De Eerste Kamer en Europa - Eerste Kamer der Staten-Generaal

Just as important for us – did not the Nazis have their own conception of Europe?
I think it is necessary to say something about this, especially as its relationship to the
post-war European community is so contested. On the one hand there is the view of
many historians of the first generation of the community, who present the community
entirely as the product of anti-Nazi resistance. On the other hand increasingly there are
others who demonstrate how deep some of the continuities in many areas of life and
administration went – through German political scientists like Ipsen, or French politicians
like Mitterrand – both of whom carried wartime ideas from the occupation era
forward into the postwar. The Nazis themselves were unambiguously against the old
liberal conception of Europe: the primacy of international law left them cold. They quite
explicitly wanted to do without it. If you read the works of Carl Schmitt, for instance,
you will see a perfectly cogent critique of international law and the League of Nations.
Thus, National Socialism reversed what liberals had supposed was the irreversible: the
recognition of independent statehood in Eastern Europe. Countries there, which had
been given independence and sovereignty after 1918 – Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,
Poland, were deliberately turned into puppet states and broken up.
Beyond the theory, there was a very precise reason why Hitler did this and why everyone
else was so upset by it. Nazi rule was in essence a form of nineteenth century imperialism
and their war a war of imperial conquest, except that unlike the old imperialists, the
Nazis chose Europe as their terrain. In this way they broke what I would describe
as the great liberal taboo – that is to say they treated Europe as Europe traditionally
treated the rest of the world, as a zone peopled by inferiors, whether civilisational or
racial, who needed to be ruled by their superiors. Protectorates, dual systems of law,
forced labour, disciplinary administration – all of this had been common practice in
European colonies. Suddenly, the Nazis introduced it to Europe itself. Europeans were
shocked to be treated this way. But the shock was salutary in the long run, because it
made people reflect about the assumptions behind it, about the nature of empire and
the ways it had been legitimised. Because the Nazis took things to extremes Europeans
never did abroad, only made the shock all the greater.
At the same time, the Nazis had their own conception of Europe, too. If colonialism
dominated their thinking about Eastern Europe in particular, their approach to Western
Europe was much more in line with older theories of economic cooperation and
continental rationalisation. From one point of view, indeed, National Socialism was a
pre-eminently European ideology, since it presented itself as the sole effective defender
of Europe against, on the one hand, American capitalism, and on the other, Soviet
Bolshevism. There was a clear, if pretty problematic, economic conception at work here.
For Hitler, who remembered vividly the starvation of World War I, Europe needed to
become self-sufficient to be able to feed and defend herself in wartime, and needed to
be immunised from international capitalism to avoid the effects of global competition
and depression that had been visible in the 1930s. So, the Nazis tried to turn Berlin into
the centre of the continent’s economic planning, and had they won they would have
made other national economies follow their lead in setting investment and manpower
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