The future of Europe¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the defeat of Nazism will not bring genuine liberation to Europe, but merely a change of imperial masters. The core narrative thrust is that American and British imperialism intend to replace Nazi domination with their own counter-revolutionary occupation, propping up “democratic” capitalist regimes through military force. The text insists this project is doomed to fail, because the revolutionary consciousness of European workers and the war-weariness of British and American soldiers will prevent them from acting as a new SS.
The chapter makes several key claims. First, the Allies’ accumulation of food stocks is not for humanitarian relief but to supply armies of intervention, drawing a direct parallel with Herbert Hoover’s role in feeding the White armies against the Soviet Union and the Hungarian Soviet Republic after the First World War. Second, the European economy is interdependent; without German industry and markets, even present conditions cannot be maintained. Therefore, a victory for Anglo-American imperialism cannot herald a new bourgeois democracy, but only a period of barbarism and decay. Third, even this reactionary outcome cannot be stable, because the mass social basis for reaction has vanished. Any bureaucratic military regime imposed would be short-lived, collapsing at the slightest shock.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical context of the Second World War’s closing stages and the interwar revolutionary defeats. It explicitly invokes the experience of Kerenskyism and popular frontism as the likely initial form of post-war struggle, given the absence of rooted Trotskyist parties. The polemic is directed squarely against both Anglo-American imperialism and the Stalinist and social democratic leaderships, who are accused of repeated betrayals. The text condemns the “quisling politics” of those who would collaborate with the new occupiers.
The chapter’s solution is unequivocal: the programme of the Fourth International. It calls for fraternisation between occupying troops and oppressed peoples, for assisting European populations to expropriate capitalists and landlords, and for the replacement of Nazi and Anglo-American occupation alike by a United Socialist States of Europe. National liberation struggles, the text warns, will be used for reactionary ends if kept under bourgeois or petty-bourgeois control; they must be subordinated to the strategy of socialist federation. The chapter concludes with a confident prediction that the revolution will act as a hothouse for Trotskyist cadres, who alone can break the crisis and lead mankind out of the capitalist impasse.