(From the preface by Lodovico Festa to “Towards the end of the world” by Giulio Sapelli, Guerini and associates editions)
The world of today cannot be read as a return to the twenties and thirties, with related arguments about fascism and the bureaucratic drift of the Soviet Union. The phase of history we are experiencing is in fact similar to that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unbridled spirits stir as in the times of the Belle époque: on the one hand nihilistic (truth does not exist, moral values are not needed), on the other positivistic (politics is not needed, moral reflections do not help, skills are enough, science is enough, technicians are enough ).
About one hundred and twenty years ago globalization in trade reached levels similar to today’s. In that period the crisis of the Ottoman empire prepared the crisis of the Habsburg and Russian empires: with some symmetries not far from realities that characterize our times. The British Empire considered its hegemony over the world consolidated and for a long period was indifferent to the growth of the new Prussian-German power.
Considerable part of the ruling classes of the time, while accepting the democratic system (which for a long time was founded on a very narrow social base) looked with annoyance at the growth of autonomous popular movements of socialist and labor orientation but also, in certain cases, in Italy and partly in France, Catholic. The resolution of the most aware liberal men to broaden the bases of State was looked at with suspicion. The “populists” of the time, the blacks of Luigi Sturzo and the reds of Filippo Turati, were frowned upon even by quality journalists who were also perfect interpreters of the orientations of the industrial bourgeoisie of the North, such as Luigi Albertini.
And in that context, arrogance, abstractness seasoned with a will to power not harnessed by reason made their first victim: diplomacy.
The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century are characterized byexhaustion of diplomatic compromises, politically regulators of the European powers, prepared by the Congress of Vienna. An agreement that allowed Europe what Karl Polanyi defined as the century of peace (from 1815 to 1914).
We arrived at the war by sleepwalking, considering it at most a small incident, which kings and emperors, all cousins of each other, would have quickly dealt with, perhaps even disciplining the popular classes a little with too many demands.
Instead, the slaughter of 1914-1918 (also due to that touch of militaristic madness typical of the Prussian Junckers) caused a catastrophe in the old continent such as to then mark more or less the entire 20th century: thus the radicalization of large sectors of the popular classes, thus the disbandment of the best culture shaken by the massacres, thus the affirmation of a militarized socialism in a nation central to European balances such as Russia, thus the take-off of counter-revolutionary tendencies that fueled authoritarian solutions.
This is the mixture born in the trenches of France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Poland and so on, then perfected by the foolish French revanchism combined with the fatal, absent-minded idealism of a Thomas Woodrow Wilson in search of a “Kantian” perpetual peace, and instead an incubator, with its micronationalisms, of the decisive factors for transforming one of capitalism’s recurrent economic crises into catastrophe of 1929 with its tragic results: first of all the demonic Hitlerian regime and then the other massacre of 1939-1945.
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