Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (142 page)

An egregious example was Soviet Russia itself. Until 1914, agricultural modernization and the creation of large and relatively efficient peasant farms (and voluntary cooperatives) meant that Russia was one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural goods, sending up to 40 per cent of its produce abroad. Under Lenin it became a net importer of food, and the deficit widened as the years passed. Stalin’s collectivization policy led to the murder or death by starvation of most of Russia’s best peasant farmers. It branded a mark of Cain on the brow of the regime, which burned more deeply over the decades. The 1963 harvest was the first of the big post-war Soviet agricultural disasters. Khrushchev complained it would have been even worse but for his virgin-land wheat. But his policy, like Stalin’s, was confused and subject to abrupt reversals. His much-boosted virgin lands scheme was a total failure and silently abandoned. He oscillated between state farms and collectives, between centralization and decentralization. In retirement, he complained bitterly of food shortages. Even in a Moscow hospital reserved for high party officials, he whined, the food was disgusting. And Moscow, as always, was the food-showplace of Soviet Russia. It was far worse in the provinces. He met people from traditional food-producing areas who ‘tell me loudly and bitterly how eggs and meat are simply unavailable, and how they had to take a couple of
days and travel to Moscow by train’, for the privilege of queuing for groceries. Why, he asked, should eggs and meat be unobtainable ‘after fifty years of Soviet power’? ‘I look forward to the day’, he wrote, ‘when a camel would be able to walk from Moscow to Vladivostok without being eaten by hungry peasants on the way.’
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But, while he had the power, he never dared to suggest handing back the land to the private sector. Brezhnev and his immediate successors evolved more stable policies – this period was later officially branded ‘the years of stagnation’ – and kept agriculture wholly collectivized. So the food problem grew slowly but steadily worse. Though the Soviet Union had twice as much land under cultivation as any other country, including some of the best soil on earth in the Ukraine, together with a relatively low population density, its import demands, sometimes 15 million tons of grain a year, sometimes 30 million, tended to increase. During the 1970s and 1980s, meat and eggs became scarce in the non-privileged shops even in Moscow.

In the late 1980s, the regime’s agricultural policy changed marginally; a private sector was allowed to develop within strict limits and sell its produce at market (i.e., high) prices. This merely served to reveal the inefficiency and confusion of the state and collectivized sector. Attempts in 1988–91 to introduce ‘realistic’ accounting and sales, while retaining all the basic principles of collectivism, merely made matters worse, especially since the distribution system remained primitive, corrupt and grotesquely inefficient. It was calculated that 40 per cent of the food produced never reached consumers; it rotted in warehouses and railway sidings, or was eaten by rats. By the winter of 1990–91 there was a real threat of starvation in parts of Russia, and the proud Soviet regime was forced to beg for Western food aid. Food-rationing was reintroduced, followed in March 1991 by huge increases in state-determined food prices. It was characteristic of Soviet realities that during the referendum held on 16 March 1991 to determine whether the USSR should remain a unity, the regime, to encourage a high turnout, sold meat and vegetables from its secret reserves at polling stations; but even these had run out by lunchtime.
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At the root of all Soviet difficulties was a theory based on dishonest use of statistical evidence, compounded by sheer ignorance. No Marxist ever seems to have held sensible views on agriculture, perhaps because neither Marx nor Lenin was really interested in it. Marxism is an essentially urban religion.

The Soviets were not alone in their doctrinaire improvidence. Poland, a big food exporter in the 1930s, also became a major net importer, despite her uncollectivized peasantry, because the regime insisted on a socialized distribution system; the position began to
improve slowly in the years 1989–91, with the replacement of Communism by a freely-elected government. Romania, another huge exporter in the 1930s, kept up some exports, to earn hard currency for the ferocious Nicolae Ceausescu regime, only by starving its own people. Hungary, from 1985 onwards, when it began to adopt the market system, slowly raised productivity, so by 1991 it was again a net exporter. Bulgaria followed, belatedly, but Yugoslavia was another net importer of food in the 1980s. Hence the
COMECON
group as a whole, once an area with immense surpluses, became a burden on the world, and was often kept going by low-cost sales from the European Community’s food mountains, themselves the objectionable consequence of an ill-conceived system of subsidies. Thus one unsatisfactory agricultural system served to make bearable – just – another which was an unrelieved disaster.

The Marxist-collectivist influence on agriculture had calamitous results in virtually all the Third World countries which came under its spell. Iraq and Syria, both under radical military dictatorships, and embracing the Utopian mirage of Big Government and state management as a solution to all problems, turned surpluses into deficit. Iran was another example. Indonesia, under Sukarno’s brand of socialism, ceased to export rice, and his successors did only marginally better. Socialist Burma also became a net rice importer. Some of the worst cases occurred in post-colonial Africa, whose leaders eagerly embarked on socialist agricultural experiments, especially in Ghana, which rapidly turned itself from the richest black African territory into one of the poorest, and in Tanzania, which also became a net food-importer, despite receiving more foreign aid
per capita
than any other country in the world. Africa’s food-producing problems, essentially political in origin, were compounded by border troubles and especially civil wars, provoked by oppressive regimes which persecuted minorities for tribal, racial or religious reasons, and so created uprisings. This led to widespread starvation, during the 1980s, in Mozambique and Chad, to give only two examples. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, the most distressing and widespread famines occurred in the Sudan and Ethiopia, partly as a result of rain-failure but chiefly caused by the civil war raging between north and south Sudan, endemic internal unrest in Ethiopia provoked by its Marxist government, which shifted huge masses of peasants from their traditional farming and grazing areas and bombed their villages, and the regime’s wars with its neighbours, Eritrea and Somalia.

By the end of the 1980s, even the few black African states which, in the 1970s, had appeared to be making a success of independence, such as the Ivory Coast, Kenya and Malawi, were experiencing
increasing economic difficulties and social unrest. The plight of Liberia, oldest of the black states (it was founded in 1822), was pitiful: in 1990 it was torn between three murderous personal armies, run by rival contenders to the presidency, a conflict compounded by a supposed ‘peacekeeping force’ provided by neighbouring states which joined in the general pillage, while the unarmed starved. Many of the poorer African states, indeed, had virtually dropped out of the international economy by the 1990s. There were signs, however, of a process of self-education among the ruling élites. Mozambique, for instance, began to dismantle its collectivist economy in 1988 and return to a market system, inviting back Western firms it had once expelled. The same year South Africa reached a cease-fire agreement with Angola, which likewise was repudiating its collectivist structure; and this in turn made possible independence and free elections in the former mandatory territory of South West Africa (Namibia), which also chose a non-radical path.

But the most important change of all came in South Africa itself, which from early 1989 moved decisively away from its peculiar system of ethnic socialism, apartheid. Events in South Africa were of special significance, not only because of the immense interest the outside world took in its racial problems but because, in many ways, South Africa was a microcosm of the global problems which confronted humanity in the early 1990s. There is no other country on earth whose characteristics, and the difficulties they create, are closer to those of the world as a whole. The point is worth enlarging in a little detail. In the early 1990s, the world was composed of a white minority, with low birth-rates, and a non-white majority, with (on the whole) high birth-rates. So was South Africa: in 1989–90 there were about 5 million whites and 30 million non-whites living there, the ratio being of the same order of magnitude as the world’s. South African differentials in annual population growth, ranging from 0.77 per cent for whites, through 1.64 for Asians and 1.89 for ‘coloureds’ (mixed race), to 2.39 for blacks (1988 figures) were similar to those for the world.
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Like the world too, South Africa, with eleven major languages, had no one tongue written or spoken by a majority of its inhabitants. Like the world, it was a combination of a First World economy and a Third World one. Power, including military power, was distributed between whites and non-whites in a similar fashion to that in the world as a whole. Income ratios between whites and non-whites were also comparable to the world’s. Rapid urbanization, which enlarged the proportion of the population, of all races, living in towns and cities from 25 per cent in 1900 to over 60 per cent in 1989, also followed the overall world pattern and led to similar consequences: the
growth of huge, megapolitan slums and horrifying urban crime-rates. Again, like over a hundred other countries throughout the world, South Africa had attempted to solve the resulting problems by enlarging its state sector and adopting a ‘command economy’ attitude, and had thereby merely compounded them.

The flagging of the once vigorous South African economy as a result of apartheid-style Big Government, was, in fact, the compelling reason why F.W. de Klerk, who became leader of the ruling South African Nationalist Party on 2 February 1989, and President of the country on the following 6 September, introduced fundamental changes in the social, economic and political system. He began a dialogue with the black nationalists on 8 July 1989 when he visited the unofficial leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela, in jail, where he had been held for twenty-six years after being convicted of sabotage. The release of Mandela, and of many other ‘political’ prisoners, the lifting of the state of emergency, the unbanning of the
ANC
and similar measures followed later in 1989–91. One result, however, was an increase in violence between blacks (mainly Xhosa) supporting the
ANC
and blacks (mainly Zulu) belonging to the Inkatha movement. De Klerk also acted on the social front. Some aspects of the apartheid legal structure, such as the ban on sexual relations between the races, had been abolished in the 1980s; others had become inoperative under the pressure of population movements and economic change. In February 1991 de Klerk announced fundamental legal changes which ended restrictions on the movement of non-whites, residence and the ownership of houses and land – the economic core of apartheid – leaving only the voting system as the last operative relic of racial discrimination. De Klerk hoped to negotiate some form of power-sharing with black leaders, the white community (and many non-whites) fearing that adoption of a one-man-one-vote system would simply lead to civil war, as it had elsewhere in Africa. Here again, the dilemma was mirrored in the world as a whole. A world government elected by universal adult suffrage would place the whites in a small, permanent majority, made progressively smaller by demographic trends; that was the prospect universal suffrage held for South African whites too.
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One reason why, during the 1980s, Third World countries which had unsuccessfully tried to operate collectivist economies began to turn towards reform and the market was the manifest and growing success of the enterprise states of East Asia. These states, of which Japan, Hong Kong (a British crown colony), Singapore (a former British crown colony, self-governing from 1959, independent from 1965), Taiwan and South Korea, were the most important, had all
begun the post-war period with high birth-rates and low
per capita
incomes ($100 a year or below in every case except Japan). All rejected the collectivist solution, in industry and agriculture. All adopted the market system. Each illustrated the way in which rising
per capita
incomes tended to produce falls in the birth-rate, thus stimulating further wealth-creation. In 1960, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea had birth-rates ranging from 36 (Hong Kong) to 42.9 (South Korea) per 1,000. In all four territories, living standards rose faster in the 1960s than anywhere else in the world. By 1971, Hong Kong’s birth-rate was below the 20-per-1,000 mark, Singapore’s almost there, and both Taiwan and South Korea were below the 30-per-l,000 mark.
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These trends accelerated in the 1980s. By the late 1980s, Hong Kong’s
per capita
income, despite a huge influx of penniless immigrants from China, was believed to be not far below $10,000, Singapore’s (1987) was $7,464, Taiwan’s (1987) $5,075 and South Korea’s (1988) $3,450. In short, these countries were rapidly ceasing to be Third World states and were becoming part of the First World. In fact during the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of the Pacific enterprise state was perhaps the most encouraging material aspect of human society.

The process started in Japan in the late 1940s. As in West Germany in 1948–9 and France in 1958, the foundation was an excellent constitution. As we have seen, Japan’s pre-war constitution was a shambles and its whole system of law primitive and unstable. The Occupation, under which America had sole power, in effect vested in an autocrat, General MacArthur, proved a decisive blessing. He was able to play the role of enlightened despot, and impose on Japan a revolution from above, like the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s which launched the Japanese as a modern nation. The 1947 constitution, drawn up in MacArthur’s headquarters, was not an inter-party compromise, representing the lowest common denominator of agreement, but a homogeneous concept, incorporating the best aspects of the British and US constitutions and (like de Gaulle’s) steering a skilful median between executive and legislature and between central and devolved power.
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Taken in conjunction with other Occupation laws creating free trade unions, a free press and devolved control of the police (the armed forces as such were abolished), the constitution, and the ‘American era’ which it epitomized, succeeded in destroying the mesmeric hold the state had hitherto exercised over the Japanese people. The American occupation of Japan was probably the greatest constructive achievement of American overseas policy in the whole post-war period, and it was carried through virtually single-handed.
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And, as with Britain’s creation of a model trade
union movement for West Germany, it raised up a mighty competitor.