Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (112 page)

In post-revolutionary Portugal, Article 85 of the Constitution and a subsequent 1977 law explicitly forbade private enterprise in banking, insurance, transport, posts and telecommunications, electricity production and distribution, petroleum refining and the arms industry. The Socialist administration of Mário Soares sought in 1983 to introduce some flexibility by allowing the private sector to compete with the state in banking and insurance, and authorizing joint-stock companies to form in the steel, petroleum, chemical and arms industries. But it would be some time before the remaining protected sectors were opened even to limited competition.

Mediterranean Europe—like post-Communist Central Europe a few years later—would probably have been even slower to relinquish state controls but for the impact of the European Community/Union. The fixed currency parities of the European Monetary System (EMS) after 1979 were an early constraint—one reason why the Mitterrand governments started selling public assets was to reassure currency markets and thus maintain the franc at its agreed level in EMS. But Brussels’ chief means of leverage were the rules being drawn up for the operation of a single European market. The latter obliged all businesses—public and private alike—to conform to norms of open competition within and eventually between countries. There was to be no favoring of national ‘champions’, or hidden subsidies or other advantage for publicly-owned or controlled enterprises competing for contracts or custom.

However much these regulations were circumvented in practice, their mere existence obliged state-owned firms to comport themselves in the marketplace no differently from private ones—at which point there was little reason to maintain the state’s involvement in their affairs. The Italian response was typical of that of many other member states of the Community: in 1990 Italy adopted new regulations that echoed the relevant clauses of the Single European Act, requiring all state-owned firms to apply the principle of open and equal competition in all their dealings—except in the case of firms and undertakings where a state monopoly was ‘vital to its tasks’, a clause whose flexibility and vagueness allowed governments to adapt to European norms while staying sensitive to local pressures.

Despite the excited talk in Brussels (and London) of increased openness and ‘competitiveness’ the European privatization fever of these years probably wrought less change than its supporters promised or expected. Critics had warned that the result would not be more competition but simply a transfer of concentrated economic power from the public to the private sphere and this is what happened. Thanks to complicated cross-shareholding arrangements, many large private firms in France, for example, mimicked the behaviour of the old public companies. They monopolized whole sectors and were no more responsive to their small ‘stakeholders’ than they had been to taxpayers or consumers when administered under public management.

Ironically, privatization and increased competition also had little immediate impact upon the size of the state sector itself. We have already seen that in Thatcher’s Britain the scope of the state actually
expanded
. So it was elsewhere. Between 1974 and 1990 (thanks in some measure to endemic private-sector unemployment) the share of the employed workforce in public service actually grew: from 13 percent to 15.1 percent in Germany; from 13.4 percent to 15.5 percent in Italy; from 22.2 percent to 30.5 percent in Denmark. Most of these government employees, however, were now in the tertiary sector rather than in manufacturing: providing and administering services (financial, educational, medical and transportation) rather than making things.

Economic liberalization did not signal the fall of the welfare state, nor even its terminal decline, notwithstanding the hopes of its theorists. It did, though, illustrate a seismic shift in the allocation of resources and initiative from public to private sectors. This change went far beyond the technical question of who owned which factories, or how much regulation there was to be in any given industry. For nearly half a century Europeans had watched the state, and public authorities, play a steadily more prominent part in their affairs. This process had become so commonplace that the premise behind it—that the activist state was a necessary condition of economic growth and social amelioration—was largely taken for granted. Without the cumulative unraveling of this assumption in the course of the waning decades of the century, neither Thatcherism nor the Mitterrand
volte-face
would have been possible.

XVIII

The Power of the Powerless

‘Marxism is not a philosophy of history, it is
the
philosophy of history, and
to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history’.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

‘I talk about rights because they alone will enable us to leave this magic
lantern show’.
Kazimierz Brandys

‘Totalitarian society is the distorted mirror of the whole of modern
civilization’.
Václav Havel

‘The pressure of the state machine is nothing compared with the pressure
of a convincing argument’.
Czesław Miłosz

Behind the long ‘Social-Democratic moment’ in Western Europe there had lain not just pragmatic faith in the public sector, or allegiance to Keynesian economic principles, but a sense of the shape of the age that influenced and for many decades stifled even its would-be critics. This widely-shared understanding of Europe’s recent past blended the memory of Depression, the struggle between Democracy and Fascism, the moral legitimacy of the welfare state, and—for many on both sides of the Iron Curtain—the expectation of social progress. It was the Master Narrative of the twentieth century; and when its core assumptions began to erode and crumble, they took with them not just a handful of public-sector companies but a whole political culture and much else besides.

If one were seeking a symbolic moment when this transformation was accomplished, a hinge on which post-war Europe’s self-understanding turned, it came in Paris on December 28th 1973 with the first Western publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
The Gulag Archipelago.
Reviewing the English translation in the
Guardian
, W. L. Webb wrote ‘To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool, missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.’ The irony, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged, was that the message of the book—that ‘real existing Socialism’ was a barbaric fraud, a totalitarian dictatorship resting upon a foundation of slave labour and mass murder—was hardly new.

Solzhenitsyn himself had written about the subject before, and so had numberless victims, survivors, observers and scholars.
The Gulag Archipelago
added hundreds of pages of detail and data to earlier testimonies, but in its moral fervor and emotional impact it was not obviously a greater work of witness than Evgenia Ginzburg’s
Journey into the Whirlwind
, published in 1967; Margarete Buber-Neumann’s memoir of her experiences in both Soviet and Nazi camps, first published in German in 1957; Wolfgang Leonhard’s disabused account of his own misplaced faith, which appeared in 1955; or even earlier demolitions of the Soviet myth by Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine.
²⁵⁵

But timing was all. Intellectual critics of Communism had never been lacking; however their impact had for many decades been blunted by a widespread desire in Western Europe (and, as we have seen, in Eastern Europe through the 1960s) to find some silver lining, however dim, in the storm cloud of state socialism that had rolled across much of the continent since it first broke upon Russia in 1917. ‘Anti-Communism’, whatever its real or imputed motives, suffered the grievous handicap of appearing to challenge the shape of History and Progress, to miss the ‘bigger picture’, to deny the essential contiguity binding the democratic welfare state (however inadequate) to Communism’s collectivist project (however tainted).

That is why opponents of the post-war consensus were so marginalized. To suggest, as Hayek and others had done, that market-restraining plans for the common good, albeit well-intentioned, were not just economically inefficient but also and above all the first step on the road to serfdom, was to tear up the road map of the twentieth century. Even opponents of Communist dictatorship like Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus or Isaiah Berlin, who tried to insist upon the distinction between social-democratic reforms for the common benefit and party dictatorships established in the name of a collectivist myth, appeared to many of their ‘progressive’ critics to echo and thus serve partisan political allegiances taken up in the Cold War.

Accordingly, they fell foul of a widespread reluctance, especially on the part of the Sixties generation, to abandon the radical catechism. It was one thing to sneer knowingly at Stalin, now long dead and anyway condemned by his own heirs. It was quite another to acknowledge that the fault lay not in the man but the system. And to go further, to impute responsibility for the crimes and misdemeanors of Leninism to the project of radical utopianism itself was to mine the very buttresses of modern politics. As the British historian E. P. Thompson, something of a cult figure to a younger generation of ‘post-Communist Marxists’, wrote accusingly to Leszek Kołakowski (after Kołakowski published a damning indictment of Soviet Communism in the wake of 1968):
your
disenchantment is a threat to
our
Socialist faith.

By 1973, however, that faith was under serious assault not just from critics but from events themselves. When
The Gulag Archipelago
was published in French, the Communist daily newspaper
l’Humanité
dismissed it, reminding readers that since ‘everyone’ already knows all about Stalin, anyone rehashing all
that
could only be motivated by ‘anti-Sovietism’. But the accusation of ‘anti-Sovietism’ was losing its force. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Prague and its repressive aftermath, and of reports filtering out of China about the Cultural Revolution, Solzhenitsyn’s root and branch condemnation of the whole Communist project rang true—even and perhaps especially to erstwhile sympathizers.

Communism, it was becoming clear, had defiled and despoiled its radical heritage. And it was continuing to do so, as the genocide in Cambodia and the widely-publicized trauma of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ would soon reveal.
²⁵⁶
Even those in Western Europe—and they were many—who held the United States largely responsible for the disasters in Vietnam and Cambodia, and whose anti-Americanism was further fuelled by the American-engineered killing of Chile’s Salvador Allende just three months before the publication of
The Gulag Archipelago
, were increasingly reluctant to conclude as they had once done that the Socialist camp had the moral upper hand. American imperialism was indeed bad—but the other side was worse, perhaps far worse.

At this point the traditional ‘progressive’ insistence on treating attacks on Communism as implicit threats to
all
socially-ameliorative goals—i.e. the claim that Communism, Socialism, Social Democracy, nationalization, central planning and progressive social engineering were part of a common political project—began to work against itself. If Lenin and his heirs had poisoned the well of social justice, the argument ran, we are
all
damaged. In the light of twentieth-century history the state was beginning to look less like the solution than the problem, and not only or even primarily for economic reasons. What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing.

That, of course, is a very ‘intellectual’ sort of conclusion, but then the impact of the retreat from the state was felt most immediately by intellectuals—appropriately enough, since it was intellectuals who had been most zealous in promoting social improvement from above in the first place. As Jiří Gruša, the Czech writer, was to observe in 1984: ‘It was we [writers] who glorified the modern state.’ By its very nature, modern tyranny—as Ignazio Silone noted—requires the collaboration of intellectuals. It was thus altogether appropriate that it was the disaffectionof Europe’s intellectuals from the grand narrative of progress that triggered the ensuing avalanche; and somehow fitting that this disaffection was most marked in Paris, where the narrative itself had first taken intellectual and political shape two centuries earlier.

France in the Seventies and Eighties was no longer Arthur Koestler’s ‘burning lens of Western Civilization’, but French thinkers were still unusually predisposed to engage universal questions. Writers and commentators in Spain or West Germany or Italy in these years were much taken up with local challenges—though the terrorist threat that preoccupied them carried implications of its own for the discrediting of radical utopianism. Intellectuals in the UK, never deeply touched by the appeal of Communism, were largely indifferent to its decline and thus kept their distance from the new Continental mood. In France, by contrast, there had been widespread and longstanding local sympathy for the Communist project. As antiCommunism gathered pace in French public discussion, abetted by the steady decline in the Communist Party’s vote and influence, it was thus fuelled by local recollection and example. A new generation of French intellectuals transited with striking alacrity out of Marxism, driven by a sometimes unseemly haste to abjure their own previous engagement.

In condemning the distortions of radical utopianism, the young Parisian ‘new philosophers’ of the mid-Seventies like André Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Lévy were in most respects unoriginal. There was little in Glucksmann’s
Les Maîtres Penseurs
—published to universal acclaim in March 1977—that Raymond Aron had not said better in his
Opium des Intellectuels
twenty two years earlier. And there was nothing in Lévy’s
Barbarie à Visage Humain
, which appeared two months after Glucksmann’s essay, which French readers could not have found in Albert Camus’s
L’Homme révolté
. But whereas Camus’s essay was cuttingly dismissed by Jean-Paul Sartre when it came out in 1951, Lévy and Glucksmann were influential bestsellers. Times had changed.