Fifteen Eighty Four

How can individual freedom be historicised in the context of twentieth-century Europe? When setting out to answer this question I found myself grappling with the following problem: on the one hand, contemporaries invested the notion of individual freedom with very different meanings, and I wanted to grasp this multifacetedness rather than reduce it by adopting a clear-cut definition. On the other hand, I needed a somewhat stronger conceptual framework than merely ‘freedom was whatever Europeans understood by it’ – preferably one that would help me structure a book.

In search of a solution to this problem, I re-engaged with the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s notion of ‘negative freedom’, which he understood as freedom from interference by others, chiefly the state. Berlin distinguished freedom of this kind from the ‘positive freedom’ to be one’s own master, which he feared left open the dangerous possibility of liberating people in the name of an ideology and against their own express wishes. Subsequent critics have placed his views into their Cold War context and questioned his distinction between the negative and positive varieties, arguing that freedom from and freedom to are inseparable. Still, to define and claim freedom against something was of paramount importance in twentieth-century Europe. From this historian’s perspective, the problem with Berlin’s famous essay is less the notion of negative freedom as such, and more his one-sided focus on the threats of ideological engulfment and state power. It is more appropriate to speak of negative freedoms in the plural.   

In the course of the twentieth century, Europeans encountered a range of obstacles and restrictions. Armed forces subjected them to military discipline or foreign occupation; dictatorships constrained their opinions and movements; and, even in peacetime democracies, bureaucratic systems and economic inequalities, moral norms and gender hierarchies placed limits on what they were at liberty to do. Moreover, what Europeans felt constrained by depended on their persuasion as well as their situation. From around 1900, upper-middle-class men’s exclusive claim to individual freedom was increasingly challenged. Popular media and consumer culture undermined established cultural authorities and broadened the range of personal expectations. Social democrats, feminists and anticolonialists contended that the people they represented should have the possibility to be free individuals too.

The range of negative freedoms thus fed into a broad, albeit multifaceted, quest. Even the movements that Isaiah Berlin had in mind when rejecting ‘positive’ freedom could not afford to ignore it. Communists and National Socialists aspired to liberate collectives first and foremost, so that, respectively, the working class and the German race could be their own masters. Even so, they promised to free individuals from something as well: capitalist and authoritarian oppression in the case of Communism and bureaucratic constraints and ethical boundaries in the case of National Socialism. Moreover, in practice both regimes had to accommodate popular aspirations that they found ideologically secondary or even suspect, especially if these had to do with consumption and privacy. Dissidents and resisters rejected the idea that the personal pursuits that these regimes allowed for amounted to freedom, refusing to divorce freedom from personal rights. It is telling in this regard how often they expressed disappointment with their compatriots for failing to recognise that life under dictatorship was fundamentally unfree.

The quest for individual freedom thus incorporated a range of negative freedoms. It was entwined with major developments of the twentieth century and pursued in contexts that tended to be adverse. Hence, the book has chapters dealing with wars, including their preparation and anticipation; the power of the state in both dictatorships and democracies; work as discipline as well as a source of self-esteem; the persistence of established moral norms hampering the emergence of new ones; and, finally, Europeanness itself as defined in contrast to America and as extended into colonial spaces.

A variety of individuals introduce the chapter sections on different dimensions of individual freedom. Vera Brittain, a student at Oxford and then a volunteer nurse, stands for the quest for female independence during the First World War. The Czech playwright and essayist Václav Havel represents the dissident ‘defence of the individual’ against dictatorships that had become less openly repressive. Anton de Kom, an activist and author from Dutch Suriname, exemplifies colonised subjects’ claim to the freedom that European rule denied them. There are also glimpses into the lives and views of less prominent people, such as the woman in Communist Bulgaria who, reflecting on the amount of work she had to do in the office and at home, exclaimed: ‘If that’s what freedom is, then I wish it on whoever it was who invented it!’

For all my emphasis on multifacetedness, I offer a narrative of sorts, which is about conflict-ridden expansion. It highlights ordinary Europeans’ efforts to expand their realm of control, to carve out a space for themselves, to live autonomously according to their own preferred understanding. These efforts were pursued in difficult circumstances. Moreover, they stood in tension with individual freedom in its more ambitious or even existential versions, often as part of political currents that insisted on its inseparability from collective freedom. Ultimately, however, the stubborn pursuit of personal preferences without much regard for any ideological agenda proved impossible to suppress. From the 1950s grand collective projects lost much of their binding force. Different political and moral regimes gradually adapted to mundane versions of individual freedom. When the Communist regimes suddenly fell in 1989/90, it seemed as though negative freedoms had lost their importance in the absence of serious constraints on the lives of Europeans.

From a present-day vantage point, though, this impression was premature. As recent years have shown, the feeling of individual freedom being unacceptably hampered has again become widespread. That much of this sentiment is  expressed in populist terms points, however, to a fundamental problem: awareness of how important constitutional safeguards are has dwindled and was perhaps never as deeply rooted as liberals such as Isaiah Berlin hoped. After all, negative freedoms have mostly been defined by concrete and personal experiences. Revisiting the cultural, social and political history of twentieth-century Europe can, at most, provide context and foster reflection. But it does remind us of a fundamental insight: that our freedom as individuals, whatever we mean by that, cannot be taken for granted.