Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950 by Christian Bailey (review)

Christian Bailey believes that the historiography about the origins of European postwar integration is short-sighted and teleological, more a "foundational myth of integration as a linear and solely postwar process" than a complete history (2). So he has dug up some "lost Europes" (2) created by loose groupings of Germans of disparate political persuasions whose thinking began in Weimar, spanned the Nazi regime, and reappeared after 1945. He argues that the postwar integration of Europe owed much to ideas and plans proposed before 1933 and shows that conservatives, Catholics, and socialists all offered ideas for a united Europe during the Weimar period, but blamed the republic's weaknesses and the Nazi takeover on the excesses of parliamentary democracy. The internationalist schemes that they proposed were therefore markedly less democratic in structure. It comes as no surprise that these ideas placed Germany in the center of a united Mitteleuropa, looking east as much as west, thereby conferring on a new Germany the dominant position.

To demonstrate the breadth and significance of the interwar proponents of European unity, and their agreement about the dangers of mass democracy, Bailey focuses on three groups of intellectuals and political leaders. The first of these, the conservative Europäische Kulturbund, active between 1922 and 1933, was dedicated to working toward an aristocratic European community that would thwart both nationalism and the factionalism of party politics. Accordingly, many of its members, including its founder Karl Anton Rohan and figures such as Carl Schmitt, welcomed the potential for cultural renewal represented by fascism. After the war, some of these ideas were reinvigorated in the journal Merkur, where an early Ostpolitik was advanced from the political right.

On the far left, the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund, lodged uncomfortably between the SPD and KPD during Weimar, advocated an integrated Europe on the Marxist model with its center in central Europe, not the USSR. After persecution and exile during the Nazi period, Kampfbund leaders returned to Germany to advocate revolution against capitalism, while also demanding a period of political education for the German population before it was ready for sovereignty. Bailey seeks "to nuance" the common narrative that socialism in Germany was Westernized after 1945 by demonstrating that these socialists sought to create a "neutral, socialist and unified Europe" (116), unlike other SPD leaders like Kurt Schumacher.

Finally, Bailey describes a group of centrist reformers, exiled in Switzerland, who formed Demokratisches Deutschland to promote more regional sovereignty for regions like Bavaria as a reaction to the excessive nationalism of the Prussian-led unification of 1871. Heinrich Ritzel typified their views of democracy by urging that the people who had "sacrificed the political democracy to a charlatan" could not be "trusted to exist independently in a renewed political democracy" (161). Only after perhaps thirty years of tutelage under the benevolent leadership of a council of "the most talented" leaders might full democracy return to Germany (163). For these men, European integration was a means of "redistributing power away from a national center" toward regions like Bavaria (173–174).

Bailey labels the various organizations under discussion "civil society associations" (24), because they were not political parties in the strict sense. Yet the men who developed the plans he analyzes were well connected politically; their discourse was aimed at political leaders or at enabling them to attain political leadership for themselves. Civil society as we understand it in the twenty-first century does not inform his argument and was not directly addressed by such figures. These intellectuals and party leaders, all of whom had authoritarian tendencies, assumed that they represented the working class or average Catholics, but they never explained why less democracy would be better for average Germans. Bailey's use of civil society as an interpretive theme (4–7) falls short, then, but by and large he succeeds in demonstrating that a "linear political history" from the European Coal and Steel Community to...