PARTIES ,
MOVEMENTS, AND CLASSES
505
none of these nations have decided to put internal consolidation be–
fore foreign adventures. But this very blindness, far from being acci–
dental or caused
by
the romanticism or chauvinism of a few leading
personalities, proves that the internal structure of the national state
syHem, oadly damaged before the war, is now destroyed beyond repair.
The attempt to restore the status quo has been launched with
such wild outbursts of hatred and aggression because of the assump–
tion that only German and foreign domination generally had brought
about the collapse. But these chauvinistic attitudes are calculated to
make us forget the two leading aspects of the European catastrophe,
namely, the extraordinary ease with which the Germans won their
victories and the existence of the fifth columns which were nothing
but the inter-European branches of the Fascist movement. The Fas–
cists are treated as traitors, in the old national sense of the word,
in order to avoid a situation of civil war. And the fact that it would
take decades to bring so many "traitors" to trial in an orderly and
lawful way is not considered an argument against the absurdity of
the whole concept but is converted rather into a reason for clemency.
The internal structure of the national state was based upon the
national homogeneity of the country and the social division of the
people into classes. Parliament was supposed to represent various
class interests and at the same time to express the will of the nation
as a whole. Yet nowhere in Europe today, with the exception of Great
Britain (which, strictly speaking, is not Europe) do we find a na–
tionally homogeneous population. (Even France, the nation par ex–
cellence, has now what twenty years ago would have been called a
minority problem, since ten percent of its population is foreign.) The
European class-system is decisively undermined. The tremendous
population transfers which started in Eastern Europe and upon which
some governments have pinned their hopes in their desperate attempts
to create national states may create unspeakable misery and anarchy
all over the Continent. It will hardly give the countries of mixed popu–
lations a homogeneity which they never had, and which even their
luckier Western neighbors no longer enjoy. The restoration of the old
party-system, on the other hand, through which the Western Euro–
pean countries are trying to restore the structure of the national state,
~ay
at the very best result in recreating that pre-war situation when
the old parties and their class-affiliations lost more and more of their
political 5ignificance, were more and more replaced by those new
political organizations which call themselves "movements" and lack
any clear-cut class foundation. It certainly will not be able to instill
new life into a class-system which is going to pieces.
