IAs loyal Turtle readers are well aware, there is something peculiarly satisfying about exposing the extent to which a political opponent's ideas have been foreshadowed in Nazi theory and practice. To tar another with the stain of fascism is both a low political tactic and also wide open to considerable abuse; yet it is also a temptation that can be quite hard to resist. A few years ago, maverick historian Anna Bramwell showed in a pair of books how strong the continuities were between the German Green Party and the policies of Nazi Minister of Agriculture Walther Darré. Now John Laughland has used the same strategy with respect to the contemporary debate on European union, as he simultaneously anatomises and anathematises the ideological pedigree of the EU's plans for the political and economic unification of the entire continent.
For it seems that the Nazis did not just draw up blueprints for European unity that look remarkably similar to today's grand projet, in which economic integration, increased international planning and a common monetary standard would pave the way for political federation. Leading Nazi economist Werner Daitz, ran a "Central Research Institute for National Economic Order and Large Area Economics" which churned out distinctly Delorsian proposals, and the Berlin Union of Businessmen and Industrialists held a 1942 conference to discuss the creation of the Europäische Wirtschaftgemeinschaft, which translates straightforwardly as "European Economic Community". They also -- Goebbels in particular -- spouted the arguments, drearily familiar from today's so-called postmodern times, that the nation-state is too small and impractical a unit to solve the complex problems of the day; that a revolution in transport and communications has rendered national borders obsolete and undesirable; that the fact of economic "interdependence" demands a new political order; and that a world of unregulated nation-states has an in-built tendency to war.
It is not simply an unhappy coincidence, either, that this rhetoric and these plans have been recycled and redeployed by the founding fathers of the Eurocracy. Nazi "Europeanism" pre-dated the war and found its echo in a whole variety of anti-parliamentary movements in troubled interwar Europe, and Laughland documents some of the ties that linked Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Paul-Henri Spaak and Jacques Delors -- unsurprisingly, an especial bête noire of the book -- to both the anti-democratic politics of the 1930s and to the fascist puppet regimes of Occupied Europe. Out and out fascists also wound up as postwar Euro-integrationists: Sir Oswald Mosley in particular became a keen advocate of a European trading bloc with a common agricultural policy, extensive planning and fixed wages and prices. His widow, Lady Diana, recently wrote to the Sunday Telegraph to reassert her husband's Europeanism: "Union has become essential... [We] must not allow diehard Tories to wreck a prosperous future for our country".
Laughland is more intelligent and more sophisticated than the average Eurosceptic festermonger, and much more cosmopolitan than we might initially imagine for one of his political stripe. Having studied at Oxford and Munich Universities, and taught politics and philosophy in Paris and Bucharest for most of the 1990s, he now lives in Brussels, the belly of the beast. Judging from the footnotes and the bibliography, he is comfortable in four languages. He has previously demonstrated a talent for the analysis of national politics: his first book, The Death of Politics, from 1994, is a punchy and well-documented polemic against François Mitterrand, his Presidency and his Party, and one which nicely captures the highly distasteful nature of a lot of élite French politics. And he has made his mark in a number of rightist papers, writing political commentaries for the respectable enough Wall Street Journal through the occasionally unhinged Sunday Telegraph and Spectator to the barking American National Review.
It's likely that his voice that will become influential on the Eurosceptical wing of the Conservative Party, that Laughland will serve, in part, as its ideologist, and that his arguments will help to make the tin-pot Lamonts and other political flotsam from the twilight of Thatcherism feel that they are fighting on behalf of what is most noble in the human condition. Anything that has this effect is regrettable, of course, but to point this out is not necessarily to knock a dent in an argument. This is worth doing. For The Tainted Source is not without value: the historical fossicking is worthwhile, the parallels he charts are genuine and interesting, and he does, I think, show that the shadows of the past pose an uncomfortable challenge to those who uncritically sign up for anything stamped Made In Brussels.Yet Laughland's interpretations of the facts he has exhumed need more care, and the world-view that frames his account of politics, philosophy, economics, and history is madness. But this needs to be demonstrated, and this is what follows.
IILaughland wants us to be struck by the way in which Nazi references to the ideal of "Europe" predate the war. This, he suggests, means that Nazi Europeanism cannot simply be dismissed as "a fig-leaf for German aggression". But since the Nazi construction of Europe was a racial one, in which "Europe" was juxtaposed to "the East", the home of inferior, corrupting and belligerent Slavs, Jews and Bolsheviks, and since this grotesque vision of the continent was propounded explicitly in Mein Kampf, a prewar invocation of "Europe" should come as no surprise at all. The Nazi European ideology might not be wholly reducible to a mere fig-leaf for aggression, an encoded racism for more palatable consumption at home and abroad, a useful rhetoric for inducing collaboration, or a confused response to the problems of administering a conquered continent, but it is clear that the body of evidence which Laughland displays has clearly emerged from, and can be explained by, the intersection of these four problematics, without recourse to other explanations.
How we respond to this thought depends in part on how we want to interpret the idea of ideology. One view of the matter would say that ideologies are action-guiding, they are aids to practical reasoning, and that if Laughland were right, and that pro-Europeanism lay at the heart of Nazi ideology, rather than being merely and mainly a propaganda tool, then the proof of this would be to find significant Nazi projects that seemed to make no sense without the assumption that the Nazis were committed Europhiles, projects for which no other explanation seems adequate. As I have suggested, this might be quite hard. Another view of what ideology is concentrates on the illusions it produces and induces, and analyses it with respect to the interests it serves: the ideologist manipulates others, but is also self-deluded. Other forces of which the actor may only be dimly aware tend to guide or ultimately determine behaviour. Laughland makes enough remarks throughout The Tainted Source to distance himself decisively from this point of view: in general he rejects anything that smacks of a materialist explanation of politics, and this account of ideology clearly descends from the speculations of the young Marx. But he has a surface affinity to this perspective, given his concerns to show how those who espouse the Europeanist ideology are the unwitting tools of what we might call the traditional and transhistorical German war aims. If the Germans themselves understand this, but others do not, then Laughland is employing a conspiracy theory of history. And if they don't, then there's almost certainly a more robust account of ideology and its deceptions underpinning the book, and he would do well to try to spell it out.
For the theme of Laughland's third chapter is that the Germans don't really change much over time. While Laughland mocks the German pseudo-science of "geopolitics" that argues for the crucial importance of place in determining political and military strategies, his conclusions seem close to theirs in spirit, if not in substance. Laughland contends that it is an important and transepochal truth that the balance of power can only produce peace in Europe if a weak and decentralised Germany is hemmed in by stronger Western neighbours. Armed with these opinions, the achievement of European Union in tandem with German reunification represents the final victory of traditional German objectives over those of her Great Power rivals in England and France. For despite the widespread guff about a dynamic "Europe of regions", Laughland shows that the result of the impact of European law on German institutions will be a recentralisation of power in the hands of the federal government, emasculating the Länder, and helping to produce a strong unitary German state embedded in a Germanised Europe, the perennial objective of German foreign policy, he tells us, from the Hohenstaufen through to Hitler and Kohl.
Laughland insists, of course, that he is not seeking "to imply that modern pro-Europeans are fascist. That would be absurd". But he does come perilously close, because of the way he constructs the history of political thought as a fundamental dualism that neatly divides the politicians, ideologists and philosophers of European history into two camps. On the one hand, the "managerial", "technocratic", "unitarian" and "unpolitical" traditions of the continent produced fascism, corporatism, communism and, of course, the ideology of the European Union, as well as a whole host of Catholic, authoritarian, communitarian and "plannificatory socialist" positions for which Laughland has nothing but contempt. (Very strangely, Laughland interprets all of these doctrines as being "anti-capitalist"). Opposed to these currents, on the other hand, stands an heroic Atlantic tradition of classical liberalism, parliamentary democracy and government accountable to its citizens, a tradition of thought that stems from Christian traditions of natural law and from the English common law, and whose heroes seem to be John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and Friedrich von Hayek -- for a clutch of predictable Austrians seem to count as honorary Anglo-Saxons in this liberal pantheon. In particular -- for Laughland fancies himself as something of a political philosopher -- he is keen to stress that these countries' polities (both of them) are founded upon an implicit recognition that since conflict is the lifeblood of politics, and since freedom is an achievement of politics, the desire to do away with political conflict, as the beastly continentals would like, contains in itself a desire to negate citizen liberty. From this perspective, then, the difference between Stalin, Hitler and Jacques Delors threatens to become vanishingly small.
Clearly this is not an entirely absurd view of things. There are distinctively liberal strands in Anglo-American thought, which have produced real civic benefits to the citizens of these countries, and which probably contributed to the fact that Britain and the United States were not visited by the moral and political disasters that befell so many European countries in the wake of the Depression. And it is easy to isolate currents in continental European thought that do contribute and have contributed to the kind of politics Laughland so despises. But to reify these into two monolithic and transhistorical pillars, ignoring internal contradictions, ongoing debates and the cross-fertilisation of ideas across traditions is simplistic, becoming pernicious when the analyst employs this particular distorting mirror as the major interpretive tool. This can only willfully blind the scholar to the ambiguities and complexities of history that make historical and political judgment a fine art -- and a difficult one -- rather than being merely a matter of proficiency with one's preferred ideological sledgehammer.
In constructing his traditions, Laughland presents his liberal tradition as seamlessly unified, skirting quickly over the sharp distinction between Christian and modern natural law doctrines, and some fundamental disagreements, like that concerning nature of political authority between Burke and Locke. When thinkers have an ambiguous relationship to Laughland's "conservative liberalism", he prefers to pass over in silence. Thus Thomas Hobbes is only mentioned in the book to be praised, for his cogent theory of sovereignty, for his clear-headed perception of the importance of markets in modern society, and for his defence of the gold standard. He also denied the authority of the common law of England, and elaborated a "command theory" of law, yet since these ideas clearly belong on the continental despotism side of Laughland's fundamental binary, they are not mentioned in the book. When he does come to discuss the shortcomings of such a theory of law, he picks -- surprise, surprise -- a German theorist, Hans Kelsen, to criticise instead.
Laughland supplements his Manichean view of the history of political ideas with an extremely crude view of the "concept" or the "doctrine" of the "social" that came to dominate European countries in the nineteenth century [1]. When we subscribe to this doctrine, apparently, we come to replace politics with economics, administration and management; we come under the spell of erroneous philosophical doctrines -- easily refuted in a couple of sentences by a man as bright as our author -- like materialism, behaviourism, utilitarianism or rational egoism; we begin to think that governments should be responsible for welfare. Perish the thought. For none of this, Laughland thinks, should really be the concern of politics at all, even though this then makes it unclear what he thinks political conflict should be about, beyond the heroic defence of the Anglophone liberal order against the present threat from abroad. For while his view that stresses the irreducibly conflictual nature of the sphere we call politics, and which seeks to draw a distinction between the spheres of "politics" and "society" is an extremely valuable one, it isn't, and it can't be, all there is to be said on the subject.
One philosopher who disagrees quite sharply with Laughland's view is Aristotle, which might be important if we believe, with Laughland, that the origin of words, concepts and ideologies is important. Aristotle, who may have invented the word, thought that politics was simply the affairs of the city, which was the highest form of human community that "came into existence for the sake of life, and continued in existence for the sake of the good life". On this view, politics is in the first instance about the collective search for the best ways of living together, and that is why an account of public deliberation, which is not the same thing as parliamentary debate, has been so important for theorists of democratic politics since its origins. Conflict is endemic to politics, not because it constitutes the essence of politics itself but precisely because the social question cannot be excluded from the political arena. The intrusion of the social into the political didn't threaten the existence of the political, as Laughland would have us believe, even in ancient Athens, but helped to structure it, shape it, and sets its agenda. In particular, the social divide helps to creates the distinctive parties of the rich and the poor, the many and the few, the oppressors and the oppressed, and these parties, divided by interest and opinion, go on to wage the conflict which Laughland rightly sees as vitally important to the enterprise of politics. Aristotle is the first great theorist of class struggle (Machiavelli and Marx are the second and third), and he argues that when the poor hold power, we call the city a democracy. Aristotle helps us to see that if we do feel a need to interpret all of modern European history through the lens of a single account of politics, as Laughland clearly does, it must be one that is sensitive both to the moment of conflict at the heart of political affairs and to the perennial desire for unity; to the attempt to secure an autonomous domain for politics and for the necessary interaction between the political sphere and the worlds of society, economy, culture and religion. Laughland's is not, and his history suffers as a result.
IIIThe result of Laughland's approach is to construct a curious parallel to a Trotskyist historiography that presents the history of the last hundred years as a succession of heroic and militant working class movements being repeatedly betrayed to the capitalists by the social democratic, right-wing leadership. In Laughland's version the canon of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky is replaced by this tradition of "conservative liberalism" articulated by Locke, Smith, Burke et al., the capitalists are replaced by the collectivist foreigners, but the real enemies are the Anglo-Saxon traitors who subvert the tradition from within, whether it is Jeremy Bentham with his Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill with his own spin on the Classical Political Economy, or John Maynard Keynes with his General Theory. Even those who look like natural allies turn out to be suspect, for Laughland keenly hopes for a return to gold and considers even Thatcherite monetarism to be a debased kind of sound money policy: he writes, for example, that "there is little difference between [John] Redwood's thought and Stalin's recommendation of the control of the economy via the rouble" [p.247], and one recent arch-villain turns out to be President Richard M. Nixon, who severed the final link between the dollar and gold on 15 August 1971. Like the Trotskyist, finally, one's political friends turn out to be the more driven ideological extremists, in this case Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes.
In certain respects, then, it is true, and John Laughland has amply shown, that a set of continuities between mid-century fascism and contemporary Europeanism exist that should make the Euro-enthusiast pause for thought. This is the merit of the book. But the prostitution of history and philosophy in the service of Euroscepticism is not rendered any more respectable because it is occasionally quite sophisticated in its execution. In the end this book is three parts ideology to one part scholarship, forty pages of notes and sixteen of bibliography notwithstanding. With its dogmatic outlook, simplistic historiography, intolerance of ambiguity, sweeping generalisations, and crude galleries of heroes and villains that combine to strengthen a number of nasty xenophobic stereotypes, it seems far closer to the spirit of fascism than to the humane, broad-minded, tolerant and sceptical outlook that marks the liberal temper at its best. For someone who insists, with Carl Schmitt, on keeping the dyad of friend and foe at the heart of all politics, and who is also interested in the intellectual trajectory, as well as the pedigree of political ideas, because political ideas matter and because they do have consequences, it is worth remembering that the same Schmitt ended up, in Laughland's own words, as the Nazis' "court jurist". That too should give some people pause for some thought.
Footnote:
1: If Laughland draws some distorted ideas about the nineteenth century "rise of the social" from a mangled reading of Hannah Arendt's Human Condition, his view of Aristotle may also be coloured by her idiosyncratic and agonistic interpretation of his thought. Arendt, though, used her misunderstandings of canonical figures - Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant - to produce profound political and philosophical commentary on our times. Laughland, by contrast, desires to use the authority of the canon with which to trash the Europhiles. Yet only one of these is a laudable endeavour.
