Interpreters of Hannah Arendt have long been aware that although her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was published in 1951, it was actually written substantially earlier.Footnote 1 Indeed by the time Arendt began proposing such a book to publishers in 1946, she had essentially completed the first two-thirds of it—made up of historical treatments of nineteenth-century imperialism and anti-Semitism—and had even published much of those sections in the form of separate essays.Footnote 2 During the early 1940s, however, Arendt was engaged not only in fertile historical research, but also in intense political activity. Over the very years she was writing what would become the preponderance of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt was convinced that a European federation was the only hope for a peaceful and secure postwar Europe. As she published the disparate pieces that would make up her accounts of imperialism and anti-Semitism in Origins, Arendt was also composing dozens of articles, letters, and unpublished drafts arguing for the elimination of national sovereignty in Europe, and the creation of a total federation.
The aim of this essay is to reveal the intimate connection between Arendt's seminal writings on the history of totalitarianism, and her less well-documented political engagement on behalf of a European federation. My argument is that European federalism constitutes the forgotten political intention underlying Hannah Arendt's historical approach to totalitarianism. I will establish this by examining her involvement in two distinct debates, which became during the mid-1940s profoundly intertwined: a political debate over the future of postwar Europe, and a historiographical debate about the sources of Nazism. Arendt's intervention in these debates has gone largely unanalyzed. However it was in a set of writings that touched upon both these issues simultaneously, and which treated the historiography of Nazism as profoundly connected with the future reconstruction of Europe, that Arendt articulated and justified her historical analysis of totalitarianism.
The defining characteristic of Arendt's approach to the history of totalitarianism is what one might call its international character. Rather than seek the origins of Nazism in German historical conditions and events, she instead traces the emergence of Nazism (and eventually Bolshevism) to a “collapse of the nation-state” across all of Europe during the interwar years.Footnote 3 That collapse was prepared, in Arendt's telling, by nineteenth-century imperialism and anti-Semitism, and her treatments of these phenomena span not only Europe, but the whole European colonial project. At the beginning of 1945, in an article entitled “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’,” Arendt explained the political significance of this historical approach. In that article Arendt attacked a range of prominent intellectuals who were attributing Nazism specifically to Germany's history and national character.Footnote 4 She argued not only that their historical claims were incorrect, but also that they were providing strong ammunition against a European federation. Their contention that the source of Nazi militarism and tyranny was found in German history alone meant that it was in fact possible to return to the status quo of independent nation states in Europe. So long as the German menace was sufficiently crushed there was little danger of renewed war, or of totalitarianism reemerging. Arendt fiercely denied these claims.Footnote 5 She put forward an alternative historical description of Nazism as a pan-European, rather than a merely German, development.Footnote 6 Nazism derived from the collapse of the nation state as an effective political form across Europe: the only way to prevent something like it from happening again was to replace the European nation states with a continent-wide federation.Footnote 7
Later that year, in an essay entitled “Parties, Movements, and Classes,” Arendt would break more subtly, but no less decisively, with a second German-centered historiography of totalitarianism. This was the historical approach which attributed the victory of Nazism to structural weaknesses in German parliamentary democracy. The most prominent proponent of this explanation in America was Franz Neumann. It was also being put forward by Joseph Schumpeter, however, and the failings of German parliamentary democracy had been a long-standing topic in German social theory since well before the collapse of Weimar. Arendt's claim in “Parties, Movements, and Classes”—much of which would be directly reprinted in Origins—is that the collapse of interwar parliamentary government occurred identically all across Europe, and not merely in Germany. Arendt further argues that this collapse was a direct and logical consequence of the broader decline of the nation state. The fall of the Weimar Republic was therefore the result of international events and developments, and it was strikingly paralleled across continental Europe.Footnote 8 The political conclusion Arendt draws from this historical analysis is that no attempt to re-create nationally distinct parliamentary governments will succeed. Again she maintains that the only hope for Europe is to replace national sovereignty with federation.Footnote 9
Arendt's disagreement with both German-centered explanations of totalitarianism was tied to her commitment to European federalism. This essay therefore begins with an examination of Arendt's arguments in support of European federation between 1940 and 1946. Although there is significant scholarship on Arendt's theory of international federation, and on her critique of the nation state, there has been no thorough analysis of Arendt's specific writings on European federation during this period. Arendt's commitment to European federation hinged on two lines of argument. The first was that only a European federation could create lasting peace and freedom in postwar Europe, restore the shattered European economy, and prevent the domination of Europe either by the United States and the USSR, or by a new totalitarian movement. The second concerned how a European federation could potentially resolve the “Jewish Question,” and protect the rights of ethnic minorities. It is with respect to this second line of argument that Arendt's conception of international federation differs most substantially from how it is often interpreted. Scholars who have discussed Arendt's general support for federation have primarily done so in light of her later, and more canonical, philosophical writings.Footnote 10 These writings are depicted as offering an original theory of human rights, which justify the international political institutions that Arendt favored.Footnote 11 And yet in the 1940s Arendt's justification for international federation was based on the rights of nationalities rather than on human rights. Drawing upon proposals that had been put forth by Otto Bauer and Karl Renner in the early twentieth century, she called for a European federation that would apportion political rights and representation specifically on the basis of nationality, without respect to territory. She believed that such a federation could enable Jews to have representation in a European parliament, and end Jewish political powerlessness.
Following an examination of Arendt's writings on behalf of European federalism, I show how this political commitment informed her historical approach to totalitarianism. I first examine Arendt's opposition to the claim that Nazism sprang from Germany's particular history and national character, and her contention that Nazism was actually a product of the decline of the nation state across Europe. I then discuss Arendt's subtle but clear departure from the line of argument tracing Nazism to the weaknesses of German parliamentary democracy. Arendt's engagement with these other historical approaches reveals the radical political project her history of totalitarianism expressed: a project not only about Europe's past, but also one for its future.
ARENDT ON EUROPEAN FEDERATION: 1940–1946
In 1943 Hannah Arendt would proclaim that “all more progressive men,” whether “European or not,” were in favor of replacing national sovereignty in Europe with a federation.Footnote 12 That is perhaps an overstatement. But it testifies to the widespread support for European federalism that had flowered during the interwar years. The late 1920s witnessed serious diplomatic effort by France and Germany to bring about European political and economic integration, culminating in the French prime minister Aristide Briand's proposal of a “United States of Europe” to the League of Nations.Footnote 13 This was an intellectual no less than a political development. Briand had been strongly influenced by the Austrian writer Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi's arguments for a European federation based on the American Constitution.Footnote 14 Long after the collapse of formal diplomatic negotiations in 1929, Coudenhove-Kalergi would stand at the head of a diverse movement of European intellectuals in favor of a federated Europe.Footnote 15 When the war began many of them participated in Resistance movements.Footnote 16 Others, including Coudenhove-Kalergi himself, would end up in the United States.
In a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1933, Arendt declared her support for European political integration—even while also asserting that the time was nowhere near ripe.Footnote 17 What motivated her to begin seriously arguing for a European federation seven years later was the plight of European Jewry. As Arendt wrote in a letter to Erich Cohen-Bendit in 1940, “no European people is suffering as much as we are under these new circumstances. Not the Poles, not the Czechs. Our only chance—indeed the only chance of all small peoples—lies in a new European federal system.”Footnote 18 Arendt's hope was that a federation could give Jews the same political voice and power as any other European nation: “within such a commonwealth we could be recognized as a nation and be represented in a European parliament.”Footnote 19 Along with registering her strong support for federation, already by 1940 Arendt had definitively rejected the nation-state as a political form. Arendt's reasoning on this issue was connected to the persecution of European Jewry as well. The nation state combined political sovereignty in a territory with the preponderance of a single nationality. This meant, according to Arendt, that if the dominant nationality refused to share power or respect minority rights, then ethnic minorities within the territory possessed no reliable recourse. While the Jews were “the minority par excellence,” Arendt believed that the European nation state could not ensure genuine protections for any ethnic minority.Footnote 20 “All politics dealing with minorities have foundered on the existent and abiding fact of state sovereignty.”Footnote 21
Upon reaching America in 1941 Arendt would repeatedly argue for a European federation in the pages of the German Jewish newspaper Aufbau, along these same lines. Indeed, other than criticizing England's refusal to let the Jews in Palestine organize an army brigade to fight Hitler, almost no political goal exercised Arendt more during these years than that of European federation. In 1942, in an article entitled “The Crisis of Zionism,” Arendt maintained that American Jews must “support all efforts for a federated Europe, because within such a union of nationalities the Jewish question is solvable.”Footnote 22 In another article that year Arendt called for the end of the war to bring “a federated Europe along the lines of what Napoleon once had in mind.”Footnote 23 She went so far as to declare that with such a federation, “the French Revolution, which brought human rights to the Jews at the price of their national emancipation, is about to take its second great step.”Footnote 24
The model of federation Arendt supported was one in which its constitutive elements were Europe's distinct nationalities. She was convinced that war and migration were making the old ideal of nationally homogeneous territory obsolete. “Nowhere in Europe today,” Arendt argued, not even in the traditional nation states of Western Europe, “do we find a nationally homogeneous population.”Footnote 25 Arendt believed that for each of Europe's increasingly intermingled peoples to have a secure political status there had to be not only a disjunction between nation and state, but also a rethinking of the relationship between nationality and territory:
The notion that nations are constituted by settlement with borders and are protected by their territory is undergoing a crucial correction. Spaces that can truly be maintained economically and politically are constantly expanding. There may soon come a time when belonging to a territory is replaced by the idea of belonging to a commonwealth of nations whose politics are determined solely by the commonwealth as a whole.Footnote 26
She called for “a constitution giving rights to each and every nationality on the continent”—regardless of where its members happened to be dispersed.Footnote 27 As John Hiden and David Smith have documented, a European federation between nationalities had been championed during the 1920s by leaders of the Congress of European Minorities.Footnote 28 The most important source for this idea was the writings of two prewar Austrian socialists: Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. It is beyond the scope of this essay to enter into their extensive historical and theoretical arguments.Footnote 29 But the broad institutional innovations they supported—and which Arendt drew on—were twofold. The first was that each nationality would have its own deterritorialized internal governing body that could defend members’ interests throughout the entire federation.Footnote 30 The second was that representation in the federation would be accorded on the basis of nationality. This would be true of local and provincial government as well, wherever there were multiple nationalities residing.Footnote 31
Arendt's engagement with this idea has gone largely unexamined.Footnote 32 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, however, she explicitly discusses “the socialist propositions of Karl Renner and Otto Bauer in Austria to separate nationality entirely from its territorial basis and to make it a kind of personal status.”Footnote 33 She goes on to quote directly from Bauer's seminal text Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie to explain “the personal (as opposed to the territorial) principle.”Footnote 34 In that passage Arendt betrays no sympathy with their proposals. But in her 1946 review of Joseph Delos's book La nation she in fact does. Declaring it necessary that “the larger political needs of our civilization, with its ‘growing unity’ on one side, and its growing national consciousness of peoples on the other, would be met with the idea of federation,” Arendt goes on to add, “within federated structures, nationality would become a personal status rather than a territorial one”—the exact phrase she uses in Origins to describe Bauer and Renner's argument.Footnote 35
The advantage of such a federation for European Jewry, a “nation” without a territory, is obvious. Over the 1940s Arendt proposed many of the institutional components that went with this kind of federation, even attempting to theorize what “a national alliance stretching across all of Europe,” and fighting for Jewish interests, “would look like in juridical terms.”Footnote 36 When it came to the plausibility of a federation of nationalities, Arendt pointed to a rather surprising model: the USSR. She argued that despite its many faults, the USSR also exemplified a “new historic fact,” which was “that for the first time in modern history. . . the government represents a federation of peoples and nationalities.”Footnote 37 Arendt praised the “national liberation of Russian Jews—because they are the first to be emancipated as a nationality and not as individuals, the first who did not have to pay for their civil rights by giving up their status as a nation.”Footnote 38 She declared that “in pursuing its policy of nationalities, the Russian Revolution has carried the emancipation begun with the French Revolution to its obvious conclusion.”Footnote 39
Despite her strong attacks on nationalism throughout this whole period, Arendt favored a European federation in which political participation and political rights were granted specifically to nationalities: a “European politics” in which “all nationalities are maintained.”Footnote 40 What Arendt opposed in nationalism was its assumption that national differences are fixed and innate. Nationalism “holds a nation to be an eternal organic body, the product of inevitable natural growth of inherent qualities.”Footnote 41 This led inevitably, she thought, to the belief that one's own national group was inherently superior to others, and entitled to dominate or expel them. What made that view especially dangerous was the modern nation state's identification of nationality with territorial sovereignty.Footnote 42 Arendt recognized the possibility of assimilation, and the fluidity of national identity through time.Footnote 43 She obviously hated all nationalism that placed one's own people above others.Footnote 44 And yet she also clearly believed that nationality was a stable enough category of identification to serve as the basis for political rights and powers in a federation.
Although Arendt's preference was for a federation of nationalities, she was not opposed to a European federation along the lines of American federalism, in which the constituent elements were simply territorial states. This was the version that had been championed by Coudenhove-Kalergi, and proposed by Briand in 1929. Arendt thought that the example of the United States attested to how that kind of federalism could still approximate many of the benefits of “a union of nationalities.” Arendt argued that “without any revolution, only by the natural course of events, the United States has come very close to the same conception” as the USSR.Footnote 45 Even though the United States was juridically a federation of “individual states” and not a “union of nationalities” like the USSR, Arendt thought that in a profound sense the United States was also a union of nationalities.Footnote 46 She saw no single, dominant American nation, but a range of diverse nationalities, the political status of each of which was respected. When “the president of the United States speaks to ‘the Jewish people of America’” as a particular group, Arendt noted, he “expresses himself as if the government is not only a government of united states but of united peoples as well.”Footnote 47 At the close of the war Arendt could therefore consistently champion the Western European Resistance's manifestos for a federated Europe, even as she acknowledged that their aim was a federation of “constituent states.”Footnote 48
During the same period that Arendt was advocating European federation she was also a committed Zionist. Arendt's dual commitments to a permanent, institutionalized Jewish voice in European politics on the one hand, and to a Jewish presence in Palestine on the other, were not contradictory. As scholars have documented, Arendt's criticisms of the nation state led her to oppose a national Jewish state in Palestine.Footnote 49 Indeed Arendt believed even a binational state was impossible, since she thought it would be torn apart through violent conflict between the two nationalities. Her solution was to place Palestine within a much larger political federation: “Palestine can be saved as the national homeland of Jews only if . . . it is integrated into a federation”; that way “both Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights as members of a larger system that ensures the national interests of each. And the question of who should rule over whom would then have become meaningless.”Footnote 50 While one option was the British Commonwealth, Arendt's preferred choice was Europe:
A reasonable solution of the Palestine question would be a kind of Mediterranean federation. In a model of this sort the Arabs would be strongly represented and yet not in a position to dominate all others . . . this political framework can of course be expanded until it includes a larger federation of European countries. It is clear that both the Near East and North Africa would have to belong to such a system. This would be more advantageous for the Jews, for it would mean that they would be recognized as members of the European community of peoples, that they would have an intra-European status.Footnote 51
Given “the great and lasting achievements that the Arab people once passed on to Western civilization,” Arendt argues that there is no reason to fear bringing them “into union with European peoples.”Footnote 52
With the end of the war approaching, a democratic European federation reemerged as a plausible political possibility for the first time since the 1920s. Over the course of 1945 Arendt remained engaged in debates over the future of European Jewry and the settlement of Palestine. However, she also became involved in the more general question of European reconstruction. Arendt's most important intervention, and her broadest argument for a new federalist order in Europe, was a piece in Partisan Review entitled “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’.” Arendt's support for federation in that essay, and in a series of other writings published before the year was over, is entirely continuous with her political commitments during the previous five years—I already noted how she would reiterate her support for nationality as a “personal status” in 1946. However, Arendt was now arguing on quite different rhetorical terrain. “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’” was her first argument for European federation written in English, rather than in a Jewish, German-language, publication. Her topic is not only the fate of European Jewry, and the dilemmas facing minorities, but the future of Europe as a whole.
In “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’” Arendt portrays, to her American audience, a battle over European reconstruction being waged between two conflicting parties: on the one hand, European Resistance movements which were committed to a total European federation; on the other hand, national governments-in-exile and the allied powers which were seeking to restore distinct, nationally sovereign states. Arendt declared that “the cardinal principle of French resistance was libérer et fédérer,” meaning “a federated structure of the Fourth Republic” that is “integrated into a European federation.”Footnote 53 She claimed that this call for federation went well beyond France. “It is in almost identical terms that the French, Czech, Italian, Norwegian, and Dutch underground papers insist on this as the primary condition of a lasting peace.”Footnote 54 By contrast, the national governments-in-exile, which had fled to London in the wake of Hitler's conquests, aimed to reconstitute their destroyed states as nationally sovereign again. “The disagreement between the underground movements and the governments in exile is nearly complete.”Footnote 55
Arendt was broadly correct in her summary of the thought of the Resistance, which had been deeply shaped by interwar arguments for European federalism.Footnote 56 Walter Lipgens argues that “the great majority of writers of the Resistance opposed any degree of state sovereignty in the areas of foreign policy, economics, and defense,” and that “the formation of a powerful European Federal Government was in every country considered to be the absolutely essential step forward.”Footnote 57 Arendt was less accurate about a complete divergence between the goals of the Resistance and the goals of the governments-in-exile. The newly constituted governments of Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and many Eastern European nations supported a European federation, since they saw it as their only guarantee against future invasions.Footnote 58 It was de Gaulle alone among the exiled leaders who at that moment opposed a federation for nationalist reasons. He was joined by Britain and the USSR, which also saw a European federation as a hindrance to their independent political ambitions.Footnote 59 Arendt did not grasp the nuanced calculations of the newly reconstituted national governments, which were not simply against federation tout court.Footnote 60
While Arendt did not accurately identify the exact political forces arrayed against European federation, it is significant that while arguing for one throughout 1945 she couched her own appeal as a stand taken on behalf of the Resistance. “The only alternative,” she claimed, which can “preserve peace, let alone guarantee freedom, is the course taken by the European Resistance.”Footnote 61 Beyond supporting the political voice and protection that a federation would give to national minorities, Arendt favored the economic as well as political unity which Resistance groups were proposing. She supported plans to combine German, Belgian and French industry into a single administrative zone, which could be democratically managed, giving “workers and the technical personnel of each factory a stake in the results of production.”Footnote 62 Arendt appealed to the slogan libérer et fédérer to express support for federation as a broader principle of politics. European states must not only be united into a larger federation, they should also be themselves reconstituted as federations of smaller units, which would be more politically responsive than centralized states. By applying the principle of federation both within and between countries, a larger European political unity would actually be linked to greater possibilities for civic action and engagement than was possible under the principle of national sovereignty.Footnote 63
Arendt depicted de Gaulle and the other political actors trying to reconstitute nation states as wholly shortsighted. They failed to realize that national sovereignty as a form of political organization was simply unprepared to deal with twentieth-century political problems. The raison d’être of the national state was to serve and defend the interests of its people, and the reality of twentieth-century politics, in which “there are no longer any powers but global powers, and no power politics but global politics,” was that this had become an impossibility.Footnote 64 “National sovereignty is no longer a working concept of politics, for there is no longer a political organization which can represent or defend a sovereign people, within boundaries.”Footnote 65 According to Arendt, Europe's failure during the interwar years to adequately respond to the carnage of World War I, to economic depression, and to statelessness testified to this truth.Footnote 66 She predicted that such problems would reemerge in the postwar period, and that a system of distinct national governments would be no more capable of resolving them, or of rebuilding Europe.Footnote 67 “The European governments are busy restoring their national states on the ruins of national sovereignty,” she wrote, even as “the real relationships of power make national sovereignty a mockery.”Footnote 68
Arendt argued that the vast ideological disagreements of twentieth-century politics had rendered the sort of jockeying for power that could once assure European peace between independent states obsolete. Rather than a number of independent states combining and joining at will to preserve a “balance of power”, Arendt predicted that the return to separate nation states in Europe would only lead to a Europe divided between permanent ideological alliances. Each would be dominated militarily and ideologically by a great power. The United States and the USSR would inevitably treat their respective sections of Europe as neo-imperialist “spheres of influence.”Footnote 69 The choice was simple: “we can have either a federated Europe or a Europe dominated by non-European powers.”Footnote 70 This meant that the pragmatic realism of de Gaulle was neither pragmatic nor realistic at all. For believing he could restore a sovereign French national state, Arendt accused de Gaulle of being significantly more “utopian” than the Resistance.Footnote 71
By the end of 1945 Arendt had articulated three distinct arguments for a European federation. There was the need to permanently secure the rights of minorities, the need to avoid a return to the logic of political realism and realpolitik which would lead to a Europe bifurcated by neo-imperialist alliances, and finally the complete inadequacy of sovereign national states to respond to political and economic problems that are transnational in scope. These arguments do not put forward a wholly consistent picture of the political situation at hand. Arendt's worry about minority rights and about realpolitik are clearly worries about the strong assertion of national sovereign power. Her concern about the inadequacy of nation states to deal with international political and economic problems, on the other hand, gestures at a collapse of national sovereign power. And yet this inconsistent picture is in effect Arendt's deepest critique of national sovereignty as a principle of political organization. The assertion of national sovereignty by independent states leads to international political problems—minority refugees, statelessness, global armed political conflict, economic depression—that are beyond the capacity of an individual nation state to handle. Moreover, the structure of political sovereignty renders these problems insoluble by a community of nation states, since there is no mechanism or incentive to compel sovereign national states to play their part in solving them together. In the short term, national sovereignty is a force of overweening destruction, even as in the long term it is a source of political weakness and decay—leading to the emergence of international totalitarian movements as a compelling alternative to the nation state. Both sides of Arendt's criticisms of the nation state are exemplified in her attack on de Gaulle and the governments-in-exile: each of them is attempting to independently secure its own nation's sovereignty and security, rather than deal with the common problem of reconstruction, leading Europe right back to the insurmountable crises it faced during the 1930s. This is also Arendt's historical argument in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where imperialist expansion, both overseas and in continental Europe, leads to a set of economic and political problems that the nation states in Europe are unable to solve, and finally to the collapse of the nation state as a viable political form across Europe during the interwar years.Footnote 72
TOTALITARIANISM AND “THE GERMAN PROBLEM”
It was in the course of arguing for a European federation during 1945 that Arendt articulated the historiographical orientation which would define The Origins of Totalitarianism. The primary reason for an intersection between political and historiographical concerns in 1945 was the question of Germany. Arendt believed that the governments-in-exile, and especially de Gaulle, saw the containment of Germany as the fundamental task of postwar European politics: it was the crucial step in guaranteeing the security of their own reconstituted national states. The leak of the Morgenthau report in 1944, which proposed the decimation of German industry and the crippling of German sovereignty, made it appear that such a policy had powerful backing in the government of the United States.Footnote 73 Arendt strongly opposed the project of crippling Germany in order to secure the boundaries of newly reconstituted nation states.Footnote 74 And in her opinion there was a powerful line of historical argument which buttressed the supporters of a prostrate Germany.
This historical argument was one which traced the sources of Nazism to Germany's specific history and national character. According to Arendt, “by identifying fascism with Germany's national character and history people are deluded into believing that the crushing of Germany is synonymous with the eradication of fascism.”Footnote 75 The claim that phenomena like Nazism emerge naturally and straightforwardly from Germany's history and national character justified the strongest possible containment policy. But Arendt was as appalled at what this historical argument occluded as she was at what it justified. Through a German-only historical explanation of the sources of fascism, “it becomes possible to close one's eyes to the European crisis,” which could only be resolved through European federation.Footnote 76 Such a historical argument therefore gave decisive support to the “political steps” being prepared by de Gaulle.Footnote 77 The claim that Germany's particular history of illiberalism and militarism was the source of war and totalitarianism implied that freedom and peace could be reliably ensured simply by taking away Germany's sovereignty—even if no federation was created, and the sovereignty of the other European states was left intact.
Arendt's most extensive attack against a German-centered historical explanation of Nazism is found in “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’.” There she takes to pieces three distinct historical claims: she denies any connection between Nazism and the history of German thought and philosophy from Luther to Nietzsche, she radically distinguishes Nazism from Bismarck and the broader history of Prussian militarism, and she ridicules the notion that Nazism emanates from an “eternal” German national character.Footnote 78 In an undated and unpublished piece of writing, which internal evidence suggests must have been written around 1945, Arendt identifies the figures with whom she associated those arguments. She targets a group of German émigrés including Emil Ludwig, Leopold Schwarzschild, and Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster in New York, as well as Hermann Rauschning in England.Footnote 79 Arendt charges that this group, who, with the exception of Foerster, had once been German militarists, “have not yet lost the habit of wanting the country in which they happen to live to take the leadership in world affairs.”Footnote 80 They had switched to favoring the destruction of Germany, in a Europe under Anglo-American hegemony, and were offering themselves to the Allied governments “as experts on the German problem, as heaven-sent advisors” based on their “insight into what they call the German character.”Footnote 81
Arendt also suggests that the argument linking Nazism to Germany's national history and character had spread beyond this particular group of émigrés—who were distinguished in particular by the straightforward Vansittartism they drew from it.Footnote 82 Indeed the most important proponent of this explanation of Nazism would turn out to be another émigré, living in Switzerland, Wilhelm Röpke. Though his book Die Deutsche Frage would not be published until the spring of 1945, Röpke epitomizes the historical argument that Arendt was arguing against in “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’.” Röpke's explicit aim was “to leave no doubt that Nazism, far from being a mere incident in German history, arose from conditions characteristic [eigentümlich] to Germany alone.”Footnote 83 Röpke was critical of the rest of world for allowing Nazism to develop, but he maintains that Nazism itself was “the product of the whole German history . . . political, spiritual, economic, and social.”Footnote 84 Röpke's political argument was that the independent German states had only been united by Bismarck through the use of military force. The event of German unification had ensured that the state and army, based in Prussian authoritarian values, would play a commanding role in German political life, and Hitler was only the most recent manifestation.Footnote 85 Röpke also claimed to identify strongly totalitarian tendencies in nineteenth-century German philosophy and literature.Footnote 86 He engaged in an extensive psychological analysis of the dark, brooding German national character, which, when combined with Germany's long historical experience of servitude, made Germans naturally at home in authoritarian structures.Footnote 87 Ironically, Röpke actually joined Arendt in opposing a harsh settlement on Germany.Footnote 88 But this political recommendation sits uneasily with his depiction of Germany as essentially militaristic and illiberal.
Röpke's arguments were enormously influential, in large part because they tapped into existing intellectual currents. Friedrich Hayek wrote the praise-filled preface to the English translation of Die Deutsche Frage in 1946. Like Röpke, Hayek had himself traced Nazism directly back to the founding principles of the nineteenth-century German state, and in his preface to Röpke's text Hayek would strongly support Röpke's contention that there was a clear similarity between Bismarck and Hitler.Footnote 89 This was a claim that Arendt found particularly preposterous.Footnote 90 Röpke's speculations about the German psyche were echoed in Thomas Mann's influential speech on the legacy of Nazism.Footnote 91 Both these pieces of Röpke's argument were taken up by Allen Dulles, who in his own 1946 article on “Alternatives for Germany” declared that “when Germany was a unitary Prussianized state, she repeatedly brought ruin on herself and Europe,” since “the power complex of Germans tends to run riot if given a vehicle with which to express itself.”Footnote 92 Another figure whom Arendt specifically mentions as taking an excessively hard line against Germany was her fellow émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss.Footnote 93 Strauss had delivered a lecture at the New School for Social Research entitled “The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews,” in which he argued that Germany's particular history made it simply inconceivable that a majority of Germans would ever accept liberal principles: “Will liberal democracy have any appeal to, any attraction for, the Germans? A German form of collectivism perhaps—an authoritarian regime of the bureaucracy based on a resuscitated authoritarian interpretation of Christianity perhaps—but not liberalism.”Footnote 94 The implication of this, according to Strauss, was that Germany would have to be tightly controlled and contained by the Allied powers.Footnote 95
What this whole intellectual current missed, according to Arendt, was that Nazism was an international, rather than a merely German, phenomenon: “the National Socialist Party, since the end of the 1920s, was no longer a purely German party, but an international organization.”Footnote 96 Arendt pointed to the tremendous appeal that Nazism exercised beyond Germany. During the interwar years, Hitler was adored by right-wing parties in nearly every European country, which abandoned their traditional nationalist suspicions of Germany in order to support him.Footnote 97 Germany's triumphs were thus aided by “quislings and fifth-columnists” in every nation Hitler conquered, making it relatively easy for the Nazis to set up collaborationist governments.Footnote 98 While Arendt acknowledged that contingent historical factors had set Germany in particular adrift after 1919, she maintains that Nazism emerged from “the vacuum resulting from an almost simultaneous breakdown of Europe's social and political structures,” and not merely Germany’s.Footnote 99 Arendt also appealed to the central importance of the Jews in Nazi propaganda. The myth of an international Jewish conspiracy was far from a particularly German myth, and “anti-Semitism was indubitably the feature which gave the fascist movement its international appeal, equipping fellow-travelers in every country and class.”Footnote 100 The Nazis transformed the Jews, who were conveniently an international and dispersed people, into the perfect pan-European enemy: a symbol and scapegoat for social and political problems across Europe, and not merely German problems.Footnote 101 Anti-Semitism was an ideology perfectly fitted to the experience of European political and economic disintegration.
The lesson Arendt drew from this alternative historical analysis was that the way to prevent Nazism from returning was precisely not through the containment or dismemberment of Germany alone. That would eliminate one nation state, but only in order to re-create and support all the other European nation states, reconstituting the bankrupt model of political organization that had so failed to effectively deal with the economic and political crises of the interwar years. It would mean putting in place all over again the very political conditions which had made something as insane as Nazism seem like an attractive political solution in the first place. Arendt did not hesitate to warn that a return to the status quo of sovereign nation states, “in an impoverished postwar Europe, rent by nationalistic governments,” could lead to the emergence of a new “fascist international.”Footnote 102 She argued that the only hope for Europe was the political alternative being pursued by the European Resistance, which “transcended the framework of the nation from the beginning” and “felt that none of their problems—the pressing social question any more than that of political re-organization—could now be solved along strictly national lines.”Footnote 103
THE BREAKDOWN OF PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT
Thus far in this paper I have discussed Arendt's opposition to one particularly striking historiography of Nazism. However, in 1945 Arendt would also signal her departure from another, quite different, historical explanation of totalitarianism that was centered on Germany. This was the explanation that attributed the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the triumph of Hitler, to weaknesses in the structures and practices of German parliamentary democracy. The most important such historical account in America when Arendt was composing Origins was Franz Neumann's Behemoth. By analyzing Origins alongside Behemoth I will be placing Arendt in a very different intellectual context than I have so far in this essay. But this will not mean placing Arendt in a different political context: Neumann was himself deeply involved in debates over the reconstruction of Germany, serving as an intelligence analyst in the OSS alongside Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kircheiner. The divergence I will point to between Neumann and Arendt's historical accounts of the collapse of Weimar and the emergence of Nazism circles back to the same political problem that was so engaging Arendt in 1945: the future of Europe.
The search to understand the weaknesses of German parliamentarianism had a long history before Neumann published Behemoth in 1942—before even Hitler's rise to power.Footnote 104 In 1917 and 1918, Max Weber argued influentially that Bismarck's personal domination, cloaked in monarchical rather than parliamentary justifications, and the power of the German administrative state, had prevented an able political class from forming in the Reichstag as it had formed in Britain.Footnote 105 This led not merely to repeated crises of governing, but also to a crisis of parliamentary legitimacy.Footnote 106 The public had little broad attachment to parliamentary politicians or parties, a situation which Weber hoped to resolve through the formation of a strong plebiscitary executive. Although Weber's argument was highly influential in the creation of the Weimar Republic, a decade later Carl Schmitt would radicalize Weber's critique, and turn it against Weimar itself.Footnote 107 Schmitt claimed that the liberal, parliamentary institutions put in place under Weimar were utterly dominated by a corrupt and anarchic conflict between interests.Footnote 108 The reason was that the Weimar Constitution was nothing more than a purely formal structure of rules, disconnected from any genuine expression of the popular will, and from “the substantive meaning [inhalte] and forces of the German people.”Footnote 109 The survival of Germany depended, according to Schmitt, on the construction of extra-parliamentary political forms that could supply the unity and legitimacy which parliamentary democracy was lacking.
The flight of German intellectuals during the 1930s meant that reiterations of both Weber's and Schmitt's diagnoses of German parliamentarianism were prominently put forward in the United States. In his influential treatise Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, published in 1942, Joseph Schumpeter reiterated Weber's argument that the failure of liberal parliamentarianism in Germany was in large part due to the absence of a political leadership class like there existed in Britain, and he applied this diagnosis to the Weimar Republic.Footnote 110 It was also in 1942 that Franz Neumann published Behemoth, the most influential theoretical account of Nazism and its origins prior to Arendt’s. Neumann was a strong supporter of German social democracy, and politically quite opposed to Schmitt. However, Neumann echoed Schmitt's critique of the Weimar Republic. According to Neumann, the absence of a developed conception of popular sovereignty in Germany meant that German parliamentary institutions had no natural basis of legitimacy or of popular support.Footnote 111 The basic structure of the Weimar Constitution was therefore one of interest-pluralism: the “codification of agreements already made among different socio-political groups, each of which had demanded and received some measure of recognition for its special interests.”Footnote 112 Even with economic growth, these sharply opposed interests could barely arrive at the political compromises necessary for governing, and with economic collapse in 1929 no basis of political unity could be found.Footnote 113 Neumann blamed the German Social Democratic party for failing to put forward a radical and compelling alternative once economic depression hit.Footnote 114 But the broader problem evinced by Weimar was that of creating a basis for democratic unity and legitimacy in modern, heterogeneous states.
Neumann's description of the dilemmas of Germany parliamentary democracy is significantly more sophisticated than Röpke’s. Even while criticizing traditional German militarism and conservatism, Neumann does not lose sight of the distinctive and particular character of Nazism. Nor does he engage in extensive criticism of Germany's national psychology, literature, and philosophy.Footnote 115 And yet, to a degree which scholars have not sufficiently emphasized, Arendt breaks with Neumann's historical explanation of Nazism no less clearly than she does with Röpke's approach.Footnote 116 I have already noted how Arendt resolutely refuses to make Nazism a German phenomenon. She emphasizes international challenges leading up to totalitarianism, such as statelessness and minority rights, over the domestic challenges of German politics. But Arendt's opposition to a historical explanation of Nazism based in the crises of German parliamentarianism is not simply a matter of her focusing on other issues. At the end of 1945 she would provide her own analysis of the collapse of European parliamentary government during the interwar years. It is an analysis which diverges significantly from Neumann’s.
Arendt's central discussion of the crises of European parliamentary government is found in her article “Parties, Movements, and Classes,” which was published in Partisan Review in the autumn of 1945. A large portion of that article was later reprinted in The Origins of Totalitarianism.Footnote 117 While the version in Origins makes an identical historical argument to the one published six years earlier, there are two significant changes. Arendt adds a great deal more material and background on the modern history of parliamentary government in Europe. She also removes most (though not all) of the passages which connect her historical argument explicitly to the political situation in postwar Europe, and to her support for a European federation.
Although Arendt's discussion of the collapse of parliamentary government in Origins immediately precedes her famous chapter on statelessness and “the rights of man,” and covers the very same time period, it has been less commented upon by scholars. At first glance, Arendt's account of the collapse of parliamentary government actually appears quite similar to Neumann’s—though extended across Europe, and not merely located in Germany. Just as Neumann took interest-pluralism to be the defining principle of Weimar, Arendt describes all the European party systems as based in interest-pluralism. “Since the rise of the party systems it has been a matter of course to identify parties with particular interests, economic or others, and all Continental parties, not only the labor groups, have been very frank in admitting this.”Footnote 118 She holds up Britain alone as a more successful model: unlike the multiparty systems found on the Continent, Britain's two-party system was organized around general principles of action, and not merely competing economic interests.Footnote 119
But Arendt's analysis of the collapse of the European parliamentary system is not ultimately about interest-pluralism. In her depiction, the problem is not merely that each of the parties only represents a particular economic interest, and that there is no deeper source of legitimacy. The problem, rather, is that there always was a deeper source of political legitimacy available: this was the interest of the nationally and territorially bounded political unit itself. While Neumann pointed to the absence, in Weimar, of any “fundamental basis of understanding among the social groups” which could unite pluralist interests, Arendt's claim, about European parliamentary government more broadly, is that there always was a spatial, geographic, and national purpose to political organization.Footnote 120 The very fact that Europe was nationally divided meant that states and parliaments never lacked a “fundamental basis of understanding”: that basis was the national interest as a whole. Arendt's appeal is to the elementary idea that a state exists to secure the common good of citizens within a discrete nation. This is what rendered the state legitimate, and by participating in such a state, citizens and political parties became legitimate political actors—despite their sharply opposed interests.Footnote 121
Neumann also asserts that the ultimate source of political legitimacy in the modern state is the nation.Footnote 122 But he does so in the course of telling a very different story from Arendt’s. Neumann claims that because Germany lacked political unification well into the nineteenth century, the idea of the nation never became fused in Germany with the idea of popular sovereignty—as it did in France during the French Revolution.Footnote 123 It was the chasm of legitimacy that was created by the absence of a developed conception of national popular sovereignty which determined, for Neumann, the quasi-pluralism of imperial Germany under Wilhelm, and finally the disastrous pluralism of Weimar itself.Footnote 124 According to Neumann, the absence of a democratic conception of national identity also led to the prevalence of racial thinking in Germany as a substitute.Footnote 125 Germany's particular dilemma was therefore its failure to develop a coherent national democratic state. Arendt's argument could not be more different. While German political structures have their peculiarities, they are easily assimilated, for her, to the broader rise and fall of the nation state as a European phenomenon.Footnote 126 Her argument is about the weakness of this whole structure of political organization and identification, across Europe, and not the absence of its full development in Germany.
In Germany as elsewhere, in Arendt's depiction, the national interest was the basis of the legitimacy of the state. The problem is how that national interest could find any sort of clear expression in parliamentary politics. It could not be expressed through parties that were based in particular class interests, which was the essence of Continental political parties, but only through a broader sense of nationalist identity: “The more, therefore, the party system on the Continent corresponded to class interests, the more urgent was the need of the nation for nationalism, for some popular expression and support of national interests.”Footnote 127 Nothing, however, prevented a group outside the traditional party system from claiming to represent, or act on behalf of, this national interest. Arendt claimed that the imperialist leagues were the first to grasp the political potentialities which could be found in simply appealing to the nation itself, rather than to any particular interest within the nation. “The slogan ‘above the parties,’ the appeal to ‘men of all parties,’ and the boast that they would ‘stand far removed from the strife of parties and represent only a national purpose’ was [sic] equally characteristic of all imperialist groups.”Footnote 128 For the imperialist parties, this appeal straight to nationalism was “a natural consequence of their exclusive interest in foreign policy in which the nation was supposed to act as a whole.”Footnote 129 Their claim to represent a national purpose was taken up by the “pan-movements,” and finally and most successfully by Italian fascism. “The Fascist movement, a ‘party above parties,’ because it claimed to represent the interest of the nation as a whole, seized the state machine, identified itself with the highest national authority, and tried to make the whole people ‘part of the state.’”Footnote 130 Fascism therefore “carried out what the imperialist-minded leagues, societies, and ‘parties above parties’ had aimed at.” Arendt describes “ Italian Fascism” as “the only example of a modern mass-movement organized within the framework of an existing state, inspired solely by extreme nationalism, and which transformed the people permanently into such Staatsbürger or patriotes as the nation-state had mobilized only in times of emergency and union sacrée.”Footnote 131
The danger of a nationalist party completely overwhelming the parliamentary system, since it is the only party able to appeal to the highest possible source of political legitimacy in an ethnically and territorially bounded state, is only one possible crisis that Arendt discusses. I have already documented how, in 1945, Arendt was motivated by two opposed concerns about the nation state. One was the assertion of national state power—whether against minorities, against overseas peoples, or, in this instance, against the parliamentary system. But Arendt's second concern was the powerlessness of the nation state to deal with global political problems created through the assertion of national power. And this in turn led to a second kind of crisis confronting the parliamentary system, which stemmed from the nation state's inability to deal with international crises. When it became apparent that there were international threats to the national interest which could not credibly be dealt with by the state on its own, the legitimacy of the state, which consisted in defending the interests of a nationally and territorially delineated political unity, collapsed. As the state lost its credibility to protect the nation, because of international crises that were beyond its ability to solve, the system of interest-based parties, which had existed to manage and govern the state, in turn lost its sole source of legitimacy—its participation in a state that was “above all parties” and existed for the sake of the nation. This meant that “the decay of the Continental party system went hand in hand with a decline of the prestige of the nation-state.”Footnote 132 Arendt ties strongly together the international crises of statelessness and economic depression, and the domestic collapse of the parliamentary system across Europe.Footnote 133
For Arendt it was this dangerous dynamic that ultimately destroyed the Weimar Republic. Central to her argument is the fact that in 1933 all of the traditional parties, despite their conflicting interests, lined up behind Hindenburg. She claims that this was because Hindenburg represented better than anyone else the German national state, which was the source of the legitimacy of the party system itself: “Hindenburg became the symbol of the nation-state and the party system.”Footnote 134 On the other hand, Hitler and Thälmann each represented movements which sought to completely destroy the nation state in favor of an international political vision. Hitler's strong following represented a lack of confidence not merely in the disunity of the party system, but also in the national state itself, which was the sole source of unity for the party system, and which Hindenburg represented. Nor was this merely a German phenomenon. Arendt argues that after 1933 the same conflict played itself out in every other European parliament.Footnote 135 With Hitler and Stalin representing international totalitarian political visions, parties in parliaments across Europe were torn between serving their increasingly discredited national interest, and serving the interest of an international ideological capital. France is Arendt's primary example: the fact that right-wing parties in France switched from nationalist suspicion of German expansionism to appeasing Hitler, “advocating peace even at the price of foreign domination,” signified no less than Hitler's strong showing against Hindenburg a turn against the national state, in favor of a destructive internationalist vision.Footnote 136
The crises of parliamentary assemblies in Europe, and the fall of the Weimar Republic, are therefore assimilated to Arendt's broader international account of the collapse of the nation state. Arendt's two-step historical argument, in 1945 no less than in the final version of The Origins of Totalitarianism, is that the European nation state first sets out on a path of sovereign national assertion, only to be confronted with transnational problems and crises that it cannot resolve on its own. Parallel to this, the parliamentary system first risks being overwhelmed by nationalist parties, which alone are able to lay exclusive claim to a higher source of political legitimacy than pluralist group interest. On the other hand, when the state confronts international challenges to the national interest that it cannot credibly overcome, the parliamentary system then loses all political legitimacy. Arendt's commitment to an international, rather than merely German, history of totalitarianism is expressed in a radically different critique of the Weimar Republic. Its problem was not the absence of a source of legitimacy, but rather that like all of the other Continental parliamentary systems its legitimacy was tied in a highly unstable manner to the service of a discrete national and territorial interest.
The implications of this critique are profound. Arendt ends “Parties, Movements, and Classes” by arguing that the impossibility of restoring stable European nation states entails the equal impossibility of restoring functioning parliamentary government, and the party system. Just as the interwar European parliaments were unable to sustain any loyalty to their discredited nation states, and instead divided into proponents of Hitler and of Stalin, Arendt predicts that the postwar European parliaments will be equally split by outside, international powers—“divided between those who are inclined to accept Russian influence, and those who prefer an American or English inspired government.”Footnote 137 Arendt explicitly analogizes this to the events of the 1930s:
These are the conditions which, during the thirties, made possible the success of the Fascist and Communist movements, whose modernity consisted precisely in their having identified domestic with foreign politics. The restoration of the status quo will automatically restore or create “parties” which—whatever their ideologies may be—will be directed and exploited by foreign powers.Footnote 138
The incapacity of the independent European nation state to secure or represent its people in global politics continues to be, in Arendt's telling, the source of the internal decay of domestic parliamentary government. Arendt's explicit alternative in “Parties, Movements and Classes” is the path articulated by the European Resistance: an international federation linking together all the peoples of Europe, and organized neither around territorial nation states, nor around particular class interests.Footnote 139
In Origins, Arendt would remove all the passages expressing support for the European Resistance. However, she concluded her discussion there as well by predicting that any attempt to revive parliamentary democracy in the postwar world would fail. She claimed, and this is as late as 1951, that “nothing proves better the irreparable decay of the party system than the great efforts after this war to revive it on the Continent.”Footnote 140 Arendt pointed to the “pitiful results” of this effort, declaring that “the result of all efforts to restore the status quo has been only the restoration of a political situation in which the destructive movements are the only ‘parties’ that function properly.”Footnote 141 No less than in 1945, she continued to predict both the demise of the reconstructed national states and a surge in support for radical internationalist movements.Footnote 142
What best reveals the stakes of Arendt's divergent narrative about the collapse of European parliamentary government is the contrast between her solution to Europe's political crisis and Neumann’s. While Neumann certainly did not accept Röpke's explanation of Nazism, he did assert that “German imperialism is not solely the product of the Nazi Party,” but of a much more long-standing reactionary tradition in Germany, “composed of the Junkers, the industrial and financial leadership, the German Officers Corps, and the high bureaucracy, all of which formed the German ruling class . . . actively supported by the petty bourgeoisie.”Footnote 143 Neumann conceived the task of German reconstruction as one of creating a stable, social-democratic nation state. This required eliminating all forms of interest pluralism. It also meant promoting the strength of peaceful social-democratic forces, and permanently sidelining the reactionary traditional German elite, which Neumann claimed had put Hitler in power.Footnote 144 Neumann thought that this would be a long process: “many years of education under an operating democracy will be necessary to demilitarize the spirit of the masses.”Footnote 145 Like Leo Strauss, Neumann therefore thought that a long-term policy of containment was necessary. It would include heavy reparations, the permanent banning of any German armed forces, the forbidding of German aircraft construction, and the internationalization of German ports.Footnote 146 He claimed that “if the elimination of the causes of the aggressiveness from German society has not taken place,” then “the destruction of Germany as a political and economic power should be considered.”Footnote 147 As late as 1950 Neumann continued to believe that “substantial social and political changes will be required in Germany to achieve internal democracy.”Footnote 148 Scholars have pointed out important similarities between Arendt's and Neumann's descriptions of totalitarianism.Footnote 149 However, their positions on the most fundamental sources of Nazism, and their political agendas for postwar Germany, differed substantially.
In the decades following the war, Arendt set out to construct a theory of political life that was freed from the traditional notion of political sovereignty, while Neumann would continue to conceive of state sovereignty as a potential guarantor of both international stability and domestic political freedom.Footnote 150 He noted that “sovereignty in the modern period, though it formally appeared as the negation of the juristic concept of freedom, was in reality is very presupposition.”Footnote 151 While Arendt never wavered in her support for political federation, Neumann evinced deep skepticism about it.Footnote 152 He utterly rejected any inherent connection between federalist systems and either political security or political freedom.Footnote 153 Neumann acknowledged that in some circumstances federations might have practical advantages. But he maintained that all historical evidence indicated that in most cases they do not: federalist political structures in the United States had hindered adaption to novel economic and social problems, while in Germany they had never succeeded in creating a grassroots, democratic political culture.Footnote 154 Neumann's political vision was straightforward representative democracy, as long it had a basis in popular sovereignty and was freed from the hold of interest pluralism.Footnote 155 Arendt preferred the more diffuse political configuration of the United States Constitution, which she claimed did not have any single locus of sovereignty—and which created various institutional obstacles to the identification of a clear popular will.Footnote 156 Her developed conception of democracy went far beyond that. For Arendt, democracy requires autonomous, grassroots local political councils on the one hand, and institutions of international political community on the other.Footnote 157 She did not believe that straightforward representative democracy based in popular sovereignty could properly flourish.Footnote 158
CONCLUSION
This essay has tied Arendt's historical approach to totalitarianism to her engagement in political debates over postwar European reconstruction. Arendt's role in those debates would come to a swift conclusion. At end of 1945 she lamented the complete defeat of a European federation along the lines argued for by the Resistance. Arendt primarily faulted the USSR's expansionism in Eastern Europe—which closed off half of Europe from any federation.Footnote 159 But she also blamed the Anglo-American victors, and continued to lambast the governments-in-exile.Footnote 160 While Arendt would continue to express support for European federation over the following decade, it would not be with anything like the urgency that she did in the first half of the 1940s.Footnote 161 The tremendous success of The Origins of Totalitarianism in the United States was occasioned by very different themes—such as Arendt's description of the totalitarian tendencies in mass society, and her controversial analogy between Nazism and Bolshevism.Footnote 162
For the rest of her lifetime, Arendt's dire predictions in 1945 about the future of Europe would have seemed extraordinarily incorrect. Contrary to her predictions, parliamentary democracy in Western Europe was rebuilt along largely national lines, and encountered nothing like the crises that it had faced during the 1930s. European integration proceeded apace throughout this period, but the simple fact is that Western Europe was able to return to economic prosperity and political stability without the dramatic federalism that Arendt believed was necessary. From our own perspective today, however, Arendt's position in 1945 appears somewhat more prescient. The last two decades have seen a stunning resurgence of many of the international political dilemmas Arendt that identified in 1945. It may be that the geopolitical and ideological struggle of the Cold War served only to obscure the problems that Arendt was trying to think through in 1945, problems which were never genuinely resolved, and which we have inherited as our own.
