I have just reread my opening talk given thirty years ago at the Biblioteca Comunale in Arezzo, which was packed out across all three days of a conference on the memory of Nazi massacres.1 The audience at this 1994 conference came from all corners of Italy, searching for some sort of cultural and political answer to Silvio Berlusconi’s first government which had just been formed and brought the neofascists into the governing majority, resulting in the first painful caesura in the history of the Republic. For many years, I kept a copy of the Financial Times displayed in my study at Modena with an article on the new government stretched over nine columns. Historian Renzo de Fe- lice’s long revisionist offensive, which became ever more openly political in his ‘anti-antifascism’, backed up and amplified as it was by Corriere della Sera and the whole media system, had achieved its declared objective. In Rosso e Nero, published the following year, his historical revisionism practically amounted to an apologia for the regime.2
At the cultural level, Claudio Pavone’s 1991 volume3 was a powerful and creative response, with a completely new picture of the Resistenza freed from static simplistic accounts and situated within the flow of the real contradictions of Italian history. The great value of the Arezzo conference, with its international focus on the Nazi and fascist massacres in Europe, is that it again raised the question of violence as an endemic and structural feature of fascism, closely tying it to the memory of the victims, investigated with the tools of oral history. Pierre Nora’s ponderous academic volumes, published in France a decade before, had confined the history of memory to the narrow- ly institutional realm, conceiving it as another element of national identity.4 Still in the 1980s, Claude Lanzmann’s camera gave us interminable long shots of the worn faces of Shoah survivors while they remembered what they had always wanted to forget. This was the model that inspired us, as historians, alongside anti-partisan and divided memories.
Already then, Europe’s political context marked by the 1989 Wende and the reunification of Germany seemed anything but reassuring. The Eastern European countries entered the EU in 2004, tilting the culture of Europeanism rightward, but by then the collapse of communism had already been relegitimising anti-Soviet memories of an openly neo-Nazi character. The anti-fascist narrative proper to Western Europe began to be replaced by the theme of the twin totalitarianisms, which had put its stamp on all of the Cold War period. These were the first signs of a new EU memory policy which, going hand in hand with NATO enlargement, continuously fanned the flames, turning the border with the Russian Federation into an ever more heated zone.5
24 February 2022 was the tragic culmination of a progressive escalation of the conflicts that marked the end of the Europe of Yalta, of coexistence, and of reciprocal recognition among diverse traditions and histories. And, with the war, History returned with its total unpredictability, and consequently so did the need to discern the outlines of an approaching future.
In Italy the neo-fascists of the past have become the leading party of the Berlusconian centre-right. It is not the past that is returning, as we often hear; rather, what we are seeing is the conclusion of a weakening of Italian democracy that has been occurring uninterruptedly for thirty years in ways that have also concerned all Western countries. The old idea of historia magistra vitae6 has lost all meaning. There is no longer any point in remembering the evils of the past in order to preserve the present. This is, it seems to me, the great difference between today and 1994, when the Arezzo Conference took place. We need to understand the new historical paths that brought us to the present state of crisis. European contemporary historiography has to own up to this new terrain of struggle; otherwise, there is a risk of foundering on the crisis which it has been undergoing for some time now.
The irreversible end of the equilibriums created by Yalta, which the Ukraine war has brought about, requires above all a reconsideration of World War II that can distinguish three distinct but interlocking processes:
1. First of all, obviously, there is the defeat of Nazism/fascism at the hands of an anti-fascist coalition in which the Soviet Union bore the major burden. Without Stalingrad and Kursk and, as a result, the ‘de-modernisation’ of the German army,7 the invasions of Sicily and Normandy in the summers of 1943 and 1944 could never have occurred. Zhukov’s advances toward Berlin were thus no less important even for Italy’s liberation than Clark’s and Montgomery’s successes in the Italian campaign. This incontestable historical truth ceased to be a political truth during the Cold War. In 1997, Roberto Benigni was able to tell viewers, without creating any scandal, that Auschwitz was liberated by a tank draped in the stars and stripes. And yet that collaboration among such profoundly diverse states and peoples perhaps represents the highest moment, ethically and politically, of the whole of twentieth-century history.
2. The defeat of Nazism and fascism was accompanied by the end of Western Europe’s centrality as the place that determined global equilibria. With the decline of the French and British colonial empires the long historical period begun in 1492 with the adventures of Portuguese and Spanish caravels came to an end. The decidedly extra-European character of the two victorious powers and the definitive launching of the anti-colonial liberation movement, with the Chinese communist revolution of 1949, opened a new phase of global politics, in which we now find ourselves. The European nation-state after 1945 was substantially emptied of its primary function – war – for which it had been born, and converted, definitively beginning with the 1956 Suez Crisis, into a trading state that has based its relegitimation on economic development and the welfare state.8
3. The third and certainly most decisive fundamental event of World War II was the affirmation of the USA as the new hegemonic standard. This latter is roughly characterised by an intransigently global perspective and the close connection between the destructive force of the military, based on air power, and the reconstructive force of an economic power based on mass production and consumption.
The difficulty that contemporary historiography is still experiencing in chronicling this great historical rift made up of the fusion of these three developments is reflected in the now commonly accepted ‘short-century’ periodisation suggested by Eric Hobsbawm.9 It was with the end of World War II, not the fall of the Soviet Union, that the world, the epoch, in which we are living, took shape – as a confirmation, we might add, of the principle formulated by another British historian, Geoffrey Barraclough, for whom ‘contemporary his- tory begins when the problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape’.10
Two victors emerged from World War II with completely different narratives. The Soviet Union spoke of a patriotic war and emphasised the defence of its national territory, the Motherland. The forced and violent transformation of eastern European countries into socialist states arose from the need to create a security zone that would function as a buffer in the event of new attacks on the USSR’s western borders. It is significant that the main accusation Putin levels at Stalin today is that he was unable to avoid the German invasion of June 1941, thus making the country pay the price of 25 million human lives.
By contrast, the United States created the myth of just war. Here we should above all recall Michael Walzer’s book,11 first published in 1977, whose declared purpose was to resurrect the concept of Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Francisco Suárez and, on this basis, to establish a list of diverse historical instances of just and unjust wars. It thus reintroduced the typical belief of medieval theology that in the presence of an armed conflict there could be moral reasons that justify the war waged by one of the two adversaries: ‘These reasons, which may be declared by a superior moral authority or argued on the basis of a universal ethical code, would make the war of one of the belligerent parties into a just war and the war of its adversary an unjust war or war of aggression.’12
Walzer reconnected theology and politics, which had been definitively separated after the religious wars and the founding of modern states as formalised by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Thereafter, adversaries fought, and won or lost, for specific objectives, such as the conquest of territory or the creation of spheres of influence. World War I, although it did indeed have elements of a clash of civilisations, was nevertheless concluded at Versailles with an exhaustive series of treaties delineating new borders and new states in eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Just War – which needs to be understood not as a philosophical interpretation or justification proffered by historians ex post factum, and thus arguable in various ways, but as a modus operandi inherent in this particular species of warfare itself – broke through, well before Walzer’s speculations, during World War II. It did so with the Anglo-American language that — aimed at legitimising the war effort — reintroduced the existence of non-negotiable universal values: liberty, democracy, and human rights. Already in his State of the Union address of January 1942, right after the Pearl Harbor attacks, Roosevelt spoke of an elemental clash between light and darkness, good and evil. The moralisation of war through recourse to absolute values implies, once again: a) the criminalisation of the adversary, and b) the objective of his total destruction. Just War, as theological war, is thus again an unrelenting war which does not allow for compromises, and which thus can only be ended through the unconditional surrender and elimination of the enemy.
The value-based eternalisation of conflict was aggravated with the Cold War. National Security Council Document 68, written in April 1950 under the shock of the Soviets’ first nuclear explosion and the Chinese Communist revolution (on 29 August and 1 October 1949, respectively) speaks of an irreducible struggle between the principle of freedom and of slavery.13 There is no longer any trace here of the great revolution introduced by the genius of Machiavelli who transformed politics and history into a sphere independent of morality and religion. The supreme counterposed values are seen, without any mediation, in terms of the relations of military force.
The conceptual and political distance that separates patriotic war, interested as it is in territories and spheres of interest, from Just War, projected in a planetary dimension, is confirmed by the different ways in which the two countries deployed their military force. The Soviet Union’s principal resource had been its land potential. The Red Army arrived in Berlin with boots on the ground, as we now say, specifically with the crucial contribution of Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Tajiks. The great resource of Just War is air power. This is the technological premise of the will to a global political presence, subsequently enunciated in black and white in the March 1947 ‘Truman Doctrine’.
Air power contracts space and time, to use David Harvey’s famous expression:14 that is, it shrinks the world and, as such, represents that powerful factor of modernisation which asserts itself well beyond the arena of war. Its main characteristic is the violation of any kind of national sovereignty. The German soldier who obstructed the advance of the Russians on the eastern front lost all motivation when, coming home on leave, he found his own home reduced to rubble. In this sense we can say that air power is the translation into military terms of that economically cosmopolitan, anti-mercantilist vocation which the US has always articulated through the principle of the open door.15
Through its exceptional deterrence capacity and the scale on which it is used, air power is the only force that can impose unconditional surrender, so essential for the device of Just War, on fighting forces that have demonstrated great valour in combat such as the German and Japanese militaries did. ‘Unconditional surrender’, Churchill said before the House of Commons in 1944, ‘means that the victors have a free hand. It does not mean that they are entitled to behave in a barbarous manner, nor that they wish to blot out Germany from among the nations of Europe. If we are bound, we are bound by our consciences to civilisation. We are not to be bound to the Germans as the result of a bargain struck. That is the meaning of ‘unconditional surrender’’.16
These are unsettling words when reread today. Behind the apparent ambiguity they convey a programme of extermination of the enemy. We know that the commitment to civilisation was often extensively ignored. The device of Just War, precisely due to its ethical-religious motivations, was in fact perfectly suited to providing full legitimation for the systematic extermination of hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians. ‘Distilla veleno una fede feroce’ (a ferocious belief distils venom), wrote Eugenio Montale in ‘Dora Markus’, anticipating through poetry the tragedy that was by then looming over the world. In recent years studies on bombings have proliferated in Italy at the local level. Individual communities have begun to reappropriate this important aspect of the experience of war through archival research, commemorations, and museum exhibitions of various sorts. Moreover, these studies have been developing a rather more sophisticated comparative vision, which analyses the diverse responses that the state and civil society were able to give to the bombardments suffered in England, Germany, Italy, and France.17
Nevertheless, in my view we still do not have an adequate assessment of the enormous strategic political significance that the irruption in World War II of this new military technology had, whose control, however, continues to determine the evolution of the balance of forces within the totality of international relations. To accomplish this last step, it is indispensable to move from the point of view of the victims, from whose vantage point most of the research has up to now been carried out, to that of the perpetrators.
From this perspective the two principal insights that the British scholar Richard Overy gave us in his pioneering 1981 study are still important.18 Above all, he established a clear difference between the tactical and strategic use of air power on the part of Italy, Germany, and Japan on the one side, and the Anglo-Americans on the other. The former was meant to follow and accompany land operations, the latter was assigned full autonomy and directly related to the final objective of the war. Overy thus came to the conclusion that air power played an essential role in determining the defeat of the Axis powers precisely because it was intended to primarily hit the civilian population (moral bombing).
The celebrated Battle of Britain, fought in summer of 1940 by Stukas and Spitfires, thus lies outside our area of interest. The outlines of genuine air power begin to appear in 1942 with the use of Britain’s Lancaster bombers during night-time operations, still carried out in compliance with the principle of selected targets, but it was definitively established with the massive entry of the American B24 Liberator and the B17 Flying Fortress, which inaugurated the practice of totally indiscriminate daytime carpet bombing.
We are all shocked at the 40,000-plus documented civilian killings in Gaza. Even this is still less than the 55,000 victims of the bombardment of Hamburg from 25 July to 3 August 1943, to the 100,000 victims (though the estimates vary widely) of the fire-bombing of Dresden on 13–15 February 1945, and to the perhaps 150,000 victims of the bombardment of Tokyo on 9-10 March 1945. The detonation of the atomic bomb when the war had in fact already been over is the almost natural completion of this uninterrupted progression of violence from the skies, sustained and incentivised, moreover, by continuous technological innovation. At this point that close connection between war and scientific/technological research was established which led in 1969 to the invention of Arpanet, subsequently transformed for civilian use into the Internet at the beginning of the 1990s.19
The preferred targets of air offensives are the populous working-class neighbourhoods of enemy cities. Depriving the industrial workforce of its housing is more effective than bombing factories. The irony, then, is that it is the democratic countries which have most systematically obliterated any distinction between combatants and non-combatants as theorised by the concept of total war developed by the pro-Nazi jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Compared to the 15 – 20,000 Italian civilian victims of the Nazi massacres, in 1954 Italy’s National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) cited 64,000 Italian victims of Allied air power.
We may then ask: What led to this immense deployment of air power, which is the keystone of the Allied victory, and how was it achieved? I believe we find a suitable explanation in On War by Carl von Clausewitz: ‘The degree of force that must be used against the enemy depends on the scale of political demands on either side’. And also: ‘The political object – the original motive for the war – will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires’.20 The degree of force used depends on the dimensions of the political objective. Thus, the meaning of these bombardments, Clausewitz would suggest, becomes clear when placed in the broader strategic framework pursued by the Americans. And so unconditional surrender is only the first step in Just War; the second is the military, political, and economic control of the enemy’s territory.
In 1943 the British scholar Halford Mackinder published an article in Foreign Affairs which became famous for containing the first and coherent exposition of the new geopolitical direction pursued by the Atlantic Alliance.21 His thesis was that it was no longer possible to entrust military and political control to a navy as in the experience of the British Empire (‘Britannia rules the waves’). Foreseeing the post-war situation it appeared indispensable to have a
The paranoid style always produces a radical cultural regression which, first of all, attacks history as a terrain of analysis and concreteness, and consequently politics as the necessary search for an overcoming of conflicts through the principle of compromise and reciprocal recognition.
direct presence on the continent, that is, the ‘Eurasian land mass’, to contain the inevitable expansive drive of the Soviet Union. In his best-known book, Zbigniew Brzezinski emphasised that control of Western Europe represented the essential prerequisite of the US’s global power projection, ‘America’s essential bridgehead on the Eurasian continent’.22
A response to this conviction was the decision in the early post-war years, openly supported by George Kennan, to proceed immediately to the partition of Germany, making its more developed western part into the Western military and economic outpost of an anti-Soviet front.23 But, more generally, the US came out of World War II with a network of military bases without precedent in the history of empires. Alexander Cooley, director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, has counted 756 of them.24 From Panama to Okinawa, through Iceland, the Azores, England, and Germany, Europe’s Mediterranean countries (in Italy alone there are nine officially recognised bases), Turkey, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, etc. It is a network of military but also economic and political power which encompasses the entire planet for the defence of the ‘free world’, in Truman’s still used terminology, a network unthinkable without the system of rapid connection guaranteed by the new air power. The leases of these bases vary enormously in content according to the nature of the host countries, but there is one point they all have in common: the transfer to the US of national sovereignty within the territory on which the base is located.
The great strength of air power corresponds to the strength of the American economy based on an internal market whose movements were able, due to its size, during and after the war, to influence the economic patterns of the rest of the world without itself being influenced in turn. We need to remember that air traffic saw an enormous development in the inter-war years because it began to substitute rail as the logistical infrastructure of an economy that extended from coast to coast. The two great flagship companies PanAm and TWA were the starting point in developing military aviation.
The policy of the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ initiated with the Lend-Lease Act passed in March 1941 when the US was still neutral, and whose immediate beneficiaries were Great Britain and the Soviet Union, was intended, accord- ing to Roosevelt, to exert an influence on the course of the conflict by dint of the US’s productivity. But with entry into the war the huge expansion of the federal budget unleashed an economic boom that the New Deal policies were never able to stimulate. It was precisely with the full employment of the war years that the US’s mass-consumption society achieved important new gains, such as the spread of home ownership among the working class.
The ‘internationalist’ decision made by Truman in March 1947 was also based on awareness of the strongly anti-cyclical effect of arms expenditures. And the above-mentioned NSC document of April 1950, while continuing to insist on the enormity of the ‘Soviet threat’, proudly provides figures to demonstrate the superiority of the American economy and its capacity to produce both guns and butter in contrast to Russia’s economy in which every rouble spent on arms would always be a rouble subtracted from domestic consumption.
The German historian Michael Geyer has characterised this novel form of militarisation, speaking of ‘a civil society organised for the production of violence’.25 This very close connection between war and development meant that the unsparing use of force in the bombing campaigns was followed by the creation of consensus around reconstruction. The destruction of the European urban belt stretching from Palermo to Hamburg was followed by a reconstruction which was a true refoundation of the European economy. In the strategy developed by George Kennan, the creator of the Marshall Plan, consumption was understood as the principal weapon in containing the Soviets. From starting points which in some cases included the feudal institution of sharecropping, in just a few years Europe turned into a mass-consumption society driven by the new generation of consumer durables. An analogous process of economic transformation took place in the same years in the Asian areas subjected to American control: not only Japan, which experienced the maximum destruction of its air power, but also South Korea and Taiwan soon created economies with a high level of economic specialisation.
For the US, World War II ended with a great hegemonic masterpiece that was able to bring together many diverse elements: the atomic bomb, human rights, and an economy of abundance. The theory of the ‘end of ideology’ formulated at the end of the 1950s by American sociologists well expressed the conviction, shared by all of the US ruling class, that economic development was the decisive weapon for neutralising the polarisations of political conflict and for creating the stability of a ‘vital center’ able to marginalise extreme positions.26
In an important 1985 work the American historian Ronald Schaffer emphasised the fact that the use of air power in World War II had been the basis for the large-scale bombings to which North Vietnam was subjected starting in 1965.27 ‘Do as in Berlin’ was the watchword of General Westmoreland whom the White House had put in charge of Southeast Asia. But Vietnam is not just the first of a chain of military defeats for the US after the fall of the Soviet Union; it is also the experience starting with which the US hegemonic standard based on abundance underwent a profound change. It is revealing to reread today how Samuel Huntington reconstructed the American form of the ‘crisis of governability’ in his contribution to the famous volume published by the Trilateral Commission in 1975.28
Things moved in a direction opposite to what the theory of the end of ideology had predicted. The large flows of public expenditures necessitated by the war and by the strong pressure exerted by the African-American civilrights movement had unleashed an inflation from which the dollar emerged weakened. At the same time the high levels of employment that had been created strengthened the bargaining power of labour, opening up a social conflict made still more acute by its overlap with opposition to the war.29 The decision made by the Nixon administration in 1971 to end the convertibility of the dollar to gold and in 1973 to adopt a system of floating exchange rates destroyed the Bretton Woods monetary system which had guaranteed growth and stability for an entire era. It was the beginning of the end of the Trente glorieuses – and only a short step to a system of free capital movements which transferred the power to steer the economy from the states to international finance.
This was the way in which the new conditions of governability invoked by the Trilateral Commission were established, though, as we well know, at the price of a development that systematically left ample sections of existing productive capacity unutilised and produced increased social inequalities. In this way the credibility of the democratic political system was radically called into question. The crisis of the parties opened the road to all the uncertainties of the populist environment. From this point of view the disintegration of the democratic fabric has been completely symmetrical on both shores of the Atlantic. The US finance-led economy would abandon entire manufacturing sectors in order to concentrate on the electronic and digital revolution. In this new hegemonic configuration, that virtuous combination of force and consent with which the United States emerged from World War II has been broken. Just War has repeatedly returned after the fall of the Soviet Union with the conceit of founding a unipolar order. But at the same time its features appear changed and somewhat weakened.
We have already noted the close interdependence of the ethical-religious motivation of war, the unusual dimensions of the violence wielded by air power, and the adoption of a global kind of perspective. Beginning with the Gulf War, alongside the moralisation of war, there has been an attempt to legalise it. The original nucleus of this operation was seen in the Nuremberg Trials, enthusiastically promoted by the Americans in the face of English and Russian disinterest, and established with an agreement of 6 August 1945, between the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.30 It was the first form of a new ‘judicial internationalism’, destined to re-emerge like an underground river in the 1990s with the creation of the Hague Tribunal established to condemn the war crimes committed in Yugoslavia and which has recently condemned Putin. Thus, alongside military and economic globalism a kind of juridical globalism has been created with the intention of creating an international judicial instance whose competence it is to legitimise military interventions against single states, in violation of national sovereignty which is the constitutive basis of all international law. After the long pause of the Cold War, the device of Just War is returning, newly armed in its original claim to provide a justification based on universal values for the violence of war. Indeed, the most immediate political result of juridical globalism consists of its fine-tuning of a very effective ideological and propagandistic weapon: the categorising as terrorism of any position inconsistent with the strategies of American power. The state of Israel has distinguished itself through the unscrupulous use of this device, to which it has had constant recourse to deny any kind of relevance or political dignity to any form of resistance expressed by the Palestinian people in the face of military occupation.
The 1991 Gulf War was followed by the ‘humanitarian war’ against Serbia and the long bombardment of Belgrade in 1999, the ‘exports of democracy’ to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, and the punishment of the ‘rogue states’ in Libya and Syria in 2011. The war was extended in Syria until 2016 with the savage destruction of the urban fabric and mass migrations of the population. In all these cases we see the wish to punish a ‘new Hitler’ (Saddam, Bin Laden, Milošević, Gaddafi, Assad). This new edition of Just War in fact interprets an international situation characterised by continuous changes of form, and by an exponential increase of complexity, as an eternal clash between democracies and dictatorships resolvable only by force of arms.
In all these cases the destructive force of air power triggers absolutely chaotic social and political processes that lead to no new stability. The capture and execution of the new Hitlers remains a pure ostentation of force not followed by any reconstructive process. In this new version, the device of Just War, far from renewing the hegemonic combination of force and consent that characterised it when it first appeared, has turned into a tool for exacerbating conflicts and creating increased instability. An entire historical trajectory of the device seems completed.
For this reason it is astonishing today to read a 2006 essay by the esteemed American historian Charles Maier – perhaps misled by the rapidity with which Baghdad was conquered, precisely on the wave of the air power born in the heart of World War II – in which he could assert that for the first time since the beginning of the twentieth century the moment had come to ask whether the United States had not become an empire ‘in the classical sense of the term’.31 An improvident idea, first of all because of the total chaos into which all of the Middle East was thrown by the Iraq War. It has to be said that the debate on the health of the American empire launched in 1987 by Paul Kennedy based on the theory of overstretching as an inevitable factor of crisis but then suddenly closed down at the fall of the Soviet Union32 was reopened at the beginning of the 2000s with Emanuel Todd’s thesis stressing the impossibility of a unipolar order in the face of the multiplicity and variety of forces set in motion by the end of the Cold War.33 At the same time, Benjamin Barber’s books pointed with great alacrity to the obstacles globalisation was facing 34 and emphasised the risks for democracy of the neoconservative direction that was empowered with George Bush.35 On the other hand, the expression ‘bound to lead’ well summarises the overall sense of the multiple reassuring responses fine-tuned by Joseph Nye.36 Attempts at a position-finding of whether US power has reached crisis, with inevitable analogies with the British Empire, have been multiplying, to the point of taking on the somewhat Byzantine features of a scholastic dispute.37
The sudden collapse of the subprime mortgages in 2007 brought an abrupt end to this type of speculation. While the financial crisis imposed a severe recession on all of the West, China’s internal market became the driving force of the world economy. It was the unmistakable sign that for the first time in history globalisation did not award the strongest, that the extension of the value chains had benefitted the peripheries, creating uncertainty and fragility in the traditional command centres.38 The United Sates, which in 1995 had asked China to enter and become part of the World Trade Organization in the framework of a traditional open-door policy, has now become generally protectionist. Once again, just as at the beginning of the twentieth century, the apparently incontrovertible thesis of Norman Angell,39 according to which doux commerce creates much more advantages than war can provide with its destruction, is revealed as illusory. At a certain point economic competition turns into political competition by dint of the existence of the great Leviathans, whose inevitable dissolution in the markets had been erroneously proclaimed by the dominant schools of political science.40 This plurality of power centres has inevitably caused an intensification of the conflicts, which is bringing war back to Europe. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has definitively shone the spotlight on the extreme fragility of the European Union, and, by contrast, the compact and disciplined power of NATO, which has in fact become in the last two years the only political spokesperson of the old continent. Russia and China, the two principal commercial partners of the German-centred EU, following an unpredicted new military goal, have been demoted to the status of enemies in the space of one morning. The lightning speed with which the new political direction was imposed glaringly confirms the harsh law of the balance of forces governing NATO. At 80 years from the end of the second global conflict the absolutely [period-defining] character of the defeat suffered by the old continent is being brought up again. The problem has been formulated unambiguously in these terms: ‘We define as anti-European in the geopolitical sense the negation of Europe as a potential unified subject (the Europeanist dream) and as a centre of transcontinental powers, the result of the American decision to remain in Western Europe after the Second World War.’41 Indeed, the whole history of Europeanism (from the Coal and Steel Community of 1951 to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992), if on the one side it represses the memory of the enormous transmigration of power that occurred between the two shores of the Atlantic at the end of World War II, on the other hand it systematically avoids any concrete reference to the federal dimension. Thus, the deep identity crisis which the EU is now experiencing with the return of History has its origins precisely in the way in which World War II was concluded.
To return to our problem, how should we interpret the erasure in Europe of any memory of the hundreds of thousands of victims of US air power if not in terms of the discrepancy between it and the politically correct outlook of the new hegemonic standard of Just War?
In 1994, the Arezzo conference sought a response in the manipulations of historical revisionism, which then led to a period of studies on the violence of the Nazi/fascist massacres. Now, at a distance of 30 years, the machine that manipulates history shows a quite different aspect of its strength. The device of Just War, of which we have had ample experience in the last two years, appears as the most recent incarnation of that ‘paranoid style in American politics’ which Richard Hofstadter identified as a constant in the country’s history.42 We have already seen it: history reduced to a conspiracy, to an irreconcilable clash between good and evil, which always implies the existence of a completely villainous enemy, and which thus impedes a realistic determination of the relation of forces.
The paranoid style always produces a radical cultural regression which, first of all, attacks history as a terrain of analysis and concreteness, and consequently politics as the necessary search for an overcoming of conflicts through the principle of compromise and reciprocal recognition.
It is therefore a crazed device because refusing to take cognizance of a reality that is by now irreducibly pluralist, it imposes on the notion of the ‘West’ an ever narrower and more aggressive interpretation as an entrenched field surrounded by a hostile world. The reconstruction of its parabola can make a contribution to the effort that not only historiography but also the social sciences as a whole have to make to begin to understand the tensions and contradictions that are shaking the ‘Atlantic’ dimension in which we have now been living for eighty years.
Endnotes
1 In Memory. Per una memoria dei crimini nazisti. Convegno internazion- ale di Studi per il 50 Anniversario dei Massacri in Provincia di Arezzo, 22-24 June 1994, Bilioteca della Città di Arezzo.
2 Renzo De Felice, Rosso e Nero, edited by Pasquale Chessa, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995.
3 Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, London: Verso, 2014 (first Italian edition 1991). Claudio Pavone was a partisan and past president of the Società italiana per lo studio della storia contemporanea as well as director of the journal Parolechiave.
4 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire. Vol. I : La République, Paris : Gallimard, 1984. The volumes dedicated to ‘La Nation’ and ‘Les France’ were to follow in 1986 and 1992.
5 In this connection see the roundtable ‘The EU Crisis and Europe’s Divided Memories’ with the participation of Geoff Eley, Leonardo Pag- gi, and Wolfgang Streeck, organised by Carlo Spagnolo, in Ricerche storiche 2/2017.
6 ‘History is life’s teacher’, as per Cicero’s De oratore.
7 Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; Bartov, The Eastern Front,1941-45, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001; and Richard Overy, Russia’s War: 1941-45, New York, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010.
8 Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conflict in the Modern World, New York: Basic Books,1986; Alan Mil- ward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, London: Routledge, 1992.
9 Leonardo Paggi, ‘Il secolo spezzato. La politica e le guerre, Novecento’,
Parolechiave 12/1996: 71-107.
10 Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History, Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p.20.
11 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Histori- cal Illustrations, New York: Basic Books, 1977 (and subsequent revised editions).
12 Danilo Zolo, Cosmopolis, La prospettiva del governo mondiale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995, pp. 97-109.
13 ‘There is a basic conflict between the idea of freedom under a gov- ernment of law and the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of Kremlin…The idea of freedom, moreover, is peculiarly and intolerably subversive of the idea of slavery. But the converse is not true. The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles. It is this fact which gives the present polarization of power the quality of crisis’,
A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary (Lay), 7 April 1950. On the document’s strategic significance, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment. A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp.89 ff.
14 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
15 It is perhaps worth remembering as a small but not insignificant bibliographical documentation of this major theme Philip W. Buck’s volume, The Politics of Mercantilism, published in 1942 by Henry Holt, whose reprinting in 1964 by Octagon Books was certainly no accident. It contains a meticulous reconstruction of the history and structure of English mercantilism which, precisely during the course of the Second World War, represented for the US ruling classes the model of political economy directly opposed to the open door policy which they were fighting in Europe to affirm. That this study was no purely academic exercise is seen in its final chapter (pp. 176-194) which located the rebirth of mercantilism in the economic policies of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet communism, all equally defined as ‘totalitarian’ due to their dirigiste and planned aspects. The same theme appears two years later at the centre of Friedrich Hayek’s famous pamphlet The Road to Serfdom. With the breaking of the anti-fascist alliance, the academic argument took on an explosive political relevance. Yesterday’s ally could suddenly be equated with Nazism based on the concept of totalitarianism, which has ever since been a keyword in American political science.
16 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, op. cit, p. 145.
17 Claudia Baldoli and, Andrew Knapp (eds), Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy under Allied Air Attack, 1940-1945, London /New York: Con- tinuum International Publishing Group, 2012; Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp, and Richard Overy (eds), Bombing, States and Peoples in West- ern Europe 1940-1945, London/New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011; Dietmer Süß, Death from The Skies: How the British and Germans Survived Bombing in World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 (first published in German as Tod aus der Luft. Kriegsgesellschaft und Luftkrieg in Deutschland und England, 2011).
18 Richard Overy, The Air War 1939-1945, New York: Stein and Day, New York: 1981.
19 Michael Sherry, in The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1987, speaks of a ‘technological fanaticism’, On the more general relation between public intervention and technological development see Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State, London: Anthem Press, 2013.
20 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 229 and 20.
21 Halford Mackinder, ‘The Round World and the Winning of the Peace’,
Foreign Affairs 21 (1943): pp. 595–605
22 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York: Basic Books, 1997 – quoted from the Italian edition (La grande scacchiera. Il mondo e la politica nell’era della supremazia americana), Milan: Longanesi, 1998, pp. 81 ff.
23 Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp.122 ff.
24 Alexander Cooley, Base Politics: Democratic Change and U.S. Military Overseas, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.
25 Michael Geyer, ‘The Militarisation of Europe 1914-1945’, in John Gillis (ed.) The Militarisation of the Western World, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1989. On the central role of war as an evolutionary factor in the history of the United States see Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 30s, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
26 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 50s, New York: The Free Press, 1960. Today the book represents an extremely interesting document of the culture of American govern- ment of the period.
27 Ronald Shaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
28 Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, New York: New York University Press, 1975.
29 Pointing to a close relationship between increased public expenditure and the growth of social conflict, Huntington archly asserts: ‘What the Marxists mistakenly attribute to capitalist economics, however, is, in fact, a product of democratic politics’, Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, op. cit, p. 73. The ‘governability’ of democracy was to be restored through a drastic contraction of the role of politics in determining economic development.
30 See Danilo Zolo, La giustizia dei vincitori. Da Norimberga a Bagdad,
Bari: Laterza, 2006.
31 Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Prede- cessors, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p.24.
32 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York: Random House, 1987.
33 Emmanuel Todd, Après l’Empire: Essai sur la décomposition du sys- tème américain, Paris : Gallimard, 2002.
34 Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World, New York: Random House, 1996.
35 Benjamin Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
36 Joseph Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, New York: Basic Books, 1990; Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Joseph Nye, The Powers to Lead: Hard, Soft, Smart Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. He express- es more worry in Is the American Century Over?, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.
37 For a sense of the state of the debate at that time see Ulrich Speck and Natan Sznaider (eds), Empire Amerika. Perspektiven einer neuen Weltordnung, Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2003.
38 The hawk Brzezinski lucidly chronicles the change in his last work, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2012, in which he issues a stark warning to the ruling class of his own country against the rash use of military power.
39 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion. A Study of the Relation of the Military Power to National Advantage, New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1910.
40 The theme was decisive also in Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire, which appeared in 2000 and made the transcendence of the nation-state into the premise of all strategies of resistance to globali- sation.
41 Lucio Caracciolo, La pace è finita. Così ricomincia la storia in Europa,
Milan: Feltrinelli, 2023, p. 52.
42 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, New York: Vintage, 1967. It was Hofstadter’s conviction that an ultra-conservative populist strand went through all of American history. With his premature death in 1970 his analysis stopped with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 elections, but more recent developments in American politics seem like a new, updated chapter of his book.