The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  25. Floréal

  Moscow and Peking had supposed that the Third World would rescue them. In the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks had really won because they had recruited the earliest version of it: you could tell assorted downtrodden Eastern peoples that colonialism was the enemy, that Marxism was the friend. After they had won the civil war, in September 1920, the Bolsheviks had staged a congress of ‘the toiling peoples of the East’ at Baku on the Caspian; 2,000 attended, some taking time off for their prayers, others trading, and had been addressed first of all by Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, screeching his Moscow-Jewish German, and then by the Turkish Enver Pasha, nephew-in-law of the Sultan, former commander of the Turkish army, who addressed them as ‘comrades’, and flounced out when he was told he could only have five minutes (he responded by circulating his vast address). The enemy was imperialism. There was obvious sense in this strategy, as was later displayed in China in 1949, and Vietnam in 1975. The Russians had accordingly gone into the Middle East and Africa, a process culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan. On America’s door-step, they had taken up alliance with the revolutionaries of Nicaragua, who agreed — as had happened with Republican Spain in the civil war — to pretend to establish a popular front rather than a people’s democracy, so as to rope in Western allies who would not have liked an outright Communist takeover. But in 1983 the Third World was not working out as intended. Iran had gone very badly wrong. So had the invasion of Afghanistan. And two very vulnerable places, Chile and Turkey, had shown that the Soviet formula was quite misplaced. The eighties economy was defeating not just Marx, but Lenin and Mao Tse-tung as well.

  The most characteristic book of the eighties was written not long after the decade ended, Francis Fukuyama’s End of History (1992). The title seemed funny when the book appeared, and seemed even funnier afterwards, but it was not senseless. The claim (a quote from Hegel) was that democracy and capitalism (‘free markets’) had spread from period to period after the Second World War, that dictatorships, Communism, wars, etc. would be things of the past, and that the world would move more and more in the direction of, say, Denmark. The essential was a decent level of prosperity, after which politics could move from Third to First World. Walt Rostow, back in the 1960s, had said much the same about industrialization. A point came when a country could ‘take off ’ into self-sustaining growth: England at the time of the Industrial Revolution, Germany somewhat later. ‘Big picture’ books of this sort were easy enough to pick apart, but they did connect with a substantial literature of Europe around 1900, when it was perfectly obvious that Western civilization had produced something unique, which needed explanation, and which countries such as Japan or Turkey might copy. Fukuyama’s contribution was only hesitantly stated. Its centre was that a modernizing dictatorship, or at any rate a period of rule without real elections, might be necessary for the ‘take-off ’, whether political or economic, to be arrived at. The question would have been accepted by any Communist in the 1930s: the peasants, Marx’s quadrupeds, would only accept progessive change if they were forced to. Modernization from the Left was a standard line, and was accepted very widely indeed. Since the Second World War a school of development economics had emerged, with the Swede Gunnar Myrdal in the lead, and its adepts were all around, whether in Africa or Latin America, arguing in effect that the peasantry and the small bourgeoisie should pay for heavy industrialization, courtesy of the State.

  But in 1976, by the time Mao Tse-tung had died, that scheme of things looked much less promising. China, after all, had gone through convulsions, disasters, tens of millions of people dead of starvation, and the USSR was also hardly an advertisement. Development economics had grown out of the Marshall Plan, and something had gone badly wrong: the more aid, the more backwardness, however you were to explain this. In remote relationship, much the same happened with the Keynesian assumptions as regards public spending and unemployment: much of England was Third World, in German eyes, though there were only low-level civil wars. And now there was a Pinochet, creating considerably more prosperity than anything Communist; quite soon thereafter, 2 million Soviet citizens were taking refuge in, of all places, Turkey. What was going right, and what, wrong?

  In Chile, in the first four years, to 1977, the aim was consolidation of the regime, a depoliticization of life, and a suppression of political parties and labour unions: farmers to farm, workers to work, students to study. There would have to be a currency reform, to put an end to the inflation: the State, printing its own money, was paying for its hangers-on at the expense, in taxes and rising prices, of people just trying to do a useful job outside the system. These matters had been analysed by political economists since the time of Adam Smith, two centuries beforehand, and economists in that tradition had swept the board in the nineteenth century. The State should be confined to its proper functions, in the way of defence, the rule of law and a money the value of which could be trusted. This brought about extraordinary progress in the later nineteenth century. But then had come 1914 and the big State had seemed to be the answer: world wars and the great crash of 1929, when finance and trade had collapsed, had seen to that. But this generated problems of its own, and these had been obvious enough to a particular school of political economists in central Europe even before 1914. The Austrian empire had been a very peculiar place, never really captured by western European liberal economics. Even in 1914 it employed a quarter of the population, and there was a legendary tragi-comic bureaucracy, the tax laws taking up three huge volumes, printed in two columns in small print on thin paper. Lawyers swarmed, and the general atmosphere was summed up by the great journalist of the era, Karl Kraus, when he said that Vienna was an asylum where you were allowed to scream. By 1934 there was a semi-dictatorship, trying to assert financial (and other: divorce was banned) orthodoxies. Its leader, Engelbert Dollfuss, faced a revolt from the Left. The army brought up artillery against a huge fortress-like public housing development called Karl-Marx Hof in Heiligenstadt, otherwise an upper-middle-class district; shells flew. The photographs of that, in the snows of February 1934, became one of the great Comintern tableaux, and two very prominent British Communists, one of them a major spy, became involved with left-wing Austrian women of that vintage. But that atmosphere also produced a school of political economists who looked upon the whole business and wondered what had gone wrong with the comfortable certainties of 1914. Like Keynes, they had a weakness for answering the problem in terms of mathematics. Hayek and Schumpeter had got out, via London, to Chicago and Harvard. Ludwig von Mises got out to Switzerland, and the oddest remark made, upon the outbreak of the Second World War, was made by him at Bern station to Wilhelm Röpke, later the architect of the West German economic miracle, whom he encountered by chance, as he transferred from Istanbul to Switzerland: if the Anglo-French free-trade treaty had been ratified by Louis Napoleon, this war would not have happened. In its surreal central European way, this stated a truth: countries that ignored the economic rules would distort everything and end up with a disaster. This ended up with the bombardment of the Karl-Marx Hof by the artillery of Prince Schönburg-Hartenstein. It also ended up with the Pinochet coup. The University of Chicago took in the Austrian school, Hayek in particular. In the USA universities competed with each other, and there was freedom in ideas. Chicago had always striven to acquire a character different from the Ivy League places, which listened to grand siren voices from England. Milton Friedman and others of his tendency worked there. In Chicago, at any rate, there were young men and women who had listened to what Hayek and his disciples had to say, and there were young Chileans who had attended the same classes. There had, since 1956, been a formal link between Chicago and the Catholic University in Santiago. In Allende’s Chile, Friedman had much to chew upon, and Pinochet’s Chile became the test case for an experiment that was to prove to be of worldwide importance.

  Allende himself had stood on what appeared to be a formidable rock of thinking. Why was C
hile poor, much poorer than Argentina? The Argentinian Raúl Prebisch argued powerfully that in Latin America big estates counted as a bottleneck, and in Chile they predominated — 80 per cent of the land held by 7 per cent of the farms, each with a thousand hectares on average, whereas 37 per cent of the farms held 0.2 per cent of the land. These figures seemed to reflect ‘social injustice’, and development economists argued that, because there were so many very poor peasants, there was not proper demand for industrial goods. The rich just imported them, and otherwise did nothing for economic growth except employ servants who, in the poorest countries such as Haiti, themselves employed servants. In the USA, there was a great deal of head-shaking as to what had gone wrong, the role of the USA included. Kennedy, as part of a campaign to limit the appeal of Castro, promoted an ‘Alliance for Progress’, with grants of money for ‘structural reforms’ in Latin America, and the Chilean Christian Democrats promoted land reform, though they did so prudently: carried out too quickly it could damage production. There was a problem for Chile, in that half of the population lived in the central valleys, not in the immense areas to north and south: vast estates on endless tracts of valueless land hardly made any difference, one way or the other, and some of them worked efficiently enough. They would have worked more efficiently, as experience was to show, had Chilean produce been freely bought and sold in the richer markets. But these protected their own agriculture: no-one knew Chilean wines until much later. Over the pace of land reform, the Christian Democrats split three ways, and their alliance with the Right disintegrated, which was the background to the election of Allende. That had ended in tears.

  The concomitant of the big state was printed money, which produced inflation, and inflation distorted everything. Augusto Pinochet led the field in what was to become a powerful counter-attack. His first move was to cancel the 300 per cent wage increases sanctioned by Allende, and some of the controlled basic prices were hugely increased. The great mass of the population had had its energy sapped, and accepted the immediate troubles easily enough, though no doubt the presence of the military helped. The essential move was to restrict the output of paper, which in turn meant a drastic curtailment of the State’s spending. There was no great secret in this: you needed some foreign support, high interest rates to prevent an expansion of borrowing, devaluation, and maybe bond sales at a well-judged rate, to attract some of the excess paper. These things had been done in 1923 in Germany, and a great inflation, which had brought the Mark to 11 billion against the dollar, stopped more or less overnight, in the context of a Communist takeover in Saxony (suppressed by the army, in what was known as a Reichsexekution) and then Hitler’s first attempt to seize power, with the Putsch in Munich. There, the change had come about because, at last, a government stretching from some way into the Left to some way into the Right had been strong enough to maintain control. There were problems in the short run, with bankruptcies and unemployment, but there followed an economic recovery. Now, the first step in Chile was to carry through the money reform. Reducing inflation is a slow business, and in 1974 it still stood at over 500 per cent. Milton Friedman came on a visit in March 1975, and an economic recovery programme was announced. There were three phases of liberalization — the first to 1977, then a council of state in 1981 and a constituent assembly in 1985 with direct election every eight years provided for. A constitutional article forbade attacks on the family. Control of inflation meant, not just management of a paper currency, but attacking the causes of the inflation — what a prominent English politician, Sir Keith Joseph, with excellent American contacts, famously addressed at this time.

  There would have to be a dismantling of the State. It meant privatization, to encourage efficiency through competition. The State, with ignorant investment of other people’s money, with over-employment, with automatic further credit from some puppet bank and with inappropriate political appointments, could in effect ruin concerns to the point at which no-one would buy them. No-one would make a profit out of them. In Chile some of the firms taken over by Allende had not been so ruined, and by 1978 all of the 259 sequestered firms had been returned to the stockholders, and ninety-nine others were sold off cheaply, mainly to conglomerates. There were two concomitants. The peso, though stable enough, was devalued, to the point at which imports from Chile became very cheap, and a further concomitant concerned the outside world: trade was widely liberalized, with foreign competition allowed. Tariffs sank to 10 per cent by 1978. There was a recovery, led by exports, and not just by the copper and other raw materials that Chile produced. There was now a property boom in Santiago, and there was a rehousing of the poor, away from the shanty towns into tower blocks well-segregated from middle-class areas, which experienced a property boom, because the tax on capital gains in property was abolished, and conglomerates (piranhas) made great gains out of the proceeds. Prices, generally, were removed from controls. On the sixth anniversary of the coup, Pinochet made a speech referring to the ‘seven modernizations’, which included a new labour code, and a new principle, of privatization, to be followed. This latter included social security: there would now be competition among private firms to provide insurance, rather than blanket coverage by the State. The new principle meant that education was also devolved — first onto the municipalities — while private schools were encouraged. The University of Chile and the Catholic University had been placed under the military, and were now expected to be self — financing. Privatized universities now became part of the intellectual agenda: this reflected the success of the American model, as against the decline of state universities in every other country.

  Sergio de Castro became finance minister in December 1976 and surrounded himself with Chicago Ph.D.s who proposed textbook answers to the various problems. These became, quite soon, the stock-in-trade of the Western world, from the Atlantic to Turkey. There would be liberalization of foreign trade, and an end put to the practice of import substitution; the peso would be devalued as far as might be necessary to promote exports. On the other hand, credit would be restricted and interest rates put up in order for inflation to be stopped. These two aims were not always easy to combine, because high interest rates could push up the value of the peso, which might damage exporting. There was a further problem, that the course of privatization brought, at least in the short term, unemployment, although to some extent public works were used to counteract this. Given the overwhelming strength of the army, there was of course nothing that the trade unions could do while the reforms went ahead. Wages fell in purchasing power by half. Then matters began to improve, as the end of inflation meant that people started to save again.

  The regime then had to contend with the ‘second oil shock’, when, in 1979, petrol prices doubled, and the country suffered from further difficulties when, in 1979, the British and Americans launched their own inflation cures, with a great fall in demand in 1980 and 1981. The rise of the dollar disrupted the exchanges, and in Chile, in 1982, there were many bankruptcies — 824, as against twenty-four in normal times, and unemployment reached beyond 20 per cent, while output fell by over 14 per cent. In 1983 the unemployment figure rose to 28.5 per cent and inflation also went up, from 9.9 per cent to 27 per cent. One problem was that the peso had been overvalued, and there had not been proper supervision of banks, which took dollar loans and lost the money in speculation. The de Castro team imagined that there would be some automatic adjustment, but by 1983 Pinochet himself realized that he must contain the crisis by state action. The claim was that the rich grew richer and that the gap between them and the poor widened — a not improbable claim. By 1978 conglomerates had emerged in force — Vial controlling twenty-five companies, Cruzat-Lorrain thirty-seven of the 250 largest ones, and six conglomerates held over half of their assets; there were press empires, and two of them took over 75 per cent of social security arrangements. Banks borrowed heavily from foreign fringe banks and then somewhat later ran into difficulties. In the later seventies interest rates were lo
w and there was much borrowing once inflation had been halted: imports, debts and interest costs grew in 1980-81 as the dollar rose, and by 1982 a debt problem had emerged (in 1973 it had stood at $3.67bn but by 1982 it was over $17bn). The gremios — new private companies — suffered from foreign competition and in the last years of the seventies there were 1,338 bankruptcies. Even Vial and Cruzat-Lorrain went bankrupt and some bankers were prosecuted.

  De Castro left office, succeeded by a more flexible man, José Piñera, who reorganized the entire world of pensions and welfare, devalued by 35 per cent and imposed tariffs again — not part of the original programme at all. Some of the banks were taken over, and their debts were underwritten by the State. Real wages were held down; they had fallen by one third between 1973 and 1975, and even in 1989 were still 90 per cent of the 1970 level. There was some labour unrest in 1983 and the copper workers staged a day of protest against the police, but wages were generally held down, and growth, at over 7 per cent, returned. Now, trade opened up: for instance, Chilean wine could be exported, and enterprising farmers worked out how they might grow new fruit — kiwi for instance. Once recovery was in place, by 1986, there was more privatization — utilities, mining and some services, and the banks that had been taken over were also sold off, as going concerns, this time with military money involved as ‘people’s capitalism’.