Germany – The Duke Reader

Parliamentary Abdications: 1933 and 1940

15 Oct 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications, Ivan Ermakoff, Duke University Press, 2008.**

Ruling Oneself Out How can a majority of parliamentarians vote to renounce democracy? Why would a group accept its own debasement and, in doing so, abdicate its capacity for self-preservation? What induces them not only to surrender power, but also to legitimize this surrender by a vote? Which conjuncture allowed democratically elected officials to rule themselves out and allow authoritarian leaders to take full control? This sad reversal of fortune happened on two occasions in the twentieth century. On 23 March 1933, less than one month after the burning of the Reichstag, German parliamentarians gathered at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin passed a bill enabling Hitler to concentrate all powers in his own hands by a majority of 444 to 94, meeting the two-third majority required for any constitutional change. On the afternoon of 10 July 1940, at the Grand Casino in Vichy, a great majority of French deputies and senators—569 parliamentarians, about 85 percent of those who took part in the vote—endorsed a bill that vested Marshal Pétain with full powers, including authorization to draft a new constitution. In these two cases, abdication was sanctioned by an explicit decision—a vote. Both cases gave authoritarian leaders all powers to sideline parliament, suspend the republican constitution, and rule by decree. Both 23 March 1933 and 10 July 1940 are dates which live on in infamy in Germany and in France. As soon as the events occurred, they were to haunt the elected officials who took part in the decision. To borrow Ivan Ermakoff’s words, these were “decisions that people make in a mist of darkness, the darkness of their own motivations, the darkness of those who confront and challenge them, and the darkness of what the future has in store.” Can we shed light on this darkness?

History and context

History is the discipline of context, and it explains an event by putting it into a broader frame. But how much context does a historian need, and how far back is one to investigate to put an historical event into a proper frame? In Ruling Oneself Out, Ermakoff chose to explain the handing over of state powers to Hitler and to Pétain by staying as close to the event as possible. He takes as chronological points of departure the German presidential election of 1932 and the French declaration of war in September 1939, giving a short summary of Germany’s descent into political chaos and France’s ignominious defeat. He concentrates on the moment of decision within the two national parliaments by making a blow-by-blow narrative of those two fateful days, trying to enter the minds of rank-and-file parliamentarians and to account for their every motions and expressions. This is different from the historian’s point of view which usually goes farther back in time and tries to put an event into a causal chain of explaining variables and historical determinants. For instance, in a historical essay written on the spur of the moment, Marc Bloch explained France’s “Strange Defeat” (L’Étrange Défaite) by listing all the personal failings and strategic mistakes made by political and military leaders during the interwar period. German historians have interpreted the rise of Nazism as a “belated post-scriptum” (ein spätes Postskriptum) to the cultural conflict (Kulturkampf) between German Catholics and the central state inaugurated by Bismark’s antichurch policies in 1871, or as the expression of a Sonderweg some see going as far back as Luther’s Reformation. Ermakoff’s goal is not to provide a historical account of the two events but to build a theoretical model, a “theory of collective abdications” that may apply, beyond the two cases of parliamentary suicide, to a broad class of collective situations and outcomes.

In the empirical sciences, and especially for the formal lenses of decision theory, context should be reduced to a minimum. The scientist builds a theoretical model and tests it on a constructed dataset, keeping as close as possible to a controlled experiment. Ermakoff’s study is context-rich and steeped in empirical detail. For him, abstracting the event from its historical context is a crucial mistake. The sources he uses for his enquiry are narrative accounts produced by the actors themselves. These testimonies are either contemporary or retrospective, spontaneous or in response to a request, public stances or private accounts. Especially letters and diaries written immediately after the facts are very helpful to debunk ex post rationalizations. They allow to reconstruct actors’ subjective states as they made their decisions. But all testimonies include a form of self-justification and self-deception. The actors rationalized their decision by portraying it as the only viable and acceptable course of action. The tactical reasons the delegates invoke for themselves are self-serving and often betray a willingness to deceive oneself. As Jean-Paul Sartre has shown, the consciousness with which we generally consider our surroundings is different from our reflecting on this consciousness. The historian has to dig deeper if he wants to examine actors in the process of making their decisions. He has to rely on a range of analytical tools—formal, quantitative, and hermeneutic— and apply them to a variety of historical sources. The theory he offers is primarily a theory of the case. Its scope is limited to the confines of the two historical events. No single determination or macrocausal explanation can account for the result of the two parliamentary votes. The outcome was not predetermined; events could have turned differently. The parliamentary votes of abdication were the end result of a process by which parliamentarians based their opinions on the behavior and declarations of their peers. The collective understanding of a situation is dependent on a series of interactions. In confining the analysis to the moment of decision, both theory and history gain in intelligibility and leverage.

Fear of retaliation, misjudgment, ideological contamination

Ermakoff starts by rejecting the three standard explanations for political acquiescence during these two fateful days: fear, blindness, or treason. Delegates who participated in the decision, and historians after them, argued that they made their choice because they were coerced; because they were deceived; or because they were complicit. The coercion thesis portrays abdication as a forced choice. Miscalculation calls into question the assumption that target actors correctly assess the implications and significance of their decision. Collusion lifts the hypothesis that the challenger and the target actors have conflicting interests. Each explanation holds a degree of validity. Threats and intimidation were certainly present in the context of 1933 Germany. Nazi thugs harassed their opponents with seeming impunity. On the day of the vote, several thousand Nazi activists demonstrated outside the Kroll Opera House, where the parliamentarian session took place. In the meeting room they filled the banks reserved for external observers. In France, the country was under the direct threat of an occupying army, and rumors of latent menaces also suffused the political climate. A vote of no confidence would have entailed Pétain’s resignation and a leap into the abyss. But when so much is at stake, actors can always choose to disregard the threats that are deployed against them. As Ermakoff underscores, they can decide to challenge the odds. At the final moment, the decision is theirs. Likewise, the explanation that abdication was based on misjudgement takes actors’ most common retrospective justification at face value. But Hitler’s intentions were clear for all people to see, and in France Pétain’s mouthpiece Pierre Laval had made it clear that a “yes” vote would mean an end to democracy and the republican regime. Besides, the coercion and the misjudgment arguments miss the fact that the two votes were by no means unanimous. Some parliamentarians took a stand and opposed the delegation of full powers to a single man. In Germany, the Social Democratic delegation unanimously voted against the bill. Despite all appearances in retrospect, acquiescence in March 1933 and July 1940 was not a foregone conclusion.

The third scenario, ideological collusion, takes the deterministic argument to its extreme. Nazism’s rise to power is sometimes interpreted as a result of a class alliance between the ruling elite and Hitler’s party in order to thwart communism and secure the interests of the capitalist owners of production. Similarly, the Vichy vote is seen as a conservative revenge against the Front Populaire that had won the elections and implemented labor-friendly policies in 1936. More generally, the period saw the commitment to democratic institutions dwindle, becoming either tenuous or dubious. German Catholic leaders, it is argued, surrendered to Hitler because they were not entirely immune to an antiliberal frame of mind and an organicist conception of the nation. In France, class-based motivations for a political revenge went along with a rejection of the political regime that had made military defeat possible. According to historian Robert Paxton, “there was no resistance simply because no one wanted to resist.” There is a degree of truth in this argument. Parliamentarians who voted “yes” to Hitler and to Pétain failed in their role to uphold the constitution and maintain democratic institutions. They gave the transition to an authoritarian regime the appearance of legality because they abdicated their political capacity. From a legal perspective, they had no right to give a constitutional blank check to Hitler and to Pétain. Lack of personal courage was ultimately the reason for the delegates’ acquiescence. But accusing a majority of parliamentarians of treason or dereliction of duty misses the point. The social scientist’s role is to interpret and to explain, not to judge or to vindicate. A more fine-grained approach to the mechanics of decision is needed.

Decision under stress

Another line of argument points to the irrational forces at play during the decision process. Delegates were under maximum pressure. Wild rumors were circulating. Fear and anguish spread like a disease. On February 28, the day after the burning of the Reichstag, Hitler had issued an emergency decree “for the protection of the people and the state” that abolished basic civil rights conferred by the Constitution. Germany was veering toward total chaos and civil war. Likewise, France after the defeat was totally disorganized. In Vichy, where authorities had gathered after a chaotic escape away from the advancing German troops, everything had to be improvised. The breakdown of parliamentary groups made interactions more random, more hectic, more informal, less structured, and less predictable than in routine times. In such circumstances, social scientists often emphasize the irrationality of crowds, herd behavior, panic movements, and contagion effects. The collective behavior of a disorganized group can influence people to act a certain way or lose their responsibility. Ermakoff agrees that the explanatory key to the outcome is to be found in the collective dimension of the decision. The focus should be on a collective process of decision making. Diffusion effects and the modeling of interactions should take centerstage, for in situations of radical uncertainty people tend to turn toward their peers to shape their own expectations. Yet what gets diffused is less an emotional state than a strategic assessment of the situation. Contagion, the diffusion of an affective state, is a misleading representation of group behavior, for it implies that the process is purely emotional, affective, and mechanical. Even if the process is nonlinear and the result suboptimal, there is no need to resort to the irrationality of crowds and to abandon the hypothesis of rational behavior.

The crucial factor underlying collective abdications were not threats, blindness, or ideological propensities but the dynamics of expectation formation that took shape among delegates in a context of radical uncertainty and as traditional coordination mechanisms had broken down. Witnessing their world crumbling, delegates turned their eyes to their peers. But they did not know where these peers stood. This situation is a classical setting in game theory, decision science, or empirical finance. And indeed, Ermakoff mobilizes many concepts from these disciplines. His theory of collective abdication builds on the three notions of sequential alignment, local knowledge, and tacit coordination, and uses concepts such as reference groups, prominent actors, action thresholds, tipping points, and common knowledge. Traditional historians may shy away at the evocation of these abstract notions, and may even recoil in horror at the sight of a book’s appendix full of equations and graphs. But Ruling Oneself Out is not a book written for theory’s sake, and its narrational structure remains faithful to disciplinary standards in historiography. It refers to many books written by historians on the two events, and particularly to Robert Paxton’s Vichy France. Historians will be on familiar ground, as game theory or decision science are only mobilized to interpret the historical narrative and analyze data. This sociology to the event stands in stark contrast to the cumbersome constructions of social scientists who only use empirical evidence to advance their theoretical claims. Sociology remains a historical science and cannot abstract itself from its temporal condition in order to offer an abstract modeling of social systems. Here, formal tools and abstract theories remain at the service of explaining the facts.

When democracies fail

Ruling Oneself Out offers many valuable lessons for today’s social scientists and committed citizens. The choice to concentrate on two episodes when democracies surrendered on their own free will is significant: it shows in particular that the failure of democracies was not a preordained conclusion. Things could have turned differently. Historical outcomes are not the result of deterministic forces and collective interests: individual decisions matter. And so does politics. In particular, parliamentarians are bestowed with a great burden of responsibility and accountability. Their decisions can make or break a constitutional order. They are the guardians of the democratic temple, and their failure in protecting the sacred treasure that they have in charge can have dramatic consequences. Ermakoff also offers a lesson in applied social science, or historical sociology. He used the best conceptual tools available at his time, without falling into the trap of theory fetishism of math graph envy. His book combines various methods of analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, which are rarely used together. It remains an historical account of two significant events, in which the lay reader will learn a lot. In this perspective, theory and evidence should go hand in hand. Being faithful to “how things actually happened,” to take Leopold von Ranke’s definition of history, does not imply a rejection of formal models or theoretical constructions. The role of parliaments offer a particularly rich material for theoretically inclined social scientists. Parliaments’ archives contain a trove of empirical data, both textual and statistical. They are open to the public, and easily lend themselves to participant observation or ethnographic work. A young French sociologist, Etienne Ollion, has recently published a book on the functioning of the French National Assembly using state-of-the-art narrative techniques and quantitative tools, including statistical techniques derived from artificial intelligence. I hope his book, Les candidats, gets translated into English.

A Gender Perspective on the U.S. Military Presence Overseas

30 Jun 20179 Jul 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, Edited by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, Duke University Press, 2010.

Over There.jpg A few years ago Hashimoto Toru, mayor of Osaka and president of Japan’s Restoration Party, caused outrage when he declared that Japan’s wartime use of comfort women was “understandable,” implying that when male soldiers are at war, organized efforts to provide women to satisfy their lust are natural, and that the practice has been adopted by many countries. He further undermined his credibility by saying that U.S. soldiers on Okinawa should use the island’s “adult entertainment industry” in order to reduce incidences of sexual assault on local women. Facing domestic and international uproar, he retracted the second comment and formulated an apology to the American people and to the U.S. military. But he stuck to his first comment on comfort women, claiming he had been misunderstood and that other countries were also guilty of sexual abuses during wartime. He called the use of comfort women, many of whom were recruited in Japanese-ruled Korea, “an inexcusable act that violated the dignity and human rights of the women.”

Comfort women and administered prostitution

To the Japanese public, these comments brought up memories from a not so distant past. They echoed the decision taken by the first postwar cabinet, immediately after Japan’s surrender, to provide sexual services to the U.S. Occupation Forces through a system of administered prostitution. The Japanese officials hoped that special comfort women would provide an outlet for the occupiers’ sexuality, help to prevent mixed blood, and serve as a buffer between “good” Japanese women and GIs. Similar plans were also proposed by German officials managing the postwar transition, only to be turned down by American commanders, who unsuccessfully tried to apply a strict policy of non-fraternization between U.S. soldiers and German male and female nationals. Likewise, during the Korean War, the Korean government reinvigorated the Japanese institution of “comfort stations” to serve Allied Forces and Korean soldiers in the name of protecting respectable women and rewarding soldiers for their sacrifice. These unsavory episodes belong to an immediate postwar or a wartime context; but despite the official ban on prostitution, the institution of camptown prostitution or “adult entertainment” has accompanied the U.S. military presence abroad throughout the years.

Regardless of what Osaka’s mayor has said, or meant to say, there is a genuine need for an open debate on the side effects of large military deployments overseas and on official attitudes regarding the sexual demands of male soldiers. These public attitudes are fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. On the one side, the U.S. military, and many host country governments, maintain a prohibition on prostitution and punish it with variable sanctions. On the other hand, they tolerate and even regulate the presence of camptown prostitution, registering sex workers and imposing medical visits in order to limit the spread of venereal diseases. While modern rest-and-relaxation (R&R) facilities and adult entertainment may not always involve paid sex, the presence of transnational sex workers with little legal protection raises the issue of transborder human trafficking, which the U.S. strongly condemns. At a time when U.S. policymakers are debating the future shape of the global network of military bases, the new global posture, which emphasizes mobile forces sent on short-term deployments without families, has far-reaching implications for gender and sexual relations with host societies.

A global network of military bases

The essays collected by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon in this volume are not limited to the issue of prostitution – although the book cover makes the theme quite explicit. Written with a historical perspective, and using the lenses of gender and postcolonial studies, they illustrate the various aspects of the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and class that are constitutive of the maintenance of America’s military presence in its main postwar locales: West Germany, Japan and Okinawa, and South Korea (with an additional essay on Abu Ghraib). The authors insist that this global network of military bases constitutes what can only be described as an empire: indeed, “the debate is focused not on whether the United States is an empire at all but on what kind of empire it is.” The absence of formal colonies and the reliance on bilateral or multilateral security arrangements and Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) obfuscate the deep power imbalances between the imperial power and its military projection outposts, creating a relationship that the authors frame in neocolonial terms.

By focusing on the social and cultural impacts of the United States’ military presence overseas, the authors’ ambition is to “make visible this unprecedented empire of bases.” The U.S. military empire has bearing not only on the lives of soldiers and their families, but also on the lives of camptown workers, who cater to their needs, and on residents of local host communities, who have to deal with the economic, social, and cultural consequences of their presence. America’s global military footprint is ubiquitous. During the Cold War, some 500,000 soldiers, as well as tens of thousands of civilian employees and hundreds of thousands of family dependents, were stationed overseas. Most Americans would be stunned to hear that the United States now maintains military bases in more than 150 countries. In the Middle East, it has kept a substantial military presence in Bahrain and Turkey for more than fifty years. To provide housing and training facilities for its personnel, the U.S. military controls almost 29 million acres of territory. And the SOFA agreements cover relations with host countries in minute detail, granting legal privileges to American servicemen that are deeply resented by local citizens.

American empire and neocolonialism

According to the volume editors, “the U.S. military displayed a colonial perception that women of occupied territories in Korea, Japan, and Germany should be sexually available for G.I.s, just as colonized women of color had been available to European colonialists.” Within the context of these three countries, nowhere was the neocolonial character of the U.S. presence more evident than in South Korea. Clustered in Gyeonggi Province and around Seoul, camptowns became a virtually colonized space where Korean sovereignty was suspended and replaced by the U.S. military authorities. The clubs and bars catering to GIs were legally off-limits to Korean nationals (except for registered hostesses and sex workers). After the Korean War, liaisons between G.I.s and Korean women often took the form of concubinage, a practice developed in European colonies whereby a white man and a local woman would cohabit outside the respectability of marriage and dissolve their relation upon the white man’s departure. Although the U.S. now maintains a zero-tolerance policy with regard to human trafficking and prostitution, many Filipinas or Russian camptown women fall prey to similar arrangements with American soldiers, and are left raising children alone because their G.I. boyfriends or husbands have returned to the United States. Foreign migrant workers continue to be subjected to abuse and violence, and the exploitative working conditions maintained by business owners and managers often comes close to the trafficking in persons that the U.S. State Department so vehemently condemns.

For Seungsook Moon, the U.S.-Korean SOFA has remained far more unequal than comparable agreements in Japan, Germany, or other NATO countries: “under the SOFA, Korean citizens are virtually colonial subjects in their own territory.” The U.S. military bases “have enjoyed extraterritoriality, marking them virtually as U.S. territories where Korean sovereignty ends.” She analyzes the presence within U.S. Army ranks of KATUSAs, or young Korean conscripts who serve as augmentation troops in support functions. This institution, “which resembles nineteenth-century European colonial military arrangements with native soldiers,” was created during the Korean War to compensate for dire manpower shortages. Nowadays KATUSAs often come from privileged social backgrounds and, unlike other Korean conscripts, they benefit from more lax discipline and better infrastructure in an English-speaking environment. While KATUSA service remains the most popular form of military service among Korean conscripts, they often resent the menial work and sense of superiority of their American colleagues. As analyzed by the author, the nonfictional and fictional accounts produced by KATUSAs about their experience of serving in the U.S. military reveal criticism of arrogant male G.I.s and fantasies about sexual encounters with white female GIs. Young Korean men also resent the predatory attitude of white male soldiers towards Korean female college students, who are often seen visiting military bases or going out with G.I.s.

Mama-san and pan-pan girls

The chapters about Japan also highlight the hidden social costs, the unequal power relations, but also the transformative and sometimes even the emancipating aspects of America’s military presence. The United States stations the bulk of its forces on the island of Okinawa, a former colony of Japan, whose inhabitants were regarded as second-class members of the nation. The institution of military prostitution has now disappeared, and the “pan-pan girls” of occupied Japan are a distant memory, but sexual or romantic entanglements around U.S. bases have not ceased. Okinawan women who date or marry U.S. military men are often the target of local scorn and ostracism. They occupy a hybrid space or liminal status in the Okinawan and U.S. military communities. Although social, racial, and cultural hierarchies are also present among the members of a Japanese Wives Club described by one contributor, Japanese women who marry American GI..s feel most at home not in the United States or in their local communities, but in the extraterritorial spaces that the military housing areas provide. Residing in the hybrid spaces created in and around U.S. military bases, local nationals are able to challenge existing hierarchical social relations of race, gender, sexuality, and class in their own societies. These same challenges of class and gender boundaries are also expressed by the young Okinawans practicing for eisa, a traditional dance performed each summer during Obon, the festival of the dead. Formerly practiced by young warriors of noble ancestry, eisa now provides working-class Okinawans, male and female, the occasion to transcend the history of double colonization and contemporary lives dominated by the overwhelming U.S. military presence. Beautifully written and deeply evocative, the text on the eisa dance enchants the reader with a literary interlude, while building on what Ann Laura Stoler has called “the affective grid of colonial politics.”

Germany provides an interesting counterpoint to the studies of South Korea and Japan. The narrative about the U.S. occupation and military presence is sharply divided along gender and generational lines. To the men who fought in the Wehrmacht or were enrolled in the Hitlerjugend, the widespread sexual and romantic fraternization between German women and U.S. soldiers came as a shock. A particularly misogynist joke during the bitter occupation years lamented that “German men fought for six years, while German women fought for only five minutes.” Those same men later held deep skepticism about the fighting spirit of their American allies against the Soviet threat. The relaxed attitude of GIs who strolled in German communities, hands in pocket and chewing gum, stood in sharp contrast with the tightness and discipline that Germans educated in the Prussian tradition had come to equate with “manliness”. But this new masculine casualness had opposite effects on the younger generation, who eagerly adopted the clothing habits and musical tastes of their American role models. During the Vietnam War, as they learned about the civil rights movement, German students reached out to African-American soldiers in order to fuel dissent in army ranks and encourage desertion. The racial crisis in the U.S. military was addressed very differently in West Germany, where it led to the adoption of sweeping measures to eradicate discrimination, and in South Korea, where it was framed as a dispute about access to local women. By exposing U.S. servicemen and their families to different racial and gender roles, the overseas military presence also had effects in changing social relations back home.

Framing the U.S. military presence overseas

Over There is a fine volume of advanced scholarship that breaks new ground and explores an issue that has garnered strikingly limited attention from scholars working outside the narrow circle of strategic studies and military history. The decision by the editors to frame the U.S. military presence overseas in imperial and neocolonial terms will not convince all readers. Some of the chapters are avowedly militant in style, and breach the sharp line between academic scholarship and social activism. But the combination of gender studies and a postcolonial perspective sheds light on an important aspect of America’s global military shadow. Referring in particular to Ann Stoler’s work, the editors argue that “social relations of gender and sexuality figure into the working of an imperial power not as a peripheral issue but as a constitutive aspect of producing and maintaining the boundary between the colonizer and the colonized.” A debate on the gender and sexual aspects of America’s military empire is long overdue.