BYZANTINE GERMANY
By PROFESSOR GUGLIELMO FERRERO• AGERMAN Chancellor who throws his Vice-Chancellor into prison and shoots out of hand, without show of trial, his Chief of Staff and high officials who the day before were his friends—such are the astonishing characteristics of a regime which claims to have recon- structed the moral unity of Germany.
Executions of this kind were witnessed long ago in Constantinople in the darkest epochs of the Byzantine Empire or the Osmanli Turks. Assuredly Europe is making progress : behold one of the greatest States which twenty years ago was schooling the whole world in law, becoming a modest pupil in the political methods of the Turkish Empire of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Will the events that have been taking place in Germany at last open the eyes of the free countries ? Will they make them realize that the Nazi and Fascist governments differ from representative governments in this above all, that they are illegitimate governments which have set out to discover a new principle of authority outside the principles of Monarchy and Democracy, and, having failed to find it; rest on no principle of law whatever ?
The heads of the Nazi government, like the Fascists, are endeavouring to convince the world by public speeches that they have established a marvellous regime, dazzling in its novelty. But all this fine talk does little to conceal from discerning eyes the incurable weakness of the two regimes—the absence of any legal title, clear, precise, and recognised by the people. If • we ask by whom was Germany governed twenty years ago, in 1914, the answer is, by a certain number of great and small dynasties, in whose hands power mainly rested, ruling by hereditary right ; and by a certain number of Parliamentary institutions which collaborated with the dynasties in government, though in a subordinate role.
The German people traditionally recognised the here- ditary rights of the reigning families as legitimate. There was a sufficient element of freedom in the elections of Parliaments to entitle them to be considered as the genuine expression of the popular will within the restricted sphere of action conceded to them. The government, thus formed of different elements, might be pleasing or displeasing to the people, but it never occurred to any- one to doubt that all the agents of power, from the Emperor, the Kings and the Princes down to the humblest gendarme, had the right to fulfil the functions allotted to them as their share in the government. Power, secure in its foundations, though its character was authoritarian and aristocratic, was not arbitrary, or violent, or san- guinary. It was the government of a civilized people.
But what is the basis of Hitler's power ? Hereditary right ? But he is a little Austrian bourgeois who in the Germany of twenty years ago would have been a mere foreigner excluded from all public office. The will of the people ? Up to the time when he came to power Hitler could never claim to represent more than half the people of Germany. As soon as he found himself in office he destroyed every means by which the people could express their opinion freely ; at the present moment nobody knows what he stands for—his own will and his own hallucinations, or those of a section of the German people, and if so what section ? Elections and plebiscites could legitimize his power provided they were held with some measure of freedom ; but_there is no trace of freedom in Germany today._ Although it still enjoys popularity in • The distinguished author of The Greatness and Decline of Rome is at present a professor at the University of Geneva. certain social circles the National Socialist government cannot legitimize itself in accordance with democratic principles, for it has stifled all opposition. Legitimate democracy implies the right to oppose, and consequently the existence of an opposition.
Unable to base its claim either on the principle of heredity or on that of democracy, the Nazi government, like the Fascist government, seeks to legitimize itself by making the people believe that it is capable of working miracles. It rests on mysticism or on mystification—call it which you will. The mysticism or mystification which these two governments exploit are represented by a revo- lution, a great revolution which was to change the face of the world. For-the first time we behold the futuristic paradox of two governments claiming to establish order in the world in the name of revolution 1 In Italy this desperate manoeuvre of expiring absolut- ism has not yet produced the disastrous consequences inherent in it. The people of Italy are mild, docile and extremely timid, but still endowed with a common sense which resists these extravagances. They have never believed in revolutions, least of all when they are pro- claimed by Ministers of the Crown, decked in Court dress and the insignia of the Annunciata. If Italy has not yet experienced the horrors of Germany, she owes that not to the intelligence of the government, but to the wisdom (unfortunately a little too passive) of her people.
In Germany, on the other hand, the great revolution was taken seriously—the revolution which was to legitimize the power of the Nazi government, —and the attempt to realize it has begun. To escape the conse- quences of the mysticism, or mystification, of revolution, Herr Hitler has perpetrated a double massacre, directed both at the Left and Right, in the hope of convincing the German people that he refuses to check the anti-capitalist revolution to secure the interests of the capitalists. Such are the quibbles by which massacre is condoned today in Byzantium-on-the-Spree.
Newspapers with Conservative tendencies in all coun- tries seek to reassure us about the future by the reflection that the Nazi regime must henceforward lean on the Reichs- wehr. The Reichswehr is an army of legal origin, and it is hoped that it will be a force on the side of order. But that is one more illusion. An army of from 100,000 to 150,000 men will be sufficient as a rule in a country of 60,000,000 people to support a constitutional, legitimate State, based on clear principles of law accepted by the people. But it will be insufficient to support an unconsti- tutional regime resting on the hysterical popularity of a bloodthirsty braggart, and on the ambiguities of revolu- tionary mystification, that is to say, on nothing concrete or solid. We must expect then in Germany a long period of bloodshed and convulsion, which will have a baneful influence on the whole of Europe and especially on Italy/ Thanks, in part, to the prevalent distress we shall sec a spirit of revolt making headway even among the Black- shirts, who up to now for a daily pittance have been content with the modest role of participants in official parades.
Twenty years after the War Europe finds herself in a terrible situation. That is the truth which the nations still must have the courage to grasp. Why is the situation so grave? Because certain great Powers have governments without any legal claim, based on mystic or mystifying revolutionary principles, instead of on legal principles, clear, precise and universally accepted5 Such is the fundamental cause of Europe's distresses. It is a figment of the imagination to suppose that these • illegitimate governments,. with their hatred of each other,. can come to any understanding with the still normal governments of France and England for the re-establishment of order and _prosperity in Europe. What is order for those Powers which adopt the mystical theory of revolution is disorder for legitimate governments. So long as this lasting misunderstanding remains among the two groups of Powers, the fear of a common danger may produce rapprochements,transitory and essentially un- stable, like the fear which causes them—but nothing more.
Europe will only regain a measure of equilibrium and its old proSperity on the day when these two great Powers, Germany and Italy, at least, have once more a constitutional government based on the principles which are recognized by all the civilized West. That return to true order will not be easy, but it may be less difficult than it appears when once public opinion in the great free States realizes that it is a matter . of life and death for all countries which still call themselves civilized. Europe has been reduced to disorder by the sluggish indifference which, since 1914, has led it to regard political crises as domestic events of purely local interest. These crises, beginning with the Russian Revolution, so far from being domestic affairs of purely local interest, are calculated to drive step by step into destruction and anarchy even the wealthiest States, long accustomed though they be to free and legitimately established governments.
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