curioussoul wrote: ↑Sun Nov 03, 2024 2:09 am
Most of the above is just nonsense. It's true that National Socialism probably could never have been successfully exported globally as a political ideology because of its deep roots in German ethnonationalism and European-style enlightenment philosophy, but the idea that National Socialism was rendered useless as an ideology by 'modernism' and economic developments post-WWII is idiotic. Many of the major civilizational problems facing European countries today, such as low birth rates, mass immigration and cultural decay, are the result of global developments that were antithetical to National Socialist beliefs and would have never taken place if Germany remained a global power broker under a National Socialist regime. Economically, the National Socialist government navigated through and established the rules of engagement for a nationalist state in a rapidly growing globalized economy. The modern global economy is largely the result of the outcome of WWII and the establishment of the U.S. as the world's 'police' and guarantor of global trading routes and shipping lanes. We do not know what the global economy would necessarily look like if Germany won the war and imposed its nationalist beliefs in geopolitics. The idea that 'empire' and 'Lebensraum' was at the very heart of the ideology of National Socialism itself is furthermore very ill-informed. Hitler sought to avoid another war in Europe while balancing the German aspirations of reclaiming land lost after WWI with the more ideologically rooted aspirations of uniting the Germanic parts of Europe in a quasi-political union led by Germany. Given the virtual insigificance of Europe in the global geopolitical landscape today, I think a lot of people would agree that this outlook on the future of Europe as a global force to be reckoned with was quite foresighted.
European dominance was already significantly undermined by the bloodletting of the First World War; this also started in motion various trends which led to the end of European colonial empires. Wilhelmine Germany had very few colonies and these were shared out easily enough as 'mandates', the key issue was whether the British, French, Dutch and Belgian colonial empires could be sustained. It turned out that they could not.
Some of that was down to the contingent events of 1940. Rapid defeat in western Europe coupled with the German-Japanese alliance undermined European colonial empires in Asia, starting with the Japanese occupation of Indochina, and climaxing in 1941-2. African colonies were not affected by this but all were given up around 1960, with only Portugal clinging on to Angloa and Mozambique until the mid-1970s, around the same time as Portugal and Spain ceased being dictatorships.
There were already extensive movements agitating for national liberation and thus decolonisation in the interwar era. Gandhi and the Congress Party of India ring any bells? Many British and French colonies contributed their share to their imperial war efforts in WWII as they had in WWI - Algerian troops were used in Italy, France and Germany, just as African troops were used in Burma, yet in Kenya and Algeria there were significant anti-colonial uprisings in the 1950s.
European prosperity rested on a combination of industrialisation of western and central Europe together with the ability to import foodstuffs either from Eastern Europe or from colonial or semi-colonial regions elsewhere in the world. The Great Depression and slump in trade did not help manufacturing, food continued to be imported up to WWII. After 1945, both western and eastern Europe became remarkably successful in developing industry while western Europe solved the food supply issue with the 'green revolution' in agriculture. Suddenly there were EEC food mountains and surpluses. The secular trend towards a smaller agricultural sector continued.
Nazi economics contended with agriculture, land and questions of settlement to a far greater degree than is ususally realised if one focuses on armaments and the autobahns. Germany was still a significantly agrarian society, especially compared to Britain whose agricultural workforce had shrunk drastically by the 1930s. Most European societies were similar: agrarian.
Settlement dynamics and population economics influenced Nazi policies of annexation around the borders of the Greater German Reich and underpinned the longer-term logic of conquering *and colonising* the Soviet Union in its European part. This vision was central to Hitler's writings in the 1920s and was not forgotten through to the 1940s. Hitler repeatedly noted the unfairness of German population densities being so markedly higher than those of other major European powers: he did not just want to gather in Germans but also to acquire land for them. That meant expelling non-Germans which irrefutably began in late 1939, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were transferred from the Baltic states and the Soviet Union.
If Hitler had been born later, he would not have obsessed over the land/population issue as he would be growing up in a post-1945 world where agricultural productivity had shot through the roof. The ongoing problems of ensuring proper agricultural productivity undermined the Soviet Union, which was forced to import grain at various times from elsewhere in the world. Some East Bloc countries did okay, like Poland, setting up a smoother transition towards EU integration after 1990. Today, Poland continues to export a fair amount of agricultural products while still retaining an industrial sector.
So the basic economic premises of National Socialism evaporated by the 1970s. They belong to a bygone era.
In that regard, Goebbels' prophetic plea to the Western powers that "das Abendland ist in Gefahr" ("the West is in danger") couldn't ring more true. In fact, it might be argued that the defeat of Germany was essentially the implicit defeat of the Western world, the nation state, and the enlightenment values that underpinned National Socialism as a political movement, as authors such as Lawrence Birken have argued.
One problem here is the 'Enlightenment' is a historiographical construct, as J.C.D. Clark has argued in a recent book. I have been meaning to read Clark's full book and now will also review Birken's arguments on this matter.
The bigger problem is the utter failure of National Socialist Germany to provide proper leadership of 'Europe'. They were extremely well placed to do so in 1941, following the pivotal victories in 1940 which meant that essentially the whole of continental Europe was under direct German rule or had gravitated to the German side one way or another. The 'crusade against Bolshevism' had a considerable popularity as an idea across Axis and Axis-sympathising Europe, but the failure to fully incorporate the peoples of the Soviet Union and callousness of invasion and occupation policies was conspicuous. Pretty much all Axis states urged Germany and Hitler to pursue more conciliatory policies in the Soviet Union, as did the nationalists in the Baltic and Ukraine, as did much of the German Army leadership, as eventually did Goebbels.
In hindsight, the 'New Order' proclaimed in 1940 was too underdeveloped to mount a successful campaign to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941: there was simply not enough military force, mechanisation, air power and logistical capability, especially considering how weak the Axis contingents were. Their expansion for the 1942 campaign ensured Germany's defeat on the Volga and Don. Pure imperial overstretch.
So if 'Europe' was to be saved, then holding a defensive line against potential Soviet aggression was needed in conjunction with knocking the British Empire out of the war, i.e. the Mediterranean-Middle Eastern strategy which was semi-seriously considered in 1940-41, and certainly advocated by various advisors. Fighting the war they were actually in rather than the war that was fantasised would have been a real start.
But one can go back to 1938-1939 and observe that Germany had expanded successfully and recovered its economic strength while also rearming to a level ensuring it could defend itself, and wonder why the intransigence over Danzig and Poland. From an anti-Bolshevik perspective, convincingly soliciting Poland and Romania as allies against the Soviet Union required postponing the expansion of German territory and bringing ethnic Germans in Poland into the national fold. There were equally large ethnic German minorities in Hungary, Romania and Slovakia; all of these states needed to be on Germany's side and not simply subjugated. There was ongoing fairly successful economic diplomacy going on to yoke southeastern Europe to the German economy through trade deals and via cultural influence, which was further reorienting the European economy away from the 'Atlanticist' states towards a European order. Certainly the potential was there to have a bigger bloc than the Central Powers of WWI (which was not a viable power bloc in military-economic terms, as it was economically crushed in WWI).
Hitler then crossed a red line with the annexation of the Czech lands in March 1939, at a time when he was actively pressuring Poland and when the forced emigration of Jews had ramped up significantly. This was really the moment when appeals to 'Europe' ring most hollow, since National Socialist Germany began a process of treating
other Europeans as colonial subjects - something that is frankly undeniable, since it was repeated even more viciously in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and then inflicted on former equal status allies like Italy.
Thus it's more persuasive to view 1914-1945 as 'the European civil war' and to note how several powers involved, especially National Socialist Germany, ended up erasing fellow European nation-states (especially Poland), undermining every occasion where a pan-European solidarity might have developed further, and generally conducting themselves in such an arrogant and violent fashion as to alienate an entire continent.
Right wing populism has been infinitely more successful in the 21st Century than hardcore neo-Nazism, at least in terms of mobilising political support. But no populist party has really been fully tested, certainly calls for repatriation have not. And non-populist governments can be as vigorous now in enforcing borders and immigration - Poland's border with Belarus has been practically militarised, while Germany has just effectively abandoned the Schengen free movement agreement. The issues arising from increased migration will only sharpen and will require a very different response to the introduction of immigration restrictions in the 1900s-1930s in the UK, US and Europe. The upswings are going to be better explained by bright shiny things attracting people north, labour market requirements due to declining populations in advanced post-industrial societies, climate change and civil wars elsewhere in the world, rather than whatever is currently being babbled on X.
That might be due to the fact that "hardcore neo-Nazism" is literally illegal or borderline-illegal in many European countries, and in the countries where National Socialism is not outright banned, many of its symbols or beliefs are. And where it's not directly illegal to support National Socialism, it has been taught to generations of children as the most backwards and evil ideology in human history, one based solely on the mass murder and genocide of Jews. There's an argument to be made that the entire ethos of post-WWII liberal democracy in Western Europe is to avoid another Holocaust. The "right wing populism" you tout as being "inifinitely more successful" is only more successful in the sense that it exists, the same way democratic socialism and communism exist, because there are almost no significant parallels between "right wing populism" and National Socialism. National Socialism was a revolutionary, anti-democratic and antisemitic ideology. Right wing populism is merely conservatism with some anti-immigration sentiments sprinkled on top.
The irrelevance of Nazism to the current era is further illustrated by technological and social change, some revolutionary and some secular/long-term. To quote you from earlier in your reply:
Many of the major civilizational problems facing European countries today, such as low birth rates, mass immigration and cultural decay, are the result of global developments that were antithetical to National Socialist beliefs and would have never taken place if Germany remained a global power broker under a National Socialist regime.
I'm afraid low birth rates reflect a secular change in advanced industrial societies. This is CLEARLY visible with South Korea and Japan, which are otherwise very ethnically homogeneous and which provide two contrasting cases of modernisation having the same end results. Japan modernised and industrialised earlier, and treated Korea as a colony, then after the Korean War, South Korea was able to modernise and industrialise very successfully. Both now have sub-replacement levels of fertility.
Pro-natalist policies were widely adopted in interwar Europe, certainly in Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union but also echoed elsewhere. It took until after 1945 for France to experience a proper baby boom and population growth in the trentes glorieuses, with immigration forming only part of the cause of this growth. French population growth from 1870-1945 was almost flat because of dividing agricultural estates, discouraging farmers from having more sons who stood to inherit.
Pro-natalist policies made only modest boosts to fertility.
The 1960s brought the pill - and Nazi Germany was ALL about contraception and tolerating premarital safe sex - but also jet travel. Tertiary education expanded everywhere and became a source of invisible earnings if marketed globally, as did tourism! All trends which have clear roots in the pre-1945 period but which became more and more significant in the postwar era.
The bigger problem is the general modernisation of European societies around the axis of motor vehicles. 1930s Germany had a much lower rate of car ownership than did France and Britain at this time; this wasn't just the result of redirecting vehicle production to military and state purposes, it reflected the fact that for all the amazing achievements in Germany during the second industrial revolution (chemical industries etc), it was simply a less wealthy, less 'advanced' and more agrarian society. The Nazis knew this and were promising German workers the Volkswagen. Those continued in production after 1945 firstly to equip British military police in the BAOR, then to satisfy the pent-up consumer demand for cars along with all the other cool products of post-1945 advanced societies: refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and more.
This is why I said that National Socialism was modernising Germany in ways that can "be fitted into social welfare state trajectories (the 1942 iteration of the Mutterschutzgesetz, the DAF and its projects for mass tourism, consumerism, housing and motor cars)." Some like the Mutterschutzgesetz went back to Bismarck, like old age pensions and other Wilhelmine innovations.
Cars, tourism and consumerism were demonstrably collective - and also rationed - in the Third Reich but became more group-oriented and individualised in post-1945 societies. Package holidays were innovated around 1950 on a commercial basis - they're an evolution from the KdF cruises of the 1930s and the parallel collectively organised tourism of communist countries.
How long could a collectivist society persist while everything was modernising? The East Bloc gives us something of an answer: maybe forty years, one or two generations, and that is if one is starting from a less advanced place.
Germany lost the war because of a lack of oil supply, despite seizing and controlling oil being a major component of Hitler's strategy (aiming to conquer the Caucasus). But also because its engine, vehicle and aviation industries were outproduced by the Allies, and lacked a depth of support from Axis industries or other European economies which could be exploited effectively. The French economy was much more heavily dependent on oil imports to run a larger fleet of motor vehicles; without the oil, the economy suffered. Conversely, the Allies won WWII in part because they controlled oil supplies in the Middle East over and above domestic production in the USSR and USA, and achieved massive economies of scale with engine, vehicle and aviation industries.
The counterfactual of what-if-National-Socialist-Germany-had-survived has to be dialled back to October 1938 to at the latest February 1939 if one is to consider how it might have persisted into the 1960s or beyond. Anything after 1939 involves war, and barring a few contingent forks in the road, like what if Germany had pursued the Mediterranean strategy and conquered the Middle East, that foredoomed National Socialist Germany to eventual defeat. But not, one hastens to add, the destruction of the machine tool park that despite dismantling and reparations was still larger in 1945 than had been the case in the 1930s, and which was then put to good use fuelling West German exports and domestic consumption in the Wirtschaftswunder.
The Wirtschaftwunder was in turn fuelled by the extra labour power of expellees from East Prussia, Silesia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, along with the steady brain and brawn drain from the DDR up to the Berlin Wall going up in 1961. The Wall stabilised East Germany and allowed it a decade plus of growth and relative prosperity with all the same consumer goods becoming available there, just at a slower more rationed pace.
Keeping the Wirtschaftswunder going meant importing Gastarbeiter, and it was former Nazi civil servants who did some of the planning there. The decision to invite Turks in rested on the colossally naive assumption that these were
guest workers and they would go home when no longer needed. The Nazis had of course forcibly imported 8-9 million foreign workers during WWII, with over 7 million in autumn 1944, expanding prewar trends of seasonal labour and cross-border workforces from Poland and the Netherlands. Italian workers were also a Thing from the 1930s onwards, and there was a continued economic migration in postwar West Germany from Italy.
One can wonder what would have happened if Nazi Germany had been at peace from 1938 to the 1960s; whether the investments of the 1940s into extra machine tools would have happened at the same pace, whether the crucial industries in the west of the country would have expanded so fast. In this counterfactual, Germany does keep Silesia and its coal fields but has to export more to import the oil and fuel needed to maintain the advanced car-centric economy it would have had. Or Germany falls behind France and Britain still further and remains underdeveloped. Are the synthetic fuel plants economically viable? In the medium term maybe not, or maybe the output is reserved for the Me-262s it develops a bit more slowly later into the 1940s, and the battleships which were ordered in 1939 but unfinished. So National Socialist Germany has to negotiate with either communist or Islamic countries to access the closest major sources of oil, since the oil fields of Poland, Romania and Hungary are not going to be enough.
A 'National Socialist Europe', whether overtly imperial or including genuine alliances of equals, was never going to succeed, I'm afraid. The track record from 1939-1945 says otherwise; everybody
hated the Germans in their Nazi incarnation by the end of the war, and hated them often more than they hated the already much loathed communists.
But I do think it would behove those inclined to what-if fantasies to consider reading more on the post-1945 world, as this might correct some misconceptions. 'Hitler would have done it differently' cannot explain away change forever, since eventually the man born in 1889 would have died, long before his 100th birthday and continued false sightings of him in a Brazilian jungle or Neuschwabenland.
