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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The transition, in the words of one eminent Spanish commentator, ‘required Francoists to pretend they had never been Francoists, and left-wing compromisers to pretend they were still committed to leftist principles’.
but even if only from enlightened self-interest, the beneficiaries were becoming loyal ‘Europeans’. Ireland successfully replaced or updated much of its dilapidated transport and sewerage infrastructure in this way, and among poorer, peripheral member states it was not alone.27
Regionalism, once the affair of a handful of linguistic recidivists or nostalgic folklorists, was now offered as an alternate, ‘sub-national’ identity: displacing the nation itself and all the more legitimate in that it came with the imprimatur of official approval from Brussels and even—albeit with distinctly less enthusiasm—from national capitals as well.
the already complex machinery of modern state government, its ministries and commissions and directorates, was now doubled and even tripled from above (Brussels) and below (the province or region). The outcome was not just bureaucracy on an unprecedented scale but also corruption, induced and encouraged by the sheer volume of funding available, much of it requiring the exaggeration and even invention of local needs and thus all but inviting the sorts of venal, local abuses that passed unnoticed by the Community’s managers
Civilized Europeans could indeed transcend boundaries—but the ‘barbarians’ would be kept resolutely beyond them. 28
The post-war welfare states rested upon two implicit assumptions: that economic growth and job creation (and thus government income) would continue at the high levels of the fifties and sixties; and that birth-rates would remain well above replacement level, ensuring a ready supply of new tax-payers to pay for their parents’—and grandparents’—retirement. Both assumptions were now open to question,
In prosperous Western Europe, then, it appeared that within two decades there would not be enough people around to pay the bills—and
The state, these critics insisted, should be removed as far as possible from the market for goods and services. It should not own the means of production, it should not allocate resources, it should not exercise or encourage monopolies, and it should not set prices or incomes. In the view of these ‘neo-liberals’, most of the services currently furnished by the state—insurance, housing, pensions, health and education—could be provided more efficiently in the private sector, with citizens paying for them out of income no longer (mis-)directed to public resources.
Driven by desperation and the conditions of an IMF loan,
بريطانيا العظمي !!!
the obdurate refusal to compromise, that so outraged her critics. As every opinion poll suggested, even those who didn’t care for Thatcherite policies often conceded a certain reluctant admiration for the woman herself. The British were once again being ruled.
As an economy, then, Thatcherized Britain was a more efficient place. But as a society it suffered meltdown, with catastrophic long-term consequences.
by vociferously insisting upon an individualist ethic that discounted any unquantifiable assets, Margaret Thatcher did serious harm to the fabric of British public life. Citizens were transmuted into shareholders, or ‘stakeholders’, their relationship to one another and to the collectivity measured in assets and claims rather than in services or obligations.
Politically, the party had to isolate and destroy the influence of Trotskyites and other ‘hard’ Left activists in some of its regional strongholds (notably Liverpool).
In his case this meant avoiding all talk of ‘class’, an antiquated social category displaced in New Labour’s rhetorical boilerplate by ‘race’ or ‘gender’.
مهم
This, then, is the measure of Margaret Thatcher’s achievement. Not only did she destroy the post-war consensus but she forged a new one. Before she rose to power the default position in British public policy was that the state is the natural fount of legitimacy and initiative. By the time she departed the scene, this was on the way to becoming a minority view
De Gaulle’s opponents and critics made much play with the ‘undemocratic’ way in which the General had seized and exercised power—‘le coup d’état permanent’ as François Mitterrand called it in a pamphlet published in 1965—but
as Mitterrand himself understood, that his achievement in 1981 was to ‘normalize’ the process of alternation in the French Republic, to make it possible for the Socialists to be treated as a normal party of government. But to Mitterrand’s supporters in 1981 the picture looked very different. Their goal was not to normalize the alternation of power in the future but to seize it and use it, here and now.
For the Left had not exercised power in France for many decades; indeed, it had never exercised power untrammeled by coalition partners, uncooperative bankers, foreign exchange crises, international emergencies and a litany of other excuses for its failure to implement socialism. In 1981, as it seemed, none of these applied and there would be no excuse for backsliding.
This pragmatic concession illustrates the broader impediment facing the Mitterrand ‘revolution’.
the Socialist governments of Mitterrand’s final years were by far the most energetic privatizers of all.
In any case, one of the chief general arguments for cutting the public sector—that the welfare state it incarnated was too costly to maintain—did not apply in Spain, or Portugal or Greece. There was no welfare state to dismantle.
مهم جدا
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.
‘Totalitarian society is the distorted mirror of the whole of modern civilization’. Václav Havel
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.
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.
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.
But you cannot build a better society on broken men.
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?
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.
مهم
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,
The victors of 1945, looking back on the dashed hopes of Versailles, concluded as we have seen that collective interests were better served by the painful but effective solution of territorial regrouping (ethnic cleansing as it would later be known).
Until then, talk of ‘rights’ had long been disfavored among left-leaning European intellectuals, echoing Marx’s famous dismissal of ‘the so-called rights of man’ as egoistic and ‘bourgeois’.
As one Italian observer remarked in 1977, the idea and ideal of ‘undivided’ freedom was being openly discussed on the Left ‘without mystification or demagogy’ for the first time since the war.
the chief victims of the repression in Czechoslovakia especially, where the Party leadership under Gustav Husák (the ‘President of Forgetting’) correctly calculated that its best hope of re-establishing ‘order’ lay in mollifying popular discontent with material improvements while energetically silencing all dissenting voices and references to the recent past.
thanks to the Helsinki Accords, ‘rights’ were by far the most accessible.
The point, he insisted, was not to argue with those in power. It was not even primarily to tell the truth, though in a regime based on lies this was important. The only thing that made sense in the circumstances of the time, he wrote, was to ‘live in truth’.
مهم
Václav Havel, for one, regarded the growing west European anti-war movement of the early 1980s as the perfect vehicle for engaging, diverting and neutralizing the western intelligentsia. : ‘peace’, he insisted, is not an option in countries where the state is permanently at war with society. Peace and disarmament under prevailing conditions would leave western Europe free and independent, while maintaining eastern Europe under Soviet control.
مهم جدا
Most people lived in a sort of moral ‘grey zone’, a safe if stifling space in which enthusiasm was replaced by acceptance. Active, risk-laden resistance to authority was hard to justify because—again, for most ordinary people—it appeared unnecessary. ‘Un-heroic, realistic deeds’ were the most one could expect. The intellectuals were talking for the most part to one another rather than addressing the community at large:
Havel and others were building a sort of ‘virtual’ public space to replace the one destroyed by Communism.
these arrangements, which—in return for political quiescence—offered social security and a low level of pressure at the workplace. As East Germany’s official Small Political Dictionary put it, with unintended irony, ‘in socialism, the contradiction between work and free time, typical of capitalism, is removed.’
In the course of the 1970s alone Czechoslovakia’s hard currency debt rose twelve-fold. Poland’s hard currency debt increased some 3,000 percent, as First Secretary Gierek and his colleagues sucked in subsidized Western goods, introduced expensive new social insurance programs for peasants and froze food prices at 1965 levels. Once borrowing at these levels took off it was hard to contain.
but the Pope was not interested in merely endorsing Christianity’s passive survival under Communism. To the occasional discomfort of his own bishops he began explicitly discouraging Catholics in Poland and everywhere else in Eastern Europe from any compromise with Marxism, and offered his Church not merely as a silent sanctuary but as an alternative pole of moral and social authority.
divisions.
المقصود كتاءب
But theirs was still a tiny and haphazard network of activists. What triggered mass backing was the Communist Party’s attempt—for the third time in a decade—to resolve its economic difficulties by announcing, on July 1st 1980, an immediate increase in the price of meat.
(of particular interest to Adam Michnik, who was determined to overcome the traditional anti-clericalism of the Polish Left and forge an alliance with the newly-energized Catholic leadership);
حسره علينا
As for the ‘peaceniks’, they were far less troubled by repression in Warsaw than by the bellicose rhetoric emanating from Washington.
And so it proved. In retrospect, the American defense build-up would come to be seen as the cunningly crafted lever that bankrupted and ultimately broke the Soviet system. This, however, is not quite accurate.
The 1979 Soviet census revealed an unprecedented increase in the (largely Muslim) population of Soviet Central Asia. In Soviet Kazakhstan and the republics abutting the Afghan frontier—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—the numbers were up by over 25 percent since 1970. Over the course of the following decade, whereas the Ukrainian population would grow by just 4 percent, that of Tajikistan increased by nearly half. European Russia, as it seemed to its leaders, was under demographic threat from its internal minorities:
as Politburo member Yegor Ligachev would later acknowledge to the American journalist David Remnick, after Afghanistan there could no longer be any question of applying force in Eastern Europe.
To the extent that hopes were vested in Gorbachev, this reflected more than anything the absence of any domestic opposition in the Soviet Union. Only the Party could clean up the mess it had made, and by good fortune the Party had elected as its leader a man with both the energy and the administrative experience to make the effort.
