It is hard not to be struck by the continuing interest in the concept of ‘modernity’ or ‘the modern’ for making sense of the economic, cultural and political transformations of twentieth-century Europe.Footnote 1 Seemingly laid to rest by the early 1980s for its association with modernisation theory, modernity as a concept was revived during the late 1980s and 1990s largely by European historians working on countries, especially Germany and Russia, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories that modernisation theorists deemed models of developmental backwardness or case studies in the failure to modernise and its consequences. But, like its striking re-appearance in scholarship on those areas of the world – especially Asia and Africa – written off as the most irredeemably un-modern or ‘traditional’ by modernisation theorists, this renewed interest in modernity derives from very different interventions in post-structuralist theory and cultural and postcolonial studies, which have generated new definitions, and critiques ‘modernity’ and its ‘dark side’ from the vantage point of ‘postmodernity’.
If German historians developed the most theoretically explicit discussion of modernity among European historians during the 1980s and 1990s, largely in response to Detlev Peukert's formulation of a dialectical and historicised conception of ‘classical modernity’ as a way of explaining the origins of Nazism and the Holocaust, historians of the Soviet Union have taken up the concept in a different and more lasting way.Footnote 2 Their embrace of modernity as a category of analysis appears to have been inspired initially by the work of Stephen Kotkin, especially his influential monograph Magnetic Mountain (1995), which explores the creation of the steel town of Magnitogorsk on the nearly uninhabited steppes of the Russian interior during the 1930s. In this major study Kotkin identifies the utopianism of Stalinist urban planning and state-directed economic and social transformation with a ‘prevalent conception and experience of “progressive modernity”’ (p. 20). The latter, he argues, can be traced both to ‘the Enlightenment’ and to the revolutionary politics of late eighteenth-century France in its overall aim and methods: to the vision of a well-ordered and harmonious society, which derived from the classic ‘Enlightenment goal’ of designing and perfecting social order in accordance with scientific rationality, and to ‘politics’ as the means ‘to direct and possibly even remake society’ (pp. 18, 7). Other historians, often drawing on the sociologies of the state and genocide produced by James Scott and Zygmunt Baumann, have since deployed a similar conception of modernity in their analyses of early to mid twentieth-century Soviet social, human and medical sciences; social welfare and ‘population policy’; the Great Purge; policing and surveillance; the prison and camp system (Gulag); and population ‘transfer’; and ‘genocide’ during the 1920s and 1930s. From this overall perspective modernity seems to inhere in all forms of ‘social engineering’ and ‘the gardening state’, which set out scientifically to create or transform society, and necessarily ended in mass violence and death in the twentieth century.Footnote 3
Taking Kotkin's work as my point of focus, I would like to examine this particular usage of modernity as a concept and its consequences for writing histories of ‘the social’ in twentieth-century Europe. In particular, I will attempt to critique its treatment of four major and inter-related dimensions of twentieth-century socio-political development: social welfare policy, ‘the state’, colonialism, and economic activity. My aim is to challenge what I regard as the ahistorical formalism intrinsic to this modernity paradigm, its homogenising comparative method, and the monistic conception of the political to which it has given rise, for when scholars invoke ‘modernity’ in this way, they impose an abstract analytical framework on disparate historical phenomena in order to insist on their formal resemblances and fundamental sameness. This approach treats diverse ideologies of social order, forms of political struggle and domination, and state structures across Europe as if they emerged from, and unfolded within, a single or shared register. It thus obscures the dynamics of political contestation that propelled projects of social transformation and state (re)formation and the contingencies and openness of politics as such in the twentieth century.
I
Kotkin presents the history of Magnitogorsk as an expression of ‘progressive modernity’ in part as a narrative about the rise of the welfare state. The latter figures in Magnetic Mountain as the ensemble of ‘grand strategies’ of ‘social regulation’ – that is, population (re)settlement, labour recruitment, work and wages policies, housing and urban planning, and the creation of the supply system (retailing and consumption) – implemented by state officials in Magnitogorsk. These state strategies were organised according to a ‘social logic’ or ‘world-view’, according to Kotkin in Magnetic Mountain and his essay entitled ‘Modern Times’ (2001),Footnote 4 which informed the welfare states of other European countries during the twentieth century. Moreover, Kotkin suggests in Magnetic Mountain that the formation of the welfare state was ‘a far less visible historical drama’ than other large-scale historical transformations because the politics surrounding it did not involve ‘political parties and parliamentary clashes’ but rather ‘identities and the clever tactics used in the invention of everyday life’ (p. 19). He examines social or welfare politics, therefore, in terms of the relationship between state social regulation from above and quotidian acts of self-assertion enabled by the practice of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ (p. 198) from below – that is, advancing individual interests in clandestine ways within the language sanctioned by the Soviet state. Other historians have since taken up this interpretation and recast social welfare, in the words of David L. Hoffmann, in terms of state-orchestrated and authoritarian measures to manage populations, ‘control reproduction and shape society’.Footnote 5 It finds its most exaggerated expression in Amir Weiner's claims about a social welfare-ethnic cleansing ‘axis’, supported ‘across the ideological spectrum’, which defined ‘the gardening state’ and drove its efforts to sculpt ‘the body national’ and control the ‘everyday life of the citizenry’ in countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, Germany, Sweden and the USA.Footnote 6
This particular approach to the welfare state, however, obscures the political-hegemonic struggle over the very shape of ‘the social’, which involved non-state and state actors, engaged competing social visions and biopolitical intentions, and brought about varying constellations of welfare states across the rest of Europe during twentieth century. There are several ways to approach this complex of issues, but I will illustrate these historical dynamics of state social policy formation by briefly examining the welfare systems of the Weimar Republic and its Nazi successor after 1933. The Weimar welfare state was precocious for the universal scope of its social provision and its broad guarantees – inscribed in the Weimar constitution of 1919 – of basic social rights to work, healthcare, education, housing, pensions and other forms of support. This was partly the result of its conditions of emergence in the wake of the ‘social contract’ of 1914–1918, the November Revolution of 1918, the post-war socialist insurgencies, and the new institutional clout of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Nevertheless, the Weimar welfare state emerged out of the legislation enacting its main provisions in ways that reflected the balance of social and political forces – socialist and non-socialist – of the inter-war years. Neither entirely public or state-organised, nor entirely secular, it institutionalised components of competing religious, social liberal, feminist and Social Democratic visions of social welfare and rested on a corporatist arrangement whereby seven voluntary associations, including Catholic, Protestant, Christian-Worker, Jewish, Red Cross, bourgeois-feminist and Social Democratic welfare organisations were funded by the state and endowed with responsibility for the actual provision of assistance.Footnote 7 If it increased the role of state agencies and voluntary associations in the regulation of economic and social life, introduced new guidelines for conduct, and targeted the male-headed family as a key instrument of governmentality, Weimar welfare provision also came with privacy protections, and civil and political rights, including protections and rights for women. Moreover, its social-hygienic accents in the areas of youth, healthcare and maternity never evolved into bio-racist programmes or measures (for example, forced sterilisation). The hybrid nature of the Weimar welfare state, however, did invite the competing welfare associations and their associated political parties to serve as lobbying organisations on behalf of their memberships and to shape major legislation implementing the welfare programmes.
The result, as Young-Sun Hong argues, was not the convergence of different groups around a ‘world-view’ but rather the opposite: a ‘Weltanschauungskrieg (war between world-views) in the welfare sector’.Footnote 8 The Social Democrats, who viewed the social as the domain of class exploitation but also the potentially democratic site from which human needs collectively could be met, favoured a public and professionalised system of provision and insisted that a welfare recipient be treated as the subject as well as the object of welfare. They found common ground with social-liberals, who also adopted a ‘social’ diagnosis of poverty and ill health, and a commitment to preventive and therapeutic forms of welfare, even if they were not committed to its democratic organisation or the guarantee of social rights. By contrast, most Catholic and Protestant welfare providers viewed the social as a fundamentally religious-moral domain, opposed the secular and rights-based dimensions of social-democratic welfare, and favoured privatised and personalised forms of religious charity. From the left, the KPD was hostile to social welfare as a compromise with capitalism but nevertheless mobilised welfare recipients and mounted protests against denial of benefits or welfare cuts. When the global capitalist system entered into crisis after 1929 and public finances were cut, opposition from the political right against the Weimar welfare state coalesced: religious opponents of the Weimar welfare system were joined by social liberals, as Hong shows, who began to criticise what they saw as its ‘hypertrophy of individual rights’;Footnote 9 industrialists, who regarded it as economically burdensome; and German-national conservatives and the Nazis, who vilified it as dangerously egalitarian, rights-based, feminine, humanitarian, and dysgenic for the way it propped up the ‘asocial’, ‘workshy’ and biologically ‘weak’.
This active right-wing opposition helped to bring down the welfare system and the Weimar Republic itself and paved the way for the Nazis to construct a social state in accordance with a fundamentally different and brutally exclusionary, racialised ‘world-view’. The Nazis embraced an understanding of the social as a realm of bio-racial entities and processes, and premised their social state on the imperatives of what I would like to call, borrowing from Foucault, racist biopower: its primary aims, as Uwe Lohalm shows us, were the biomedical cultivation of the German Volkskörper as a discrete ‘population-race’ on the basis of ‘racial selection’ and the promotion of a ‘völkische Leistungsgemeinschaft’ (racialised community of performance).Footnote 10 The former required scientific recognition of the alleged differential value of human life and the full implementation of ‘racial cultivation’ (Rassenpflege), which included pronatalist and antinatalist social and medical policies to support the ‘racially fit’, and to contain, exclude and ultimately exterminate the ‘genetically defective’ and ‘racially-foreign’ – Jews were especially targeted – in order for the German Volkskörper to thrive. The Nazis instrumentalised the family in this mission, but in ways antithetical to family policy in the Weimar Republic: the Nazi family was thoroughly subordinated to the dictates of the state and its demands for bio-racial cultivation, placed outside the normative functioning of the legal system, and reorganised explicitly as a site of overt male domination over women. Promotion of a Leistungsgemeinschaft (community of performance) required punitive, disciplinary social policy that would compel the ‘uneconomic’, ‘workshy’ or ‘asocials’ into ‘productive’ labour, or forcibly exclude them from the ‘people's community’ by incarcerating or eradicating them. Thus, the aim of Nazi social policy, according to the leader of the National Socialist Welfare organisation (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, NSV), Erich Hilgenfeldt, who is cited in Lohalm's study, was to prepare Germans for work and the racial struggle between peoples: ‘Our welfare [Wohlfahrtspflege] treats the individual not as a weak recipient of alms but rather as a human whose latent powers must be awakened and strengthened. The NSV also wants to make him a fighter (Kämpfer ) because life is struggle (Kampf).’ Those unwilling to ‘fight in this world of constant struggle’, Hilgenfeldt continued, did not ‘deserve to live’.Footnote 11 In general, Nazi social policy, which operated outside any legal or political constraints, overtly rejected the principle of universal and equal provision as well as individual rights to social assistance, completely subordinated the needs of the individual to the needs of the Volksgemeinschaft, and was murderous in intent and practice.
These features of Nazi social policy, which was every bit as ‘modern’ for its attempt to apply the findings of racial ‘science’ to social-biological order, to compel people to work in the capitalist economy, and to respond to a world in constant motion, diverged fundamentally from welfare systems established in Germany before and after the Third Reich and throughout the rest of Europe before and after 1945 in ways that call into question claims about a singular social logic or world-view governing the functions of welfare states across twentieth-century Europe. Historical comparisons that discern what appear to be the same welfare policies across twentieth-century states only obscure the organised political-ideological struggles over labour, inequality, poverty, ill health and reproduction that brought social policies into being, the over-determined nature of European state welfare systems, and their configuration within quite different regimes of citizenship. Above all, comparisons of this kind uncouple social welfare from efforts to create democratic political capacities by collectively addressing human needs and extending citizenship rights and responsibilities beyond the domain of formal politics – a twentieth-century history no less important than the rise of the malevolent ‘gardening state’.
II
Indeed, this oversight has partly to do with the way this social engineering or gardening state is understood as a self-activating and unitary entity, autonomous from ‘society’ in recent discussions of Soviet modernity – an approach to the state that has given new life to the allegedly similar aspects of the Soviet and Nazi states as ‘totalitarian’ systems. In view of the power and centralisation of the Soviet state and Stalin's role in many of its initiatives during the 1930s and 1940s, it is perhaps not surprising that the state figures in this neo-Weberian way. Even Kotkin's compelling effort in Magnetic Mountain to deploy Michel Foucault's definition of modern power as a circuit or grid of compulsions, which take form in a disparate set of instruments, techniques and tactics that guide conduct, portrays the Soviet state as an already-constituted and centralised agency, introducing these less formal or institutionalised mechanisms of power from above and determining the ‘fields of action’ (p. 21) in which individual subjects were required to operate. Ignoring Kotkin's interest in Foucault and its opening to a different perspective, however, the studies of Peter Holquist, David Hoffmann, Amir Weiner, Nicolas Werth, Norman Naimark and others on the Soviet Union and ‘modern’ forms of politics only entrench an understanding of ‘the’ state as a free-standing agency, which carried out schemes for social engineering and the management or ‘gardening’ of populations from above.Footnote 12
This approach tends to overlook the historical dynamics of twentieth-century states and their diverse and evolving structures over time. As much recent scholarship on states and processes of state formation suggests, rather than treating each state as if it were an already-constituted subject that intervenes in or creates society, it makes more sense to view states as ensembles of institutions and circuits of power, which emerge historically out of the totality of practices and relations that constitute an entire social formation. This approach has the virtue of steering us clear of the tendency to categorise highly diverse twentieth-century states simply as social engineering or ‘gardening states’, and thus to ignore the considerable political capacities and spaces for dissent opened up by state institutions such as parliaments and even democratic institutions. It also calls into question the attempts of what Thomas Dodman so aptly calls the ‘neo-totalitarian school’ among Russian historians to treat Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’ states with shared features and common histories.Footnote 13
I would like to illustrate this point by exploring the distinctiveness of European fascisms and their conditions of emergence as well as the novelty of the fascist state form to which they gave rise. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who formed a tightly organised party under the shadow of a highly repressive tsarist regime, the fascists rejected the party as an organisational form for its alleged fostering of social conflicts, self-interestedness, stultifying bureaucratic routine and effeminate proceduralism. Instead, as the studies of Wolfgang Schieder, Sven Reichardt and Dylan Riley show, the Nazis created self-styled authoritarian-populist and violently masculine ‘movements’ as tributaries of right-wing nationalism in well-developed civil societies.Footnote 14 Rather than centralised, systematised and disciplined parties of cadres, therefore, the Italian Fascist Party and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) were highly decentralised organisations with loosely defined decision-making structures and disparate regional power bases, sustained through personal networks and the ‘charismatic’ authority of ‘the leader’. In this loose and dynamic form, they were brought into alliances or coalitions with other right-wing and conservative parties, government officials, and members and organisations of the dominant classes. Once in power they formed governing blocs or ‘power cartels’ with key sectors of the existing ruling elites and classes. Mussolini led the Fascist ‘March on Rome’ in 1922 and Hitler the Nazi ‘seizure of power’ in 1933, therefore, not as revolutions overthrowing existing socio-political orders and replacing them with entirely new ones, but rather as multi-phased counter-revolutions against the institutional power of the political left that only gradually evolved into a new fascist state form.Footnote 15
This state form incorporated fascist hostility toward systematic organisation, which extended to all formal elective bodies, state bureaucracies, legal systems and constitutions that stood opposed to the discretionary will of ‘the leader’, the ‘actionist’ militancy of the fascist movements and the ever-evolving needs of the ‘people’. Over time, but at different rates and to different degrees, the Fascists and Nazis variously eviscerated legislative bodies, declared states of exception (Ausnahmezustände), and turned the law into an instrument of coercion only, or simply operated outside of it; and they encouraged the proliferation of new agencies outside existing state-institutional channels, vertically aligned with and subordinate to ‘the leader’. In the case of the Nazi state, authority rested on a combination of pre-existing ‘normative’ state-constitutional structures and newly created ‘prerogative’ agencies, such as the SS or the special courts and People's Court, which supplemented and gradually transformed pre-existing state institutions and practices. As Martin Broszat, Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen have argued, these agencies were not dual party-state formations of the Soviet kind but rather, in Broszat's words, novel ‘Leader-retinue structures’: personalised networks of influence extending to the grass roots that derived their authority from Hitler and evolved over time into agencies with considerable autonomy.Footnote 16 Despite their hierarchical operation, moreover, these structures served not simply to transmit orders to the retinue but also to channel and license the restiveness of the rank and file, and the self-activated terror from below.Footnote 17
This melding of the populist dynamics, personal networks and charismatic authority of the Nazi movement with existing agencies of the state drove the wider restructuring of relations between state and society in the Third Reich: the distinctive matrix of sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power that rendered the regime so dynamic and destructive. It is important to point out that the coercive agencies of the Nazi state and its proliferating carceral institutions were always accompanied by forms of governmental power that inhered in the dispersed political rationalities, technologies and tactics of social administration carried out by wider constituencies of non-Nazi planners, social workers, physicians, jurists, criminologists, and so on. In addition to the networks that traversed the NSDAP and its auxiliary organisations, therefore, the Nazi state took on new organisational capacities by means of the formal incorporation of existing associations (Gleichschaltung) into the NSDAP, the evolution of hybrid organisations within the NSDAP itself (for example, the SS or DAF) and the creation of corporatist state agencies (for example, the rings and cartels of German industry or the Women's Bureau). The effect was to invite wider and non-coerced participation in various Nazi projects and to inject a restless competitive dynamic into the Nazi state that propelled its destructive tendencies. It is no accident that the ‘institutional formlessness’, in Dylan Riley's words, of the Third Reich was manifested most fully after the German invasions of 1939 and 1941 in the occupied regions of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where German state institutions by definition were non-existent and Nazi rule unleashed the competitive struggle and improvisational merging of functions between the Wehrmacht, SS-Police, local German civilian administrations, Reich ministries and party organisations. Unlike the bureaucratic party-state of the Soviet Union, therefore, the Nazi state was an intrinsically promiscuous institutional framework for mobilising and channelling populist energies in the direction of total war, racial annihilation and imperial-colonial expansion.
III
This brings us to another dimension of ‘modernity’ central to recent interpretations of the Soviet Union: its coloniality. In ‘Modern Times’, Kotkin suggests that the Soviet experiment should be viewed as an attempt to construct an ‘empire of nations’ and compared with other twentieth-century European, US and Japanese empires.Footnote 18 From this perspective, which other historians have since developed, the rule of the communist party and Bolshevik nation-building schemes within the different Soviet republics are understood as a ‘colonial project’ that the Soviet Union shared with other European empires. This was especially the case in Soviet Central Asia, according to Douglas Northrup, where the Bolsheviks invoked a civilising discourse in their efforts to impose from the centre a version of ‘modern’ society shaped by ‘European cultural norms’ like ‘gender equality, medical and hygienic practices, and certain ways of life on what they deemed ethnically different and culturally ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’ Soviet peoples on the periphery.Footnote 19
But to characterise Soviet modernity in this way is to miss important structural differences between the Bolshevik state and society-building experiments and other European colonial empires. In contrast to the construction of a multi-national and ‘anti-colonial’ Soviet state, which, according to Terry Martin, offered ‘affirmative action’ to non-Russian nationalities and relatively uniform government and legal institutions, the British, French, German, Dutch, Italian and US colonial empires of the twentieth centuries were what Ann Laura Stoler calls uneven and mobile ‘macropolities’, centring on nation-state cores but radiating outward in complex architectures of territorial and non-territorial sovereignty, variegated legal orders given to states of exception, and formal gradations of citizenship and subjecthood.Footnote 20
Moreover, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, these other nation-state empires generated new models of overseas social order based on the ‘rule of colonial difference’, as Partha Chatterjee observes, which enforced the ‘alienness of the ruling group’ of European colonisers in relation to colonised peoples.Footnote 21 These models required political instruments and technologies for the definition, measurement, surveillance and policing of populations as well as socio-spatial regimes and built environments structured in various kinds of internal borders and residential segregation, which separated coloniser from colonised into variegated zones of spatial, social and ethnic-racial differentiation. In this imperial-colonial framework, European colonisers produced special laws or legal codes, states of exception to legal systems and international conventions, and forms of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’ – human beings subject to sovereign power but denied the status of rights-bearing citizens within the law.Footnote 22 This ‘nomos of colonial modernity’, in Derek Gregory's words, enabled everyday brutalities against colonised people alongside arbitrary or extra-legal detention, concentration camps, violent schemes of population ‘transfer’, annihilatory warfare and genocide.Footnote 23 From this perspective, the colonial dimensions of European modernity are to be found not in eighteenth-century universalising visions of a society based on equality, sameness and harmony, but rather in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialisms that sought to create particular, spatially-bifurcated or segmented socio-legal orders founded upon racial-cultural hierarchies and incommensurable difference.
This general remaking of colonial social order relied on late nineteenth and twentieth-century human and social sciences – ethnology, anthropology and sociology – or ‘colonial knowledge’ proffering essentialising claims about racial difference and hierarchy among human beings.Footnote 24 Colonial officials across the European empires turned away from an ‘Enlightenment’ or liberal universalising colonial mission geared toward ‘civilising’ colonial subjects, or effecting their transformation into Europeans, and remaking indigenous societies in the image of European societies in the wake of armed and organised anti-colonial resistance, beginning in the British Empire from the 1840s to the 1870s but coming to completion in the German, French and Dutch empires in the early twentieth century. In response, they devised models of indirect rule to control the unreformable ‘savagery’ and primitiveness of ‘natives’, and to restore or stabilise ‘traditional’ indigenous customs and social institutions, understood together now as comprising an organic ‘community’, so as to govern more effectively through them.Footnote 25 Following Karuna Mantena, we might say that late European colonial rule was predicated on social and cultural theories and assumptions emphasising the stability of human nature and ‘communities’, not their ‘plasticity’ or perfectibility, and the imperative to stabilise, ‘protect’,or restore them to their essences when they threatened to disintegrateFootnote 26 – or, in a settler-colonial context, to annihilate them when they resisted dispossession or failed to adapt to European rule. These theories insisted on the constraining effects of history, culture and community on efforts at social reform and the limitations of ‘politics as a vehicle for the radical reconstitution of society’ when future-oriented political goals did not seek social, cultural and racial ‘restoration’ or regeneration.Footnote 27
Finally, these new colonial anthropologies and sociologies and colonial state practices were not forged in metropolitan Europe and then brought to the colonial ‘peripheries’; rather, they were developed for the colony and reverberated onto metropolitan politics in Europe but in ways that were not shared across the ideological spectrum, for radical-nationalists and fascists across Europe embraced the most developed schemes of racist biopower in their struggle against the Marxist left and in their persecution of minorities. Nazi racial or population policies, for example, were linked genealogically to the imperialist and colonial advocacy of the pre-war Pan-German right and its model of community refracted through visions of racist social order in South West and East Africa.Footnote 28 After 1905, radical nationalists brought this new colonial racism back to Europe, redefining other European peoples as population-races and Germans as a collective biological entity or racial body (Volkskörper), which required ‘living space’ at the expense of other population-races. At the same time they became obsessed with internal ‘racial threats’ to their own organic ‘community’ when the SPD opposed their imperialist aims and even defended colonised peoples. This was the context in which radical nationalists associated socialist views with Jewish influence and bio-racialised long-standing streams of religious and economic anti-Semitism. Consequently, they demanded new state practices for ‘internal’ and external colonialism, including laws, social policies, internal borders and ‘reserves’ that would separate the ‘races’ within metropolitan Germany itself; and they called for population ‘transfers’ and ‘evacuations’ and German expansion on the continent, especially during the First World War. After the German defeat and the post-war revolution, the Nazis radicalised these visions of internal and external colonialism, by calling for the immediate elimination of ‘Marxists’ and Jews from the German community as Volkskörper, and the acquisition, through conquest, of foreign territories and imperial control over other European peoples.Footnote 29 During the late 1930s and 1940s, they concretised them in a restlessly expansive and destructive imperial formation, an uneven macropolity or ‘New Order’ extending across much of Europe but aiming primarily to seize territory and destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ in the Soviet Union. Forged in total war, population expulsion and resettlement, concentration camps, and genocide, the Nazi New Order was designed to institute new partitions of ‘race’ and ‘space’ and render permanent the state of exception.Footnote 30
This nation-state empire reveals fundamental differences between Nazi colonialism and Soviet nation-building. Its aims and implementation were committed to colonial domination and intrinsically exterminationist: the racist biopower of the Nazi empire rested on the premise that other European peoples had to be subjugated, expelled or exterminated in order for the German Volkskörper to live. There was no equivalent of the Nazi mass murder of European Jewry in Soviet ‘population’ policy. Moreover, it is hard to see Nazism simply as another ‘utopian’ project. The Nazis held to a notion of regenerating an enduring German ethno-national and racial essence or ‘community’, rather than a plan to create a yet-to-be ‘nowhere’ or, in Phillip E. Wegner's words, ‘some fully other existence’ for the German ‘people’ in a utopian sense.Footnote 31 They rejected visions of a socially inclusive, egalitarian and harmonious society of the future and sought instead to bring about its opposite: an exclusive organic community based on a colonial bio-racial schema of unalterable human difference, inequality and hierarchy, and the imperative of endless racial competition and struggle. Indeed, the temporal and spatial imaginings of Nazism were paradoxical: as a vision of socio-political order, Nazism looked to the past for its ‘Germanic’ roots in medieval Europe and to a future of national renewal, and it imagined the New Order as a spatially and racially heterogeneous empire centred on a racially homogeneous nation state or communal core.
IV
These dimensions of Nazi imperial designs and the New Order, which emerged out of wider temporal and spatial transformations and inter-imperialist rivalries, highlight the central role of global capitalism in the making of social order in twentieth-century Europe – a final aspect of these histories of welfare, state forms and colonial empires obscured in the recent emphasis on the shared ‘modernity’ of twentieth-century nation states. In ‘Modern Times’, Kotkin identifies economic modernity not in the dynamics of capitalism but rather in what he sees as the shared commitment to ‘scientifically managed industry’ (p. 115) in the form of a system of Taylorised mass production across the advanced industrial world. He considers Soviet industrial policy an example of Fordism, or ‘productionist Fordism’ (p. 118) – a concept traceable to Gramsci and developed by sociologists for analysing the twentieth-century emergence of a distinctively capitalist regime of accumulation. In so far as Kotkin addresses capitalist economic activities, the latter appear in Magnetic Mountain as underground forms of subversive petty manufacture and trade (pp. 157–79, 238–56) or in ‘Modern Times’ as inherently ‘pluralistic’ consumer and mass-cultural practices that undermine authoritarian rule and promote democracy (pp. 123, 164). These two aspects of this discussion – the side-lining of capitalism and the gesturing toward the subversive or ‘democratic’ dimensions of capitalist retailing and commodity consumption – bear further scrutiny because they appear frequently in postcolonial and cultural-historical studies organised around the concept of ‘modernity’ or ‘modernities’.Footnote 32
The neglect of capitalism in these scholarly investigations of ‘modernity’ is unfortunate because it renders us unable to grasp the conditions of economic and social transformation that helped to propel or shape the very historical phenomena which scholars refer to as distinctively modern, including not only social policies, state forms and colonialism across western Europe but also Nazism and the Third Reich. The radical-nationalist imaginary that created the latter was forged in processes of ‘time-space compression’, in David Harvey's words, generated by global capitalist transformations. Radical nationalists and Nazis bemoaned the disappearance of ‘place’ and temporal continuity wrought by global economic practices and invented a ‘deep mythology of place’ and a conception of an enduring, essential German ‘people’ or organic community in relation to them.Footnote 33 This conception was an expression of the re-territorialising and continuously re-temporalising dynamics of global capitalism in the sense that its notion of cultural-racial purity relied for its definition on the threatening presence of the ‘other’ frequently brought into the national or communal space by the increasing tempo of transnational flows of commodities, fashions, images, words, ideas or ideologies, and persons. From 1922 to 1923, this obsession with purity intensified under conditions of catastrophic inflation, during which the German right attributed the ‘anonymous powers’ of the international sanctions regime and the volatile movements of money and credit to the activity of ‘racially-foreign’ Jews. Finally, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the global capitalist crisis provided the decisive context for the Nazi accession to power, after which the Nazi leadership constructed a repressive, militarised Fordist regime of accumulation and prepared for a campaign of colonial conquest and economic imperialism across Europe in its ‘struggle’ against the Soviet, British and US ‘world empires’. The campaign only deepened the dialectic between border-crossing economic exploitation and schemes for ethnic-racial consolidation within borders that escalated the predatory nature and violence of Nazi imperialism.Footnote 34
The tendency to view capitalist retailing, consumption and culture as subversive of authoritarian regimes or totalising social visions, moreover, ignores the complicity between Nazism, on the one hand, and capitalist forms and modalities of mass consumerism and spectacle, on the other, even if the Nazis sought to nationalise economic life and privileged military budgets over consumption.Footnote 35 During the 1920s and 1930s, radical nationalists turned their literary productions, newspapers, magazines and film studios into successful forms of mass entertainment driven by capitalist imperatives. The Nazis followed by adopting methods of political mobilisation based on technologies of mass communication, and aesthetic staging derived from capitalist forms of advertising and spectacle; and, during the Third Reich, they created state-sponsored culture industries (cinema, radio, tourism) and promoted wider arenas of commodity consumption that gave Nazi ideology access to the visual technologies, and cognitive and affective registers, of consumerism and popular entertainment. In this way, processes of ideological articulation during the Third Reich could enter more effectively, because covertly, into the increasingly commodified and other-directed realms of individual subjectivity, aspiration and desire. This helped to facilitate a new dynamic whereby Germans were interpellated as private individuals and as members of the ‘people's community’, setting them apart from each other but also inviting them to participate in Nazi forms of mass spectacle. It also helped to generate hostility toward ethnic or racial ‘others’ or simply indifference to their fate, especially during the war.
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These reflections are not meant to reject modernity as a concept that might be useful for historians, nor are they in any way intended to discredit Kotkin's fine study of Magnitogorsk or the recent illuminating work of other scholars working on Soviet social and population policy, surveillance practices and empire. Instead, my aim was to interrogate this particular definition of modernity and its broader comparative claims about the rest of Europe. In this regard, I would identify three methodological shortcomings of this approach to modernity. First, its search for similarities between ideologies, social policies, states and colonialisms while downplaying the significance of differences risks becoming what Marc Bloch called a ‘caricature’ of historical comparison.Footnote 36 It does so by ignoring the challenge thrown up by comparative historical method: namely, the tendency to examine objects of analysis in isolation by situating them in frozen or ‘experimental time’ and pulling them out of the structural settings that define them. Second, this comparative approach is accompanied by an analytics that treats signifying systems (world-views, ideologies, languages) and social structures (states, colonial empires, economies) as static phenomena, overlooking the ongoing and productive struggle over meaning that takes place within and between ideologies or languages as well as the social practices and what William H. Sewell, Jr. calls ‘events’ that in part constitute or transform social structures over time.Footnote 37 Third, the apparent emphasis in these studies on the ‘isomorphic’ aspects of modern political projects as homologous responses to general underlying conditions downplays the political dynamics that defined them in relation to each other. These oversights converge in a methodological formalism that approaches twentieth-century politics as a closed dynamic of state-imposed imperatives or the logical unfolding of an (authoritarian) ideology or policy, which allow only individualised responses that are cast in terms defined by these imperatives and policies.
Historians tend to use the concept of modernity in laudable attempts to explain how the world we inhabit, or important aspects of it, came into being. Rather than reject the concept altogether, therefore, it might make sense to think about how it might be used to ask different questions and tell different stories about Europe in the twentieth century. If our aim is to explore the making of social order or ‘the social’, then my preference would be to draw on definitions of modernity, associated especially with Marx, Baudelaire, Simmel and Benjamin, which point to the accelerating transformations or conditions of flux that increasingly characterised social life in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as the self-consciously modern or modernising political projects that issued from and sought to (re)order those conditions. This definition opens itself up to a reconsideration of the role of capitalism and its globalising dynamics in the making of modernity. For these dynamics generated the spatio-temporal transformations, transnational entanglements, imperial-colonial encounters, class relations and inequalities, and displacements of everyday life that invited political projects seeking to remake social order. They also shaped the modalities of perception and cultural mediation out of which those projects were made.
As the latter intimates, this definition of modernity also suggests that we begin analysis of the ‘transformative’ politics in twentieth-century Europe not with an already formed, singular, and transcendent scientific ‘rationality’ of the state as it sought to re-design ‘society’, but rather, following Foucault as Kotkin suggested, with the heterogeneous and multiple rationalities of social reform projects and their immanence: that is, the multiform ways in which they were embedded in and emerged from dispersed and localised domains, technologies, and tactics of disciplinary and governmental power that traversed the entire social order. Then we might trace the ways in which these capillary forms of power constituting and targeting the individual body and the wider ‘population’ were subject to processes of strategic codification and gradually concentrated into the ‘global mechanisms’ of the state. But we might also keep in mind the continuing role of sovereignty – understood as a centred, absolute, discontinuous, repressive and ‘underived’ form of power – alongside disciplinary and governmental power in the modern world.Footnote 38 This kind of approach would not preclude analysis of Soviet projects of social transformation; it would instead draw our attention to their conditions of emergence in social and political struggles, and to their ongoing operation in wider transnational fields of cultural and political interaction, rather than their unfolding from within an ideology or logic in relative isolation. It would also allow us to make comparative sense of different developments in other parts of Europe, where modernity might refer to the proliferation of micropolitical fields of government and political-ideological contestations over the social, which were only gradually condensed within the apparatuses of over-determined and highly disparate ‘governmentalised’ states in the twentieth century. Finally, this definition of modernity might be better equipped to trace the genealogies of twentieth-century European social welfare systems, states, colonialisms, and economies and their inter-connections after 1945 and into their present-day forms: namely, Europe's collapsing welfare programmes, rescaled state structures and hollowed-out party systems, colonial and imperial projects abroad and their attendant states of exception in the name of ‘humanitarianism’ or fighting ‘terror’, and neo-liberal regimes of capital accumulation within the EU and the global order of consumer capitalism.
