The Revolutionist Context

Abstract

The Nazis had launched a revisionist drive for the purpose of creating a self-sufficient economic bloc in Europe under German leadership. This idea attracted the support of European political parties willing to collaborate with the Nazis, as in the case of the Rexist movement in Belgium and the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands, as well as many ordinary Europeans disillusioned with the drawbacks of liberal democracy during the interwar years. However, the Nazi New Order was at its best politically and economically vague and at its worst a programme based on racial domination and extermination, as well as the economic exploitation and political subjugation of the occupied states.¹ World War Two had confronted different ideologies in the quest to reconfigure the international order. In this struggle, the Soviet Union and the Western Allies forged an associative framework based on the tolerance of ideological diversity. This entailed the prospect of a postwar international order which would have to accommodate Soviet and American aspirations and therefore be based on a system of coexistence. Coexistence was the necessary precondition for the transformation of the post-war international order. The task of denazification provided the opportunity to realign Germany and Europe under the aegis of the superpowers, and to eliminate the chances of a revisionist drive by Germany and/or a self-sufficient German-led European bloc.