Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950, by Christian Bailey

Abstract

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950, by Christian Bailey. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. xiv, 259 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). In his fascinating political history of German visions of Europe from the 1920s through to the 1950s, Christian Bailey sets out to complicate the history of European unity. Thanks to a large and growing body of scholarship, we know a great deal about how the European Union was formed. In recent years scholars have focused on the project's extensive intergovernmental negotiations. This includes the examination of how countries manoeuvred for the advantage, the defense of perceived national interests, and the balance of making sufficient concessions to its negotiating partners to prevent the project's collapse. Bailey brings a refreshing perspective to this hard-headed realist history. An example of this is his revival of the history of ideas approach that seriously considers how politically-active Europeans conceived of a united Europe before the political agreements that serve as historical milestones: the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, the Schuman Plan, the European Coal and Steel Community, the failed European Defence Community, and the Rome Treaties. This history of ideas approach is best exemplified by the work of Walter Lipgens and his collaborators, who sought to trace the historical origins of European federalism. This method was largely abandoned because of its presumed inability to explain why European integration took the precise form it did when it did. As Bailey's study shows, there are good reasons to return to this earlier approach. Its value lies not so much in identifying the lineages of the European Union, as in making clear that Europe was not simply an instrument of international cooperation and progress for some of its most fervent proponents on both the political left and right. Perhaps the most intriguing argument in the book concerns attitudes toward parliamentary and majoritarian democracy. Bailey examines the case of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK), a splinter group founded in the 1920s and situated between the German socialist and communist parties. He argues that the ISK leaders, several of whom would assume prominent roles in the post-war German Social Democratic Party (SPD) (among them Willi Eichler), distrusted parliamentary democracy because of their belief that the masses could be too easily manipulated. This distrust was fuelled by the breakdown of the Weimar democracy, beginning in the late 1920s, followed by the experience of the Nazi regime with its popular/plebiscitary practices. Democracy might be judged preferable to dictatorship for Germany, but it had to be a democracy capable of curbing the masses. …