offering a way out of the downward spiral, a new vision of society in which states put markets in their place and fought the atomization, dislocation, and discord that liberalism, capitalism, and modernity had generated.”129 123. Tooze 2006:65. 124. Haffner 1978:27. 125. Quoted in Pollock 1939:121. 126. Quoted in Kurzman 2008:253. 127. Seigo 1995:239. 128. Mosse 1964:21. 129. Berman 2006:5.

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This “new vision of society” was rooted not only in material recovery— although this formed the prerequisite basis of its appeal—but also in its spiritual promise. Orwell called Nazism “one of the most appealing demagogic inventions of the twentieth century.”130 It enticed the masses by supplanting the populist appeal of democracy with the promises of a purer body politic— united in national spirit, purged of plutocratic corruption, and incarnated through colossal public spectacles. As the Italian fascist Giovanni Gentile wrote, the fascist state “is a people’s state, and, as such, the democratic state par excellence.”131 Fascism promised a version of fairness more substantive than the sterile impartiality of the liberal rule of law—whose majestic equality, in Anatole France’s sardonic phrase, forbids the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges and begging for bread. For all its high-­minded promises of intellectual freedom, democracy had regressed into “the freedom to starve,” wrote Rosie Waldeck, a Jewish-­German countess turned Newsweek correspondent. One in ten Europeans, she estimated, actually cared for individual freedom; the rest were “partly unaware of the real nature of Hitler’s menacing shadow, partly indifferent to it, and partly ready to take a chance on the Fuhrer.”132 At a time of such widespread disillusionment, fascism blandished the promise of an undiluted political community comprised of a people “capable of mastering a common fate.”133 This sense of Volksgemeinschaft embodied a spiritual purpose that no written constitution could hope to supersede. Despite its rejection of liberal ideals and the subjugation of the personal into the collective, fascism managed to acquire the tenor of an emancipatory doctrine. This element of fascist appeal has been clouded by history, by the dead of Dachau and the lamentations of Martin Niemöller. But for many in the 1930s, fascism became the transcendental democracy of its age, and in that sense the interwar years were not simply a struggle between democracy and its rivals but a dispute about the meaning of democracy itself. “Their outlook may be nostalgic, and it is certainly elitist,” argued Seton-­Watson, “but as a political force they are more democratic than oligarchic.”134 Their promises excited “the deracinated masses, who felt alienated from the formal institutional structures of modern democracies,” argues Avineri. “Far from being agents of the conservative, bourgeois order, fascism and Nazism were revolutionary and supremely modern movements. Much of their appeal lay in their claim to be more democratic than the democracies.”135 130. Quoted in Conquest 1999:83. 131. Gentile 1928:302. 132. Waldeck 1942:14–15. 133. Müller 2011:4. 134. Seton-­Watson 1979:357–8. 135. Avineri 2012:70.

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Compounding the problem, postwar European liberals were slow in articulating their own response to the age of mass politics. Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930, exemplified this hostility. For the Spanish philosopher, the vulgar “mass man” was the opposite of the nineteenth-­ century liberal—the well-­informed burgher guided by prudence and restraint. He attacked “hyper-­democracy” and “the accession of the masses to complete social power”: “Since the masses, by definition, neither can nor should direct their own existence, let lone that of society as a whole, this new development means that we are now undergoing the most profound crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, or cultures.136 Through such pronouncements “liberalism seemed to reveal itself as a quasi-­aristocratic approach to politics,” argues Müller, “one that simply could not cope with mass democracy.”137 It struggled with the growing mobilization of labor and the peasantry, and the concomitant rise of labor movements and agrarian parties. Its emphasis on individualism and factional interests, according to Mazower, “contributed to its own downfall by failing to encourage a civic consciousness or a sense of community.”138 There was a litany of other complaints. Democracy was slow and indecisive, subject to endless deliberation and delay, “sluggish, materialistic, unexciting and incapable of arousing the sympathy of the masses.”139 Too much of it “seemed piecemeal, hasty, rushed,” writes Runciman. “Decisions would be made and then unmade, solutions proposed and then abandoned, as governments came and went. . . . Too slow to act, too quick to change its mind: this was the double trouble with democracy.”140 “Today, it is hard to imagine the hatred aroused by parliamentary deputies at the time,” writes Furet. “The deputy was hated as the essence of all the lies of bourgeois politics. He symbolized oligarchy posing as democracy, domination posing as law, corruption lurking beneath the affirmation of republican virtue.”141 These sentiments extended to intellectuals as well: the notion of Parliament as “a fraud and a folly, a slow-­footed relic of a dying age, was a standard faith of intellectuals on left and right alike,” argues Gopnik.142 The problem was not only corrupt parliamentarians but also the fickle, credulous voters to whom they pandered. In 1933 H. G. Wells published The Shape of Things to Come. A novel told from the perspective of the year 2106, it 136. Ortega y Gasset 1930:3. 137. Müller 2011:20. 138. Mazower 1998:22. 139. Mazower 1998:25. 140. Runciman 2013:80, 81. 141. Furet 1999:170. 142. Gopnik 2010:81.

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portrayed democracy as a relic of the past, an obsolete pseudo-­religion remembered for worshipping that poor invertebrate mass deity of theirs, the Voter, easily roused to panic and frantic action against novel, bold or radical measures, very amenable to patriotic claptrap, very easily scared and maddened into war, and just as easily baffled to distrust and impotence by delays, side issues, and attacks on the personalities of decisive people he might otherwise have trusted.143 Democracy, wrote Wells, was a political system “altogether too slow-­witted for the urgent political and economic riddles” of the day. Fascism, on the other hand, was “not an altogether bad thing; it was a bad good thing.”144 Wells’s disillusion with democracy echoed the concerns of his fellow countrymen. The British 1930s, recalls the Economist, were “a uniquely gloomy and fearful era” that “saw the future of civilization in terms of disease, decay, and death.”145 A number of British aristocrats, argues Ferguson, “found that they genuinely sympathized with aspects of Hitler’s policy, including even its anti-­ Semitism.”146 Viscount Halifax, according to a friend’s recollection, “liked all the Nazi leaders. . . . He thinks the regime absolutely fantastic,” while the Duke of Westminster “inveighed against the Jews and . . . said that after all Hitler knew that we were his best friends.”147 In 1937, no less a nemesis than Winston Churchill wrote that Hitler’s struggle for German recovery “cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome all the authorities or resistances which barred his path.”148 As Judt notes, there was “no shortage of English aristocrats and editorial writers ready as late as 1938 to defend Hitler as a bulwark against communism or disorder.” Fascism “was youthful—thrusting, energetic, on the side of change and action and innovation. For a surprising number of its admirers, fascism in short was everything that they missed in the tired, nostalgic, gray world of Little England.”149 The notion that democracies were inferior in fighting wars—a common sentiment in the pre–World War I period—also resurfaced with renewed force. A 1934 observer argued that dictatorships “are in a better position than de143. Wells 1933:114. 144. Wells 1933:114, 124. 145. Economist 04/25/2009. 146. Ferguson 2006:338. 147. Quoted in Ferguson 2006:338. 148. Churchill 1937:228. In a cautiously sympathetic profile, he described Hitler as one who may one day be regarded as one of the “great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind” (Churchill 1937:225). 149. Judt 2012:64–65.

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mocracies to steer public opinion toward war” and “are able to act more decisively than democratic governments, which face the possibility that public opinion may revolt against the war.”150 In the run-­up to the war, top-­ranking officials in Britain and France held up the German regime “as a model of Teutonic efficiency, worthy of emulation,” according to Joseph Maiolo.151 “It is no doubt the best example in modern economic life,” wrote the anti-­Nazi journalist Antonin Basch in 1941, “of the organization of a whole national economy for several years with one primary purpose—preparedness for war.”152 In his 1937 book Ends and Means, Aldous Huxley argued that democracies could only wage war effectively by borrowing from autocracies—but would cease to be democratic in the process. Modern war, he argued, “cannot be waged or even prepared except by a highly centralized executive wielding absolute power over a docile people.” As a result, defending against fascism “entails inevitably the transformation of democracy into Fascism.”153 And as E. M. Forster argued in 1939, “we must become Fascist to win. There seems no escape from this hideous dilemma, and those who face it most honestly often go jumpy.”154 In Europe, fascist emulation was particularly pronounced in eastern and central Europe. Across the region, argues Rothschild, the “imposing domestic and diplomatic successes” of Nazi Germany “projected the impression that authoritarian dictatorship was the wave of the future.”155 It was “a powerful force” in Croatia, Hungary, and Romania, and “a considerable factor” in Poland and Slovakia.156 By 1938, a memo by the British Foreign Office noted “a general trend in the Danubian countries away from parliamentary democracy,” a process “hastened by the growing fear that Germany’s domination of the Danubian Basin is now inevitable.”157 Britain’s under-­secretary of state for foreign affairs echoed these concerns: It certainly seems that an “authoritarian” wave is beginning to surge through the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The trend is away from “democracy” which is represented as clogging and inefficient for dealing effectively with the successive shocks to which the world is subjected.158

150. Dean 1934:188. 151. Maiolo 2010:331–32. 152. Basch 1941:11. 153. Huxley 1937:36. 154. Forster 1939:40. 155. Rothschild 1974:21. 156. Seton-­Watson 1964:192. 157. Hoare 1938:250. 158. Cadogan 1938:251.

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While both Hungary’s and Romania’s radical fascists (the Arrow Cross and the Iron Guard, respectively) established total control only after German wartime occupation, these movements “penetrated and influenced” interwar governments in both countries, argues Mann, so that starting by the mid-­1930s, both regimes “were pervaded by fascist ideas and practices, blended into more conservative authoritarianism.”159 Writing from Budapest in 1936, the British diplomat Geoffrey Knox reported that Hungary’s legislators regularly contrast “the ruthless efficiency” of dictatorship with democracy’s “fog of petty squabbles.”160 Given Hungary’s poverty, wrote a British consul in 1938, it was no surprise that the country’s middle and lower classes “should be impressed . . . with the efficiency of German methods.”161 In Romania, the government attempted to co-­opt the fascist Iron Guard by forming its own parafascist youth group, though its artificiality inhibited grassroots support. Like elsewhere on the continent, the threat of revolutionary fascism led the moderate, semi-­liberal regime to move to the right, and in 1936 the government dissolved all political militias. Nevertheless, membership in the Guard continued to grow steadily, with over 200,000 members by the end of 1937, at which point, Payne notes, “German influence reached a new level.”162 In Romania’s last elections before the war, the movement won sixty-­ six parliamentary seats. As a result, King Carol dissolved the Parliament via a royal coup in February 1938. Other political parties were outlawed; the Iron Guard’s leader Corneliu Codreanu and his top officers were executed. This pushed the movement even further into the German embrace, and in the late 1930s, the organization intensified the development of closer links with Berlin through patronage and military training. Nor did the government’s victory stem its own drift toward fascism. In 1939, the Romanian foreign minister Grigore Gafencu assured Germany that his country “intended to follow lines similar to National Socialism and Fascism.”163 The pro-­Nazi government of Ion Gigurtu took office in 1940, and quickly left the League to become a formal Axis member. Outside of Europe, fascist appeal was bound to be limited, given the fanatical racism of Nazi Germany.164 Yet Germany’s anti-­colonial zeal (particularly toward the British Empire) and the promise of economic rejuvenation softened the sting of racism to onlookers in the developing world. Even those who re159. Mann 2004:238. 160. Knox 1936. 161. Gascoine 1938. 162. Payne 1995:284. 163. Quoted in Vago 1975:53. 164. Although in South Africa the Nazis’ racism found resonance among the Afrikaners who, out of “all peoples outside Europe,” argues Payne (1995:338), “may have registered the greatest degree of popular support for something approaching European-­type fascism.”

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jected Nazi ideology saw Germany as a useful ally against British colonialism. Yitzhak Shamir, the future prime minister of Israel, was a member of Zionist terrorist groups that attempted to approach the Nazi government to cooperate against the British as late as (astonishingly) 1941.165 Fascism made its greatest inroads in Latin America and the Middle East, although philofascist movements made their appearances elsewhere. In Latin America, the decline of the export-­import development model associated with the Depression opened up space for military dictatorships to replace traditional oligarchs.166 Nearly all regimes in Latin America fell in the early 1930s. As a result, the Depression “compromised liberal constitutional government as much in Latin America as in Europe.”167 In the 1920s, Latin America had fourteen semi-­democratic (though elitist) regimes and six dictatorships. By the end of the 1930s, the region had fifteen dictatorships and only five democracies. A lack of territorial ambitions, the multiethnic composition of most states, and low levels of mass mobilization dampened the spread of revolutionary fascism. Yet here as elsewhere, fascism became the default source of institutional innovation. For Latin American observers, “fascism undoubtedly looked like the success story of the decade,” argues Hobsbawm, and it was here that “European fascist influence was to be open and acknowledged.”168 Many of the new dictatorships of the 1930s were thus “favorably disposed toward Italian Fascism or Nazism,” according to Payne, “and permitted or occasionally even encouraged pro-­fascist propaganda.”169 Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru possessed either successful fascist movements (in that they managed to gain political office) or leaders who openly borrowed elements of fascist ideology as part of their political program.170 In Bolivia, the influence of Italian and German ideas “was often admitted by Bolivian leaders” and a radical coalition came to power in 1936 advocating a corporative state.171 Brazil’s Getulio Vargas, “a nationalistic dictator with semifascist leanings,” governed by balancing competing groups, the most important of which were the Integralists.172 Headed by a charismatic leader named Plinio Salgado, who cultivated a Hitler-­ 165. The plasticity of Nazi appeal was such that Irgun’s founder Abraham Stern attempted to get Nazi financing for his group through Vichy Syria ( Johnson 2001:482). 166. Smith 2005:28. 167. Roberts 1999:374–75. 168. Hobsbawm 1994:134, 133. 169. Payne 1995:340. 170. Even in Chile, where constitutional rule was preserved throughout the decade, the Nacis managed to elect 29 municipal council members in 1937, mainly in large cities. Sznajder 1993:271–72. 171. Payne 1995:343–44. 172. Frieden 2006:226.

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like appearance, its members used the Nazi salute and advocated a corporatist authoritarian state. They possessed “most of the distinguishing characteristics of European fascism,” argues Payne, and in the mid-­1930s they attracted between 200,000 and 400,000 members, more than any other proto-­fascist movement in Latin America.173 As in Europe, leaders of Latin American states emulated key institutional elements of fascism without always embracing its ideology or implementing its racial policies. Latin American leaders generally eschewed violent nationalism and sought to pacify rather than galvanize the masses. Yet the general statist trend in the region was nevertheless “highly influenced by fascism.”174 Several of the continent’s militaries copied the German model and were trained by Nazi officers.175 While Soviet planning was also a source of admiration, its influence remained limited not only because the leaders were instinctively anti-­Left but also because anti-­communism ensured the cooperation of the oligarchs.176 In the Middle East, fascist influence found adherents among those frustrated with democratic incompetence and impressed by Germany’s economic success and national unity. In Payne’s view, “European fascism was taken more seriously in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world” except Japan, South Africa, and Bolivia.177 In Iraq, the pro-­British Hashemite rulers faced a number of pro-­fascist movements who viewed Nazi Germany as the only power capable of challenging British dominance. This view was particularly strong among the Iraqi military elite, culminating in the pro-­Nazi coup of April 1941. Mein Kampf was published in several Arabic translations, and a number of “shirt movements” sprouted in the region by the end of the decade in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Fervent anti-­Semitism also bolstered Nazi appeal. British support for Jewish immigration to Palestine provided fertile ground for Nazi propaganda, and was effectively used to gain Arab supporters. Hitler’s anti-­Semitism “found an echo among the masses anxious about Jewish immigration into Palestine,” argues Aron.178 The region’s three most prominent movements were Syria’s Socialist Nationalist Party (PPS), Iraq’s al-­Futuwwa, and Young Egypt. All three stressed self-­sacrifice, martial virtues, and territorial expansion; all three praised both German Nazism and Italian Fascism. Syria’s PPS advocated totalitarianism 173. Payne 1995:345–46. 174. Mann 2004:371. 175. Hobsbawm 1994:133. 176. Roberts 1999:376. 177. Payne 1995:353. This influence proved more durable in that region than in any other; by the 1980s, he adds, Gaddafi’s Libya and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had “more characteristics of a classic fascist regime than any others in the world.” 178. Aron 1957:40.

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headed by a strong leader. The party adopted the Hitler salute and a curved swastika as their symbol, and members even sang their anthem to the tune of “Deutschland über alles.”179 Iraq’s radical youth movement al-­Futuwwa was explicitly based on the Hitler Jugend; in 1938 the movement sent a representative to the Nuremberg rally, and soon afterwards hosted the leader of the Hitler Youth. Prominent Iraqi intellectuals like Sami Shawkat praised the success of martial patriotism instilled among the German youth; Shawkat advocated violence as a means to Arab unity, and was a leading force in al-­Futuwwa. Egypt’s experience in the interwar years closely mirrored the political trajectory of European states. In the 1920s Egypt experienced a “progressive phase,” during which leading intellectuals advocated the social and political values of Western liberalism.180 The country established a constitutional parliamentary regime in 1923 and elected a prime minister the following year. As elsewhere, the Depression opened up political space for the radical right. By depressing global agricultural prices, the economic crisis severely undermined the country’s exports. The result was a rejection of parliamentary politics and a turn toward authoritarianism, religion, and nationalism. The failures of democracy forged a strong sense of disillusionment with the corruption and factionalism of parliamentary rule. As Safran argues, the Depression seemed to confirm that liberal democracy “was a decaying system”: The contrast between the misery, despair, and social discord that pervaded the Western democracies and the discipline, orderliness, and aggressive confidence that appeared to characterize the totalitarian regimes made a deep impression on Egyptians, who had seen in their own country a record of unmitigated failures of democracy.181 P. J. Vatikiotis similarly argues that fascist successes “undermined constitutional government as a model of emulation by non-­European societies,” and the “echo in Egypt was quite resounding.”182 The country saw a rapid rise of groups advocating the use of violence and the adoption of fascism to counter democratic corruption. The most prominent of these was the Muslim Brotherhood and the Young Egypt movement. The Brotherhood manifested its fascist influences in a number of ways—the cult of a leader, the rejection of democratic divisiveness in favor of national unity, the demand for autocratic politics, a quasi-­military and uniformed youth movement, and a program of official anti-­Semitism. Hasan al-­Banna, the group’s founder, praised the “militarism” and “masculinity” of the Nazis, which 179. Pipes 1992:100–1; Yaari 1987. 180. Safran 1961. 181. Safran 1961:192. 182. Vatikiotis 1991:315.

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he argued would serve as a model for the Muslim Brothers. Democracy, he argued, “has become an obstacle on the road of revival and progress.”183 Young Egypt, the country’s other prominent fascist movement, was also directly influenced by Nazi semiotics and quasi-­military organizational structure. In their political outlook, use of public violence, and fealty to a central leader, they “bore an unmistakable similarity” to European fascism and went even further than the Brotherhood in their denunciation of parliamentary rule.184 The Young Egypt activist Hamada al-­Nahil described democracy as a disease, the deadly malady of partisanship upon the body politic. The cure was dictatorship, “the medicine of salvation as represented by discipline.”185 After the tainted elections of March 1938, Young Egypt intensified their rejection of democracy. Three months later, the movement’s secretary-­general wrote an essay arguing that the system had failed to provide for the nation’s needs: “If it is dictatorship that can instill the youth with strength and the nation with a militant spirit, filling the people with electricity, vigor, and dynamism, then we will be dictators to the bone.”186 The leader of Young Egypt, Ahmad Husayn, repeatedly expressed admiration for the fascist political system. In 1938, he referred to the “miracles” of Germany and Italy in glowing terms, as examples of national recovery to be emulated, and argued that they were “the bearers of much the same values as those that Young Egypt was trying to instill in the Egyptian people—faith and action.”187 By the late 1930s, the movement’s propaganda explicitly presented itself as following the political trajectory of its German and Italian counterparts. By asserting the primacy of an all-­powerful state, fascism appealed to anti-­ colonial leaders who sought to forge their own powerful regimes from the remnants of colonial domination. “[P]ersonal liberty is to be respected,” wrote an Indian academic in 1935, “only insofar as this liberty does not in any way interfere with the development of a strong nationalistic state.” In China, he wrote, the government realizes that it “must work out her own salvation through a strong army and a centralized government—if need be, a dictatorship.” It therefore “seeks inspiration” from Japan, Italy, and “the military genius of the German generals who have been acting as advisers.”188 Chinese fascism was represented by the Blue Shirts, the fascist wing of Chiang Kai-­shek’s Kuomintang. They sought to harness nationalist sentiment and accelerate the country’s industrialization, and thus “admired European 183. Quoted in Gershoni and Jankowski 2009:228. 184. Gershoni and Jankowski 2009:238. 185. Quoted in Gershoni and Jankowski 2009:246. 186. Quoted in Gershoni and Jankowski 2009:247–48. 187. Gershoni and Jankowski 2009:249. 188. Das 1935:15,17,19.

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fascism and were influenced by it.”189 A 1933 Blue Shirt newsletter welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, describing it as a response to international oppression and predicting (correctly, as it turned out) the spread of fascism across Europe.190 In return, Nazi Germany provided military and economic assistance; Hitler sent one of his generals as a military advisor to Nanking, and in 1936 signed a Chinese-­German trade agreement.191 The Blue Shirts openly pushed “to make Chiang Kai-­shek a fascist dictator,” writes Elkins. “We must have our leader,” they asserted. “[W]ithout him we cannot solve our national problem— we need our Hitler.”192 In 1936 the movement’s leader visited Germany and upon his return wrote that fascist countries have “expanded their national vitality and augmented their people’s strength.”193 As another leading spokesman argued in 1937: “Whatever we may think about fascist and Nazi methods . . . their leaders have secured the enthusiastic support of their respective nations,” concluding that Hitler and Mussolini had done “more in a few years than many countries have done in decades.”194 In that year the Blue Shirts helped to mobilize resistance to the Japanese invasion but were soon dissolved by the Kuomintang, who saw them as potential rivals. Indian nationalists, seeking to overthrow the British yoke, also found ideological affinities with Nazi doctrine. According to Mann, in the 1930s they “explicitly adapted fascist organizations, emphasizing hierarchy, discipline, [and] paramilitarism.”195 There were, to be sure, significant differences, since they generally rejected racism and preferred cultural assimilation to segregation. Yet the Hindu concepts of caste and Hinduness (hindutva), with their emphasis on martial virtues and the spiritual essence of the nation, seemed easily compatible with Nazi ideology. Leaders of the RSS, a large Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, frequently extolled Nazism and fascism, and during the war both Germany and Japan were able to mobilize nationalist Indian forces to fight against the British.196 Japan became the most prominent instance of fascist emulation outside of Europe.197 For Japanese military leaders “dreaming of conquest and commu189. Payne 1995:337–8. 190. Kirby 2001:247. 191. Ferguson 2006:303. 192. Quoted in Elkins 1969:426. 193. Quoted in Kirby 2001:255. 194. Quoted in Kirby 2001:255. These sentiments found support among the general public. Fascism “is the only tool of self-­salvation of nations on the brink of destruction,” argued a 1933 newspaper editorial; “China cannot but imitate the fascist spirit.” Quoted in Kirby 2001:246 195. Mann 2004:372. 196. Mann 2004:373. 197. By the mid-­1930s, contemporaries regularly referred to Japan as a “fascist” state. See, e.g., Tanin and Yohan 1934:226, Field 1937:7, or Yakhontoff 1939:39.

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nity,” argues Aron, “National Socialism offered encouragement and example.”198 After a tentative attempt at democracy in the 1920s, the Depression and the concomitant rise of nationalism put Japan on a steady path toward authoritarianism. By 1932 half of the country’s factories stood idle, and living standards fell accordingly. Like their European counterparts, Japanese intellectuals began to desert democratic principles in favor of a fascist solution. They “were drawn to European fascist ideas because of their repugnance for contemporary party politics and the free market economy,” writes Lebow, and “imagined that fascism would be more efficient, avoid debilitating clashes between unions and companies and strengthen Japan internationally.”199 The Nazi emphasis on the nation and the Volk as the driving force of history also dovetailed neatly with Japanese notions of racial superiority. “[T]he ethnic source of state legitimacy on which fascism depends,” argues Philip Bobbitt, “had deeper roots in Japan than perhaps anywhere else.”200 After the 1936 assassination of Korekiyo Takahashi, a respected finance minister who opposed imperial expansion, the militant nationalists’ hold on political and economic power was secure, and “the Japanese government took on many fascist features.”201 Remaining democratic elements were discarded, and the state began pursuing a policy of rapid industrialization and the consolidation of large-­scale industry and finance. Just as Prussia had served as a model of military reform after the Meiji Restoration, Nazi Germany was “a major inspiration to Japanese bureaucrats and ideologues” who wanted to regulate the economy and eliminate autonomous interest groups.202 Japanese trade associations were structured after German state cartels, as was the state women’s association, the state youth organization, and the state agricultural association. The German Ministry of Propaganda also provided a direct model for the Japanese Cabinet Information Bureau. Unlike its Italian or German counterparts, therefore, Japanese fascism did not sweep into power from below but was adopted by the state from above, imposed upon the country by military and bureaucratic elites. ——— As a country that always presented itself as the antithesis of authoritarian values, the United States seems to offer a difficult case for the fascist wave. But as Kenneth Waltz has argued, because social science theories can always find 198. Aron 1957:26. 199. Lebow 2008:406. 200. Bobbitt 2003:43. 201. Frieden 2006:214. 202. Payne 1995:335.

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confirming instances, a good test of their worth is how they deal with the hard cases, where the dynamics predicted by the theory are not expected to be present. And in fact, fascist influence expressed itself in a number of ways even within the United States—both at the level of public and intellectual discourse about the desirability of fascist-­style reforms, and through the conscious emulation of fascist institutions at the policy-­making level. At the mass level, the increasing support for fascist ideas was reflected in the growth of pro-­German organizations and the rise of anti-­Semitic and nationalist movements like the Black Legion, an offshoot of the Klan. “Americans don’t like Jews much better than the Nazis,” concluded Fortune magazine in 1939.203 A 1940 poll found that nearly a fifth of Americans saw Jews as a national “menace”—more than any other group, including Germans. Almost a third anticipated “a widespread campaign against the Jews”—a campaign that 12 percent of Americans were willing to support.204 A 1941 book by the American academic Donald Strong listed over a hundred anti-­Jewish organizations that had formed since 1933, arguing that the Nazi rise to power, along with the Depression, had “violently spurred the formation of anti-­Semitic groups.”205 As late as July 1942, a Gallup poll showed that one in six Americans thought Hitler was “doing the right thing” to the Jews.206 The fusion of anti-­Semitism with pro-­German ideas was reflected clearly in the radio career of Father Coughlin. Coughlin, who blamed the Jews for the Depression and enjoyed the second-­largest radio audience in the country (after Roosevelt’s fireside speeches), frequently quoted Goebbels and praised the Nazis’ quest for full employment and racial purity. He broke with Roosevelt in 1934, forming his own party whose 1936 candidate received nearly 900,000 votes. After the mid-­1930s, Coughlin became the country’s foremost public apologist for Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler, while his followers organized local Christian Front paramilitary groups. He was finally silenced by the Catholic Church in early 1942. The only other significant and ideologically fascist grassroots movement in the United States was the German-­American Bund, essentially “a slightly watered-­down Nazi Party for the United States.”207 Despite bizarre attempts to cross over by branding American flags with swastikas, the movement failed to attract a mass following. Its membership peaked at approximately a hundred 203. Quoted in Rapoport 1999:43. 204. Stember 1966:129, 131. Other polls showed that 40% of Americans thought Jews had “too much power,” while 20% proposed to “drive Jews out” of the country to reduce this influence (Stember 1966:121). 205. Quoted in Abrams 1942:200. 206. Rapoport 1999:44. 207. Payne 1995:351.

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thousand, made up almost completely of German immigrants and naturalized Germans.208 Yet the appeal of fascist ideas extended far beyond German-­Americans, reaching prominent citizens like Henry Ford and Charles Lindberg, the latter praising Hitler as “undoubtedly a great man.”209 Major American corporations invested in the German market, and subsequent congressional investigations showed they had contributed extensively to the Nazi rearmament program.210 As in Europe, fear of communism intensified fascism’s appeal. “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler,” argued Christian activist Frank Buchman in 1936, “who built a front line of defense against the anti-­Christ of Communism.”211 Fascism derived its influence both from its own material successes and the flagging vitality of the democratic alternative. “Is democracy a success, or is it merely one more failure in the long list of governmental experiments?” asked one American observer in 1933.212 In the same year, the Chicago Daily Tribune published an article documenting the decline of democracy around the world. “Democracy is waning before the steady stride of dictatorships,” it began uncontroversially, citing William Ogburn, an academic who had recently sat on Roosevelt’s consumer advisory board. More surprising was Ogburn’s reaction to it: “I look forward to the decline of democracy,” he declared. “An executive with the power to act such as that given President Roosevelt will meet requirements of speedy action and will be able to cope with rapid changes. A dictator can represent better than a legislature.”213 These sentiments lingered throughout the decade and well until the start of the war. In an unpublished 1938 essay, George Kennan argued for an American government ruled by the elite, proposing that the country should travel “along the road which leads through constitutional change to the authoritarian state.”214 The American diplomat Lawrence Dennis spent much of the decade advocating for fascism in the United States, and in 1941 was named the ideol208. As Katznelson (2013:39) notes, the country saw “much ethnic admiration, even loyalty, to German and Italian fascism” among their American diasporas. Payne (1995:351) argues that Bund membership was closer to fifteen thousand. 209. Quoted in Katznelson 2013:69. In a 1941 speech, Lindbergh accused the Jews of drawing America into the war—a charge that about a third of Americans supported (Stember 1966:112,118). The previous year, Lindberg’s wife published a bestseller that called totalitarianism “The Wave of the Future” and a “new, and perhaps even ultimately good, conception of humanity trying to come to birth” (quoted in Schlesinger 2005:107). 210. Dobbs 1998; Billstein 2004. 211. Quoted in Miller 1942:178. Social problems, he added, could be “solved through a God-­ controlled Fascist dictatorship.” Buchman was later twice nominated for the Nobel peace prize for his work on Franco-­German postwar reconciliation. 212. Mallet-­Prevost 1933:159. 213. Chicago Daily Tribune 8/26/1933. 214. Quoted in Hixson 1989:7. In the essay Kennan called for the disfranchisement of blacks,

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ogy’s top American intellectual by Life magazine. “It appears to me that prevailing social forces the world over make a fascist trend the inevitable alternative to chaos or communism,” he wrote in 1935. “The middle-­class revolution has already begun. I call it fascist.”215 Likewise, the American polemicist James Burnham, in his popular 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, argued that the Depression demonstrated that capitalism “was not going to continue” much longer.216 Pointing to growing parallels between Stalinism, Nazism, and the New Deal, Burnham argued that liberal capitalism was soon be replaced by a technocratic, undemocratic, and managerial society.217 He predicted that Germany would win the war and successfully conquer both Europe and the Soviet Union. “At every point,” wrote Orwell in a critical review of the book, “evidence is squeezed in order to show the strength, vitality, and durability of Hitler’s crazy regime.”218 Concerned American observers frequently urged an amalgamation of democratic and fascist institutions. “In our attempts to solve the problem of national economic control,” wrote one scholar in 1933, “the Fascist experiment seems able to furnish us with several interesting examples and suggestions.”219 And as another academic argued a few years later: “Democracy should learn, on the basis of the extreme example of Fascism, how to reconcile individual liberty with the regulation and control of social affairs.”220 In a time of deep social and economic crisis, argues Oren, Americans “earnestly (though not always critically) searched for remedies,” and in doing so, “expressed positive curiosity about, and even downright admiration of, certain Nazi policies and practices.”221 These were not marginal radicals, but successful mainstream scholars, APSA presidents, and journal editors.222 The vast majority did not immigrants, and nonprofessional women. “I hate democracy,” he wrote to his sister in 1935, “. . . I hate the ‘peepul’.” Quoted in Gaddis 2011:100. 215. Dennis 1935:62, 63–64. 216. Burnham 1941:31. 217. As he had argued previously, the New Deal was “preparing the United States for the comparatively smooth transition to Fascism” (quoted in Menand 2013). 218. Orwell 1946:179. Burnham had predicted the world be divided among three autocratic-­ managerial states—Germany, Japan, and the United States—and this bleak vision, argues Menand (2013), became a key influence for Orwell’s 1984. In a particularly strange example of the peregrinations of twentieth-­century intellectuals, Ronald Reagan later awarded Burnham the Medal of Freedom for his anti-­communist writings. 219. Welk 1933:109. 220. Steiner 1938:141. 221. Oren 2003:18, 48, 47. 222. In his 1934 presidential address, APSA president Walter Shepard railed against “the dogma of universal suffrage” and argued for a system that excluded “the ignorant, the uninformed, and the anti-­social elements.” And if these reforms smacked of fascism, “we have already recognized that there is a large element of fascist doctrine and practice that we must appropriate” (Shepard 1935:16, 18–19).

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call for a violent revolution or a nationalistic dictatorship, and often hastened to point out the regime’s objectionable aspects. Nevertheless, they sought to study fascism in a value-­neutral fashion, distinguishing between efficient institutions and hateful ideology. An interest in emulating fascist institutions was not limited to scholars or public intellectuals. Roosevelt came into office determined to reshape the structure of American government. A number of New Dealers saw unchecked capitalist competition as the source of the country’s problems, and sought to use state planning and corporatist institutions to end the economic crisis. “Fascist corporatism was anti-­parliamentary corporatism,” writes Whitman. “So was American corporatism; indeed, seen in the large, New Deal delegationism should be viewed only as the American manifestation of a world-­wide anti-­ parliamentarism.”223 As a National Recovery Administration bureaucrat wrote in 1935: “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those which we have been evolving here in America and so are of particular interest at this time.”224 As John Garraty has argued, Nazi Germany and the United States shared a number of similarities in the 1930s—in industrial and agricultural policy, foreign exchange measures, banking reform, and leadership styles.225 An obvious commonality was the reliance on strong, charismatic leadership to undertake fundamental reforms. While FDR clearly never sought to transform the American system into a dictatorship, he did signal a willingness to borrow nondemocratic methods in shaping his leadership style. According to Katznelson, his claim to embody a singular popular will, coupled to his suggestion that the legislative branch might be surpassed or displaced, did seem to announce a willingness to convene an emergency and extraconstitutional government that would dodge the federal government’s traditional separation of powers.226 Shortly after FDR’s first election, a New York Times journalist noted that massive popular opinion now “vests the president with the power of a dictator,” and that nobody “is much disturbed by the idea of dictatorship.”227 Walter Lippmann, America’s most prominent journalist, “urged the new president to assume ‘dictatorial powers’ in order to save American freedom,” notes Hamby, and in doing so was “clearly motivated by the example of Germany.”228 Roosevelt’s later rejection of the informal but powerful norm of the two-­term limit 223. Whitman 1991:778. 224. Quoted in Schivelbusch 2006:203–4. 225. Garraty 1973. 226. Katznelson 2013:122. 227. Quoted by Katznelson 2013:123. 228. Hamby 2004:121.

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represented a growing acceptance of the idea that a strong (and if necessary, long-­lasting) executive was needed to lead states through the modern age. Beyond centralization of leadership, the most significant component of fascist emulation was reform of the national economy. The New Deal quickly transformed a highly decentralized economy with limited social insurance into a regulated mixture of public and private programs, complete with massive public works, government deficit management, collective bargaining, and business regulation. Many of these reforms bore an unmistakable similarity to fascist and communist institutions, a fact that the administration did not always seek to hide, especially before 1939. They did stress, however, that this imitation was pragmatic and policy-­oriented rather than ideological. In October 1933, Roosevelt told his secretary of the interior Harold Ickes: “What we are doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we are doing them in an orderly way.”229 While the racial and totalitarian aspects of Nazi policy did not find mainstream admirers across the Atlantic, in politically more neutral areas such as a labor service and business cartelization, argue Gotz and Patel, “the USA was interested in Germany’s experiences.”230 Coming into office, Roosevelt quickly abandoned the orthodox policies of fiscal tightening. The dollar was taken off the gold standard and devalued. (His exchange-­rate policies, which stressed national revival rather than international currency stabilization, “was Nazi orthodoxy,” notes Garraty.231) Within a hundred days, the new administration adopted programs to support agriculture, build large-­scale public works, regulate industrial prices, and encourage businesses to cartelize and set prices. “These early measures smacked to many of fascism,” writes Frieden, and led to opposition in the Supreme Court, which declared the more controversial measures unconstitutional.232 When Roosevelt described mass unemployment as “the greatest menace to our social order” in 1934, he was echoing the concerns of political leaders around the world. Like them, Roosevelt was intensely interested in the German solution to this problem. After 1933, “it was Hitler’s government in Germany that offered the prime example of a labour service in practice,” argue Gotz and Patel.233 The Nazi success in quickly eliminating unemployment stimulated intense interest and discussion abroad, and thus became “a model for other, similar organizations throughout the world.” The Reichsarbeitsdienst (German labor service) thus “left a deep imprint” on the minds of American 229. Ickes 1953:104. 230. Gotz and Patel 2006:63. 231. Garraty 1973:922. 232. Frieden 2006:233. 233. Gotz and Patel 2006:57, 59.

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policy makers, who showed “an unexpected willingness to study the Third Reich as a source for policy ideas.”234 According to Garraty, “there was little difference in appearance or intent between the Nazi work camps and those set up in America under the Civilian Conservation Corps.”235 Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador to Germany, favorably compared German labor camps to “the efforts we were making in the CCC.” Praising Germany’s efforts to “enrich the lives of workmen,” he sent embassy officers to a tour of the camps, citing Roosevelt’s interest in its successes. The Nazi government, Wilson concluded, had solved its social problems in ways that “is going to be beneficial to the world at large.”236 When the administration sought to train air mechanics for the CCC, they looked to the Reichsarbeitsdienst and the Flieger-­H J, a branch of the Nazi Youth devoted to aviation, as organizational models. The New York Times reported on the administration’s interest in these German institutions, and when aviation classes were introduced into the CCC, “the Nazi experience had obviously been a source of inspiration.”237 Despite their vast and crucial differences, concludes Hamby, some “similarities between Hitler and Roosevelt are arresting”: Both would launch government programs against the Depression that were sustained by campaigns of mass mobilization usually reserved for times of war. Both appear consciously to have preferred administrative disorderliness to explicit lines of authority and delegations of power.238 Nazi Germany was not the sole source of institutional inspiration during the 1930s. Both the Soviet Union and (in particular) Italy also provided important models for reform. Italy’s brand of fascism seemed especially palatable to American policy makers. As James Whitman notes, “a startling number of New Dealers had kind words for Mussolini”—as did, of course, a number of American conservatives.239 But while Hitler never enjoyed Mussolini’s popularity in FDR’s administration, notes Schivelbusch, this “did not prevent Washington from closely examining individual measures and programs undertaken in Berlin to see if they were suitable for emulation.”240 The willingness of American intellectuals and policy makers to emulate Germany highlights the power of hegemonic shocks in stimulating domestic reforms even among regime rivals. American-­style democracy had indeed 234. Gotz and Patel 2006:59, 62–63. 235. Garraty 1973:910. 236. Quoted in Weil 1978:60–61. 237. Gotz and Patel 2006:63. 238. Hamby 2004:202. 239. Whitman 1991:747. 240. Schivelbusch 2006:33.

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survived and prospered, but it did so in part by imitating successful elements of authoritarian regimes—and this syncretic imitation stemmed directly from the incentives produced by the hegemonic transition. Beyond Imitation: Inducement and Coercion in the Fascist Wave Fascist institutions metastasized not only through voluntary imitation by impressed observers but also through the inducements created by growing German power. The expansion of German trade linkages brought states closer into the Nazi camp, whether for reasons of self-­interest or desire to please a rising hegemon. The rise of German power also brought an increase in Nazi diplomatic activities through aid to local fascist movements abroad, as well as efforts at propaganda and cultural diplomacy. In the Middle East, for example, Germany actively promoted Nazi ideology by supporting local newspapers and arranging for cultural exchanges with leaders of anti-­colonial movements.241 The Arrow Cross and the Iron Guard were among several major European movements that received weapons and financial assistance from Berlin. Such influence expanded beyond Europe: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdul Aziz sought and received German arms and contacts, while Syrian and Iraqi delegations attended the Nuremberg party congresses. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood established direct links with Germany, which sought to influence the movement through financial support. Documents seized by the British in 1939 showed that the Brotherhood had received secret subsidies from the German news agency in Cairo through Palestinian intermediaries.242 German economic influence was particularly pronounced in central and southern Europe, where Germany sought to establish economic dominance through a series of bilateral trade deals. The Depression led to the collapse of agricultural prices and the curtailing of British investment in the region. Germany stepped in as the ostensible savior, arranging for bulk purchases of agricultural foodstuffs and raw materials, often at prices above market levels. In return, however, the states of central Europe were obliged to import German manufacturing and industrial commodities. German payments were held in special Reichsbank accounts that could be accessed only to purchase German goods. By acquiring a monopsony on central Europe’s agricultural exports, Germany also acquired a monopoly on the sale of manufacturing products in 241. In Iraq, for instance, German representatives had direct contacts with three of the country’s major newspapers. Bashkin 2008:58. 242. Gershoni and Jankowski 2009:213.

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TABLE 4.1.

German Trade with Southeastern Europe, 1933 and 1939 Exports to Germany (% of total exports)

Imports from Germany (% of total imports)

1933

1939

1933

1939

Bulgaria

36

71

38

70

Hungary

11

52

20

53

Romania

11

43

18

56

Yugoslavia

14

46

13

53

Note: Trade volume for 1933 from Arndt 1944:198; for 1939 from Hehn 2002:235. Numbers rounded off to the nearest percentage point.

the region, thereby hampering these countries’ own industrial development and entangling them with its economy. By paying artificially high rates, Germany further raised the prices of the region’s agricultural products, making them even more uncompetitive for exports to other countries. At the same time, the region’s dependence on German industrial equipment meant that central Europeans increasingly relied on Germany for spare parts and maintenance.243 Governments that refused to cooperate in such trade deals risked the collapse of their agricultural exports. The result, argues Hehn, was the “virtual incorporation of Southeastern Europe into the German interest sphere.”244 Dependence on German imports and exports intensified in the late interwar years. In Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia, the share of exports to Germany more than doubled between 1937 and 1939. German imports followed a similar trajectory (see table 4.1). This economic peonization created opportunities for Germany to extend its political influence. “The economic stranglehold once established, Germany could use it for other than economic ends,” argues Seton-­Watson. “Commercial and technical missions could provide useful cover for political and military espionage, and German buyers could use opportunities for political propaganda among the peasantry.”245 After establishing an irreversible degree of control, noted Basch in 1941, Germany “began to take a hand even in internal policies, giving preferences to exporters and importers sympathetic with the Nazi regime.”246 The Nazis’ use of their economic leverage to achieve these 243. Seton-­Watson 1945:383–84. 244. Hehn 2002:181. 245. Seton-­Watson 1945:384. 246. Basch 1941:37.

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political ends amounted to what the journalist Paul Einzig, in a 1938 book, called a “bloodless invasion.” The more that eastern European states “come to depend upon trade with Germany for their prosperity,” he noted, “the more they are exposed to political pressure aiming at setting up puppet Nazi Governments which would take their orders from Berlin.”247 The entrenchment of German business organizations throughout the region “provides excellent facilities for Nazi propaganda,” he concluded, and “subconsciously influences” local attitudes toward Germany.248 In Bulgaria, for example, the looming military threat and economic might of Nazi Germany created increased pressures to move toward the fascist camp. Although Bulgaria’s King Boris attempted to suppress radicals on both the left and the right, the rapid rise and territorial ambitions of Nazi Germany forced him to adopt a pro-­German foreign policy by the end of the decade. Restrictions on Jewish economic activity appeared in 1939. When the Iron Guard took control of Romania in 1940 and instituted a number of anti-­Jewish measures, the Bulgarian government adopted the Law of the Defense of the Nation, “so as not to be behind Rumania in the expression of loyalty to Hitler,” wrote socialist politician Dino Kazasov in scornful opposition.249 After the early Nazi conquests, King Boris even took to calling himself Vozhd (Leader) in imitation of the führer. In the end, argues Miller, the country was unable to mobilize its people through an indigenous ideology, and “instead committed itself to following the fascist patterns more closely.”250 By 1939, when 70 percent of Bulgaria’s exports went to Germany, Göring could comfortably call it his country’s “vassal.”251 Until the late 1930s, Romania attempted to resist Nazi penetration by maintaining trade links across Europe via the Little Entente. But after the Austrian Anschluss and the partition of Czechoslovakia, King Carol “saw the handwriting on the wall and tied Romania increasingly to the Axis.”252 As elsewhere, economic and political influences were intertwined. “German economic penetration,” argues Vago, “accompanied the Nazi political and ‘cultural’ activity in Romania.”253 After 1938, Hehn writes, Romanian trade “became increasingly politicized and Romania itself, because of its vital oil resources, converted into a German satrapy by 1940.”254 The economic treaty with Germany concluded in March 1939 demanded “a complete molding of Rumanian economy to fit 247. Einzig 1938:7. 248. Einzig 1938:65. 249. Quoted in Miller 1975:94–5. 250. Miller 1975:92. 251. S. G. Marks 2003:187; Hehn 2002:256. 252. Hehn 2002:235. 253. Vago 1975:50. 254. Hehn 2005:235.

A Low Di s h o n e s t D ec a d e 145 732

Reichsmarks (millions)

700

Total imports to Germany

677

600 500

473

400

448

518

496

410

300 289

325 330

Total exports from Germany

200 241

227

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

FIGURE 4.3. Latin American trade with Nazi Germany, 1933–­1938, in millions of Reichsmarks. Includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Adapted from Hehn 2002:248. Numbers rounded off to nearest million.

German needs,” wrote Basch. The agreement, he concluded, was “the forerunner of the reduction of central and southeastern European countries to a semicolonial status.”255 Similar developments unfolded in Poland and Yugoslavia. By the mid-­ 1930s, Germany had taken control over Yugoslavia’s mineral and agricultural exports, “and that country had begun to enter the orbit of Nazi hegemony.”256 Germany’s economic policy, argues Rothschild, “effectively supplemented her ideological, political, military, and diplomatic prowess in attracting Danubian and Balkan Europe to herself in the second half of the 1930s.”257 In Latin America, the expansion of Nazi economic influence was the direct result of Germany’s purposeful economic decoupling from the United States. As compensation, Germany turned to the raw materials producers of southeast Europe and Latin America. Germany’s trade with Latin America rose steadily after 1933. Its exports to the region grew from 241 to 496 million Reichsmarks between 1933 and 1938, while imports grew even faster during the same period, from 289 to 677 million Reichsmarks. (See figure 4.3.) In Guatemala and El Salvador, German exports more than doubled between 1935 and 1939, amounting to a third of those countries’ total imports. In Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, German imports amounted to a quarter of the total. By the end of the decade, Germany was Brazil’s biggest 255. Basch 1941:40. 256. Hehn 2002:105. 257. Rothschild 1974:22.

146 C H A P TER 4

trading partner—its share of imports increased from 9 to 25 percent between 1930 and 1938, even as American imports fell from 30 to 23 percent.258 As in Europe, economic linkages with Germany facilitated the expansion of its political power, bolstered the appeal of Nazi economic success, and created channels for the expansion of German influence. In 1939 an American scholar of Latin America warned of a “fascist penetration” of the region through a variety of such channels—the increased influence of German firms, the establishment of a German naval base in Peru, “Nazi agitation” among the local German population, espionage, bribery of journalists and publishers, and subsidies for German-­language schools.259 The Germans, argued an observer in 1939, “have been able to achieve in Latin American countries a remarkably high and solid economic position which has made them generally respected, if not popular.”260 In the Middle East, Nazi influence took the form of cultural exchanges, propaganda efforts, and the patronage of local philofascist movements, although increased trade also served as a lever of influence. In 1936, for instance, the German finance minister Hjalmar Schacht made a state visit to Iran, followed by a visit from the Hitler Youth leader, which resulted in an exchange program between that group and its Iranian counterpart. Iran’s Reza Shah welcomed Hitler’s rise to power and undertook a wide-­sweeping campaign of nationalization in 1935, changing the country’s name from Persia to Iran— “Land of the Aryans.” He praised the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1936, and the country witnessed sporadic pogroms in 1938. In 1937, Iran, along with Turkey and Afghanistan, signed the Saadabad Friendship Pact, which gave Germany preferential treatment in trade and access to Iranian raw materials; Iran in turn received German credits, trade concessions and (beginning in 1938) weapons and military planes. As the country began moving into the German economic sphere, relations with Britain quickly deteriorated. A secret agreement in 1939 made Iran a provider of food and natural resources for the Third Reich. At the end of 1939 Iran also signed the Treaty of Friendship with Japan, although it remained officially neutral during the beginning of World War II and entered the war on the Allied side in September 1943. The Iraqi regime also established close ties with Nazi Germany; Rashi Ali al-­Gailani, the country’s prime minister between 1933–35 and again in 1940, was the country’s leading advocate for rapprochement with fascism and staffed his cabinets with extreme nationalists.261 ——— 258. Behrendt 1939:2. 259. Efron 1939. 260. Behrendt 1939:4. 261. Blamires and Jackson 2006:342–43.

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The final, coercive phase of the fascist wave begin with the Austrian Anschluss of March 1938 and ended with the defeat of Japan and Nazi Germany in 1945, though the effort appeared increasingly doomed after the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943. The string of fascist conquests that marked the opening years of the war was therefore not the start of the fascist wave but its culmination. The spread of autocratic waves via hegemonic coercion is the most dramatic and least theoretically convoluted way through which hegemonic shocks create sweeping domestic changes. The final, bloody stage of the wave was defined by the use of brute force—territorial conquests, annexations, and the creation of satellites, puppets, and tutelary regimes. New fascist satellite states included Slovakia (1939), Vichy France (1940), and Croatia (1941). By the beginning of 1941, Hitler had “blackmailed or, by territorial concessions, cajoled” Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary into joining the Axis and becoming junior partners in the fascist coalition.262 Bulgaria, for example, provided economic cooperation and free transit for German troops, and received a slice of Yugoslavia as a reward. The initially successful invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked the apogee of German power and the crest of the fascist wave. At the peak of Nazi success in Europe, only Sweden, Britain, and Ireland remained free, with Switzerland as a cooperating neutral and Finland as an ally.263 In Asia, Japan had established puppets in China and all over Southeast Asia as parts of its Asian Co-­Prosperity Sphere. By 1942 it had conquered the Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, the Netherland Indies, New Guinea, the Aleutians, and Burma, and “everywhere they found ready collaborators among enemies of European imperialism.”264 Hitler “recognized the need for certain allies, for acquiescent satellite states, and for friendly neutrals,” and this produced a new configuration of states under German leadership and domination that the Nazi press sometimes hailed as the new “United States of Europe.”265 Beyond annexation, Germany also established direct territorial administration under both civilian and military control. But even at this late stage, the coercive expansion of fascist institutions cannot be separated from the ideological appeal of Nazi ideology. As in other waves driven by hegemonic shocks, material success facilitated the legitimation of Nazi institutions. For some observers, the early stages of the war provided the ultimate confirmation of the power and efficiency of Nazi institutions. “What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism . . . does not 262. Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 2002:815. 263. Of the five official neutrals, three—Spain, Switzerland, Sweden—collaborated with the Nazi regime in some capacity. 264. Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 2002:817. 265. Payne 1995:376.

148 C H A P TER 4

work,” wrote Orwell in 1941. “The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism.”266 The centralized autocratic model appeared more indomitable than ever. As Galbraith argued, in the early war years “it was widely believed that the ruthlessly exercised power of the German dictatorship was a major source of strength,” as demonstrated by its ability to command and mobilize seven million workers across the enslaved territories.267 After the swift defeat of France, Ambassador Joe Kennedy predicted that democracy would soon be finished in England as well.268 Henri de Man, leader of Belgium’s Labor Party, proclaimed that the “collapse of a decrepit world, far from being a disaster, is a deliverance.”269 As Rosie Waldeck wrote in 1942: The fall of France formed the climax to twenty years of failure of the promises of democracy to handle unemployment, inflation, deflation, labour unrest, party egoism and what not. Europe, tired of herself, and doubtful of the principles she had been living by, felt almost relieved to have everything settled. . . . Hitler, Europe felt, was a smart guy—disagreeable but smart. He had gone far in making his country strong. Why not try it his way? That’s how Europeans felt in this summer of 1940.270 Having suddenly become the custodian of a continent, German fascism adopted what Hobsbawm calls a “paradoxically internationalist” outlook at the start of the war, offering a vision of a united Europe reaching back to the Holy Roman Empire.271 Early German conquests gave fascism a certain pan-­ European appeal that was absent before the start of the war. As Judt notes, the notion of a European Union began not as a liberal dream but as a right-­wing response to Bolshevism and Americanization, and found great appeal among European intellectuals in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Third Reich’s Festung Europa promised a post-­democratic Europe united under German dominion but accommodating other Western states. When that possibility appeared to become a reality after the fall of France, “the German model took on, briefly, a certain glow.”272 As Hobsbawm notes, it was precisely this transnational element of Nazi occupations, with Germany as the guarantor of a 266. Orwell 1941:79, original emphasis. 267. Galbraith 1967:142–44. 268. Mazower 1998:184. 269. Quoted in Mazower 1998:141. 270. Waldeck 1942:124. In its military triumph, she writes, Germany seemed “powerfully united in the one purpose of conquest, a purpose which appealed to the people’s most intimate dreams” (Waldeck 1942:15). 271. Hobsbawm 1994:136. 272. Judt 2012:177,178.

A Low Di s h o n e s t D ec a d e 149

resurrected European order, that was stressed by non-­German soldiers fighting under the banner of the swastika.273 The attraction of fascism as a promising model thus lasted well into the war years. In 1942, argues de Grazia, “the notion that the New Order would enable a high standard of living acquired surprisingly wide credibility.” Territorial unification offered the promise of “economic complementarities” and a higher standard of living. As a result, “pan-­Europeanists who saw in Hitler’s triumph the fulfillment of their vision of a prosperous, united Europe rallied to the New Order.”274 Conclusion For all its power and promise in the decade after 1933, fascism’s total defeat destroyed its relevance as an alternative regime path. This outcome was especially damaging because a core component of Nazi ideology was the appeal to “war as the ultimate test, the nation’s most validating mission,” writes Payne, and as a result, “the final defeat was so thorough and unconditional that fascism was itself discredited to a degree unprecedented among major modern political movements.”275 Germany was now, in the words of the journalist Hanson Baldwin, “perhaps the most devastated and thoroughly beaten nation since Carthage.”276 Yet fascist influence has remained as an institutional residue—permanently submerged, rarely acknowledged—within the structures of postwar democracies. For that reason, fascism cannot be dismissed as a grotesque aberration in Europe’s political evolution. As Mazower notes, many of its opponents liked to see Europe’s move to the Right as a burst of collective insanity, a form of mass madness over which reason must eventually prevail. Even today it seems easier for many people to envisage inter-­war Europe as a continent led astray by insane dictators than as one which opted to abandon democracy.277 The appeal of fascism was both real and, in the context of the times, understandable. The hegemonic rise of Nazi Germany was an undeniable manifestation of its success and the major catalyst of a fascist wave. “The rise and triumph of the Nazi movement overshadowed everything else that happened 273. Hobsbawm 1994:136, original emphasis. 274. de Grazia 2005:127. 275. Payne 1995:436–37. 276. Baldwin 1945:528. 277. Mazower 1998:27. As Ingram (1946:474) argued shortly after the war, “we cannot regard Fascism, either in its Nazi or non-­German forms, as an exotic foreign growth. It is our own civilization, exaggerated into a desperate and extreme shape.”

150 C H A P TER 4

in Europe during the depression years,” argues Howe; “the example of Germany exposed the weakness of all the rest of Europe.”278 In the uncertainty of the period, the dramatic recovery of Nazi Germany provided an appealing alternative. It “inspired other anti-­liberal forces, supported them and lent the international Right a sense of historic confidence: in the 1930s it looked like the wave of the future,” argues Hobsbawm.279 “It was obvious that laissez-­faire capitalism was finished,” wrote George Orwell in 1940, “and that there had got to be some kind of reconstruction.”280 Dismissing the brief success of fascism as a byproduct of conquest ignores the rapid expansion of Germany’s economic and diplomatic influence, and the surprisingly widespread imitation of the country’s institutions during the 1930s, including within ostensibly democratic states. In 1938, the scholar Arthur Steiner argued that fascism “has done more than anything else to jolt the complacency of self-­assured democracy, long since become static, into an awareness of the need of placing its own house in order.”281 To survive, democracy would now have to evolve beyond the classical liberal state to include social welfare programs and state guidance of the economy. As E. H. Carr wrote in 1940, it could no longer be a regime that “maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live.”282 Democracy, wrote an Austrian émigré to the United States in 1942, “must show that it is able to adapt its psychology and its methods to the new times.”283 As Schivelbusch writes: “The victor was America, but an America that achieved the stability that became its hallmark only by assimilating a major part of its defeated enemies’ culture, much like the Alexandrian and Roman empires had in their time.”284 To be sure, the late interwar years were not a time of unquestioned fascist hegemony, in matters of either ideology or material power. For many, it was a period of shifting loyalties, intense polarization, violent contestation, and an uncertain search for alternatives. Often, however, this search pulled observers toward fascist solutions, even if in sometimes circuitous ways. Some autocracies, such as Latvia, Romania, or Estonia, adopted fascist institutions not because they admired Nazi success but precisely because they were afraid of it. They created their own radical right parties in an attempt to outflank the Nazis from the right, and pandered to right-­wing sentiment by embracing militarism and anti-­Semitism. They restricted liberties and outlawed independent parties 278. Howe 1953:450. 279. Hobsbawm 1994:112. 280. Orwell 1940a:236. 281. Steiner 1938:141. 282. Quoted in Mazower 1998:185. 283. Ranshofen-­Wertheimer 1942:123. 284. Schivelbusch 2006:189.

A Low Di s h o n e s t D ec a d e 151

to curb the Nazi menace within their own states. And in the process of trying to defeat fascism, they came to resemble it. “And if you shall conquer, then we shall perish only to live in your victory,” a Gestapo interrogator tells his prisoner in Vasily Grossman’s epic wartime novel Life and Fate. “Through losing the war we shall win the war—and continue our development in a different form.”285 This was an optimistic exaggeration, but it contained a grain of truth. The war had prompted a fundamental reevaluation of capitalist democracy and propelled “a renewed attempt to define the place of the democratic nation-­state in the modern world.”286 Despite the myth of liberal capitalism’s triumph after 1945—a myth that gained potency with the start of the Cold War—postwar democratic institutions had been fundamentally reshaped by their conflict with a rising autocratic rival, in the process re-­embedding capitalism within the larger structure of democratic society. 285. Grossman 1959:397. 286. Mazower 1998:182.

5 Two Ways of Life There is, at the present point in world history, a conflict between two ways of life. — RE P ORT OF T H E STATE -­WAR - ­NAVY COORD I NAT I NG COMM I TTEE , 1 9 471

Whether the Marxist situations all over the world become Communist depends mostly on the relative strength and policies of the Western and the Soviet camps. —ADAM ULAM ,1 9 6 0 2

For Germans, the year 1945 became known as stunde null—zero hour, the moment when European history was irreversibly transformed by forces outside of itself. Cleaved by the clash of two messianic powers, Germany became the symbol of a struggle between two mutually exclusive visions of the modern state. World War II was the only hegemonic shock of the twentieth century that produced not one but two rising great powers, and as a result the war’s aftermath witnessed two distinct waves of institutional reforms. Despite profound differences in their content, both waves diffused through similar methods—a mixture of coercion via military occupation and nation-­building; inducement through the expansion of trade, foreign aid, and newly forged international institutions; and emulation by foreign audiences impressed by the self-­evident success of the two systems. Given communism’s ignominious demise, it’s easy to forget how much moral and practical appeal—how much of a viable way of life—this regime appeared to offer in the postwar years. In the long run, its success proved il1. Quoted in Brands 1994:20. 2. Ulam 1960:10. 152

T wo Ways o f Li fe 153

lusory, driven by the low starting base of communist economies and their ability to churn out heavy industry without regard for quality, innovation, or consumer demand. But for about a decade after the war—and in some places much longer—the outcome of the hegemonic shock enabled Soviet-­style communism to exert not just ideological sympathy but real material attraction. On Stalin’s seventieth birthday in 1949, writes Malia, “it seemed as if the worldwide triumph of Communism was possible, perhaps even imminent.”3 In the 1930s, notes Frieden, “[n]o other government was remotely interested in socialist central planning, and even in the Soviet Union its future was unclear.” But by the 1950s, “Soviet-­style socialism was firmly in place in more than a dozen countries with over a third of the world’s people”: Communist movements were powerful all over the developing world and in some Western European countries. A Communist optimist had grounds to believe that it was only a matter of time before most of the developing world and even large parts of the developed world adopt some version of Soviet socialism.4 Today, few things symbolize the bankruptcy of communism more dramatically than the differences between North and South Korea. In a decades-­long quasi-­ natural experiment, two similar populations pursued drastically different development strategies, with equally drastic results. Today South Koreans live on average a decade longer, stand two inches taller, and enjoy a quality of life unimaginable in the world’s last Stalinist regime. Since the Soviet collapse, per capita GDP in the two countries has diverged dramatically, with the South about eighteen times richer on a per capita basis (see figure 5.1). But this comparison does not tell the full story. Figure 5.2 shows the same graph with the timescale pushed back to the beginning of the Cold War. For the first three decades of their existence, the two Koreas symbolized not the inevitable triumph of capitalism but the irrefutable reality of communism as an appealing and credible path of development. Until the mid-­1970s, the North matched the South in per capita output, education, and productivity. A 1969 UN report saw “no chance whatsoever for an economic take-­off ” in South Korea, and as late as 1977, the British economist Joan Robinson confidently predicted the inevitable triumph of the North. “Obviously, sooner or later,” she wrote, the two countries “must be reunited by absorbing the South into socialism.”5 As a beneficiary of the hegemonic transition, the USSR offered both the promise of material might and a vision of a better world. Its sudden emergence as a superpower, Furet writes, “combined the two gods that make or break 3. Malia 1995:274. 4. Frieden 2006:321–22. 5. Revel 1993:151; quoted in Turner 1989:92.

154 C H A P TER 5

20,000

South Korea GDP per capita

15,000

10,000

5,000

North Korea 0 1990 FIGURE 5.1.

1995

2000

2005

2010

North and South Korean GDP, 1990–­2007.

historical times: power and ideas.”6 Particularly in the developing world, there was “considerable skepticism” about democracy’s ability to outperform centralized economies.7 And though this seemed unlikely in 1989, postwar Europe witnessed rising prosperity on both sides of the Iron Curtain. A Stalinist economy was well-­suited for rebuilding devastated countries. China grew faster than India, Eastern Europe grew faster than Western Europe, and the Soviet Union itself grew at a rate of around 3.4 percent, almost a full percentage higher than the United States. In Eastern Europe, this growth was accompanied by rapid social changes—the spread of literacy, the introduction of free medical care, swift declines in infant mortality, and the transformation of rural agrarian backwaters into urban industrial states. In 1955, the influential Sovietologist Philip Mosely argued that the Soviet economy was strong and “growing stronger at a rapid pace,” concluding that “we are involved, whether we like it or not, in a contest for survival.”8 The myth of a neat separation between the economic ideologies of communism and capitalism was born from the rivalry of the Cold War, which promoted on both sides a Manichean interpretation of rival economic theories. Yet the postwar years saw a cautious convergence between capitalism and communism in embedding the market further into the structures of the state. “All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-­faire order of society,” wrote Karl Mannheim.9 In the Western world, the planned 6. Furet 1999:349. Communism, Fukuyama (1992a:100) notes, offered “a perfectly viable economic alternative to capitalism in the early phases of industrialization.” 7. Bhagwati 1992:41–42. 8. Mosely 1955:102, 108. 9. Mannheim 1943:38.

T wo Ways o f Li fe 155

20,000

South Korea GDP per capita

15,000

10,000

5,000

North Korea

0 1950 FIGURE 5. 2.

1970

1990

2010

North and South Korean GDP, 1946–­2007.

economy was accepted—in some cases welcomed—as a necessary component of development and a safeguard against the instability of the interwar years. In doing so, the West European states drew upon “the Soviet example,” as E. H. Carr pointed out.10 Even in the United States, according to Arrighi, “the idea of a self-­regulating market was rejected in principle and in practice.”11 It was thus in politics rather than economics that communism and democracy expressed their most sincere differences. This is not to equate Soviet and American approaches to economic management, which remained vastly different in scope of government action. But to present them as direct opposites also glosses over a fundamental commonality—the rejection of the absolute supremacy of the market, along with a newfound conviction that active government intervention in the economy was both indispensable and just. In the United States, this similarity tended to be papered over by Cold War–era ideological conviction, which portrayed the free market rising phoenix-­like from the war to defend the world from communist enserfment. The Soviet Union, utterly committed to an inept and often ludicrous economic dogma, had no need for such hypocrisy. Both superpowers could make a convincing case to potential converts. Both had demonstrated military dominance and economic resilience in the face of a crisis. Both were utopian in their aspirations and universalist in their goals, and both offered a vision for political and social development that transcended national boundaries. Each was founded “on ideas and plans for the betterment of humanity” rather than national identity, writes Westad, and therefore “saw themselves as assisting natural trends in world history and as 10. Carr 1939:44. 11. Arrighi 1994:328.

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defending their own security at the same time. Both saw a specific mission in and for the Third World that only their own state could carry out.”12 The dark side of this utopian universalism was a shared imperial mentality tinged with a self-­r ighteous paternalism. As a result, both sides supported questionable surrogates and cultivated unsavory clients. Such behavior has been common to great powers throughout history. Yet here their ideologies compounded and magnified the hubris attached to hegemonic influence, and provided ready justification for its exercise. As with its economic policies, here the Soviet Union benefited from undisguised malice. It “treated its impoverished third-­world clients with cynical disdain,” Judt notes, and unlike the United States, “did not even pretend to be in the business” of democracy promotion—leaving the United States more exposed to the charge of moral hypocrisy in its support of corrupt and murderous dictators.13 These parallels do not require a position of moral equivalence toward the rival regimes or toward the superpowers that embodied them. Both sought to prevent political backsliding in their respective zones of influence, but in Western Europe this was accomplished through economic development and social stability rather than by the suppression of dissent or the continued threat of force. In Europe, at least, the United States focused on creating the conditions for a moderate and pro-­American political climate. In the wake of the hegemonic shock, the primary mechanisms of Soviet hegemonic engagement was coercion in eastern Europe and emulation outside it. (After 1955 or so, the USSR added a variety of economic and diplomatic inducements to its arsenal.) The Emergence of Bipolarity Like previous hegemonic shocks, the outcome of the war both transformed and clarified the distribution of power in the international system. The continent had ended the war in ruins, both physically and economically. “What is Europe now?” asked Churchill in 1947. “It is a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding-­ground of pestilence and hate.”14 France and Britain, first-­rank European powers for centuries, were reduced to supplicants reliant on American intervention. The French decline was made clear by the humiliating defeat of 1940, followed by four years of subservient occupation. As late as 1938, British military strategy positioned France as the continent’s preeminent military power and the bulwark against German aggression. But in a few weeks, Judt writes, France “ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a 12. Westad 2005:39, 4–5. 13. Judt 2006. 14. Quoted in Bruun and Lee 1964:113.

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power, and despite De Gaulle’s best efforts in later decades it has never been one since.”15 Britain fared little better. Alone among the European states, it was perceived as somewhat equal to the two superpowers, at least in the closing stages and the immediate aftermath of the war. But fighting had left the country nearly bankrupt and unable to maintain its far-­flung empire. It emerged from the conflict “exhausted, impoverished, and numb,” becoming the largest debtor nation in the world while shedding a quarter of its wealth.16 In 1941, a former League of Nations official declared that British finance had become “an annex to the American financial power.”17 For the defeated Axis states, feared conquerors only three years earlier, the decline was even more dramatic. Their industries were in ruins, their populations scattered, the reputations of their regimes irretrievably damaged both by the defeat and their wartime conduct. Per capita industrial output in the postwar Axis countries was less than half of its prewar levels; in Italy and Japan output returned to its 1910 levels, in Germany to roughly 1890. German living standards, roughly equal to Great Britain’s before the war, were barely one-­ third of British levels in 1946, on par with Peru.18 The attempt to modernize through fascism had failed. For a decade the Nazi regime had been hailed as a paragon of efficiency and order; now, in the words of a 1945 New York Times editorial, it was “a beaten and discredited system.”19 The United States and the Soviet Union, on the other hand, began the postwar period with their strength and reputations greatly enhanced. Militarily, the Soviet Union had achieved a stunning victory. The defeat of Nazi Germany, which many prewar contemporaries saw as an industrial goliath, “suggested that the Soviet system had considerable real-­world vigor.”20 The outcome of the hegemonic shock thus played a key role in the attraction exerted by communism in the postwar period.21 The Red Army was the first to enter Berlin, and only the quick advance of General Montgomery blocked it from moving north through Germany toward Denmark. The collapse of the German juggernaut left a power vacuum in central and eastern Europe that the USSR rushed to fill. At the end of the war it had four million active soldiers, and controlled a territory far larger than its 15. Judt 2005:113. 16. Lundestad 1986:264; Ikenberry 2000:167. 17. Quoted in World Citizens Association 1941:68–69. 18. Frieden 2006:261. 19. New York Times 10/14/1945. 20. Stokes 1993:8. 21. Even before the war concluded, Aron (1944:194) observed that communism “profits from and will go on profiting from the enormous prestige reflected on the Soviet regime and people by the victories of the Russian armies.”

Soviet share of hegemonic power (%)

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50

40

30

20

10 1930

FIGURE 5.3.

1940

1950

1960

Soviet share of hegemonic power, 1930–­1960.

prewar or even tsarist boundaries. Its army dominated half the continent and occupied an unbroken cordon sanitaire from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The USSR’s victory, Furet writes, “had proved its military strength, its social cohesion, the patriotism of its population. It lent Stalin an unassailable negotiating position at the end of the war. . . . Communism had won the war and thus a new lease on history.”22 The Soviet victory was not just military but economic, legitimating the communist system of production. The country’s economy, though profoundly shaken by the war, was recovering rapidly. Living standards improved quickly, albeit from a very low point, and industrial production doubled between 1945 and 1950, soon exceeding prewar levels. These economic trends were especially important because they signaled the system’s viability to skeptical observers in the developing world. The war had been communism’s greatest challenge and, through the very magnitude of that challenge, its savior. This potent combination of real-­world success and ideological appeal enabled the USSR both to intimidate its neighbors and to attract admirers within them, sometimes at the same time. The initial attraction of communism was amplified by its anti-­fascist stance. During the war, communists were prominent in resistance and partisan movements, and with the exception of Poland, anti-­fascist resistance politics skewed to the left. As a result, the defeat of fascism was “even more of a political victory for the Communist idea than for the democratic idea.”23 And for European intellectuals who witnessed the decay of the old bourgeois order, communism held the promise of a transcendent future. 22. Furet 1999:350. 23. Furet 1999:356.

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The United States held an undeniable advantage over the Soviet Union in economic influence and industrial development. But when it came to ideological appeal, communism more than held its own. The United States, Judt writes, “seemed economically carnivorous and culturally obscurantist: a deadly combination,” and fear of American domination brought many reluctant converts into the Soviet camp.24 Even the eventual communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948, writes Milan Kundera, took place “not in bloodshed or violence, but to the cheers of about half the population”: Yes, say what you will—the Communists were more intelligent. They had a grandiose program, a plan for a brand-­new world in which everyone would find his place. The Communists’ opponents had no great dream; all they had was a few moral principles, stale and lifeless, to patch up the tattered trousers of the established order.25 The brutal repression of Eastern Europe has overshadowed this element of the Soviet appeal, but in the years immediately after the war the USSR exerted influence not only through its armies but also through the cultural and ideological prestige afforded by its success. Without this wartime triumph, communism might have shared the fate of other alluring and failed attempts at modernity, and indeed seemed to be on the way to doing so in the 1930s. All the ideological attractions of communism were in place well before 1945. But the expected wave of revolutions after the 1917 Bolshevik victory never materialized, despite Lenin’s expectations. As with Italian fascism, ideological innovation alone was insufficient for catalyzing an institutional wave. The postwar years therefore “constituted exceptionally good vintages for the Communist idea,” writes Furet, “because they were accompanied by the most powerful god in history—that of victory.”26 Whatever the nebulous appeal of its ideology, in the final count it was Soviet ascent to great-­power status that paved the way for a credible communist alternative around the world. Despite initial setbacks, “the USSR had out-­produced and out-­fought the Nazi colossus, ripping the heart from the magnificent German military machine,” writes Judt. “Stalin’s policies were vindicated, his pre-­war crimes largely forgotten. Success, as Stalin well understood, is a winning formula.”27 The United States was the other major beneficiary of the hegemonic transition. Spurred by vast increases in military production, domestic standards of living actually rose during the war; its postwar GDP was more than half the world’s total.28 With only 6 percent of the world’s population, it produced 24. Judt 2005:220. 25. Kundera 1979:8. 26. Furet 1999:361. 27. Judt 2005:165–66. 28. As Kennedy (1987:357–58) notes, among the leading states, the United States “was the

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nearly half of the world’s electricity and eight times more cars than Britain, France, and Germany combined.29 By 1945 it owned or controlled 60 percent of global gold and oil reserves and was the world’s largest creditor and biggest source of international liquidity. It was the home of over half of the world’s economic production, the globe’s biggest exporter, supplier of half of the world’s shipping, and the leader in advanced technologies.30 Its merchant fleet, a third the size of Europe’s in 1939, was more than twice as large by 1947.31 Economic power inevitably translated into military dominance: by 1945 the United States had 12.5 million servicemen, 7.5 million of them stationed in sixty-­four countries around the world.32 By the mid-­1950s, the United States had around 450 bases in thirty-­six countries and held alliance treaties with forty-­eight nations ranging from Australia to Saudi Arabia.33 Outside the Soviet sphere, the United States possessed total command of the global commons, both on the water and in the air. It held a monopoly on nuclear weapons and had an overwhelming command of the air, with over two thousand heavy bombers and over a thousand long-­range B-­29s. The power disparity between European and American economies was staggering, and much greater than in the aftermath of the First World War. In 1939 the combined economies of Europe, Japan, and the USSR were twice the size of the United States; by 1946, the United States was larger than all of them together. The steel production of Germany, Britain, and the USSR combined was less than half that of the United States, having been 15 percent larger only seven years earlier.34 As Harold Laski wrote, “America bestrides the world like a colossus; neither Rome at the height of its power nor Great Britain in the period of its economic supremacy enjoyed an influence so direct, so profound, or so pervasive.”35 Unlike previous hegemonic shocks, bipolar competition dictated active global involvement by both superpowers. Both their immense power and their messianic visions encouraged the export of their influence to all corners of the world. Both thus “needed to change the world in order to prove the universal applicability of their ideologies,” writes Westad.36 This compulsion lent a messianic undertone to their foreign policies that further spurred the waves. only country which became richer—in fact, much richer—rather than poorer because of the war.” 29. Lundestad 1986:264. 30. Ikenberry 2000:167. 31. Frieden 2006:261. 32. Ferguson 2004:86. 33. Lundestad 1986:265. 34. Frieden 2006:261–2. 35. Laski 1947:641. 36. Westad 2005:4–5.

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US share of hegemonic power (%)

80

60

40

20 1930

FIGURE 5.4.

1940

1950

1960

American share of hegemonic power, 1930–­1960.

The Communist Wave The Romanian diplomat Silviu Brucan mordantly described his country’s forced Sovietization as a journey from underdeveloped capitalism to underdeveloped socialism.37 In the years after 1945, about a hundred million people passed into Soviet jurisdiction. Governments across Eastern Europe adopted the major features of the Soviet state: a one-­party dictatorship, a centralized state-­planned economy, show trials and purges of local communists, and obedience to an official ideology. It was only in a few cases, however, that communists came to power through overt violence, though its threat lurked in the background almost everywhere. In four countries—Poland, East Germany, Romania, and Hungary—the reforms were imposed exclusively by military force.38 But the native popularity of communism varied widely across countries, and in some places it was embraced by a substantial part of the population, especially in the early postwar period. In Yugoslavia and Albania, communist partisans enjoyed widespread indigenous support, which soon enabled them to break away from increasingly heavy-­handed Soviet dominance. Czechoslovakia probably had the highest degree of genuine Soviet support. (“We came to an agreement about everything!” exulted Beneš after returning from his talks with Stalin.39) The country’s communist party was the only one in the region to remain legal in the interwar period and was therefore able to reconstitute itself relatively 37. Brucan 1993:ix. 38. Hobsbawm 1994:395. 39. Quoted in Borsody 1980:190.

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quickly after the war. In the genuinely free 1946 elections, the Communists received 38 percent of the vote, while the Social Democrats received another 12 percent.40 In the immediate wake of the war, Eastern Europe saw “enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and respect for its achievements,” argues Mazower, and the Red Army’s considerable prestige “was not immediately dispelled by its soldiers’ ill-­disciplined behaviour.”41 During the Nazi occupation, the Soviet Union symbolized freedom rather than tyranny. As a result, “the Soviet occupiers were at first welcomed as liberators and harbingers of change and reform.”42 And even noncommunists saw opportunities in the rapid growth of state and party institutions. The postwar purges provided a macabre means of social advancement, as aspiring functionaries could outmaneuver potential rivals with readily accepted denunciations—a grim replica of the USSR’s own purges a decade before. One of the paradoxes of postwar Eastern Europe, notes Vinen, was that between 1945 and 1948—a time of repression, political intimidation, show trials, and executions—was also a time when “enthusiasm for communism was most intense,” and when local leaders “made the deliberate choice to attach the fate of their countries to that of the Soviet Union.”43 The region’s readiness for reform magnified the Soviet appeal. As Borsody argues, “the oppressed and humiliated masses, resentful of the past, were overwhelmingly in favor of radical change.”44 The old elites had been discredited, the quisling and philofascist administrations overthrown, the upper classes removed from state bureaucracies. The immense pent-­up desire for change, facilitated by the breakdown of social order during the war, made communism a palatable and even alluring option. As the Red Army began to liberate Eastern Europe, argues Seton-­Watson, there was a general desire not only for peace, but for an end to fascist regimes and for a social revolution. There was also a widespread desire, among both the educated elite and the masses, for friendly relations with Russia, whose military heroism they admired and whose revolutionary and democratic slogans they heard with sympathy.45 The youth and the intelligentsia were especially inspired by the prospect of fundamental reform. Polish exile and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called postwar communism a “New Faith” for Eastern European intellectuals, who 40. Halperin 2004:253. 41. Mazower 1998:256. 42. Judt 2005:130. 43. Vinen 2000:338. 44. Borsody 1980:159. 45. Seton-­Watson 1962:23.

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now had a vital role to play in the Soviet system. No longer jesters for plutocrats, they could now become, in Stalin’s words, nothing less than “engineers of human souls.” In this way, communism presented a way for intellectuals to become “reality’s deliberate designers rather than its plaything.”46 The Czech communist (and later Prague Spring leader) Zdeněk Mlynář recalled the excitement surrounding the arrival of the Red Army. At that time, he writes, the Soviet Union was “a land of hope for all who desired a radical departure from the past,” and Stalin the man “to lead the fight. Today it sounds absurd, but in those first postwar years it seemed different.”47 Echoing Milosz, he described the thrill of suddenly finding himself on the right side of history. “Your inner world is transformed,” he wrote; “you have become almost overnight a superior being with the correct views.”48 Adding to their appeal in the region, the Soviets did not immediately appear to pursue hardline policies. In many ways, Judt notes, early Soviet strategy “really was reassuringly moderate,” with “very little talk of ‘Socialism’ as a goal.”49 The initial changes focused on agrarian reforms—land redistribution to peasants rather than forcible collectivization. Private property was for the most part left alone (except for the confiscation of “fascist” property, especially in eastern Germany), and the USSR did not pursue a policy of economic nationalization. Even in countries where coercion played a greater role early on, “the new regime initially enjoyed a temporary legitimacy and, for a time, some genuine support,” argues Hobsbawm. The apparent “energy and determination” of the communists’ reconstruction efforts “commanded a broad, if reluctant, assent.”50 Stalin assured the West that the region would evolve not into Soviet-­style socialism but a “people’s democracy”—an alliance of workers, peasants, and the bourgeoisie who would build mixed economies.51 An echo of the social democracy model in the West, it sustained the hope of Soviet-­ American postwar cooperation and made the initial push for reforms more palatable both inside Eastern Europe and to onlookers in the West, some of whom cautiously granted legitimacy to Soviet occupation. “It was great Russia that saved the Slavs from servitude or destruction,” declared a Le Monde editorial, “and it is normal that they now show their gratitude toward it by grouping under its aegis.”52 46. Spufford 2010:12. 47. Mlynář 1978:2. 48. Mlynář 1978:3. 49. Judt 2005:131. For noncommunists, according to Mazower (1998:257), Soviet policy “in the first two or three years after liberation encouraged their hopes by its relative flexibility and gradualism.” 50. Hobsbawm 1994:396. 51. Frieden 2006:274. 52. Quoted in Revel 1983:255.

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Share of global power (%)

40

Communist states 30

20

Communist states (excluding USSR)

10

0 1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

FIGURE 5.5. The communist wave (the share of global power held by communist states, measured by CINC).

The Soviet emphasis on industrialization also resonated with people in backward agrarian states seeking a quick path to modernity. The economic appeal of communism long outlasted its initial ideological attraction. Between 1950 and 1965, GNP grew at unprecedented levels across Eastern Europe, averaging 9.2 percent in Yugoslavia and 7.7 percent in Romania. Between 1950 and 1973, per capita output in Bulgaria and Romania more than tripled. Even relative laggards like Hungary and Czechoslovakia grew at an average rate of 4.7 and 4.8 percent, respectively.53 The early years of Soviet rule saw the beginnings of massive industrialization and urbanization, while the creation of enormous welfare programs quickly raised life expectancy close to West European levels. Reducing the postwar communist wave to forced impositions therefore understates the real appeal of communism after the war. “In many parts of Europe,” writes Brown, “there was ideational change as well as the strategic change brought about by Soviet force of arms. Socialism was increasingly believed to be a more just and more rational way of organizing an economy than capitalism.”54 The outcome of the hegemonic shock thus provided a degree of legitimacy to Soviet occupations, opened up political space for radical social change, brought the promise of Soviet-­led economic development, and assuaged fears of Soviet domination by moderate Soviet policies in the initial phase of the postwar order. The result was an unprecedented increase in the number of communist states (see figures 5.5 and 5.6). 53. Fowkes 1993:197; Frieden 2006:337. Measured as average annual GNP growth rate at constant prices. 54. Brown 2009:148.

Proportion of communist states (%)

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15

10

5

0 1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

FIGURE 5.6. The number of communist states as a proportion of all states in the international system.

None of this is to minimize the cruelty of Soviet domination, which was from the start characterized by brutal repression. “People confessed to improbable crimes at grotesque show trials,” writes Vinen, “and thousands were executed, imprisoned or driven from their jobs.”55 Yet portraying the Sovietization of Eastern Europe as a triumph of evil misses the murky ideological loyalties circulating across the region.56 In the postwar years, argues Mazower, “well-­informed and impartial observers saw things rather differently. They remembered the inter-­war legacy of failed democracy, economic depression and ethnic strife—grim memories which weakened opposition to communism inside and outside the region.”57 The coercive element of the early communist wave in Eastern Europe was piecemeal and improvised rather than methodical.58 Bulgaria and Romania became puppet states as early as the spring of 1945, while the takeover of Hungary was not completed until 1947. In Czechoslovakia, Stalin felt comfortable enough to withdraw the army, and full control was not established until 1948. Finland was left alone in return for a promise of neutrality, and direct Soviet influence was minimal in Albania and Yugoslavia, where the communists came to power indigenously. In 1948 the Russian-­French essayist Boris Souvarine characterized Stalin’s policy in Eastern Europe as a mix of “caution, 55. Vinen 2000:338. 56. See, e.g., Leffler’s (1999) critique of Gaddis for his Manichean take on the Cold War. 57. Mazower 1998:252. 58. Leffler 1999, Zubok and Pleshakov 1996:277, and Mastny 1996:21. Mazower (1998:259), for example, describes pre-­1947 Soviet foreign policy as “hesitant and uncertain.”

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patience, intrigue, infiltration, corruption, terrorism, exploitation of human weakness.”59 Whatever its initial attractions, the appeals of communism in Eastern Europe were limited by its coercive nature.60 Once the Red Army transformed from liberator to oppressor, “representing not a universally valid ideology but an alien Empire intent on maintaining and extending its power,” writes Howard, “they lost all their universalist moral authority.”61 The decades-­long maintenance of communism of Eastern Europe was therefore not so much a process of consolidation as one of coerced ossification, resulting in ostensibly entrenched but brittle regimes that were ready to crack once Soviet support was withdrawn. After 1948 and especially after Stalin’s death, the focus of the Soviet wave shifted from Eastern Europe to the developing world, where the attractions of communism still managed to retain their haloed glow. Communism and the Developing World The expansion of communism into the developing world rested largely on the desire to emulate Soviet successes and to benefit from potential Soviet patronage. In the space of a generation, Russia had progressed “from a condition of backwardness, inefficiency, and widespread illiteracy to the position of a superpower, second only to the United States,” write Bruun and Lee, and its leaders “insisted that Russia’s rapid progress proved that Communism was a more dynamic and efficient system than Capitalism.”62 In the early Cold War period, this adoption often took place even without overt material support from the Soviet Union. Stalin had little interest in movements he could not control. Chinese communists had received arms from the USSR, but their 1949 victory depended very little on direct Soviet support. In Africa, the USSR remained aloof until the mid-­1950s; most of its direct sponsorship of non-­European movements began in earnest at least a decade after the war. But even in the absence of direct hegemonic engagement, communism took root because of its status as an alternative path to modernity. The Soviet victory had clearly demonstrated the plausibility of this path; nascent communist movements that had operated in the developing world since the 1920s suddenly found their ranks reinforced by a swelling number of converts. Communist ideas found fertile ground in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—regions 59. Quoted in Revel 1983:97. 60. By the late 1940s, the Soviet Union “had exhausted the credit it had drawn from the generalized hatred of Germany” (Furet 1999:410). 61. Howard 1991:128. 62. Bruun and Lee 1964:99. “In the decolonized world, following the inspiration of the Soviet Union, they were to see the way forward as socialism,” argues Hobsbawm (1994:177).

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in which communism was not so much an alternative to nationalism but a universal substitute for it, since it offered a vision of national development coupled with a transnational ideology that had proven its worth against Western powers. The non-­European communist wave achieved its most visible early successes in Asia. A Soviet-­occupied zone was established in North Korea in 1945, while the Americans occupied the south of the country, replicating the division of Germany in Europe. China’s adoption of communism in 1949, while retaining its own national idiosyncrasies, was the first major case of emulation; as the country’s slogan of the times proclaimed: “Today’s Soviet Union will be tomorrow’s China.” Recent archival evidence, Leffler notes, has shown that Mao “looked to Stalin for advice, support, and a model for communist development” more than Cold War historians had previously realized.63 China was always obstinately independent from Moscow, but both regimes shared “a common sense of ideological euphoria—a conviction that the forces of history were on their side,” argues Gaddis.64 For China, the appeal of communism was obvious: “Marxism allows the Chinese, who suffered such humiliation at the hands of the materially superior West, to overcome their complexes,” wrote Aron in 1954. “A country that joins the camp of ‘progress’ and ‘socialism’ suddenly finds itself in the avant-­garde of mankind.”65 As Mao himself wrote in 1950, there were many similarities between China and pre-­1917 Russia: “Feudal oppression was the same. Economic and cultural backwardness was common to both countries. Both were backward. China more so than Russia. . . . The conclusion was reached that we must advance along the path taken by the Russians.”66 Elsewhere in the region, the First Indochina War created a communist-­led North Vietnam that closely imitated the Soviet model with collective agriculture, state ownership of the means of production, and centralized economic planning. In a way, French imperialism had forced the regime’s hand. Early attempts to promulgate a liberal regime in Vietnam had failed because anti-­ colonial sentiment entailed a preference for communism over even “a nominal constitutional connection with the French Republic.”67 Absent immediate French withdrawal, the Soviet Union could always trump democratic sympathies by playing the anti-­imperial card. Other attempts were less successful, but their persistence demonstrated the powerful attraction of revolutionary communism in the region. As in Eu63. Leffler 1999:508. 64. Gaddis 1997:83. 65. Aron 1954:227. 66. Quoted in Watnick 1952:27. 67. Roy 1951:233.

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rope, the local communists gained prestige from anti-­Japanese resistance, and after 1947 the USSR began encouraging anti-­imperialist rebellions. Armed communist uprisings took place in Malaya, led by Chinese communists; in the Philippines, led by the communist Hukbalahap; in Hyderabad in India; and at Madiun in Indonesia in 1948. In these conflicts the communists portrayed themselves, with some success, as champions of anti-­Western resistance. In the Middle East as well, communist ideology began to attract increased support after the war, especially among nationalists and intellectuals. The war brought “considerable indigenous communist expansion in the Arab world,” argues Ismael: “The pre-­eminent military role of the USSR in the war against Germany, the concomitant popularity of the Soviet Union, and newfound legality or semi-­legality in many areas for Arab communist parties or communist-­sponsored organizations all spurred communist recruitment.”68 Communist parties made large gains in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and to a lesser extent Turkey. “The power of attraction of Communism as a creed should never be underrated,” wrote Laqueur in 1955, “and it is nowhere so strong as in underdeveloped countries, such as those of the Middle East.”69 Enumerating the attractions of communism in the region, the Lebanese foreign minister Charles Malik listed its “social vision, its total character, its total interpretation of life—its messianic idea, namely, that it is the wave of the future. Also, the promises it holds—that it will solve all these economic and social injustices.”70 Ideologically, the leaders of newly independent states saw themselves as “engaged on the same sort of project of emancipation, progress and modernization” as the USSR.71 They sought to replicate Western modernity without recapitulating the vices of a system permanently disgraced by colonial exploitation. Even without Soviet proselytizing, therefore, the desire to distance themselves from former occupiers was important in pushing the new states toward communism. Here the USSR could present itself as an anti-­colonial savior “fighting the dragon of the West.”72 The Nazis had employed similar tactics in the interwar years by acting as a foil to French and British colonialism, and the USSR now took up the torch. Western democracy, for all its promises of 68. Ismael 2005:18. 69. Laqueur 1955:25. In postwar Iran, communism appealed to the intelligentsia, argues Seton-­Watson (1962:71), “and it was not difficult, with Soviet financial and political aid, to build up a following among the urban poor.” Three members of Iran’s communist party Tudeh were brought into the new government in 1946, but the party was banned three years later after a member attempted to assassinate the shah. 70. Quoted in Bernstein 1956:624. 71. Hobsbawm 1994:435. 72. S. G. Marks 2003:311, 313.

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freedom, was thoroughly tainted by its association with imperialism. As Laqueur wrote in 1955: Capitalism is identified with imperialist rule and democracy is something the imperialist powers allegedly practice at home. Democracy has not been a militant creed and it has not provided the answers to many questions of Asia. . . . [O]n the other hand, Communism has had all the force of a secular religion—in Asia even more than in Europe.73 The choice for new states, therefore, was not between democracy and communism but between a corrupt past and a promising future. This was the root of its attraction—whatever Soviet communism could become, it would not be the continuation of the old ways of life. Communism promised to empower the meek, and for that reason among the poor its slogans often resonated more than democratic ideals. “Without having read a word of Marx or Lenin,” wrote Ulam, an illiterate peasant who is being squeezed economically . . . experiences almost instinctively the feelings that Marxism formulates in a theoretical language: a sense of alienation springing from his loss of property and status, and an antagonism toward the people and authority personifying the mysterious forces that have made his previous social existence impossible.74 For the oppressed, Ulam argued, communism was not an exercise in abstruse theory but “a systematic expression of their own feelings,” an ideology that “makes sense out of an apparently senseless world.” Western democracy, on the other hand, required a long process of economic development and social habituation, and therefore appeared vastly more alien and convoluted. Communism offered “a convincing demonology” of a modernity whose evils could be attributed to the impersonal forces of capitalism.75 But more importantly, it also offered something in exchange. It possessed “the respectability of a great philosophical lineage, the democratic stamp of approval, the dignity of science,” writes Furet. “What could be a better conduit for resentment of the elite than the poor, colonized, or dependent countries of the world?”76 The socioeconomic structure of Third World countries—an immense and impoverished peasantry and a small, politically weak middle class—was far 73. Laqueur 1955:21. 74. Ulam 1960:284–85. 75. Ulam 1960:284–85. 76. Furet 1999:370. Third World nations “were deeply impressed by the Russian accomplishment in transforming a backward agricultural society into a vigorous industrial society,” write Bruun and Lee (1964:99).

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more conducive to communist appeals. “The less capitalistic a society is, and the less developed its productive forces, the more favorable are the conditions it offers to Bolshevism,” argued Aron in 1954.77 By co-­opting “claims of social justice for the marginalized majorities in the agrarian world,” argues Smith, “the communists were advancing an appeal that liberal democracy had traditionally been slow to understand.”78 Communism also gave the elites of the developing world a convincing justification for strong centralized rule. A communist regime was perfectly adapted to the self-­image of Third World revolutionary elites as a group of qualified and dedicated functionaries whose mission was to tell the backward and ignorant masses what to do. It provided them both with a moral and intellectual basis for what they sought to do, and with an assurance that it would work.79 Such top-­down modernization also appealed to new leaders trying to build states from scratch. Variations of the Soviet model thus spread not only “because it swayed legions of native idealists,” argues Marks, but also because its centralized style of governance suited itself to the revolutionaries seeking to remold their societies.80 Through this paradoxical promise of mass emancipation and elite empowerment, communism found resonance among a large swath of Third World social groups—the peasants, the intelligentsia, and the political elite. It became, Ulam wrote, “the natural ideology of underdeveloped societies in today’s world.”81 This was particularly true for economic reforms. The postwar economic climate favored the adoption of central planning, which ceased to be a Soviet curiosity and became an accepted model of development. Nowhere was the appeal of state-­led development more clear than in the developing world, which lacked a history of large-­scale industrial enterprise or private sources of capital. Capitalism required “a sacrifice of social conditions to accelerate industrialization,” writes Frieden, but centralized economies “seemed to have achieved both growth and social equity.”82 Communism served as a model for emerging out of agrarian backwardness through state planning—a process that, moreover, had been stamped with the imprimatur of scientific rationality. 77. Aron 1954:210, 228. 78. Smith 1994:185. 79. Clapham 1992:19. 80. S. G. Marks 2003:320. 81. Ulam 1960:285, 287, original emphasis. As a result, he concluded, in many parts of the world “Communism has proselytizing powers superior to liberalism.” 82. Frieden 2006:338.

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The adoption of communist-­style planning did not even require a full-­ fledged embrace of Marxist ideology. Simply the desire for strong government intervention in the economy nudged developing states into the communist camp. Governments around the world nationalized major industries and developed a large public sector that approached the Soviet Union in its scope. While stopping short of adopting a fully planned economy, “a majority of Third World leaders followed the Soviet Union in giving governments direct or indirect dominance over economic life,” argues Marks.83 In Egypt, for example, after Nasser took power in a 1952 revolution, the state nationalized the country’s banks and insurance companies as well as most industries, creating a Soviet-­style command economy. It owned 90 percent of factories employing more than ten workers and accounted for nearly half of industrial output and a third of the labor force.84 At the same time, Nasser lacked the ideological rigidity of European Marxists. He was ambivalent toward communism, respecting it “as the inspiration of much that was of social worth in today’s world,” but also doubting “its materialistic basis.”85 He rejected communism’s contempt for religion, claiming that it is “impossible to be a good Muslim and a good communist.”86 He even suppressed revolutionary communists, seeing them as a domestic threat and an obstacle to a union with Iraq. Nevertheless, his sympathies were never with the West; the 1955 Bandung conference solidified his distaste for capitalism and put him firmly on the path to pan-­Arab socialism—a decision fortified by the withdrawal of Western support for the Aswan Dam and the 1956 Suez crisis. His anti-­capitalism stance was reflected in the country’s National Charter, which employed Marxist tropes to proclaim the worker as “the lord of the machine, not a cog in the production mechanism.”87 India, likewise, “emulated aspects of Soviet planning” with a series of five-­ year plans for national industrialization.88 Jawaharlal Nehru, who governed the country between 1947 and 1964 and had spent time in the USSR during the 1920s, encouraged extensive state investment in manufacturing. Between 1951 and 1966, the state accounted for half of all industrial investment. Yet India combined communist-­style central planning with a Western-­style democracy. Like Nasser, Nehru adopted a sort of pragmatic socialism. During his 1955 visit to the USSR, he described its people as “happy and cheerful,” and “if there are complaints they are about relatively minor matters.”89 At the same time, he 83. S. G. Marks 2003:329. 84. Frieden 2006:318. 85. Said 1972:40. 86. Quoted in Brockway 1963:90. 87. Quoted in Brockway 1963:96. 88. Frieden 2006:314. 89. Quoted in Johnson 2001:475.

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took care to protect and defend private businesses, arrested thousands of communists on charges of inciting violence, and banned the sale of communist literature on government property. Asia, the Middle East, and later Africa became contested battlefields where the influence of the two superpowers shifted and overlapped. The amalgam of American and Soviet institutions in developing states reflected the two giants’ struggle for influence and their shared plausibility as models for emulation. Communism, as a result, was rarely adopted wholesale. Third World leaders sometimes adopted an à la carte approach to emulation, borrowing “from the Soviet example what they felt would best allow them to achieve their nationalist and power-­political ends, which meant sometimes embellishing revolutionary ideologies with localisms and sometimes leaving ideology behind altogether.”90 In many cases, the apparatus of the state was simply too weak to imitate the omnipresent Soviet regime or to insert itself too deeply into the economy. And most Third World elites were attracted to communism not for its glorification of the proletariat but for its practical techniques of nation-­ building and social control. Regardless of their motives, the spread of “partial imitations” like Afro-­Communism, argues Arnason, made “the prospect of sustained Soviet expansion seem more plausible” than it appears in retrospect.91 As with fascism, the defining feature of emulation was not the detail of the mimicry but the source of the inspiration. No single communist-­inspired regime “was an exact replica of the Soviet exemplar, and few approximated an ideal of the totalitarian state,” writes Marks. “But whether they were formally communist or not, in all such cases Soviet inspiration has been operative at a basic level.”92 Many could be placed into a category that Crawford Young dubbed “populist socialism,” including Nkrumeh’s Ghana, Toure’s Guinea, Nyerere’s Tanzania, or Ne Win’s Burma.93 These regimes shared with traditional communism a rule by a single party but were far less expansive in their control over agricultural production or social life. Yet the centrality of state-­led economic planning and nationalization of major companies placed them into the Soviet camp. Like democracy and fascism before it, communism was not a monolithic phenomenon, particularly when applied to the specific needs of the developing world. Asian Communism, for example, tended to be more gradualist and agrarian, focusing on land reforms and redistribution, at least at the outset.94 90. S. G. Marks 2003:314. 91. Arnason 2000:81. 92. S. G. Marks 2003:324. 93. Young 1982. 94. Frieden 2006:322.

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The principle of class war found little resonance in countries whose rural social structures did not resemble nineteenth-­century Europe. Yet however incomplete their resemblance to the USSR, the Soviet-­leaning regimes of Africa and Asia during the Cold War were “modelled to a greater or lesser extent on the example of the Soviet Union,” argues Clapham. They constituted “a recognisable and coherent model of political and economic management which has been both defined as socialist by themselves, and generally recognised as such by others.”95 Even in its diluted version, communism presented a number of attractions to both leaders and masses in developing states. Beyond offering a rejection of the imperialists, Soviet-­style socialism offered enormous economic, social, and political advantages. Domestically, it presented the promise of rapid economic development without exploitative capitalism. It seemed to accommodate the tensions that plagued ethnically divided states by integrating them into an ideologically united community. And to rulers who cared little for ideology, it seemed to deliver “an intoxicating vision of a people moulded to their leaders’ need.”96 Internationally, it provided a way out of the capitalist global superstructure, a repudiation of neocolonial dependence, and membership in a club of states loudly committed to social justice and the advancement of backward countries into the ranks of modernity. The Communist Appeal in Western Europe The same factors that bolstered communism’s appeal outside Europe—its grand vision of history, its rejection of vulgar capitalism, its new superpower status, and the legitimacy associated with its victory over fascism—also strengthened its appeal in the democratic core of Western Europe. Here, in fact, the absence of actual communist regimes magnified its appeal by sustaining an abstract and alluring fantasy unsullied by the messy implementation of actual communist rule. Despite the Western reticence of the interwar years, the struggle and eventual victory over Hitler temporarily cast Soviet intentions in a benign light. “Faith in Soviet Russia was nourished by a belief then current, that communism could progress from tyranny to democracy, a belief which reached its highest peak in the West during the war,” argues Borsody.97 As Aron wrote in 1944, the communists have “dispelled some instinctive fears by their heroism in the struggle against Germany.”98 Certain wartime shifts in Soviet policy 95. Clapham 1992:14. 96. Clapham 1992:18. 97. Borsody 1980:127. 98. Aron 1944:194.

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appeared to signal a newly accommodationist approach—the official recognition of the Orthodox Church, the 1943 dissolution of the Comintern, and the intensification of the Pan-­Slavic movement (seen as a rejection of subversive internationalism and a return to wholesome old-­fashioned nationalism). These were stopgap measures designed to placate Western allies and bolster Russian patriotism, but at the moment they could be selectively interpreted as the normalization of a former pariah. As Simone de Beauvoir recalled in her autobiography, after the war “[t] here were no reservations in our [Western Europeans’] friendship for the U.S.S.R.; the sacrifices of the Russian people had proved that its leaders embodied its true wishes.”99 This was, needless to say, a selective interpretation. Russian sacrifices were inspired by a fight for survival rather than Marxist slogans, and the country’s wartime propaganda emphasized national heritage while dispensing with communist exhortations. Nevertheless, the communists had triumphed, and this triumph was sufficient to convince many that communism itself had been responsible. “The victory over fascism, even if it owed little to anything derivable from Marxism,” writes Müller, “legitimated the regime like nothing else during the history of the Soviet Union.”100 The result was a leftward shift across Western Europe. As the New York Times noted in 1945, the nature of democracy had been irretrievably transformed by the “inevitable shift toward the left which swept away many landmarks of the past.”101 In France and Italy in particular, communist parties “swelled with the momentum and the respect that came from having been the spearhead of the French Resistance and the Italian partisans.”102 The French communists numbered over 900,000 members while the Italian communists topped 1.7 million at the end of 1945, making them the largest party in both countries.103 Italy in fact had the largest communist party outside the Soviet bloc; in the 1946 elections it received a fifth of the total vote. In 1947 the French communist party engineered a general strike that paralyzed much of the country, and some of the nation’s newspapers predicted a communist takeover by the end of the year.104 Communism had always been a romantic project. For its followers, “great plans, great ideas and great interests take precedence over everything,” wrote Nikolai Bukharin in his last, pleading letter to Stalin shortly before his execu99. Beavoir 1963:7. 100. Müller 2011:88–9. 101. New York Times 10/14/45. 102. Walker 1994:30. 103. Walker 1994:30. 104. Bermeo 1994:162. At the time of France’s liberation in 1944, notes Furet (1999:391), public opinion leaned “more toward the left than at any other time in history.”

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tion.105 It “excited intellectuals in a way that neither Hitler nor (especially) liberal democracy could hope to match,” writes Judt. It was “exotic in locale and heroic in scale,” and so its crimes “were excused by many non-­Communist observers as the cost, so to speak, of doing business with History.”106 This allowed its supporters to present communism as a quest whose faults might be excused by the scope of its ambition. As Conquest writes: One of the things that gave even Stalinism its prestige in the West, even (or especially) among those who recognized that its methods were immensely ruthless, was the abstract, utopian notion that there was a certain horrible grandeur in what was going on. Men of ideas, who had profoundly considered the laws of history, were creating a new society and taking upon themselves the guilt of the necessary merciless action.107 Capitalism, on the other hand, portended a hollow materialistic existence, “a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead.”108 As Schumpeter had argued years before, capitalism was uniquely deft at eliciting contempt from the intellectuals who benefited from it. “The servitudes of industrial civilization, the harshness of human relations, the power of money, the puritan elements in American society—all this offends the susceptibilities of the intellectual bred in the European tradition,” wrote Raymond Aron in The Opium of the Intellectuals.109 Even the prospect of state repression offered the perverse pleasure of cultural importance: “The Soviet Union purges and subjugates the intellectuals, but at least it takes them seriously,” he wrote. “Persecution is more bearable to the intelligentsia than indifference.”110 Whatever its faults, revolutionary communism seemed to decisively reject bourgeois banality. Young intellectuals repulsed by the prospect of placid middle-­class existence were especially susceptible to Marxist charms.111 As Judt writes, Marxism held “a distinctive attraction” for decades after the war: “Marxism, we tend to forget, is a marvelously compelling account of how history works, and why it works. It is a comforting promise to anyone to learn that History is on your side, that progress is in your direction.”112 105. Quoted in Ferguson 2006:189. 106. Judt 2005:216. 107. Conquest 1999:7. 108. Spufford 2010:66. 109. Aron 1955:228. 110. Aron 1955:228, 300. 111. “A sizable contingent of the world’s anti-­Western intelligentsias saw Communist Russia as the embodiment of higher truth, the bearer of light from the exotic East,” writes S. G. Marks (2003:275). 112. Judt 2012:82.

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All these ideological attractions were now magnified by the material triumph of the Soviet superpower. For intellectuals, “here was Auschwitz and there was Stalingrad,” writes Lukes. The first “was a by-­product of a crisis in capitalist Europe”; the second “stood for the superiority of socialism.”113 The Soviet rise to superpower status now made the prospect of human reinvention not just appealing but obtainable. Even more than in Eastern Europe, where its implementation soon alienated communist supporters, the attraction of communism reflected a profound postwar disillusion with classical liberalism. “We need to take more seriously the prevalent sense that capitalism had totally failed in the 1930s,” argues Reynolds, “and that the massive Soviet victories in 1941–1945 seemed at least a partial vindication of the Communist system.”114 These manifold appeals may also help explain what Ferdinand Mount called the “asymmetry of indulgence” between the crimes of Hitler and Stalin in the eyes of Western intellectuals.115 The twenty million murdered by Stalin “will never command the sepulchral decorum of the Holocaust,” writes Martin Amis.116 Despite its atrocities, communism’s “humanist heredity”117—its utopian, Enlightenment-­bred idealism—lent it a degree of sympathy among the intelligentsia that would have been unthinkable for fascism. Though both fascism and communism sought to reforge the world, one vision appeared to be based on social justice and comradeship, the other on reptilian hatreds.118 The Democratic Wave The American victory had proven democracy’s ability to triumph over a respected and successful autocracy. John Kenneth Galbraith notes that during the war “it was widely believed that the ruthlessly exercised power of the German dictatorship was a major source of strength,” but the war’s outcome “revealed no advantage.”119 As the New York Times concluded in 1945, it is “apparent that democracy has not only held its own, but is stronger than ever

113. Lukes 1997:249. 114. Reynolds 1996:658. 115. Quoted in Ash 1984:123. 116. Amis 2002:88. 117. Tismaneanu 2014:69. 118. In a speculative twist, Amis (2002:83–85) argues that the barbarities practiced by the two tyrants were of very different kinds. The unsettling modernity of Hitler’s crime—its industrial scale and bureaucratic precision—reflects our own civilization and thereby repels us. Stalin’s cruelty is intelligible because it is deliberately arbitrary, sprung from the mind of a “tiny, cautious, insecure, cruel, nocturnal and endlessly suspicious” man. (Hobsbawm 1994:389.) His atrocities are crude in their brutality and therefore easier to understand, assimilate, and dismiss. 119. Galbraith 1967:142–3.

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and carries a greater appeal to more people than ever before.”120 The American victory, wrote Isaiah Berlin, “strengthened democracy everywhere,” by demonstrating that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government; that power and order are not identical with a strait jacket of doctrine, whether economic or political; that it is possible to reconcile individual liberty and a loose texture of society with the indispensable minimum of organization and authority.121 The outcome of the war, argued Kohn in 1949, “has reinvigorated democracy. It has shown surprising strength in its mobilization of material and moral resources under full preservation of individual liberty.”122 In his defeat, Hitler joined a long list of interwar skeptics who had dismissed the ability of democratic states to effectively manage a modern economy or win large-­scale wars. He “persistently, and dramatically” underestimated the United States, writes Hobsbawm, “because he thought democracies incapable of action.”123 The outcome of the hegemonic shock credibly (though not permanently) repudiated democratic defeatism. It “proved that America could defeat evil on a global scale,” writes Westad, and was thus a victory for the “American way of life itself. It had outproduced and outgunned its enemies; now the time had come to transform both enemies and friends in one’s own image.”124 As Simone de Beauvoir wrote shortly after the war, America was “the country which had sent our deliverance; it was the future on the march; it was abundance, and infinite horizons.”125 As America’s erstwhile rivals struggled with postwar recovery, their economies looked toward the United States as a source of capital, resources, even food. Unlike in 1919, the United States played a more visible and widely acknowledged part in ending the war, securing itself a decisive role in shaping postwar reforms. America’s industrial output, concluded the journalist Hanson Baldwin in 1945, had “provided the sinews of conflict for all the Allies. Without it victory would have been impossible and Germany’s will to fight would never have been undermined and her armies defeated.”126 Moreover, the expansion of American influence was encouraged by the very target of that expansion, Europe itself. Many European leaders were will120. New York Times 10/14/1945. 121. Berlin 1955:67. 122. Kohn 1949:217, although “full preservation” is far too sanguine, given the violation of civil liberties in wartime United States. 123. Hobsbawm 1994:41. 124. Westad 2005: 20–21. 125. Beauvoir 1963:17.  126. Baldwin 1945:528.

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Global level of democracy

11

10

9

8

7 1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

The second democratic wave. Average global level of democracy (Polity IV).

FIGURE 5.7.

ing to accept American influence as protection against communist upheaval, and as result the United States could dictate the terms of the postwar settlement to a much greater degree than in 1919. At Versailles, Frieden writes, America “had faced European intransigence on issue after issue,” forced to compromise on fundamental points like German reparations. Now, its European allies were at its mercy.127 As in the Soviet case, the democratic wave unfolded through a combination of coercion, inducement, and emulation. For the United States, however, outright force played a far less prominent role, at least in the early postwar years. This was partly a result of America’s position in the international system. Its economy was in far better shape than the USSR’s, giving it a diverse set of instruments for influencing potential allies. Moreover, it faced a different set of motivations in doing so. Both superpowers sought followers to legitimize their global regime claims, but beyond that basic goal they had a very different set of immediate concerns. Unlike the Soviet Union, the United States did not seek a protective security zone ruled by pliable and unquestioning regimes. Its physical security was assured, but its economic well-­being depended on securing export markets. Motivated by fears of economic decay rather than existential security, America focused on conversion rather than coercion as the motivating force behind its expansion. This inducement took the form of massive economic aid, in the form of the Marshall Plan, and the creation of a global institutional infrastructure designed to embed countries in a web of American influence. 127. Frieden 2006:262.

Global proportion of democracies (%)

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70

60

50

40 1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

The number of democratic states as a proportion of all states in the international system.

FIGURE 5.8.

Coercion, of course, was not entirely absent from the early postwar wave, playing a key role in Germany and Japan. In both, US military authorities made crucial decisions about institutional reforms, including forcibly opening the former Axis countries to global trade and instituting democratizing reforms, like mass suffrage, civil liberties, and collective bargaining. In some ways the democratization of both countries was overdetermined, since brute imposition was never the sole driving factor. In both states, the United States had used a number of economic inducements to make the occupation tolerable. And in both, a large proportion of the people welcomed both the American presence and the regime it stood for, preferring it as a benign alternative to Soviet domination. This conjunction of hegemonic commitment and ideological legitimacy was thus a byproduct of the unique circumstances created by the hegemonic shock. Japan’s surrender meant “not merely the overthrow of their military might—it was the collapse of a faith,” wrote General MacArthur in his memoirs. “It left a complete vacuum, morally, mentally, and physically. And into this vacuum flowed the democratic way of life.”128 By discrediting the wartime elites, the hegemonic shock made the occupation more palatable, the population more pliable, and the institutional landscape more open to coerced reform. In suspending the normal rules of the international order, the hegemonic shock created a window of legitimacy for foreign military occupations that would have been impossible in other circumstances. For the Japanese, argues Lewis, “from the outset there was never any 128. Quoted in Smith 1994:168.

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doubt that they had brought this misery on themselves.”129 They “soon showed themselves willing to co-­operate fully with the victors and eager to adopt the form of government recommended by them.”130 This widespread sentiment legitimized the American presence and reduced local resistance to the occupation. Similarly, the US occupation of Germany encountered little native opposition at least in part because of the nature of the war and the total defeat that accompanied its conclusion.131 “Most of the towns and cities surrendered without any attempt at sabotage; sniping or any last-­moment desperate resistance was rarely encountered,” reported Ingram in 1946. “The Allies found themselves confronted in the main by a people fatalistically resigned to defeat.”132 The finality of the shock’s outcome created an environment conducive to successful occupation by the victors. In 1945, writes Diehl, “defeat was welcomed not with disbelief but relief.”133 Given the desperate German resistance in the closing weeks of the war, the Allies expected widespread resistance at the outset of the occupation, notes Merritt, but were instead surprised to find “fairly docile Germans, who seemed more interested in getting on with life than in squabbling with the occupiers.”134 The outcome of the war thus discouraged post-­occupation insurgency. “The German people do realize—have been made to realize—that they lost the war decisively,” wrote the UN Assistant Secretary-­General Byron Price. “They are at this stage a thoroughly beaten and discredited people.”135 Postwar public opinion in Germany was heavily pro-­American; an October 1947 poll showed that 63 percent of respondents expected the United States to treat them fairly, compared with 45 percent for Britain, 4 percent for France, and none for the USSR.136 The hegemonic shock of the war did not merely replace the previous regimes; it shattered all of their previous claims to rule and severed their hold upon the people’s loyalty. The “grotesque, bloody end of the Third Reich completely undermined its legitimacy and popular support for Nazism,” argues Bessel. “The military defeat had been so complete, the shock of violence so 129. Lewis 2010:265. 130. Seton-­Watson 1962:73. 131. As Maier (1981:349) notes, “defeat and occupation clearly permitted the United States more direct intervention than was possible elsewhere. Occupation authorities in all three [former Axis] countries could limit the organization of political unions, postpone nationalization, and halt strikes.” 132. Ingram 1946:459. 133. Diehl 1989:398. 134. Merritt 1995:326. 135. Quoted in Merrill 1995:154. 136. Lundestad 1986:273. A 1947 survey found that 70 percent of Germans approved of American-­style capitalism (Willett 1989:14).

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great, and the dislocation suffered so profound, that very few Germans continued to identify with the Nazi cause.”137 Similarly, Edwin Reischauer argues that the Japanese willingness to accept the occupation stemmed from its disastrous suffering and defeat, which “produced a revulsion against military leadership and any form of militarism”: Even for more hard-­headed Japanese, the military solution for Japan’s great economic problem stood entirely discredited. . . . If the militarism and authoritarianism of the past had proved so wrong, then the democracy the Americans extolled or the socialism or communism of other Western lands, all of which Japan’s recent leaders had condemned, must be right. . . . Japan lay entirely open to new influences.138 Not all coercion took the form of outright force. Covert American actions to sway elections resided in an uneasy middle ground between exercising influence and imposing a preferred outcome. In the 1948 Italian elections, the CIA funded the Christian Democrats to help ensure their victory over the socialists and the left-­wing Popular Democratic Front. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets,” a former CIA operative told an interviewer decades later.139 According to the US consul general in Milan, the CIA spent decades subsidizing parties, newspapers, and individual politicians and journalists, while withholding aid from others.140 Clandestine support for US-­friendly parties and politicians was common in France, Germany, and Greece, including German Chancellor Willy Brandt and French Prime Minister Guy Mollet. In Italy, the subversion of electoral outcomes continued for the next twenty-­four years, according to declassified records.141 Sometimes only the threat of coercion, rather than its use, was employed to shape institutional outcomes. According to Layne, the United States “was prepared to use raw military power—either directly or indirectly by threatening to intervene militarily—to keep the Communists out of power in France and Italy.”142 In May 1946, concerned that the French communists were on the verge of taking control, President Truman ordered US occupation forces in Western Germany to be prepared to intervene in France. A 1948 Policy Plan137. Bessel 2009:147, 201. “Although American officials feared widespread German opposition,” writes Merritt (1995:389), “they encountered neither Nazi-­inspired guerrilla warfare nor sustained passive resistance among civilians.” 138. Quoted in Goldsmith 2005:6. In a survey conducted shortly after MacArthur’s departure in 1951, 93 percent of Japanese citizens thought the occupation had been beneficial for their country (Smith 1994:170). 139. New York Times 07/06/2006. 140. Quoted in Weiner 2007:346. 141. New York Times 07/06/2006. 142. Layne 2006:78.

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ning Staff memo suggested that the United States should “make full use of its political, economic and, if necessary, military power” to prevent France from falling under Soviet domination.143 Still, outside of Germany and Japan, economic inducement rather than military coercion was the order of the day in Europe. The Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine were the two primary levers of this influence. At its core, the Marshall Plan was a mammoth undertaking to nudge European party politics toward the center-­right, and in doing so to fortify American-­friendly regimes while curbing the expansion of Soviet influence. It thus presented a dramatic example of how changes in domestic party dynamics in the wake of hegemonic shocks reflected broader geopolitical shifts in the international system. The Marshall Plan was an unprecedented use of hegemonic inducement to secure the consolidation of regimes that followed the American model. By its conclusion in 1952, the United States had spent $13 billion, more than all previous American foreign aid combined. Germany, Britain, and France received the largest absolute amount, but for smaller countries like Italy and Austria it amounted to a larger relative share of the economy.144 The aid was not simply a disbursement of direct assistance but was based on the use of counterpart funds. The United States provided goods to European states, who would then sell them to local businesses and individuals paying dollar values measured in local currencies (hence, “counterparts”) into special Marshall aid accounts administered by the country’s central bank. As a result, the United States held tight reins over the conditions attached to the funds; as Lundestad notes, the creation of counterpart funds “represented an instrument with great potential for intervention, since the various countries could only draw upon these funds with the consent of the United States.”145 The primary motivations for the Marshall Plan was fear of expanding communist influence and the collapse of European markets for US exports. The defeat of fascism had thoroughly discredited the right, while the rise of Soviet power imbued communist parties with renewed respect and admiration. “In all countries where free elections were held after the war there was a marked swing to the left,” notes Seton-­Watson.146 Across much of Western Europe, the combined share of the socialist and communist vote gave them an electoral plurality or majority in the first postwar elections.147 By the middle of 1945 every European country except Greece had governments led either by communists or by coalitions in which communists shared power, and all of Europe 143. Quoted in Layne 2006:239. 144. Judt 2005:91. 145. Lundestad 1986:268. 146. Seton-­Watson 1962:31. 147. Frieden 2006:271

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“was covered with Communist parties, Popular Fronts, anti-­capitalist proclamations, and revolutionary engagements. The image of the USSR had reached its zenith.”148 The communists alone were receiving 10 to 30 percent of votes, and were members of governing coalitions in ten western European countries.149 Opinion surveys in France “consistently revealed a substantial reserve of sympathy for the Soviet Union,” notes Judt.150 This leftward shift, combined with the uncertainty of European recovery, created a palpable fear of Soviet encroachment across the continent. American policy makers “knew the Kremlin was not the cause of postwar turbulence, but they feared that Moscow would exploit it,” writes Layne.151 Shortly after the war ended, Averill Harriman declared that “half and maybe all of Europe might be Communist by the end of next winter.”152 The Marshall Plan became the primary tool for accomplishing several related goals—curbing Soviet expansion from without and communist influence from within, ensuring a market for American exports by facilitating European recovery, embedding allies in a web of economic and political alliances headed by the United States, and demonstrating the superiority of the American model to both Europeans and potential allies in the developing world. In doing so, argues Layne, the plan would solidify a coalition of states “that would share America’s political, economic, social, and cultural values.”153 As Kennedy notes, “the raison d’etre for the plan was to convince Europeans everywhere that private enterprise was better able to bring them prosperity than communism.”154 Given American goals, countries with strong communist parties received the most generous financial assistance, while right-­wing democracies like Ireland had a difficult time securing US funds.155 At the same time, this institutional nudging was never officially presented as a program for adopting US-­ friendly institutions. Given Europe’s humiliating prostration, an ostentatious display of US influence was neither productive nor necessary for achieving its goals. As a 1946 State Department document put it, pro-­American policy in Italy would be a judicious mixture of flattery, moral encouragement and considerable material aid . . . a kind word, a loaf of bread, a public tribute to 148. Furet 1999:388. 149. Revel 1993:99. “The prestige and power of the victorious Soviet Union,” writes Howard (1991:127), “brought communist parties throughout Europe to a position of such commanding influence that for a few months it looked as if they might really take over power.” 150. Judt 2005:115. 151. Layne 2006:56. 152. Quoted in Johnson 2001:437. 153. Layne 2006:79. 154. Kennedy 1987:377. 155. Vinen 2000:259.

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Italian civilization, then another kind word, and so on, with an occasional plug from the sponsors advertising the virtues of democracy American style.156 In that regard, the plan was immensely successful. Its impact on the consolidation of democracy in Western Europe was both immediate and long-­ lasting. In Austria, for example, local communists (supported by Soviet forces, who still occupied the eastern half of the country) “never made any dent in the popularity of Americans and their aid,” noted Judt. American assistance “put food in people’s mouths and this was what mattered most.”157 Across Europe, the Marshall Plan reduced the attraction of Soviet-­style reforms and communist institutions by providing a means for general economic recovery. Economic growth surged in the second half of the 1940s, inaugurating a golden age for Western Europe that lasted two decades. Dutch industrial and agricultural production surpassed prewar levels by 1948, while France, Austria, and Italy reached the same milestone in 1949, and Greece and West Germany in 1950.158 Without American aid and the social stabilization that it brought, argues Chirot, “it is likely that France and Italy would have become communist in the late 1940s.”159 Over the next few years, the vestiges of Soviet influence were exorcised through American assistance. By 1948 communism was in crisis across Western Europe. The moderate European socialists distanced themselves from communist principles, allowing greater cooperation with center and center-­right parties. As the region’s economies recovered, communism lost its source of appeal and communist parties saw swift decline. Though they retained a degree of influence in France and Italy, the parties shrank into insignificance in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, and Scandinavia. Communist parties and ministers were eased out of governments after 1946, and by May of the following year their representatives were pushed even out of French and Italian cabinets. Communist slogans “were prescriptions for hard times,” writes Judt, “and in the West, at least after 1952, the times were no longer so hard.”160 The United States also used a number of noneconomic levers to nudge institutional incentives and dampen communist sympathies. These took the form of a variety of public diplomacy measures—cultural exchanges, psychological warfare, and propaganda campaigns carried out through ostensibly private actors like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Partisan Review. The Soviet Union recognized its appeal in the West early on, and sought to capitalize on it by presenting itself as a peaceful alternative to aggressive capi156. Quoted in Harper 1986:109. 157. Judt 2005:96. 158. Judt 2005:96. 159. Chirot 1977:149. 160. Judt 2005:6.

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talism. American cultural diplomacy was slow in countering this effect, at least in the early postwar years.161 But the United States soon caught up. The CIA began sponsoring literary journals across Europe, and the US government subsidized the creation of radio services—Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe—which increasingly became focal points for anti-­communist dissidents. After the early 1950s, these programs increasingly expanded to the developing world. A 1954 report by the US Information Agency, the public face of American propaganda, stated: “We are in competition with the Soviet Communism primarily for the opinion of the free world. We are (especially) concerned with the wavering, the confused, the apathetic, or the doubtful within the free world.”162 Since Soviet propaganda focused on the material achievements of communism—its promise of quick and equitable development—American propaganda followed suit, emphasizing the economic benefits of democratic capitalism. Beyond direct bilateral aid, the United States also exerted its influence through the creation of organizations that allowed it to solidify control over the states embedded within them. It created regional organizations designed to extend its influence—the Organization of American States in Latin America in 1948, NATO in Western Europe in 1949, and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in 1954. Most importantly, it transformed the global economic infrastructure through the creation of the Bretton Woods system, designed to pry open autarkic trading blocs and ensure a set of global rules and institutions that favored American interests. Preferential colonial trading arrangements were torn up (despite Churchill’s vociferous objections), and in their place were put arrangements like the GATT, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Such a profound transformation would have been unthinkable in the absence of a major geopolitical cataclysm. For both superpowers, the hegemonic shock created a window of opportunity for a fundamental overhaul of the global order. International organizations were not merely conduits of American influence. A US-­led order required a credible American commitment to abide by its own rules. In forging the postwar trade regime, the United States created self-­b inding mechanisms that made continued participation a welfare-­ maximizing strategy for all involved. This strategy, argues Ikenberry, convinced the other participants that binding themselves to the US order was a feasible long-­term strategy, thereby solidifying the US position in the economic system. American power allowed it to create a new international order, and in the process provided an incentive to bind itself to the rules of that order.163 161. Western counterpropaganda was “by Moscow’s standards, small-­scale and low-­funded,” writes Conquest (1999:161). 162. Quoted in Osgood 2002:99. 163. Ikenberry 2000; Goldstein and Gowa 2002.

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The effects of American influence extended far beyond Western Europe. The rise of American power created a number of incentives for democratization. These motives included a desire for American patronage and participation in the American-­led international order, the need for a counterweight for potential Soviet domination, or ideological admiration of American success. The external incentives for Turkish democratization, for example, were both material and ideological. Its economic interests resided with the West, and after 1949 it saw increased flow of credits, investment, and economic assistance from the United States. But without democratizing, the country also “would not be able to gain in the West the proper moral recognition she desired and needed.”164 The resulting push for a democracy therefore stemmed from a combination of inducement and emulation. While internal forces also played a role, external changes gave force and legitimacy to the demands of the Turkish reformers and created material incentives for ruling elites to countenance democratization. In 1950 a new electoral law led to elections in which the Democratic Party captured 408 of 465 seats. The party pushed for economic liberalization and the expansion of political rights.165 Like much of Africa and the Middle East in subsequent decades, Asia became a contested zone for the superpowers. In both Malaysia and the Philippines, the withdrawal of Japanese forces led to armed conflicts between communists and anti-­communists. The Philippines declared independence on July 4, 1946, and quickly allied itself with the United States. The country’s Huk rebellion intensified between 1949 and 1953, but never managed to make a serious impact on urban areas or achieved the same level of threat as the revolutionary struggle in neighboring Malaysia.166 American assistance contributed to relatively free congressional and presidential elections in 1951 and 1953, and the Philippines managed to maintain a semblance of democracy until the late 1960s. Given the regional tensions, American efforts to establish democracy in the region soon took a backseat to containment of communism, especially after the “loss” of China in 1949. In South Korea, the United States sponsored an election that brought to power Syngman Rhee, who quickly realized that his anti-­communism was more valuable to the Americans than any ostensible democratic credentials. He began assuming dictatorial powers in a fight against communism, backed by the United States. The Korean War allowed him to consolidate his grip on power, and a democracy was not introduced until 1987. Indonesia likewise began as a fragile democracy before President Sukarno turned it into a dictatorship. A similar fate befell Vietnam. The Democratic 164. Karpat 1959:140. 165. Seton-­Watson 1962:69–70. 166. Slater 2010:103.

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Republic of Vietnam was established in 1945, in a document modeled after the US Declaration of Independence. In September 1945, Ho Chi Minh recited America’s founding document in front of hundreds of thousands in downtown Hanoi, calling it an “immortal statement” of human equality. There was pragmatism in this act as well, notes Susan Dunn: He might have felt that his use of Jefferson’s Declaration would impart some legitimacy to his struggle, that it would be a signal to the Americans that he respected them, that he wanted their friendship as well as their support for his own sister revolution.167 But despite FDR’s initial support for French decolonization, the importance of France as a Cold War ally soon overshadowed any push for Vietnamese independence. Shortly after FDR’s death, the US State Department issued a statement upholding French sovereignty across Indochina, pushing Vietnam into the Soviet camp. So long as cooperation with the Soviet Union seemed possible, democratization and the eradication of fascism remained paramount. But as the confrontation hardened, “safeguarding” countries from communist influence became more important than maintaining fragile, messy, potentially disloyal democratic regimes. As Zakaria notes, despite “brief flirtations with democracy after World War II, most East Asian regimes turned authoritarian.”168 After 1948, when forced to choose between democracy and loyalty in its allies, the United States frequently picked the latter. The hegemonic shock had temporarily lowered the opportunity costs of democracy promotion, but as the crisis faded, geopolitical interests quickly reasserted themselves. The evolution of postwar democracy represented a clear case of the overstretch that accompanies democratic waves—hegemonic pressures first encouraging democracy and then undermining it. Beginning in the late 1940s, the United States used covert actions to overthrow a number of democratically elected left-­wing regimes in places like Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, and Nicaragua. Van Evera estimates that a dozen democratic regimes were overturned through US action during the Cold War, and that in half of these cases it employed violence or the threat thereof.169 In Guatemala the self-­proclaimed socialist Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown by exiles with the aid of the United States (with the prodding of the United Fruit Company) four years later. The overt reason was American fears of communist influence, but Arbenz had also begun to pursue land reforms that threatened American holdings. 167. Dunn 1999:175, 178–79. 168. Zakaria 1997:27. 169. Van Evera 1990.

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This pattern repeated itself across Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. After initially supporting democratization, the United States turned toward supporting anti-­communism at any cost, even if this meant overturning ostensibly democratic regimes. The turn away from a “democracy-­first” policy began in 1947 and culminated with the 1953 Iran coup, followed shortly by the coup in Guatemala the next year. By this point, Cold War politics in which anti-­communism took primacy over democracy promotion became accepted wisdom for American policy makers. As a result, American foreign policy became more defensive and contradictory, argues Smith. “With the tensions of the cold war intensifying in 1947, American interest in gambling on democratic forces abroad steadily diminished.”170 Even in cases where democracy survived, the shift in US priorities led to a general suppression of left-­wing politics. This was most visible in Western Europe, particularly in France and Italy, but also in Latin American states like Brazil and Chile. In Japan, the initial occupation agenda stressed democratization above all, and for the first few years Japanese communists “commonly regarded the overwhelmingly American occupation force as an army of liberation,” argues Dower.171 Tokuda Kyuichi, the Communist Party leader who had spent the previous two decades in prison, declared upon his release in October 1945: “We express our deepest gratitude that the occupation of Japan by the Allied forces . . . has opened the way for the democratic revolution in Japan.”172 After the war the Japanese communists portrayed themselves as moderate and even pro-­American, and as a result were able to attract the support of socialists. Between 1947 and 1949 their parliament representation increased from four seats to thirty-­five, and in the 1949 elections they received around 10 percent of the vote.173 This support exceeded American expectations, argues Zarakol, and as a result, “the idea that Japan should be a bulwark against communism started to take precedence over the idea of Japan as an equitable democracy.”174 In 1950 MacArthur banned a number of communist party officials from political activity. While the party itself was never formally outlawed, increasing US pressure, particularly after the onset of the Korean War, reduced it to a de facto underground organization.175 Gnawing fear of communist influence after 1947 led the United States to roll back the more radical liberalizing measures. The clearest example of failed consolidation inherent in democratic waves took place in Latin America. In the 1940s, Latin American regimes generally 170. Smith 1994:117, 182. 171. Dower 1999:69–70. 172. Quoted in Dower 1999:69. 173. Busky 2002:49. 174. Zarakol 2011:176–77. 175. Seton-­Watson 1962:74–75.

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moved through three phases—broad communist-­bourgeois alliances during the war; a democratic wave and a leftist resurgence immediately after the war; and soon after, a shift in US foreign policy from democracy promotion to anti-­ communism, coupled with democratic rollback and a resurgence of the right. The first phase, between 1941 and 1944, was marked by coalitions between communists and democrats against the far right, mirroring the US-­Soviet alliance against Nazi Germany. With the Soviet and American entry into WWII in 1941, both countries began to support the formation of broad party alliances that united left, center, and center-­r ight parties into anti-­fascist coalitions. These alliances meant that previously recalcitrant communist parties began cooperating with labor movements and bourgeois but anti-­fascist parties. Likewise for the United States, collaboration with communists abruptly became an acceptable trade-­off for a united front against fascism. This shift was reflected in Time magazine’s two profiles of Lombardo Toledano, Mexico’s labor leader. A prewar portrayal dismissed him as a “large-­eared, hot-­eyed, Communistic little” man. Less than two years later, he had transformed into a crusader against fascism, in the process becoming a “brilliant, aggressive and fluid leader” with “dreamy eyes.”176 Wartime alliances led to a resurgence of leftist politics, which had been tolerated by Latin American regimes and incorporated into the ruling coalitions during the years of anti-­Axis unity. “After years of weakness, isolation and for the most part illegality, many Communist parties reached the peak of their power and influence in this period,” write Bethell and Roxborough. “They were legalized or at least tolerated in virtually every country.”177 This fleeting tolerance was backed by both the United States, which encouraged broad anti-­fascist coalitions, and the USSR, which had reverted to the Popular Front tactics of class collaboration. Both countries saw these alliances as necessary wartime imperatives, and the result was a resurgence of communist representatives in mainstream politics. Working-­class parties “burst on to the scene with surprising electoral success.”178 Communists in Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela succeeded in having more than seventy representatives elected to their national legislatures.179 In Bolivia, this partnership culminated in the 1946 overthrow of the Lopez government for his fascist sympathies by an alliance of Marxists and nationalists.180 The second phase, between 1944 and 1946, was marked by strong American support for democratization and led to the collapse of dictatorships, mass 176. Quoted in Collier 1993:6. 177. Bethell and Roxborough 1988:173. 178. Collier 1993:11. 179. Pons and Service 2010:867. 180. Whitehead 1992:120. This development, he notes, was “a replication of the international events of 1945.”

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mobilization, and elections with high levels of participation across Central and South America. By mid-­1946, only five governments in the region had avoided any degree of democratization—Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. The changing international context was again a decisive factor in the region’s postwar democratization. The American victory and its dramatic rise to superpower status encouraged democratization in a number of states in Latin America.181 Starting with the Atlantic Charter in 1941, argues Brands, the notion of US-­led democratization “had a pronounced ideological impact in Latin America.” Liberalizing reforms were “inextricably linked to the broader democratic optimism of that period,” he writes. “Internal pressures and external encouragement came together between 1944 and 1946 in a remarkable wave of democratization.”182 Even before the war’s end, the United States began to withdraw its support of the region’s autocrats in order to dispel Axis sympathies. As a result, countries pushed to accommodate themselves to America’s sudden newfound respect for democracy, while also hoping to profit from US patronage and trade. The region had flirted seriously with fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s, but the changed postwar order made such disloyalty untenable, even as the absolute primacy of the United States became undeniable. “As the nature of the postwar international order and the hegemonic position of the US became clear,” argue Bethell and Roxborough, Latin American elites “recognized the need to make some necessary political adjustments.”183 According to Drake, one of the fundamental drivers of the region’s democratization was the widespread pent-­up hope—fueled by propaganda and assistance from the allies—for a postwar bonanza of democracy and prosperity. The victory in World War II of the democratic and leftist countries and the brief cooperation between capitalist and communist powers made it attractive to Latin Americans to get on the bandwagon.184 Suffrage was expanded in Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. Ecuador and Costa Rica also turned to democracy in the late 1940s, as did (briefly) Paraguay and Bolivia. In Cuba, the 1944 elections saw the victory of the reformist Ramón Grau over Batista’s handpicked successor. Elections in 1945–46 brought in new governments in Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela. The latter held its 181. “The second democratic wave across South America was essentially the result of the Allied victory in the Second World War,” argues Philip (1996:713). Likewise, Bethell and Roxborough (1988:171) argue that the postwar surge was driven primarily by “the victory of the Allies (and of democracy over fascism).” 182. Brands 2010:13–14. 183. Bethell and Roxborough 1988:171. 184. Drake 1998:72–73.

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first free election in 1947, won by the centrist Romulo Gallegos, inaugurating the country’s first brief experience with democracy (ended by a military coup a year later.) A popular uprising in Guatemala in July 1944 brought the removal of the thirteen-­year dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. The following year, Argentina witnessed growing opposition to the military regime of Edelmiro Farrell, who had taken power in a 1943 coup. A massive demonstration in the capital was followed by Farrell’s resignation, and democratic elections were held in February 1946. In Bolivia, a mass revolt removed the nationalist military government in the summer of 1946 and scheduled democratic elections for January 1947. Brazil held the country’s first relatively free elections in December 1945, after Getúlio Vargas announced electoral reforms earlier that year. This moment was brief, however. In the third phase, between 1946 and 1948, fragile democracies suffered major setbacks as the onset of the Cold War led the United States to reprioritize loyalty and stability over democratization. Coupled with this shift was an increased concern with communist influence and labor militancy. Once again, domestic realignments mirrored the shifting nature of hegemonic alliances. Growing tensions arose between a newly resurgent Left and an anxious Right, the latter now backed by a United States deeply concerned with Soviet subversion. The end of the war “brought an end to the rationale for political and class collaboration,” argues Collier, leading to “the reemergence of a postponed reformist or radical political agenda, ideological polarization, and a renewal of class conflict and labor protest.”185 In 1947, the cleavage between the two former allies became irreparable—the USSR established the Cominform as the replacement for the dissolved Comintern, while the United States inaugurated the overtly anti-­ communist Truman Doctrine. The left was forced out of the wartime alliances that had formed during the common wartime struggle. No longer legitimate partners in the anti-­fascist movement, communist parties were outlawed and repressed. The upper classes and military leaders, alarmed by the gains made by the lower and middle classes as a result of political liberalization, began pushing back. “The new order was fragile,” writes Brands, “and as it turned out, temporary.”186 In the decade following 1947, anti-­democratic forces violently pushed back the recent gains and forcibly excluded the left from national politics. Democratic regimes were overthrown by military coups in Peru (1948), Venezuela (1948), Cuba (1952), and Guatemala (1954). Even countries that remained democratic, like Brazil and Chile, saw a general drift to the right and a rollback of democratization. In Brazil, the 1945 election saw a shift to the left, and the start of the relatively democratic Dutra regime. But the 1946 Constitu185. Collier 1993:6. 186. Brands 2010:14.

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tion denied suffrage to illiterate citizens—who made up half the population— and rigged congressional seats to underrepresent the dense urban areas that formed leftist strongholds.187 Repeated strikes and demonstrations led Dutra to outlaw the communist party the following year. “As elsewhere in the continent,” writes Seton-­Watson, “anti-­communism proved a respectable slogan for a counter-­offensive from the right.”188 The interwar dictator Getúlio Vargas was reelected in 1950, and while he did not return the country to a full autocracy, the regime reestablished greater controls over labor, placing unions under the jurisdiction of the labor ministry and meddling in union elections.189 Likewise in Chile, where the regime remained democratic, “there was a substantial closing down of political space for reformist initiatives in the political arena.”190 A 1947 law forbade rural strikes and restricted rural unionization. Chilean women’s movements mirrored the development of labor movements, experiencing rapid growth immediately after the war. Given the conservative nature of the country’s domestic politics, the war acted as a “necessary catalyst” for creating “a broad, ambitious women’s movement committed to the defense of democracy and its extension to women.”191 But the later years of the decade brought the disintegration of women’s associations and the exclusion of their progressive elements. After Chile’s lurch to the right in 1947, the movement’s progressive wing “came to be viewed as a political liability by the centrist and right-­wing women’s groups,” writes Antezana-­Pernet. “They now began to exclude the leftist feminists. These internal conflicts eventually led to the dissolution of the women’s movement.”192 The rise and decline of the Chilean postwar women’s movement thus reflected the broader domestic changes embedded in the hegemonic system. All across the region, economic and military elites felt severely threatened by reforms that tended to empower the lower and middle classes, and by the end of the decade, “the conservative classes mobilized to check the progressive tendency.”193 Democratic movements were repressed in Bolivia, Paraguay, El Salvador, Panama, Haiti, Colombia, and Argentina. Bolivia’s communists were outlawed and excluded from the 1947 elections only months after banding with the nationalists to overthrow a fascist-­sympathizing regime.194 Across the region, communist parties were banned “and strong antilabor measures were 187. Bethell and Roxborough 1988:177. 188. Seton-­Watson 1962:421. 189. Collier 1993:13. 190. Collier 1993:13. 191. Antezana-­Pernet 1994:166–67. 192. Antezana-­Pernet 1994:167. 193. Brands 2010:14. 194. In “country after country popular mobilization was repressed and participation restricted and curtailed.” Bethell and Roxborough 1988:177.

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adopted. In addition, the reformist tide was reversed, and in some cases democratic regimes were overthrown.”195 The United States either actively supported this reassertion of the right as a bulwark against communism or readily acquiesced to it. During America’s pro-­democracy phase in 1945, Secretary of State James Byrnes expressed “unqualified adherence” to the idea that “the parallelism between democracy and peace must constitute a strict rule of action in inter-­American policy.” If Latin American states “are to preserve the peace,” he added, they “cannot permit oppressive regimes to exist in their midst.”196 Until 1947, the choice for American policy makers had been between democracy promotion or nonintervention. But now “a third option gained favor: intervention for dictatorships, even against indigenous political forces that might be bent on creating constitutional, democratic regimes.”197 “We cannot be too dogmatic about the methods by which local communists can be dealt with,” argued Kennan in a 1950 State Department memo. Latin America was a region “where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak to absorb successfully the intensity of the communist attack,” he concluded. America must therefore “concede that harsh governmental methods of repression may be the only answer . . . and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternative, to further communist successes.”198 The initial push for democracy had been aided by Latin American states’ desire to ingratiate themselves with the United States, not only for geopolitical reasons but also due to the promise of continued US aid. During the war, the United States had provided financial, industrial, and technical assistance. At the end of the war, argue Bethell and Roxborough, “many Latin American governments had expectations—or hopes—that the United States would continue and indeed expand this role, providing them with long-­term development capital.” American attention, however, was focused on Western Europe, and not a “single prominent American advocated large scale aid to Latin America.” By 1950, in fact, it was only region in the world without a US aid program; Belgium and Luxembourg received more aid than the entire region combined.199 There was thus no sustained economic incentive for democratization, as there had been in Western Europe. On the contrary, the region’s only hope for outside funds was through foreign investment, which required a docile labor movement and conservative pro-­business policies. 195. Collier 1993:13. 196. Department of State Bulletin no. 13, Oct.-­Dec. 1945, p. 892. Available at http://archive .org/details/departmentofstatx1345unit. 197. Smith 1994:183, 184. 198. Quoted in Smith 1994:179. 199. Bethell and Roxborough 1988:185, 186.

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The political evolution of Mexico between 1944 and 1949 offers a typical example. Between 1944 and 1946 the government of Avila Camacho introduced a number of democratic reforms. The military was pushed out of politics and electoral reforms were introduced that seemed to signal the emergence of a multiparty system. The 1946 elections were “seriously contested, saw considerable citizen mobilization, and produced the first authentically civilian presidency” since the 1919 revolution.200 These reforms were undertaken, argues Loaeza, in order to “prepare the country to meet the challenges of a new distribution of world power” and “to accommodate the country to the post war transformation of the United States” to superpower status.201 But as the Cold War ramped up, US priorities shifted toward encouraging domestic stability. Mexico’s anti-­democratic forces no longer needed to fear possible American intervention, and began to reassert themselves. In 1946, “the government moved to limit political opposition and strengthen one party dominance,” and the communist party was de-­registered in 1949.202 By the end of the decade, the center-­right PRI re-­established itself as the nation’s “official” party, and the window for democratization was closed. Venezuela was another case of democratic disappointment. The Acción Democratica party, formed in the early 1940s, took power in a 1945 revolution and initiated a series of liberalizing reforms. After three years, despite victories at the polls, the party faced increasing resistance from the military, industrialists, and landowners. A 1948 military coup ended the experiment and inaugurated a decade of political repression. This pattern repeated itself elsewhere. Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama, all of which had experienced partial democratization between 1944 and 1946, all saw reverses between 1948 and 1954. The demise of Latin America’s democratic wave was not just a byproduct of hegemonic meddling. Domestic conditions mediated international influences, shaping both the depth of democratic transitions and the nature of failed consolidations. The region was home to powerful conservative forces who sought every opportunity to reassert themselves. Yet this reassertion was facilitated by America’s passive acceptance (and in some cases, active support) of undemocratic leaders who promised to crush the radical left. For the majority of the region’s states, therefore, domestic changes were embedded in the global environment of geopolitical transformations. Latin America in the 1940s, argues Collier, “constituted a kind of microcosm of the clash among the century’s three great ‘isms’,” demonstrating the centrality of hegemonic shifts in shaping the domestic party politics and coalitional realignments.203 200. Bethell and Roxborough 1988:170. 201. Loaeza 2009:3–4. 202. Collier 1993:13. 203. Collier 1993:2.

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The evolution of Latin American regimes in the 1940s illustrates both the dynamics of built-­in failure inherent in democratic waves and the tendency for domestic party coalitions to reflect hegemonic pressures. But in doing so, it also highlights a gap between comparative and systemic approaches to studying domestic transformations. Collier, for example, examines the relative influence of domestic and external factors on institutional development in Latin America in the 1940s, focusing on Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela. She finds extensive evidence for the intrusion of hegemonic politics into the trajectories of party relations and institutional development. She concludes, correctly, that external factors did not wholly shape internal trajectories. But she then goes on to argue that external influences generally mattered less than internal influences, and that where the two sets of influences were in conflict, internal dynamics took precedence. While the international system “obviously had important consequences,” she concludes, it “does not seem to constitute a more powerful explanation than the dynamics of the internal trajectory.” Instead, systemic factors merely “round out the picture and explain some of the variation within patterns of change.”204 In her analysis, however, Collier identifies sixteen possible points of analysis (four stages of development in the four case studies), and finds that only in 2.5 cases (the half is a mixed case) do the outcomes diverge from the patterns posited by systemic factors. In other words, international dynamics correctly predict the nature of party alliances and political change in 13.5 of the 16 instances examined. The counterfactual would seem to be that because international factors only matter at the margin, the content and timing of the evolution of both party coalitions and political institutions would have followed nearly the same paths in the absence of the hegemonic shock. But the striking and simultaneous parallels in Latin America’s postwar development suggest that the region’s evolution cannot be explained without embedding it in the context of changing great-­power dynamics. Domestic factors are of course not merely byproducts of great-­power rivalries. They matter greatly in shaping the particulars of democratic transitions and the likelihood of democratic consolidations. They may be especially important for explaining gradual institutional change, or regime evolution in times of “normal” politics—that is, outside of hegemonic shocks. But they cannot explain why a number of countries, often with very different domestic structures, undergo large-­scale and near-­simultaneous transitions in certain historical moments. That is, they cannot explain democratic waves or even sudden ruptures within individual states. As Osborne writes, for example: The fate of Austria and Germany shows us something that is difficult to explain and would have been impossible to predict: each country seemed 204. Collier 1993:26.

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to embrace democracy with the determination with which, fifteen years earlier, it had chosen extreme nationalism.205 Such disjunctures are indeed difficult to explain and predict if the explanation focuses on domestic factors. From the perspective of hegemonic shocks, however, these disjunctions are clearly linked to the abrupt shift in the post-­ 1945 structure of global hegemony, which transformed the material and ideological motivations for institutional change within both of these states. Conclusion The war’s aftermath left in place two rising powers, creating two institutional waves and two visions of the modern state. This rivalry set the tone for the rest of the twentieth century until the collapse of the Soviet alternative in the early 1990s. Both countries used their military might to impose their regimes on others through coercion (though the Soviet Union came to rely on force to a greater extent than the United States). Both countries used their economic and diplomatic influence to exert political pressure and encourage other states to adopt their institutions (and here the roles were reversed, with the United States relying on its economic prowess more than the Soviet Union). Both countries benefited from the prestige bestowed on them by their victory and the imitation of their regimes—both sincere and self-­interested—that this prestige inspired around the world. And both created and used international institutions to shape and direct their power, and to embed both themselves and their followers in a web of political and economic linkages. There were, clearly, massive differences between the two waves. The shared mechanisms through which the two waves unfolded differed significantly both in their relative importance and in their impact on the lives of the people they affected. Unlike the USSR, which was quick to resort to force, America’s immense economic power gave it an “arsenal of diverse instruments” to persuade and induce converts.206 But while the democratic and communist waves differed widely in content, they possessed some key similarities in the dynamics of their spread. In this they demonstrated the parallel ways through which hegemonic shocks have shaped domestic reforms. As Leffler writes: What would be good and what would be evil seemed uncertain to individuals who had seen colonialism persevere while democracies faltered and capitalism tottered. What would be good and what would be evil seemed contingent on how governments would respond to people’s clamor for 205. Osborne 2011:221. 206. Lundestad 1986:263.

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opportunity, reform, ethnic equality, national autonomy, and respect for human dignity.207 To ignore the use of force on the American side or the elements of sincere emulation on the Soviet side simplifies the motivations behind the two regime waves. It obscures what the choice looked like to many observers at the end of the war: not between freedom and tyranny, or between scarcity and prosperity, but an uneasy decision between two different ways of life, each with its own plausible enticements. The increasingly obvious senescence and eventual demise of the communist alternative makes the decision obvious in retrospect. But the outcome of the hegemonic shock had yielded appeals for both systems, and in the uncertain years after the war it was not at all clear which would prove to be the better choice. 207. Leffler 1999:523–24.

6 The Winds from the East What’s wrong with a little capitalism? Life would be very dull without it! — MAO Z EDONG , 1 9701

The last hegemonic shock of the century offers an unexpected paradox. At first glance, the Soviet collapse presents the archetypal case study. First, the rapid decline of a great power—the discrediting of its ideology, the disruption of its material levers of influence, and the triumph of its democratic rival. Second, a global burst of democratic transitions driven by the consequences of this hegemonic shock. Third, the democratic overstretch— rollback and the rise of hybrid regimes brought about by capricious systemic pressures, adaptation by shrewd elites, and the splintering of reform coalitions. In fact, the Soviet collapse was such an exemplary case of international factors shaping domestic reforms that it catalyzed much of today’s research on the external sources of regime change. And yet this hegemonic transition also contained peculiar elements that set it apart from its predecessors. Most obviously, it was nonviolent, shaped by an unintentional implosion rather than a climactic confrontation. Even the Great Depression, which unfolded mainly through economic and social dislocation, culminated with—and was resolved by—a paroxysm of violence. But beyond Gorbachev’s half-­hearted feints at repression in the Baltics, or Ceauşescu’s desperate bid to preserve his family fiefdom, this massive geopolitical transformation was largely free of bloodshed. “History offers no previous instances,” writes Mark Kramer, “in which revolutionary politics and social change of this magnitude transpired with almost no violence.”2 1. Quoted in Gray 1998:149. 2. Kramer 2003b:3. 198

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Unlike previous shocks, the Soviet collapse was largely self-­imposed, precipitated by Gorbachev’s failed attempt to reform an ossified regime. As a result, its aftermath was shaped by the disengagement of the declining power as much as engagement by the rising power—the removal of coercion in Eastern Europe, the loss of material levers of influence abroad, and the collapse of communism as a legitimate ideology. In Africa, the Soviet collapse both undermined the normative legitimacy of communism and interrupted flows of aid to sympathizers. “The winds from the east,” declared Gabon’s president Omar Bongo, “are shaking the coconut trees in Africa.”3 The same ingratiating pliancy that so endeared Gorbachev to the West also made him Russia’s most despised ruler since False Dmitry. As a result, the shock concluded on a sour note, with the self-­inflicted dissolution of a sullen and resentful empire, robbed of the transformational catharsis that accompanied other hegemonic cataclysms. Democracy triumphed by default rather than through struggle, and its victory was therefore both decisive and oddly incomplete. The redistribution of hegemonic power accompanying the Soviet collapse was swift and self-­evident. In the last days of communism, every possible social and economic indicator seemed to be in free fall, from industrial productivity to the value of currency. Soviet GDP fell by about 40 percent between 1989 and 1993, while over the same period average life expectancy declined by five years.4 In 1991 alone, agricultural and industrial output fell by nearly a fifth, and the government’s budget deficit more than tripled.5 As a result, the country’s share of global power (as measured by the CINC index) declined from just over 17 percent in 1988 to less than 6 percent five years later. The people “expected paradise on earth,” Yeltsin said later, “but instead got inflation, unemployment, economic shock, and political crisis.”6 The decline was magnified by Russia’s hasty adoption of its rival’s economic and political system, destroying the remaining appeal of communism while magnifying the corresponding attraction of democratic capitalism. David Remnick recalls attending a screening of Wall Street for young Communist apparatchiks, who whooped unironically as Michael Douglas trumpeted the virtues of greed.7 But despite its growing ideological hollowness, communism managed to survive and even increase in influence nearly until the end. “It is now apparent to almost everyone that the communist regimes had long been disintegrating 3. Quoted in Packham 2004:209. 4. World Bank Development Indicators, http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world -development-indicators. GDP measured in constant 2005 US dollars. Over the same period, industrial production fell by half and real wages shrank by 55 percent (Rutland 1994:154, 155). 5. Smith 1993:118–19. 6. Quoted in Remnick 1997:39. 7. Remnick 1993:307.

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from within,” wrote Marc Plattner in 1991, “but during most of the Cold War period communism seemed to be enjoying a slow but steady ascendancy.”8 The end of Portugal’s dictatorship ended its African empire and spurred Soviet expansion into the continent during the 1970s. In that decade, communism gained about a dozen new adherents in the developing world. Unlike democracy, which saw a number of rollbacks and reversals during the Cold War, it seemed that once communist governments took hold, they were impossible to dislodge. In fact, not a single consolidated communist regime had been displaced until the US invasion of Grenada in 1983.9 As a result, perceptions of communist inevitability persisted until the collapse, and its sudden demise was witnessed with “awe, amazement, and disbelief.”10 National security analysts, politicians, liberal intellectuals, and Sovietologists alike shared the view that communism and the Cold War would be permanent elements of global politics for the foreseeable future.11 As late as 1989, an American textbook concluded that “there is no signal that Stalin’s heirs are prepared to retreat” from Eastern Europe, “nor any flagging of their political will to dominate the area.”12 Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1986 pronouncement that “the American-­Soviet conflict is not some temporary aberration but a historical rivalry that will long endure” reflected the conventional wisdom of the day.13 The Soviet collapse therefore accomplished two crucial tasks. It decisively and credibly unmasked the true condition of the communist system and, in doing so, made clear to everyone—from CIA analysts to African despots—that communism was no longer a tenable option even as a rhetorical facade. For all the decades-­long backwardness, wastefulness, and tyranny of communist regimes, it took the hegemonic shock to drive this point home. “Whereas only ten years earlier it had been almost impossible to argue, even in the West, that socialism was definitely and irretrievably finished,” wrote Revel in 1993, “its failure now proclaimed to the whole world that the liberal democratic model was superior.”14 8. Plattner 1991:35. 9. Plattner 1991:35. 10. Dallin 1992:279. 11. On the widespread failure to predict the Soviet collapse, see, e.g., Deudney and Ikenberry 1992b or Gaddis 1993. 12. Rothschild 1989:221. American economics textbooks, no matter the political leanings of the authors, routinely overestimated the strength of the Soviet economy and its potential for growth (Levy and Peart 2009). Paul Samuelson’s widely used text (1989:837, 840) claimed in 1989 that “the Soviet economy is proof that . . . a socialist command economy can function and even thrive,” and that the communist model “has been a powerful engine for economic growth.” 13. Brzezinski 1986:xiii. 14. Revel 1993:6.

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As with other ideologies of the state, the moral appeal of communism rested in large part on the promise of material success. But this requirement was especially acute for communism since, unlike democracy, it promised its citizens an earthly paradise as the logical end of history. Economic progress, notes Judt, “had been both the goal of Socialism and the measure of its success.”15 By that measure it had been exposed as a fraud. By discrediting the ideology of centralized planning, writes Clapham, the collapse “left Western liberal capitalism in sole possession of the field.”16 Marxist sympathizers around the world, having lost both the support of their benefactor and the last remaining dregs of their legitimacy, transformed into a collection of fragile “Third World orphans.”17 Decades of Cold War competition had created a number of practiced tightrope walkers in the developing world, who balanced between the United States and the USSR and staved off reforms by appealing to each superpower’s mutual fear of losing influence. The constraints of geopolitical rivalry meant that the United States could not risk demanding democratization in exchange for aid since such pressure might have pushed its clients “into the less demanding arms of the Soviet Union.”18 The Soviet collapse swiftly put an end to this lucrative double-­ dealing, erasing “any artificially-­enhanced global value” that developing states could extract from the Cold War rivals.19 Repression could no longer be justified by appeals to anti-­communism. No longer obsessed by a search for strategic partners, the United States could now afford to take an aid posture that credibly emphasized democratization and market reforms, increasing American pressure on autocrats in countries like Zaire and Kenya. The strategic bargaining power autocrats extracted from the Cold War disappeared along with the conflict. Aid conditionality therefore became significantly more credible after the end of the Cold War, transforming it into a powerful tool of hegemonic influence.20 All three mechanisms played a role in the post-­1989 wave. Coercion mattered mostly in the negative sense, through the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe. Unlike after World War II, the United States avoided coercive impositions, focusing instead on diplomatic and economic levers of influence. During the 1990s America’s hegemonic engagement was shaped by two countervailing forces. It faced an international system that placed few constraints on American power, encouraging greater US involvement. At the 15. Judt 2005:577. 16. Clapham 1996:193. 17. Blight and Belkin 1992. 18. Clapham 1996:191–92. 19. Decalo 1992:17. 20. Dunning 2004 finds no relationship between aid and democracy between 1975 and 1986, but a positive one between 1987 and 1997.

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same time, the end of the Cold War created a world without major threats to American dominance, curtailing the demand for engagement. The Soviet collapse validated and re-­enforced the post-­1945 American-­led order, vitiating the need for a transformative foreign policy akin to the Marshall Plan. There seemed little need to upend five decades of institutional infrastructure that had just proven triumphant. America’s boundless capacity for engagement was therefore moderated by its position as a fundamentally status quo power, and until the terrorist attacks of 9/11, US hegemonic engagement unfolded largely through economic and diplomatic inducement. There were, to be sure, exceptions—in Panama, in Haiti, and (less overtly) in the Philippines. But after the death of eighteen army rangers in Mogadishu in 1993, the United States spent the rest of the decade assiduously avoiding military involvement in the conflicts that surged throughout Africa, from Algeria to Sierra Leone. When America did enter conflicts, it did so reluctantly, with the prodding of NATO allies and without committing ground troops. Throughout the 1990s, it pursued the doctrine of enlargement through globalization, as articulated by Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security advisor, in 1993. “Throughout the Cold War, we contained a global threat to market democracies,” Lake declared. “Now we seek to enlarge their reach, particularly in places of special significance to us.”21 Hegemonic influence also operated through the changed geopolitical relationship between the two superpowers. In Nicaragua the Soviet Union began to push the Sandinistas into holding elections in early 1990—elections that US pressure (via sanctions, a blockade, and millions of dollars in aid for the opposition party) ensured they lost. The unseating of Ortega by the American-­ supported Violeta Chamorro was therefore a direct result of the geopolitical shift.22 Latin America’s wave of democratization had begun a decade before the Soviet collapse, but the easing of Cold War tensions contributed to the maintenance and consolidation of democracy by moderating the region’s politics and weakening US support for anti-­communist dictators. In 1991, for example, the Organization of American States adopted an official resolution to promote democracy in the region, and two years later prevented the president of Guatemala from seizing power in an attempted coup. As the global threat of communism receded, American foreign policy toward potential left-­wing threats also began to moderate itself. In El Salvador, for example, the United States became less concerned with an FMLN victory as a harbinger of a potential communist wave, and shifted from the hardline agenda of preventing an FMLN victory at all costs to supporting a process of inclusive democratization.23 At the same time, the Marxist elements of the FMLN agenda appeared 21. Lake 1993. 22. Remmer 1992/3:16. 23. Pugh 2009:93.

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increasingly anachronistic in light of the Soviet collapse, leading to a decline in their economic and diplomatic support from abroad. Just as the relaxed geopolitical posture of the United States moderated their support for the Salvadoran right, the far left was forced to move to the political center, leading to a negotiated resolution to the insurgency in the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords. Similar dynamics contributed to democratization in Africa. The newfound spirit of cooperation between the superpowers was a key factor in forging negotiated settlements in Angola, Namibia, and Ethiopia. In 1990, the two superpowers cooperated on initiating a peace process in Ethiopia; the USSR agreed not to renew a $2 billion arms deal, and Soviet military advisors began to be withdrawn.24 Like previous shocks, the Soviet collapse demonstrated the fractal nature of global geopolitical shifts—that is, their tendency to be reproduced on a smaller scale in domestic party alignments and national coalitions. Just as the failure of fascism crippled the radical right after 1945, the Soviet collapse led to a decline of the radical left in states with multiparty competition. The collapse delegitimized the remnants of anti-­s ystem communist parties across Europe, which had now lost both their appeal and their Soviet sponsorship. Breaking decades of tradition, leftist parties were now forced to transform into social democrats and merge with the center-­left or risk electoral irrelevance. As the general secretary of the Italian Communists declared in 1989: “Our objective is no longer the socialist system achieved by democratic means, but democracy guided by socialist ideals.”25 In the same year, Britain’s Labour Party dropped the demand for nationalization from its agenda, while Spain’s Communist Party folded into a center-­left coalition that received less than 10 percent of the vote in the 1989 elections. The Dutch Communist Party, the continent’s oldest, dissolved itself in June 1991 by merging with the Greens, and Britain’s Communist Party disbanded in the same year. The shift in party alignments was even more precipitous in the former communist states, where the radical left had been thoroughly discredited. “In postcommunist societies, you see, the left is dead,” declared Hungarian parliament member and former dissident Miklos Harazti. “So the structure we have now is an American kind of political split, and in that sense East European politics is closer to the United States rather than the West European model.”26 Such optimism was not completely justified. Communists had retained their influence in southern Europe, winning the first genuine elections in Albania and Bulgaria. But in most cases they did so by fundamentally transforming the basis of their appeal. Just as Stalin was forced to backtrack from com24. Christian Science Monitor 06/15/1990. 25. Quoted in Revel 1993:4. 26. Quoted in Plattner 1991:37.

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munism to Russian nationalism to rally the nation during the war, communist parties now found it necessary to mutate into altogether different creatures. While the moniker remained, the ideological basis was corroded or dismantled. In Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and (most poisonously) in Milosevic’s Serbia, the communists adopted an increasingly nationalist platform; further abroad, in Palestine, the secular left was increasingly displaced by Islamic fundamentalists.27 In addition to coercion and inducement, emulation played a vital role in shaping the democratic wave by discrediting the Soviet alternative and elevating democracy to the status of unquestioned winner. Even after it had lost the postwar purity of its moral appeal, communism remained useful as a tool of political mobilization, as a source of genuine skepticism about corrosive capitalism, as a paradigm of foreign policy and alliance formation, and as a coherent blueprint for state-­making. The collapse of the Soviet system eradicated these vestiges of the communist worldview. It repudiated even the pretense that communism still represented a viable path for institutional development, and in doing so discouraged both true believers and leaders who had manipulated its precepts to maintain control over their people. As a result, ritualistic but far from sincere obeisance to democratic forms became a prerequisite for rule in all but a few anomalous holdouts. Even where democratic elections remain farcical, the fact that they are held at all suggests that democracy has won the intellectual argument. The end of the Cold War thus brought about the end of history in a narrow sense—history as the continuing struggle for legitimacy between competing political ideologies. This notion formed the core of Francis Fukuyama’s controversial argument about the end of history, which (to borrow Bernard Brodie’s description of Admiral Mahan’s work) remains more often criticized than read.28 He did not offer a naive vision of a conflict-­free utopia. The end of history did not imply the end of war, terrorism, ethnic and cultural clashes, or economic instability. He suggested only that democracy had become the only coherent and plausible ideology compatible with managing a modern society, and that the Soviet collapse made this outcome indisputable.29 Despite the ideological hollowness of communism for the citizens who lived under its yoke, it was the end of the Cold War that led to a radical reconfiguration of the global ideological consensus. “It took the collapse of the USSR,” writes Marks, “to make clear to its emulators around the world that their versions of the Soviet prototype were torpid, if not moribund.”30 27. Hobsbawm 1994:456. 28. Fukuyama 1992b; Brodie 1965:2. 29. Fukuyama “was not one of the triumphalists himself,” notes Runciman (2013:227), and although they quickly adopted him as one of their own, his “tone was more admonitory than celebratory.” 30. S. G. Marks 2003:332.

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In India, for example, the collapse profoundly undermined the ideological basis of Soviet-­style economic planning. The country had faithfully continued to roll out its five-­year plans (the last and seventh was announced in 1985), but the collapse now made them appear as the “ultimate symbol of Soviet-­style sclerosis and inefficiency.”31 By 1991, operating under the threat of default, India began a series of dramatic market-­oriented reforms designed to make the country more competitive—abandoning its fixed exchange rate, encouraging foreign investment, and pulling apart its Byzantine system of tariffs and subsidies. Across Asia, notes Scalapino, the Soviet collapse “had raised the most profound questions as to whether socialism was indeed the avant garde doctrine that it had earlier claimed to be.”32 Eastern Europe and the Soviet Collapse The onset of both world wars and the Great Depression have their pivotal dates, debatable though they may seem to historians. The process set in motion in 1989, on the other hand, seems to find precedents in a series of upheavals starting in the mid-­1970s, at the start of the so-­called “Third Wave” of democracy. This monolithic term, however, hides crucial variation in the sources of democratic diffusion. It was not a secular expansion of democracy linked by common trends and forces. Until 1989, the Third Wave was a series of distinct regional waves with few connections among them. The first covered southern Europe, with the democratization of Portugal, Greece, and Spain between 1974 and 1976. The second began in Latin America in the early 1980s, and the third spread over Asia beginning in the mid-­1980s. These preludes were diverse in their timing, in their underlying causes, and in the types of regimes they were seeking to escape. With the exception of cultural ties between Iberia and Latin America, there was little cross-­pollination among these cases. Unlike in 1989, hegemonic shocks played no role in the transitions, which were driven by common domestic conditions amplified by neighborhood spillover, rather than any sudden changes in the global geopolitical environment. As such, they constituted a distinct series of waves that bore little relation to the explosion of 1989. “What happened in Moscow was . . . of such decisive importance,” writes Brown, that we should see the post-­1989 transitions as “representing a discrete political phenomenon.”33 In fact, the spread of democracy acquired such a 31. Runciman 2013:250. 32. Scalapino 1993:73. 33. Brown 2007b:217–18. As he notes, the influence of previous wavelets on Eastern Europe was either “marginal,” in the case of Southern Europe, or “non-­existent,” in the case of Latin America. Domestically, too, Eastern European democratization proceeded from a vastly different starting point than these earlier waves, since none of these “had to cope with the same near-­ total monopoly of a Party over state, economy, and society” (Dahrendorf 1990:74).

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vastly different and global character after 1989 that it seems appropriate to mark this year as the beginning of a new democratic wave.34 It was then that the Third Wave—a phenomenon driven by horizontal contagion in isolated neighborhoods—was replaced by what could be called the Post-­Soviet Wave, a global burst of democracy forged by a vertical shock. The unraveling of communism in Eastern Europe has been recounted in a vast and accomplished literature that I do not aim to recapitulate here. But one question must be addressed that relates directly to the argument’s framework. Were the revolutions of 1989 caused primarily by hegemonic action or by other factors, like national protests, transnational social movements, or external pressure from the West? If the USSR itself played a minor or reactive role, then the 1989 revolutions occurred independently of a hegemonic shift and cannot be considered a part of the wave driven by Soviet decline. The historical evidence, however, suggests that the primary cause of the 1989 revolutions were the actions (or rather, non-­actions) of the Soviet hegemon, driven by a change in foreign policy doctrine that was motivated by relative decline. The success of the protest movements was conditional upon Soviet action. To channel Barrington Moore: no Gorbachev, no 1989. Undoubtedly, the origins of the transformation cannot be reduced to a single explanation. Distinctions can be made, however, between primary and secondary causes, or necessary and facilitating factors. In this causal hierarchy, the actions of the Soviet hegemon tower above all others. Through decades of occupation, Eastern European states had repeatedly tried to loosen Moscow’s control, with each effort promptly suppressed by the Red Army. The imposing presence of Soviet power had been the major barrier to political reforms, and it was “Gorbachev’s unilateral removal of the Soviet backstop,” as Steven Kotkin puts it, that paved the way for liberalization.35  Beginning in the mid-­1980s, Moscow sent increasingly clear signals that leaving the Soviet zone of influence would be tolerated and even encouraged.36 As early as 1985, Gorbachev used the occasion of Chernenko’s funeral to inform the gathered leadership of Eastern Europe that they could no longer expect Soviet military intervention to keep them in power.37 The reform 34. McFaul (2002:242) also argues that the strong connections linking transitions from communism constitute a distinct fourth wave. And Doorenspleet (2005) likewise separates the post-­1974 period into the third and fourth waves, with 1989 as the cutoff. 35. Kotkin 2009:xvii. “Soviet domination was the decisive obstacle that had for decades prevented political progress despite ongoing socioeconomic modernization,” argues Weyland (2014:236). “As soon as Mikhail Gorbachev removed this exogenous impediment, democracy was bound to emerge.” 36. “We made that decision in 1985, 1986,” said Yegor Ligachev, Gorbachev’s protégé during the early days of reform. Quoted in Remnick 1993:234. 37. Brown 2007b:242–43.

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movements in Eastern Europe were therefore reacting to earlier changes inside the imperium itself. (In fact, the first relatively free and contested elections in the Soviet space were held in Russia in March 1989, predating the Eastern European upheavals.) At a June 1986 Politburo briefing, Gorbachev criticized the USSR’s ideological monopoly on defining communism and argued that the relationship with socialist countries “should be on the basis of equality, and it should be fully voluntary.”38 As he told the Politburo the following month: “The methods that we used in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in 1956 are inappropriate.”39 A particularly strong signal was a March 1988 Kremlin communiqué proclaiming “unconditional” support for the principle of non-­interference and the freedom of socialist countries “to define, for themselves, the path of their own development.”40 Two months later, Hungary’s hardline leader Janos Kadar was forced from office and replaced by the reformist Karoly Grosz. The new government’s announcement of loosened travel restrictions, market reforms, and plans for multiparty elections not only failed to provoke a counterreaction but received outright support from the Kremlin. In July 1988, Gorbachev visited Poland, urging senior officials to push ahead with economic and political liberalization and wholeheartedly backing General Jaruzelski’s reform package. At the end of the year, in a speech at the United Nations, Gorbachev announced a unilateral reduction of a half million Soviet troops across Eastern Europe. “Freedom of choice is a universal principle,” he declared. “Force and the threat of force can no longer be, and should not be instruments of foreign policy.”41 When a wave of strikes and protests swept across Poland four months later, the Soviet message remained resolutely in favor of reforms—a stance that remained consistent even as communist regimes began to topple across the region. “The process of renewal is gradually spreading over the entire socialist bloc,” Gorbachev told the Hungarian prime minister approvingly in March 1989, “and adds to the political culture and historical experiences of all these countries.”42 Six months later, as the rumbling intensified, Gorbachev declared that he had no “moral or political right to interfere in events.”43 His visit to Berlin in October 1989 was filled with hints that revolutionary reforms would be encouraged rather than suppressed—such as the leaked news of his promise to German officials that he would not use Red Army troops on German soil, his statement that the Berlin Wall was not “a pleasant decoration” but a “tragic 38. Quoted in Brown 2007a:3. 39. Gorbachev 2010:521. 40. Quoted in Kramer 2003a:184. 41. Gorbachev 1988. 42. Wilson Center Digital Archive 1989. 43. Quoted in New York Times 10/26/1989.

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tribute” to the past, or the rumors that he encouraged senior party members to depose the orthodox Honecker. “Life itself punishes those who delay,” he had told Honecker cryptically before leaving. 44 Within hours of Gorbachev’s departure, demonstrations of unprecedented size formed on the Alexanderplatz, and the Wall collapsed a few weeks later. The choice to allow East European democratization, in short, had been made in the Kremlin years before protestors began to gather in city squares, and this choice had been steadily sustained as the decade wore on. As Risse argues, “the renunciation of the Brezhnev doctrine enabled the peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe in the first place.” According to Anderson, “nothing fundamental could change in Eastern Europe so long as the Red Army remained ready to fire. Everything was possible once fundamental change started in Russia itself.” And as Hale concludes, “archival research now makes clear we must consider Mikhail Gorbachev’s USSR as a common cause of similar democratizing events in East Europe.”45 This crucial shift in Soviet foreign policy occurred in the context of growing fears of economic decline, which was widely acknowledged and discussed in the Politburo beginning in the 1980s. Archival documents from the early period of Gorbachev’s rule reveal a regime deeply concerned with the mounting costs of an overextended foreign policy.46 When attempts at more gradual reform through uskoreniye (economic acceleration) proved ineffective, the Soviet leadership began moving toward a more radical policy of reform at home and retrenchment abroad. “Among the leadership, economic difficulties received frequent, sometimes obsessive, attention.”47 Hegemonic decline thus led directly to the wave of democratization in 1989 by increasingly shaping and constraining Soviet choices in Eastern Europe during the 1980s. “As the material pressures on Soviet foreign policy became 44. Gedmin 1992:49; Ash (1990:67) calls Gorbachev’s visit “the turning-­point” in East German protests. 45. Risse 1997:184; Anderson 1999; Hale 2013:342. Similar arguments have been made by a number of scholars. Tarrow (1991:17): “The political opportunities that triggered these upheavals in the East became widely understood only after Gorbachev’s well-­publicized refusal to use military force.” Huntington (1991a:16): “In Eastern Europe the major obstacle to democratization was Soviet control; once it was removed, the movement to democracy spread rapidly.” Boix and Stokes (2003) find that states with Eastern European levels of development during the Cold War were highly likely to democratize, and that the Soviet factor thus exercised a key influence in keeping Eastern Europe autocratic. See also Bunce 1990:395; Brown 1996; Kumar 1992:441; Revel 1993:79; Pridham 1994:7; Kramer 2003a:192. 46. Contrary to earlier analyses of late-­era Soviet foreign policy, which focused on the primacy of ideas, later research has demonstrated that Soviet material decline “was more marked, occurred earlier, and generally placed a much greater strain on maintaining the foreign policy status quo than scholars had previously assumed” (Brooks and Wohlforth 2002:95). 47. Suri 2002:66.

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more significant,” write Brooks and Wohlforth, “Gorbachev became increasingly disposed to undertake a radical shift toward retrenchment.” The policy did encounter opposition from the party hardliners; but here, too, decline forced their hand.48 The growing evidence of decline created political space for pursuing fundamental economic reforms, whose urgency was reinforced by the pervasive fear of decline throughout the party leadership, including among the hardliners. Domestic efforts to rejuvenate the economy by necessity implied a transformation of foreign policy, for two related reasons. First, continued rivalry with the West both distorted the economy and denied the Soviet Union access to Western technology needed for growth.49 Second, controlling and subsidizing East European satellites presented an additional burden on the USSR.50 Reversing economic decline at home thus led directly to the pursuit of two closely related policies abroad: rapprochement with the West designed to end ruinous competition with the United States and allow the USSR access to Western technology,51 and retrenchment in Eastern Europe that sought to lessen the burdensome costs of imperial control.52 Besides Soviet policy, three other factors have commonly been put forward to explain the events of 1989—the choices of local communist elites, pressures from the West, and most obviously the actions of the protestors themselves. Gorbachev’s actions alone were not sufficient, argues Ash, since they cannot explain why the local ruling elites did not “deploy their own, still formidable police and security forces in a last-­ditch defence of their own power and privilege.”53 This factor, however, risks assigning too much foresight and autonomy to local party leaders who had spent decades under Soviet domination. 48. Brooks and Wohlforth 2000:50. “The escalating economic costs of maintaining the foreign policy status quo,” they note, “systematically undercut the ability of Gorbachev’s critics to come up with a compelling general foreign policy alternative.” 49. As Willy Brandt recalled in his memoirs, Gorbachev had admitted to him in 1985 that the Soviet economy had been overburdened by Cold War competition (Gedmin 1992:10). 50. By the 1980s, subsidies to Eastern Europe amounted to $11–$15 billion annually, even without accounting for the costs of maintaining Soviet military forces in the region (Gedmin 1992:15). 51. As the technological gap between the superpowers widened, the desire for Western military technology made even conservative elites and members of the military establishment more receptive toward toward integration with the West. See, e.g., Aslund 1991:37–43. 52. The two goals were mutually reinforcing: Shervardnadze later argued that the renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine was rooted in a desire to end the confrontation with the West, which he estimated had cost the USSR over 700 trillion rubles over the past twenty years (Gedmin 1992:4). The liberalization of Eastern Europe would in turn bolster the Soviet economy both by relieving the need for subsidies and by turning the countries into “instruments of beneficial cooperation between East and West Europe” (Mlynář 1990:124). 53. Ash 1990:141.

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As Domber argues, “the system was crumbling so rapidly that hardline members of East European governments might not have been able to stage a successful crackdown even if they had wanted to.”54 And according to Bunce, the East European rulers were hardly in a position to go it alone. They were already weakened by a protracted economic crisis, by increasingly testy relations with their citizens, and by their long-­term dependence on the Soviet Union for everything they needed to maintain control—that is, markets, energy, and political authority.55 By indicating that Soviet troops would not be used to maintain Communist control, Judt notes, Gorbachev “decisively undermined the only real source of political legitimacy available to the rulers of the satellite states: the promise (or threat) of military intervention from Moscow.”56 As Ash himself notes, the protesters benefited “from their ruling elites’ chronic dependency on the Soviet Union, for, deprived of the Soviet Kalashnikov-­crutch, those elites did not have an anchor leg to stand on.”57 The lack of Soviet support for incumbents, argues Kramer, was critical in “effectively depriving hardline Communist leaders of the option of violent repression.”58 In some cases, the Soviet Union went beyond merely withdrawing support for local satraps and actively prevented them from using military force. In East Germany, for example, the deeply conservative Honecker had planned to use the army to end the protests but was prevented from doing so by high-­ranking Soviet officers stationed in the GDR. Willy Brandt publicly credited Soviet officials for preventing a massacre by urging the East German army to abstain from the use of force.59 The role of the Soviet Union was thus central in shaping the response of party officials in East European satellites. If the local elites failed to act, they did so because in the absence of Soviet security guarantees they had little choice in the matter. When they did attempt to act, they were prevented from doing so by Soviet action. What about the role of the West? As many historians have noted, the United States played a curiously marginal role in stimulating the events of 1989, with 54. Domber 2011:79. 55. Bunce 1990:395. 56. Judt 2005:632. Romania was the exception that proved the rule: as the country least dependent on the Soviet Union it was able to mobilize, if only for a short time, its own security apparatus. 57. Ash 1990:141. 58. Kramer 2003a:200. 59. Gedmin 1992:101–2. As he concludes (1992:101), “Soviet influence governing the peaceful outcome of the Monday night demonstration is undeniable.”

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the Bush administration repeatedly emphasizing caution and stability over large-­scale reform.60 “Too much was happening in the East—I had seen it myself,” wrote Bush in his memoirs with Brent Scowcroft.61 Once the inertia for revolution accelerated, the Bush administration took on the role of a “reluctant inhibitor”—seeking to curb the dissidents’ push for power while pressing for the inclusion of Communists in the new governments.62 During his July 1989 visit with Jaruzelski, Bush encouraged the Communist general to run for president, describing him as “a real class act” to his advisors. By contrast, in his meetings with reformers Bush appeared stiff and uncomfortable, as if the bearded revolutionaries reminded him too much of the radicals back home. His lunch with Walesa degenerated into a shouting match over the paltry aid offer to Poland. “Who is this strange man with a beard who looks like Woody Allen?” he asked his aides after meeting Janos Kis. “These really aren’t the right guys to be running the place.”63 While Communist hardliners later claimed CIA operatives orchestrated the revolutions—a hardy theory that resurfaced decades later during the Color Revolutions—the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. According to Hale, the West “simply did not have enough penetration into East Europe’s totalitarian regimes to orchestrate events.” And as Judt concludes, the United States “played a remarkably small part in the dramas of 1989, at least until after the fact.”64 Finally, what of the role of the protesters themselves? It was their dramatic presence on city streets, after all, that so vividly marked the end of communist rule. But as the Polish dissident and philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, throughout most of the 1980s opposition movements “embraced only a tiny minority.”65 According to Czechoslovakia’s intelligence services, the active dissident population numbered about five hundred people, and Havel’s Charter 77 attracted less than a thousand signatures in a country of fifteen million people.66 Most Eastern Europeans sought to adapt, however awkwardly, to a seemingly vast and implacable system. Only Poland had something approach60. According to Pleshakov (2009:236), Bush “didn’t do much to encourage or help” the 1989 revolutions, while Garthoff (1994:776) notes that the administration “deliberately held back from pushing the process of change.” Dombert (2011:54) concludes that “Washington tried to control the transformation of Eastern Europe by slowing it.” 61. Bush and Scowcroft 1998:130. 62. Domber 2001. A cable from the US Embassy two days before the election argued that a Solidarity victory could result in “utter catastrophe” and plunge the country into chaos. GW National Security Archive 1989a. 63. Quoted in Sebestyen 2009:302, 305. 64. Hale 2013:342; Judt 2005:631. 65. Kolakowski 1992:55. 66. Judt 2006.

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ing a true civil society, spearheaded by Solidarity, but the country experienced few demonstrations in the run-­u p to the election that threw out the Communists. As Stephen Kotkin writes, grassroots dissidents “could not have shattered Soviet-­style socialism for the simple reason that civil society in Eastern Europe did not then actually exist.”67 Rather than being a cause of 1989, Kotkin concludes, civil society was one of its consequences. There was “no successful revolutionary wave from below,” argues Tismaneanu; “instead, communist ruling elites collapsed as a result of their own failures. Solidarity did not kill communism; communism killed itself.”68 Dissident groups had been active long before any changes in Soviet foreign policy, and to their proponents this suggests that Gorbachev’s actions had little impact on an already-­existing push for reforms. But the fact that dissident groups had struggled for change long before 1989 only underscores the importance of the USSR. Despite their persistent efforts, the dissidents could do little to achieve their demands until there was a fundamental realignment in Soviet policy. The crowds, the rebel intellectuals, and the leaders of trade unions succeeded only “because Mikhail Gorbachev let them.”69 Nevertheless, the myth of civil society presented a convenient narrative for academics, journalists, aid donors, and the protestors themselves. “In the heady afterglow of liberation,” writes Judt, “many East Europeans belittled the significance of Moscow, the better to highlight their own achievement.”70 To emphasize the role of the hegemon is not to minimize the efforts of the people who braved jail or death to fill city squares. Democracy needed agents who would push for change when change became possible. Yet their actions, however courageous, cannot explain the timing or the spread of the revolutions. Reformers had been there for years, agitating to no effect and unable to mobilize even a small fraction of the population. Democracy did need 300,000 people in Wenceslas Square to jingle their keys in unison. But this mass opposition only began when it became obvious “that the tiger was on its deathbed.”71 As Brown puts it, the shift in Soviet foreign policy was “overwhelmingly the most important part of the explanation,” acting as “the decisive trigger and indispensable facilitator of transition from Communist rule.”72 The result was an intense wave of democratization across the eastern half of the continent. 67. Kotkin 2009:7. 68. Tismaneanu 2014:62. 69. Judt 2005:632. 70. Judt 2005:631. 71. Kolakowski 1992:55. 72. Brown 2007b:222, 237.

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11

Level of democracy

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

Average level of democracy in sub-­Saharan Africa, 1980–­ 2000 (Polity IV).

FIGURE 6.1.

Africa’s Democratic Wave The end of the Cold War produced changes not only in the Soviet zone of influence in Eastern Europe but around the world more generally. Across Asia and Latin America, which had already begun to experience the push for democracy, the collapse of the USSR dampened ideological conflicts, weakened the material and ideological support for radical groups, and encouraged US moderation in its foreign policy of aggressive anti-­communism. But it was on the African continent where the effects of hegemonic shock were felt most visibly. It was here that, as the Economist noted in 1992, the Soviet breakup “has led to more changes there than anywhere else in the world except Europe.”73 In the decade after 1989, thirty-­two African states held free or mostly free founding elections, while over thirty states undertook economic reforms.74 Only six African states managed to retain a one-­party system by 1993.75 The result was a cascade of regime change across the continent (see figure 6.1). While external influences frequently lurk below the surface of comparativist explanations for African democratization, regional specialists have been hesitant to assign a primary role to the Soviet collapse. Wiseman notes, for 73. Economist 12/26/1992. 74. Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 2002:916. 75. Ould-­Mey 2006:39. As with other waves, the exact numbers vary based on definition and time frame. Joseph (1997:363), for example, notes that “more than half ” of African regimes undertook democratizing reforms after 1989.

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example, that “a very large majority” of scholars have concluded that domestic forces played the crucial role in African democratization, while “external developments have, at most, contributed relatively modestly.”76 And according to Brown, “many authors minimize international influence and consider recent cases in Africa to be almost a purely endogenous affair.”77 The comparativist arguments generally take two forms. The strong version argues that international factors didn’t matter much, if at all. Instead the primary role is assigned to domestic factors like the strength and cohesion of opposition groups, civil society, or the national economy. “Although the changed external environment was more conducive to political reform,” argues Wiseman, “the major pressures for democratization were those being exerted in Africa by Africans.”78 Likewise, Bratton and van de Walle argue that “external factors serve as precipitating conditions rather than causal ones.” The real push for African reform, they argue, came from the actions of domestic opposition groups.79 The weaker version of the argument concedes that external factors are important but situates them in a vague residual category, a causal last resort to be invoked when domestic explanations have been exhausted. Magnusson succinctly sums up both the essence and the shortcomings of this view: Most of us assume (correctly) that there is a connection between broad systemic change and domestic politics. Scholars almost always position the current wave of democratization in Africa “at the end of the Cold War,” but the nature and processes by which this context is important internally is rarely examined as more than a newly permissive absence of constraint (or loss of Great Power interest) that permits the otherwise natural emergence of democratic institutions to take hold.80 In their oft-­cited book on African democratization of the 1990s, Bratton and van de Walle dismiss external forces as “mere synchronicity,” offering three reasons why international factors cannot account for the continent’s democratization. It may be useful to examine the limits of the comparativist argument by examining each of these in turn. First, they argue that a changed international environment was a common shock for all African states, and therefore cannot explain the diverse range of outcomes. If a common exogenous shift is to have explanatory power, they note, “political outcomes would also have to be consistent.” Instead, the wide 76. Wiseman 1995:4. 77. S. Brown 2005:180. 78. Wiseman 1995:4 79. Bratton and van de Walle 1992:420. 80. Magnusson 2005:79.

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range of outcomes “suggests that major explanatory variables intervene between the international context and the transition processes.”81 This argument, however, conflates two different questions—the causes of the initial burst of reforms and their eventual outcomes. While the common shock served to make democratic transitions more likely, it did not guarantee a convergence of democratic outcomes, which were indeed mediated by important domestic factors. No explanation, comparative or otherwise, would be able to account for all possible outcomes. Their own argument, for example, which emphasizes the institutional heritage of previous regimes, fares poorly in explaining eventual outcomes. Of the sixteen countries they classified as democratic successes in 1995, only six were classified as “free” by Freedom House in 2013. On the other hand, of the twenty-­four cases they classified as blocked or flawed transitions, half were classified as free or partly free in 2013. Moreover, describing the end of the Cold War as a “common condition” treats external factors as homogeneous residual causes, failing to disaggregate the varied effects of systemic pressures. International influences were not uniform across all cases: in Zambia and Malawi, for example, donors successfully pressured elites to democratize. But in Congo-­Brazzaville, French policy encouraged anti-­democratic behavior by local elites, while in the Central African Republic, donors unintentionally encouraged violence by the local opposition.82 While the overall effect of the hegemonic shock was to increase opportunities for democratization, the relative strength of external forces varied substantially across cases. Second, Bratton and van de Walle argue that the end of the Cold War cannot explain democratization in southern Europe and Latin America, since these waves preceded the end of the Cold War.83 This argument amounts to little more than a non sequitur, however. Just because the end of the Cold War cannot explain all democratization does not mean it cannot explain any democratization. Democratic diffusion in southern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, as discussed above, stemmed from very different dynamics; to note that not all democratization was driven by hegemonic shocks is not to concede that external factors are therefore irrelevant. Third, they note that international pressures for democratization have been capricious. Outside donors have been inconsistent about enforcing democratic rules and in some cases actually empowered autocratic leaders.84 This is, of course, both true and consistent with the effects of hegemonic shocks. Inter81. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:30. 82. Clark 2005; Mehler 2005. 83. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:30. 84. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:241.

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national pressures are strongest immediately after the hegemonic disruption, then gradually fade as the crisis passes. Undoubtedly, domestic pressures for reform from below also played a role, just as they did in Eastern Europe. But the parallels also highlight the limits of domestic pressures. Women, students, professionals, and workers had begun to form opposition parties in the 1980s. The fight for democracy, Ihonvbere argues, “must therefore be located in this period, clearly predating the monumental upheavals in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.”85 But just as in Eastern Europe, these domestic groups were largely ineffective until the end of the Cold War. In Ghana, for example, Jerry Rawlings was pressed to outline a plan for democratization as early as 1987, but the process “achieved little progress” until outside pressures “compelled the regime to speed up its lapsed timetable.”86 As Joseph notes, transnational activists and domestic groups had steadily pressed for democracy and human rights during the 1980s, but had “had little impact in hindering the entrenchment of authoritarian regimes.87 The number of actual transitions before 1989 was extremely low; in fact, over the entire period of postcolonial government, only the island nation of Mauritius saw a peaceful transition of power from one elected government to another.88 Protest movements had difficulty in attracting wider support. According to Ould-­Mey, the basis of single-­party rule in Africa began to weaken only after Soviet disintegration, and opposition movements “became threatening to governments only in conjunction with external pressure for democratization.”89 Domestic opposition groups thus played a marginal role in the push for democratization. They developed “no new constituencies and communities,” and operated not by taking roles in the local political community, “but by courting foreign foundations, agencies, governments, and donors.”90 Direct evidence for the role of external factors also comes from statements by African officials who oversaw democratic transitions in the early 1990s. In her interviews with Tanzanian officials, for example, Vener documents a strong consensus that external influences were indispensable for reform. “Without that external pressure, there would not have been change,” notes one official.91 85. Ihonvbere 2006b:11. 86. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:170. 87. Joseph 1997:369. 88. Decalo 1992:7. As Revel (1993:168) writes, “the democratic wave was slow to gather strength in Africa in the eighties.” 89. Ould-­Mey 2006:38. Robert Bates (1994:25–26) argues that the push for reform has “strong domestic roots, but it is powerful because it is backed by international agencies and foreign capital.” 90. Ihonvbere 2006a:231. 91. Vener 2000:155.

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Domestic factors did interact with international impulses, and indeed in some cases strengthened their impact. The ongoing economic problems of the 1980s led to a string of bankruptcies and financial crises in a number of African countries, which left their economies dependent on external aid and infusions of Western capital. But the Soviet collapse, by drastically altering the willingness to employ aid conditionality, gave outside donors far greater leverage in pushing for internal reforms. The post-­Soviet wave was thus not merely an acceleration of existing trends but a radical departure from the past. Only nine sub-­Saharan African countries held elections between 1985 and 1989. Over the next five years, thirty-­eight out of forty-­seven countries held elections, of which twenty-­nine were “founding” elections.92 By ignoring the consequences of systemic shifts, domestic theories drastically underpredicted the likelihood of these transitions, and offered little purchase in subsequently explaining the wave of reforms. After all, transitions occurred in countries that lacked the traditional domestic requisites—they had low levels of economic development, a tiny middle class, and little or no past experience with democracy. “The events in Africa took scholars by surprise,” writes Decalo, “since most doubted Africa could move towards democracy.”93 Writing in 1984, Huntington argued that African states were “unlikely to move in a democratic direction,” concluding that “with a few exceptions, the limits of democratic development in the world may well have been reached.”94 The hegemonic shock was thus a crucial and necessary prerequisite for African democratization. It set in motion both the wave of democratic transitions and the democratic rollback that followed, and decisively shaped both the timing and the content of the reforms. ——— Soviet influence in Africa was minimal in the decade following World War II. Stalin had little interest in the region and instead focused his efforts on Europe. Africa had few urban workers to form the proletarian vanguard, fewer Marxist-­ trained intellectuals, and little in the way of disciplined communist cadres. This approach began to change after the 1955 Bandung Conference formalized the nonaligned movement. As in Europe two decades earlier, the USSR abandoned its policy of fomenting ideologically pure parties and began encouraging indigenous broad-­based coalitions that would remain pro-­Soviet 92. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:7. 93. Decalo 1992:7. 94. Huntington 1984:214, 218.

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while incorporating local socialists and even the bourgeoisie. The long-­term consequence was an absence of unambiguously communist African states. Local leaders tended to be nationalist and opportunist above all, prioritizing aid over ideology and consequently willing “to modify all alien ideologies to suit their own needs.”95 As a result, both capitalism and communism were filtered through local priorities, sometimes to an unrecognizable extent. Just as Nehru had his “democratic collectivism,” Senghor’s Senegal had “African socialism” and Guinea’s Sékou Touré had “communocracy.” Over the 1960s and 1970s, Afro-­Communist parties and sympathetic left-­ wing dictatorships grew in numbers and took control in Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Mozambique, the People’s Republic of the Congo, and Portuguese Guinea. None possessed the state capacity required for truly communist control over economy and society. Yet they borrowed heavily from the Soviet institutional repertoire—embracing “scientific socialism,” adopting centralized economic planning, collectivizing agriculture, indoctrinating the populace in socialist ideas, justifying their policies in Marxist language, nationalizing their industries, and ruling through “vanguard” single-­party regimes. The Soviet Union encouraged these converts with massive aid and patronage, including toward countries that were not communist but demonstrated sufficient sympathies (like Tanzania). As a result, the end of the Cold War and the freeze of Soviet patronage severely undermined autocratic durability across the continent. But it also affected countries that were reliant on Western rather than Soviet support, by bolstering Western leverage in pressing for reforms.96 Bound by geopolitical constraints, the United States could not demand too much in return for its aid, and as a result African leaders managed to shield themselves from external pressures. “Not until after the end of the Cold War,” notes Clapham, “was any effective pressure brought by the outside world on African states” to uphold human rights or introduce democratic reforms.97 The Soviet collapse made clear the vast gulf between promise and reality. Here as elsewhere, the hegemonic shock prodded domestic transformations by credibly revealing the true extent of the regime’s bankruptcy. In Africa, argues Wolgin, the “discarding the old statist beliefs only occurred after the fall of Communism and the evident failures of socialist models.”98 As the Soviet model fell apart in Eastern Europe and then within the USSR itself, African regimes quickly began to shift toward democratic and market-­oriented modes of governance. According to Plattner, communism’s “ideological self-­ discrediting” was even more harmful than its economic failure: 95. Duignan and Gann 1994:17. 96. Levitsky and Way 2010. 97. Clapham 1996:191. 98. Wolgin 1997:55.

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By attributing their system’s shortcomings to its lack of economic markets and political democracy, the Soviet leaders effectively conceded the ideological struggle to the West, and dealt communism’s worldwide appeal a mortal blow. Who wants to devote oneself to a cause that has been repudiated by its own most prominent spokesmen?99 The Romanian fiasco had a particularly strong effect in Africa, since Ceauşescu had formed strong ties with a number of the continent’s dictators, and his inglorious Christmas Day execution against a cement wall “was a harbinger of what could become of Africa’s rulers.”100 After witnessing Ceauşescu’s demise, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere swiftly initiated a transition from single-­ party rule to a multiparty democracy. “When you see your neighbor being shaved, you should wet your beard,” he informed a journalist. “Otherwise you could get a rough shave.”101 After 1991, democracy (or at least a semblance of it) appeared to be the only way to gain acceptance with both domestic audiences and the international community. This ideological victory of democracy was accompanied by increased material incentives for its adoption. During the Cold War, both superpowers hindered democratization by encouraging protracted civil wars and propping up convenient despots. But the sudden disruption of Soviet patronage abruptly transformed the domestic calculus of power. It narrowed the space for autocratic maneuverability and further disrupted the neopatrimonial networks already damaged by the economic crises of the 1980s. As a result, the regimes that were most heavily dependent on Soviet assistance were among the first to collapse. The greatest early democratic gains therefore occurred among rigidly autocratic Afro-­Marxist states—Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Congo, Somalia, Cape Verde, and Benin.102 The end of Soviet patronage was made worse by its abruptness, since aid deliveries had not gradually declined before the collapse. In fact, according to some estimates, arms deliveries to client states actually increased in the second half of the 1980s. Even as Gorbachev promised to pull Soviet troops from Afghanistan in early 1988, he simultaneously increased aid to fellow travelers like Nicaragua and Cambodia.103 Angola was forced to (unsuccessfully) sue for peace with their Western-­backed insurgents, while countries like Ethiopia simply fell apart in the absence of Soviet military aid and development assistance. “After the fall of their ideological models in Eastern Europe,” writes 99. Plattner 1991:36. 100. Mentan 1998:43. Gros (1998:12) notes that Mobutu, for instance, was “particularly shaken” by Ceauşescu’s death. 101. Quoted in Way 2011:152–53. 102. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:241. 103. Herrmann 1992:452–57.

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Mbaku, “it became very difficult for the continent’s Afro-­Marxist regimes to maintain their existence.”104 The death of the Soviet patron meant that only the West now remained as a plausible source for assistance. Swearing fealty to an ideology, whether communist or democratic, was no longer sufficient in a world where superpower competition had ceased to be the decisive factor. As a result, the end of the Cold War “found most African governments more vulnerable to Western pressures and thus more likely to respond to protest with political reform.”105 During the Cold War, the United States willfully ensnared itself with some of the most despotic regimes on the continent. States like Zaire, Sudan, and Somalia were among the top recipients of American aid, as were nondemocratic but anti-­communist insurgency movements like Angola’s UNITA. Decolonization brought in a generation of leaders who sought to suppress internal conflicts and establish strong states, often to the detriment of democratic development. In the quest for strategic superiority, the United States spent little effort pressing for reforms or promoting genuine democracy. On the contrary, the pursuit of loyal clients sometimes led to the undermining of potentially inconvenient opposition movements. In Zaire, for example, the United States helped assassinate the democratically elected but politically unpalatable Patrice Lumumba, replacing him with the anti-­communist despot Mobutu Sese Seko. As Herbst writes: While the U.S. and other western donors always nominally favored democracy, they devoted little effort to punishing countries that ended formal electoral competition. The strategic competition induced by the cold war also created an environment where authoritarian leaders or military officers were generally assured of quick acceptance by international society (and thus of aid).106 The end of Soviet support and the transformed nature of American assistance were now forcing autocrats into a corner. In April 1990, the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs announced that democratization would become an official requirement for American assistance, alongside human rights and economic reform. The following month, the US ambassador to Kenya noted “a strong tide” in Congress of focusing foreign aid on countries “that nourish democratic institutions, defend human rights, and practice multiparty politics.”107 Visiting Malawi in 1992, US Vice President Dan Quayle told Hastings Banda that his economic ties to America would be jeopardized unless he moved to104. Mbaku 2006:74. 105. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:135–36. 106. Herbst 2001:360. 107. Quoted in Ake 1991:39.

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ward democracy. In the same year, the European Community denounced Malawi’s government and Norway suspended all aid, while Britain cut its aid program in half. When Banda requested $800 million in external support, the donors instead froze all future aid (except drought and refugee relief ) and explicitly linked its reinstatement to political reforms.108 Banda was forced to hold a national referendum on allowing a multiparty democracy, leading to his regime’s defeat in 1994. In Benin, to take another case, the country’s Marxist-­Leninist regime precluded the possibility of American assistance during the Cold War. But the disappearance of Soviet financing gave external donors and international institutions substantial power to push for reforms. “Greater political openness,” Nwajiaku writes, “thus stemmed from a more pronounced need to attract external assistance in order to ‘manage’ the worsening economic crisis . . .”109 The result was a relatively peaceful democratic transition. The outcome of the hegemonic shock therefore empowered foreign aid in several related ways. First, it eliminated Soviet sources of funding, forcing African rulers to turn westward. The West’s sudden monopoly on aid made the United States, its allies, and international institutions more confident about imposing greater obligations in return for their continued largesse. Second, the end of the Cold War diminished the potential costs of losing African followers, further bolstering the credibility of aid conditionality. Third, the ideological victory of democratic capitalism bolstered its status as the only legitimate path forward, facilitating both the supply of democracy promotion from the West and the demand for such promotion among the citizens of African states. “No longer able to take refuge in balance-­of-­power politics,” Dunning concludes, “recalcitrant African states could be more effectively pressed to undertake the democratizing reforms that Western donors had de-­emphasized during the Cold War.”110 ——— Systemic and domestic factors interacted to produce a wave of African democratic reforms in the mid-­1990s (see figure 6.2). A number of related factors contributed to Africa’s democratic wave in the early 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the demise of communism as a viable path for state development in Africa. International financial institutions and Western donors, particularly the United States, began prioritizing democracy promotion over geopolitical interests, even as the cessation of Soviet patronage damaged 108. Ihonvbere 2003b:249. 109. Nwajiaku 1994:434. 110. Dunning 2004:412.

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Soviet collapse

Decline in Soviet aid/patronage

Changes in donor prefs.

Economic decay

Shrinking budgets

Breakup of patronage networks

Elite defection

Systemic factors

Socialism de-legitimized

Domestic factors

Cuts in public services

Popular protests

State de-legitimized

Democracy FIGURE 6. 2.

Factors contributing to the African democratic wave of the 1990s.

neopatrimonial elite networks and made them more susceptible to external pressures. Faced with shrinking funds, African regimes were forced to cut social spending, which led to an increase in popular protests, contributing to the push for political liberalization and multiparty elections. While domestic factors played an important role in carrying out reforms, their ability to do so hinged on the consequences of the hegemonic shock. Across the continent, the end of the Cold War and rapid Soviet decline “brought an almost instant transformation” in the domestic incentives and opportunities for democratization.111 111. Clapham 1996:192

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Democratic Rollback after the Soviet Collapse As with previous democratic waves, the triumphant expansion of democracy was soon halted by partial failure. “The ‘post-­communist’ euphoria is over and premonitions of imminent dangers are mounting,” wrote Kolakowski. “The monster is dying, in its own monstrous way. Shall we see another monster take its place, a series of bloody struggles between its various remnants?”112 About one in every five countries that democratized after 1989 either returned to authoritarianism or experienced significant democratic rollback. These reversals were unevenly distributed, affecting the former Soviet Union and Africa much more than Eastern Europe, Asia, or Latin America. All four elements of failed consolidation described in chapter 2—shifting external pressures, cognitive heuristics, collapse of ad hoc coalitions, and elite adaptation—contributed to the spread of hybrid regimes. The initial systemic pressures for democracy weakened over time, hopeful reformers inaugurated liberalization in countries with unfavorable domestic conditions, the pro-­ reform coalitions that formed in the immediate wake of the shock began to fall apart, and sitting incumbents quickly learned to subvert and co-­opt democratic institutions, adopting the trappings of democracy without loosening their hold on power. Elite adaptation was swift and varied. Autocracy, noted Africa Demos in 1993, is becoming “more cunning than ever, image-­conscious, and sophisticated in its ability to manipulate” the language of democracy.113 “The current wave of political liberalization is beginning to weaken,” argues Ihonvbere, “as politicians of the early years of independence, dictators, and incumbent regimes regain their composure and work out strategies to contain, divert, and defeat the new opposition.”114 Autocratic incumbents employed a wide variety of tactics to defuse opposition threats without undertaking full-­scale democratization. Some promptly acceded to all demands and rushed the timing of elections before the opposition had time to organize. This was the strategy adopted by Houphouet-­Boigny in the Ivory Coast: facing mass demonstrations, he quickly legalized opposition parties and announced an impending election. When some of the opposition leaders requested a delay to formalize their policies and organize electoral strategies, he cited “their own recent demonstrations for instant national elections.”115 Facing a disorganized and rattled opposition, Houphouet-­Boigny easily won the election with over 80 percent of the vote. 112. Kolakowski 1992:43. 113. Africa Demos 1993:1. 114. Ihonvbere 2006b:26. 115. Decalo 1992:27.

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Other incumbents legalized political opposition and then used the levers of state power to harass its leaders. “While an opposition leader has to depend on donated cars and advertise only when he can afford it,” reported The Economist, “the head of state zips around in a government helicopter and uses his nightly slot on the radio and television news” for campaigning.116 Some states held elections only to falsify the results, as in Cameroon. Others simply rigged the selection process: in Nigeria, Babangida’s military regime ran an election in which both presidential candidates were close associates of the general. In Zaire, after lifting the ban on political competition in April 1990, Mobutu immediately launched a campaign to undermine anti-­regime groups. This was pursued through the control of key institutions like state-­owned media, police and the army, and central banks, which allowed the government “to co-­opt, intimidate, torture, and silence rival politicians and political constituencies.”117 Where brute force was unfeasible, incumbents simply bought off the opposition. As Chege notes, “in the face of the region’s declining economies, a sizeable number of African intellectuals, journalists, and professionals have sold their services to dictators,” thereby weakening the push for democratization.118 In some cases—Edem Kodjo in Togo or Baba Gana Kingibe in Nigeria—opposition leaders defected to the side of autocratic incumbents after being offered high-­level positions in their administrations. In Senegal two major opposition leaders were incorporated into the Diouf government as ministers. In Zaire Mobutu appointed opposition leaders to his government and then undermined their base of power. In other cases politicians were simply paid to join the ruling party, as in the case of parliament members and opposition leaders in Kenya and Gabon. Erstwhile democrats “have readily sold their principles, supporters, platforms, and programs just to become part of already discredited regimes,” wrote Ihonvbere.119 All these tactics helped to further splinter the already fragile opposition. The craftiest incumbents pursued a number of these strategies simultaneously, all with the goal of molding the reform process to suit their needs. Pressured by new challenges at home and abroad, they pretended to embrace democracy “as a way of defusing opposition to their regime without fully democratizing.”120 They undertook tightly controlled steps toward democratization but hijacked the process to serve their purposes. These false transitions functioned as a way to “divide and marginalize potential opposition from elite groups and civil society, and to divert and confuse public attention.”121 In most 116. Economist 06/05/1999. 117. Afoaku 2003:218. 118. Chege 1995:48. 119. Ihonvbere 1997:376. 120. Huntington 1991b:129. 121. Beckett and Young 1997:7.

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cases, the goal was not brute suppression, which would draw too much international condemnation, but the careful subversion of a tightly controlled process. The sovereign national conference, for example, initially served as an instrument of democratic breakthroughs but was soon subverted by autocrats as a tool of regime entrenchment. National conferences were held in about a dozen African states between 1990 and 1992. A few (like Benin, Congo, Madagascar, Mali, and Niger) experienced real regime changes between 1990 and 1992, though not all of these proved permanent. In the beginning, a conference was “an unexpected breach in the wall of necessity,” in the words of the Cameroonian scholar and human rights activist Fabien Boulaga, “which opens the possibility of freedom of action.”122 Yet rulers soon learned to manage these events and even turn them to their advantage. Following some initial successes, the national conference “was vigorously rejected in Cameroon, physically intimidated in Togo, and rendered chaotic and impotent through a Byzantine combination of concession and retractions in Zaire.”123 In Gabon, Bongo convened a national conference without warning, giving the opposition little time to prepare and enabling him to manipulate the outcome.124 In doing so, he had molded it into a “domesticated and tamed conference” which had “lost the aggressiveness that characterized conferences in other countries.”125 The process of elite adaptation was necessarily intertwined with shifting external pressures. Where systemic pressures remained a factor, adaptation meant adjustment to external expectations, introducing just enough reform to keep the donors happy while maintaining a hold on political power. Joseph described such “virtual democracies” as regimes “deliberately contrived to satisfy prevailing international norms of ‘presentability’.”126 Fading external pressures meant that external actors focused on the need for elections as the ultimate test of a democracy, regardless of elites’ manipulation of the process. Incumbents’ shenanigans, noted the Economist in 1996, “are rarely picked up by foreign monitors, who often arrive only to observe the actual polling. Cynics call it ‘donor democracy’: just enough to keep the aid-­givers happy.”127 In other cases, instead of placating external actors, elites simply had to maintain power long enough until external pressures had weakened. Incumbents in states like Cameroon, Gabon, and Kenya “know too well that, when 122. Quoted in Clark 2006:101. 123. Joseph 1997:375. 124. As in Cameroon, democratization “caught the opposition by surprise. In fact, it seemed to have been convened hastily to produce precisely this result” (Messone and Gros 1998:138). 125. Nzouankey 1993:47. 126. Joseph 1997:3. 127. Economist 11/23/1996.

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faced with external pressure, all they have to do is wait it out,” writes Gros. “Sooner or later, the international community does come around.”128 In these cases, rulers “conceded the bare minimum that they thought donors would accept, with the resulting tentative openings subject to closure again once international pressure abated.”129 The adoption of pseudo-­democratic institutions was in many cases reinforced by external acquiescence to these flawed reforms. As the democratic wave wore on and the crisis of the hegemonic shock passed, elite adaptation was facilitated by autocratic learning not only from past events but also from each other. After the defeat of Kaunda in Zambia in 1991, for example, African rulers “began to advise each other on how to hold democratic elections without being voted out of office.”130 Kaunda counseled Kenya’s leader to take a harsher stance against opponents, since “in his hard-­ won experience, gradual political openings led inexorably to the ouster of incumbent leaders.” And in Cameroon, Biya was able to disrupt his country’s national conference by observing its dangerous success in Benin and Congo. Within a wave of transitions, each successful democratization not only informs other pro-­democracy movements about effective tactics and organizational strategies but also reveals to sitting rulers which strategies of suppression may work best. While contagion or “demonstration effects” produce self-­ reinforcing dynamics in the initial stages of the waves, autocrats soon begin to learn how to adjust to their new circumstances, leading to a countervailing process of negative feedback. Learning the fates of their peers, for example, allows autocratic elites to update their beliefs about the necessity of suppressing the protests. The crackdown in Tiananmen Square, for example, was to an important degree the result of Chinese leaders observing recent events in Eastern Europe. Chinese policy makers (including Deng Xiaoping) frequently cited concerns about upheavals in Eastern Europe “as one of their main motivations in deciding how to respond.”131 Li Shuzheng, the deputy director of the International Relations Department of the party’s Central Committee, told Egon Krenz (Honecker’s second-­in-­command) that concessions to the protestors were impossible, since “then there [would] be a situation like in Poland.” As she explained, party leaders felt that “legalizing the opposition would be the beginning of the end of socialism in China.”132 As Mary Sarotte argues, archival evidence shows that democratization in Eastern Europe “exacerbated party leaders’ fears of do128. Gros 1998:13. 129. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:183. 130. Nwokedi 1995:202. 131. Sarotte 2012:166. 132. Quoted in Sarotte 2012:171.

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mestic chaos and party factionalism” and “intensified the CCP’s determination not to let the same happen in China.”133 The rapid, sometimes euphoric contagion of political mobilization associated with democratic waves is often assumed to be a positive influence on reforms. But as the Chinese response demonstrates, elite learning is also a part of the counterdiffusion processes built into democratic cascades. The powerful spread of democratic institutions both encourages reformers and allows elites to adjust their strategies. After 1989, democratic advances made autocratic overthrows more likely in some states, but increased the likelihood of severe democratic crackdowns in others. As in previous waves, the favorable conditions for reform created by the shock brought together diverse domestic groups in seizing the opportunity for change. Students, journalists, doctors, human rights activists, and church congregations came together with business leaders and trade unions to push for democratic reform. In the early stages of the wave, such heterogeneity gave added force to opposition movements. Their apparent unity widened their support base and made the need for change seem inescapable. But in many cases it also contributed to their downfall by making cohesive cooperation difficult to sustain. Many protest movements were “an uneasy amalgam of diverse social elements,” comprising groups who “represented distinctive, even conflicting interests that were temporarily papered over in a popular crusade to eject unpopular autocrats.”134 The initial wave of reforms forged alliances among unlikely partners, such as the business-­labor alliances that were critical to opposition movements in Nigeria and Zambia, and were “destined to fall apart over conflicting economic interests once immediate political objectives were obtained.”135 Across Africa, argued Chege, “there has been a marked inability to rally opposition forces behind a unified antiauthoritarian banner. Rather, opposition parties tend to split repeatedly along ethnic and personality lines.”136 While the legalization of opposition opened up the political discourse, it also led to the spread of fragmented and scattered opposition groups. In 1975 an African country had an average of 1.9 parties; by 1993 the figure was 15.9.137 In 1993 Nigeria and Algeria each had about 120 candidates in their presidential elections, while Zaire had 129 registered opposition parties. The number of parties was similarly high in Burkina Faso (67), Mali (57), and Guinea (46). In the Ivory Coast, Houphouet-­Boigny faced a field of over twenty opposition 133. Sarotte 2012:180–81. 134. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:107. 135. Bratton and van de Walle 1997:107. 136. Chege 1995:48. 137. Mulikita 2003:107.

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parties, who “were crushed in the elections, having split the opposition’s few votes.”138 As the Economist noted, “opposition parties are poor and fractious, and defections to a cosy official job are common. . . . Several elections could have been won by the opposition if it had managed to be more united.”139 The mechanisms of failed consolidation rarely operate in isolation, but interact and reinforce each other. The weakening of hegemonic pressures allowed autocratic elites to expand their tactics of entrenchment—a process that in turn reinforced the growing fragmentation of opposition movements, which “became fragmented, brutalized, discouraged, and financially depleted.”140 In cases where opposition movements had succeeded in forging democratic transitions, they found themselves attempting to govern through weak and unstable institutions. The powerful systemic pressures at the end of the Cold War created an “initial rush to democratize” among states that lacked favorable conditions for democratic consolidation.141 Conclusion The Soviet collapse ended what World War I began—the replacement of territorial empires with nation-­states, and the decisive victory of democracy over a series of rival regimes. In three hegemonic shocks, democracy had emerged victorious over monarchy, fascism, and communism, experiencing only one major setback during the interwar years. As the Soviet case demonstrates, even the salience of nonhegemonic external factors in shaping domestic regimes is itself shaped by hegemonic transformations. The credibility of aid conditionality, for example, was magnified by the pressures of the hegemonic moment in the early 1990s. The Soviet collapse “has released the U.S. government from the need to orient every international action toward the pursuit of national security,” write Meernik, Krueger, and Poe, enabling policy makers to “devote greater attention and resources to the international promotion of U.S. ideological values” like democracy and human rights.142 Examining the focus of US foreign assistance before and after the Soviet collapse, they find that strategic, security-­driven concerns dominated during the Cold War, while an ideological focus on democracy promotion became more important in the years immediately after the Soviet collapse (1991–94), concluding that in those years, the United States 138. Ihonvbere 1997:376. 139. Economist 06/05/1999. 140. Joseph 1997:378. 141. Henze 1998:41. 142. Meernik, Krueger, and Poe 1998.

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was “increasingly rewarding democratic states with foreign aid while reducing assistance to strategically important nations.”143 The increased power of economic statecraft after the Soviet collapse has two implications for theories of political development. First, the logic of aid conditionality flips the modernization argument on its head. While modernization theory suggests that democratization is most likely in countries that reach a certain development threshold, this was not the case in Africa of the 1990s. Instead, it was the poorest countries that were most likely to make the transition to democracy, precisely because their poverty increased their need for outside assistance and thus their sensitivity to external pressures for reform. Some of the most successful cases of initial democratization were also among some of the continent’s least developed, like Malawi, Benin, or Mali. Malawi’s Banda, for example, was forced to give in to the demands of outside donors because the country’s poverty made foreign aid critical. As Gros notes: There is no question that an international environment that was receptive to democratization in the early 1990s made a difference, particularly in Africa’s poorest states. In Benin, Congo, Niger, and Malawi, the need to remain eligible for external financial aid, made all the more paramount by depleted national treasuries, forced incumbents in these countries to succumb to demands for change.144 Richer countries, by contrast, were more able to shield themselves from these external pressures. This was especially true for states endowed with natural resources, which allowed them to both deflect international pressure and pacify disruptive domestic actors through patronage. The countervailing effects of aid conditionality might explain why no consistent links have been found between economic development and democratization in 1990s Africa. A second implication has to do with the effects of systemic polarity on the effects of aid. The lessons of the 1990s demonstrated that aid conditionality is most effective under unipolarity (or at least in the absence of major geopolitical rivalry), since unipolar powers care least about attracting allies or preventing them from joining rival coalitions. A relative decline in US power, by increasing the importance of geopolitical competition, is likely to once again undermine the power of aid conditionality. If so, aid will become a less effective tool for economic and political reforms. Contrary to what many studies of foreign aid 143. Meernik, Krueger, and Poe 1998:64. Similarly, Bearce and Tirone (2010) find that foreign aid has promoted economic growth only after the end of the Cold War, even when accounting for other potentially confounding variables such as increases in global economic flows. 144. Gros 1998:12, emphasis added.

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argue, its effectiveness may depend not on aid type, donor, or even the qualities of the recipient but on the larger geopolitical structure in which aid is embedded. Future research on foreign assistance might thus benefit from examining the effects of aid within the hegemonic context in which its disbursement takes place. The post-­Soviet victory of democracy was far from complete. It missed certain regions entirely, and where it left a mark the result was often partial and tentative. In the realm of political legitimacy, democracy was ascendant; but this ideological superiority did not always translate into political dominance. The result has been not a consensus around democracy but the profusion of qualifying adjectives attaching themselves to the word “democracy.”145 While the hegemonic shock of the Soviet collapse led to partial democratization in many states, the mechanisms of failed consolidation inherent in democratic waves led to democratic stagnation and rollback. The rise of hybrid regimes over the past twenty years has therefore been in large part a byproduct of the shifting systemic pressures produced by the century’s last hegemonic shock. 145. Collier and Levitsky 1997.

7 Conclusion BE YOND THE GREAT PL ATEAU

So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. — E . M . FORSTER , 1 93 81

World history strides on from catastrophe to catastrophe, whether we can comprehend and prove it or not. — OSWALD S P ENGLER , 1 93 2 2

For most of the nineteenth century, rulers sought to domesticate the rise of democratic impulses through nationalism. But if World War I marked the climax of this long inculcation, it was also the beginning of its decline. After 1918, faith in one’s nation increasingly came into conflict with faith in a diffuse, nonterritorial ideology. The three contenders—communism, democracy, and even fascism—offered explicitly universalizing claims, and in doing so sought to disengage from an imagined community demarcated by national borders. Nationalism could not be displaced entirely, of course, and nationalists often harnessed global ideologies toward their own narrower purposes. But the broad contours of the century were also shaped by transnational ideological clashes, manifested by a series of confrontations between leading states that represented competing visions of the modern state. Each confron1. Forster 1938:84. 2. Spengler 1932:20–21. 231

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tation culminated in a hegemonic shock, which put to rest old struggles even as it catalyzed new ones, until democracy’s apparent victory at the end of the Cold War. What lessons do hegemonic shocks of the twentieth century hold for the future of democracy? To address this question, it might be helpful to briefly take stock of the book’s main arguments. I have argued that the evolution of domestic regimes in the twentieth century has been shaped by cross-­border institutional waves—sudden bursts of domestic reforms, most prominently of democracy but also of fascism and communism. Traditional explanations for democratization, which focus on domestic factors, cannot tell us much about the causes and dynamics of these regime cascades. Instead, the major source of institutional waves has been a specific type of systemic volatility, in the form of hegemonic shocks. Hegemonic shocks are moments defined by abrupt shifts in the distribution of relative power among leading states in the international system. Four such episodes have occurred in the twentieth century—the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Soviet collapse. These shocks created unique and powerful incentives for waves of domestic reforms, and have profoundly shaped the spread and retreat of democracy, fascism, and communism. Shocks lead to waves through three sets of mechanisms—coercion, inducement, and emulation. Namely, shocks create windows of opportunity for regime imposition; they enable rising hegemons to exogenously change the preferences, incentives, and capabilities of domestic actors; and they credibly reveal hidden information about relative regime efficiency to foreign audiences. The importance of each mechanism varies with each shock, but their persistence allows for the creation of a theoretical framework that explains the volatile evolution of domestic institutions over the past century. Finally, I’ve argued that failures of consolidation are inherent in democratic waves created by shocks. Shocks produce powerful but temporary pressures for democratization, leading to a period of democratic overstretch. The dissipation of these pressures, coupled with counterwave dynamics, leads to democratic rollback and collapse as domestic pressures reassert themselves. Abrupt hegemonic transitions thus forge powerful but fleeting incentives for democratization, shaping both the initial transitions and the subsequent failures of democratic consolidation. The failures of post–Cold War democratization, which brought us into a world populated by hybrid regimes, were in large part the result of this interplay between the systemic and the domestic. In sum, the history of modern democracy cannot be completely understood without taking into account the effects of hegemonic shocks. These systemic upheavals have repeatedly challenged and transformed accepted notions of what constitutes a legitimate state. In this they have been, to borrow Marx’s description of revolution, the midwives of history. The fortunes of de-

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mocracy, fascism, and communism have all been influenced by the outcomes of these geopolitical cataclysms. These arguments have a number of implications for studies of democratization and global orders. The evidence in this book suggests that in the wake of hegemonic shocks, domestic party realignments and coalitional shifts often become reflections of broader geopolitical dynamics rather than of internal forces or party intrigues. Theories of democracy that focus on elite pacts or class relations might therefore examine how hegemonic shocks alter the likelihood and content of these pacts, while also transforming the balance of class relations. Hegemonic shocks are also closely linked to processes of state formation and development. The twentieth century saw an explosion of state creation, with the total number of countries growing from around fifty in 1900 to nearly two hundred today. Shocks have been an important element in producing bursts of new states, as was the case in 1919 and 1989. (In fact, twenty-­two of the twenty-­eight transitions in the post-­communist space occurred within newly created states.3) Most explanations of state formation focus on internal factors that can undermine or strengthen institutional development—divided ethnicities, class relations, nationalism, or competing social forces within proto-­states.4 As a result, the role of the international system in shaping state emergence and development remains poorly understood. Coggins, for example, notes that “state emergence is an essential dynamic of the international system, yet international relations scholars pay it little attention.”5 Hegemonic shocks have played a crucial role in state formation over the past century, whether by shaping boundaries after major wars, changing the incentives for secession, or unleashing the centrifugal forces of fragmentation. State formation, especially in the twentieth century, has been deeply embedded in abrupt changes within the international system. The effects of hegemonic shocks on the dynamics of state formation remains work for future research. In addition to changing domestic institutions, hegemonic shocks have also repeatedly altered global political norms and practices—the expected standards of legitimate behavior both within and between states. The Soviet collapse, for example, triggered changes in norms dealing with the right to de3. These include the 15 former Soviet Republics plus Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-­Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, and Macedonia. (Munck 2001:133.) 4. E.g., Beissinger 2002; Roeder 2007. 5. Coggins 2011:433. Several scholars have recently linked the effects of state formation to the international system. Coggins (2011, 2014) argues that secession movements are more likely to succeed when they have support of the great powers in the international system. Griffiths (2017) suggests that the likelihood of secession is often shaped by international dynamics, namely global polarity.

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mocracy, sanctions, democracy assistance, foreign aid, and international election monitoring. “Modern humanitarian intervention was first conceived in the years following the end of the Cold War,” write Western and Goldstein: The triumph of liberal democracy over communism made Western leaders optimistic that they could solve the world’s problems as never before. Military force that had long been held in check by superpower rivalry could now be unleashed to protect poor countries from aggression, repression, and hunger.6 Most theories of norm evolution emphasize bottom-­up processes like persuasion and socialization by norm entrepreneurs. Yet norm change also appears to be shaped in part by sudden changes in the structure of global power. Hegemonic shocks create opportunities for normative cascades in which existing practices are quickly transformed or discarded. This process is both ideational and material, since shocks not only change the costs and benefits of adhering to certain norms but also cause a deep ideological reevaluation of which practices ought to be considered acceptable and legitimate. As comparative scholars have repeatedly pointed out, there are key differences between autocratic breakdowns and democratic transitions, with no guarantee that the first will lead to the second.7 In most cases the fall of dictators begets more dictators; since World War II less than a quarter of autocratic breakdowns have led to democratization.8 Shocks, however, alter and compress this process. During hegemonic shocks the same forces that lead to regime breakdown also lead to democratic transitions, and the two stages become temporarily fused—as happened most recently in 1989. The relationship between autocratic breakdowns and democratic transitions is therefore contingent on the presence of waves. In democratic waves, autocratic openings become synonymous with democratic transitions. But while the two processes become tightly coupled during waves, they are much less tightly linked in the course of normal politics. Moreover, the shifting pull of hegemonic pressures also means that Western linkage and leverage may not necessarily promote democratization once the shock passes. The post–Cold War experience in fact suggests that both weak and strong links may undermine democracy promotion, albeit for different reasons. While weak links cause hegemonic pressures to fade away due to lack of interest, strong links cause geopolitical interests to soon take precedence over democratization. 6. Western and Goldstein 2011:49. 7. E.g., Berman 2007. 8. Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2014.

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Hegemonic shocks also contain some implications for bellicist theory—the notion that domestic institutions are shaped by preparation for and fighting wars. As the outcomes of the world wars show, the effects of wars on domestic institutions are contingent not only upon the threat or actual prosecution of war but also upon its outcome. The aftermath of a hegemonic shock discredits or vindicates the rival mobilization strategies pursued by the combatants, and thereby shapes the attraction of their regimes in the wake of the conflict. Understanding the causes and dynamics of democratic waves is also crucial for understanding the effectiveness of regime promotion by external means. As the case of World War I demonstrates, the lack of US commitment in promoting democratic institutions throughout postwar Europe contributed to the collapse of new democracies and paved the way for the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Those mistakes were corrected in the settlement following World War II. Yet during the Cold War, American foreign policy had an ambivalent relationship with democracy, often preferring reliable autocrats over unpredictable democrats. Much of US policy in this period was guided by the fear of a communist wave that would begin in Asia and eventually wash up on the shores of California. Given the importance of democracy promotion in contemporary foreign policy, the sources of democratic waves can provide important insights into the effectiveness of these policies, whether they are pursued through sanctions, foreign aid, or military interventions. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, was motivated at least in part by the Bush Administration’s commitment to starting democratic waves through forced regime change. Yet policies that attempt to influence democratization might keep in mind that democracy has often moved in cycles of transnational advances and retreats. It may be insufficient or even counterproductive to focus on the needs and preferences of domestic actors inside any single country if domestic reforms are embedded in a larger framework of global or regional power shifts. The case studies in this book have focused on the twentieth century because hegemonic shocks require a system of states through which they can propagate. A system is a connected network of political actors that have, in Hedley Bull’s definition, “sufficient contact between them, and have sufficient impact on one another’s decisions, to cause them to behave—at least in some measure—as parts of a whole.”9 By these criteria, Bull argues a world system did not really emerge until World War I.10 English geographer Halford Mackinder proclaimed the birth of a “closed political system” of “world-­wide scope” a decade before World War I.11 And as Tilly writes, “From World War I onward it be9. Bull 1977:9. 10. Bull 1977:19–20. 11. Mackinder 1904:422.

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comes increasingly difficult to separate the European system from the world system of states that was forming rapidly.”12 Hegemonic shocks therefore could not have truly global consequences until a networked system of states consolidated itself at the end of the nineteenth century. But even if the world was not a unified system until World War I, the study of hegemonic shocks does not require a global unit of analysis. By Bull’s definition, Europe had become its own regional system at the end of the seventeenth century, if not before. The hegemonic shock of the Napoleonic Wars and its reverberations throughout Europe thus offers another case study of an early institutional wave. As Furet notes, the clash between revolutionary France and monarchical Europe “initiated the era of democratic war.”13 For decades before the French revolution, statesmen warned that it would become necessary to bring the majority of the population under the control of the state, to replace patronage with centralized authority mediated by the rule of law and financed by a far-­reaching tax system. The revolution confronted European rulers with these facts. At its peak, Napoleonic France “looked like a country where modern representative institutions, the rule of law, and universal military service had engendered an unprecedented level of patriotism and effectiveness on the battlefield,” writes Hosking. And while this dominance was partly illusory, “contemporaries were impressed.”14 The spread of republican institutions during the wars was partially reversed by the Holy Alliance, but the lessons of popular mobilization for democratic reforms remained in place. After a century of relative peace during which European energy was directed toward industrialization and colonization, World War I raised both mass mobilization and democracy to new levels. ——— At the start of the twentieth century, intensifying links between transnational ideologies and political regimes brought a fundamental change to the sources of regime legitimacy. Major shifts in the international system, rather than the internal attributes of states, acquired a new significance in shaping the spread and appeal of transterritorial ideologies of governance. World War I set the stage by marking the demise of vast monarchical empires. Around the world, the war’s outcome signaled the end of monarchy as a model for development and, for a brief moment, elevated democracy to the status of a political pana12. Tilly 1990:179. Likewise, Schweller (2010:28) describes the creation of the international system as a process that began roughly a century ago and “subsumed the entire earth, such that nothing remained outside of it.” 13. Furet 1999:48. 14. Hosking 2001:240–41.

B e yo n d th e G r e at P l ate au 237

cea. But the disappointing and tentative aftermath of the war led to a search for new alternatives. The Great War not only created an opportunity for a communist takeover in one of the defeated empires but also planted the seed for a fascist revolt against the shortcomings of liberalism. Democracy was the war’s short-­lived offspring, but communism and fascism were its enduring progeny. These challengers—the two “great totalitarian temptations” of the century, in the words of Fritz Stern—offered tempting alternative paths to modernity that at various points seemed poised to overtake an ailing, stagnant, and corrupt democracy.15 Yet less than five decades after helping democracy expunge the fascist alternative, communism itself left the world stage with a quiet implosion. Both challengers exited from the world stage defeated, discredited, and ready to adopt the institutions of their former rival. Neither fulfilled its self-­appointed destiny to forge a new world on the ruins of the old. “Today it is hard to realize that they are such recent ideologies,” writes Furet, “for they seem outmoded, absurd, deplorable, or criminal, depending on the case. Nonetheless, they permeated the twentieth century.”16 Given their eventual defeat, why was the twentieth century so hospitable to various forms of radicalism? As Ernest Gellner has argued, in this period the theological mode of thought was supplanted by the scientific mode, and as a result scientific facts acquired a newfound social significance.17 Both fascism and communism drew upon the suggestiveness of biological and historical “laws” to imbue their tenets with an air of certainty derived not only from numinous revelations, in the style of old ideologies, but also from ostensibly observable facts.18 In this way the ideological confrontations of the past century fused faith with science to produce virulent belief systems that justified radical action through recourse to both passion and scientific rationality. Liberal democracy took part in this hubris, finding its equivalent of historical materialism in modernization theory, which in its crudest form offered “a narrative of progress with a clear and un-­interrogated end point.”19 Both through the teleology of modernization theory and the triumphant discourse that followed the Soviet collapse, proponents of democracy have sometimes embraced its historical inevitability. Yet all twentieth-­century ideologies, notes Mazower, in fact shared a portrayal of “their own utopia as an End to History—whether in the form of universal communism, global democracy or a 15. Stern 1997:21. 16. Furet 1999:23. 17. Gellner 1989. 18. At Marx’s funeral, Engels proclaimed that just as Darwin “discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history” (quoted in Stern 1990:21). 19. Judt 2012:154.

238 C H A P TER 7

Thousand Year Reich.”20 All shared the narcissism of certainty bestowed by ideological faith. Far from being buried in the ideological struggles of the past century, the lessons of hegemonic shocks continue to resonate today. At the end of the twentieth century, democracy appeared to have decisively defeated its challengers. The number of democracies around the world stood at an all-­time high. Yet since 1995, and despite occasional outbursts, the level of democracy in the world appears to have reached a Great Plateau. Its peak coincided with a brief moment of unchallenged American dominance, which began and ended with a collapse—the first in Berlin in November 1989, the second in lower Manhattan in September 2001. During this interval, the United States loomed as the world’s great superpower, and no rival institutional template seemed ready to replace the model of capitalist democracy for which it stood. But after a period of unfettered unipolarity, the United States once again found itself facing the prospect of a new global struggle. Radical fundamentalism never posed a serious ideological challenge; even to call it “Islamo-­fascism” is to give it a historical and intellectual coherence the movement never possessed. But it exercised its effects indirectly, through the prospect of diminishing civil liberties within democracies and the alienating foreign policy of the American superpower. The first decade of the century was marked by democratic anxiety—what the Economist called “liberty’s lost decade” after 9/11.21 America’s heavy-­handed policy of spreading democracy through force contributed to a backlash against democracy promotion and gave ideological cover to autocrats by allowing them to credibly present democratization as a tool of Western neo-­imperialism.22 After 2008, the Great Recession cast doubt on democratic capitalism as a viable economic system, reviving the search for alternatives. In its early stages, the crisis understandably drew parallels to the Great Depression. Polanyi’s 1944 conclusion that “the origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-­regulating market system” would not have been out of place in a 2008 newspaper editorial.23 Despite avoiding another Depression-­like catastrophe, and despite the partial and uncertain recovery that followed, the economic crisis seems to have permanently damaged the appeal of democratic capitalism. Like the Depression, the Great Recession began in the United States and, in the process, “has tarnished the American model,” writes Ikenberry.24 People “no longer believe that the alternative to Washington-­led order is chaos,” write Jentleson and Weber. “[T]he rest of the world has no fear about experimenting with 20. Mazower 1998:xi. 21. Economist 08/03/2013. 22. Carothers 2006 and 2010; Ottaway 2010. 23. Polanyi 1944:29. 24. Ikenberry 2011:57.

B e yo n d th e G r e at P l ate au 239

alternatives.”25 Over the past few years, a slew of observers have begun to suggest that liberal democracy is in the process of being supplanted by state capitalism—an institutional bundle exemplified by China and marked by a capitalist system of production undergirded by state ownership and guidance. Modern state capitalism, according to this argument, is not just warmed-­over dirigisme but a sophisticated blend of efficient centralization and capitalist flexibility. State-­owned enterprises are no longer left to ossify, as in the Soviet Union, but are listed on the stock market, overseen by shareholders, and subject to performance reviews and periodic restructuring. “Elements of state capitalism have been seen in the past, for example in the rise of Japan in the 1950s and even of Germany in the 1870s,” writes the Economist, “but never before has it operated on such a scale and with such sophisticated tools.”26 Today’s capitalist autocracies, Gat argues, “appear to represent a viable alternative path to modernity, which in turn suggests that there is nothing inevitable about liberal democracy’s ultimate victory—or future dominance.”27 Looking back over the twentieth century, this anxiety appears as a recurrent motif, and is often a function of relative hegemonic decline. The criticisms leveled against democracy today—its propensity for gridlock, its economic inefficiency, its divisive and fragmented politics—are close echoes of the arguments made against democracy in the 1930s and the 1970s. This democratic pessimism takes two forms: the external critique, which points to the centralized efficiency of superior alternatives (whether Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, or modern China), or the internal critique, focusing on the supposedly intractable flaws of democracy itself. The two critiques often intertwine, of course, since the success of alternatives only serves to highlight democracy’s own perceived deficiencies. The coupling of capitalism with democracy was largely a byproduct of Cold War ideology and the modernization theory that accompanied it. The events of the past decade, however, serve as a reminder that historically the two need not go together. The modern capitalist economy took off in classical authoritarian regimes like Cromwell’s England and Bismarck’s Germany. Both Britain and the United States, two of the earliest capitalist states, did not extend the franchise to the majority of the population until the twentieth century. As Brucan notes, “it took Western capitalism about two centuries to reach the present balance between market and democracy.”28 And modern-­day capitalism, writes Michael Ignatieff, has “turned out to be politically promiscuous. Instead of marrying itself to freedom, capitalism was just as happy to bed down with authoritarian rule.” It is this flexibility, he notes, that allows state capital25. Jentleson and Weber 2008:46–47. 26. Economist 01/21/2012. 27. Gat 2007:60. 28. Brucan 1993:203.

240 C H A P TER 7

ism to present itself as a credible alternative that is “authoritarian in political form, capitalist in economics, and nationalist in ideology.”29 In fact, as an economic system, capitalism is proving to be just as popular in nondemocratic states—a 2010 poll showed that 68 percent of Chinese believed that capitalism was “the best economic model,” compared with only 59 percent in the United States.30 Shortly after the Soviet collapse, Revel predicted that any future totalitarians will “almost surely, again, be anticapitalist,” because “the disappearance of private property leads to the end of political and cultural freedom.”31 But private property can coexist quite comfortably with political constraints—provided that the latter do not endanger the former. Capitalism appears ready to uphold and perpetuate whatever system best suits its purposes, and there are good reasons to suspect that both democracy and autocracy can fulfill that role, albeit with different trade-­offs. Moreover, as Arthur Schlesinger notes, the relationship between democracy and capitalism is inherently unequal, since democracy requires private property that exists “beyond the arbitrary reach of the state” and “provides the only secure basis for political opposition and intellectual freedom.” Capitalism, on the other hand, has no need for democracy, “as Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew, Pinochet, and Franco, not to mention Hitler and Mussolini, have amply demonstrated.”32 The defining struggle of the twenty-­first century may be not between capitalism and state-­ led socialism but between liberal and illiberal variants of the capitalist state. The question today is whether modern state capitalism, as embodied by China, now represents the newest credible rival to the liberal democratic model—as monarchy, fascism, and communism all did in the past. According to one Chinese scholar, his country’s success will “challenge the West’s conventional wisdom about political development and the inevitable march toward electoral democracy.”33 As the twentieth century suggests, the reality of this prediction depends to a large extent on the changing structure of hegemonic power. One clear lesson of past hegemonic shocks is that a sudden decline in American power poses a much greater challenge to global democracy than a gradual Chinese ascent. China may be the first nonproselytizing great power since the Dutch Golden Age. Even Nazi Germany, despite its professed aversion toward exporting fascism, cultivated philofascist organizations and supported fellow travelers in South America, the Middle East, and south-­central 29. Ignatieff 2014:30. “Capitalism can function with a variety of state forms,” argues Gluckstein (1999:5). 30. Economist 04/07/2011. 31. Revel 1993:251. 32. Schlesinger 1997:7. 33. Li 2013:35.

B e yo n d th e G r e at P l ate au 241

Europe. So far, however, China has avoided preaching the virtues of its institutional model, abjuring terms like the “Beijing Consensus.” It remains to be seen if this attitude is a permanent consequence of China’s historical insularity or a temporary timidity stemming from a desire to secure its material position before all else. “At this early stage of development, Chinese ideas about alternative world orders remain inchoate and contested within China itself,” write Schweller and Pu. Yet these vague notions may “develop into a more appealing and consequential alternative ideology as they become more coherent and as China increases its power and prestige.”34 As the historical lessons of the past century demonstrate, the future of democracy is tied to the future of American power. Yet ironically America’s most enduring contribution to the global spread of democracy has been not through its conscious efforts at democracy promotion, which have often been clumsy, inconsistent, and hypocritical, but through its exalted status as a model worthy of emulation and a side worth joining. American power and success serves to legitimate the regime that it embodies and creates powerful incentives for leaders around the world to place themselves in the US camp. In that respect, no hegemonic catastrophe seems to loom. The United States “still remains the democracy whose state of health determines the credibility of the liberal capitalist model itself in the world at large,” writes Ignatieff.35 The ongoing economic and political crisis has not reached the level of the Great Depression, and thus does not constitute a global hegemonic shock— as a title of a recent book puts it, the System Worked.36 The current anxiety about democracy more closely parallels the crisis of the 1970s rather than of the 1930s, with many similar problems occupying the minds of American observers: terrorism, political crisis and deadlock, the subversion of democracy, American involvement abroad, and economic uncertainty. This period, representing the low point of the second wave of democracy, eventually passed with no major systemic disruptions. But a drastic US decline—perhaps as a result of another, more disorienting economic crisis—would set off an autocratic wave of unprecedented proportions. Historically, democracy is a deeply unusual form of government. It took root in a few isolated outposts two centuries ago and achieved global dominance only in the last few decades. It may yet “turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.”37 Over the past two centuries, it success has been frighteningly contingent on the global success of two powerful and unique states—Great Britain in the nineteenth cen34. Schweller and Pu 2011:52. 35. Ignatieff 2014:33. 36. Drezner 2014. For a dissenting critique, see Cohen 2015. 37. Revel 1983:4.

242 C H A P TER 7

tury and the United States in the twentieth. “I know of no evidence that ‘democracy,’ or what we picture to ourselves under that word, is the natural state of most of mankind,” wrote George Kennan in 1977: “Democracy has, in other words, a relatively narrow base both in time and in space; and the evidence has yet to be produced that it is the natural form of rule for peoples outside those narrow perimeters.”38 Most governments, write Will and Ariel Durant, have been oligarchies “chosen either by birth, as in aristocracies, or by a religious organization, as in theocracies, or by wealth, as in democracies.” This tendency is “as inevitable as the concentration of wealth; the majority can do no more than periodically throw out one minority and set up another.”39 If so, atrophy from within rather than destruction from the outside is the greater long-­term danger and a more insiduous one. “If despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character,” wrote Tocqueville in 1840. It “would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.”40 Despite their widespread appeal, fascism and communism thrived especially well in conditions of misery, uncertainty, and insecurity. Democracy, on the other hand, appears to be and has always appeared to be civilization’s paramount luxury good, most compatible with—and to some extent dependent upon—a condition of relative safety and prosperity. As Lord Acton put it, liberty is “the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.”41 The absence of these conditions stimulates the abandonment of democracy by leaders, intellectuals, and publics alike. Democracy’s natural constituency, notes Smith, is the middle class: unlike the peasants, they have “something to lose from revolution”—but unlike the elites, they also have “something to gain from reform.”42 In places where the middle class is weak or threatened, as was the case in much of the Third World, “the appeal of some form of either communism or fascism is more likely to hold sway.”43 And in times of crisis, democracy may fail to provide some much-­needed psychological crutches. As Ken Jowitt has argued, by elevating “rational impersonality” as the organizing principle of society, democracy fails to fulfill human impulses toward “group membership, expressive behavior, collective solidarity, and heroic action”—impulses that may be better met by anti-­democratic movements.44 Hitler, as Orwell observed in 38. Kennan 1977:41–43. Democracy, writes Chirot (1977:225) may be a rarity “created by a set of unique historical circumstances that will not be repeated.” 39. Durant and Durant 1968:70. 40. Tocqueville 1840:317. 41. Dalberg-­Acton 1877:1. 42. Smith 1994:187. 43. Smith 1994:187. 44. Jowitt 1991:17.

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1940, “knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-­hours.” They also seek “struggle and self-­sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-­parades.” Whatever their economic merit, he concluded, “Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”45 Democracy has survived previous crises and outlived a number of well-­ informed Cassandras. Even without a structure of hegemonic power that favors its persistence, democracy possesses certain advantages that may prove to be crucial in the long run. Foremost among them is a seemingly boundless capacity to adapt, to experiment with institutional reforms and borrow from its rivals in a way unavailable to its autocratic peers.46 “Autocrats can experiment with democracy but they can never let democracy experiment on them,” writes Runciman. “It can’t be done without losing control. That is why, in a crisis, semiauthoritarian regimes will revert to authoritarianism, while democratic regimes can try something new.”47 Autocratic concentration of power may increase regime stability, but it also increases regime fragility by preventing minor adjustments. While political centralization “reduces deviations from the norm, making things appear to run more smoothly, it magnifies the consequences of those deviations that do occur.” As a result, autocracy “concentrates turmoil in fewer but more severe episodes, which are disproportionately more harmful than cumulative small variations.”48 As Gorbachev himself admitted, Marx had deeply “underestimated capitalism’s ability to self-­develop.”49 Democracy survived the twentieth century in part by mimicking the successful elements of communism and fascism. Currently, China is seeking to do the same, by attempting to graft successful elements of capitalism onto its autocratic political structure. Its success to date calls into question the inevitability of autocratic rigidity. To Chinese rulers, the demise of the Soviet Union served as a stark warning of what happens when autocrats fail to adapt. Since 1989, the country’s communist party has proactively pursued strategies of adaptation to avoid the Soviet fate of ideological dogmatism and entrenched corruption.50 In this process of adaptation and hybridization, autocrats in China and elsewhere have stayed away from the totalizing ideologies of the twentieth 45. Orwell 1940c:14. 46. Democracy is superior to other regimes, argues Revel (1993:ix), because “it is the only system which, through trial and error, can become aware of its mistakes and correct them. Totalitarianism cannot correct itself: it is forced to follow its logic until the final catastrophe.” 47. Runciman 2013:322. This also implies, however, that transitions to autocracy may be subtler than transitions to democracy. 48. Taleb and Treverton 2015:89. 49. Quoted in Gedmin 1992:20. 50. Shambaugh 2008.

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century, preferring a trade-­off between private and public liberty. This is a distinction rarely made in the Western world, and one that sounds alien to our ears. But as a Russian acquaintance put it to me, so long as he can choose his job and say what he wants to his friends, why should he care about waving banners in Red Square? Michael Ignatieff makes a similar distinction: “The more private freedoms their citizens are allowed, the less they demand public liberty. Private freedom—to buy and sell, to inherit, to travel, to grumble in private—keeps the lid on discontent.”51 Despite the efforts of its rulers, China’s success may prove as illusory as the Soviet Union’s did in the 1950s. But if liberal democracy “fails in the 21st century, as it failed in the twentieth, to construct a humane, prosperous, and peaceful world,” writes Schlesinger, “it will invite the rise of alternative creeds apt to be based, like fascism and communism, on flight from freedom and surrender to authority.”52 As Hegel remarked, world history is the ultimate court of judgment. Failures are condemned as foreseeable blunders, successes are praised as inevitable triumphs—regardless of whether failure or success was determined by the actual merits of the enterprise. A communist USSR defeated fascism—and therefore won because it was communist. Whether this is true is far less important than the impression that it was. The same retrofitted determinism works in reverse; as E. H. Carr puts it, if the American quest for independence had failed, the Founding Fathers “would be briefly recorded in history as a gang of turbulent and unscrupulous fanatics.”53 As a result, democracy’s superiority appears self-­evident to people who have been steeped in its ideological virtues and material successes. But during the past century, democracy’s moral appeal has rarely been sufficient for its adoption. “Democracy has survived the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth,” writes Schlesinger. “It will not enjoy a free ride through the century to come.”54 While the metaphor of waves suggests a powerful inexorable force, democracy’s success has been predicated upon the ability of powerful democrats to weather military and economic crises, and to emerge triumphant in their wake. When democracies fail to do so, as during the Great Depression, the tide of popular and elite opinion shifts just as readily and just as naturally against democratic institutions. The advance of liberal democracy has been forged by the outcomes of grim and uncertain hegemonic struggles. The fragility of democratic success is the enduring lesson of hegemonic shocks. 51. Ignatieff 2014:30. 52. Schlesinger 1997:4. 53. Carr 1939:65. 54. Schlesinger 1997:11.

APPENDIX 1

Regime Classifications, 1900–2000

(includes occupations) States Coded as Fascist Albania—1939–1944 Austria—1933–1944 Belgium—1940–1944 Bulgaria—1934–1944 Czechoslovakia—1939–1944 Denmark—1940–44 France—1940–1944 Germany—1933–1945 Greece—1941–1944 Hungary—1938–1944 Italy—1922–1943 Japan—1936–1945 Netherlands—1940–44 Norway—1940–44 Philippines—1942–1944 Poland—1940–44 Portugal—1934–1973 Romania—1940–44 Spain—1939–1975 Thailand—1942–1944 Yugoslavia—1941–44 States Coded as Communist Afghanistan—1978–1991 Albania—1945–1991

Angola—1976–1990 Benin—1975–1990 Bulgaria—1946–1990 Cambodia—1976–1991 China—1949–2000 Congo DRC—1970–1991 Cuba—1959–2000 Czechoslovakia—1948–1989 Ethiopia—1975–1990 East Germany—1946–1990 Greece—1948–49 Grenada—1979–1983 Hungary—1947–1989 Laos—1976–2000 Mongolia—1924–1991 Mozambique—1975–1990 North Korea—1945–2000 Poland—1945–1989 Romania—1946–1989 Somalia—1976–1990 USSR—1917–1991 Republic of Vietnam—1954– 1975 Yemen’s People Republic—1968–1989 Vietnam—1976–2000 Yugoslavia—1945–1991

245

APPENDIX 2

Regime Impositions

Great Power?

Own Regime?

US

Yes

Yes

Cuba

US

Yes

No

Cuba

1912

Germany

Yes

Yes

Albania

1912

Austria-­Hungary

Yes

Yes

Albania

1912

France

Yes

No

Albania

1912

Russia

Yes

No

Albania

1912

Italy

No

Yes

Albania

1912

Great Britain

Yes

Yes

Albania

1914

US

Yes

Yes

Mexico

1915

US

Yes

Yes

Haiti

1916

US

Yes

Yes

Dom. Rep.

1917

US

Yes

Yes

Cuba

1918

Japan

Yes

No

Russia/USSR

1918

France

Yes

Yes

Russia/USSR

1918

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Finland

1918

Great Britain

Yes

Yes

Russia/USSR

1918

Italy

No

Yes

Russia/USSR

1918

US

Yes

Yes

Russia/USSR

1918

Germany

Yes

Yes

Finland

1919

Romania

No

No

Hungary

1919

France

Yes

Yes

Hungary

1920

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Iran

1920

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Poland

1921

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Mongolia

1936

Russia/USSR

Yes

No

Spain

1936

Italy

No

Yes

Spain

1936

Germany

Yes

Yes

Spain

1939

Germany

Yes

Yes

Slovakia

Year

Promoter State

1900 1906

Target State

247

248 A P P END IX 2

Great Power?

Own Regime?

Germany

Yes

Yes

Denmark

1940

Germany

Yes

Yes

France

1941

Germany

Yes

Yes

Croatia

1943

US

Yes

Yes

Italy

1943

Great Britain

Yes

Yes

Italy

1944

US

Yes

Yes

France

1944

Great Britain

Yes

Yes

W. Germany

1944

Canada

No

Yes

France

1944

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Poland

1944

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Romania

1944

Great Britain

Yes

Yes

Greece

1944

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Bulgaria

1944

Great Britain

Yes

Yes

France

1944

US

Yes

Yes

W. Germany

1944

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Albania

1945

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Iran

1945

Russia/USSR

Yes

No

Austria

1945

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Hungary

1945

US

Yes

Yes

Japan

1945

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

N. Korea

1945

US

Yes

Yes

Denmark

1945

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Czechoslovakia

1945

US

Yes

Yes

Luxembourg

1945

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

E. Germany

1945

US

Yes

Yes

Norway

1945

US

Yes

Yes

Netherlands

1945

US

Yes

Yes

Belgium

1945

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Yugoslavia

1947

N. Korea

No

Yes

China

1949

Syria

No

Yes

Lebanon

1950

China

No

Yes

S. Korea

1950

US

Yes

No

S. Korea

1950

N. Korea

No

Yes

S. Korea

1950

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

S. Korea

1953

Great Britain

No

No

Iran

1953

US

Yes

No

Iran

Year

Promoter State

1940

Target State

REG I ME I M P OS ITI ONS 249

Great Power?

Own Regime?

Target State

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

E. Germany

1954

US

Yes

No

Guatemala

1956

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Hungary

1958

Great Britain

No

No

Jordan

1958

US

Yes

No

Lebanon

1962

Egypt

No

Yes

N. Yemen

1964

US

Yes

No

Laos

1964

US

Yes

No

Brazil

1964

N. Vietnam

No

Yes

Laos

1964

Thailand

No

No

Laos

1964

France

No

No

Gabon

1965

US

No

No

S. Vietnam

1965

US

Yes

No

Dom. Rep.

1965

Philippines

No

Yes

S. Vietnam

1965

Australia

No

No

S. Vietnam

1965

Thailand

No

Yes

S. Vietnam

1965

China

No

Yes

S. Vietnam

1965

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

S. Vietnam

1965

New Zealand

No

No

S. Vietnam

1965

S. Korea

No

Yes

S. Vietnam

1967

N. Korea

No

Yes

S. Vietnam

1968

Hungary

No

Yes

Czechoslovakia

1968

S. Yemen

No

Yes

Oman

1968

Jordan

No

No

Oman

1968

Bulgaria

No

Yes

Czechoslovakia

1968

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Czechoslovakia

1968

Iran

No

No

Oman

1968

Great Britain

No

No

Oman

1968

Poland

No

Yes

Czechoslovakia

1968

E. Germany

No

Yes

Czechoslovakia

1969

France

No

No

Chad

1970

N. Vietnam

No

No

Cambodia

1970

US

Yes

No

Cambodia

1970

S. Vietnam

No

No

Cambodia

1973

US

Yes

No

Chile

1975

S. Africa

No

No

Angola

Year

Promoter State

1953

250 A P P END IX 2

Great Power?

Own Regime?

Israel

No

No

Lebanon

1975

Cuba

No

Yes

Angola

1976

Syria

No

No

Lebanon

1978

Vietnam

No

Yes

Cambodia

1979

Russia/USSR

Yes

Yes

Afghanistan

1979

Tanzania

No

Yes

Uganda

1980

Iran

No

Yes

Iraq

1980

Iraq

No

Yes

Iran

1983

Jamaica

No

Yes

Grenada

1983

US

Yes

Yes

Grenada

1989

US

Yes

Yes

Panama

1993

US

Yes

No

Somalia

1994

US

Yes

Yes

Haiti

1995

US

Yes

Yes

Bosnia

1995

France

No

Yes

Bosnia

1995

Great Britain

No

Yes

Bosnia

1997

Nigeria

No

No

Sierra Leone

1999

Canada

No

Yes

Yugoslavia (Kosovo)

1999

US

Yes

Yes

Yugoslavia (Kosovo)

1999

Great Britain

No

Yes

Yugoslavia (Kosovo)

1999

France

No

Yes

Yugoslavia (Kosovo)

Year

Promoter State

1975

Target State

A Note on Measuring Impositions The definition of impositions and the dataset of external impositions is taken from Owen 2002 and 2010, and supplemented by several cases excluded from the list: USSR in Mongolia (1921); United States in Nicaragua (1954), United States and Britain in Iran (1953), and United States in Chile (1973). The variables “Great Power” and “Own Regime” are used to construct the two-­by-­two matrix in figure 1.6. The raw frequency of impositions in a given year can be calculated as either the number of regime promoters or the number of target states. Measuring the number of great powers imposing their own regimes can thus be calculated by summing the number of target states experiencing such impositions in a given year, or by summing the number of great powers doing so in a given year. Although the two numbers correspond, they are not always equivalent—a

REG I ME I M P OS ITI ONS 251

number of states may try to impose a regime on a single state (e.g., Albania in 1912); conversely, a single state may try to impose a regime on more than one state during the same year (e.g., USSR in 1945). A measure that incorporates both the number of promoters and the number of targets can be obtained by multiplying the two measures to get a sense of the overall intensity of regime promotion in any given year (as in figure 1.5). For example, if two countries were promoting regimes in three other states, the total promotion intensity score for that year was six. This is useful in distinguishing between a scenario in which five countries are experiencing an imposition from the same promoter and a scenario in which five countries are experiencing impositions from five different promoters. Although the total number of impositions is the same in both cases, there are many more countries involved in regime promotion in the latter scenario. In this way the measure can account for the overall participation intensity of external regime promotion.

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INDEX

Abdallah, Khalid, 43n38 Acheson, Dean, 6, 20 Afghanistan, 146 Africa, 18–19, 24n71, 51, 166; appeal of communism in, 172–73; democracy movements in, 43; democratization in, 24, 24n71, 38, 54n81, 57, 187, 203; dependence of on the Soviet Union, 18– 19n46; East Africa, 48; “economic and strategic marginalization” of, 38; Francophone Africa, 40; political liberalization in sub-­Saharan Africa, 18n45; politics of foreign aid in, 19; “Potemkin democratizations” in, 24. See also Africa, democratic wave in Africa, democratic wave in, 213–22, 213n75; comparatist arguments concerning, 214; domestic pressures for democratic reform, 216, 217; effect of the Soviet collapse on, 218–21; external factors involved in, 216–17; reasons why international factors do not account for Africa’s democratization movements, 214–16 Ake, Claude, 38 Albania, 65, 161; Soviet influence in, 165 Aldcroft, Derek H., 96 Alexander I (king of Yugoslavia), 92 Algeria, 227 Aly, Götz, 121 American Relief Organization, 96 Amis, Martin, 176; on the barbarities practiced by Hitler and Stalin, 176n118 Anderson, Perry, 208 Angola, 203, 219 anticommunism, 19 anti-­Semitism, 127, 131, 132, 136 anxiety: cultural anxiety, 10; democratic anxiety, 238, 239, 241 Arab Spring, 7, 55, 56 Arbenz, Jacobo, 186 Argentina, 33, 130, 190, 192, 194

279

Armenia, 77, 87; occupation of by the Red Army (1920), 90 Arnason, Johann P., 172 Arndt, H. W., 116 Aron, Raymond, 80–81, 112n58, 116, 135, 157n21, 173; on the European intellectual tradition, 175; on the favorable conditions for Bolshevism, 170 Arrighi, Giovanni, 155 Arrow Cross, 113, 129, 142 Ash, Timothy Garton, 209, 210 Asia, 51, 166, 235; appeal of communism in, 172–73; efforts by the United States to establish democracy in 186–87 Asian Co-­Prosperity Sphere, 147 Atlantic Charter (1941), 190 Auden, W. H., 101 Austria, 14n31, 85, 88, 117, 195–96; as a democratic socialist republic, 78 Austro-­Hungarian Empire, 61, 78 authoritarianism, in Hungary and Romania, 129 autocracies, 24n71, 25n77, 69, 75, 176, 192, 240, 243, 243n47; German autocracy, 65; monarchial autocracy, 67 Avineri, Shlomo, 125 Azerbaijan, 77, 87; occupation of by the Red Army (1920), 90 Azis, Abdul, 142 Babangida, Ibrahim, 224 Baden, Max von, 92 Bagehot, Walter, 88 Balkans, the, fascist movements in, 113 Baltic states, post–World War I, 77–78 Banda, Hastings, 220–21 Bandung Conference (1955), 217 al-­Banna, Hasan, 132–33 Barrès, Maurice, 62–63 Basch, Antonin, 143, 145 Bavaria, 72 Beard, Charles, 85–86

280 I NDE X

Beer, George, 65 “Beijing Consensus,” the, 241 Beissinger, Mark, 51–52n70 Belarus, 50, 77 Belgium, 69, 70, 80, 184; and women’s suffrage, 86 bellicist theory, 80–85, 235 Beneš, Edvard, 161 Benin, 45, 225, 226, 229; democratization of, 19, 40, 219, 221 Berlin, Isaiah, 177 Berman, Sheri, 124 Bermeo, Nancy, 81 Bessel, Richard, on the military defeat of Nazi Germany, 180–81 Bethel, Leslie, 37, 190, 190n181 Bibó, István, 13 bipolarity, emergence of, 156–60 Biya, Paul, 40, 45, 226 Black Legion, 136 Bloch, Ernst, 110–11 Blue Shirts, 133–34 Bobbit, Philip, 135 Boigny, Houphouet, 45 Boix, Carles, 52, 53 Bolivia, 130, 131, 189, 190, 191, 192 Bolsheviks/Bolshevik Revolution, 11, 72, 73, 75, 89, 159 Bongo, Omar, 45, 225 Boris III (king of Bulgaria), 144 Borsody, Stephen, 162 Brands, Hal, 190, 191 Brandt, Willy, 181, 209n49 Bratton, Michael, 45, 214–16 Brazil, 33, 130–31, 187, 189, 190; denial of suffrage in, 191–92; as Nazi Germany’s largest trading partner, 145–46 Brinks, Daniel, 36 Brodie, Bernard, 204 Brooks, Stephen G., 209 Brown, Archie, 164, 205–6 Brown, Stephen, 214 Brubaker, Roger, 87 Brucan, Silviu, 13, 161 Bruun, Geoffrey, 166 Bryce, James, 61 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 200 Buchman, Frank, 137 Bukharin, Nikolai, 174–75 Bulgaria, 87, 105, 143, 147, 165, 204; Agrarian Union of, 91; postwar politics in, 91 Bull, Hedley, 235 Bunce, Valerie, 210 Burkina Faso, 227

Burma, 172 Burnham, James, 138, 138n218 Bush, George H. W., 211 Byrnes, James, 193 Cambodia, 219 Cameroon, 40–41, 45, 226; democratization in, 225 Canada, 69, 80; and women’s suffrage, 86 Cape Verde, 219 capitalism, 28, 110, 118, 153, 164, 175, 218; coupling of with democracy, 239–40; “creative destruction” of, 101; the failure of private capitalism, 147–48; fascism as a restraint on, 106, 115; identification of with imperialism, 169; and industrialization, 170; laissez-­faire capitalism, 150; liberal capitalism, 11, 138, 151, 201; state capitalism, 239. See also Great Depression: association of with the faults of American democratic capitalism Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 101 Carol II (king of Romania), 129 Carr, E. H., 63, 94, 150, 155, 244 Carson, Edward, 84 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 198, 219 Central African Republic, 40 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 185 Chamorro, Violeta, 202 Charter 77, 211 Chege, Michael, 227 Chiang Kai-­shek, 133, 134 Chile, 14n30, 34, 130, 130n170, 187, 189; closing down of reformist initiatives in, 192 China, 44n42, 79, 124, 154, 186, 239, 243– 44; appeal of communism in, 167; concerns of about upheavals in Eastern Europe, 226–27; emulation of fascism in, 133–34, 134n194; as the first nonproselytizing great power since the Dutch Golden Age, 240–41; May Fourth Movement in, 67 Christian Front, 136 Churchill, Winston, 28, 109, 185; positive opinion of Hitler, 127, 127n148 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 108, 141 Clapham, Christopher, 41, 201 clustering, 55, 55n84 Codreanu, Corneliu, 129 Coffin, Howard, 83 Cold War, the, 11, 15, 19, 24, 194, 200, 201–2, 219, 220, 235; effect of the end of on de-

I NDE X 281

mocratization, 215, 218, 222; hegemonic engagement of the Soviet Union and the United States during, 30; politics of, 188; pressure to democratize after the end of, 45; and the suppression of the left, 37 Collier, Ruth Berins, 191, 194, 195 Colombia, 34, 190, 192 colonialism, British, 130 colonization, 236; American, 73 Color Revolutions, 56 Committee for Public Information (CPI), 96 communism, 2, 31, 36, 57, 112n58, 115, 118, 218, 242; as an alternative to capitalism, 154n6; appeal of to intellectuals, 175–76; appeal of in Western Europe, 173–76; decline of, 58, 152–53; failure of to spread between 1917 and 1919, 72–73; failure of to transform theory into practice outside of the Soviet Union, 110–11; fear of, 72n57, 111–12, 112n54, 137, 235; influence of in Europe due to the Soviet victory in World War II, 183; influence of in southern Europe, 203–4; Japanese communists, 188; and the lack of hegemonic power, 73; in Latin America, 189–90; moral appeal of, 201; as the most long-­ term ideological innovation of World War I, 72; in postwar Eastern Europe, 3, 19– 20, 20n53, 162–63; prestige gained by from the victory in World War II, 157n21; universal communism, 237; upsurge of in the Middle East, 11. See also communism, and the developing world; communist wave, the communism, and the developing world, 166–73; the appeal of communism in China, 167; the appeal of communism in India, 171–72; the appeal of communism in Iran, 168n69; the appeal of communism in the Middle East, 168; the appeal of Soviet planning, centralization, and nationalization among Third World countries, 170–72; the attraction of communism to Third World elites, 172; and communism as an alternative path to modernity, 166–67, 168–69; loss of communist influence in Europe, 184; and the socio-­economic structure of Third World countries, 169–70 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 11 communist wave, the, 161–66; coercive element of, 165–66; and Soviet encouragement of anti-­imperialist rebellions, 168; success of the non-­European communist

wave, 167; and the use of overt power, 161–62 Composite Index of National Capabilities (CINC), 8–9, 8n11, 9n12, 199 Congo, 45, 219, 225, 226, 229 Conquest, Robert, 31, 175 Conrad, Joseph, 33 conscription, 80, 84, 123 Coppedge, Michael, 36 Costa Rica, 34, 180, 190 Coughlin, Charles, 136 counter-­diffusion. See counterwaves counterwaves: the democratic counterwave, 87–98; and the interaction of counterwave mechanisms 47–50. See also counterwaves, factors in the creation of counterwaves, factors in the creation of: through autocratic adaptation, 44–46; through bounded rationality, 46–47; through the collapse of ad hoc coalitions, 43–44; through shifting hegemonic pressure, 37–43 Creel, George, 97 Croatia, 128, 147 Cuba, 33, 189, 191 Czech Communist Party, 13 Czechoslovakia, 13, 69n42, 78, 90; increase in GNP of after World War II, 164; invasion of by Germany, 109; partition of, 144; Soviet support for, 161–62 de Beauvoir, Simone, 174, 177 De Gaulle, Charles, 157 De Grazia, Victoria, 110, 149 De Long, Bradford, 20 de Man, Henri, 148 Decalo, Samuel, 217 Declaration of Independence for Middle Europe (1918), 60, 66 decolonization, 61, 166n62; Roosevelt’s support for French decolonization, 187 defeatism, democratic, 63–64, 177 democracies: diminishing civil liberties within, 238; as effective entities in a competitive international system, 64; failure of fledgling democracies, 67–69, 67n33, 67–68n35, 69n42, 87–88; as inevitably disadvantaged in military leadership, 64, 127–28; intact democracies after World War I (France, Great Britain, the United States), 71–72; lack of U.S. overt support for democracies after World War I, 95– 97; the rise of new democracies after World War I, 77–80, 98–100

282 I NDE X

democracy, 27, 29, 137, 150; ability of to compete with autocratic rule, 64–65; as the answer to the problems of modernity, 99; ascent of, 31; comparativist theories of, 2–3, 57–58, 195–96, 214–17; complaints concerning, 126–27; consolidation of in Western Europe, 184; coupling of with capitalism, 239–40; demise of in the 1930s, 61, 103, 103nn10–11, 125; failure of, 101–2, 148; and fascism, 124–25; future of as tied to American power, 241; great-­ power strategies and the undermining of democratic consolidation, 68–69; “hyper-­democracy,” 126; ideological ascendance of, 79–80; importance of in the promotion of contemporary foreign policy, 235; inadequacies of, 64, 64n18; influence of fascism on, 106–8; “international genealogy” of, 53; international sources of, 51–52; liberal democracy, 120, 132, 234, 237, 239, 244; moral commitment to after the Soviet collapse, 38; natural constituency of, 242; as paralyzed by checks and balances, 63; in post–World War I Europe, 94–95; as the product of class struggle, 58; promotion of, 12; social democracy, 107n27; as superior to other regimes, 242n46, 244; as an unusual form of government, 241–42, 242n38. See also democracy, and war mobilization; Potemkin democracy democracy, and war mobilization, 80–87; autocratic nature of mobilization, 80–81; and bellicist explanations of war’s effect on democracies, 80–82; and conscription, 80, 84; strategies of mobilization (through coercion or the granting of political rights to workers), 82–84 democratic diffusion, 57; diffusion across national borders, 34–35, 45–46; horizontal and vertical influences on, 55–56, 55n87; and the spread of democracy triggering resistance to democratic diffusion, 36; and Weber’s umbrella, 54–56. See also diffusion democratic optimism, 68, 190; and the “Wilsonian moment,” 67 “democratic overstretch,” 6, 6n4, 34, 37, 67, 198; and the spread of post–World War II democracy, 187–88 democratic wave, post–World War II, 176– 96; acceptance of American influence by European leaders as a hedge against communism, 177–78; American focus on con-

version rather than coercion in expansion of the democratic wave to Europe, 178; in Asia, 186–87; effects of beyond Western Europe, 186; evolution of postwar democracy as a case of democratic overstretch, 187–88; examples of failed consolidation inherent in democratic waves in Latin America, 188–95; importance of the Marshall Plan to, 182–84; noneconomic levers used to promote institutional incentives and dampen communist sympathies, 184–85; and the use of coercion (overt and covert) in the occupations of Germany and Japan by the United States, 179–80, 180n131, 181–82, 181n138 democratic waves, 1–2, 6n4, 7, 54n81, 57, 98–100; alternative explanations for the causes of, 51–54; classification of, 62; cognitive biases in, 46–47; definition of, 54; democratic failures that follow waves, 5, 34; the first democratic wave as a consequence of postwar hegemonic transition, 66; as the interplay of positive feedback brought on by hegemonic shock and negative feedback brought on by fading hegemonic pressure, 36; and political reality, 46; possible fourth waves, 206n34; the Post-­Soviet Wave, 206, 217; and pro-­ reform coalitions, 43, 57; reverse waves, 67–68n35; the Third Wave, 54, 205, 206; translation of hegemonic shocks into waves, 30–31. See also Africa, democratic wave in; democratic wave, post–World War II democratization, 6, 15, 58, 69, 186, 226, 234; in Africa, 24, 24n71, 54n81, 57, 187, 203 (see also Africa, democratic wave in); comparative analysis of, 21–22, 51–52; domestic factors that may inhibit democratization, 34–35; in Eastern Europe, 205n33; foreign impositions on, 16; “forgotten dimension” of, 51; in Greece, Portugal, and Spain, 205; occurrence of in waves, 2; post–World War II democratization in Latin America, 33–34, 36–37, 189–94; post–World War II push for, 44; power of the United States as a major force for democratization, 53; pressure to democratize after the end of the Cold War, 45; regional democratization, 36; study of, 51–52n70; temporary incentives for, 5; transnational dimension of, 51– 52n70; wave-­driven democratization, 44, 44n42

I NDE X 283

Deng Xiaoping, 226, 240 Denmark, 157 Dennis, Lawrence, 137–38 despotism, 242; decline of, 42 Deutscher, Isaac, 112 Diehl, James M., 180 diffusion, 54–55; criticisms of 56. See also democratic diffusion Diggins, John, 114n71 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 119 Domber, Gregory, 210 Dower, John, 188 Drake, Paul W., 190 Dunn, Susan, 187 Dunning, Thad, 19, 221 East Germany, 161, 184 Eastern Europe, 29, 48, 51, 154, 162, 163, 164, 205n33; causes of the 1989 revolutions in, 206, 209–10; and the collapse of the Soviet Union, 205–12; concerns of in China about upheavals in Eastern Europe, 226– 27; democratization in, 205n33, 207–8; repression of by the Soviet Union, 159; the role of protestors in the 1989 revolutions in, 211–12; Soviet subsidies to, 209n50 Eatwell, Roger, 118n87 Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes), 74 Ecuador, 190, 194 Edelstein, David M., 16, 17 Egypt, 41, 79, 131, 168; nationalization of industries in under Nasser’s regime, 171 Eichengreen, Barry, 20 El Salvador, 190, 192; Nazi Germany’s exports to, 145 Elkins, W. F., 134 Embracing Defeat (Dower), 12 Ends and Means (A. Huxley), 128 Engels, Friedrich, 237n18 England. See Great Britain Ethiopia, 203, 219 Europe, 68, 81; central Europe, 69; as the “default” course of long-­term institutional development, 51n69; democratic transformation in, 61; dependence of democracy in post–World War I Europe on Great Britain and the United States, 94– 95; emulation of fascism in, 128–29; influence of communism in southern Europe, 203–4; loss of communist influence in, 184; policy and the prospect of European Union membership, 38–39; south-­central

Europe, 18; Stalin’s policy in Eastern Europe, 165–66. See also Eastern Europe; Western Europe European Union, 148 Evans, Richard J., 94 factionalism, 89, 90, 132, 227 Farrell, Edelmiro, 191 fascism/the fascist wave, 2, 11, 31, 149n277, 231, 235, 242; appeal of, 149–50; appeal of to anti-­capitalist writers, 114–15n74; different types of fascism, 118; difficulty in defining fascist regimes, 114–18, 117n84, 118n87; fascist regimes, 18, 113n60; ideological sway of fascism in the 1930s, 108– 9, 113–14n67; influence of on democracy and democratic regimes, 106–8; initial appeal of fascist institutions, 27–28; insular/nationalist nature of, 116, 117; Italian fascism, 159; Marxist view of, 118; Mussolini’s “gentler” brand of, 114, 114n71; primary institutional elements of, 106–7; promotion of “universal fascism” by Mussolini, 116n78; as a response to the failures of liberal capitalist democracy, 116–17; as a restraint on capitalism, 106; rise of as a direct result of Germany’s power and international standing, 102–3, 102n8, 112– 13; timing of the fascist wave, 113–14. See also fascism, interwar emulation of; fascist wave, inducement and coercion in fascism, interwar emulation of, 124–35, 149– 51; among English aristocrats, 127; in China, 133–34, 134n194; in Europe, 128– 29; and fascism as a new vision of society, 124–25; in India, 134–35; in Japan, 134– 35; in Latin America, 130–31; in the Middle East, 131–33; outside Europe, 129–30; and the promise undiluted political community, 125; in the United States, 135–42, 137n208; view of fascism as the transcendental democracy of the age, 125 fascist wave, inducement and coercion in, 142–49; coercive expansion and the appeal of Nazi ideology, 147–48; and the importance of German imports and exports (German economic leverage), 143–44; and new fascist satellite states, 147; and the transnational nature of German occupations, 148–49 “fascistization,” 105 Feldman, Gerald, 93, 94 female suffrage. See women’s suffrage Ferguson, Niall, 123, 127

284 I NDE X

Finland, 69n42, 85; democratic republic of, 77–78 First Indochina War (1946–1954), 167 Fisher, H.A.L., 54 Flieger-­H J (branch of the Nazi Youth movement), 141 FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), 202–3 Ford, Henry, 137 Forster, E. M., 128, 231 Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD), 48 France, 40–41, 65, 68, 69, 71–72, 81, 103–4, 118, 182; actions of the United States to prevent France from falling to the communists, 181–82; the clash between revolutionary France and monarchial Europe, 236; commitment of to democracy, 40; crumbling economy of in the 1930s, 119– 20; fall of to the Nazis, 148; fear of communism in, 112; hardline position of concerning the Versailles treaty negotiations, 93; imperialism of, 167; loss of French power and prestige, 156–57; mutinies in the French army (1917), 75; Napoleonic France, 236; occupation of after the Napoleonic Wars, 17; rise of communism in, 174; sympathy for the Soviet Union in, 183; and World War I, 75n76. See also Vichy France France, Anatole, 125 Franco, Francisco, 240 Francophone Summit, 40 French Revolution, 81 French Third Republic, 88 Frieden, Jeffry, 121, 153, 170 Fukuyama, Francis, 154n6, 204, 204n29 fundamentalism, radical, 238 Furet, François, 88, 114, 126, 158, 174n104; on the clash between revolutionary France and monarchial Europe, 236; on the rise of the Soviet Union as a superpower, 153–54 al-­Futuwwa, 131, 132 Gabon, 24, 40, 45, 224, 225 Gafencu, Grigore, 129 al-­Gailani, Rashi Ali, 146 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 148, 176 Gallegos, Romulo, 191 Garraty, John, 139, 140, 141 Gasset, José Ortega y, 126 Gat, Azar, 239 Gellner, Ernest, 237

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 185 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes), 104–5 Gentile, Giovanni, 125 George, Lloyd, 109 Georgia, 77, 87; occupation of by the Red Army (1921), 90 German-­American Bund, 107, 136 German Ministry of Propaganda, 135 German Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law (1916), 82n115 Germany, 15, 28, 40, 61, 68, 82, 88, 117, 182, 195–96, 239; centralized nature of the German state, 70–71; economic decline of in the 1920s, 120; favorable public opinion of the United States in after World War II, 180; Imperial Germany, 70, 70n45; living standards in, 157; loss of the Saar region and Alsace-­Lorraine, 71; preeminence of before World War I, 71; prestige of, 70; steel production in, 120; trade with, 18, 18nn42–43; U.S. postwar occupation of, 13, 179–81. See also East Germany; Germany, post–World War I democratic reforms in; Nazi Germany; Weimar Germany; Wilhelmine Germany Germany, post–World War I democratic reforms in: failure of, 92–93; incentives within Germany for a prodemocracy coalition (fear of revolution and hope for an American-­led peace settlement), 93–94; support of democratic reforms by industrialists and military officers in, 92–93 Ghana, 172, 216 Gibbon, Edward, 1 global orders, building of, 6 globalization, 36 Goldsmith, Benjamin, 46–47n52 Goldstein, Joshua, 234 Gömbös, Gyula, 113 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 198, 199, 212, 219, 243; choice of to allow democratization in Eastern Europe, 207–8; criticism of the Soviet Union’s monopoly on defining communism, 207; and the removal of Soviet military support for Eastern European communist regimes, 206–7, 208n45, 209–10 Göring, Hermann, 144 Gotz, Norbert, 108, 140 Gourevitch, Peter, 106n25 Great Britain, 20, 39, 40, 51, 68, 69, 71–72, 80, 103–4, 147, 156, 182, 184, 239; admira-

I NDE X 285

tion for fascism among English aristocrats, 127; ceding of political rights to Parliament by the monarchy, 81; disbanding of the British Communist Party, 203; economic stagnation in and colonial unrest of in the 1930s, 119–20; global success of its democracy, 241–42; hardline position of concerning the Versailles treaty negotiations, 93; industrialization of, 70– 71; Liberal Party of, 93; living standards in, 157; and women’s suffrage, 86 Great Depression, 9, 19, 67, 142, 198, 238; association of with the faults of American democratic capitalism, 119, 120; effect of on authoritarian leaders’ economic policies, 105; as the only hegemonic shock of the twentieth century wherein democracy did not emerge as a winner, 102; unemployment as the most visible manifestation of, 120–21 Greece, 105; democratization in, 205 Grenada, 200 Gros, Jean-­Germain, 39 Grossman, Vasily, 151 Grosz, Karoly, 207 Guatemala, 14n30, 15, 33, 187, 191, 194, 202; covert coup in (1954), 21; Nazi Germany’s exports to, 145 Guillebaud, W. C., 121, 122, 123 Guinea, 172, 218, 227 Haffner, Sebastian, 102, 124 Haig, Douglas, 75 Haiti, 192, 202 Hale, Henry, 208 Halperin, Sandra, 84–85, 112 Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, 71 Hamby, Alonzo, 102, 122, 141 Harazti, Miklos, 203 Harriman, Averill, 183 Harrington, Michael, 113 Hauser, Johann, 78 Hegel, G.W.F., 244 hegemon, 22n62; definition of, 8, 8n9 hegemonic engagement, varieties of, 29–31 hegemonic power, and the shaping of institutional waves, 113–14 hegemonic shocks, 2–6, 232–33; and the alteration of global political norms and practices, 233–34; and the creation of new international institutions, 22; and the creation of opportunities for reform, 50; defining characteristic of, 63; definition of, 8–12; and the definition of a hege-

mon, 8; and domestic coalitions, 21–22; and domestic reforms, 7–8; effects of, 7; as episodes of “democratic overstretch,” 6; fear of revolutionary upheaval as a temporary byproduct of in Germany, 93– 94; of the Great Depression, 102; implications of for bellicist theory, 235; lesson of that a decline in American power is a challenge to global democracy, 240–41; military hegemonic shocks, 14; power of, 5, 6; reasons for the impact of, 11–12; relation of to the process of state formation, 233, 233n5; and regime transitions, 7; and the relative strength of competing regime types, 24; as a structural source of regime change, 7; and the system of states, 235–36; translation of into waves, 30–31. See also hegemonic shocks, recurring mechanisms of (hegemonic coercion, inducement, and emulation) that connect shocks to democratic waves; Soviet Union, collapse of: as the last hegemonic shock of the twentieth century; World War I; World War II hegemonic shocks, recurring mechanisms of (hegemonic coercion, inducement, and emulation) that connect shocks to democratic waves, 3–5; mechanisms of coercion, 12–17; mechanisms of emulation, 22–28, 23n67; mechanisms of inducement, 17–22, 23n67 “hegemonic war,” 8, 8n10 hegemony: “the first face of,” 17n41; “the second face of,” 17 Hehn, Paul, 71, 143, 144 heuristics, cognitive, 46 Hicks, Granville, 28 Hintze, Otto, 80; and the “Hintze-­Seeley law,” 82 Hirschman, Albert O., 18n42, 96 Hitler, Adolf, 9, 28, 102, 127, 134, 140, 146, 177, 242–43; cruelty of, 176n118; economic policies of, 120–24; as a “prophet of nihilism,” 116; similarities of with Roosevelt, 141; on the Volkisch standard of living, 110 Hitler Youth, 146; and the Flieger-­H J (branch of the Nazi Youth movement), 141 Ho Chi Minh, 26, 187 Hobsbawm, Eric, 130, 148–49, 177; on the rise of German fascism, 102–3, 114; on the “strange democratization of war,” 80 Holy Alliance, 236 Honduras, 190

286 I NDE X

Honecker, Erich, 208, 210 Hoover, Herbert, 96 Horthy, Miklós, 91, 113, 119 Houphouet-­Boigny, Félix, 223, 227–28 Howard, Michael, 166, 183 Howe, Quincy, 114, 150 Hungary, 72, 87, 117, 128, 129, 143, 147, 161, 207; authoritarian turn in due to a weak parliament, 90–91; communist land reforms in, 13; fascist mobilization in, 113; increase in GNP of after World War II, 164; replacement of democratic government in by a Bolshevik “Republic of Councils,” 90 Huntington, Samuel, 53, 62, 217 Husayn, Ahmad, 133 Huxley, Aldous, 25n77, 106 Huxley, Thomas, 54 Hybel, Alex Roberto, 64 Ickes, Harold, 140 Ignatieff, Michael, 239 Ikenberry, G. John, 12, 24, 73, 87, 95, 238; on Wilson’s postwar rhetoric, 96 illusion, and historical consequences, 25, 25n77 Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (Veblen), 70–71 imperialism: European imperialism, 147; French imperialism, 167; identification of with capitalism, 169; Western neo-­ imperialism, 238 India, 154, 168, 171–72; emulation of fascism in, 134–35 Indonesia, 168, 186, 187 industrialization, 11, 70–71, 154n6, 236; and capitalism, 170; in China, 133–34; in India, 171; in Japan, 135; under Stalin, 109–10, 164 Ingram, Kenneth, 149n277, 180 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 185 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 185 intervention types: classification of, 14n30; post-­shock interventions, 16–17 Iran, 14n30, 15, 146, 187. See also Treaty of Friendship with Japan (Iran and Japan [1939]) Iraq, 12, 131n177, 168; invasion of by the United States (2003), 235 Ireland, 69n42, 147 Iron Guard, 129, 142, 144, 149 Ismael, Tareq, 168 Italy, 68, 75n76, 87, 117, 141; adoption of offi-

cial racism in, 114n68; collapse of the Italian army in World War I, 75; economic problems of under fascism, 114; Mussolini’s “gentler” brand of fascism in, 114, 114n71, 159; rise of communism in, 174; rise of fascism in, 112–13 Ivory Coast, 45, 227 James, Scott, 17 Japan, 7n8, 15, 27, 40, 68, 70n45, 73, 117, 131, 239; adoption of official racism in, 114n68; and the Asian Co-­Prosperity Sphere, 147; emulation of fascism in, 134– 35; intervention of in Russia, 14n31; Japanese communists, 188; pro-­American policy in, 183–84; surrender of, 179; U.S. postwar occupation of, 12, 179–80, 181. See also Treaty of Friendship with Japan (Iran and Japan [1939]) Japanese Cabinet Information Bureau, 135 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 207, 210 Jentleson, Bruce, 238–39 Jews, 136 136n204; persecution of, 109 Johnson, Paul, 103 Joseph, Richard, 47–48 Jowitt, Ken, 242 Judt, Tony, 21, 28, 31, 68, 104, 110, 127, 175; on the loss of French power, 156–57; on the moderate early strategy of the Soviet Union, 163; on the origins of the European Union, 148; on sympathy for the Soviet Union, 183 Kadar, Janos, 207 Kadritzke, Ulf, 25n77 Károlyi, Mihály, 90–91 Katznelson, Ira, 107 Kaunda, Kenneth, 45, 226 Kazasov, Dino, 144 Kennan, George, 37, 63, 137, 137–38n214 Kennedy, Joe, 148 Kennedy, John F., 6 Kennedy, Paul, 70, 119 Kenya, 39, 48–50, 201, 224, 225; after the post-­Soviet collapse, 48; ethnic violence in, 48; the United States’ push for democratization in, 48 Kerensky, Alexander, 88 Keynes, John Maynard, 74; on Nazi Germany’s economic policies, 104–5 Kier, Elizabeth, 82 Kingibe, Baba Gana, 224 Kis, Janos, 211 Kletz, Trevor, 33

I NDE X 287

Knox, Geoffrey, 129 Kocka, Jürgen, 117n84 Kodjo, Edem, 224 Kohn, Hans, 114, 117, 177 Kolakowski, Leszek, 211 Korea, 15n33, 79; March First movement in, 26, 67. See also Korean War (1950–1953); North Korea; South Korea Korean War (1950–1953), 186 Kotkin, Stephen, 212 Kramer, Mark, 198, 210 Krebs, Ronald R., 81–82 Kristallnacht, 109 Krueger, Eric L., 228, 229n143 Kupchan, Charles A., 12, 24 Kyuichi, Tokuda, 188 Lake, Anthony, 202 Lake, David, 17 Laqueur, Walter, 11, 169 Laski, Harold, 160 Latin America, 18, 56, 202–3; antifascist coalitions in, 36; banning of communist parties in, 192–93; communism in, 189– 90; democratic regimes overthrown by military coups in, 191–92; emulation of fascism in, 130–31; expansion of Nazi Germany’s influence in, 145; expansion of suffrage in, 190–91; failed consolidation inherent in democratic waves in, 188–95; party realignments in, 21; post–World War II democratization in, 33–34, 36–37, 189–94; promotion of democracy in by the United States, 41 Law of the Defense of the Nation (1940), 144 Le Bon, Gustave, 60 League of Nations, 69, 97–98, 114, 129 Lebanon, 131, 168 Lee, Dwight E., 166 Lee Kuan Yew, 240 Leffler, Melvyn, 11, 196–97 Legion of the Archangel Michael, 113 Lenin, Vladimir, 72, 73 leviathans. See state leviathans Levin, Gordon, 97 Levy, Jack, 47 Li Shuzheng, 226 liberalism: economic liberalism, 238; as a quasi-­aristocratic approach to politics, 126; Western liberalism, 19, 132 Libya, 131n177 Lichtenberger, Henri, 124 Life and Fate (Grossman), 151 Lindberg, Charles, 137, 137n209

Lindberg, Stefan, 24 Link, Arthur, 98 Lippmann, Walter, 63, 139 Lithuania, 87, 91 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 65, 98 Lord Acton, 242 Lord Halifax, 109, 127 Lord Landsdowne, 84 Ludendorff, Erich, 64n19, 66; support of for a parliamentary government, 92 Lukacs, John, 73 Lukes, Igor, 176 Lundestad, Geir, 10 Lyons, Eugene, 109 MacArthur, Douglas, 179, 188 Mackinder, Halford, 235 Magnusson, Bruce, 214 Maier, Charles, 44, 97 Maiolo, Joseph, 128 Malawi, 50, 220–21, 229 Malaya, 168 Malaysia, 186 Mali, 225, 227 Malia, Martin, 153 Malik, Charles, 168 Managerial Revolution, The (Burnham), 138 Manela, Erez, 79 Mann, Michael, 116, 123, 129, 134 Mann, Thomas, 63 Mannheim, Karl, 106, 154 Mao Zedong, 167, 198 March on Rome, 11 March First movement. See Korea: March First movement in Markoff, John, 23–24, 51–52n70, 84, 97 Marks, Sally, 94, 170, 172, 204; on anti-­ Western intelligentsia, 175n111 Marshall Plan, 17, 20, 96, 178; effect of on post–World War II German politics, 21; importance of to the post–World War II democratic wave, 182–84; primary motivations of, 182–83 Marx, Karl, 237n18, 243 Masaryk, Tomáš, 60, 77 Mauritius, 216 Maurras, Charles, 62–63 May Fourth movement. See China: May Fourth movement in Mazower, Mark, 31, 44, 97, 109, 163n49; on fascism, 277 Mbaku, John Mukum, 220 Meernik, James, 228, 229n143 Meiji Restoration, 135

288 I NDE X

Mein Kampf (Hitler), 131 Mencken, H. L., 64n19 Menderes, Adnan, 25 Mentan, Tatah, 40 Merridale, Catherine, 89 Merritt, Richard, 180 Mexico, political evolution of, 194 Meyers, Daniel, 36 Middle East, 166, 172; emulation of fascism in, 131–33; influence of Nazi Germany in, 146 Miller, Marshall Lee, 144 Milner, Alfred, 75n76 Milosz, Czeslaw, on postwar communism, 162–63 Mitterrand, François, 40 Mlynář, Zdeněk, 163 mobilization. See democracy, and war mobilization Mobutu Sese Seko, 219n100, 224 modernity, 11; communism as an alternative path to, 166–67, 168–69; democracy as the answer to the problems of, 99 Moi, Daniel arap, 48–49, 50 Mollet, Guy, 181 monarchy, 63n11; as critical for the effective governance of a modern state, 62–63; demise of monarchial empires during World War I, 236–37; monarchial autocracy, 67; monarchial empires, 71; Wilhelmine Germany as the template for a centralized monarchy, 78 Mongolia, 14n30 Montgomery, Bernard, 157 Morris, Ian, 75, 76 Mosely, Philip, 154 Mosse, George L., 124 Mount, Ferdinand, 176 Movement for Multi-­Party Democracy (MMD), 50 Mozambique, 219 Müller, Jan-­Warner, 65, 71, 111, 126, 174 Müller-­Sturmheim, Emil, 69 Muslim Brotherhood, 132, 133, 142 Mussolini, Benito, 111, 114, 134; and the promotion of “universal fascism,” 116n78 al-­Nahil, Hamada, 133 Namibia, 203 Napoleonic Wars, 16, 81; occupation of France after, 17 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 171 National Recovery Administration, 139 National Socialism. See Nazi Germany nationalism, 61, 88, 174; nationalist tensions

in new post–World War I multiethnic states, 91–92; triumph of over class solidarity, 84 Nazi Germany: as an alternative model to democracy, 102; destruction of labor unions in, 121; devastating defeat of, 149, 179–80; economic ascent of, 23, 103–5, 106, 106n25, 120–24; emergence of a command economy in, 122; emphasis of on rearmament, 123; expansion of its trade ties with Latin America and central Europe, 108, 146; imports and exports of, 143–44; influence of in the Middle East, 146; relative peaceful rise of compared to Stalin’s Great Purges, 109–10, 109n36; state-­sponsored proliferation of consumer durable goods’ production in, 121– 22; true socialist nature of National Socialist economic reforms, 121 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 171–72, 218 Netherlands, the, 184; disbanding of the Dutch Communist Party in, 203 New Deal, the, 138n217, 139, 140 Nicaragua, 37, 187, 190, 219; and the Sandinistas, 202 Niemöller, Martin, 125 Niger, 225, 229 Nigeria, 227; annulment of its elections by the military, 40; military regime in, 224 non-­democratic regimes, 2n3 norms, international, 233–34 North, Douglass C., 81 North American Treaty Organization (NATO), 185, 202 North Korea, 167 Norway, 65, 85 Nuremberg Race Laws (1936), 146 Nwajiaku, Kathryn, 221 Nyerere, Julius, 219 Oakeshott, Michael, 117n84 Ogburn, William, 137 Oliver, Pamela, 36 Opium of the Intellectuals, The (Aron), 175 Organization of American States, 202 Ortega, Daniel, 202 Orwell, George, 101, 103, 138, 138n218; on the appeal of fascism, 110, 125; on the appeal of Hitler, 102, 242–43; on the failure of private capitalism, 147–48; on laissez-­ faire capitalism, 150 Ottoman Empire, 61 Overy, Richard, 119 Owen, John, 16, 53

I NDE X 289

Palestine, 131, 168 Panama, 202 Paraguay, 190, 192 particularism, 36 Patel, Kiran Klaus, 108, 140 Paxton, Robert, 118n87 Payne, Stanley G., 114, 129, 130; on fascism, 117–18; on fascism in the Middle East, 131; on “fascistization,” 105 Peceny, Marc, 95 Peru, 34, 189, 190, 191, 194; living standards in, 157 Philip, George, 190n181 Philippines, the, 168, 186, 202; Huk rebellion in, 186 Pilsudski, Józef, 90 Pinochet, Augusto, 240 Plattner, Marc, 200, 218–19 Poe, Steven C., 228, 229n143 Poggi, Gianfranco, 81 Poland, 87, 91, 99, 128, 145, 158, 161, 211–12; recognition of as a democratic republic, 77 Polanyi, Karl, 44 political change, in small/weaker nations, 23–24, 24n70 political psychology, 46–47 political rights, 83–84; ceding of political rights to Parliament by the British monarchy, 81; furthering of democratization through the expansion of suffrage and granting of political rights, 80 Portugal, 87, 117, 200; democratization in, 205; failure of democracy in, 91 postwar (World War I) power transition, 70–76 Potemkin democracy, 45; “Potemkin democratizations” in Africa, 24 Price, Byron, 180 Pridham, Geoffrey, 51–52 Prussia, 135 Quayle, Dan, 220 racism, 114n68, 129–30; in South Africa, 129n164 Radio Free Liberty, 185 Radio Liberty, 185 Rai, Lajpat, 79 Rauschning, Hermann, 116 Rawlings, Jerry, 216 Reagan, Ronald, 138n222 Redfield, William C., 70 reforms: domestic reforms, 52; international

transformations as drivers of institutional reform, 52–53; reform coalitions and the failures of consolidation, 35 regime waves, 7; definition of, 54–55; regime impositions, 14–15 regimes (great power regimes): decline of communist regimes, 199–200; decline of democratic regimes, 103, 103nn10–11; democratic regimes overthrown by military coups in Latin America, 191–92; difficulty in defining fascist regimes, 114– 18, 117n84, 118n87; effect of the Great Depression on authoritarian regimes, 105; hybrid regimes, 41–42; incentives of to export regimes, 12; regime change, 52; vital test of, 65. See also regime waves Reichsarbeitsdienst (German labor service), 107, 140–41 Reischauer, Edwin, 181 Remnick, David, 199 Revel, Jean-­François, 200, 240, 243n46 Revolt of the Masses, The (Gasset), 126 Reynolds, David, 176 Reza Shah, 146 Rhee, Syngman, 186 Roberts, John M., 47, 94, 99 Robinson, Joan, 153 Romania, 13, 90, 105, 117, 128, 129, 143, 147, 165, 204, 210, 219; during the interwar period, 68; fascism in, 113; increase in GNP of after World War II, 164; reasons for its ties to the Axis powers, 144–45; Romanian anti-­fascists, 13; Sovietization of, 161 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 107, 139–40; on mass unemployment, 140; similarities to Hitler, 141; support of for French decolonization, 187 Rosenberg, Alfred, 119 Rothschild, Joseph, 128 Roxborough, Ian, 37, 190, 190n181 Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 58 Runciman, David, 61, 64n18, 204n29 Russia (post-­Soviet era), 27, 46–47n52, 167, 204 Russia (pre-­Soviet era), 61, 73, 77, 87; and the February Revolution (1917), 77, 89; transition in to moderation and democratic rule made possible by the shock of World War I, 88–90. See also Bolsheviks/Bolshevik Revolution; Soviet Union Rustow, Dankwart, 52, 81

290 I NDE X

Saadabad Friendship Pact (1937), 146 Safran, Nadav, 132 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 119 Salgado, Plinio, 130–31 Saudi Arabia, 41 Scalapino, Robert, 205 Scandinavia, 184 Schacht, Hjalmar, 146 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 118–19 Schlesinger, Arthur, 150; on the failures of democracy, 101–2; on the relationship between capitalism and democracy, 240 Schumpeter, Joseph, 101 Schweller, Randall, 241 Seeley, John, 80; and the “Hintze-­Seeley law,” 82 Seigo, Nakano, 124, on democracy and fascism, 124 Senegal, 218, 224 Serbia, 90, 204 Seton-­Watson, Hugh, 18n43, 27, 118, 125; on the appeal of communism in postwar Iran, 168n69 Shamir, Yitzhak, 130 Shape of Things to Come, The (Wells), 126–27 Shaw, George Bernard, 76, 112 Shawkat, Sami, 132 Shepard, Walter, 138n222 Shirer, William, 122 Slater, Dan, 57 Slovakia, 128, 147 Smith, Terence V., 60 Smith, Tony, 170, 188, 242 Snyder, Timothy, 99, 109 Social Democrats: in Germany, 92, 94; in Hungary, 91 socialism, 112n54, 164, 167; in China, 226; “populist socialism,” 172; state-­led socialism, 240 Socialist Nationalist Party (PPS), 131–32 socialization, 24, 27; definition of, 25 Solidarity, 211n62, 212 Somalia, 219, 220 Sontag, Raymond, 102; on fascism in the 1930s, 108–9 South Africa, 129n164, 131 South America, 70n45 South Korea, 153, 186 Souvarine, Boris, 165–66 Soviet Union, 14n30, 22, 29, 141, 156, 166n60, 166n62, 239; and Africa, 18–19, 18–19n46, 196–97; cruelty of Soviet domination, 165; emergence of as a superpower, 153–54; emphasis on industrial-

ization, 164; encouragement of anti-­imperialist rebellions by, 168; industrialization in, 109–10, 164; intervention of in Austria, 14n31; material and economic decline of, 208–10, 208n46, 209nn48–50; need of for Western technology, 209, 209n51; policy of in Eastern Europe, 165–66; postwar occupation of Eastern Europe by, 10–11, 13; pre-­1947 foreign policy of, 165n58; regime wave of after World War II, 9–10; renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine by, 209n52; repression of Eastern Europe by, 159; sympathy for the Soviet Union in France, 183; victory of in World War II, 3–4, 28, 157– 58, 173–74. See also Soviet Union, collapse of Soviet Union, collapse of, 7, 18, 19, 24, 38, 42, 53, 99; and Eastern Europe, 205–12; effect of on Asia, 205; effect of on India, 205; and the fall of Soviet GDP (1989– 1993), 199; as the last hegemonic shock of the twentieth century, 198–99; and the overestimation of the strength of the Soviet economy, 200n12; and the recurring mechanisms of hegemonic shock (hegemonic coercion, inducement, and emulation), 201–2; redistribution of hegemonic power accompanying the collapse, 199; as self-­imposed, 199. See also Soviet Union, collapse of, democratic rollback following Soviet Union, collapse of, democratic rollback following, 223–30; and elite adaptation, 223, 225–26; and the influence of national conferences on, 225; and the mechanisms of failed consolidation, 228 Spain, 117, 147n263; democratization in, 205; fascist movements in, 113 Spengler, Oswald, 231 Spring of Nations (1848), 56 Stalin, Joseph, 28, 203–4; cruelty of, 176n118; and the drive for industrialization under 109–10, 164; the Great Purges of, 109; on the “people’s democracy,” 163 Stamboliyski, Alexander, 91 Starr, Harvey, 25 state leviathans, 57–58 steel production, 120, 160 Stern, Abraham, 130n165 Stern, Fritz, 88, 237 Stevens, Evelyne Huber, 58 Stevens, John D., 58 Strong, Donald, 136

I NDE X 291

Sudan, 220 suffrage, 80, 83, 138n222; denial of suffrage in Brazil, 191–92; effect of World War I on women’s suffrage, 85–87; expansion of in Latin America, 190–91 Sukarno, 186 Supreme Economic Council, 95 Sweden, 65, 85, 118, 147, 147n263; and women’s suffrage, 86 Switzerland, 65, 147n263 Syria, 131, 168 Tagore, Rabindranath, 26 Takahashi, Korekiyo, 135 Tanzania, 172, 218 Tarbell, Ida, 86 Taylor, A.J.P., 116 Third Reich, The (Lichtenberger), 124 Thompson, E. P., 31 Tilly, Charles, 84, 235–36 Tismaneanu, Vladimir, 212 Titmuss, R. M., 83 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 25, 63, 64 Togo, 40, 224, 225 Tooze, Adam, 63, 121; on the economic miracle of Nazi Germany, 122–23, 123–24 Touré, Sékou, 218 Transylvania, 88 Treaty of Friendship with Japan (Iran and Japan [1939]), 146 Treaty of Versailles, negotiations concerning, 72 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 62–63 Truman, Harry S., 17; actions of to prevent France from falling to the communists, 181–82 Truman Doctrine, 182, 191 Tugwell, Rexford, 107 Turkey, 25, 27, 41, 117, 146, 168 Turkmenistan, 38 twentieth century, the, 34; evolution of domestic institutions/regimes in, 1–2, 3; reasons for successful and unsuccessful democratic waves in, 34–35; volatility in, 1 Twenty Years Crisis, The (Carr), 94 Ubico, Jorge, 191 Ulam, Adam, 152, 169, 170, 170n81 United States, 14n30, 20, 22, 26, 29, 41, 53, 63, 71–72, 82, 118, 196–97, 241; admiration in (among New Dealers) for certain fascist economic and social policies, 107– 8; advantage of over the Soviet Union in

economic influence and industrial development, 159; as a beneficiary of the hegemonic transition of World War II, 159–60, 159–60n28; comparison of to Germany, 70; economic power of, 74–75, 74n70, 76, 76n82, 160; emulation of fascism in, 135– 42; emulation by other countries of the principles of, 78–79; entry of into World War I, 75–76; exports of to Africa, 38; external interventions of, 15–16; as the greatest beneficiary of World War I, 73– 74; and the idea of self-­regulating markets, 155; increase in exports of after World War I, 74; invasion of Grenada by, 200; and the League of Nations, 69; marginal role of in the breakup of the Soviet Union, 210–11, 211n60; participation of in World War I and the facilitation of an Allied victory, 66–67, 75–76; post–World War I foreign policy of, 95–97; post– World War II foreign policy of, 36n9; post–World War II occupation of Germany by, 13, 179–81; post–World War II occupation of Japan by, 12, 179–80; post– World War II presence of in Western Europe, 10–11; power of as a major force for democratization, 53; production of war (World War I) materiel by, 74–75, 74n72; push by for regional democratization in Latin America, 36–37; reasons for postwar foreign aid of, 20–21; regime wave of after World War II, 9–10; shaping of postwar regime choices by, 66; spreading of democracy by through the use of force, 238; and women’s suffrage, 86. See also United States, foreign aid of United States, foreign aid of, 201, 201n20; to Africa, 38; through the establishment of regional organizations, 185. See also Marshall Plan United States Information Agency (USIA), 185 universalism, 36; utopian universalism, 155–56 urbanization, 164 Uruguay, 34, 189 Ustashi, in Croatia, 113 Vago, Bela, 111 van de Walle, Nicolas, 214–16 Van Evera, Stephen, 187 Vargas, Getúlio, 130, 191 Vatikiotis, P. J., 132 Veblen, Thorstein, 71–72

292 I NDE X

Vener, Jessica, 216 Venezuela, 34, 189, 190, 194 Versailles treaty conference, 79, 178; domination of by France, Great Britain, and the United States, 71–72; fundamental premise of, 99–100; new states hatched as a result of, 68 Vichy France, 147 Vietnam, 12, 15, 79, 167; Democratic Republic of, 186–87; North Vietnam, 167 Waldeck, Rosie, 148, 148n270 Walesa, Lech, 211 Walker, Martin, 19 Waltz, Kenneth, 7, 25, 135–36 war, three components of (threat of war, mobilization, war itself ), 81–82 Webb, Beatrice, 112 Weber, Steven, 238–39 Weimar Germany, 85; the Weimar Republic as a blueprint for liberal parliamentary democracy, 78 Weingast, Barry R., 81 Wells, H. G., 26, 67; on democracy, 126–27 West Germany, 184 Westad, Odd Arne, 155–56, 160, 177 Western, Jon, 234 Western Europe, 51, 154; appeal of communism in, 173–76; consolidation of democracy in, 184; suppression of left-­wing politics in, 188 Weyland, Kurt, 46, 46n51, 72n57 Wilhelmine Germany: admiration of, 70, 70n44; as the template for a centralized monarchy, 78 Wilson, Hugh, 141 Wilson, Woodrow, 26, 26n81, 26–27n82, 63, 79, 89; declining influence of during the Versailles treaty negotiations, 93; on democratic principles, 62; democratic rhetoric of, 76; “Fourteen Points” of, 94; as a “Great Man standing for a Great Idea,” 76; post–World War I foreign policy of (limited engagement), 95–98; view of World War I, 65. See also demo-

cratic optimism: and the “Wilsonian moment” Wiseman, John A., 41, 43 Without America It Doesn’t Work (Müller-­ Sturmheim), 69 Wohlforth, William C., 209 women’s suffrage, 85–87 “world society” literature, 26 World War I, 58, 60, 61, 65, 98–100, 235; collapse of the Italian army during, 75; and the demise of monarchial empires, 236–37; early use of blitzkrieg tactics by Germany during, 75; effect of on women’s suffrage, 85–87; entry of the United States in, 75–76; German offensives during (1918), 75; outcome of and the prestige of democratic institutions, 63; participation of the United States in and the facilitation of an Allied victory, 66–67; and the rise of new democracies, 77–80; the United States as the greatest beneficiary of, 73. See also democracy, and war mobilization; Versailles treaty conference World War II, 189; as the only hegemonic shock that produced two rising powers, 152; the United States as a beneficiary of the hegemonic transition of, 159–60, 159– 60n28; wartime alliances and the resurgence of leftist politics during, 189 Xiaoyu Pu, 241 Yeltsin, Boris, 199 Young, Crawford, 172 Young Egypt, 131, 133 Yugoslavia, 78, 86, 87, 88, 105, 143, 147, 161; control of its exports by Germany, 145; increase in GNP after World War II, 164; as a multiethnic parliamentary state, 92; Soviet influence in, 165 Zaire, 40, 201, 220, 224, 227 Zakaria, Fareed, 187 Zambia, 45, 226, 227 Zarakol, Ayse, 27, 188

A NOTE ON THE T YPE

This book has been composed in Adobe Text and Gotham. Adobe Text, designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe, bridges the gap between fifteenth and sixteenth century calligraphic and eighteenth century Modern styles. Gotham, inspired by New York street signs, was designed by Tobias Frere-­ Jones for Hoefler and Co.