and literatures. He is a democrat, a progressive, and an enthusiastic supporter of the League of Nations and of all endeavors to make peace durable. Yet his opinions on the political problems of his own country and nation are animated by the spirit of intransigent nationalism. He condemns the demands of the Catalans and the Basques for independence, and advocates Castilian hegemony for racial, historical, geographical, linguistic, religious, and economic considerations. It would be justifiable if Sr. Madariaga were to refute the claims of these linguistic groups on the ground that it is impossible to draw undisputed border lines and that their independence would therefore not eliminate but perpetuate the causes of conflict; or if he were in favor of a transformation of the Spanish state of Castilian hegemony into a state in which every linguistic group enjoyed the freedom to use its own idiom. But this is not at all the plan of Sr. Madariaga. He does not advocate the substitution of a supernational government of the three linguistic groups, Castilians, Catalans, and Basques, for the Castile-dominated state of Spain. His ideal for Spain is Castilian supremacy. He does not want “Spain to let go the work of centuries in one generation.”* However, this work was not an achievement of the peoples concerned; it was the result of dynastic intermarriage. Is it right to object to the claims of the Catalans that in the twelfth century the Count of Barcelona married the King of Aragon’s daughter and that in the fifteenth century the King of Aragon married the Queen of Castile?
Sr. Madariaga goes even further and denies to the Portuguese the right of autonomy and statehood. For “the Portuguese is a Spaniard with his back to Castile and his eyes on the Atlantic Sea.”* Why, then, did not Spain absorb Portugal too? To this Sr. Madariaga gives a strange answer: “Castile could not marry both east and west at one time”; perhaps Isabel, “being a woman after all,... preferred Ferdinand’s looks to Alfonso’s, for of such things, also, history is made.”†
Sr. Madariaga is right in quoting an eminent Spanish author, Ángel Ganivet, to the effect that a union of Spain and Portugal must be the outcome “of their own free will,”‡ But the trouble is that the Portuguese do not long for Castilian or Spanish over-lordship.
Still more amazing are Sr. Madariaga’s views on Spain’s colonial and foreign affairs. Speaking of the American colonies, he observes that the Spanish monarchy organized them “faithful to its guiding principle—the fraternity of all men.”§ However, Bolivar, San Martin, and Morelos did not like this peculiar brand of fraternity. Then Sr. Madariaga tries to justify Spanish aspirations in Morocco by alluding to Spain’s “position which history, geography and inherent destiny seemed obviously to suggest.”‖ For an unbiased reader there is hardly any difference between such an “inherent destiny” and the mystical forces to which Messrs. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin refer in annexing small countries. If “inherent destiny” justifies Spanish ambitions in Morocco, does it not in the same way support Russian appetites for the Baltic countries and Caucasian Georgia, German claims with regard to Bohemia and the Netherlands, Italy’s title to Mediterranean supremacy?
We cannot eradicate the past from our memories. But it is not the task of history to kindle new conflicts by reviving hatreds long since dead and by searching the archives for pretexts for new conflicts. We do not have to revenge crimes committed centuries ago by kings and conquerors; we have to build a new and better world order. It is without any relevance to the problems of our time whether the age-old antagonisms between the Russians and the Poles were initiated by Russian or by Polish aggression, or whether the atrocities committed in the Palatinate by the mercenaries of Louis XIV were more nefarious than those committed by the Nazis today. We have to prevent once and for all the repetition of such outrages. This aim alone can elevate the present war to the dignity of mankind’s most noble undertaking. The pitiless annihilation of Nazism is the first step toward freedom and peace.
Neither destiny nor history nor geography nor anthropology must hinder us from choosing those methods of political organization which can make for durable peace, international coöperation, and economic prosperity.
1. The Ancien Régime and Liberalism
It is a fundamental mistake to believe that Nazism is a revival or a continuation of the policies and mentalities of the ancien régime or a display of the “Prussian spirit.” Nothing in Nazism takes up the thread of the ideas and institutions of older German history. Neither Nazism nor Pan-Germanism, from which Nazism stems and whose consequent evolution it represents, is derived from the Prussianism of Frederick William I or Frederick II, called the Great. Pan-Germanism and Nazism never intended to restore the policy of the electors of Brandenburg and of the first four kings of Prussia. They have sometimes depicted as the goal of their endeavors the return of the lost paradise of old Prussia; but this was mere propaganda talk for the consumption of a public which worshiped the heroes of days gone by. Nazism’s program does not aim at the restoration of something past but at the establishment of something new and unheard of.
The old Prussian state of the house of Hohenzollern was completely destroyed by the French on the battlefields of Jena and Auerstädt (1806). The Prussian Army surrendered at Prenzlau and Ratkau, the garrisons of the more important fortresses and citadels capitulated without firing a shot. The King took refuge with the Czar, whose mediation alone brought about the preservation of his realm. But the old Prussian state was internally broken down long before this military defeat; it had long been decomposed and rotten, when Napoleon gave it the finishing stroke. For the ideology on which it was based had lost all its power; it had been disintegrated by the assault of the new ideas of liberalism.
Like all the other princes and dukes who have established their sovereign rule on the debris of the Holy Roman Empire of the Teutonic Nation, the Hohenzollerns too regarded their territory as a family estate, whose boundaries they tried to expand through violence, ruse, and family compacts. The people living within their possessions were subjects who had to obey orders. They were appurtenances of the soil, the property of the ruler who had the right to deal with them ad libitum. Their happiness and welfare were of no concern.
Of course, the king took an interest in the material well-being of his subjects. But this interest was not founded on the belief that it is the purpose of civil government to make the people prosperous. Such ideas were deemed absurd in eighteenth-century Germany. The king was eager to increase the wealth of the peasantry and the townsfolk because their income was the source from which his revenue was derived. He was not interested in the subject but in the taxpayer. He wanted to derive from his administration of the country the means to increase his power and splendor. The German princes envied the riches of Western Europe, which provided the kings of France and of Great Britain with funds for the maintenance of mighty armies and navies. They encouraged commerce, trade, mining, and agriculture in order to raise the public revenue. The subjects, however, were simply pawns in the game of the rulers.
But the attitude of these subjects changed considerably at the end of the eighteenth century. From Western Europe new ideas began to penetrate into Germany. The people, accustomed to obey blindly the God-given authority of the princes, heard for the first time the words liberty, self-determination, rights of man, parliament, constitution. The Germans learned to grasp the meaning of dangerous watchwords.
No German has contributed anything to the elaboration of the great system
