Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol V. Hal Draper
between the latter three for over seventy years. The Holy Alliance between Russia, Prussia and Austria was cemented by the parties’ common need to keep Poland down and, especially, to keep it from becoming a point of contention between them. That could wreck the whole system. As Engels put it “The tearing asunder of Poland by the three powers is the tie which links them together; the robbery they jointly committed forces them to support one another.”2 In 1830 and 1846 Polish insurrections, bloodily suppressed, provoked European wide outrage. They did not lead to a European war only because liberal and democratic opposition in Europe was weak or compromised.
In 1848, as in 1830, a revolution in France was simultaneously a revolt against the European-wide order policed by the Holy Alliance and backed by England. The spread of that revolution into Central and Eastern Europe had to lead to war between the revolutionary governments and the Holy Alliance. The war did not come because the revolution won out nowhere. Only in Hungary did the republican party carry out its program to the point of open rupture with the Alliance. Hungary was crushed.
In Marx and Engels’ day, then, the more consistent the revolutionary the more “prowar.” But something else, something more important, followed from the reliance on the 1793-4 analogy. The war being advocated was not a war in support of any of the existing states. It was a war against all of them by the loose coalition of opposition classes and tendencies that was called “the Democracy.”
2. The Main Enemy
This is the background which explains the contradictory combination (so it seems to us) that characterized the foreign policy of the newspaper edited by Marx in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (NRZ). On the one hand, there were the patriotic calls for a war against Russia in the interest of a united Germany and, on the other, a steady stream of articles which could be summarized under the head—“the main enemy is at home.”
In Engels’ case this identification of patriotism and hostility to the existing authorities predated his association with Marx or his interest in socialism. Writing as a “Young German,”3 in 1841 he took for his target the apologists for German backwardness. Perhaps the best example of Engels Young German period, this article, titled “The ‘War of Liberation’ Against Napoleon,” was an attack on the hysterical Francophobia of the “Franzözenfresser”*—the defenders of Christian-German reaction. No, says Engels, the French are a model for us Germans; they represent “civilization.” The enemy is the alliance of England and Russia. Later, the post-Marx Engels would be more specific. He would identify “civilization” with the bourgeoisification of Germany (and other backward countries) and explain why England and Russia, for different reasons feared the spread of the bourgeois order in Europe.** In this early article Engels is expressing the “left” nationalism that was common to all the young radicals who felt ashamed of the backwardness of their country. His was the defensive nationalism of the citizen of a fragmented country.
Writing in this context Engels gives his own twist to the German nationalist glorification of the “War of Liberation” against Napoleon. Like most Rhinelanders—not just radicals—Engels tended to look on the French occupation favorably because of its “civilizing”4 effect. The subsequent occupation of the Rhineland by backward, feudal-absolutist, bureaucratic, Prussia reversed the gains that had been made under Napoleon. As a Young German Engels was torn between admiration for the rebellion against Napoleon and skepticism as to its results:
. . . the greatest result of the struggle was not the shaking off of foreign rule [which would have crashed anyway] . . . , it was the deed itself . . . That we became conscious of the loss of our national sanctuaries, that we armed ourselves without waiting for the most gracious permission of the sovereigns, that we actually compelled those in power to take their place at our head, in short, that for a moment we acted as the source of state power, as a sovereign nation, that was the greatest gain of those years . . .”5
Engels was to comment later, on a number of occasions, on the halfheartedness of this imitation of 1793. In fact, his estimation of the national movement of the Germans, as of the French and other nationalities, varied over time depending on political circumstances. What was to remain constant was his emphasis on rebellion against the existing authorities as the real measure of a nation’s greatness and viability.
3. A Nation That Oppresses Others Cannot Itself Be Free
<< Index will generate here >>In 1848, the NRZ emphasized throughout that the main obstacle to German unification and self-determination was not foreign militarism but the slavish political traditions of the Germans themselves. Their collaboration in the oppression of other peoples was what kept them chained to their own rulers. One chain could not be broken without breaking the other.
Within a month of the paper’s first appearance,6 Engels recounted in detail the role of Germans as mercenaries, especially in the pay of England, from North America to Greece and Italy, but, he concluded:
The blame for the infamies committed with the aid of Germany in other countries falls not only on the governments but to a large extent also on the German people. But for the delusions of the Germans, their slavish spirit . . . the German name would not be so detested, cursed and despised, . . . Now that the Germans are throwing off their own yoke, their whole foreign policy must change too. Otherwise the fetters with which we have chained other nations will shackle our own new freedom, which is as yet hardly more than a presentiment. Germany will liberate herself to the extent to which she sets free neighboring nations.7
Engels proceeded to argue that things were getting better. Chauvinist propaganda, “the turgid phrases proclaiming that German honor or German power is at stake” are no longer effective. The article concluded by turning the argument around. If freedom at home is incompatible with oppression abroad a revolutionary foreign policy also requires a revolutionary domestic one.
. . . we must achieve a really popular government, and the old edifice must be razed to the ground. Only then can an international policy of democracy take the place of the sanguinary, cowardly policy of the old, revived system. How can a democratic foreign policy be carried through while democracy at home is stifled.8
What did the NRZ mean by a “democratic foreign policy”? The clearest editorial statement of what was meant came very early on, little more than a month after the paper began publishing. The occasion was the uprising in Prague.9
The right in Germany attempted to portray this rising, which was brutally crushed by Austrian troops under Prince Alfred zu Windischgrätz, commander of the Imperial forces, as an anti-German nationalist uprising. There were even hints and rumors that the Russians were behind the whole thing. Leading the campaign were German speaking inhabitants of Bohemia organized in groups like the League to Preserve German Interests in the East. The NRZ devoted some space to reports from the scene by German supporters of the uprising. According to these reports the rising was supported by both German and Czech democrats fighting for “the preservation of Bohemia’s independence and the equal rights of both nationalities”;10 the opposition came from the defenders of the old order and the defenders of German minority rights were simply stalking horses for the right with no significant support. How accurate were these reports? Contemporary sources as well as modern historians tend to endorse this description of the Czech national movement at this stage of the revolution.11 The uprising was, apparently, based on the largely Czech-speaking lower class with the energetic leadership of students.
Both Czech nationalists and German chauvinists reacted to this class threat by backing off from the uprising.12
In short, modern historians generally tend to support Engels view of the situation. But that is not really the relevant question if what we want to know is: What was the foreign policy of the NRZ?