‘once back in America, what will you do?’ And the answer, which will profoundly influence the Chinese thinker, comes caustically: ‘I will lock myself in my house and wait for you to bring Chinese civilisation.’
This ‘crisis of the spirit’ provided the focus for much of the writing of the period. But this was a crisis in bad conscience, a cultural and spiritual turmoil that actually represented the flip side of the structural crisis of European domination over the world. The crisis of civilisation of the 1920s stemmed largely from the provincialisation of Europe, from the diminishing economic and political role of the Old Continent at a time when the world was surpassing its old masters and beginning its path of emancipation. It was the emergence of a world beyond Europe that put Europe itself in crisis.
The First World War took away the universal system that hinged around the undisputed dominance of the British Empire. The central empires of Austria and Germany crumbled. France and Italy came out of the conflict traumatised. And following the gigantic butchery, Europe found its already feeble legitimacy all but dissipated: the civilising mission of the white man proved itself to everyone for the barbaric pillage it had always been. It is no coincidence that the first real public debate on the colonial situation began in those years, something that would soon lead to the emergence of the concept of ‘decolonisation’. Economically, all European states emerged from the conflict heavily indebted to the United States: it was bankers in New York who now decided the destiny of the Imperial cabinet. The United States started casting its shadow over the world, strengthened by the moral legitimacy of the internationalist President Woodrow Wilson and by an economy that had surpassed that of the British Empire in influence and size. The world no longer looked to Parisian architecture but to the functionalist skyscrapers of the new American metropolises. It was perhaps Leon Trotsky who put it in the most explicit terms: Europe, he argued, found itself in the same position, vis-à-vis the United States, once occupied by the countries of South-Eastern Europe in relation to Paris and London. They had all the vestiges of sovereignty, but none of the substance.5
The crisis of European civilisation was nothing but the crisis of the sovereignty of the great European powers. Indeed, as paradoxical as it may sound, it was precisely the decline of European nation states that became the source of the great nationalist uprising that would lead the continent towards totalitarianism and a Second World War. This paradox is something that Hannah Arendt already identified in her famous study on the origins of totalitarianism. Like a weakened animal, scared and hence ready to bite, nationalism became the response of a body that had lost its vigour. Nationalism, then as now, is a response to a structural crisis of the national form. And if we dig deeper into the great resentment that characterised yesterday’s as much as today’s age of anger, what we will find is this: impotence.
The first ouroboros
Here is another paradox: the crisis of Eurocentric globalisation and of the unity of the world praised by Zweig manifested itself through the emergence of a world that became increasingly integrated and emancipated from its partial and provincial European origins. More world emerged from the crisis of the pretence that was European universalism.
The Babel that followed the end of universal Europe was very peculiar. If, on the one hand, the period between the two world wars certainly saw the impetuous growth of nationalism and protectionism, it is equally true that the causes of the multiple military, political and economic crises that would ultimately produce the fracture of the imperial and Eurocentric order all served to highlight and deepen, through the unfolding of the crisis itself, the extraordinary interdependence reached by the world system.
With a dialectical flip, the globalisation of railways and world markets took a leap forward and acquired greater self-consciousness precisely through the extraordinary novelty of its disintegration: a war that went from a skirmish on the border between Austria and Serbia to a conflict involving almost the whole of humanity; a Wall Street crash that brought the world financial system to its knees in a matter of days. Indeed, what is the purpose of the word ‘great’ prefixed to the war of 1914 and to the depression of 1929 if not to signal its unprecedented planetary character? Counterintuitively, it was the very existence of a deeply interconnected world that was revealed by the path of its implosion. And so the rupture of imperial globalisation was at once an unveiling and a deepening of the unity of the world.
Take a character such as Philip Raven, an economist in the service of the League of Nations and the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s 1933 futuristic novel The Shape of Things to Come. Raven dreams of a world government and confesses that if it was the First World War that turned this idea into a working hypothesis, it was the Great Depression that led to the final realisation that human society had become one indivisible and integrated economic whole.
If the crumbling of European sovereignty, as Hannah Arendt recalled, leads to a hardening of totalitarian logic; if the new political impotence that Trotsky described leads to an increase in aggressiveness and to a recoiling on national identities; then it is always from this same contradiction that the theorisation of world unity, revealed and deployed through its crisis, takes a leap forward. Indeed, Wells’s insights are not confined to the field of literature but accompany a new attempt to restore a political dimension to the system of global interdependence. The inter-war period was the backdrop to the first great proposals for the ‘United States of Europe’, from Jules Benda to Altiero Spinelli, and for a world order based on the League of Nations; it was precisely from this crisis that the search for the reorganisation of a new world system began. And it is in this context of unripe globalism that an ideology that would define the lives of billions of people decades later would also be born: neoliberalism. We will come back to this shortly.
We can perhaps think of the image of the ouroboros: the famous symbol of a snake biting its own tail and forming a circle that perpetually overcomes and renews itself. The implosion of universal Europe represented a turn of the screw, or better, a full circle of the ouroboros, which further tightened the universal character of the world, overtaking the limited remit of Europe itself. The ouroboros is the symbol of a process of becoming-world of the world, a process that deploys itself through the crisis of an order – the painful moment the snake reaches and bites its tail – that already contains within itself a further deepening of world interdependence, another round of the circle.
From a war that threw a world system to dust and yet prepared the cocoon for its overcoming emerged a planet that was increasingly intertwined and that towered over a weakened national politics. It was Antonio Gramsci who clearly identified the new playing field: ‘The whole post-war period is crisis’, he wrote, and ‘one of the fundamental contradictions is this: that while economic life has internationalism or better cosmopolitanism as its necessary precondition, the life of states has increasingly developed in the direction of nationalism.’6 Or, in other words, the global deployment of economic forces tramples and overcomes weakened national polities.
The history of the twilight of universal Europe presents the opening sequence of the long crisis of the nation state. And if Gramsci’s words appear to be written today, that is because it is at this historical juncture when first emerged the contradiction that now occupies the front pages of our newspapers.
Notes
1 1. Stefan Zweig, Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink (London: Pushkin Press, 2016).
2 2. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2017).
3 3. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
4 4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism (London: Penguin, 2017).
5 5. Leon Trotsky, ‘Is the Slogan “The United States of Europe” a Timely One?’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/25b.htm.
6 6. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Torino: Einaudi, 1975):