The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Introduction

Books on the twentieth century tend to be either encyclopedias or tracts. I have a certain weakness for the tract approach: it makes for readability, because, as Pirandello said, facts are like sacks, which do not hold up unless you put something into them. If asked to recommend a book on this subject, I always suggest Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, written from — on the whole — the Right, or Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, written from a head-shaking Left. Each is very good on the vices of the other.

I am not a tractarian. This book began life as a history of the entire twentieth century, but I soon realized that the task was too great, not least because the two halves of the century were so different. Churchill and Hitler were old-fashioned figures, looking back to the nineteenth century, but 1945 was, as the Germans called it, Stunde Null, when things started anew. There had been a three-cornered international battle, between Fascism, Communism and what, for want of a more accurate word, we have to call liberalism, i.e. the free-market-democracy world of which the USA became the pre-eminent representative. Fascism lost, and quite soon the other two were fighting the Cold War, which ended fifty years later. ‘Capitalism’ was not in splendid shape, and it lost various tricks in the fifties. Of course, in 1989, it won, and even triumphed: as a Soviet marshal said, the Soviet Union had lost the third world war without firing a shot. However, the triumphalism of 1989 did not really last for very long, and, with financial and other troubles, the world was back, in a sense, to the doubts and compromises that had marked the 1970s. Back then, it was the Left that, on the whole, might appear triumphalist, and it is as well to be reminded of the swings and roundabouts in these matters.

In the fifties, a great many people assumed that the Soviet system was superior. Perhaps the greatest symbol of this was Sputnik in 1957, the first man-made satellite in space. It came from a country which, back in 1914, had been by European standards well behind — two thirds of the railwaymen illiterate, for instance. But the concentration on education in Soviet Russia was extraordinary, even reaching far into backward Central Asia. One of my earliest semi-adult memories is a visit to the Brussels Exhibition of 1958, taken there by a splendid French family with whom, for a month at a time over four years, I did an exchange. They, the Simottels of Brest, were well-off, and we, my mother school-teaching in Glasgow, an RAF war widow, were not: Madame Simottel understood, and was superb (and even sent me to a Franco-German establishment in Lindau, on Lake Constance, where I learned to massacre German in the French manner). The bus from Brest to Brussels stopped off in Amiens, and we went to the cathedral, which, since I knew that Amiens had been the main town for the British army in the First World War, moved me greatly. In Brussels, where the exhibition was marked by an ‘Atomium’ — there was a European Atomic Community, though it never took off — the various states showed off, and the Soviet one was best.

The British Pavilion was not bad, not bad at all, but it was very old-fashioned (not a bad thing — subsequent efforts, as with the Dome, verged on the farcical, and the British should just stick to old formulas: it was stained-glass windows, Benjamin Britten, and a general air of reverential hush; it got the third prize). The French one dwelled on the wonderful things that France was doing in Algeria (they were all going to leave, in four years, and at fifteen I had made myself unloved in Brest by predicting this). The American one was boring; kitchen equipment or something. The Soviet one had Sputnik, I suppose, but I remember a room with recordings of Oistrakh doing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and, at seventeen, you are forgiven for succumbing. Nowadays, I have what must be a complete collection of everything that Svyatoslav Richter ever played, though nothing could ever replace those live performances, and I have never forgotten the Hammerklavier that he performed at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1975 or 1976, peace to his rather tortured soul. As things have turned out, it was the Michael Jacksons (his rather mercenary obsequies proceeding as I write, in late July 2009) who won. Why, is a good question, to which I wish I had a dogmatic answer. A Russian in New York asked, in bewilderment, why is it that, with a system of education five times better, we have an economy five times worse? In this book, I have tried to answer such questions. The Atlantic world won, warts and all.

In this book, Communism is central, but so is the other great theme, the extraordinary vigour of the ‘capitalist’ (Hayek tried to find another word, and failed) world. It has helped that I have been here before. In some ways, this book is a continuation of an earlier one, Europe Transformed 1878-1919. In that period, free-market democracy, or whichever word you want to use, spread, and the British were at the centre of the world system. Even then, something of an Atlantic system was building up, the British by far the largest investors in the United States, although, as the great economic crash of the early 1930s was to show, the Americans were not yet up to the world-wide responsibilities that their economic weight entailed. It was particularly absurd to slap a tariff against the exports of countries that owed money to the USA and could not pay, except if they exported, but other things went wrong as well, including the collapse of thousands of banks. It was only in the later thirties, and especially during the Second World War, that these matters were responsibly managed, and after 1947 (when my book really starts) there was an extraordinary boom in the West, the Atlantic world of my title. Its symbol has been the extraordinary growth of English, the language, as a French ambassador sagely remarked, that is easiest to speak badly. Nowadays, when I have to introduce this subject to Turkish students, I ask them to bear in mind that they use the language, wear the clothes, and — sadly — listen to the music or eat the fast food (in a superior version) of the Atlantic.

The post-1947 era has had a great many resemblances, of a greatgrandfatherly kind, to the present. Marvellous inventions, ultimately the computer and the internet, are part of the story. However, before we succumb in admiring speechlessness, it is worth remembering that the later nineteenth century was there before us, so much so that I refuse to regard ‘globalization’, an ugly word in any event, as something new. By 1890, there had been wonderful inventions: horses and carts to aircraft in a generation. One of my earliest memories is of being taken by my mother to see a friend of hers, whose grandmother, aged about a hundred, was bed-ridden but otherwise in good order. She told me what it had been like to have a dental operation, in rural Scotland, in what must have been about 1848. The story went: barn-yard table, two large glasses of whisky, string round tooth, other end attached to door of barn, slammed shut; half tooth off; more whisky, then stable chisel used to extract rest of tooth (little girl then lives for ever). By 1900, there would have been ether to knock her out. By 1948, when my own dental visits started, a drill worked by the dentist’s foot, and I still dread a visit to the dentist, but my splendid Turkish dentist now understands why I need a jab even for tooth-cleaning. Andrew Wilson, in his Victorians, rightly remarks that these improvements in dentistry are one of the few elements of progress that can be welcomed without reservation: with others, there have been great drawbacks. At any rate, the years 1878-1914 saw an enormous jump in progress, as measured by the positivist standards of the era. This left writers, often, strangely gloomy, and Orwell teased them: quoting, say, Ernest Dowson’s ‘I have been faithful to thee, Cynara’, he remarks, ‘hard cheese, old chap’. But the Dowsons were right. That world of progress came to an end in 1914, with the First World War, and the following generation saw the great disasters. The thirties were indeed, as an old student of mine, Richard Overy, calls them, ‘morbid’. It is salutary to remember that the ‘research’ of Dr Mengele at Auschwitz — he ended up, tail-waggingly, carting a box of eyeballs to his professor at Frankfurt through the mess of 1945 Germany and was very hurt when his university deprived him of his doctorate — was paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation (though the story is more complicated).

At any rate, the West, in 1947, resumed the progress that had happened before 1914. I write, ‘progress’, but there is much over which heads can be shaken. It has gone together with a vulgarization and a coarsening of things, although before 1914 reactionaries had also complained of this. The decisive year seems to have been 1968, when there were babyish revolts, terrifying enough to bureaucracies for them just to capitulate: the universities of Europe, to which the world had beaten its path in 1914, collapsed into near irrelevance. I had direct experience of what happened to the great university of Louvain in Belgium in that, thirty-five years ago, I was asked to translate an admirable official history, for presentation of honorary doctorates to the usual suspects (Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron) by an institution that had become Flemish. It was an exceedingly interesting task, but also depressing: in Louvain, if in some public office, even a telephone box, you were required to speak Flemish, even if you explained that you were foreign. Being from Glasgow, and speaking decent German, I could more or less make it up, and the resulting hilarity ensured that my messages got through, but the growth of provincial nationalism is an absurd phenomenon, and in this book I make my protest by using ‘England’, often enough, to cover a country generally known, in passport-ese, as ‘UK’. We say ‘Holland’ to cover Zeeland, without resorting to ‘The Netherlands’, which is anyway inaccurate. Pace Glasgow, England saved us from civil war, and I owe her a considerable debt.

If there is a single country of which admirable things can be said in the era after 1947, it would of course be Germany. Success is boring, and Germans shake their heads, but their recovery has been remarkable. The world of late nineteenth-century progress came to an end when Germany kicked over the board, and went to war in 1914. It was an exercise in intelligent craziness that ended with Hitler’s Bunker in 1945; Downfall (Der Untergang) is, after The Third Man, Graham Greene’s Vienna of 1947, one of the grand films (and quite accurate, as I know from having seen the interrogations, in Moscow, of the Bunker witnesses). It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the counterpoint, over the centuries, of Germany and England. I would even claim that the best historians of Germany are English, and I seem to have taught German to them, from Richard Overy and David Blackbourn to Harold James and Niall Ferguson. I cut my own teeth as historian by looking at Austria-Hungary, and if I rationalize about that, now, I can see that I was really looking at two important questions, which, in the early 1960s, I was hardly able to appreciate. You are looking, in the first instance, at the question of nationalism: why, as a Yugoslav remarks, do the peasants grow up and hate their nearest neighbour, and what can be done about it? The other question is more difficult: given that Prussia ended in disaster, why was the Catholic, Austrian, alternative not more successful? In the end this is an old nineteenth-century question, boiling down to the relationship of Catholicism and Liberalism — not a happy story. An old Cambridge colleague, Tim Blanning, in his The Pursuit of Glory, produces some answers. It is about the third Germany, great-great-grandfather of the Bundesrepublik, those prince-bishoprics that were very worthy and thought that the Thirty Years War had been a mistake. The prince-bishoprics — harmless souls — took over in 1949, and have done incredibly well. 1989, the fall of the Wall, was a deserved tribute, though the Lutheran Church rather characteristically forbade the tolling of bells in celebration. Margaret Thatcher — one of the none-too-many heroic figures in this book: my others would be Charles de Gaulle and Helmut Schmidt — worried that some sort of Fourth Reich was emerging, and invited me to Chequers, along with other historians, to lecture her on the subject. I was able to reassure her that, in taking over East Germany, the West Germans were just getting six Liverpools. We shall see what they make of it. Yes, the European Union is German-dominated, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

However, the creativity has been Atlantic, not European, and that involves messiness. This was most obviously on display in England. It had been rather spoiled, post-war, and for a very long time, well into the eighties, a tiresome self-satisfaction reigned. At Oxford, I used to dread having to mark the examination scripts covering the ultramodern period of British history, because they all beta-plusly said the same things about the 1945 Labour government (of which I had, of all oddities, been an agitprop exhibit, photographed winsomely clutching a bunny and a blanket in advertisement of crèches to help the working mother). Very, very few undergraduates managed to write originally about that period, the best of them an Italian, of Communist background, and the real reason was that none of them knew how much better matters had been organized on the Continent. That England came to grief in the seventies, when, of all oddities, the very heartland of Atlantic capitalism had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund. Helmut Schmidt shook his head, and Germans in Scotland could not believe the level of poverty. And then came the remarkable turnaround. England is a place gifted with tissue regeneration. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, and there was a very bumpy period as she turned things round, in the teeth of endless criticism, often contemptuous, from the powers that had been. I myself drew some flak for writing in the press, fairly frequently, in support of her. So be it: I was right. Nowadays there are 400 German students at Oxford, the largest foreign contingent, and they are not there because the truth is in the middle.

Of course, the United States, in it all, was the great creative force. All along, you need to read American books (while I am on the subject, here is a curious fact: in the Cambridge University library, where, unlike the Bodleian at Oxford, you can go round the stacks, the books on ‘Reaganomics’ are almost never taken out). For some reason, they are much more interesting on defeat — Vietnam — than on victory, and the enormous biographies of presidents are a considerable though necessary bore. I have had to read enormous amounts of dross, have made a vow never ever again to read a book by a man with a beard, and sometimes think that America abolished feudalism only through making serfs think they were free. Still, it has huge bursts of creativity, and serious thoughts about the modern world come from there: there is a strange fact that the stars whom I have taught, with Harold James or Niall Ferguson or David Blackbourn, ended up there. America follows from Europe Transformed, and Niall Ferguson was quite right to explore the British parallels.

As is inevitable with a book of this sort, it brings back my yesterdays. Much of what I say about England has had to be wrenched out. It was a very good place in the fifties and I can remember what it was like, going to the old Cambridge schol. exam, through the last great fog, by a steam train from Glasgow Central Station. The Head Porter at Caius, in a top hat, an ex-sergeant major frequently mistaken for the Master, received you, and then, at 9 a.m. in the Old Schools in Benet Street, you were confronted with an examination, beautifully printed, which read, ‘For translation into French’. The passage would read: ‘choppingly, the blades flashing in the wan sunlight, the queen’s skiff moved through a brisk north-easterly towards the port of Leith (A. Fraser)’. In those days there was an interesting battle between the examiners and the schoolmasters, and I had an enormous advantage, in that I had been taught by the siege-master extraordinary, Christopher Varley, at Glasgow Academy, who had no thoughts at all — he read Balzac for the vocabulary, a siege-engine of some power, which enabled you to turn the tables on the interviewers, who would be lost as you trotted out words such as balivot, or is it baliveau, meaning a tree marked one year to be cut down the next, in English, ‘staddle’. The examiners were wiped out, but, once at Caius, I realized I could not handle literary criticism (admittedly there was some excuse: they expected me to read Gide, to whom ‘hard cheese, old chap’ was indeed the only possible response). I switched to history, and was again very lucky, in that I fell under the control of Neil McKendrick, a teacher of genius. He taught me a version of history which was an updated version of the Whig Interpretation, and I have been struggling ever since to get away from it. I remember my first supervision. I had written some drivel about the Dutch Revolt, as to how the breasts of free men could not be whatever-it-was against Inquisitions and what-not. He said, do not forget that torture can be quite efficient. I am still not sure about the Whig Interpretation of English history. The experience of the 1980s showed that there was a huge amount to be said for the Whig Atlantic, warts and all. The warts are horrible — Michael Jack-son and the rest — but the Atlantic won, and is now spreading to, of all places, China. Chinese students are now all over Oxford, learning English. The resurrection of that extraordinary civilization must count as the best thing in the modern world.

There has been another resurrection: Turkey. I have been teaching there for some fifteen years, and very happily so: my university, Bilkent, a private one, was established a quarter-century ago in the teeth of considerable resistance. Its founder, İhsan Doğramacı, had a very good idea as to what was going wrong with universities in the 1970s. Inflation had been a disaster, and Turkey was one of the centres of the troubles of the 1970s. However, she too is a country with tissue regeneration, and though I was much criticized by left-wing friends for being a sort of monkey in a fez jumping up and down on the Bilkent barrel organ, they now admit that I was right. In the latter part of this book, concerning the 1980s, I have written a good bit about Turkey, because there is much interest in a process that has turned the country into a considerable economic power, with a resonance throughout Eurasia. When the country started off, in 1923, you could not even have a table made, unless by an Armenian carpenter, because the legs wobbled, the Turks not knowing how to warp wood. Now, they make F16s. Today, aged not far from seventy, I still look forward to marching into a class of Turks, the best being excellent, and the others decorative and polite. As ever, I owe much to my Rector, Professor Ali Doğramacı.

I have a great many other debts of gratitude, a book of this scope needing a great deal of outside support. The London Library is a wonderful institution, and my assistants, Onur Onol and Yasin Yavuz, have been helpful way beyond the line of duty. My agent, Caroline Michel, has been magnificently encouraging, as have Simon Winder at Penguin and Lara Heimert at Basic Books. Rupert Stone, as ever my target reader, made encouraging comments, and Christine Stone has splendidly put up with the bad patches that come up when sails flap listlessly in windlessness. Over the years I have of course learned a great deal from friends in various countries, and I can here only acknowledge a few. Manfred Bruncken, of the Hanns-Martin-Schleyer Foundation in Cologne, Francine-Dominique Lichtenhan in Paris, Sergey Mironenko in Moscow, Rusty Greenland in Texas and, on matters to do with business in England, Robert Goddard have all been especially informative and helpful. In Turkey I have as ever relied especially upon David Barchard, Andrew Mango, Sean McMeekin, Hasan Ali Karasar, Evgenia and Hasan Unal and Sergey Podbolotov. As regards the significance of the 1980s, I have been fortunate to be able to discuss them at length, and at all levels, with Niall Ferguson, Nick Stone and Robert Skidelsky. There is one final debt. Towards the end of her time in office, Margaret Thatcher took me on as speech-writer, and these were rather dramatic occasions. She did not exactly throw things, but she made her point, and you did not spend five minutes in her company without having a memory to chalk up. She represented a force of tissue-regeneration that, in the 1970s, I had not expected.