ABSTRACT
Let us begin by imagining three political maps of Europe. The first bears the caption ‘January 1920’, immediately following the promulgation of the Versailles Treaty and some months after the overthrow of short-lived Soviet regimes in Hungary and Bavaria. The second is dated ‘Summer 1939’, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The third is labelled ‘Winter 1941–42’, showing the continent at the peak of Nazi Germany's European hegemony. On all three maps, each country is coloured according to its official constitutional status: communist states red, constitutional democracies white, and right-wing dictatorships black. Looking at the first map, we immediately see that west of the red of Soviet Russia, and perhaps with the exception of a decidedly grey Hungary, Europe is completely white. The second map, however, presents a very different picture: the Soviet Union is still of course red, but the white area has retreated to roughly the northwestern quadrant: France, Switzerland, the Benelux countries, the Nordic countries (including Finland and Iceland), Britain and Ireland. The rest of Europe stands out as black. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, dismembered Czechoslovakia, Poland, the three Baltic states, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece are all now subject to one or another form of right-wing authoritarian regime. Moving our gaze finally to the third map, we see that now only Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland remain as white islands in a vast blackness whose eastern boundaries, furthermore, have been pushed hundreds of miles into the otherwise still stubbornly red Soviet Union.
