28. ‘Ending History’
As the Iron Curtain collapsed, there was much interest in the causes and consequences. The Left was mainly taken by surprise, and was (and, again mainly, is) quite unable to account for what had happened: Susan Sontag remarked honestly and pertinently that Reader’s Digest had been closer to the truth all along. But the academic observers of the bloc scene were also caught napping. A British expert on international relations, Philip Windsor, remarked, seeing the fall of the Wall on television, that it was the end of an empire; when his companion asked whether he meant the Soviet one, he said, no, political science. Very, very few people in the West had foreseen the end — the first was a 25-year-old Frenchman, Emmanuel Todd, whose The Final Fall (1976) seems to have been inspired by rock music, listened to in a shabby student flat in Budapest. Earlier, in 1970, a very brave Russian, Andrey Amalrik, had guessed, on the basis of day-to-day impressions, that the end was coming, though he got the date wrong. Grave seniors, the world over, shook their heads at such perversity, and when Gorbachev appeared, there was a sort of parade of guards of ‘useful idiots’, including J. K. Galbraith, who thought that the achievement of full employment was the great strength of the USSR. This writer will not plead innocence, having informed students until 1986, though not in print, that the Soviet Union had ‘solved the nationality problem’. But it is clear now that the most reliable guides all along had been the shunned ‘Cold Warriors’, men such as Alain Besançon, Robert Conquest or Vladimir Bukovsky, whose accounts (in Jugement à Moscou) of his dealings with American foundations read tellingly: when he explained to them, back in the 1970s, what was really going on in the Soviet Union, he was no longer welcome, and was even missed off the Christmas card list. In the same way, most of West German academe and much of the media was entirely taken aback when East Germany imploded. There is a counterpart in economics, where the ‘supplysiders’ of the early eighties had been widely dismissed, with derision, and had then turned out to be right, in so far as economics is about prosperity.
In 1991 there was much triumphalism on the Right, the more so as, by a quirk of history, the fall of the Berlin Wall more or less coincided with the fiftieth anniversaries of the Marshall Plan and NATO or, for that matter, of the German Federal Republic itself (celebrants of which could often only mumble a half-remembered and rather soppy version of the old national anthem). It was an Atlantic hour, a triumph of American power, soft, as exemplified by CNN, and hard, as exemplified by the IMF. The Fukuyama thesis, that the West, catchily described as free market and democracy, had won, had captured Japan and South Korea, and would go on turning all countries of the world into versions of Denmark, sounded quite convincing. But which ‘West’? For most of the world, it was Reagan’s United States — and not the European countries that practised the minor virtues, such as thrift, failing to make babies and padding their pensioners.
Efforts were made to parade the European Union (as it was soon to be called) as an alternative model, of ‘Rhenish’ as distinct from ‘Atlantic’ capitalism. On one level, Europe, or at any rate the Europe of the Single European Act, unquestionably did good, in that it could break into stagnant pools of local protectionism, and for a Spain or a Greece, emerging from stupid military dictatorships, joining Europe was important for morale and in a limited degree finance. The same was, on the whole, true for former Iron Curtain countries, which got German investment and remittances from migrants to the West. But, as generally happens with multinational organizations, Europe was good only at dealing with limited and well-defined problems. Her efforts on the world stage were laughable — never more so than when the then presiding officer, a Luxemburger named Jacques Poos, turned up with two other worthies at the start of the Yugoslav civil wars in 1991 to warn against nationalism — in this case, that of the Slovenes, who were ticked off for thinking that their country (an elephant beside his own) was large enough to indulge in independence. At bottom, Europe was itself in any case an Atlantic creation, and French aspirations to make it independent of the United States very speedily broke down. Lacking armed forces, it had only two lines in foreign affairs: ‘Me, too’ to the Americans, and then ‘Oh, dear’ to the Americans.
Even the ‘Swedish model’, long and finger-waggingly upheld as a sort of ‘third way’, broke down. It had thrived, with a small population sitting on raw materials, had thrived further because it had stayed out of both world wars, had done well out of the export of arms, while its political establishment moralized at the rest of the world. Up until the 1970s, Swedish Lapps had been sterilized in tens of thousands on the grounds that they, stunted in growth and drunken in habits, were not worthy to reproduce themselves. In the 1990s, Swedish delegations were appearing in Turkey to reproach Turkey for her handling of the Kurds, a handling that most certainly did not include sterilization. By 1990 Sweden herself had slipped from being second most prosperous country in the world to being seventeenth, and was overtaken by Finland, a former colony, where affairs were less pretentiously managed. In 1990 the only European of any serious interest in the former Communist bloc was Margaret Thatcher, herself, of course, no great respecter of the European Union.
Great numbers of hungry, intelligent Russians (and others from the old bloc) came west, with a view, often dewy-eyed, to learning what the secret had been. Others did not need any such training. Communism had had, in the form of Alain Besançon’s ‘C’ system, its own hidden, brutal and corrupt form of a market, and vicious figures made enormous fortunes out of the Soviet rubble. Russia then went through a very difficult decade, most Russians becoming disillusioned. The end of the Soviet empire was of course the culminating moment of the eighties, but there was an air of anti-climax to it all, as with most such moments, including Victory Day in 1945. Besides, this particular victory would clearly bring great problems, the worse for having been so widely unforeseen by the bureaucracies that had come into existence in the era of détente in the 1970s. Yugoslavia, the very model of Communism-with-a-human-face brotherhood-of-peoples, exploded, and the unification of Germany brought headaches of unemployment and mass migration to the prosperous places of the West. After a year or two of patriotic euphoria, the European countries of the former bloc were mainly taken over by variants of reformed Communists, now generally learning to talk another wooden language, that of ‘Europe’; their young migrated, their agriculture generally languished, particularly when European regulations were used to suppress the old-fashioned ways with, say, ham or smoked fish or wine that might have let them be competitive. Much effort went into making out that this was all a great success for Europe, and for a brief period there was even a parody of the old Sovietology, in which ‘transition’ from Fascism or Communism was solemnly studied, as if there could be any conceivable comparison between Spain and Russia except at the most superficial level. But the reality after 1990 was, mainly, depressive, and the collapse of population growth almost everywhere demonstrated as much.