Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

…hope, detached from faith and untempered by the evidence of history, is a dangerous asset, and one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions. —Roger Scruton The Uses of Pessimism

Premonitions can be precious. They offer an uncanny, decipherable warning about something or other, especially if the person having them is at the right place at the right time.

Doom is the word that immediately comes to mind when thinking about the Weimar Republic. Weimar is a candy-coated horror tale: a cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism. Weimar signifies an artistically and intellectually vibrant period—defined by the novels of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, the expressionist poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the atonal music of Arnold Schönberg, the design and architectural experimentation of the Bauhaus—a period replete with so much social and cultural experimentation, yet packed with nasty racial and religious tensions, to say nothing of inflation and depression, all leading, without skipping a beat, to…Hitler.

Will we be any the wiser? I ask because Weimar now beckons us. But not at all in the way we think. We think about Weimar only in terms of the weakening of American democracy. While we should really think about it in terms of the world.

Technology has made us both masters and victims to a previously unimaginable degree. We believe we can defy gravity, yet we are weighed down by a mountain of worries that arrive instantly in our devices.

Politics has rarely before been played out on such an intense, globe-spanning, and consequential level, even as electronic communications have made it abstract and therefore more extreme—creating vast political distances between even our closest neighbors.

True globalization is still an illusion until technology and world governance advance a few more orders of magnitude. Yet we dramatically affect each other and depend upon each other, so that we all inhabit the same, highly unstable global system.

It is like in Sartre’s play No Exit, in which the three characters are locked in a small room and torment each other. With no mirrors on the walls, they only know themselves by the gaze of the others upon them. Indeed, we are liberated and oppressed by connectedness, with the media increasingly directing governments rather than the other way around.

The entire world is one big Weimar now, connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent. Like the various parts of the Weimar Republic, we find ourselves in an exceedingly fragile phase of technological and political transition.

Analogies can be futile, I know, since no thing is exactly like another. Analogies can lead us down a perilous path. Yet they are often the only way to communicate and explain. While on the one hand an analogy is an imperfect distortion, on the other hand it can create a new awareness, another way to see the world. It is only through an analogy that I can begin to describe the depth of our global crisis. We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us. This is the usefulness of Weimar.

Weimar’s “normal state was crisis,” writes the late Stanford historian of Germany Gordon A. Craig.[5]

To recall Weimar is to emphasize and admit the growing interdependencies of our own world, and to accept responsibility for them. So rather than interrelated German states, so that a crisis in one becomes a crisis in all, all countries are now connected in ways in which a crisis for one can contain a domino effect that becomes almost universal. The Weimar phenomenon, therefore, becomes one of scale.

The public and politicians both were caught up in the moment, in all of its intensity, unable to concentrate on what might come next because the present was so overwhelming. Everyone was hanging on for dear life, unaware of where they were going.

The next year, in 1923, came Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup d’état that began at the Bürgerbräu Keller, a beer hall in Munich. The event would have a comic-opera aspect to it if it hadn’t been so ugly: demonstrative of all the thuggery, rowdiness, incipient anarchy, and general incompetence of the politics of the era. The Beer Hall Putsch was an example of how law and order could begin to disintegrate even in an advanced country. It started when Bavarian leaders were in a rage to establish a right-wing, nationalist regime in Berlin and met at the Bürgerbräu Keller to plan strategy.

Democracy, when weak and unstable, and conducted in a context of tottering institutions, is no guarantee against tyranny. The world is big and varied and at various stages of political development, and the Beer Hall Putsch holds lessons for our time: lessons about how fragile governmental authority is in many parts of the world and, consequently, how little it takes to undermine them, leading to crises that cross borders.

The years of the mid- and late 1920s that were associated with Gustav Stresemann—a liberal realist politician, by all accounts brilliant, who served as both chancellor and foreign minister—constituted a time of economic growth, cultural blossoming, and political compromises and reconciliations. There was a distinct sense for a while that things were getting better and that Germany was finally emerging out of postwar chaos.

History is Shakespearean as well as geopolitical, a matter of contingencies, and if Brüning had not had the personal limitations that he did, the history of the 20th century might have been vastly different.

The more abject the disorder, often the more extreme the tyranny to follow, and that brings us to Weimar’s last chapter.

Golo Mann asks what is the meaning of human existence when “such a lightweight” as von Papen could at a key juncture “determine the course of world history.”[9] Again, there are large, overwhelming forces of geography, culture, and economics, and there are also contingencies based on pivotal personalities. History blends the two.

So rather than risk the rise of another Hitler, we are forced to wallow in one sort of emergency or another without pause, as crises seep and ricochet across the globe. Weimar is now a permanent condition for us, as we are connected enough by technology to affect each other intimately without having the possibility of true global governance.

Near the end of World War II, after 50 million deaths, Churchill reflected that “if the allies at the peace table at Versailles had not imagined that the sweeping away of long-established dynasties was a form of progress, and if they had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittelsbach, and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler,” who had come to power in a complete vacuum of generational order.[11]

Those dynasties were reactionary and lazily corrupt. But their rules, which had lasted for centuries, bore the mark of stability and legitimacy. And because they were inherently legitimate, their cruelties borne of autocratic tendencies could remain within acceptable bounds. They were dictatorial without being totalitarian. That is, they generally protected minorities and allowed a political breathing space for opposing views. But because they were all on the losing side in World War I, and headed political systems that had been in decline even before the war, these monarchical and imperial orders were dashed into oblivion at the 1919 Paris Peace Treaty. The result, in a phrase, was the Beer Hall Putsch and events like it, which originated from an utter vacuum of legitimate political authority, that allowed thugs and bullies to run riot, invading the political space.

Churchill saw all of this because he was a man of empire: an Edwardian-era reactionary who had experienced colonial wars in Africa firsthand, and, because of his pride in Britannia, was willing to fight Hitler early on, before many other members of the British establishment had even recognized Nazi Germany as a threat. Churchill’s imperialism was inseparable from his anti-Nazism, as inconvenient as that realization may be. Churchill identified Hitler, much as the young Henry Kissinger did by way of an analogy with Napoleon, as a “revolutionary chieftain,” threatening world order.[12]

In both Churchill’s and Kissinger’s minds, world order may not be altogether fair or compassionate even, but it does constitute the foremost political legitimacy to be had in the secular realm of human affairs.

In truth, order must come before freedom, because without order there is no freedom for anyone.

Q

Human nature being what it is, order must remain the paramount political virtue. Without it there is no one, as Hobbes says, to adjudicate right from wrong, to separate the guilty from the innocent, so not only is there no freedom but no justice. These are the central realizations of classical conservatives (who prefer stability to illusions of progress) from which all other realizations emanate.

Q

I am talking about a secure, stable, and orderly political system where the rules are adhered to. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington explained that what made America great was less its ideals than its institutions, including the separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and between the federal, state, and local authorities.

In the early 1920s Hitler had tried to violently overthrow a democratic government but served very little jail time as a consequence. That was the mark of a weak system, riven with backroom deals and compromises, that didn’t believe in itself. Weimar’s democracy was ultimately no safeguard against Hitler,

Q

history shows us no easy path forward.

Democracy has worked in the West and a few other places for several hundred years, whereas the moral example of kings and queens—relying, as the 19th-century British journalist Walter Bagehot implied, on their aesthetic, emotional, and numinous power—has stabilized vast portions of the earth for millennia.

Always remember that the existing figurehead monarchies of Great Britain, Spain, and northern Europe, especially Scandinavia, continue to play a vital role in the relatively boring stability of those countries’ politics. “The institution of monarchy, shorn of its absolute power,” writes the mid-20th-century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, possesses virtues that arise from “the continuing will and unity of a nation as distinguished from the momentary will, embodied in specific governments.”[13]

The opposite of anarchy is hierarchy, from which order derives. And the removal of the czar undermined the only real hierarchy that existed in Russia. In this sense, the Russian Revolution is more than just a corollary to the finale of the Weimar Republic. It is a panoramic amplification of it: a master key to the whole experience and consequences of political disorder.

Again, it is in the guise of fiction where a writer can more accurately tell the truth. These novels are history told in the spirit of the present tense.

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Solzhenitsyn demonstrates—rather than merely states—the need for order above all else. Order in pre-revolutionary Russia constituted a medieval totality, represented by the absolutism of the Romanov dynasty. Czar Nicholas II was stupid, indecisive, and self-destructive. He had no judgment. But as much as Nicholas retreated into a reactionary past—even as Russian society was experiencing the painful birth pangs of modernization—there could simply be no Russia without the monarchy.

It is a conceit of the modern world, and particularly of the West, Solzhenitsyn suggests, that history is governed by reason. Reason is like an axe to the living, growing tree of history, with its convoluted branches, each cell and molecule emerging as a matter of sheer contingency, one building upon the next—so that great events arise from innumerable plots and threads. Solzhenitsyn in these books provides a treatise on unreason and the subsequent creation of the modern world in the 20th century, in which the axe of reason, as he puts it, is rare, and when it does fall sometimes produces absolute terror.

Hindsight is lazy in this regard, Solzhenitsyn intimates, since it reduces complexity to a counterfeit clarity. He replaces hindsight with a multitude of characters thinking and acting in the moment, so that at the beginning of World War I, “the clock of fate was suspended over the whole of East Prussia, and its six-mile-long pendulum was ticking audibly as it swung from the German to the Russian side and back again.”[14]

Prediction is impossible. It is only through coming to terms with the past and vividly realizing the present that we can have premonitions about the future.

The ability of the Ukraine War to affect the trajectory of 21st-century geopolitics in ways only now being perceived becomes more palpable when reading Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the Battle of Tannenberg—which covers hundreds of pages and is panoramic, immersive, and masterly, the equivalent in typewriter ink of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting Fight Between Carnival and Lent.

In Europe on the eve of World War I, order itself, which had lasted more or less a century since the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, was completely accepted. In other words, too few were thinking tragically in order to avoid tragedy. They didn’t realize that pessimism can be constructive and help states to avoid catastrophe. They took their good fortune for granted, and assumed it was a permanent condition.

Of course, the popular naïveté preceding World War I is an old story that is the stuff of many books. But Solzhenitsyn goes on to illuminate in his saga how the same innocence will carry through the entire revolutionary process in Russia, in which words like “war” and “revolution” mean very different things to a people whose frame of reference extended only to the end of the 19th century. Thus they had no conception of how history could wildly swerve in a new technological age. They would not know that the new military conflict would be nothing like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, or that the revolution to come would yield nothing like the French revolution of 1789, which even with its Reign of Terror was altogether benign compared to what was in store for Russia.

Solzhenitsyn is the ultimate patriot, who, with a deep belief in an Orthodox Christian God, recognizes the primacy of culture and empathizes with the military, even as he must expose every aspect of a decadent and autocratic system that has failed its own people.

Solzhenitsyn’s uniqueness rests on his deep political conservatism, married to a narrative genius akin to Tolstoy’s, and encompassing, like that earlier master, so many universes: from the horrors of the Romanian front in World War I, to the exaltations of falling in love in middle age, to the fantastic dinners in private rooms with masses of smoked salmon and sturgeon, bouillon, sour cream, and rowanberry vodka.

World War I was an unnecessary war that by virtue of its global scale ultimately had vast consequences: the birth of Nazism and Communism. The Ukraine War, despite its panorama of death and destruction, is not of the same magnitude. Nevertheless, it occurs at a time of greater global integration, so that its effects, in coming years, could also have the most serious of consequences, for better or worse.

In this entire revolutionary process, what pierces most through the intelligent reader’s consciousness is the madness of crowds coupled with the romance and irresistibility of extremism, so that a minority ends up moving history.

Solzhenitsyn is a deeply moral man of liberty, as the political philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney has observed. Yet as a man of liberty he realizes, as all conservatives do, that without order, yet once again, there is no freedom for any man. And the greater the disorder, the greater the repression to follow. Of

Lenin’s milieu in November 1916 is an émigré world of Russian revolutionaries in Zurich and Geneva: a world brilliantly depicted by Joseph Conrad in his 1911 novel Under Western Eyes. Conrad’s characters resemble, as one critic observed, “apes of a sinister jungle,” in which Conrad announces that “the spirit of Russia is the spirit of cynicism…. For that is the mark of Russian autocracy and of Russian revolt,” so that revolutions begin with idealism and end with fanaticism.[21]

in chaotic, disorderly, vulnerable moments, the politicians and the intelligentsia can be paralyzed by the singular and fanatical people who have true focus, relying on faltering institutions to stop or slow them.

However backward, reactionary, and ineffectual the monarchy was, longevity had provided Nicholas II’s royal line with legitimacy, allowing him to rule without the sharpened steel of any of the extreme ideologies of the 20th century, with all their frightening isms. This is why, as explained by the philosopher Daniel Mahoney, Solzhenitsyn came to see the often forgotten February Revolution that brought the democrat Alexander Kerensky to power as “the true revolution and the enduring disaster,” because of the utter illusion it presented of a stable middle ground, since it toppled the monarchical order and led Russia into complete anarchy, from which a Bolshevik coup, the October Revolution, was only subsequent.[26]

To repeat, it was Churchill who preferred the restoration of the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns both, if only as figureheads, to prevent a Lenin or Hitler. In its first few months alone, Lenin’s secret police executed almost 15,000 people, nearly twice the number of those executed by the Romanovs in the entire previous hundred years.[28]

as Kissinger wrote in A World Restored, “the most fundamental problem of politics…is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”[29] It is self-righteousness that lies at the heart of the worst tyrannies: the belief that your opponents can be destroyed because they are in your eyes fundamentally illegitimate.

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