The Penguin History of the World

3 Crises and Détente

In the 1970s, the two great powers still bestrode the world like giants, as they had done since 1945, and they still often talked as if the world was divided into their adherents or enemies. But changes had come about in the way they were regarded. Some believed the United States to have lost its once overwhelming military preponderance over the Soviet Union, and perhaps any preponderance at all. The perception was wrong, but many, and even some Americans, shared it. Those easily frightened by signs of instability wondered what would happen if another confrontation arose. Others thought that a more even balance might make such a crisis unlikely. Other relevant changes, too, were difficult to weigh up. The two once more or less disciplined blocs, surrounded by small fry in danger of being swallowed by them, were showing signs of strain. New quarrels were beginning to cut across old ideological divisions. More interesting still, there were signs that new aspirants to the role of superpower might be emerging. Some people even began to talk about an era of détente.

Once again, the roots of change go back some way and there are no sharp dividing lines between phases. The death of Stalin, for instance, could hardly have been without effect, although it brought no obvious immediate change in Soviet policy, and even more difficulty in interpreting it. Subsequent changes of personnel led after nearly two years to the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as the dominant figure in the Soviet government, and the retirement in 1956 of Molotov, Stalin’s old henchman and veteran of Cold War diplomacy, from his post as foreign minister. There had then followed a sensational speech by Khrushchev at a secret session of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. In it he denounced the misdeeds of the Stalin era and declared ‘coexistence’ now to be the goal of Soviet foreign policy. The speech was soon given wide publicity, which shook the monolithic front Communism had hitherto presented to the world, and for the first time alienated many Communist sympathizers in western countries who had been hitherto untroubled by Soviet realities – or, perhaps, the revelations allowed them to express an alienation they already felt at no cost to their consciences.

Together with announcements of Soviet reductions in armaments, Khrushchev’s speech might have heralded a new mood in international affairs, had not the atmosphere in 1956 quickly been fouled. The Suez adventure called forth Soviet threats to Great Britain and France; Moscow was not going to risk Arab goodwill by failing to show support for Egypt. But the same year had also brought more anti-Soviet rioting in Poland and a revolution in Hungary. Soviet policy had always been morbidly sensitive to signs of deviation or dissatisfaction among its satellites. In 1948, Soviet advisers had been recalled from Yugoslavia, which was then expelled from the Cominform. Yugoslavia’s treaties with the USSR and other Communist states were denounced, and five years of vitriolic attacks on ‘Titoism’ began. Not until 1957 did the two governments finally come to an understanding when the USSR climbed down and symbolically resumed its aid to Tito.

Yugoslavia’s damaging and embarrassing survival as a socialist state outside the Warsaw Pact, however, had made Moscow even more sensitive to tremors in the eastern camp. Like anti-Soviet riots in East Berlin in 1953, those in Poland in the summer of 1956 showed that patriotism, inflamed by economic discontent, could still challenge Communism in places nearer its heartland. Similar forces help also to explain how disturbances in Budapest in October 1956 grew into a nationwide movement that led to the withdrawal of Soviet forces from the city, a new Hungarian government promising free elections and the end of one-party rule. When that government also announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, declared Hungary’s neutrality, and asked the United Nations to take up the Hungarian question, the Soviet army returned. Thousands fled the country and the Hungarian revolution was crushed. The UN General Assembly twice condemned the intervention, but to no avail.

This episode hardened attitudes on both sides. The Soviet leadership could again reflect on how little they were liked by the peoples of eastern Europe and therefore became even more distrustful of western talk of ‘liberating’ them. Western European nations were again reminded of the real face of Soviet power and sought to consolidate their growing strength.

In October 1957, Sputnik I had opened the age of superpower competition in space and gave a terrible shock to Americans’ confidence that Soviet technology lagged behind their own. Soviet foreign policy in the Khrushchev era meanwhile continued to show recalcitrance, unco-operativeness and sometimes remarkable confidence. Fearing the danger of a rearmed West Germany, the Soviet leaders were anxious to strengthen their satellite, the German Democratic Republic. The all too visible success and prosperity of West Berlin – surrounded by GDR territory – was embarrassing. The city’s internal boundaries between west and east were easily crossed and well-being and freedom drew more and more East Germans – especially skilled workers – to the west. In 1958, the USSR denounced the arrangements under which Berlin had been run for the previous ten years and said the Soviet sector of the city would be handed over to the GDR if better arrangements could not be found. Two years of drawn-out wrangling followed.

As an atmosphere of crisis over Berlin deepened, the outflow of refugees through the city shot up. The numbers of East Germans crossing to the west were 140,000 in 1959, 200,000 in 1960. When more than 100,000 did so in the first six months of 1961, in August that year the East German authorities suddenly put up a wall (soon reinforced by land-mines and barbed wire) to cut off Berlin’s Soviet sector from the western sectors. Tension increased in the short run, but in the long term the Berlin Wall may have calmed things down. Its gloomy presence (and the sporadic killing of East Germans who tried to cross it) was to be for a quarter of a century a gift to western Cold War propaganda. The GDR had succeeded in stopping emigration, though. Khrushchev quietly dropped more extreme demands when it was clear that the United States was not prepared to give way over the legal status of Berlin, even at the risk of war.

A similar rhythm was seen the following year over Cuba, although the risk was then far greater. The European allies of the United States were not so directly interested as they had been over a possible change in the German settlement, nor did the Soviets seem to pay much attention to Cuban views. Moreover, in a virtually ‘pure’ confrontation of the superpowers, the Soviet Union appeared to have been forced to give way. While avoiding action or language which might have been dangerously provocative, and while leaving a simple route of retreat open to his opponent by confining his demands to essentials, President Kennedy none the less made no conspicuous concessions, though the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey followed quietly after a little while. Immediately, Khrushchev had to be satisfied with an undertaking that the United States would not invade Cuba.

It is difficult to believe that this was not a major turning-point. The prospect of nuclear war as the ultimate price of geographical extension of the Cold War had been faced by the Soviet Union and found unacceptable. The subsequent setting-up of direct telephone communication between the heads of the two states – the ‘hot line’ – recognized that the danger of conflict through misunderstanding made necessary some more intimate and immediate connection than the ordinary channels of diplomacy. It was also clear that in spite of Soviet boasting to the contrary, American preponderance in armed strength was as great as ever. The new weapon that mattered for purposes of direct conflict between the two superpowers was the intercontinental rocket missile; at the end of 1962 the Americans had superiority in this weapon of more than six to one over the Soviets, who set to work to reduce this disparity. The choice was made of rockets before butter, and once again the Soviet consumer was to bear the burden.

Meanwhile, the Cuban confrontation had helped to achieve the first agreement between Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union on the restriction of testing nuclear weapons in space, the atmosphere or underwater. Disarmament would still be pursued without success for many years, but this was the first positive outcome of any negotiations about nuclear weapons.

In 1964 Khrushchev was removed from office. As head of both government and party since 1958 it seems likely that his personal contribution to Soviet history had been to provide a great shaking-up. That had meant qualified ‘de-Stalinization’, a huge failure over agriculture, and a change in the emphasis of the armed services (towards the strategic rocket services that became their élite arm). Khrushchev’s own initiatives in foreign policy (besides the disastrous Cuban adventure) may have been the fundamental cause of the decision to remove him. Yet though with the connivance of the army he was set aside by colleagues whom he had offended and alarmed, he was not killed, sent to prison or even to run a power station in Mongolia. Evidently the Soviet Union was civilizing its techniques of political change. The contrast with old times was striking.

Soviet society had indeed relaxed a little after Stalin’s death. The speech at the 20th Congress could never be unsaid, even if much of it was aimed at diverting criticism from those who (like Khrushchev himself) had been participants in the crimes of which Stalin was accused. (Symbolically, Stalin’s body had been removed from Lenin’s tomb, the national shrine.) In the next few years there was what some called a ‘thaw’. Marginally greater freedom of expression was allowed to writers and artists, while the regime appeared briefly to be a little more concerned about its appearance in the eyes of the world over such matters as its treatment of Jews. But this was personal and sporadic: liberalization depended on who had Khrushchev’s ear. It seems clear only that after Stalin’s death, particularly during the era of Khrushchev’s ascendancy, the party had re-emerged as a much more independent factor in Soviet life. The authoritarian nature of the Soviet government, though, seemed unchanged – which is much what might have been expected.

It may now seem odd that for a time it was the fashion to say that the United States and the Soviet Union were growing more and more alike, and that this meant that Soviet policy was becoming less menacing. This theory of ‘convergence’ gave a distorted emphasis to one indisputable truth: the Soviet Union was a developed economy. In the 1960s some on the European Left still thought socialism a plausible road to modernization because of that. But often overlooked was the fact that the Soviet economy was also inefficient and distorted.

Although Soviet industrial strength had long been evident in heavy manufacturing, the private consumer in the Soviet Union remained poor by comparison with his American counterpart, and would have been even more visibly so but for a costly system of subsidies. Soviet agriculture, which had once fed the cities of central Europe and paid for the industrialization of the tsarist era, was a continuing failure; paradoxically, the Soviet Union often had to buy American grain. The official Soviet Communist Party programme of 1961 proposed that by 1970 the USSR would outstrip the United States in industrial output. That did not happen, although President Kennedy’s proposal of the same year to put a man on the moon was realized. Yet the USSR, in comparison with undeveloped countries, was undoubtedly rich. In spite of the obvious disparity between them as consumer societies, to the poor the United States and the USSR sometimes looked much the same. Many Soviet citizens, too, were more aware of the contrast between their stricken and impoverished country in the 1940s and its condition in the 1970s, than of comparison with the United States.

Nor was the contrast between the two systems always one-sided. Soviet investment in education, for example, may have achieved literacy rates as good as, and even at times better than, the Americans’. Such comparisons, which fall easily over the line from quantitative to qualitative judgment, nevertheless do not alter the basic fact that the per capita GDP of the Soviet Union in the 1970s still lagged far behind that of the United States. If its citizens had at last been given old age pensions in 1956 (nearly half a century after the British people), they also had to put up with health services falling further and further behind those available in the West. There had been a long legacy of backwardness and disruption to eliminate; only in 1952 had real wages in the USSR even got back to their 1928 level. The theory of ‘convergence’ was always too optimistic and too simplistic.

None the less, by 1970 the USSR had a scientific and industrial base that in scale and at its best could rival the achievements of the United States. Its most obvious expression, and a great source of patriotic pride to the Soviet citizen, was in space. By 1980 there was so much ironmongery in orbit that it was difficult to recapture the startling impression made twenty years before by the first Soviet satellites. Although American successes had speedily followed, Soviet space achievements remained of the first rank. Reports of space exploration fed the patriotic imagination and rewarded patience with other aspects of daily life in the USSR. It is not too much to say that for some Soviet citizens their space technology justified the revolution; the USSR was shown by it to be able to do almost anything another nation could, and much that only one other could, and perhaps one or two things which, for a while, no other could. Mother Russia was modernized at last.

Whether this meant that she was in some sense becoming a satisfied nation, with leaders more confident and less suspicious of the outside world and less prone to disturb the international scene, is an entirely different matter. Soviet responses to Chinese resurgence did not seem to show that; there was talk of a pre-emptive nuclear attack against China (although in response to serious Chinese provocations). Soviet society was beginning to show new signs of internal strain as well by 1970. Dissent and criticism, particularly of restraints upon intellectual freedom, had become obvious for the first time in the 1960s, as had such symptoms of anti-social behaviour as widespread corruption and ever-increasing alcoholism. But they probably held both as much and as little potential for significant change as in other large countries. Less obvious facts may turn out to have been more important in the long run; in the 1970s native Russian-speakers for the first time became a minority in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the regime was still one where the limits of freedom and the basic privileges of the individual were defined in practice by an apparatus backed up by administrative decisions and political prisons. The difference between life in the Soviet Union and the United States (or any west European nation) could still be reckoned by such yardsticks as her enormous expenditure on jamming foreign broadcasting.

For obvious reasons, changes in the United States were more easily observed than those in the USSR, but this did not always make it easier to discern fundamentals. Of the sheer growth of American power there can be no doubt, nor of its importance to the world. In the middle of the 1950s, the United States contained about 6 per cent of the world’s population but produced more than half the world’s manufactured goods; by the year 2000, the economy of the state of California alone would be the fifth largest in the world. In 1968 the American population passed the 200 million mark (in 1900 it had been 76 million), only one in twenty of whom were not native-born (though within ten years there would be worries about a huge Spanish-speaking immigration from Mexico and the Caribbean). Numbers of births went up while the birth rate dropped after 1960; the United States was unique among major developed countries in this respect. More Americans than ever lived in cities or their suburbs, and the likelihood that they would die of some form of malignancy had trebled since 1900; this, paradoxically, was a sure sign of improvement in public health, because it showed a growing mastery of other diseases.

The immensely successful American industrial structure was dominated in 1970 by very large corporations, some of which already commanding resources and wealth greater than those of some nations. Concern was often expressed for the interests of the public and the consumer, given the weight in the economy of these giants. But no doubts existed about the economy’s ability to create wealth and power. Though it was to be shown that it could not do everything that might be asked of it, American industrial strength was the great constant of the post-war world and underpinned the huge military potential upon which the conduct of American foreign policy inevitably rested.

Political mythologies still mattered in the 1950s. President Truman’s second administration and those of President Eisenhower were marked by noisy debate and much shadow-boxing about the danger of governmental interference with the economy. It was largely beside the point. Ever since 1945 the federal government has held and indeed increased its importance as the first customer of the American economy. Government spending had been the primary economic stimulant and to increase it had been the goal of hundreds of interest groups and thousands of capitalists; hopes of balanced budgets and cheap, business-like administration always ran aground upon this fact. What was more, the United States was a democracy; whatever the doctrinaire objections to it, and however much rhetoric might be devoted to attacking it, a welfare state slowly advanced because voters wanted it that way. These facts gradually made the old ideal of totally free enterprise, unchecked and uninvaded by the influence of government, unreal. They also helped to prolong the Democratic coalition. The Republican presidents who were elected in 1952 and 1968 on each occasion benefited from war-weariness; but neither could persuade Americans that they should elect Republican congresses. On the other hand, signs of strain were to be seen within the Democratic bloc even before 1960 – Eisenhower appealed to many southern voters – and by 1970 something a little more like a national conservative party had appeared under the Republican banner because some southerners had been offended by Democratic legislation on behalf of black Americans. The Democratic-voting ‘Solid South’ created by the civil war had disappeared as a political constant.

Presidents could sometimes shift emphasis. The Eisenhower years leave an impression that little happened in the domestic history of the United States during them; it was not part of that president’s vision of his office that he should provide a strong policy lead at home. Partly because of this, John Kennedy’s election by a narrow margin of the popular vote in 1960 – the arrival of a new man (and a young one, too) – produced a sense of striking change. It was misleading in that too much was made at the time of the more superficial aspects of this. In retrospect, though, it can be agreed that in both foreign and domestic affairs, the eight years of renewed Democratic rule from 1961 brought great change to the United States, though not in the way in which Kennedy or his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, hoped when they took office.

One issue already apparent in 1960 was what was still then called the ‘Negro question’. A century after emancipation, the African-American was likely to be poorer, more often on state relief, more often unemployed, less well housed and less healthy than the white American. Fifty years later, this was still to be true. In the 1950s and 1960s, though, there was growing optimism about changing things. The position of blacks in American society suddenly began to appear intolerable and became a great political question because of three new facts. One was black migration that had turned a southern question into a national problem. Between 1940 and 1960 the black population of northern states almost trebled in a movement not reversed until the 1990s. New York became the state with the biggest black population of the Union.

This not only brought African-Americans into view in new places, but also in new ways. It revealed that the problem facing them was not only one of legal rights, but was more complex; it was one of economic and cultural deprivation, too. The second fact pushing the question forward on to the national stage lay outside the United States. Many of the new nations, which were becoming a majority at the United Nations, were nations of coloured peoples. It was an embarrassment – of which Communist propaganda always made good use – for the United States to display at home so flagrant a contravention of the ideals she espoused abroad as was provided by the plight of many of her own black citizens. Finally, the action of African-Americans themselves under their own leaders, some inspired by Gandhian principles of passive resistance to oppression, won over many whites. In the end, the legal and political position of black Americans was radically altered for the better as a result. Yet bitterness and resentment were not eliminated in the process, but in some places actually increased.

The first and most successful phase of the campaign for equal status for the black was a struggle for ‘civil rights’, of which the most important were the unhindered exercise of the franchise (always formally, though not actually, available in some southern states) and for equality of treatment in other ways, such as access to public facilities and schooling. The success stemmed from decisions of the Supreme Court in 1954 and 1955. The process thus began not with legislation, but with judicial interpretation. These important first decisions declared that the segregation of different races within the public school system was unconstitutional and that where it existed it should be brought to an end within a reasonable time. This challenged the social system in many southern states, but by 1963 there were some black and white children attending public schools together in every state of the Union, even if others stayed in all-black or all-white schools.

Legislation was not really important until after 1961. After the inauguration of a successful campaign of ‘sit-ins’ by black leaders (which itself achieved many important local victories), Kennedy initiated a programme going beyond the securing of voting rights to attack segregation and inequality of many kinds. It was to be continued by his successor. Poverty, poor housing and bad schools in run-down urban areas were symptoms of deep dislocations inside American society. And inequalities were made more irksome by the increasing affluence in which they were set. The Kennedy administration appealed to Americans to see their removal as one of the challenges of a ‘New Frontier’.

Even greater emphasis was given to legislation to remove them by Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded to the presidency when Kennedy was murdered in November 1963. Unhappily, the deepest roots of the American black problem appeared to lie beyond the reach of laws in what came to be called the ‘ghetto’ areas of great American cities. Again, a long perspective is helpful. In 1965 (a hundred years after emancipation from slavery became law throughout the whole United States) a ferocious outbreak of rioting in a black district of Los Angeles was estimated to have involved at its height as many as 75,000 people. Other troubles followed in other cities, although not on the same scale. Twenty-five years later, all that had happened in Watts (where the Los Angeles outbreak took place) was that conditions had further deteriorated. The problem of America’s blacks was (it was usually agreed) one of economic opportunity, but none the easier to solve for that. It not only remained unsolved but also appeared to be running away from solution. The poisons it secreted burst forth in crime, a major collapse in health standards and family cohesion in some black communities, and in ungovernable and virtually unpoliceable inner-city areas. In the culture and politics of white America they seemed at times to have produced a near-neurotic obsession with colour and racial issues.

His own poor southern background had made President Johnson a convinced and convincing exponent of the ‘Great Society’ in which he discerned America’s future, and perhaps this might have held promise for the handling of the black economic problem had he survived. Potentially one of America’s great reforming presidents, Johnson nevertheless experienced tragic failure, for all his aspirations, experience and skill. His constructive and reforming work was soon forgotten (and, it must be said, set aside) when his presidency came to be overshadowed by an Asian war disastrous enough before it ended to be called by some ‘America’s Sicilian Expedition’.

American policy in South-East Asia under Eisenhower had come to rest on the dogma that a non-Communist South Vietnam was essential to security, and that it had to be kept in the West’s camp if others in the area – or perhaps as far away as India and Australia – were not to be subverted. So, the United States had become the backer of a conservative government in part of Indochina. President Kennedy did not question this view and began to back up American military aid with ‘advisers’. At his death there were 23,000 of them in South Vietnam, and in fact many of them were in action in the field. President Johnson followed the course already set, believing that pledges to other countries had to be shown to be sound currency. But government after government in Saigon turned out to be broken reeds. At the beginning of 1965 Johnson was advised that South Vietnam might collapse; he had the authority to act (given to him, thanks to careful political management, by Congress after North Vietnamese attacks on American ships the previous year) and air attacks were launched against targets in North Vietnam. Soon afterwards, the first official American combat units were sent to the south. American participation quickly soared out of control. In 1968 there were over 500,000 American servicemen in Vietnam; by Christmas that year a heavier tonnage of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than had fallen on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War.

The outcome was politically disastrous. It was almost the least of Johnson’s worries that the American balance of payments was wrecked by the war’s huge cost, which also took money from badly needed reform projects at home. Worse was the bitter domestic uproar that arose as casualties mounted and attempts to negotiate seemed to get nowhere. The better-off young (among them a future president) sought to avoid conscription and Americans gloomily contemplated at home on their television screens the cost of a struggle viewable in their homes as no other war had ever been. Rancour grew, and with it the alarm of moderate America. It was small consolation that the USSR’s costs in supplying arms to North Vietnam were heavy, too.

More was involved in domestic strife over Vietnam than the agitation of young people rioting in protest and distrust of their government, or the idealism of conservatives outraged by fellow citizens’ ritual desecrations of the symbols of patriotism and refusals to carry out military service. Vietnam was changing the way many Americans looked at the outside world. In South-East Asia it was at last borne in on the thoughtful among them that even the United States could not obtain every result it wanted, far less obtain it at any reasonable cost. The late 1960s brought the end of the illusion that American power was limitless and irresistible. Americans had approached the post-war world with this illusion intact. Their country’s strength, they believed, had, after all, decided two world wars. Beyond them there stretched back a century and a half of virtually unchecked and unhindered continental expansion, of immunity from European intervention, of the growth of an impressive hegemony in the American hemisphere. There was nothing in American history that was wholly disastrous or irredeemable, hardly anything in which there was, ultimately, failure, and nothing over which most Americans felt any guilt. It had been easy and natural for that background to breed a careless assumption of limitless possibility. Prosperity helped to carry it over from domestic to foreign concerns. Americans easily overlooked the special conditions on which their success story had long been built.

The reckoning had begun to be drawn up in the 1950s, when many Americans had to be content with a lesser victory in Korea than they had hoped for. There had then opened twenty years of frustrating dealings with nations often enjoying not a tenth of the power of the United States, but apparently able to thwart her. At last, in the Vietnam disaster, both the limits of power and its full costs were revealed. In March 1968 the strength of the rising opposition to the war was shown clearly in the primary presidential elections.

Johnson was already moving towards the conclusion that the United States could not win the war. He was ready to restrict bombing and asked the North Vietnamese to open negotiations again. Dramatically, he now also announced that he would not stand for re-election in 1968. Just as the casualties of the Korean War won Eisenhower election in 1952, so the casualties of Vietnam, on the battlefield and at home, helped (with the presence of a third candidate) to elect another Republican president in 1968 (only four years after Johnson had won a huge Democratic majority) and to re-elect him in 1972. Vietnam was not the only factor, but it was one of the most important in finally dislocating the old Democratic coalition.

The new president, Richard Nixon, began to withdraw American ground forces from Vietnam soon after his inauguration, but peace-making took three years. In 1970 secret negotiations began between North Vietnam and the United States. There were further withdrawals, but also renewed and intensified bombing of the north and its extension to Cambodia by the Americans. The diplomacy was tortuous and difficult. The United States could not admit it was abandoning its ally, though in fact it had to do so, nor would the North Vietnamese accept terms that did not leave them able to harass the southern regime through their sympathizers in the south. Amid considerable public outcry in the United States, bombing was briefly resumed at the end of 1972, but for the last time. Soon afterwards, on 27 January 1973, a ceasefire was signed in Paris. The war had cost the United States vast sums of money and 58,000 dead. It had gravely damaged American prestige and eroded American diplomatic influence, and had ravaged domestic politics and frustrated reform. What had been achieved was a temporary preservation of a shaky South Vietnam, saddled with internal problems which made its survival unlikely, while terrible destruction had been inflicted on the peoples of Indochina, of whom 3 million died. Perhaps the abandonment of the illusion of American omnipotence went some way to offset these costs.

It was a real success to have disentangled the United States from the morass and President Nixon reaped the political benefit. The liquidation of the venture had followed other signs of his recognition of how much the world had already changed since the Cuban crisis. The most striking of these was a new policy of normal and direct American diplomatic relations with Communist China. It came to a climax only in 1978, but two dramatic earlier events had preceded even the making of the Vietnam peace. In October 1971 the UN General Assembly had recognized the People’s Republic as the only legitimate representative of China in the United Nations, and expelled the representative of Taiwan. This was not an outcome the United States had anticipated until the crucial vote was taken. The following February, there took place a visit by Nixon to China that was the first visit ever made by an American president to mainland Asia, and one he described as an attempt to bridge ‘sixteen thousand miles and twenty-two years of hostility’.

When Nixon followed his Chinese trip by becoming also the first American president to visit Moscow (in May 1972), and this was followed by an interim agreement on arms limitation – the first of its kind – it seemed that another important change had come about. The stark, polarized simplicities of the Cold War were blurring, however doubtful the future might be. The Vietnam settlement followed and this can hardly have been unrelated to it; Moscow and Beijing both had to be squared if there was to be a ceasefire. China’s attitude to the Vietnamese struggle was by no means simple. It was complicated by potential danger from the USSR, by the United States’ use of its power elsewhere in Asia – notably in Taiwan and Japan – and by older memories of the strength of Vietnamese nationalism; its Indochinese Communist ally was admired but never fully trusted. Seen by China as a ‘younger brother’ in Communism, the Vietnamese looked back on a long history of struggle against Chinese as well as French imperialism. In the immediate aftermath of the American withdrawal, too, the nature of the struggle going on in Vietnam was more and more clearly revealed as a civil war over who should rule a reunited country.

The North Vietnamese and their southern allies did not wait long to settle the matter. For a time the United States government had to pretend not to see this; there was too much relief at home over the liquidation of the Asian commitment for scruples to be expressed over the actual observation of the peace terms that had made withdrawal possible. When a political scandal forced Nixon’s resignation in 1974, his successor faced a Congress suspicious of what it saw as dangerous foreign adventures and determined to thwart them. There would be no attempt to uphold the peace terms of 1972 in so far as they guaranteed the South Vietnamese regime against overthrow. Early in 1975 American aid to Saigon came to an end. A government which had lost virtually all its other territory was reduced to a backs-to-the-wall attempt to hold the capital city and lower Mekong valley with a demoralized and defeated army. At the same time, Communist forces in Cambodia were destroying another regime once supported by the United States. Congress prevented the sending of further military and financial help. The pattern of China in 1948 was being repeated; the United States was cutting her losses at the expense of those who had relied on her (though 117,000 Vietnamese left with the Americans), and the North Vietnamese army entered Saigon in April 1975.

Such an outcome was particularly ironic. The United States had entered the war first and foremost to contain Chinese Communism – now closer relations with the Chinese Communists had made withdrawal possible. In the United States itself, an increasingly vocal right-wing believed that the military had not lost the war – it had been defeated by spineless politicians, anti-war activists and social radicals at home. During the late 1970s the loss in Vietnam may have contributed to American soul-searching about its purpose in the world and a temporary reluctance to get involved militarily elsewhere in the post-colonial regions. First and foremost it meant a beginning doubt about the possibility of détente with the Soviet Union, the country’s main rival in international affairs.

As 1980 drew nearer many Americans were confused and worried; national morale was not good. Vietnam had left deep psychological wounds as well as helping to feed a counter-culture at home which the majority found frightening. In the 1960s, the first voices of note had raised the alarm over environmental dangers; the 1970s had brought the oil crisis and a new sense of exposure at a moment when, for the first time, America’s Middle Eastern ally, Israel, no longer seemed invulnerable to her enemies. The disgrace and near-impeachment of President Nixon after a scandalous abuse of executive power had eaten away at confidence in the nation’s institutions. Abroad, the behaviour of other allies (themselves worried and confused by American disarray) seemed less predictable than in the past. For the first time, too, Americans’ confidence in the promise their nation had always been believed to hold out for mankind faltered in the face of what looked like blunt rejection by much of the Islamic world.

The situation was indeed not easy to read. Yet the American democratic system showed no sign of breaking down, or of not meeting many of the country’s needs, even if it could not find answers to all its problems. The economy had, astonishingly, been able to continue for years to pay for a hugely expensive war, a space exploration programme that put men on the moon, and for garrisons around the world. True, the black American’s plight continued to worsen, and some of the country’s greatest cities seemed stricken by urban decay. Fewer Americans, though, seemed to find such facts as worrying as their country’s supposed inferiority in missile strength to the Soviet Union (it was to be an issue in the presidential election of 1980). President Gerald Ford (who had taken office in 1974 on the resignation of his predecessor) had already had to face a Congress unwilling to countenance further aid to its allies in Indochina. When Cambodia collapsed and South Vietnam quickly followed, questions began to be asked at home and abroad about how far what looked like a worldwide retreat of American power might go. If the United States would no longer fight over Indochina, would she, then, do so over Thailand? More alarmingly still, would she fight over Israel – or even Berlin? There were good reasons to think the Americans’ mood of resignation and dismay would not last for ever, but while it lasted, their allies – including the key ones in Europe – looked about them and felt uneasy.

Europe was the birthplace of the Cold War and was for a long time its main theatre. Yet well before 1970 there had been signs that the terrible simplifications institutionalized in NATO and (even more rigidly) in the Warsaw Pact might not be all that was shaping history there. Although long insulated by Soviet power from external stimuli to change and by its command economies, there were signs of division in the eastern bloc nations. The violence with which Albania, the tiniest of them, condemned the Soviet Union and applauded China when the two fell out in the 1960s had to be endured by the Soviets; Albania had no frontier with other Warsaw Pact countries and so was not likely to have to take account of the Red Army. It was more striking when Romania, with Chinese support, successfully contested the direction of its economy by Comecon, asserting a national right to develop it in its own interest. It even took up a vaguely neutralist position on questions of foreign policy – though remaining inside the Warsaw Pact – and did so, oddly enough, under a ruler who imposed on his countrymen one of the most rigidly dictatorial regimes in eastern Europe. But Romania had no land frontier with a NATO country, and one 500 miles long with the USSR; her skittishness could be tolerated, therefore, because it could be quickly curbed if necessary.

That there were clear limits to the dislocation of the old monolithic unity of Communism was clearly enough shown in 1968 when a Communist government in Czechoslovakia set about liberalizing its internal structure and developing trade relations with West Germany. This was not to be tolerated. After a series of attempts to bring her to heel, Czechoslovakia was invaded in August of that year by Warsaw Pact forces. To avoid a repetition of what had happened in Hungary in 1956, the Czech government did not resist and a brief attempt to provide an example of ‘socialism with a human face’, as a Czech politician had put it, was obliterated.

None the less, Sino-Soviet tension combined with tremblings within the eastern bloc (and perhaps the uneasiness of the United States over relations with Latin American countries) to lead to suggestions that the world as a whole was abandoning bipolarity for ‘polycentrism’, as an Italian Communist called it. The loosening of Cold War simplicities had indeed been surprising. Other complicating developments had meanwhile emerged in western Europe. By 1980 it was clear that one of the historic roles of its peoples was over since they by then ruled no more of the world’s surface than their ancestors had done 500 years earlier. Huge transformations had taken place, and irreversible things had been done since then. Although Europe’s imperial past was over, the discovery of a new role was well under way. Western Europe had begun to show some of the first, feeble signs that nationalism’s grip on the human potential for large-scale organization might be loosening in the very place where nationalism had been born.

Legacies of common European experience have been traced by enthusiasts back to the Carolingians, but 1945 will do as a starting-point. From that date the continent’s future for more than forty years was mainly determined by the outcome of the war and Soviet policy. The likelihood of another great civil war in the West over the German question seemed remote since defeat and partition had disposed of the German problem and so quietened the fears of France. Soviet policy had then given the western countries many new reasons to co-operate more closely; the events in eastern Europe in the late 1940s struck them as a warning of what might happen if the Americans ever went home and they remained divided. The Marshall Plan and NATO turned out to have been the first two of many important steps towards the integration of a new Europe.

That integration had more than one source. The initiation of the Marshall Plan was followed by the setting-up of an Organization (at first of sixteen countries, but later expanded) of European Economic Co-operation in 1948, but the following year, a month after the signing of the treaty setting up NATO, the first political bodies representing ten different European states were also set up under a new Council of Europe. The economic forces making for integration were developing more rapidly, however. Customs Unions had already been created in 1948 between the ‘Benelux’ countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), and (in a different form) between France and Italy. Finally, the most important of the early steps towards greater integration emerged from a French proposal for a Coal and Steel Community. This came into existence formally in 1952 and embraced France, Italy, the Benelux countries and, most significantly, West Germany. It made possible the rejuvenation of the industrial heartland of western Europe and was the main step towards the integration of western Germany into a new international structure. Through economic rearrangement, there came into existence the means of containing while reviving West Germany, whose strength, it was becoming clear, was needed in a western Europe menaced by Soviet land power. Under the influence of events in Korea, American official opinion (to the consternation of some Europeans) was in the early 1950s rapidly coming around to the view that Germany had to be rearmed.

Other facts, too, helped to ease the way to supranational organization in Europe. Political weakness, of which their domestic Communist parties were symptoms, subsided in both France and Italy, mainly thanks to economic recovery. Communists had ceased to play any part in their governments as early as 1947, and the danger that French and Italian democracy might suffer a fate like Czechoslovakia’s had disappeared by 1950. Anti-Communist opinion tended to coalesce about parties whose integrating forces were either Roman Catholic politicians or social democrats well aware of the fate of their comrades in eastern Europe. Broadly speaking, these changes meant that western European governments of a moderate right-wing complexion pursued similar aims of economic recovery, welfare service provision and western European integration in practical matters during the 1950s.

Further institutions emerged. In 1952 a European Defence Community formalized West Germany’s military position. This was to be replaced by German membership of NATO, but a major thrust towards greater unity, as before, was economic. The crucial step came in 1957: the European Economic Community (EEC) came into being when France, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy joined in signing the Treaty of Rome. Besides looking forward to the creation of a ‘Common Market’ embracing its members, within which barriers to the free movement of goods, services and labour were to be removed, and with a common tariff, the treaty also provided for a decision-making authority, a bureaucracy and a European parliament with advisory powers. Some spoke of the reconstitution of Charlemagne’s heritage. It spurred countries which had not joined the EEC to set up their own, looser and more limited, European Free Trade Association (EFTA) two and a half years later. By 1986, the six countries of the original EEC (by then it had become simply the EC – the word ‘Economic’, significantly, had been dropped) were twelve, while EFTA had lost all but four of its members to it. Five years later still, and what was left of EFTA was envisaging merging with the EC.

Western Europe’s slow but accelerating movement towards a modicum of political unity demonstrated the confidence of those who made the arrangements that armed conflict could never again be an acceptable alternative to co-operation and negotiation between their countries. Tragically, though recognizing that fact, Great Britain’s government did not immediately seize the chance to join in giving it institutional expression; later, it was twice to be refused admission to the EEC. Meanwhile, the Community’s interests were steadily cemented together by a Common Agricultural Policy, which was, to all intents and purposes, a huge bribe to the farmers and peasants who were so important a part of the German and French electorates and, later, to those of poorer countries as they became members.

For a long time determined opposition to further integration at the political as opposed to the economic level came from France. It was expressed strongly by General de Gaulle, who returned to politics in 1958 to become president when the fourth French republic seemed likely to slide into civil war over Algeria. His first task was to negotiate these rapids and to carry through important constitutional reforms, which created the Fifth Republic. His next service to France was as great as any in his wartime career, the liquidation of her Algerian commitment in 1961. The legions came home, some disgruntled. The act freed both him and his country for a more vigorous international role, though a somewhat negative one.

De Gaulle’s view of European consolidation was limited to co-operation between independent nation-states; he saw the EEC above all as a way of protecting French economic interests. He was quite prepared to strain the new organization badly to get his way. Further, he in effect twice vetoed British applications to join it. Wartime experience had left de Gaulle with a deep distrust of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and a belief, by no means ill-founded, that the British still hankered after integration with an Atlantic community embracing the United States, rather than with continental Europe. In 1964 he annoyed the Americans by exchanging diplomatic representatives with Communist China. He insisted that France go ahead with her own nuclear weapons programme, declining to be dependent on American patronage. Finally, after causing it much trouble, he withdrew France from NATO. This could be seen as the coming of ‘polycentrism’ to the western bloc. When de Gaulle resigned after an unfavourable referendum in 1969, a major political force making for uncertainty and disarray in western Europe disappeared.

Great Britain finally joined the EEC in 1973, a registration, at last, of the facts of twentieth-century history by the most conservative of the historic nation-states. The decision complemented the withdrawal from empire and acknowledged that the British strategic frontier lay no longer on the Rhine, but on the Elbe. It was a significant turning-point, though far from conclusive, in an era of uncertainty. For a quarter of a century British governments had tried and failed to combine economic growth, increased social service provision and a high level of employment. The second depended ultimately on the first, but when difficulty arose, the first had always been sacrificed to the other two. The United Kingdom was, after all, a democracy whose voters, greedy and gullible, had to be placated. The vulnerability of the traditional British economy’s commitment to international trade was a handicap, too. Other handicaps lay in its old staple industries, starved of investment, and the deeply conservative attitudes of its people. Though the United Kingdom grew richer (in 1970 virtually no British manual worker had four weeks’ paid holiday a year; ten years later a third of them did), it fell more and more behind other developed countries both in its wealth and its rate of creating it. If the British had managed a decline in international power and the achievement of a rapid decolonization without the violence and domestic bitterness visible elsewhere, it remained unclear whether they could shake off the past in other ways and ensure themselves even a modest prosperity as a second-rank nation.

One obvious and symptomatic threat to order and civilization was posed in Northern Ireland. Protestant and Catholic hooligans alike seemed bent on destroying their homeland rather than co-operating with their rivals, and caused the deaths of thousands of British citizens – soldiers, policemen and civilians, Protestant and Catholic, Irish, Scottish and English alike – in the 1970s and 1980s. Fortunately they did not disrupt British party politics as Irishmen had done in the past. The British electorate remained preoccupied, rather, by material concerns. Inflation ran at unprecedented levels (the annualized rate between 1970 and 1980 was over 13 per cent) and gave new edge to industrial troubles in the 1970s, especially in the wake of the oil crisis. There was speculation about whether the country was ‘ungovernable’ as a miners’ strike brought down one government, while many leaders and interpreters of opinion seemed obsessed with the themes of social division. Even the question whether the United Kingdom should remain in the EEC, which was submitted to the revolutionary device of a referendum in June 1975, was often put in these terms. It was therefore all the more surprising to many politicians when the outcome was unambiguously favourable to continued membership.

None the less, more bad times (economically speaking) lay immediately ahead; inflation (in 1975 running at 26.9 per cent in the wake of the oil crisis) was at last identified by government as the overriding threat. Wage demands by trades unions were anticipating inflation still to come and it began to dawn on some that the era of unquestioned growth in consumption was over. There was a gleam of light; a few years earlier vast oil fields had been discovered under the seabed off the coasts of northern Europe. In 1976 the United Kingdom became an oil-exporting nation. That did not help much immediately; in the same year, a loan from the International Monetary Fund was required. When Mrs Thatcher, the country’s (and Europe’s) first female prime minister and the first woman to lead a major political party (the Conservatives), took office in 1979 she had, in a sense, little to lose; her opponents were discredited, as were the ideas, many felt, that had been long accepted uncritically as the determinants of British policy. A radical new departure for once really did seem to be a possibility. To the surprise of many and the amazement of some among both her supporters and her opponents, that is exactly what Mrs Thatcher was to provide after a shaky start to what was to prove the longest tenure of power of any British prime minister in the twentieth century.

Not far into her premiership, she found herself in 1982 presiding unexpectedly over what may well prove to have been Great Britain’s last colonial war. The reconquest of the Falkland Islands after their brief occupation by Argentinian forces was in logistic terms alone a great feat of arms as well as a major psychological and diplomatic success. The prime minister’s instincts to fight for the principles of international law and for the islanders’ right to say by whom they should be governed were well-attuned to the popular mood. She also correctly judged the international possibilities. After an uncertain start (unsurprising, given its traditional sensitivity over Latin America), the United States provided important practical and clandestine help. Equally important, most of the EC countries supported the isolation of Argentina in the United Nations, and resolutions that condemned the Argentinian action. It was especially notable that the British had from the start the support (not often offered to them so readily) of the French government, which knew a threat to vested rights when it saw one.

It now seems clear that Argentinian action had been encouraged by the misleading impressions of likely British reactions gained from British diplomacy in previous years (for this reason, the foreign secretary resigned at the outset of the crisis). Happily, one political consequence was the fatal wounding in its prestige and cohesiveness of the military regime that ruled Argentina and its replacement at the end of 1983 by a constitutional and elected government. Although some in Britain regretted the unnecessary loss, as they saw it, of human life in the conflict, overall Mrs Thatcher’s prestige rose with national morale; abroad, too, her standing was enhanced, and this was important. For the rest of the decade it provided the country with an influence with other heads of state (notably the American president) which the raw facts of British strength could scarcely have sustained by themselves.

Not everyone agreed that this influence was always advantageously deployed. Like those of General de Gaulle, Mrs Thatcher’s personal convictions, preconceptions and prejudices were always very visible and she, like him, was no European, if that meant allowing emotional or even practical commitment to Europe to blunt personal visions of national interest. At home, meanwhile, she transformed the terms of British politics, and perhaps of cultural and social debate, dissolving a long-established bien-pensant consensus about national goals. This, together with the undoubted radicalism of many of her specific policies, awoke both enthusiasm and an unusual animosity. Yet she failed to achieve some of her most important aims. Ten years after she took up office, government was playing a greater, not a smaller, role in many areas of society, and the public money spent on health and social security had gone up a third in real terms since 1979 (without satisfying greatly increased demand).

Although Mrs Thatcher had led the Conservatives to three general election victories in a row (a unique achievement in British politics up to then), many in her party came to believe she would be a vote-loser in the next contest, which could not be far away. Faced with the erosion of loyalty and support, she resigned in 1990, leaving to her successor rising unemployment and a bad financial situation. But it seemed likely that British policy might now become less obstructive in its approach to the EC and its affairs and less rhetorical about it.

The 1970s had been difficult years for all the members of the Common Market. Growth fell away and individual economies reeled under the impact of the oil crisis. This contributed to institutional bickering and squabbling (particularly on economic and financial matters), which had reminded Europeans of the limits to what was so far achieved. It continued in the 1980s and, coupled with uneasiness about the success of the East Asian economic sphere, dominated by Japan, and a growing realization that other nations would wish to join the ten, led to further crystallization of ideas about the Community’s future. Many Europeans saw more clearly that greater unity, a habit of co-operation and an increasing prosperity were prerequisites of Europe’s political independence, but some also felt an emerging sense that such independence would always remain hollow unless Europe, too, could turn herself into a superpower.

Comfort could be drawn by enthusiasts from further progress in integration. In 1979 the first direct elections to the European parliament were already being held. Greece in 1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986, were soon to join the Community. In 1987 the foundations of a common European currency and monetary system were drawn up (although the United Kingdom did not agree) and it was settled that 1992 should be the year which would see the inauguration of a genuine single market, across whose national borders goods, people, capital and services were to move freely. Members even endorsed in principle the idea of European political union, although the British and French had notable misgivings. This by no means made at once for greater psychological cohesion and comfort as the implications of such a union emerged, but it was an indisputable sign of development of some sort.

In the years since the Treaty of Rome, western Europe had come a very long way, further, perhaps, than was always grasped by men and women born and grown to maturity under it. Underlying the institutional changes, too, were slowly growing similarities – in politics, social structure, consumption habits and beliefs about values and goals. Even the old disparities of economic structure had greatly diminished, as the decline in numbers and increase in prosperity of French and German farmers showed. On the other hand, new problems had presented themselves as poorer and perhaps politically less stable countries had joined the EC. That there had been huge convergences could not be contested. What was still unclear was what this might imply for the future.

In December 1975 Gerald Ford became the second American president to visit China. The adjustment of his country’s deep-seated distrust and hostility towards the People’s Republic had begun with the slow recognition of the lessons of Vietnam. On the Chinese side, change was a part of an even greater development: China’s resumption of an international and regional role appropriate to her historic stature and potential. Mao’s revolution had made China more integrated than ever before, and made significant improvements in health and education. But its economic development had been chaotic, and it had not lifted the Chinese people out of poverty. By the mid-1970s many Chinese leaders were looking for ways of breaking out of Mao’s endless political campaigns to focus on making the country strong and its people rich.

Mao died in September 1976. The threat of the ascendancy of a ‘gang of four’ of his coadjutors (one was his widow), who had promoted the policies of the Cultural Revolution, was quickly averted by their arrest (and, eventually, trial and condemnation in 1981). Under a new leadership dominated by party veterans, it soon became clear that the excesses of the Cultural Revolution were to be corrected. In 1977 there rejoined the government as a vice-premier the twice-previously disgraced Deng Xiaoping, firmly associated with the contrary trend (his son had been crippled by beatings from Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution). The most important change, though, was that China’s long-awaited economic recovery was at last attainable. Scope was now to be given to individual enterprise and the profit motive, and economic links with non-Communist countries were to be encouraged. The aim was to resume the process of technological and industrial modernization.

The major definition of the new course was undertaken in 1981 at the plenary session of the central committee of the party that met that year. It undertook, too, the delicate task of distinguishing the positive achievements of Mao, a ‘great proletarian revolutionary’, from what it now identified as his ‘gross mistakes’ and his responsibility for the setbacks of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. For all the comings and goings in the CCP leadership and the mysterious debates and sloganizing which continued to obscure political realities, and although Deng Xiaoping and his associates had to work through a collective leadership that included conservatives, the 1980s were to be shaped by a new current. Modernization had at last been given precedence over Marxist socialism, even if that could hardly be said aloud (when the secretary-general of the party pronounced in 1986 the incautious and amazing judgment that ‘Marx and Lenin cannot solve our problems’, he was soon dismissed).

But while Marxist language still pervaded the rhetoric of government, the capitalist market soon became the engine that drove the Chinese economy forward. Deng’s willingness to experiment meant that the CCP gave priority to whatever its leaders believed served their overall aims, what Deng (and his mentor Zhou Enlai before him) called the four modernizations: modernizing agriculture, industry, defence and technology. While much of the change therefore seemed chaotic (and the party’s belief in stringent planning fell by the wayside), there was a general direction to it: away from the stranglehold that the Chinese state had attempted to gain on production since the Qing era, and towards emphasizing the private producer.

One remarkable change was that agriculture was virtually privatized in the next few years in the sense that, although they were not given the freeholds of their land, peasants were encouraged to sell produce freely in the markets. New slogans – ‘to get rich is glorious’ – were coined to encourage the development of village industrial and commercial enterprise. Special economic areas, enclaves for free trade with the capitalist world, were set up; the first was near Guangzhou, the historic centre of Chinese trade with the West. It was not a policy without costs – grain production fell at first, inflation began to show itself in the early 1980s and foreign debt rose. Some blamed the growing visibility of crime and corruption on the new line, and there were both critics who wanted to return to planning and those who argued for political democracy as part of modernization. Deng, through his political skills, sidelined them both.

Yet of the economic success there can be no doubt. Mainland China began in the 1980s to show that perhaps an economic ‘miracle’ like that of Taiwan was within her grasp. By 1986 she was the second largest producer of coal in the world, and the fourth largest of steel. GDP rose at more than 10 per cent a year between 1978 and 1986, while industrial output had doubled in value in that time. Per capita peasant income nearly tripled and by 1988 the average peasant family was estimated to have about six months’ income in the savings bank.

The new line specifically linked modernization to strength, thus it reflected the aspirations of China’s reformers ever since the May 4th Movement, and of some even earlier. China’s international weight had already been apparent in the 1950s; it now began to show itself in different ways. The initial approach towards establishing normal relations with the United States had been made before the reforms began, but it was now made an integral part of China’s development plans. Formal recognition came in 1979. In a Sino-American agreement the United States made the crucial concession that its forces should be withdrawn from Taiwan and that official diplomatic relations with the island’s Guomindang government should be ended. Deng was smart enough, however, not to make the continuation of United States involvement with the island in other fields (including weapons’ sales) a sticking point in Sino-American relations; China’s modernization was far more important to him than the recovery of Taiwan.

In 1984 China and Britain agreed over terms for the reincorporation of Hong Kong in 1997 on the expiration of the lease covering some of its territories. A later agreement with the Portuguese provided for the recovery of Macao, too. It was a blemish on the general recognition of China’s due standing that among its neighbours Vietnam (with which China’s relations at one time degenerated into open warfare, when the two countries were rivals for the control of Cambodia) remained hostile; but some of the people on Taiwan were reassured by Chinese promises that the reincorporation of the island into the territory of the People’s Republic in due course would not endanger its economic system. Similar assurances were given over Hong Kong. Like the establishment of special production and trading enclaves on the mainland where external commerce could flourish, such statements underlined the importance China’s new rulers attached to commerce as a channel of modernization. China’s sheer size gave such a policy direction importance over a wide area. By 1985 the whole of East and South-East Asia constituted a trading zone of unprecedented potential.

Within it, new centres of industrial and commercial activity were developing so fast in the 1980s as to justify by themselves the view that the old global balance of economic power had disappeared. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore had all shed the aura of undeveloped economies; Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, by 1990, looked as if they were moving up rapidly to join them. Their success was part of that of East Asia as a whole, and Japan had been indispensable to this outcome.

The rapidity with which Japan, like China, recovered its former status as a power (and surpassed it) had obvious implications for its place both in the Asian and the world balance. In 1959, Japanese exports again reached pre-war levels. By 1970 the Japanese had the second highest GDP in the non-Communist world. They had renewed their industrial base and had moved with great success into new areas of manufacture. Only in 1951 did a Japanese yard launch the country’s first ship built for export; twenty years later, Japan had the largest shipbuilding industry in the world. At the same time it took a commanding position in consumer industries such as electronics and motorcars, of which Japan made more than any country except the United States. This caused resentment among American manufacturers – the supreme compliment. In 1979 it was agreed that Japanese cars should be made in England, the beginning of their entry to the EC market. The debit side of this account was provided by a fast-growing population and by the ample evidence of the cost of economic growth in the destruction of the Japanese environment and the wear and tear of urban life.

Japan was, nevertheless, long favoured by circumstance. The Vietnam War, like the Korean, was a help; so was American enforcement of a bias towards investment rather than consumption during the occupation years. Yet human beings must act to take advantage of favourable circumstances and Japanese attitudes were crucial. Post-war Japan could deploy intense pride and an unrivalled willingness for collective effort among its people; both sprang from the deep cohesiveness and capacity for subordinating the individual to collective purposes which had always marked Japanese society. Strangely, such attitudes seemed to survive the coming of democracy. It may be too early to judge how deeply democratic institutions are rooted in Japanese society; after 1951 there soon appeared something like a consensus for one-party rule (though irritation with this quickly showed itself in the emergence of alternative groupings, both on the Right and the Left). Mounting unease was shown, too, over what was happening to traditional values and institutions. The costs of economic growth loomed up not only in huge conurbations and pollution, but also in social problems that strained even Japanese custom. Great firms still operated with success on the basis of group loyalties buttressed by traditional attitudes and institutions. None the less, at a different level, even the Japanese family seemed to be under strain.

Economic progress also helped to change the context of foreign policy, which moved away in the 1960s from the simplicities of the preceding decade. Economic strength made the yen internationally important and drew Japan into western monetary diplomacy. Prosperity involved it in many other parts of the world, too. In the Pacific basin, it was a major consumer of other countries’ primary produce; in the Middle East it became a large buyer of oil. In Europe, Japan’s investment was thought alarming by some (even though its aggregate share was not large), while imports of its manufactured goods threatened European producers. Even food supply raised international questions; in the 1960s, 90 per cent of Japan’s requirements for protein came from fishing and this led to alarm that the Japanese might be over-fishing important grounds.

As these and other matters changed the atmosphere and content of foreign relations, so did the behaviour of other powers, especially in the Pacific area. Japan increasingly assumed in the 1960s an economic predominance in relation to other Pacific countries not unlike that of Germany towards central and eastern Europe before 1914. As it evolved into the world’s largest importer of raw materials, New Zealand and Australia found their economies increasingly and profitably tied into the Japanese market. Both of them supplied meat, and Australia minerals, notably coal and iron ore. On the Asian mainland the Soviets and the South Koreans complained about the Japanese fishing. This added a new complication to an old story. Korea was also Japan’s second biggest market (the United States was the biggest) and the Japanese started to invest there again after 1951. This revived a traditional distrust; it was ominous to find that South Korean nationalism had so anti-Japanese a tone that in 1959 the president of South Korea could urge his countrymen to unite ‘as one man’ against not their northern neighbour, but Japan. Within twenty years, too, Japanese car manufacturers were looking askance at the vigorous rival they had helped create. As in Taiwan, so in South Korea industrial growth had been built on technology diffused, at least in part, by Japan.

Yet although Japan’s dependence on imported energy meant a nasty economic shock when oil prices shot up in the 1970s, nothing seemed for a long time to affect Japan’s economic progress. Exports to the United States in 1971 were worth $6,000 million: by 1984, that total had grown ten-fold. By the end of the 1980s, Japan was the world’s second largest economic power in terms of GDP. As its industrialists turned to advanced information technology and biotechnology, and talked of running down car manufacturing, there appeared no reason to think that it had lost its power of disciplined self-adaptation.

Greater strength had already meant greater responsibilities. The withdrawal of American direction was logically rounded off in 1972 when Okinawa (one of the first of its overseas possessions to be reacquired) was returned to Japan, a large American base there notwithstanding. There remained the questions of the Kuril Islands, still in Soviet hands, and of Taiwan, in the possession of the Chinese Nationalists and claimed by the Chinese Communists, but Japanese attitudes on all these matters remained – no doubt prudently – reserved. There was also the possibility that the question of the island of Sakhalin might be reopened. All such issues began to look much more susceptible to revisions or at least reconsideration in the wake of the great changes brought to the Asian scene by Chinese and Japanese revival. The Sino-Soviet quarrel gave Japan more freedom for manoeuvre, both towards the United States, its erstwhile patron, and towards China and the Soviet Union. That too close a tie with the Americans might bring embarrassment became clearer as the Vietnam War unrolled and political opposition to it grew in Japan. Its freedom was limited, in the sense that all three of the other great powers of the area were by 1970 equipped with nuclear weapons (and Japan, of all nations, had most reason to know their effect), but there was little doubt that Japan could produce them within a relatively brief time if it had to. Altogether, the Japanese stance had the potential to develop in various directions. In 1978 the Chinese vice-president visited Tokyo. Indisputably, Japan was once more a world power.

If the test of that status is the habitual exercise of decisive influence, whether economic, military or political, outside a country’s own geographical area, then by the 1980s India was still not a world power. This is perhaps one of the surprises of the second half of the century. India moved into independence with many advantages enjoyed neither by other former European dependencies, nor by Japan in the aftermath of defeat. It had taken over in 1947 an effective administration, well-trained and dependable armed forces, a well-educated élite and thriving universities (some seventy of them); it had much international benevolence and goodwill to draw upon, a substantial infrastructure undamaged by the war and, soon, the advantages of Cold War polarization to exploit. The country also had to face poverty, malnutrition and major public health problems, but so did China. By the end of the century the contrast between them was very visible; the streets of Chinese cities were filled by serviceably dressed and well-nourished people, while those of India still displayed horrifying examples of poverty and disease.

This comparison made it easy to be pessimistically selective in considering India’s poor development performance. There were sectors where growth was substantial and impressive. But such achievements were overshadowed by the fact that economic growth was poor compared with other parts of Asia and was barely able to keep up with population growth; most Indians remained little better off than those who had welcomed independence in 1947.

It can be argued that to have kept India together at all was a great achievement, given the country’s fissiparous nature and potential divisions. Somehow, too, a democratic electoral order was maintained, even if with qualifications, and peaceful changes of government occurred as a result of votes cast. This was a massive achievement. Yet even India’s democratic record looked less encouraging after 1975 when the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, proclaimed a state of emergency and the imposition of presidential rule akin to that of viceroys in the old days (one of the two Indian Communist parties supported her). This was followed, it is true, by her loss of the elections in 1977 and her judicial exclusion briefly from office and parliament the following year, which could be thought a healthy symptom of Indian constitutionalism. But on the other side of the balance were the recurrent resorts to the use of presidential powers to suspend normal constitutional government in specific areas, and a flow of reports of the brutality of police and security forces towards minorities.

It was an ominous symptom of reaction to the dangers of division that in 1971 an orthodox and deeply conservative Hindu party made its appearance in Indian politics as the first plausible threat to the hegemony of Congress, and held office for three years. That hegemony persisted, none the less. Forty years after independence, Congress was more visibly than ever not so much a political party in the European sense as an India-wide coalition of interest groups, notables and controllers of patronage, and this gave it, even under the leadership of Nehru, for all his socialist aspirations and rhetoric, an intrinsically conservative character. It was never the function of Congress, once the British were removed, to bring about change, but rather to accommodate it.

This conservatism was in a manner symbolized by the dynastic nature of Indian government. Nehru had been succeeded as prime minister by his daughter, Indira Gandhi (who had begun her divergence from his wishes by setting aside his request that no religious ceremony should accompany his funeral) and she was to be followed by her son, Rajiv Gandhi. When he was blown up by an assassin (he was not in office at the time), Congress leaders at once showed an almost automatic reflex in seeking to persuade his widow to take up the leadership of the party. In the 1980s, though, there were signs that dynasticism might not prove viable much longer. Sikh particularism brought itself vividly to the world’s notice in 1984 with the assassination of Mrs Gandhi (who was once more prime minister at the time), after the Indian army had carried out an attack on the foremost shrine of Sikh faith at Amritsar. In the next seven years, more than 10,000 Sikh militants, innocent bystanders and members of the security forces were to be killed. Fighting with Pakistan over Kashmir, too, broke out again in the later part of the decade. In 1990 it was officially admitted that 890 people had died that year in Hindu–Muslim riots, the worst since 1947.

Once again, it is difficult not to return to banal reflection that the weight of the past was very heavy in India, that no dynamic force emerged to throw it off and that modernity arrived slowly and patchily. As memories of pre-independence India faded, the reassertion of Indian tradition was always likely. Symbolically, when the moment for independence had come in 1947 it had been at midnight, because the British had not consulted the astrologers to provide an auspicious day and a moment between two days had therefore to be chosen for the birth of a new nation: it was an assertion of the power of Indian ways that were to lose little of their force in the next forty years. Partition had then redefined the community to be governed in much more dominantly Hindu terms.

By 1980 the last Indian Civil Service officer recruited under the British had already retired. India lived still with a conscious disparity between its engrafted western political system and the society on which that has been imposed. For all the great achievements of many of its leaders, devoted men and women, the entrenched past, with all that means in terms of privilege, injustice and inequity, still stood in India’s way. Perhaps those who believed in its future in 1947 simply failed to recognize how difficult and painful fundamental change must be – and it is not for those who have found it hard to accomplish much less fundamental change in their own societies to be supercilious about that.

India’s neighbour Pakistan had turned more consciously to Islamic tradition (or at least modern incarnations thereof) and so soon found itself sharing in a movement of renewal which was visible across much of the Muslim world. Not for the first time, western politicians had again to recall that Islam was strong in lands stretching from Morocco in the west to China in the east. Indonesia, the largest South-East Asian country, Pakistan, Malaysia and Bangladesh between them contained nearly half the world’s Muslims. Beyond those countries and the lands of the Arabic culture, both the Soviet Union and Nigeria, the most populous African country, also had large numbers of Muslim subjects (as long ago as 1906, the tsarist government of Russia had been alarmed by revolution in Iran because of its possibly disturbing effect on its own Muslim peoples). But new perceptions of the Islamic world took time to appear. Well into the 1970s the rest of the world tended to be obsessed by the Arab countries of the Middle East, and especially the oil-rich among them, when it thought of Islam much at all.

This limited perception was also for a long time obscured and confused by the Cold War. The shape of that conflict sometimes blurred into older frameworks, too; to some observers an old-fashioned Russian desire for influence in the area seemed to be a strand in Soviet policy now nearer satisfaction than at any time in the past. The Soviet Union had by 1970 a worldwide naval presence rivalling that of the United States and established even in the Indian Ocean. Following British withdrawal from Aden in 1967, that base had been used by the Soviets with the agreement of the South Yemen government. All this was taking place at a time when further south, too, there had been strategic setbacks for the Americans. The coming of the Cold War to the Horn of Africa and the former Portuguese colonies had added significance to events taking place further north.

Yet Soviet policy, in a longer perspective, does not appear to have benefited much within the Muslim world from the notable disarray of American policy in the mid-1970s in the Middle East. Egypt had by then fallen out with Syria and had turned to the United States in the hope of making a face-saving peace with Israel. When in 1975 the General Assembly of the United Nations denounced Zionism as a form of racism and granted the PLO ‘observer’ status in the Assembly, Egypt was inevitably more isolated from other Arab states. By this time, the PLO’s activity across the northern border was not only harassing Israel, but also making Lebanon, whose élites were very Europeanized, a PLO sanctuary, followed by its ruin and disintegration. In 1978 Israel invaded southern Lebanon in the hope of ending the PLO raids. Although the non-Islamic world applauded when the Israeli and Egyptian prime ministers met in Washington the following year to agree a peace providing for Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai, the Egyptian three years later paid the price of assassination by those who felt he had betrayed the Palestinian and Arab cause.

The limited settlement between Israel and Egypt owed much to President Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate who had won the American presidential election of 1976. American morale was by then suffering from other setbacks than those in the Middle East. The Vietnam War had destroyed one president and his successor’s presidency had been built on the management of American defeat and the peace settlement (and it was soon clear how little that settlement was worth). There was in the background, too, the fear many Americans shared of the rising strength of the USSR in ballistic missiles. All this affected American reactions to an almost wholly unforeseen event, the overthrow of the shah of Iran. This not only dealt a damaging blow to the United States, but also revealed a potentially huge new dimension to the troubles of the Middle East and the volatility of Islam.

Long the recipient of American favour as a reliable ally, in January 1979 the shah was driven from his throne and country by a coalition of outraged liberals and Islamic conservatives. An attempt to secure constitutional government soon collapsed as popular support rallied to the Islamic faction. Iran’s traditional ways and social structure had been shaken by a policy of modernization in which the shah had followed – with less caution – his father Reza Khan. Almost at once, there emerged a Shi’ite Islamic Republic, led by an elderly and quite fanatical cleric. The United States quickly recognized the new regime, but unavailingly. It was tarred with guilt by association as the patron of the former shah and the outstanding embodiment of capitalism and western materialism. It was small consolation that the Soviet Union was soon undergoing similar vilification by the Iranian religious leaders, as a second ‘Satan’ threatening the purity of Islam.

Soon after the Iranian revolution, students in Tehran worked off some of their exasperation by storming the American embassy and seizing diplomats and others as hostages. A startled world suddenly found the Iranian government supporting the occupiers, taking custody of the hostages and endorsing the students’ demands for the return of the shah to face trial. President Carter could hardly have faced a more awkward situation, for at that moment American policy in the Islamic world was above all preoccupied with a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. A severance of diplomatic relations with Iran and the imposition of economic sanctions were the first responses. Then came an attempted rescue operation, which failed dismally. The unhappy hostages were in the end to be recovered by negotiation (and, in effect, a ransom: the return of Iranian assets in the United States, which had been frozen at the time of the revolution), but the humiliation of the Americans was by no means the sole or even the major importance of the episode.

Besides its wide policy repercussions, the retention of the hostages was in another way symbolic. It was a shock (registered in a unanimous vote of condemnation at the United Nations) to the convention, evolved first in Europe and then developed over more than three centuries throughout the civilized world, that diplomatic envoys should be immune from interference. The Iranian government’s action announced that it was not playing by the accepted rules. That was a blatant rejection of assumptions that had originated in Europe, but had since gone global. It forced many people around the world to wonder for the first time what else Islamic revolution might imply.

Some Americans were encouraged, therefore, when the particularly ferocious Ba’ath regime in Iraq, already viewed with favour for its ruthless execution and pursuit of Iraqi Communists, fell out with the new Iran in a conflict inflamed (in spite of Ba’athist secularism) by the traditional animosity between Mesopotamian Sunni and Persian Shia Muslims. When in July 1979 Saddam Hussein took over as president in Baghdad, it looked encouraging to the American security services: it was thought that he was likely to offset the Iranian danger in the Gulf.

This was the more welcome because the Iranian revolution implied more than just the American loss of an ally. Even though a coalition of grievances had made possible the overthrow of the shah, a speedy reversion to archaic tradition (strikingly, in the treatment of women) showed that more than a ruler had been repudiated. The new Iranian Islamic republic, although specifically Shi’ite, made universal claims; it was a theocracy where right rule stemmed from right belief, somewhat in the style of Calvin’s Geneva. It was also an expression of a rage shared by many Muslims worldwide (especially in Arab lands) at the onset of secular westernization and the failure of the promise of modernization. In the Middle East, as nowhere else, nationalism, socialism and capitalism had failed to solve the region’s problems – or at least to satisfy passions and appetites they had aroused. Those who believed that Islam furnished all answers to political problems (often called Islamists) thought that Atatürk, Reza Khan and Nasser had all led their peoples down the wrong road. Islamic societies had successfully resisted the contagion of atheistic Communism, but to many Muslims the contagion of western culture to which so many of their leaders had looked for a century or more now seemed even more threatening. Paradoxically, the western revolutionary notion of capitalist exploitation helped to feed this revulsion of feeling.

The roots of Islamism were varied and very deep. They could tap centuries of struggle against Christianity. They were refreshed from the 1960s onwards by the obviously growing difficulties of outsiders (including the USSR) in imposing their will on the Middle East and Persian Gulf, given their Cold War divisions. There was the mounting evidence for many Muslim Arabs that the western principle of nationality, advocated since the 1880s as an organizational remedy for the instability that followed Turkish decline, had not worked; only too evidently, the wars of the Ottoman succession were not over. A favourable conjunction of embarrassments for the West was made more promising still by the recent revelation of the potency of the oil factor. But then there was also, since 1945, the growing awareness of pious Muslims that western commerce, communications and the simple temptations offered to those rich with oil were more dangerous to Islamic societies than any earlier (let alone purely military) threat had been. This made for strain and uneasiness.

Yet those societies found it hard to move in step. Sunni and Shi’ite hostility went back centuries. In the post-1945 period, the Ba’ath socialist movement, which inspired many Muslims and which was nominally entrenched in Iraq, had become anathema to the deeply religious Muslim Brotherhood, established in Egypt in the 1920s, which deplored the ‘godlessness’ of both sides even in the Palestinian quarrel. Popular sovereignty was a goal fundamentalists rejected; they sought Islamic control of society in all its aspects, so that, before long, the world began to become used to hearing that Pakistan forbade mixed hockey, that Saudi Arabia punished crime by stoning to death and by the amputation of limbs, that Oman was building a university in which men and women students were to be segregated during lectures – and much, much more. By 1980 radical Islamists were powerful enough to secure their goals in some countries. Even students in a comparatively ‘westernized’ Egypt had already by 1978 been voting for them in their own elections, while some of the girls in medical school were refusing to dissect male corpses and demanded a segregated, dual system of instruction.

To put such attitudes in perspective, moreover (and at first sight it is curious to western eyes that student radicals should happily espouse such obviously reactionary causes), they have to be understood in the context of a long absence within Islam of any state or institutional theory such as that of the West. Even in orthodox hands, and even if it delivered some desirable goods, the state as such is not self-evidently a legitimate authority in Islamic thought – and, on top of that, the very introduction of state structures in Arab lands since the nineteenth century had been in imitation, conscious or unconscious, of the West. Youthful radicalism, which had tried and found wanting the politics of socialism (or what was thought to be that, and was in any case another western import), felt that no intrinsic value resided in states or nations; they looked elsewhere, and that, in part, explains the efforts shown first in Libya, and then in Iran and Algeria, to promote new ways of legitimating authority. Whether the age-old Islamic bias against public institutions and towards tribalism and the brotherhood of Islam can be sustained remains to be seen. Even that brotherhood, after all, has to recognize that most Muslims in the world do not understand Arabic.

The potential for disorder and even internecine conflict in parts of the Islamic world makes it too tempting to simplify. The Islamic world is not culturally homogeneous. No more than the mythological ‘West’ denounced in the 1980s by popular preachers in the mosques can Islam be identified convincingly as a coherent, discrete, neatly bordered civilization. Like the ‘West’ it is an abstraction, occasionally a useful shorthand for expository purposes. Many Muslims, including some of a religious cast of mind, seek a footing in two worlds, committed in a measure to both western and Islamic ideals. Each world represents a historical centre of dynamism, a source of energies, boundless in their own ways, but also with impacts on each other that have reverberated through time, most recently through the massive influence that European ideas have had on the Muslim world.

The unsettled situation in parts of the Islamic lands, especially in the Middle East, was made the more explosive by demography. The average age of most Muslim-dominated societies is said to be between fifteen and eighteen, and some are still growing at very fast rates. The new generation of Muslims may go in very different directions politically, socially and ethically. What is clear is that they are hungry for change, away from a situation that has left far too many of them in poverty, without political representation and with values, which may be composite and complex, but which they feel are respected neither by the West nor by their own rulers.