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economy. They have won because large sections of the ruling
classes in the democracies have turned traitor to their own govern·
ments and aided the Nazi victory from behind the lines, apparently
recognizing that fascism is a superior form of ruling class domina–
tion to democratic capitalism. Such large-scale treachery, unknown
in the last war, characterizes social wars, where the clash of social
ideas cuts across national boundaries. Above all, the Nazis have
won because they were fighting a new kind of war that, as clearly
as Napoleon's military innovations, expressed a new kind of
society, while the democracies were fighting the last war over
again, since their own social system remained essentially
un·
changed since 1918.
Most significant of all is the contrast
in
the
results
of the two
wars. In 1918 the victors set up the Versailles system, which
carried to a pitch of insanity the nationalisms which-had been
strangling European economy for half a century. Europe became
more "Balkanized" than ever. The war settled nothing because it
was an anachronism, a nineteenth century national war in a
twentieth century whose productive forces had developed far
beyond the nationalist stage.
This time the Allies were fighting for the same end as in 1914;
there were even reports that conquered Germany would be redi–
vided into the small states of the pre-Bismarck era. Not so the
Nazis. Their victory means the end of Europe, the end of the whole
nationalist epoch. We are already living in what some one has
called the "Post-European period." Unlike the last war, this time
the defeated nations are actually occupied by the victor, most of
them being incorporated into the Reich or ruled as colonial prov·
inces. So overwhelming is the German military superiority that
those nations not formally occupied have lost even the illusion of
neutrality or national independence. A
"grossraumwirtschaft,"
or
"large-scale super-national economy," is coming into being. Na–
tional boundaries are dissolving, international trade is changing
its character, and a new Europe, united as one vast concentration
camp under the Nazi bureaucracy, is coming into being. The proc–
ess of unification has been stimulated all over the world: Japan
moves to include all Eastern Asia under its own "Monroe Doc·
trine"; Hitler's jackals, Italy and the Soviet Union, snatch up small
nations in the Baltic and the Balkans; and the United States pre·
