Conditions For The Success Of The Democratic Method

II. THE EFFECTS of the First WORLD War on THE CHANCES Of THE SOCIALIST PARTIES OF EUROPE

1. Any major war that ends in defeat will shake the social fabric and threaten the position of the ruling group; the loss of prestige resulting from military defeat is one of the hardest things for a regime to survive. I do not know of any exception to this rule. But the converse proposition is not so certain. Unless success be quick or, at all events, striking and clearly associated with the performance of the ruling stratum—as was, for instance, Germany’s success in 1870—exhaustion, economic, physical and psychological may well produce, even in the case of victory, effects on the relative position of classes, groups and parties that do not differ essentially from those of defeat.

The First World War illustrates this. In the United States the effort had not been sufficiently prolonged and exhausting to show it. Even here the administration responsible for the war suffered a crushing defeat at the polls. But in all other victorious countries the prestige of the ruling strata and their hold on their people were impaired and not enhanced. For the fortunes of the German and English socialist parties, this meant the advent of power or, at all events, office. In Germany control of the central organs of society was thrust upon the party: though in order to save doctrinal face some of them as well as some anti-socialists insisted on speaking of a revolution, the fact was that they undertook government by request—and a humble request it was. In England the labor vote that had been at little over half a million in January 1910 and not quite two millions and a quarter in 1918, 7 went to 4,236,733 in 1922 and to 5,487,620 in 1924 (8,362,594 in 1929). MacDonald reconquered the leadership and in 1924 the party came into office if not really into power. In France the structure of the political world prevented any such clear-cut consummation, but the general contours were the same: there was a syndicalist revival immediately after the war, but the Confédération Générale du Travail, leaving the newly founded Confédération Générale du Travail Syndicaliste and the communist Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire to absorb inadaptable elements, discouraged revolutionary courses and slowly prepared itself for a dominant political role.

Moreover, the socialist or quasi-socialist parties who then shouldered the responsibility that came to them may well have felt that they had almost a monopoly of many of the qualifications required in order to make a success of their venture. Better than any other group they were able to handle the masses that seethed with discontent. As the German example shows, they even were in a better position than anyone else was for the time being to deal firmly with revolutionary outbreaks—if need be, by force. At any rate, they were the very people to administer the right dose of social reform, to carry it on the one hand, and to make the masses accept it on the other. Most important of all, they were, from their standpoint, quite justified in believing that they were also the people to heal the wounds the “imperialist war” had inflicted, to restore international relations and to clear up the mess which, without any fault of theirs, purely bourgeois governments had made of the peace. In this they committed the same kind of error which from a different standpoint was committed by their bourgeois competitors who believed in collective security, the League of Nations, the reconstruction of gold currencies and the removal of trade barriers. But once we grant the erroneous premise we must also grant that the socialists were right in hoping for success, particularly in the field of foreign policy.

2. The achievements of the two MacDonald governments—MacDonald’s and Henderson’s work at the foreign office—are sufficient to illustrate this. But the German case is still more significant. First of all, only the Social Democrats were in a moral position to accept the peace treaty and to support a policy that aimed at fulfilling its provisions. They lamented the national catastrophe, of course, and the burdens it imposed. But feeling as they did about military glory, neither the defeat itself nor the peace spelled unbearable humiliation for them. Some of them almost subscribed to the Anglo-French theory of the war. Most of them cared little for rearmament. While other Germans looked on in sullen disgust, they worked for peaceful understanding

with the victors in a spirit that was perfectly free, if not from resentment, yet from passionate hatred. In the matter of what to others was an imposed democracy, they even saw eye to eye with the western nations: having disposed of the communist revolts in 1918–1919 and having by judicious compromise acquired a dominant role in domestic politics, they were in their most democratic mood.

Second, their hold on the masses was strong enough to make this attitude politically effective. For the moment, a great part of the population saw things in the same light. Their views of the situation and the right way of dealing with it temporarily became the official view whatever the politics of the government that happened to be in office. They provided the political support for the coalitions which negotiated the Dawes plan and the Locarno pact and which could never have been formed or, if formed, could never have taken that line without them. Stresemann was no socialist. Yet the policy associated with his name was the policy of the Social Democratic party— the policy for which they were to get all the credit during one decade and all the punishment in another.

Third, they were at an advantage in their relations to political opinion abroad. The world knew little about Germany. But it understood two things: on the one hand, it realized that there was a party that was ready to accept for good many of the postwar arrangements and in fact quite approved of some of them, a party that was the enemy of what France and England had convinced themselves was their enemy; on the other hand, it realized that German Social Democracy need not be feared on other counts—however conservative a government might be, there was no need for it to object to German as it did object to Russian socialism.

In the long run this was a weakness. It had much to do with the dilatory treatment dealt out to German grievances, for it induced the foreign offices of England and France to believe that Germany would remain indefinitely the meek petitioner who could be made happy by assurances that some day he might be promoted to a position of equality with the superior nations. In the short run, however, and especially during the dark days of the Ruhr invasion, it was an asset: the party—or rather governments known to depend on the support of the party—had an entrée that would have been denied to others.

Fourth, there were the old contacts of the Social Democratic party with the corresponding parties in other countries which dated from the Second International. These contacts had not been completely severed by the war. After all, the Second International had never been officially dissolved, and many individuals and groups within it—especially, but by no means exclusively, those of the neutral countries—had kept their internationalist beliefs intact. The secretary (C. Huysmans) had continued to act, and in 1917, on the suggestion of the Scandinavian socialists, he had even made an attempt to convene a congress which failed only because the Allied powers, by that time determined to crush their adversary, refused to grant passports. 8 Thus it was but natural that many socialists should have thought of reviving it as a matter of course.

3. It was revived but not without difficulties. The first conferences that were held for this purpose in 1919 and 1920 were only moderately successful. The Communist (Third) International that had emerged meanwhile (see below) exerted an attraction that proved a serious obstacle to unity among the laborite and socialist parties of the world. And several important groups that were in no mind to throw in their lot with the communists still wanted something more up to date than the Second International.

This situation was met successfully by a clever tactical device. On the initiative of the Austrian Socialists who were joined by the German Independents and the English Independent Labor Party, a new organization, the Workers’ International Union of Socialist Parties (the so- called Vienna International), was formed in order to radicalize the groups in the revived Second International, to restrain the groups that leaned too much toward communism and to bring them both into line by judicious formulations of aims. 9

The meaning of the venture is exactly rendered by the sobriquet the communists immediately found for it, the “International number two and one-half.” That is precisely why it was able to serve the needs of the time. At the Congress of Hamburg (1923) the Second and the Vienna Internationals were united in order to form the Labor and Socialist International, to stigmatize the peace as “imperialist” and to call for a united front against international reaction—which at any rate sounded well—for the eight-hour day and for international social legislation. The reduction of Germany’s indemnity to a definite and reasonable figure, the abolishment of interallied debts and the evacuation of German territory had been declared necessary a year before (Frankfort Resolutions, 1922). In the light of subsequent events we cannot fail to realize how great an achievement—and service—that was.