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all concern for the world as a whole just as they have abandoned
the restricted program of a narrow nationalism. Instead, they con–
structed for themselves a half-way house between the
world,
which
seemed too large for the more intense form of subjugation which
was now intended, and the
nation,
which was too small. The new
habit of "thinking in big spaces," the so-called "Pan-ideas" pro–
claimed by Haushofer and his disciples all over the world, is
applied in the attempted subdivision of the world into a "Western
Hemisphere," a "United States of Europe, Africa, and the Near
East," a "Co-Prosperity Sphere of Eastern Asia," and in many
similar schemes that are quickly invented, modified, and rejected
under the impact of changing developments and new possibilities
oEered by every new phase of the present world-wide war.
Yet this is only one aspect of the historical
Weltanschauung
of the totalitarian movement. Nazism as a whole is still closely
bound to an utterly skeptical" and pessimistic outlook in regard to
the wider possibilities of its own historical action. Instead of
using the greater potentialities that the Copernican tum of world
history has opened up for an unfettered world-historical action, the
Nazis still cling to Spengler's pessimistic theory of an inevitable
decline which was described above as merely a new form of the
earlier historians' optimistic belief in a continuous progress-an
optimism in reverse. This allegiance to an obsolete historical
philosophy-a philosophy of monopoly-capitalism rather than of
revolutionary historical action-not only pervades the speeches of
the Fuehrer and of such ideological representatives of Nazism as
Moeller van den Bruck, Juenger, and Rosenberg, but appears even
· in Haushofer. . Again and again he interrupts his
penetra~irrg
inquiries into present-day possibilities of a totalitarian
"Welt–
politik"
to engage in a tortuous argument for the proposition that
in spite of the relentless rule of destiny and Spengler's theory of
decline there may still be a chance of rejuvenating the political life
and imperialistic growth of a people. that for once had already
· "outrun its course" and exhausted its creative and dynamic abil–
ities. "It is this venture in which Italy, Germany, Japan have
boldly engaged, and which is today being undertaken by the rising
millions of India and China in their gigantic effort towards
national self-government."*
*Karl Haushofer,
Weltpolitik von heute,
Berlin, 1934.
