Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (179 page)
The highest level of resentful anger was to be found in the public service unions, covering underpaid government employees from dustmen to nurses. The major
industrial
unions were far more sanguine about Callaghan’s cuts: so long as Labour kept its promise to protect the traditional skilled industrial workers and leave their privileges intact, their leaders were pleased to tolerate the government’s apostasy. They were rather taken aback to discover that no such deals could be cut with Mrs. Thatcher.
In 1996 (its last year of existence) Britain’s nationalized railway network ‘boasted’ the lowest public subsidy for a railway in Europe. In that year the French were planning for their railways an investment rate of £21 per head of population; the Italians £33; the British just £9.
And private poverty, too. By breaking the link between pensions and wages, Thatcher sharply reduced the retirement income of most of her fellow citizens. By 1997 UK public pensions were just 15 percent of average earnings: the lowest ratio in the EU.
In the decade following her retirement, Margaret Thatcher’s heirs at the Conservative helm declined from the tiresomely humdrum (John Major), through the bumptiously inadequate (William Hague), to the terminally inept (Iain Duncan Smith). After the long reign of the Sun Queen there ensued a deluge of mediocrity.
As she explained to the Scottish Tory Party Conference, on May 14th 1982: ‘It is exciting to have a real crisis on your hands, when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment.’
With perhaps this difference: whereas Margaret Thatcher believed in privatization as something akin to a moral good, Tony Blair just likes rich people.
A 1979 poll revealed that the electoral profile of Mitterrand’s
Parti Socialiste
uncannily reflected that of the country at large, something no other party could claim.
A former banker and one-time adviser to Gaullist Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Delors would go on to preside over the European Commission from 1985-1995.
Even at the height of popular discontent with government policy, in the economic slump of the mid- 1980s, 57 percent of electors declared themselves pleased with Mitterrand’s
foreign
policy.
In 1982 IRI (
Instituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale
) controlled, among much else, all of Italy’s cast-iron manufacturing, two-thirds of its special steel output, one quarter of its ice-cream production and 18 percent of its peeled tomatoes.
The original goal of the
Treuhand
was to convert as many as possible of the nine thousand East German companies (employing seven million men and women) into real businesses and liquidate the rest. But under political pressure it preferred to rehabilitate or consolidate many of the unprofitable concerns, ironically thereby creating a new, semi-public sector subsidized from public funds. See Chapter 21.
14
Instituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, Instituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Elettrica.
Evgenia Ginzburg,
Journey into the Whirlwind
(Harcourt, 1967); Margarete Buber-Neumann,
Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1957); Wolfgang Leonhard,
Child of the Revolution
(Pathfinder Press, 1979), first published in Cologne in 1955 as
Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder
; Victor Serge,
Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire
(Paris, 1951); Boris Souvarine,
Stalin. A Critical Survey of Bolshevism
(first published in English in 1939).
Between 1975 and 1981 France alone took in 80,000 refugees from Indo-China.
In 1963, long after he had lost interest in France’s own Communists, the author of
Les Mains Sales
could still be heard in Prague enthusing about Socialist Realism to a bemused audience of Czech writers and intellectuals.
‘La responsabilité envers l’Histoire dispense de la responsabilité envers les êtres humains’.
‘Pour ma part, je pense que s’il y a une grande cause aujourd’hui, c’est la défense des intellectuals.’ See
Le Nouvel Observateur
, #1140, septembre 1986, ‘Les Grandes Causes, ça existe encore?’
Antonino Bruno,
Marxismo e Idealismo Italiano
(1977), pp.99-100.
Curiously, it was the Czechoslovak government’s decision to ratify the UN human rights Covenants in 1976—the 35th state to do so—that made those Covenants binding under international law.
But even environmentalism had its internal dissidents. Milan Šimečka, the Slovak writer, warned his colleagues (Havel among them) against underestimating the benefits of modernity: ‘I am of the opinion that even the pollution that accompanies industrial prosperity is better than the chaos and brutality which plagues those societies in which people are unable to satisfy their basic needs.’ Milan Šimečka, ‘A World With Utopias or Without Them’,
Cross-Currents
, 3 (1984), p. 26.
Yugoslavia is the exception that illustrates the rule: ‘As there had never been an official culture established in Yugoslavia (which did not prevent the existence of official figures in cultural life), there could never be its natural opposite, an underground, alternative or parallel culture, such as was richly cherished by other socialist countries.’ Dubravka Ugresic,
The Culture of Lies
(1998), page 37.
With good reason. As we have since learned, the British and West German peace movements of the time were thoroughly penetrated by Soviet and East German intelligence.
During the 1980s Poland and Czechoslovakia both slipped into negative economic growth—their economies actually shrinking. The economy of the USSR itself had probably been shrinking since 1979.
Timothy Garton Ash,
The Uses of Adversity
(NY, 1989), page 9.
In agriculture, much of the Soviet Union, Hungary and Romania once again resembled the great nineteenth-century landed estates: poorly-paid, under-performing, inadequately-equipped agricultural labourers did the minimum for their absent employers while saving their energy for the real labour they put into family plots.
I am grateful to Dr Paulina Bren for this reference.
15
In the Brezhnev years a pound of beef cost three and a half rubles to produce but was sold in shops for two rubles. The European Community subsidized its farmers too, and in approximately the same proportions. The difference, of course, was that Western Europe could afford a Common Agricultural Policy and the Soviet Union could not.
Hungary joined the IMF in May 1982, to mutual self-congratulation. Only in 1989 did it emerge that its government had seriously understated its internal and external debt for the previous decade.
Moreover, like Brezhnev himself, they were among the leading consumers of the age. In a Soviet joke from the time, the Soviet leader is showing his mother his
dacha
, his cars and his hunting lodges. ‘It’s wonderful, Leonid,’ she says. ‘But what if the Communists come back to power?’
It is of course the business of the Catholic Church to inveigh against material idols and the sin of pride. But Karol Wojtyła went much further. In his 1975 Lenten Exercises at the Vatican, three years before becoming Pope, he explicitly announced that of the two threats to the Church, consumerism and persecution, the former was by far the graver danger and thus the greater enemy.
Witness his initial support for a projected Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, later withdrawn in the face of international protest. His thoughtless description of Poland under martial law as a ‘vast concentration camp’ reflects a similar limitation.
With the encouragement of the Vatican, the US would provide significant financial support for Solidarity in its clandestine years—by some estimates as much as $50 million.
Though early in his presidency, in November 1981, Reagan did let slip the thought that a nuclear war in Europe need not lead to a strategic exchange. Washington’s West European allies were at least as alarmed as Moscow and both protested vociferously.
There was, of course, never any question of Pershings or Cruises being deployed in France itself . . .
6
It emerged after 1990 that at least 25 Bundestag members in these years were paid agents of the GDR.
7
On December 13th 1981, the day martial law was declared in Poland, Schmidt was in the GDR holding ‘summit talks’ with his counterpart Erich Honecker and was somewhat put out, less by the imprisonment of hundreds of Polish dissidents than by the potentially ‘destabilizing’ impact of Polish developments on improving inter-German relations.
Thanks to an ever-larger GDP, the defense element in American public expenditure had fallen steadily in relative terms from the mid-Fifties through 1979, even during the Vietnam years. It then increased dramatically: as a percentage of Federal outlay, defense spending in 1987 was up by 24 percent on 1980 levels.
In fact Gorbachev’s own family had suffered greatly under Stalin: both of his grandfathers were imprisoned or exiled in the course of the dictator’s purges. But the new Soviet leader did not even acknowledged the fact until November 1990.
‘Mais c’est quoi, la dialectique?’ ‘C’est l’art et la manière de toujours retomber sur ses pattes, mon vieux!’
Jorge Semprún,
Quel Beau Dimanche
(Paris: Grasset, 1980), p. 100
This was the subject of a book by Zhores Medvedev,
Nuclear Disaster in the Urals
, published in exile in 1979.
In an opinion poll taken some months later, in January 1990, Gorbachev ranked just after Peter The Great in public favour—but far behind both Karl Marx and V.I.Lenin...
It was Sakharov who forced the issue into the open by demanding—on live television—the abrogation of Article Six and the return to the peoples’ representatives of the power ‘stolen’ by the Party in 1918. Gorbachev himself finally switched off Sakharov’s microphone, but too late.
He also made a point, at Chernenko’s funeral in March 1985, of meeting and greeting Alessandro Natta, the head of the Italian Communist Party, until then perennially in Moscow’s bad graces.
In an ironically apposite echo of the American fiasco in Vietnam, the puppet regime in Kabul—now bereft of armed support from abroad—limped on until 1992 before succumbing (its international guarantors notwithstanding) to the forces of the Taliban.
Andrei Grachev, quoted in Archie Brown,
The Gorbachev Factor
(Oxford, 1997), p.88.
In 1986 the US lifted its veto on Polish membership of the IMF, in return for the release of all remaining political prisoners and a general amnesty.
See Harold James,
International Monetary Cooperation since Bretton Woods
(IMF + Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 567.
Officially the site of Nagy’s grave had remained unknown for thirty years; in fact its location, in an obscure and unmarked corner of the Budapest Municipal Cemetery, was public knowledge.
I am grateful to Professor Timothy Garton Ash for this reference.
It appears that Honecker had calculated, reasonably enough, that Gorbachev would not last and could safely be ignored.
Three days after Gorbachev’s visit Honecker received a visiting Chinese dignitary and compared the unrest in the GDR with China’s recent ‘counter-revolution’. It seems likely that he was at least contemplating a German re-play of the Tiananmen Square massacre—one reason why his colleagues took the decision to oust him.
To be fair, the East German dissidents genuinely misread the courage of the crowds in November 1989 as the basis for a renewed socialist republic. On the other hand, the source of that misreading was their blind failure to understand what ‘socialism’ had come to mean—and their own investment in its survival.
In certain respects its Polish equivalent came in 1980-81—the political transition in Poland a decade later was an altogether more calculated and negotiated affair.
The author, who was in Prague at this time, can vouch for the intoxicating feeling that history was being made by the hour.
A cartoon in one of the ephemeral Prague student newspapers of December 1989 perfectly captures the generation gap. A paunchy middle-aged man in an undershirt stares with distaste into his shaving mirror at a blowsy woman in the doorway, a dirty nightgown draped over her shoulders, her hair in rollers, a cigarette dangling from her lips. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ she taunts him. ‘I’m your dream of 1968.’
‘If a people have never spoken, the first words they utter are poetry.’ Ferdinando Camon in
La Stampa
, ‘Tutto Libri’, December 16th 1989.
At least until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, after which the West had no further use for an anti-Soviet maverick.
The trial and execution by firing squad were filmed for television, but not shown until two days later.