Reappraisals

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Reappraisals Page 53

by Tony Judt


  The proper level of state involvement in the life of the community can no longer be determined by ex hypothesi theorizing. We don’t know what degree of regulation, public ownership, or distributive monopoly is appropriate across the board, only what works or is required in each case. Intervention mechanisms inherited from decisions that were appropriate when first made but that have since become anachronisms, like farm price supports or early retirement on full pay for state employees, are indefensible, above all because they inhibit the growth required to provide truly necessary benefits. Conversely, reductions in state involvement in the provision of public housing, medical facilities, or family services— cuts that seemed to make demographic, economic, and ideological sense when first introduced in the 1970s and 1980s—now look perilously socially divisive, when those who need them have no access to any other resources.

  The modern state still has a considerable say over how the economic growth generated in private hands might best be collectively distributed, at least at the local level. If the Left could convincingly argue that it had a set of general principles guiding its choices in the distribution of resources and services and could show that those principles were not merely stubborn defenses of the status quo, making the best of someone else’s bad job, it would have made a considerable advance. It would need to show that it understood that some must lose for all to gain; that a desire to sustain the intervention capacities of the state is not incompatible with acknowledgment of the need for painful reconsideration of the objects of that intervention; that both “regulation” and “deregulation” are morally neutral when taken in isolation. As things now stand, the continental Left merely records its (and its electors’) discomfort at the prospect of rearranging the social furniture; while Britain’s New Labour clings to power on the bankrupt promise that in these tricky matters it has no (unpopular) preferences of any kind.

  Reconsideration of principles is notoriously hard, and it is unfortunate, if not altogether accidental, that the Left finds itself confronted with the need to reimagine its whole way of thought under less than propitious economic circumstances. But there is never a good moment for untimely thoughts. For some years to come, the chief burden on the government of any well-run national community will be ensuring that those of its members who are the victims of economic transformations over which the government itself can exercise only limited control nevertheless live decent lives, even (especially) if such a life no longer contains the expectation of steady, remunerative, and productive employment; that the rest of the community is led to an appreciation of its duty to share that burden; and that the economic growth required to sustain this responsibility is not inhibited by the ends to which it is applied. This is a job for the state; and that is hard to accept because the desirability of placing the maximum possible restrictions upon the interventionary capacities of the state has become the cant of our time.

  Accordingly, the task of the Left in Europe in the years to come will be to reconstruct a case for the activist state, to show why the lesson for the twenty-first century is not that we should return, so far as possible, to the nineteenth. To do this, the Left must come to terms with its own share of responsibility for the sins of the century that has just ended. It was not so long ago, after all, that West German Social Democrats refused to speak ill of the late, unlamented German Democratic Republic, and there are still French and British Socialists who find it painful to acknowledge their erstwhile sympathy for the Soviet project in precisely its most state-idolatrous forms. But until the European Left has recognized its past propensity to favor power over freedom, to see virtue in anything and everything undertaken by a “progressive” central authority, it will always be backing halfheartedly and shamefacedly into the future: presenting the case for the state and apologizing for it at the same time.

  Until and unless this changes, the electors of Longwy and Sarrebourg, like their fellows in Austria, Italy, and Belgium (not to speak of countries farther east), will be tempted to listen to other voices, less timid about invoking the nation-state and “national-capitalism” as the forum for redemptive action. Why are we so sure that the far political Right is behind us for good—or indeed the far Left? The postwar social reforms in Europe were instituted in large measure as a barrier to the return of the sort of desperation and disaffection from which such extreme choices were thought to have arisen. The partial unraveling of those social reforms, for whatever reason, is not risk-free. As the great reformers of the nineteenth century well knew, the Social Question, if left unaddressed, does not just wither away. It goes instead in search of more radical answers.

  This essay was first published in 1997 in the journal Foreign Affairs, at the invitation of its then managing editor Fareed Zakaria. He asked me to write about any problem or development in foreign affairs likely to be of significance in years to come. I opted to discuss the new “social question” of poverty, underemployment, and social exclusion and the failure of the political Left to reassess its response to these and other dilemmas of globalization. Nothing that has happened in the intervening decade has led me to moderate my gloomy prognostications—quite the contrary.

  PUBLICATION CREDITS

  The essays in this book were first published in the following journals:

  Chapter I: “Arthur Koestler, the Exemplary Intellectual” in The New Republic, January 2000

  Chapter II: “The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi” in The New York Review of Books, May 20, 1999

  Chapter III: “The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber” in The New Republic, April 1, 1996

  Chapter IV: “Hannah Arendt and Evil” in The New York Review of Books, April 6, 1995

  Chapter V: “Albert Camus: ‘The best man in France’” in The New York Review of Books, October 6, 1994

  Chapter VI: “Elucubrations: The ‘Marxism’ of Louis Althusser” in The New Republic, March 7, 1994

  Chapter VII: “Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism” in The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2003

  Chapter VIII: “Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kołakowski and the Marxist Legacy” in The New York Review of Books, September 21, 2006

  Chapter IX: “A ‘Pope of Ideas’? John Paul II and the Modern World” in The New York Review of Books, October 31, 1996

  Chapter X: “Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan” in The Nation, July 19, 2004

  Chapter XI: “The Catastrophe: The Fall of France, 1940” in The New York Review of Books, February 22, 2001

  Chapter XII: “À la recherche du temps perdu: France and Its Pasts” in The New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998

  Chapter XIII: “The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain’s ‘Heritage’” in The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2001

  Chapter XIV: “The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters” in The New York Review of Books, December 2, 1999

  Chapter XV: “Romania between History and Europe” in The New York Review of Books, November 1, 2001

  Chapter XVI: “Dark Victory: Israel’s Six-Day War” in The New Republic, July 29, 2002

  Chapter XVII: “The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up” in Ha’aretz, May 5, 2006

  Chapter XVIII: “An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers” in The New Republic, April 14, 1997

  Chapter XIX: “The Crisis: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Cuba” in The New York Review of Books, January 15, 1998

  Chapter XX: “The Illusionist: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy” in The New York Review of Books, August 13, 1998

  Chapter XXI: “Whose Story Is It? The Cold War in Retrospect” in The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006

  Chapter XXII: “The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America” in The London Review of Books, September 21, 2006

  Chapter XXIII: “The Good Society: Europe vs. America” in The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2005

  Envoi: “The Social Question Redivivus” in Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997

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sp; INDEX

  Abel, Lionel

  absurd, idea of the

  Accumulation of Capital, The (Luxemburg)

  Acheson, Dean.

  Acton, Lord

  Adenauer, Konrad

  Adler, Alfred

  Adler, Max

  Afghanistan

  Africa

  Aǧca, Mehmet Ali

  Age of Capital, The (Hobsbawm)

  Age of Extremes, The (Hobsbawm)

  Agnew, Spiro T.

  Agusta (Belgian company)

  Albania

  Algeria

  Algerian war.

  Allen, Richard

  Allende, Salvador

  Allon, Yigal

  Alsop, Joseph

  Althusser, Hélène

  Althusser, Louis

  America Houses

  American Enterprise Institute

  Améry, Jean

  Anderson, Rudolf

  Anissimov, Myriam

  Annales

  Annan, Kofi

  Annan, Noel

  anti-Americanism

  Arab sources of

  cold war policies and

  Iraq invasion and

  anti-Communism

  Chambers and

  Hobsbawm on

  intellectuals and

  John Paul and

  Koestler and

  McCarthyism and

  anti-Fascism

  anti-Semitism

  Germany and

  Israel’s critics charged with

  Poland and

  Romania and

  Antohi, Sorin

  Antonescu, Ion

  Arab-Israeli conflict

  Kissinger shuttle diplomacy and

  post-change in

  solution impediments for

  See also Israel, State of; Lebanon; occupied territories; Palestinians; Six-Day War; Yom Kippur War

  Arafat, Yassir

  Aragon, Louis

  Arbatov, Georgi

  ‘Aref, ’Abd al-Rahman Muhammad

  Arendt, Hannah

  on Camus

  Argentina

  Arkan (Serb terrorist).

  Armenia/Armenians

  arms race

  Aron, Raymond .

  Arrival and Departure (Koestler)

  Arrow, Kenneth

  Arrow in the Blue (Koestler)

  “Arsenic” (Levi).

  Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (Cesarani)

  Ashdown, Paddy.

  Attali, Jacques

  Attlee, Clement

  Auschwitz.

  Carmelite convent proposal for

  Levi’s survival of

  Sperber essays on

  Austria

  Avenir dure longtemps , L’(Althusser)

  Ayer, A. J.

  Baader-Meinhof gang

  Babelon, Jean-Pierre

  Bachelard, Gaston

  Badinter, Robert.

  Bakunin, Mikhail

  Balaguer, Escrivá y.

  Ball, George

  Bangladesh

  Barak, Ehud

  Barbie, Klaus

  Barenboim, Daniel

  Barnsley (South Yorkshire)

  Barr, Nicholas

  Barrès, Maurice.

  Barrett, William

  Barthes, Roland

  Bartlett, Charles

  Barzun, Jacques

  Basque nationalists

  Baudelaire, Charles

  Baudouin (King of the Belgium)

  Bauer, Otto

  Bay of Pigs.

  Bazaine, François, Marshall

  Beard, Charles

  Beauvoir, Simone de

  Beckham, David.

  Begin, Menachem

  Beinart, Peter

  Belarus

  Belgium

  fall of France and

  Bell, Daniel

  Ben-Ami, Shlomo

  Benedetti, Leonardo de.

  Benedict (Pope)

  Ben-Gurion, David

  Benjamin, Walter

  Bentley, Elizabeth

  Bergen-Belsen

  Berle, Adolf A., Jr.

  Berlin

  airlift ()

  crisis ()

  Berlin, Isaiah.

  Berlinguer, Enrico

  Berlin Wall

  Berman, Paul.

  Bernanos, Georges

  Bernstein, Carl

  Bernstein, Eduardn.

  Bernstein, Leonard

  Beschloss, Michael

  Bessarabia.

  Beveridge, William

  Bhagwati, Jagdish.

  Biological Weapons Convention

  Birnbaum, Pierre

  Bismarck, Otto von

  Blair, Tony

  Blake, George

  Blanchard, Georges

  Bloch, Ernst

  Bloch, Marc

  Blocher, Christoph

  Blücher, Gebhard von

  Blum éon

  Blumenthal, Sidney

  Blunt, Anthony

  Boff, Leonardo

  Bohlen, Charles

  Bolshakov, Georgi.

  Bolshevism.

  Borkenau, Franz

  Borochov, Ber

  Borowski, Tadeusz

  Bosnia.

  Brandt, Willy

  Brazil

  Bread and Wine (Silone)

  “Breakdown, The” (Kołakowski)

  Brecht, Bertolt

  Brezhnev, Leonid

  “Bridge, The” (Levi)

  Britain. See United Kingdom

  British Communist Historians Group

  British Communist Party

  British National Party.

  British Rail

  Broadwater, Bowden

  Brown, Gordon

  Brussels

  Brzozowski, Stanisław

  Buber-Neumann, Margarete

  Bucharest

  Buckley, William F., Jr.

  Bukharin, Nikolai

  Bukovina.

  Bulganin, Nikolai

  Bulgaria

  Bund

  Bundy, Harvey.

  Bundy, McGeorge ..

  Bundy, William

  Burgess, Guy

  Burrin, Philippe

  Bush, George H. W.

  Bush, George W.

  Europe and

  liberals and

  Caligula (Camus)

  Calvino, Italo

  Cambodia

  Cambridge University .

  Camus, Albert .

  Canovan, Margaret.

  Can You Hear Their Voices? (Chambers)

  capitalism.

  inequities of

  John Paul on

  Left’s reconciliation with

  Marxism on

  totalitarianism and

  Western model of

  Caradja, Princess Brianna

  “Caritas” scam (Romania)

  Carné, Marcel

  Carnets (Camus)

  Carter, Jimmy

  Casey, William

  Castro, Fidel.

  Catholicism

  Belgium and

  Communist Secretariat compared with

  France and

  Poland and

  Vatican and. See John Paul

  Caute, David

  Cavani, Liliana

  Ceauşescu, Nicolae

  Celan, Paul

  Cesarani, David

  Chamberlain, Neville

  Chambers, Whittaker

  Charter(Czechoslovakia)

  Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU)

  Chateaubriand, François-René de

  Chechnya

  Chernobyl disaster.

  Chesterton, G. K.

  Chiaromonte, Nicolà

  Chiave a stella, La (Levi)

  Children’s Rights Convention ()

  Chile

  China.

  Communist takeover of

  as potential great power

  U.S. diplomatic opening with

  U.S. similarities with

  Christian Democrats

 
“Christianity and Revolution” (Arendt)

  Churchill, Winston

  CIA

  Cioran, E. M.

  class struggle

  Clinton, Bill

  Clubb, O. Edmund

  coal mining

  Cobbett, William

  Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea

  Cohn, Roy

  Cohn-Bendit, Daniel

  cold war

  Cuban missile crisis and

  détente and

  Hiss-Chambers case and

  illusions/errors about

  John Paul /Reagan alliance and

  Kissinger/Nixon policies and

  legacies of

  war on terror analogy with

  See also Soviet Union

  Cold War, The (Gaddis)

  Colombia

  colonialism

  anticolonial violence and.

  France and.

  Israel and

  Columbia University.

  Comintern.

  commemoration. See memorialization

  Committee on the Present Danger

  Common Agricultural Fund

  Communism.

  attraction of

  Chambers-Hiss case and

  failure of

  Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to

  ideas and

  intellectuals and

  Jews and

  Kissinger’s policymaking and

  Koestler’s portrayal of

  Marxism transformed into

  messianism and

  revisionist

  state’s role in

  totalitarianism and

  See also anti-Communism; cold war; Marxism; under specific countries

  Compagnon, Antoine

  Congo

  Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

  Congress for Cultural Freedom

  Congress of Bad Godesberg ()

  Congress of Vienna ()

  Constantinescu, Emil

  Corap, André

  Corbin, Alain

  Cordier ploy.

 

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