Understanding Europe (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

IV. Germany and Central Europe

53 iv Germany and Central Europe The difficulties imposed on the European society of peoples by the inadequacies of the European system have nowhere been greater than in Central Europe, above all in the German lands. Ever since the Middle Ages Germany and Austria have been a kind of microcosm of Europe—a society of peoples with a common culture, but politically divided and continually disturbed by internal and external wars. Moreover the two problems are so intimately connected with one another that it is hardly too much to say that the fate of Germany is the fate of Europe, and that the very existence of Europe as an international society depends on the solution of the German problem. European opinion has always been more or less conscious of this, and statesmen have again and again attempted to make the reorganization of Germany the key to an international settlement of European problems. The attempt was made in 1648 by France and Sweden in the Peace of Westphalia, it was made by Napoleon in the Confederation of the Rhine, it was made by Alexander I and Metternich and Castlereagh at Vienna in 1814–15, and finally it was made by the victorious Western powers at Versailles in 1919. And on every occasion they have failed, because they have attempted to solve the German problem in terms of the Balance of Power and European security without taking full account of the peculiar character of the German problem and the historic forces that have conditioned it. But the responsibility does not rest with the Western powers alone. If Western statesmen have over-simplified the problem by subordinating the needs of Germany to the interests of Europe, the Germans have replied by an even more drastic simplification which subordinated the 54 Understanding Europe needs of Europe to the interests of Germany and imposed this onesided solution by force of arms. Bismarck himself was a great simplifier who united Germany under Prussian leadership by the resolute and forcible exclusion of all those elements in the German and Central European traditions which were inconsistent with his conservative Prussian solution, while in our own days Hitler has brought ruin on Germany and Europe by the enormous and disastrous simplification of a “New Order” for Europe based on a totalitarian and racialist Germany party state. Under the circumstances it is not surprising that the victorious powers in 1945 concluded that international order could only be established by the complete elimination of Germany as an independent power centre. Yet it has only taken five years to show us how completely we were mistaken. The elimination of Germany has solved none of the problems of Europe. On the contrary it has involved the elimination of all the other independent powers in Central Europe and has increased the dangers of Western civilization to an appalling degree. Geographical and economic conditions make it impossible to separate the fate of Germany from that of Central Europe, or that of Central Europe from the West. The idea, widely diffused in some quarters, that it is possible to reorganize the world round two world centres, based on the United States and the U.S.S.R., breaks down because it is impossible to draw a world frontier through one of the most thickly populated and highly organized areas in the world in defiance of economics , geography and culture. In spite of national conflicts, Central and Western Europe is a closely knit economic whole, and it is impossible to eliminate and segregate Germany without disrupting the whole European economic system. The reconstruction of Europe—of the European economy and the European social order—cannot therefore take place without the active co-operation of Germany, and the problem we have to face is how to find a political order which will make this co-operation possible. But we cannot do so by transplanting Russian Communism or Anglo-Saxon democracy to German soil, for even if it were possible it would only provoke ideological conflicts which would prevent international co-operation. Somehow or other the elements of a new political order must be found in the German tradition itself. Germany and Central Europe 55 No doubt there is a large and influential body of opinion that would deny the possibility of such a solution, on the ground that the German tradition is directly and primarily responsible for the evils of Nazism and all the disasters that...