by Tony Judt
Despite the excited talk in Brussels (and London) of increased openness and ‘competitiveness’ the European privatization fever of these years probably wrought less change than its supporters promised or expected. Critics had warned that the result would not be more competition but simply a transfer of concentrated economic power from the public to the private sphere and this is what happened. Thanks to complicated cross-shareholding arrangements, many large private firms in France, for example, mimicked the behaviour of the old public companies. They monopolized whole sectors and were no more responsive to their small ‘stakeholders’ than they had been to taxpayers or consumers when administered under public management.
Ironically, privatization and increased competition also had little immediate impact upon the size of the state sector itself. We have already seen that in Thatcher’s Britain the scope of the state actually expanded. So it was elsewhere. Between 1974 and 1990 (thanks in some measure to endemic private-sector unemployment) the share of the employed workforce in public service actually grew: from 13 percent to 15.1 percent in Germany; from 13.4 percent to 15.5 percent in Italy; from 22.2 percent to 30.5 percent in Denmark. Most of these government employees, however, were now in the tertiary sector rather than in manufacturing: providing and administering services (financial, educational, medical and transportation) rather than making things.
Economic liberalization did not signal the fall of the welfare state, nor even its terminal decline, notwithstanding the hopes of its theorists. It did, though, illustrate a seismic shift in the allocation of resources and initiative from public to private sectors. This change went far beyond the technical question of who owned which factories, or how much regulation there was to be in any given industry. For nearly half a century Europeans had watched the state, and public authorities, play a steadily more prominent part in their affairs. This process had become so commonplace that the premise behind it—that the activist state was a necessary condition of economic growth and social amelioration—was largely taken for granted. Without the cumulative unraveling of this assumption in the course of the waning decades of the century, neither Thatcherism nor the Mitterrand volte-face would have been possible.
XVIII
The Power of the Powerless
‘Marxism is not a philosophy of history, it is the philosophy of history, and
to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history’.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
‘I talk about rights because they alone will enable us to leave this magic
lantern show’.
Kazimierz Brandys
‘Totalitarian society is the distorted mirror of the whole of modern
civilization’.
Václav Havel
‘The pressure of the state machine is nothing compared with the pressure
of a convincing argument’.
Czesław Miłosz
Behind the long ‘Social-Democratic moment’ in Western Europe there had lain not just pragmatic faith in the public sector, or allegiance to Keynesian economic principles, but a sense of the shape of the age that influenced and for many decades stifled even its would-be critics. This widely-shared understanding of Europe’s recent past blended the memory of Depression, the struggle between Democracy and Fascism, the moral legitimacy of the welfare state, and—for many on both sides of the Iron Curtain—the expectation of social progress. It was the Master Narrative of the twentieth century; and when its core assumptions began to erode and crumble, they took with them not just a handful of public-sector companies but a whole political culture and much else besides.
If one were seeking a symbolic moment when this transformation was accomplished, a hinge on which post-war Europe’s self-understanding turned, it came in Paris on December 28th 1973 with the first Western publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Reviewing the English translation in the Guardian, W. L. Webb wrote ‘To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool, missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.’ The irony, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged, was that the message of the book—that ‘real existing Socialism’ was a barbaric fraud, a totalitarian dictatorship resting upon a foundation of slave labour and mass murder—was hardly new.
Solzhenitsyn himself had written about the subject before, and so had numberless victims, survivors, observers and scholars. The Gulag Archipelago added hundreds of pages of detail and data to earlier testimonies, but in its moral fervor and emotional impact it was not obviously a greater work of witness than Evgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, published in 1967; Margarete Buber-Neumann’s memoir of her experiences in both Soviet and Nazi camps, first published in German in 1957; Wolfgang Leonhard’s disabused account of his own misplaced faith, which appeared in 1955; or even earlier demolitions of the Soviet myth by Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine.255
But timing was all. Intellectual critics of Communism had never been lacking; however their impact had for many decades been blunted by a widespread desire in Western Europe (and, as we have seen, in Eastern Europe through the 1960s) to find some silver lining, however dim, in the storm cloud of state socialism that had rolled across much of the continent since it first broke upon Russia in 1917. ‘Anti-Communism’, whatever its real or imputed motives, suffered the grievous handicap of appearing to challenge the shape of History and Progress, to miss the ‘bigger picture’, to deny the essential contiguity binding the democratic welfare state (however inadequate) to Communism’s collectivist project (however tainted).
That is why opponents of the post-war consensus were so marginalized. To suggest, as Hayek and others had done, that market-restraining plans for the common good, albeit well-intentioned, were not just economically inefficient but also and above all the first step on the road to serfdom, was to tear up the road map of the twentieth century. Even opponents of Communist dictatorship like Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus or Isaiah Berlin, who tried to insist upon the distinction between social-democratic reforms for the common benefit and party dictatorships established in the name of a collectivist myth, appeared to many of their ‘progressive’ critics to echo and thus serve partisan political allegiances taken up in the Cold War.
Accordingly, they fell foul of a widespread reluctance, especially on the part of the Sixties generation, to abandon the radical catechism. It was one thing to sneer knowingly at Stalin, now long dead and anyway condemned by his own heirs. It was quite another to acknowledge that the fault lay not in the man but the system. And to go further, to impute responsibility for the crimes and misdemeanors of Leninism to the project of radical utopianism itself was to mine the very buttresses of modern politics. As the British historian E. P. Thompson, something of a cult figure to a younger generation of ‘post-Communist Marxists’, wrote accusingly to Leszek Kołakowski (after Kołakowski published a damning indictment of Soviet Communism in the wake of 1968): your disenchantment is a threat to our Socialist faith.
By 1973, however, that faith was under serious assault not just from critics but from events themselves. When The Gulag Archipelago was published in French, the Communist daily newspaper l’Humanité dismissed it, reminding readers that since ‘everyone’ already knows all about Stalin, anyone rehashing all that could only be motivated by ‘anti-Sovietism’. But the accusation of ‘anti-Sovietism’ was losing its force. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Prague and its repressive aftermath, and of reports filtering out of China about the Cultural Revolution, Solzhenitsyn’s root and branch condemnation of the whole Communist project rang true—even and perhaps especially to erstwhile sympathizers.
Communism, it was becoming clear, had defiled and despoiled its radical heritage. And it was continuing to do so, as the genocide in Cambodia and the widely-publicized trauma of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ would soon reveal.256 Even those in Western Europe—and they were many—who held the United States largely responsible for the disasters in Vietnam and Cambodia,
and whose anti-Americanism was further fuelled by the American-engineered killing of Chile’s Salvador Allende just three months before the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, were increasingly reluctant to conclude as they had once done that the Socialist camp had the moral upper hand. American imperialism was indeed bad—but the other side was worse, perhaps far worse.
At this point the traditional ‘progressive’ insistence on treating attacks on Communism as implicit threats to all socially-ameliorative goals—i.e. the claim that Communism, Socialism, Social Democracy, nationalization, central planning and progressive social engineering were part of a common political project—began to work against itself. If Lenin and his heirs had poisoned the well of social justice, the argument ran, we are all damaged. In the light of twentieth-century history the state was beginning to look less like the solution than the problem, and not only or even primarily for economic reasons. What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing.
That, of course, is a very ‘intellectual’ sort of conclusion, but then the impact of the retreat from the state was felt most immediately by intellectuals—appropriately enough, since it was intellectuals who had been most zealous in promoting social improvement from above in the first place. As Jiří Gruša, the Czech writer, was to observe in 1984: ‘It was we [writers] who glorified the modern state.’ By its very nature, modern tyranny—as Ignazio Silone noted—requires the collaboration of intellectuals. It was thus altogether appropriate that it was the disaffectionof Europe’s intellectuals from the grand narrative of progress that triggered the ensuing avalanche; and somehow fitting that this disaffection was most marked in Paris, where the narrative itself had first taken intellectual and political shape two centuries earlier.
France in the Seventies and Eighties was no longer Arthur Koestler’s ‘burning lens of Western Civilization’, but French thinkers were still unusually predisposed to engage universal questions. Writers and commentators in Spain or West Germany or Italy in these years were much taken up with local challenges—though the terrorist threat that preoccupied them carried implications of its own for the discrediting of radical utopianism. Intellectuals in the UK, never deeply touched by the appeal of Communism, were largely indifferent to its decline and thus kept their distance from the new Continental mood. In France, by contrast, there had been widespread and longstanding local sympathy for the Communist project. As antiCommunism gathered pace in French public discussion, abetted by the steady decline in the Communist Party’s vote and influence, it was thus fuelled by local recollection and example. A new generation of French intellectuals transited with striking alacrity out of Marxism, driven by a sometimes unseemly haste to abjure their own previous engagement.
In condemning the distortions of radical utopianism, the young Parisian ‘new philosophers’ of the mid-Seventies like André Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Lévy were in most respects unoriginal. There was little in Glucksmann’s Les Maîtres Penseurs—published to universal acclaim in March 1977—that Raymond Aron had not said better in his Opium des Intellectuels twenty two years earlier. And there was nothing in Lévy’s Barbarie à Visage Humain, which appeared two months after Glucksmann’s essay, which French readers could not have found in Albert Camus’s L’Homme révolté. But whereas Camus’s essay was cuttingly dismissed by Jean-Paul Sartre when it came out in 1951, Lévy and Glucksmann were influential bestsellers. Times had changed.
The parricidal quality of this local intellectual earthquake is obvious. Its ostensible target was the calamitous Marxist detour in Western thought; but much of its fire was directed above all at those dominant figures of post-war intellectual life, in France and elsewhere, who had peered across the touchlines of History, cheering on the winners and politely averting their eyes from their victims. Sartre, by far the best known of these fellow-travelers, himself fell from favour in these years, even before his death in 1980, his creative legacy sullied by his apologetics first for Soviet Communism, later for Maoism.257
The climate change in Paris extended beyond a settling of scores across a generationof engaged intellectuals. In 1978 Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery appeared in French for the first time, the harbinger of a steady absorption into the French mainstream of a whole corpus of ‘Anglo-American’ scholarship in philosophy and the social sciences of which the local intellectual culture had for decades remained in near ignorance. In the same year the historian François Furet published his path-breaking Penser la Révolution Française, in which he systematically dismantled the ‘revolutionary catechism’ through which the French had for many decades been taught to understand their country and its past.
In this ‘catechism’ as Furet dissected it, the French Revolution had been the urmoment of modernity: the confrontation that triggered France’s division into opposing political cultures of Left and Right, ostensibly determined by the class identities of the antagonists. That story, which rested upon the twin pillars of early-nineteenth century liberal optimism and a Marxist vision of radical social transformation, had now, in Furet’s account, run into the ground—not least because Soviet Communism, the revolutionary heir-presumptive in this morality tale of purposeful radical transformation, had retroactively polluted the whole inheritance. The French Revolution, in Furet’s words, was ‘dead’.
The political implications of Furet’s thesis were momentous, as its author well understood. The failings of Marxism as a politics were one thing, which could always be excused under the category of misfortune or circumstance. But if Marxism were discredited as a Grand Narrative—if neither reason nor necessity were at work in History—then all Stalin’s crimes, all the lives lost and resources wasted in transforming societies under state direction, all the mistakes and failures of the twentieth century’s radical experiments in introducing Utopia by diktat, ceased to be ‘dialectically’ explicable as false moves along a true path. They became instead just what their critics had always said they were: loss, waste, failure and crime.
Furet and his younger contemporaries rejected the resort to History that had so coloured intellectual engagement in Europe since the beginning of the 1930s. There is, they insisted, no ‘Master Narrative’ governing the course of human actions, and thus no way to justify public policies or actions that cause real suffering today in the name of speculative benefits tomorrow. Broken eggs make good omelettes. But you cannot build a better society on broken men. In retrospect this may appear a rather lame conclusion to decades of intense theoretical and political debate; but for just that reason it illustrates rather well the extent of the change.
In Ma Nuit Chez Maud, Eric Rohmer’s 1969 conte moral, a Communist philosopher and his Catholic colleague argue at considerable length over the competing claims of Pascal’s wager on God and the Marxist bet on History. What is striking in retrospect is not the conversation itself, which will be familiar to anyone old enough to remember the Sixties in continental Europe, but the seriousness with which it was taken not just by the on-screen protagonists but by millions of contemporary viewers. Ten years later the topic, if not the film, was already a period piece. The resort to History in defense of unpalatable political choices had begun to seem morally naïve and even callous. As Camus had noted many years before, ‘Responsibility towards History releases one from responsibility towards human beings’. 258
The new uncertainty about ‘History’ (and history) inaugurated a disagreeable decade for West European intellectuals, uneasily aware that the disintegration of great historical schemes and master narratives boded ill for the chattering classes who had been most responsible for purveying them, and who were now themselves—as it seemed to many of them—the object of humiliating indifference. In September 1986, in a revealing solipsistic aside to a French journalist, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu bemoaned the fallen condition of the engaged public thinker: ‘As for me, I think that if there is a great cause left today it’s the defense of the intellectuals’.259
Intellectual self-
abnegation before History was once described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘the horrible German way out of the burden of moral choice’. This is a little hard on Germans, who were hardly the only Europeans to abase themselves on the altar of historical necessity, though it is true that the idea had its roots in German romantic philosophy. But it points to an emerging vacuum in European political ideas: if there was no ‘great cause’ left; if the progressive legacy had run into the ground; if History, or necessity, could no longer be credibly invoked in defense of an act, a policy or a programme; then how should men decide the great dilemmas of the age?
This was not a problem for Thatcherite radicals, who treated public policy as an extension of private interests and for whom the marketplace was a necessary and sufficient adjudicator of values and outcomes. Nor were the times unusually troubling for Europe’s traditional conservatives, for whom the measure of good and evil in human affairs remained anchored in religious norms and social conventions, bruised but not yet altogether displaced by the cultural tsunami of the Sixties. It was the progressive Left, still the dominant presence in European political and cultural exchanges, which was urgently in need of a different script.
What it found, to its collective surprise, was a new political vernacular—or, rather, a very old one, freshly rediscovered. The language of rights, or liberties, was firmly inscribed in every European constitution, not least those of the Peoples’ Democracies. But as a way of thinking about politics, ‘rights talk’ had been altogether unfashionable in Europe for many years. After the First World War rights—notably the right to self-determination—had played a pivotal role in international debate over a post-war settlement, and most of the interested parties at the Versailles Peace Conference had invoked their rights quite vociferously when pressing their case upon the Great Powers. But these were collective rights—the rights of nations, peoples, minorities.
