506
PARTISAN REVIEW
The continental party-system ceased to be a working device ot
political life long before the war. Its decay was not caused by any
external forces, but rather by a growing incapacity to face the major
political issues of the time. The tremendous success of the modern
movements was due to the fact that they no longer appealed to
classes. The Communist> learned from the Fascists the secret of ·poli–
tical success in this period, and under the pretext of enlarging their
class-basis they entered the competition to capture the growing masses
of modern society that stand outside all class-strata. These declassed
groups, composed from the beginning of individuals from all strata
of society, have continued to increase since the end of the last century,
until, after the great crisis of unemployment of the Twenties and the
Thirties, they seemed to be almost a majority in all European coun–
tries, and they produced their most politically comcious representa–
tives. Since the days of the Dreyfus affair, there has hardly been a
single political movement of any importance that did not start outside
the party-system and in hostility to Parliament. Parliament was felt
to represent the people in appearance only.
As
chauvinistic insistence on prestige
is
all that is left of national
sovereignty, so-with some exaggeration-senile parties are all that is
left of the national class-system. This disappearance of classes makes
itself felt today in all spheres of European life. But it has become most
tangible in the appearance of those millions and millions of people,
who under the name of displaced or stateless persons, have been put
outside all laws and outside all classes. Also, these entirely new groups
are not simply the product of this war but an extension of a pheno–
menon that came into existence after the Russian Revolution.
2.
The disintegration of the party-system became apparent through
the rise of the Fascist and Communist movements. Both these move–
ments soon succeeded in robbing all the other parties of their original
position with respect to one another. We all know, for example, how
the French Right which always had been strongly pro-war and anti–
German, changed abruptly, after 1933, not only its attitude to Ger- '
many but its whole political outlook, becoming the vanguard of paci–
fism. The Left, on the other hand, switched from a pacifism at any
price to a firmer stand against Nazi Germany and was soon accused
of being a party of warmongers by the same people who only a year
ago hc.d denounced their pacifism as national treachery. (See the care–
ful analysis by Charles A. Micaud, "The French Right ayd Nazi Ger–
many. 1933-1939.")
