Toward & Against the Total State

Toward & Against the Total State : 

Exploring the Historic Precedent of Failed Governance

“Nations become totalitarian as a result of two factors;

bad policies by its inept preceding rulers, and

a perception of adversity from the external world beyond the border.”

The Trigger

The claim is a good description of the background conditions in the classic twentieth-century cases. It is not a sufficient explanation, and states that faced both pressures and did not become totalitarian are more numerous than the ones that did. Totalitarianism is the rare outcome. Ordinary dictatorship, or a bruised democracy that survives, is the common one.

Two definitions keep the test honest. Totalitarianism, in the sense used by Hannah Arendt and by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, means a regime that tries to occupy private as well as public life: a monopolistic party, an official ideology treated as scientific truth, a terror apparatus aimed at categories of people rather than only at active opponents, and control of communications, arms, and (usually) the economy. Authoritarian rule (eg; Franco, Salazar, Horthy, the interwar Balkan kings, most Latin American juntas) concentrates power and represses opponents but leaves large zones of life alone. The thesis is about the first, not the second.

"Bad policies by inept preceding rulers" means concrete, attributable failures of the regime that the new movement displaces: lost wars, currency destruction, food-system collapse, refusal to exit a war the population has already rejected. "Perception of external adversity" means a widely held belief that forces beyond the border are the cause, or the imminent cause, of that ruin. The perception can be partly real and partly manufactured. Both have to be present in the sequence, not merely in the propaganda after the fact.

Where the sequence holds

Russia, 1917. The February regime inherited a state already broken by Nicholas II's conduct of the war: roughly 1.7 million military dead by 1917, rail and food distribution collapsed, Petrograd on bread riots. The Provisional Government then made the decisive error of staying in the war. The June (Kerensky) offensive cost about 150,000 casualties and ended in refusal to fight. Inflation halved the value of paper money over the summer; peasants seized land because the government would not legalise it. Lenin's slogan "Peace, Land and Bread" was a direct reply to those three failures, and to the claim that Britain and France, through secret treaties, were keeping Russia in a war for other people's territory. Allied intervention in the Civil War later supplied a real external enemy, but the seizure of power in October preceded it. The preceding rulers' refusal to exit the war is the cleanest single policy failure in the set.

Italy, 1919–25. Liberal Italy entered the war late and came out with 650,000 dead and the "mutilated victory": Orlando left Versailles without Dalmatia or Fiume. Demobilised officers met the Biennio Rosso; factory occupations, land seizures, a Socialist Party that talked revolution and could not make one. Governments under Giolitti, Bonomi and Facta neither restored order nor conceded enough to the left to split it. Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922 succeeded because the king and the army declined to use the state against him. External grievance (Versailles, fear of Bolshevik contagion) was real in elite perception; the preceding liberal state's inability to govern was the domestic half.

Germany, 1918–33. This is the strongest case, and also the one most often oversimplified. Versailles fixed blame, capped the army at 100,000, took territory and colonies, and imposed reparations. When Germany defaulted, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr in January 1923. The Cuno government answered with passive resistance and paid the strikers by printing money. The mark went from about 4.2 to the dollar in 1914 to 4.2 trillion in November 1923. Middle-class savings were wiped out. That crisis was contained by the Rentenmark and Dawes Plan; the Nazi vote in the mid-1920s stayed marginal, and recent economic history finds little direct link between 1923 local inflation and 1932 Nazi vote share. The second failure mattered more. After 1929 unemployment passed 6 million, about 30 percent of the insured workforce. Brüning's deflation (1930–32), rule by presidential decree under Article 48, and the conservative elites' decision to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933 to "box him in" handed a plurality movement the state. External adversity was not only perceived: French occupation, reparations, and the Polish corridor were facts. The stab-in-the-back story was a myth laid over those facts. Nazi vote share rose from 2.6 percent in 1928 to 37.3 percent in July 1932 and 33.1 percent in November 1932, still short of a majority. The regime became totalitarian after the Enabling Act, not at the ballot box.

China, 1927–49. The Kuomintang's Nanjing decade and wartime government lost the countryside, lost the currency (prices rose by factors of millions between 1945 and 1949), and were widely seen as having fought Japan less effectively than the Communists in the north. Japanese invasion from 1937 was not a perception. It killed on the order of 15–20 million Chinese and destroyed the fiscal base of the Republic. The external war did the work that Versailles did in Germany: it discredited the incumbent and let a disciplined party-army claim to be the only force that could restore the border.

Cambodia, 1969–75. Sihanouk's neutrality failed in practice; the monarchy was overthrown by Lon Nol in 1970. US bombing from 1969 to 1973 dropped roughly 500,000 tons of ordnance on 113,000 targets inside Cambodia. Rural displacement fed recruitment. Lon Nol's republic was corrupt, militarily incompetent, and tied in the villages to the foreign bombs. The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975. External adversity here was unusually concrete. It was still not sufficient: the CPK's programme (emptying cities, abolishing money, class extermination) was an ideological project, not a rational response to bombing.

North Korea, 1945–48. Japanese colonial rule (1910–45) was the preceding regime, and it was harsh enough that Soviet occupation could install Kim Il-sung as the anti-Japanese alternative. The Korean War then froze an external enemy into the permanent constitution of the state. This is the case where the external half of the thesis never lapsed.

What the two factors do not explain, even inside these cases

In every one of them a third element is present that the thesis leaves out: an already-formed ideological cadre that treated the crisis as proof of a total doctrine, and that had a party or army capable of seizing the coercive apparatus before rivals did. The Bolsheviks were a minority in the Constituent Assembly elections of November 1917 (about 24 percent). The Nazis never won a free majority. The CCP won a civil war, not an election. Where that cadre was absent, the same two pressures produced something else.

The factors also do not explain the internal radicalisation after seizure. Stalin's collectivisation and the Great Terror, the Night of the Long Knives followed by the racial state, the evacuation of Phnom Penh: these were choices by the new regime, not mechanical products of the old regime's incompetence. Richard Overy's comparison of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia makes the point that both systems required popular participation and administrative penetration far beyond the emergency that brought them in.

Exceptions, and why they are the larger set

The same pair of pressures hit several major states without producing totalitarianism.

The United States entered the 1930s with unemployment peaking near 25 percent in 1933, a banking collapse, and a widespread belief that the preceding order had failed. By 1941 it faced an external enemy that had already sunk its fleet. Emergency powers expanded (internment of Japanese Americans, wage and price controls, sedition prosecutions). The constitutional order, competitive elections, and an independent judiciary remained. Roosevelt was re-elected, not enthroned.

Britain in the 1930s had structural unemployment above 10 percent for most of the decade, a recent experience of mass death, and from 1933 an obvious external threat. The British Union of Fascists peaked at perhaps 50,000 members and collapsed after Olympia and Cable Street. The National Government stayed inside parliamentary rule. Leaving gold in 1931 eased the depression relative to the US; that policy success is part of why the crisis did not deepen into regime breakdown. The organisational fact mattered as much: no mass party existed that combined ideology, street force, and elite collusion.

France did collapse, but into Vichy authoritarianism under occupation, not into a home-grown totalitarian movement. The Third Republic's failures were real (1930s stagnation, 1940 military defeat). The outcome was foreign conquest plus a conservative collaborationist state, reversed as soon as the occupier left.

Interwar Europe supplies a whole class of near-misses that falsify sufficiency. Poland under Piłsudski, Hungary under Horthy, Austria under Dollfuss, Spain under Primo de Rivera and then Franco, Portugal under Salazar, the Baltic dictatorships: all faced weak preceding governments, depression, and fear of Germany or the Soviet Union. They became authoritarian. They did not build the ideological-terrorist apparatus Friedrich and Brzezinski described. Franco left the Church, the family, and large parts of the economy outside the state's doctrine. That is the modal outcome of the two factors, not the totalitarian one.

Czechoslovakia between the wars had the external pressure (German and Hungarian irredentism, then Munich) and serious domestic strain, and remained a functioning democracy until destroyed from outside in 1938–39. Its destruction was conquest, not an internal totalitarian capture.

Post-1945 Western Europe is the large-scale exception. Defeated Italy and West Germany, and exhausted Britain and France, all carried the memory of catastrophe and a Soviet army a few hundred miles away. They built welfare states and remained constitutional. The external adversary was used to justify NATO and, in places, anti-communist surveillance. It was not used to justify a single party.

Cases where one factor is weak

Cuba is awkward for the thesis. Batista's regime was corrupt and repressive, so the "inept predecessor" half holds. The external half was secondary at the moment of seizure in 1959; the US embargo became the organising external enemy afterwards, and was indispensable to the regime's later self-justification. The ideological cadre (the 26 July Movement, then the party) did the work.

Stalin's consolidation after 1928 is a poor fit for the external half. The Civil War was over, foreign intervention had ended, and the regime invented "capitalist encirclement" as a permanent condition while it already held the state. The terror of 1936–38 targeted the party and the peasantry more than it responded to any new foreign shock.

Verdict

The two factors are real and recurrent in the rise of the regimes everyone agrees to call totalitarian. Preceding governments that lost wars, destroyed currencies, or refused to end unwinnable conflicts created the opening. A believable external adversary — sometimes an occupier, sometimes a treaty, sometimes a neighbouring revolution — let the new movement define opposition as treason. That pattern covers Russia 1917, Italy 1922, Germany 1933, China 1949, North Korea 1948 and Cambodia 1975 well enough to be worth stating.

It is not the rule those cases are usually treated as. The same pair of pressures produced authoritarian dictatorships across interwar Europe and Latin America, and left the American and British constitutional orders standing through depression and world war. Totalitarianism additionally required a cadre party with a total ideology, a collapse or betrayal of the old coercive apparatus, and usually a prior mass mobilisation (almost always a war) that had already taught the state how to run society by decree. Where any of those was missing, bad government plus fear of the foreigner produced a dictator, a coalition, or a recovery, not a total state.

Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism adds a further condition the thesis underweights: the breakdown of class parties into atomised masses, and the earlier imperial habit of ruling subject populations by bureaucracy and race rather than by law. Those are nineteenth-century and wartime developments, not simply the errors of the last cabinet. The thesis is therefore a correct account of the trigger, and an incomplete account of the mechanism.

The Exceptions

The two factors create a demand for order and a named enemy. They do not supply the organisation that turns that demand into a total state. Where the supply is missing, or where existing institutions can still absorb the demand, the same pressures stop at authoritarianism, emergency government, or recovery.

Exceptions with both factors present

Britain, 1926–1940. The preceding settlement had failed in ways people could name. The return to gold in 1925 overvalued sterling, the General Strike of 1926 showed the state and the unions in open collision, and unemployment sat above 10 percent for most of the 1930s, with long-term unemployment concentrated in the north and in Wales. From 1933 the external adversary was not a rumour: a rearming Germany, a stated ideological enemy, and after 1938 a concrete threat of bombing and invasion. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists reached roughly 40,000–50,000 members in mid-1934 and drew establishment curiosity, including from Lord Rothermere’s press. It did not become the state. After the Olympia rally of June 1934, where stewards used knuckle-dusters on hecklers, Rothermere withdrew and respectable members left. The party then adopted open antisemitism and shrank to the fringe. Labour had up to half a million members and the unions about six million; the Communist Party never passed about 20,000. The National Government could devalue, cut, and rearm inside Parliament. The police remained an instrument of the existing state, not of the movement. Island geography and the absence of a lost war on home soil kept the coercive apparatus intact. Both factors were present. The outcome was a constitutional government that later fought a total war without becoming a total state.

The United States, 1929–1945. Unemployment reached about 25 percent in 1933. Bank failures wiped out savings. Hoover’s response was widely taken as proof that the preceding order could not govern a crisis. From December 1941 the external adversary was an enemy that had already attacked US territory, with a second enemy in Europe publicly committed to a new order. Emergency power expanded: wage controls, sedition cases, and the internment of Japanese Americans, upheld in Korematsu as a military necessity. Competitive elections continued. Roosevelt was re-elected, not appointed by an emergency clique to box in a movement. No cadre party with a private army was handed a ministry. Federalism, courts, and a two-party system that could absorb the discontent (the New Deal realignment) kept the crisis inside the constitution. The factors were present at a scale comparable to Germany’s. The regime type did not change.

France, 1934–1944. The Third Republic’s preceding record was poor: ministerial revolving doors, the Stavisky riots of 1934, stagnation, and then military collapse in six weeks in 1940. External adversity was occupation itself. The outcome was Vichy, a conservative collaborationist state under a foreign power, not a home-grown totalitarian movement that had captured the republic and then rebuilt society. Vichy repressed, excluded, and administered deportations. It did not build an independent ideological apparatus aimed at the permanent remaking of private life, and it ended when the occupier left. Defeat plus a failed republic produced an authoritarian satellite, reversible from outside.

The interwar authoritarian belt. Poland after 1926, Hungary under Horthy, Austria under Dollfuss, Spain from Primo de Rivera through Franco, Portugal under Salazar: each had a weak or deadlocked preceding government, depression, and a felt threat from Germany, the Soviet Union, or both. Several also had recent defeat or territorial loss. They became dictatorships. They did not become totalitarian. Franco left the Church, the family, and large parts of the private economy outside doctrinal control, and ruled through army, Church, and patronage rather than through a party that claimed to know the end of history. Salazar’s Estado Novo censored and policed; it did not try to abolish the private sphere. Horthy’s regency repressed communists and later cooperated with Germany under pressure; it was a counter-revolutionary holding operation. Juan Linz’s distinction is the operational one here: authoritarianism wants obedience and a demobilised population; totalitarianism wants belief, mobilisation, and the destruction of every loyalty that is not the party’s.

Czechoslovakia to 1938. Coalition governments were brittle, the German minority was a real internal fracture, and the external threat was explicit well before Munich. The republic held competitive elections and a functioning state until it was dismantled by Germany and its neighbours. Destruction came by conquest and partition, not by an indigenous cadre taking the interior ministry and the radio.

West Germany, Italy, and Japan after 1945. These are the sharpest exceptions, because both factors were at their maximum. The preceding regimes had lost a total war, the currencies and cities were ruined, and the external adversary was an occupying army. The outcome was constitutional government. The reason is mechanical, not cultural mystery: the occupier dismantled the party, the secret police, and the monopoly of arms, then imposed an alternative institutional supply. Where that dismantling was not done, as in the Soviet zone, the same defeat produced another total state under a different cadre.

Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the 1930s add bulk rather than a new type. Depression, policy failure in the orthodox sense (gold, balanced budgets), and after 1939 a direct external threat. Social-democratic or liberal parties absorbed the demand for protection. No street party was invited into the cabinet.

The difference between factors and outcome

The factors are on the demand side. A failed government produces humiliation, shortage, and a loss of belief that ordinary procedures can restore either. A credible external adversary supplies a cause that is not merely “the last cabinet was incompetent,” and fuses domestic opponents with a foreign threat. That combination makes emergency rule plausible to people who would otherwise refuse it.

The outcome is on the supply side. Three questions decide it.

First, does a cadre already exist that treats the crisis as confirmation of a total doctrine, and that has a hierarchy, a private coercive arm, and a theory of the enemy? In Germany that cadre was the NSDAP, still a minority in November 1932 (33.1 percent) but organised for office. In Britain the equivalent peaked at about 50,000 and lost its elite patrons in a single summer. In the United States it did not exist at national scale.

Second, is the coercive apparatus still loyal to the existing state, or has it been paralysed, defeated, or handed over? The Italian army and the king declined to fire on the March on Rome. The German army and the presidency were bargained into acquiescence. The British police and the US Army were not available to a movement. A lost war on home soil, as in Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918, is the usual way the apparatus breaks; absence of that break is the usual reason the factors stop short.

Third, can intermediary institutions still absorb the demand? Unions, churches, federal states, competing parties, and a press that the movement does not yet own give people somewhere to go other than the cadre. Totalitarianism begins when those bodies are destroyed or gleichgeschaltet. Authoritarianism begins when they are cowed but left in place. Democracy survives when they remain strong enough to channel the crisis into policy.

So the difference is not that the exceptions lacked bad government or foreign fear. It is that the crisis met either no total cadre, or a state still able to refuse it, or both. Demand without that supply produces a dictator, a coalition, or a New Deal. It does not produce a system that requires belief.

The Mechanism

The previous part of this article account stopped at the trigger: inept predecessors and a felt external threat open the door. The mechanism is the sequence that turns the open door into permanent occupation of society. It has a recognisable order in the cases that completed it.

The ideology comes first, and it is doing specific work. It is not a list of grievances. It is a claim to explain the whole crisis as one process, with an end-state (classless society, racial empire, year zero) and an enemy who is simultaneously inside the country and an agent of the outside. Bolshevik “imperialist war” fused the Provisional Government with Britain and France. Nazi “November criminals” fused the republic, the Jews, and Versailles. Khmer Rouge urban and Vietnamese categories fused Lon Nol with the bombs and with Hanoi. Once that fusion is accepted, ordinary opposition is no longer politics. It is collaboration with the foreign adversary. That is why the external perception matters to the mechanism and not only to the trigger: it licenses the treatment of domestic rivals as an invasion.

The cadre is the instrument. Friedrich and Brzezinski’s syndrome starts here for a reason: a single mass party, usually under one leader, with a passionate core well below 10 percent of the population, organised hierarchically and standing above or inside the state bureaucracy. The party does not need a majority. It needs a monopoly of organised violence on its own side, and enough elite allies to neutralise the state’s violence. Lenin in October 1917, Mussolini in 1922, and Hitler in January 1933 were all minority forces at the moment of entry. The mechanism is capture, not persuasion of a majority.

The legal bridge makes the capture look like continuity. Weimar Article 48 already let the president govern by decree when parliament could not form a majority; Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher had normalised that before Hitler arrived. The Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933 suspended habeas corpus, speech, press, and assembly. The Enabling Act of 23 March, passed 444 to 94 after Communist deputies had been arrested and Centre deputies bargained with, let the cabinet legislate without the Reichstag. Papen’s line to his allies, that within two months Hitler would be pushed into a corner and would squeal, is the mechanism’s characteristic elite error: the belief that the cadre can be used as a battering ram and then dismissed. The state of exception, in Carl Schmitt’s sense, stops being a pause in the legal order and becomes the order. Parallel bridges exist elsewhere: the Russian sovnarkom ruling in the name of the soviets while closing the Constituent Assembly, the Chinese party committee standing above the state ministry, the Khmer Rouge abolishing the old state rather than capturing it because the old state had already disintegrated.

Capture of arms and police follows, or coincides. The movement either dissolves the old forces into its own (SA into the state, then the SS over both; Red Guards into the Cheka and the Red Army) or binds them by oath and purge. Until that happens the process can still be reversed, as it was in the Kapp putsch and the Beer Hall putsch. After it, reversal requires war or fracture inside the apparatus.

Intermediary bodies are then destroyed or absorbed, because any independent loyalty is a rival source of truth. Parties are banned or merged. Unions become the labour front. Churches are subordinated or split. Professional associations are nazified or bolshevised. Arendt’s point about atomisation belongs here rather than at the trigger. The preceding crisis has already weakened class parties and local ties; the mechanism finishes the job so that the individual faces the party with no layer between them. Authoritarian regimes stop before this step. They want a quiet country. The totalitarian mechanism wants a country in which private life has been redefined as a public duty.

Terror then changes function. Ordinary dictatorship uses police against opponents. The totalitarian police (Cheka and successors, Gestapo, CPK’s Santebal) is aimed at categories: kulaks, “objective enemies,” racial groups, people with the wrong biography. Guilt is detached from the act. That is what makes the system total rather than merely harsh, and it is a choice of the new regime, not a residue of the old government’s incompetence. The original crisis can even be over. Stalin’s consolidation after 1928 ran on a manufactured encirclement. The mechanism, once installed, produces its own emergency so that the legal bridge never has to be taken down.

Monopolies of communication and of the economy lock the rest in place. One narrative, one plan, and control of career and ration make exit costly. Friedrich and Brzezinski listed these with ideology, party, terror, and the arms monopoly as the six features. They are not the trigger. They are the completed mechanism. A state can pass through bad government and foreign fear and acquire none of them.

The sequence can abort at each joint. No total ideology, and the crisis stays a policy argument. A cadre without access to the army, and the putsch fails. An elite that will not hand over the chancellorship, and the movement remains a street party, as in Britain after Olympia. Intermediary bodies that still function, and the demand is absorbed, as in the New Deal and in Scandinavian social democracy. An external power that destroys the cadre after defeat, and the factors, however extreme, do not reproduce the system, as in the western occupation zones. The trigger explains why the door opened in the classic cases. The mechanism explains why, in most places where the same door opened, nobody walked through it all the way to a total state.