‘No man and no penny’: Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, anti-militarism and the opportunities of the First World War1

What can an antimilitarist anarchist do when war breaks out? In 1914 Dutch anarchist F. Domela Nieuwenhuis had a long track-record as an anti-militarist. During the 1870s as a radical liberal he had been inspired by Émile de Laveleye’s transnational solutions to prevent wars, but during the 1880s as a socialist he had learned to value the action of workers themselves. He now favoured the general strike and a general refusal to take up arms. During the 1890s he openly became an anarchist and combined his socialist means with the proposals of De Laveleye. In the international anarchist movement he became the leading expert on anti-militarism. Nevertheless, when war broke out, Domela Nieuwenhuis was empty-handed. His solutions were invalid if they were not reciprocally applied. Because of his anti-German prejudice it took him some time to find a truly internationalist stance. Moreover, the war prevented the re-establishment of the anarchist anti-militarist movement. In the end he hoped that a revolution in Germany would end the war, but when the revolution broke out in Russia he soon came to see that this means hardly could help the anarchist cause.