The American Way of Peace: An Interpretation [1 ed.] 0826215955, 9780826215956, 9780826264800

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The American Way of Peace

Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy Other Books in the Series Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson by francesca aran murphy Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World by john von heyking Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues by james m. rhodes Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964 edited by peter emberley and barry cooper A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding by ellis sandoz Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking by david j. levy Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence by thomas j. mcpartl and The Narrow Path of Freedom and Other Essays by eugene davidson New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism by barry cooper Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944–1984 edited by charles r. embry Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity by glenn hughes Voegelin, Schelling, and the Philosophy of Historical Existence by jerry day

The American Way of Peace An Interpretation

Jan S. Prybyla

ø Universit y of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2005 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prybyla, Jan S. The American way of peace : an interpretation / Jan S. Prybyla. p. cm. — (Eric Voegelin Institute series in political philosophy) Summary: “Traces the development and implementation of Pax Americana, the American Way of Peace, from World War II to the war on terrorism and the Iraqi conflict. Examines the extent to which modernization must incorporate values of democracy and rule of law”— Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-1595-5 (alk. paper) 1. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 2. United States—Foreign relations—1989– 3. Peace-building—United States. I. Title. II. Series. E840.P79 2005 327.73'009'045— dc22 2005003463

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This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: Phoenix Type, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Adobe Garamond, Blackadder, and Cancione Ornaments

ø The University of Missouri Press offers its grateful acknowledgment to the Conference on European Problems and to the Eric Voegelin Institute for generous contributions in support of the publication of this volume.

To Eliz abeth with thanks for her encouragement and gentle insistence that this be written down

ø

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Contents Preface

ix

I. Then (1945–1991) 1. Pax Americana

3

2. The Postwar Task

8

3. Bretton Woods

10

4. The Marshall Plan and Containment

23

5. German Wirtschaftswunder

28

6. The Berlin Blockade

30

7. The Truman Doctrine

32

8. NATO and Its Cross of Lorraine

34

9. The Korean War

38

10. The Hungarian Revolution and the Berlin Wall

41

11. The Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev

43

12. The Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Brezhnev Doctrine

46

13. Cultural Shift

49

14. Détente

52

15. Eurocommunism

57

16. Negotiated Cold War

67

17. The Errors of Socialism

69

18. Ronald Reagan and His Critics

73

19. Solidarity

78

viii

Contents

20. Gorbachev and His Nemesis

83

21. The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification of Germany

87

22. The End of an Era

91

II. And Now (1991–2004) 23. After the Fall: Celebratory Foresight and Ominous Speculations

103

24. After the Wall: What Happened on the Ground

118

25. Drifting Apart: Multipolarity and Hegemony

124

26. Aggregation: The European Union

134

27. Disaggregation: Civil War in Bosnia and Herzegovina

159

28. Chinese Shadows

164

29. 9/11 and the War on Terrorism

179

30. Lessons

184

ø Appendix. Modernization and Modernity in the Process of Economic Growth and Development

189

Notes

213

Index

237

Preface

I

n writing, expanding, and updating for publication my June 2003 address to the last symposium of the Conference on European Problems (CEP),1 I noticed how many of the ideas that underlay what I said in Kansas City on that moving occasion when our ways parted had been developed in a brief essay I had published ten years earlier. It appeared in a journal in Taipei, and fell dead-born from the press. The article was written against the backdrop of an America triumphant, Central and Eastern Europe out of jail, and Wall Street about to take off on a heady upward course to which there were no limits, or so the financial experts (now in another branch of work) said. Because that article bears on the centrality of modernization and (what I call) modernity in the process of economic growth and development, its reflections clarify the reasoning behind my, at times eristic, interpretation of Pax Americana, the American way of peace, and do so less polemically than this book. I have reprinted the essay in an Appendix with permission from the editor of Issues and Studies, Institute of International Relations, Taipei, Taiwan, for which I am grateful. Another reason for doing this is that Eugene Davidson, the founder of the Conference on European Problems, scholar and no-nonsense man of action, his mind keen as a razor, accomplished author and fine stylist, had recommended that I seek a wider readership for that article, nearer home. Our views did not coincide on all issues, but we did agree on many, including those contained in the Appendix. It is as a token of my appreciation of his integrity and generosity of spirit that I attach this essay to the expanded text of the Kansas City farewell address on the American way of peace. 



Preface

The moving force of the Conference on European Problems during four decades of its existence was Professor Jerzy Hauptmann, the organization’s Executive Secretary, a hero of the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 who was decorated by the postcommunist Polish government with the Cross of Valor and recognized for his exemplary services by the City of Warsaw in August 2004 on the sixtieth anniversary of the uprising. I was fortunate to count a man of his character and courage among my friends. Hans Brisch, Vice President of the CEP, formerly Chief of Staff to the Governor of Nebraska and Chancellor for the Higher Education System of the State of Oklahoma, has been most helpful in attending to the smooth running and indispensable operational details of our organization for many years. Our thanks go out to him. Erich Pohl, Academic Director of Foreign Languages and Cultures at Heidelberg University, has been a gracious host to our final symposium in Germany in May 2003. He was a good colleague and friend, and I along with all the other members of the CEP thank him and his wife, Heidrun, for their many kindnesses.

My motto is: “Ready, fire, aim,” and you give me lectures and make sly fun of me about that. But yours is: “Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim.” —Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

Si vis pacem, para bellum Flavius Vegetius Renatus —De Rei Militari

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i Then (1945–1991)

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1 Pax Americana

My topic is America’s evolving conception of its role in the world and its performance in that role over the nearly six decades following the end of World War II, a little more than a quarter of U.S. history. America’s role during this time has been worldwide. Because of historical circumstances not wished by Americans and beyond their control, the American role demanded not only involvement but also leadership, always a sensitive issue in the international couloirs of power peopled by many wannabes but few who can really deliver. As envisaged and carried out by the United States—sometimes with, sometimes without, transatlantic partners—America’s actions brought theretofore unmatched prosperity and overall (that is, aggregate, not necessarily local/detailed) peace to those willing and able to work together on this vast undertaking and accept the not overly demanding prescripts for the attainment of the desired ends.1 After a period of darkness, liberty was restored in Western Europe, implanted in Japan, saved from extinction in other parts of the globe, and eventually spread to Central and Eastern Europe. The record has not been flawless. Mistakes were made; there were slippages, failures, and lapses of good judgment. But the idea was worthy, the will to act was there, and the job was done. The name of this historical phenomenon is Pax Americana. Looking back, it is possible for purposes of exposition to divide the six decades into three interrelated phases, each stamped with a distinct major preoccupation. The first two are past; the third is still with us, more 

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The American Way of Peace

open-ended and dangerous since September 11, 2001. The initial and final dates are approximate. The first period covers 1945–1948, from the end of World War II to the consummation of the division of Europe, which Winston Churchill foresaw in the “Iron Curtain” speech he made at Fulton, Missouri, two years earlier. The second phase, from 1948 to 1989/1991, comprises the Cold War, détente, and renewed tensions between the two major powers after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The period ended with the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The third phase is now thirteen years old. It has seen the liberation of Central/Eastern Europe from the Soviet yoke, the defection of the Soviet Union itself from communism, and the coming together of the two Germanies. With the exception of Romania and the former Yugoslavia, the transition has been a velvety one with a lot of assembly required. Yet, given the historical odds, it has been a successful one. Contrary to popular belief, the sudden disappearance of empires does not inevitably produce calamity all around. The idea is to give people realizable hope, to create as rapidly as feasible a peaceful, free, secure, and materially comfortable world by providing leadership where it is lacking either because of economic deficiencies, as in the first phase (1945–1948), or noneconomic ones, as in the second (1948–1989/1991), which in some West European countries included reversion to the propensity of the 1930s, due to excessive elite cerebration and failures of nerve, to temporize and appease in the face of mortal danger. The idea derives from bedrock American values: not Nazi values, not Japanese imperial values, not old European colonialist values. The key deontological positions are staked out with commendable clarity and brevity at the very beginning of the second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. They are taken seriously here, unlike much of what in many parts of the world passes for decorative constitutional hype, to be ignored in practice and disposed off at the next convenient turn on the political road. These positions have shaped the American character, continue to attract millions to these shores, and enter into the masonry of Pax Americana. Anyone with more than a surface acquaintance with Americans recognizes the character traits, likes them, and assimilates the traits with ease. Having spent two-fifths of my life in Central and Western Europe and three-fifths in the United States, I feel qualified to propose for your consideration a list of traits that make one an American.

Pax Americana

• Judging people on their merit, on what they do, not by the number of pedigree growth rings on their family tree, their social class, or their place of birth.2 Whereas many Europeans like to think of themselves as being to the manor born, Americans take pride in their allegedly humble origins and childhood poverty. On closer examination, both recollections are somewhat embroidered. • A belief in equality—not equal distribution of income and wealth or of skill and talent, but a belief in the numinous, innate, equal worth of every human being, and hence in the nobility and dignity of every person irrespective of station in life. This implies equality of opportunity at the start, a realizable possibility to rise in one’s self-chosen domain and build one’s own destiny, which doesn’t take a village. It also implies trust, verified as needed, in equal justice under the law. Beyond due process, Americans are fair, an idea conveyed by a word that, like “gentleman,” has no precise equivalent outside the English language. • Helpfulness, sociability, geniality, gregariousness, wit. Easygoing and free, Americans are not deferential. They put up with hierarchies as a necessary functional nuisance but do so without submission. They do not defer, they do not cringe, they do not fawn. Casually courteous, they are not bound by elaborately refined rules of etiquette. They are impatient to get things done, cut through the fat, and get straight to the point. The presumption of wisdom and honorability does not automatically attach to rank and longevity. Gabby out-of-office officeholders pontificate on non–prime time talk shows, and seniors are parked in Florida, so to speak. With a caring but unintentional touch of ambiguousness, admission tickets for a tour of the Boeing plant in Everett, Washington, are priced at five dollars for adults and three dollars for seniors and children under fifteen. • Independence. Americans are entrepreneurial, ready to make choices, take risks, and bear personal responsibility—civil, moral, and monetary—for the outcomes of their decisions: “educated common people engaged in free choice.”3 They are averse to the centralization and sprawl of government without proper safeguards, to excessive regulation of personal space broadly defined, notably of private property, and wary of state bureaucrats bearing gifts at taxpayer expense. Nonetheless, they recognize that social security and nonaddictive amounts and kinds of welfare benefits help underpin “the social cohesion that permits capitalism to get on with the process of creating wealth.”4 So they pay their taxes, not joyfully but by and large conscientiously. The fact that tax evasion is severely punished helps concentrate the mind.

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The American Way of Peace

• Self-motivation, inventiveness, energy (“computing on the go”), practicality, level-headedness, resourcefulness, mobility, competitiveness, and a tendency to be upbeat. Much of their ingenuity is expended on making everyday life easier. They believe that a better tomorrow can actually be reached through competent work and good sense (achieving the American dream). Theirs is a culture of accomplishment. • Someone once said, “Americans have a big heart not found anywhere else.” He was right. They believe in the naturalness of goodness. They are kind and giving, the most generous nation in the history of mankind, considerate, not retributive, mean-spirited, envious of other people’s achievements, or disposed to take satisfaction in the misfortune of others (schadenfreude). They are decent. But the core is hard, not to be trifled with. And, oh yes, they do not like to be taken advantage of by those to whom friendship is only a value-in-use. • A strong populist streak and a quality of informality. This undeniable aspect of Americans’ culture is spontaneously embraced by the young of many lands. • An ability to get along and pull together in good times and bad, within an open, democratic market society that predictably works, in spite of diversities of ethnic background, religion, and national origin and a tendency to argue, disagree, and criticize themselves. • A willingness to face issues. In the last four decades they have used law and education to combat unsettling racial disaffinity and estrangement, not the less hurtful and offensive for being casual. Progress has been made. But there’s a ways to go.

These are not the characteristic attitudes of egocentric, power-hungry, profit-obsessed, hegemonic, materialistic imperialists. Imperious sometimes, maybe; imperialistic, no. Even when insinuated by elegant, softspoken diplomats against a stage set of crystal chandeliers and gilded Louis Quinze courting chairs, such appraisals of the American character are untrue, unkind, and unfair. Used to living in a vast, freely breathing land full of like people, it comes as no surprise that the Yankees would rather go home, as earnestly advised by café-school self-styled sophisticates abroad who are always with us when they need us. Of course, not every American possesses these attributes of character any more than every Frenchman is like Charles de Gaulle. Lists of other alleged American personality flaws and disorders, including naïveté (“they’re like children,” a subject of considerable merriment to offshore adultescents), cultural shal-

Pax Americana

lowness, arrogance, violence, obsessive litigiousness, and shortness of historical memory have been compiled by critics, foreign and domestic, and not just by the tendentiously anti-American or smugly condescending.5 No matter. In the American instance, the good outweighs the bad and is, in fact, the norm. Peace is safe in American hands.6



2 The Postwar Task

A

return to head-in-the-sand isolationism not being an option, the global task facing the United States as it emerged from World War II, victorious, confident, and powerful, was to promote marketbased rather than centrally planned economic growth, and political stability within a framework of democratic institutions. The wartime pragmatic alliance between the United States and Soviet Russia did not survive the peace. Systemically, ideologically, and culturally, in the normal course of events, the United States and the Soviet Union had nothing in common other than suspicion of each other’s motives and intentions. For the United States this escalating mistrust of its former accidental comrade-inarms translated into a need to provide the reemergent but debilitated Western democracies with the wherewithal of defense, including arms, munitions, military manpower and technologies, leadership, and organization. And so to the chore of jump-starting postwar economic and political recovery was added the costly and, as it turned out, lengthy job of providing security in America’s contested spheres of stewardship. Recovery, however, was not enough. There had to be institutional renewal, a novel architecture of ideas, new and better ways of doing things, not simply a return to discredited prewar social theories, structures, and policies. There was no blueprint or comprehensive plan for this, just a window of opportunity to experiment, with little room for error. Pre–World War II economic, political, and military concepts, antiquated even then, had been made more irrelevant by the war, not least by revolutionary changes in technol

The Post war Task

ogy. They were helpful insofar as they suggested what to avoid, but not helpful in suggesting how to build a very different world. It was here that American inventiveness and resolve came into play. The first part of this book (the “Then” of the part title) deals with key measures taken on American initiative during the periods 1945–1948 and 1948–1989/1991 with the collaboration of, but understandably not without grumbling and occasional picaresque posturing by, some of the potential beneficiaries hurt in their national self-esteem. By 1991 the Berlin Wall had already been torn down, Germany reunited, and Central/Eastern Europe liberated. It was the end of an era that had come to be known as the Cold War. The second part (“And Now”) recounts what has been and is happening since. Whereas troubles overcome are good to tell, the here and now, because of its closeness, contentiousness, and indeterminacy, is not easy to untangle. The future and the manifold unexpected side effects of any present actions are difficult to predict without allowing for a large margin of error, even though politicians have no problem becoming clairvoyant, mostly at election time. I hope that my interpretation of the events— for that is what it is—will encourage questions and vigorous discussion.



3 Bretton Woods

P

ermit me here to insert a personal reminiscence. I was introduced to the world of international finance when as a kid hanging onto my father’s coat sleeve on a very cold December day in 1939, in an alley back of the National Bank of Romania in Bucharest, I witnessed nearly worthless Central European currencies being exchanged for the mighty U.S. dollar at a rate that had an instant Black Friday effect on our refugee family’s cash balance and net worth. Thanks to strategically distributed baksheesh, such shadowy transactions made it possible to secure an exit visa, buy a train ticket, and transit through Axis Italy (whose citizens demurely diverted their eyes) to France, which was then in the midst of the drôle de guerre, streetlights on the Champs Elysées painted a delicate blue, unaware of the looming tragedy of defenseless defeat and ignominious surrender. At about that time I was also initiated into the mysteries of the gold standard by overhearing the grownups talk about Polish gold reserves having been taken out of the country right under the German blitzkriegers’ and the Russian backstabbers’ noses. The story gets fuzzy after that, but I believe the gold was trundled through Romania and Syria to France, no doubt shedding a bar or two en route to smooth the way, eventually landing in England, where it helped the good guys in the war. I heard, but cannot vouch for it, that it was returned to Poland half a century later, in 1989, after the communists got religion. A brief memory-refresher aside, I will spare you as much as possible the soporific jargon and technicalities of international finance. This gos

Bret ton Woods

samer network of ideas and institutions (agreed-on ways of doing things) acts as a lubricant for international exchanges of goods and services through money, by providing the liquidity and currency convertibility that make sophisticated, nonbarter, multilateral trade possible. Absence of such a contrivance or its low quality causes the world trade system to falter, snap, and grind to a standstill with baleful consequences for the economic wellbeing and political stability of all parties concerned. That is so because economics, of which international finance is a vital constituent, may not be in a transcendental sense the most important of humanity’s intellectual endeavors, but it is a most powerful and merciless disciplinarian. It often rewards and invariably punishes individuals and nation-states for obeying or disregarding its not always clearly articulated laws of the “on the one hand, on the other hand” kind. That is why, according to legend, President Harry Truman is said to have wished for a one-handed economist to advise him on policy. But had he found two such one-handed advisers, his wish-come-true would have instantly come undone. Now, quickly: to be money, something has to be a keeper of value and a generally accepted medium of exchange for relatively scarce goods and services, compared, that is, to the demand (readiness to pay) for them. Money need not assume a bodily form (notes, coins, checks). It may be, and is increasingly so, a bundle of digital notations concerning voluntary transfer of property rights between sellers and buyers, whisked electronically through cyberspace. The only concrete thing about it is the users’ confidence in money’s power to facilitate exchanges; in other words, conditional trust—an attitude. Conditionality comes seriously into play in dire situations such as galloping inflation (too much money chasing far too few goods, hence astronomical prices wiping out money’s facility of storing value and acting as a go-between in exchange transactions). “Hard money” is money freely accepted for international exchanges of goods and services (tangible and intangible goods); for example, the U.S. dollar or the euro. “Soft” money is money used in exchanges only in the country of its issue, as with the Bhutan ngultrum—familiarly known as the nu. When in July 1945 Mr. Truman drove from Potsdam to Berlin, he is reported to have said, “I never saw such destruction.” But such destruction was as nothing compared with the ruin to which, with all its architectural faults, the world’s prewar financial structure had been reduced, first by the Great Depression, then by six years of devastating warfare. An example:

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

The American Way of Peace

Between 1944 and 1946 the note issue in Hungary rose from 12,000 million pengös to, at its maximum, a figure containing 27 digits. In July 1946, the 1931 gold pengö was worth 130 billion paper pengös.1 In that war America had lost nearly half a million of her young men. Back home, noncombatants had to tighten their belts, but in contrast to its wartime allies, the United States emerged from the war in good economic shape. With no physical damage to its territory to speak of, it produced more than half the world’s output, possessed the bulk of the world’s gold reserves, ran a sizable balance of external payments surplus, and was the world’s largest creditor—the last a risky business considering that the debtors, the Swiss and Swedes excepted, were insolvent. At the same time, however, it had accumulated a backlog of unmet needs in housing and infrastructure, interstate highway transportation in particular, and was poised to undertake a massive industrial reconversion with potentially huge outlays of scarce domestic resources, no matter how abundant, not to say limitless, these may have appeared to the impoverished Europeans. Moreover, the costs of military occupation and of legal proceedings against or deprogramming of Nazi and Japanese war criminals had to be borne, possibly for many years to come. Looming on the horizon was the menace of communist expansion and the burden in manpower, ordnance, and money of stopping it in its tracks, which in fact, was assumed overwhelmingly by American taxpayers until the end of the century. On American initiative, with estimable British input, a conference attended by representatives of forty-four allied countries and neutral Argentina convened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, on July 1, 1944, about three weeks after the Normandy landings. Its purpose was to agree on a compromise plan for a workable postwar international monetary system, two blueprints of which had been prepared during previous years by British and American economists, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White among them.2 Without a mechanism of this kind, remodeled to take careful note of lessons from the past, the world’s economic or any other rebirth was deemed impracticable. The agreement that emerged from Bretton Woods on July 22, 1944, was closer to the American than the British draft, “reflecting,” in the opinion of one observer, “the overwhelming power of the United States as World War II was drawing to a close.”3 Be that as it may, Keynesian notions of statesmanly market-demand management influenced both the spirit and the institutional design of

Bret ton Woods

the system, particularly in regard to the perceived need for an international public body empowered to supervise, coordinate, administer, counsel, and act as a lender of last resort for multilateral monetary settlements among nation-states in accordance with codified rules—a long way of saying “planning”—but not as a supranational central bank with power to create money at will. The following year, during which the Bretton Woods agreement was ratified by the required number of national legislatures, a meeting at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., created the United Nations organization, the political equivalent, it was hoped, of the Bretton Woods arrangement. Here, too, the fate of the new organization’s predecessor, the interwar League of Nations bereft of American presence, impotent in the face of aggression, drowning in a sea of words, served as admonition to the architects of the United Nations, the United States in the forefront. Land for the construction of the UN headquarters building on the East River in Manhattan was donated by the Rockefeller family. The interwar years (1919–1939) were seared by monetary chaos. To recuperate from the Great War (1914–1918), which was eight times as expensive as all wars from 1793 to 1910 put together, the ex-combatants needed liquidity, money to grease the wheels of production, and lots of it. Since under the mandate of the classical gold (specie) standard dating back to the 1870s for Germany, much earlier for England, they had been obliged to convert their domestic currencies into gold at a fixed and unchanging rate, they soon found their stocks of that metal depleted. No problem. They went off the standard and—problem—printed money with Gutenbergian zeal, thereby unleashing colossal inflation, at first suppressed (forced into the nether regions of barter, bribes, and black markets) by physical rationing, then after this was lifted, runaway. Against the advice of Keynes, urged by the French, who had lost nearly 1.7 million men in the war, the victorious powers imposed on Germany onerous reparations payments, which in 1921 came to 132 billion gold marks, roughly double that country’s prewar national income.4 A small portion of this fine was actually collected, and that only because under the Dawes Plan the United States lent the Germans dollars and encouraged its private sector to invest in the defaulters’ economy. Reluctantly, the United States also gave up on the unpaid debts owed it by its wartime allies. Now fasten your seat belts while I break my promise for a moment and outline for you the basic provisions of the Bretton Woods Agreement

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

The American Way of Peace

by dipping into the brew of professionally-in terms.5 Or you may simply, if you so wish, skip ahead to the next chapter. [Exeunt omnes]. Wiser for the interwar experience, the Bretton Woods negotiators tried to find the golden mean, so to speak, between the extremes of the unalterably fixed exchange rates characteristic of the classical gold standard and the freely floating rates that reflect unconstrained international exchanges of goods and services and capital transactions. The compromise solution adopted was the pegged rate, also known as the “adjustable peg” or “par value system.” It was intended to work as follows. First, each member government had to declare a par value or “peg” for its currency, that is, the value at which its national money would be converted into a troy ounce of gold on demand (for example, thirty-five dollars for the United States). Second, to avoid cast-in-stone exchange-rate rigidity, which, on past evidence, acts like a distorting mirror causing more trouble than it is worth, each member government was obligated to intervene in the currency market in order to keep its money’s exchange-rate fluctuations within a “band,” or maximum margins, of 1 percent above to 1 percent below the declared par value (parity). Third, to ensure that emergencies would not be sacrificed to the aesthetics of symmetry, national governments were allowed to change the par value of their currencies beyond the specified band limits, but only in the event of, and in order to correct, a “fundamental disequilibrium” in their balance of external payments,6 an aberration expected to be temporary, and to do this only in concordance with procedures approved by the agreement. In the context of a par value currency exchange mechanism, the gaping omission was the Bretton Woods Agreement’s failure to explain precisely what was meant by fundamental disequilibrium, not just as a vaporous general idea, an intellectual teaser, but in detailed pragmatic terms. Insofar as the phenomenon was defined, attention focused on how to deal with expected future deficits (when countries ran out of reserves), not on how to reduce widespread surpluses, a condition not likely, it was thought, to be experienced by many traders outside the United States any time soon. Wrong. Actually, as we shall see, by 1958 the payments balances of all the major players, the United States prominently and humongously excepted, were in surplus. Apart from some shrewd, fleet-footed, speculatively inclined bankers and transnational corporations, no one was sure

Bret ton Woods

just what to do with this surprising development that some mistrustful souls, late in the day (around 1962), suspected of being an American equivalent of the legendary Greek gift. It should be noted that the long-range aim of Bretton Woods was to arrive at an international trade and multilateral payments regime free of fiscal (taxes, subsidies), financial (exchange restrictions), and administrative (quota) interventions by national governments—a foreshadowing of economic globalization; a worldwide, Smithian, “obvious and simple system of natural liberty [which] establishes itself of its own accord,”7 rather than a Keynesian one of deliberate, supranational, macro intervention. To that end member states were, in principle, required to refrain from practices that in the past had given rise to a me-first, beggar-my-neighbor world of skyrocketing inflations and global great depressions. Because in an imperfect world principles tend to be honored mostly in the breach, but also to give the system extra suppleness, Bretton Woods excluded capital account (investment) controls from the members’ convertibility obligations under the agreement. Article VIII limited the convertibility requirement to current goods and services transactions (current account) only. In fact, governments were advised to defend their payments balances against guerrilla raids on their capital accounts by speculative privatesector “hot monies” from outside their borders. In the absence of a free float (as-you-go convertibility of currencies into one another, courtesy of demand-supply interactions in the international money market), and given the Bretton Woods requirement (with a couple of exceptions) that governments convert their national monies into gold at fixed rates, it was logical to make an institutional provision that would enable members to have enough liquidity—gold or money convertible into gold—in the event of a temporary hitch in a member’s balance of payments. At that time, the only available monetary silver bullet of that kind was the U.S. dollar. The supervisory and administrative institution created for this purpose was the International Monetary Fund. The IMF (which in 2002 had 183 members) was not a supranational central bank able to create new reserves at its own discretion, as Keynes would have preferred. It was nearer H. D. White’s concept of a pool into which members were obliged to put (subscribe was the word used) specific quotas of gold or gold-convertible dollars: 25 percent of the quota (the “gold

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The American Way of Peace

tranche”) to be paid in gold or nearly as good as gold currency (the U.S. dollar at the time), and 75 percent (the “credit tranche”) payable in a member’s own currency. The respective quotas were set by estimating each country’s relative economic importance. Each member’s voting rights were proportionate to its quota. At the outset the U.S. quota was two-thirds of the total IMF quotas, the last representing 20 percent of all world reserves of gold and currencies convertible into gold. The arrangement gave the United States a “hegemonic” standing in the organization. By the early 1970s the American quota had fallen to a little over one-fifth. A member country could borrow from the IMF common pool the foreign currency it happened to be short of, up to the limit determined by its quota.8 France was first to use the funds, borrowing $250 million in 1947. For the really hard-pressed, newly emerging, economically underdeveloped countries in need of long-term financial assistance and much else besides, another agency, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or World Bank, was established at this time (1944–1946). Plans for an International Trade Organization were deferred by American opposition arising from not unfounded concerns that such a body could become a bureaucratic hindrance to the promotion of free trade. The idea, however, did materialize in a more informal and pliant, less comprehensive, but effective institution, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947), which began operations in 1948 with a membership of twenty-three countries. It liberalized international trade in successive negotiating “rounds” by including in bilateral agreements the so-called most-favored-nation clause, whereby privileges accorded to one signatory were extended to all GATT members, as well as by its success in significantly reducing tariffs (but not quantitative restrictions on trade, which were not within its terms of reference). It was transformed in 1995 into the World Trade Organization, larger in scope and powers, more tightly knit, visible, and controversial with 148 members as of January 1, 2002. By 1946 the liquidity-dispensing machine built at Bretton Woods of something old and something new was ready to start oiling and greasing the battered international trade-and-payments engine with gold and dollars, the greenback replacing the English pound sterling of the previous century. Two years after the Bretton Woods Agreement went into effect, it became evident that the monetary situation was more serious and intri-

Bret ton Woods

cate than had been anticipated. Members’ stocks of monetary gold were evaporating, and the IMF’s life-belt reserves adequate for transient emergencies were insufficient to deal with structural price and income distortions. After the loan to France and another to Britain, the IMF’s lending activities withered on the vine for a decade or so. The Iron Curtain had descended on Europe, and rearmament expenditures were rising. At this critical juncture America came to the rescue, again. Like the Bretton Woods Agreement itself, the American move was consultative, cooperative, and multilateral in design, assented to by the countries affected, but at a rate inversely proportional to improvement in their financial balances and an upswing in their amour propre. In practice the United States was the leader of the band, a position, it should be observed, it did not seek but thought was the right thing to do in its own interest and that of the free nations involved. The consensus was that the job could be afforded and should be undertaken. What happened was that instead of liquidity being provided by a modernized, post–art deco, gold exchange standard as envisaged by Bretton Woods, it was supplied—lavishly—by the country that held most of the world’s monetary gold plus a less bulky money asset, the U.S. dollar, freely convertible into gold, which everybody accepted with gleeful yodeling to use for buying less shiny but more directly useful goods, like food, machines, cranes, bulldozers, and such, needed for recovery. The problem in 1945–1947 was that the world outside the United States was experiencing a severe dollar shortfall, which most economists thought would last, perhaps not forever but just short of that. What they did not foresee was that Uncle Sam would open wide his wallet and buy, sell on time, give for free, lend, invest, subsidize, send out tourists by the millions, and just plain spend like there was no tomorrow. Stunned would be a good word to describe the Europeans’ first reaction. To people habituated for centuries, and not without cause, to suspect their neighbors of harboring sordid motives, the American largesse looked puzzling. Even during the late war, and in England at that, where, due in part to nature-made insularity, there is inbred reserve but less interpersonal distrust than on the turbulent continent, some sniffy crumpets, with an affected, imitation upper-crust stammer for effect, murmured that “the Americans, don’t you know, are over-p-paid, oversexed, and over here.” But the perplexity did not last

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The American Way of Peace

long. One gets accustomed to generosity, tending to conclude that the rich can afford to be magnanimous because they have too much money—an unsound application of the Austrian theory of diminishing marginal utility to, in this instance, an honorable action by a people to whom giving comes naturally. That the generosity combined business with pleasure and national interest with moral satisfaction in no way diminishes its nobility. As with all acts of human kindness, in the end everyone came out a winner. America kept its doors open to imports from Western Europe and Japan—not quite ajar, but wider than most. It dispensed grants (gifts), made long-term loans to former allies and enemies alike through the Marshall Plan and other foreign aid programs, and channeled private investments through the New York capital market. Short-term credits were made available to cushion financial shocks, and there were lots of those in the early years. When the West Europeans pleaded for protection from American exports so they could rehabilitate their domestic industries reduced to infancy by the war (which actually was not quite the case), the United States responded by giving preferential treatment to European imports, a case close to quid pro nihil. Japanese sellers were given access to the American market, contrasting sharply with West Europe’s allergy to goods made in Japan, traditionally regarded as substandard, mostly stolen knockoffs, but in reality no longer such. The Marshall Plan promoted industrial and agricultural enterprise productivity in Europe, including all-expense-paid inspection tours of American business offices, factories, and farms. After the plan’s termination, the United States financed the European Productivity Agency administered by the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in Paris. Aid was given to third-world countries through contributions to the World Bank and bilaterally. It goes without saying that Americans paid the lion’s share of the cost of common defense. No matter what misgivings one may have on the subject, it takes, in my view, a culture of selfless giving, and a big heart, to do what Americans did to bring a little sanity, a lot of enthusiasm, and much hope to the postwar world. “We make a living by what we get,” Winston Churchill once said, “we make a life by what we give.” And so, in the late 1940s and through the 1950s, the Bretton Woods formal gold exchange standard was morphed into a dollar exchange standard by tacit mutual agreement between America and the noncommunist

Bret ton Woods

world. Various ad hoc cooperative financial structures were spawned by it and, more proximately, by the Marshall Plan and the OEEC. Among them was the European Payments Union, formed in 1950 and dissolved eight years later when OEEC countries’ monies had become freely convertible into U.S. dollars. The union’s task was to remove quantitative restrictions on intra-European trade, prevent the proliferation of discriminatory bilateral commercial contracts, and clear deficits and surpluses resulting from trade among OEEC countries up to the limits of quotas apportioned to them in proportion to their respective shares of world trade. Seed capital in the amount of $350 million ($2.7 billion in 2004 money) was put for that purpose into the common till by the Marshall Plan. The U.S. dollar was accepted in lieu of gold as the reserve currency of choice by all countries of the first, second, third, and—if the truth be known—the fourth (communist) worlds, except that the multiple exchange rates set by Soviet authorities for their ruble were about as much in touch with reality as were the Soviet five-year plans. The general acceptability of the dollar as a reserve asset in place of gold was in the simplest terms due to two facts: one, you could earn interest on dollar holdings; and two, if for some reason you panicked, you could convert your dollars into gold in Manhattan at thirty-five dollars to the ounce (either directly or, if a member of the sterling area, via the British pound), and then sit back, relax, and contemplate your hoard. However, not foreseen or planned by the framers of the Bretton Woods Agreement, the cascading dollar soon (by the late fifties) altered the equation and with it the business climate. From being in surplus, the United States began to show disquieting symptoms of piling up large trade deficits, not accidentally or temporarily, but as a regular feature of indeterminate duration. Between 1958 and 1971 the cumulative U.S. deficit came to $56 billion. Not to precipitate an international liquidity crisis, but also because of the financial drain of the Vietnam War ($102.2 billion for fiscal years 1965–1972) and military outlays on the Western front and in other actual and potential trouble spots (Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Middle East), the United States did nothing basic to tidy up its skewed balance of payments. For a while, until they corrected their external payments accounts, the West Europeans went along with this American benign neglect, counting their dollars until they reasoned that they had too many of them for their

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

The American Way of Peace

own good. Then, before you could cry Uncle Sam or revisit the meaning of his hegemony, the dollar shortage became a dollar glut that threatened loss of confidence (conditional trust) by those holding the glutted currency, in inverse ratio to the size of each disillusioned holder’s dollar hoard. If everyone suddenly made a dash for the bank to unload their dollars, they might precipitate a world financial crisis. Why? Because within the Bretton Woods framework the United States no longer had enough gold reserves (or newly fashionable foreign hard monies like the deutsche mark or the Japanese yen) to redeem foreign central bank-held dollars, certainly not at thirty-five dollars an ounce. The problem came to be known as the “Triffin dilemma,” named after Yale economist Robert Triffin, who was critical of relying quasi permanently on American balance of payments deficits (U.S. IOU spending) to keep world liquidity from drying up but, on the other hand, was not keen on a free float either. During the 1950s these deficits had provided 82 percent of the increase in world liquidity that was largely, and rightly, credited with helping generate the strong growth of world economy and trade in that politically unsettled decade. Throughout the 1960s several cures, which we need not enter into, were tried jointly and severally. They included the General Agreement to Borrow (1962: 10 countries); the U.S. Interest Equalization Tax, Voluntary Credit Restraint, and Mandatory Investment Controls (1963, 1965, 1968); Special Drawing Rights (SDR, 1967, also known as “paper gold”: 104 countries); and the Smithsonian Agreement (December 1971). Being in the nature of palliatives, their common denominator was that they did not work. They failed to eliminate the root causes of the problem. Times had changed, and the Bretton Woods Agreement, which served well at first, had lost its foundations. One of its achievements was a sixfold increase in world trade from 1948 to 1973. On August 15, 1971, reacting to a massive flight from the dollar, President Nixon announced that the United States would no longer convert dollars into gold. By March 1973 the fixed-rate system had folded, but not before it had made possible currency convertibility, a precondition of capital mobility and the integration of world financial markets, of which the euro is the latest example. Contrary to dire predictions, there was no global economic collapse—more like a setback attended by a revision of notions and a reappraisal of the importance attached to economic schools. Search for the Monetary Grail resumed.

Bret ton Woods

There was, however, enough blame to go around, pointed and acerbic coming from those in Europe and Japan, with trunks full of dollars, who charged the American hegemon with bad faith, simplism, and worse. A word about hegemonies and hegemons, both value-laden terms. Hegemony— dominating influence—may be benign or harmful, and a hegemon can be nice or nasty, as can be those subordinated to him, depending on character, balance between affinity and meanness, and the difference between rational self-interest (a behavioral postulate of the market system) and selfishness. Although the old adage—“nice guys finish last”—should have alerted me to this earlier, I found only the other day that, etymologically speaking, “stupid” was the first sense recorded for the word nice. It comes from Old French, borrowed from the Latin nescius for “ignorant.”9 It will be up to you to decide whether America’s performance in its role of alleged global monetary hegemon (“the money manager of the world”) by virtue or perhaps unwittingly in spite of Bretton Woods, was mostly “nice” in the word’s currently accepted meaning of good-natured amiability, altruism, caring, and helpfulness, or in the cantankerous Old French sense. The same test for niceness should be applied, of course, to the European and other former subjects of the presumed hegemon. On February 4, 1965, President de Gaulle, who had a chip on his shoulder the size of a boulder because, as he saw it, after June 1940 President Roosevelt did not treat him, hence France, as being politically on par with the wartime Big Three,10 took it out on the Bretton Woods par-value system and its by then strapped money manager of the world. Granted that there was much to complain about on economic grounds, the general’s challenge (le défi français, as it was known locally), scripted by economist Jacques Rueff, carried a broader message. It objected to the hegemon’s monopoly power to issue a currency with which he acquired creative European firms, while like a bunch of scrooges the European central banks held onto the rascal’s depreciating money for increasingly illusory reserve purposes. At the time the response in Europe to de Gaulle’s défi was fairly listless. Nonetheless, when the United States abandoned the dollar exchange standard six years later, it was not unusual to be told time and again, and not in France alone, that the gullible Americans with their precious dollars had got their comeuppance at last, never mind that for a quarter of a century they and the monetary system managed by them were instrumental in putting

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The American Way of Peace

the industrial world, with several east Asian tigers in tow, on the path to unprecedented prosperity. The inference of selfish purpose and alleged softness in the head of someone who had acted kindly was answered years ago by Eugene Davidson: “it is not a sick society that has stood in the path of a totalitarian communism and that has given freely of its resources, its brains and manpower, with no notion of any material profit to be gained. Naive perhaps, given to foolish oversimplifications and ever ready moral purposes, but it has held off barbarians both beyond the wall and on this side of it.”11

4 The Marshall Plan and Containment

The years 1945–1948, as we have seen, were dominated by the need to rehabilitate and streamline the economies of countries ravaged by war. The situation was made more pressing by the rapid deterioration of relations with the Soviet Union and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which as a consequence of the Yalta agreement concluded by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in February 1945 were shortly thereafter under firm Soviet military and political control in all but name.1 A Pax Mafiosa. The urgency was greatly increased by the systemically subversive activities in Western Europe—Greece, Italy, and France in particular—of well-organized, armed, power-seeking communist parties working hand in glove with the Soviet Union. To the question of how to breathe life into the economy, the French initially had a simple but timeworn 1919-vintage answer: Germany from its industrial base in the Ruhr, the Rhineland, and the Saar would foot the bill for France’s economic rehabilitation. A used goods concept, it did not fly. On June 5, 1947, in his address to a Harvard commencement, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, in what came to be known as the Marshall Plan, invited “any government . . . willing to assist in the task of [European] recovery” to draft a recovery program with American “friendly aid” (persuasion, dissuasion) and subsequent material support. The program, at that time the largest in American history, was to be “a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all, European nations.” America’s preference was for a unified European effort, not to make the accounting job easier, but to begin laying 

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The American Way of Peace

to rest the divisive nationalistic impulses that twice in a generation had torn the continent apart, and to enlarge what, in the year of America’s independence, Adam Smith had called “the extent of the market,” the key to riches. The European Recovery Program was put together promptly. “When Marshall’s proposals were announced,” said British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, “I grabbed it with both hands.”2 The idea of cooperation, unification, and integration, and the ideal of a borderless economy, began to take hold in Western Europe. It was institutionalized first in the multilateral, but not supranational, Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, 1948), then in other economic, security, and political formations of which the customs union of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (Benelux, January 1, 1948) and the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) were early examples.3 The same month in which it was made, Secretary Marshall’s offer was rejected by Molotov as “totally unsatisfactory,” and reluctantly by Poland, Hungary, and other East European countries already subjugated by the USSR. The Czechs at first accepted, then withdrew, panicked by Stalin’s wrath. “Tremble and obey!”4 Besides the American encouragement of European cooperation, there was embedded in the Marshall Plan a geopolitical philosophy elaborated by George Kennan in a July 1947 Foreign Affairs article (signed X) that delineated a strategy for the containment of Soviet expansionism, and indirectly of any revanchist thoughts that a rebuilt Germany might entertain and be tempted to put into practice at some future time. The containment was to be peaceful except for precisely drawn lines that a potential predator could cross only at the risk of war with the United States. The threat of force was made credible by American readiness to use it. Containment, the first choice, was combined with deterrence.5 This combination was not seriously called into question until the advent of a general atmosphere of détente with the East, pursued within this context in the early 1970s by Social Democratic Chancellor (1969–1974) Willy Brandt under the name of Ostpolitik, a late variant of the “constructive engagement” that had been in fashion, off and on in Western Europe after Stalin’s death (1953) and Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 partial “de-Stalinization.” Among the early acts of Brandt’s chancellorship was the conclusion of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, a treaty with the USSR pledging renunciation of force and the acceptance of post–World War II European borders, and a nonaggression treaty with Poland recognizing the Oder-Neisse

The Marshall Pl an and Containment

line as the western boundary of Poland. In the late 1950s Brandt had been instrumental in the disowning by the West German Social Democratic Party of its Marxist past and the adoption of the Bad Godesberg Program accepting the principles of the free market system. Brandt resigned in 1974 when upon belated verification he discovered to his astonishment that his trust in outreach politics—including ransom payments made for the repatriation to West Germany of political prisoners held by the Stasi, the East German secret police—had not been reciprocated. It turned out that his closest personal adviser and confidant, Günter Guillaume, was an East German spy. The jury is still out on this episode of verified but misplaced trust. Willy Brandt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.6 But then there are those who think that his was an unrealistic and hazardous exercise in unilateral intellectual disarmament. Its effects were largely symbolic. In 1990 Guillaume was at work helping the transgendered East German Communist Party (SED), renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism, in the upcoming elections. “My work [during détente]” Guillaume explained, “was misused by a distorted form of socialism.”7 In light of the importance historically attached in Europe to the perceived responsibilities of the state in the economy (Staatswirtschaft), the United States practiced exemplary self-containment and sagacious restraint in passing opinion on the Europeans’ proposed grandiose and costly, statefinanced and state-managed social welfare schemes. Once implemented, these grew exponentially and came to be regarded by aging population cohorts as immutable entitlements, a social compact the fulfillment of which became for them the acid test of the state’s legitimacy. They also tended to transfigure society into what Chancellor Helmut Kohl called a “collective amusement park” (kollektiver Freizeitpark), a postmodern European equivalent of panem et circenses. German and French governments continue to struggle with the budgetary deficits and structural distortions of their (somewhat corporatist) market system caused by the high cost of the welfare bloat paid for out of steep taxes on high gross wages and company profits.8 As the USSR declined internally over the years and the threat of invasion from the east weakened in the European perception, so did West European outlays on defense, especially on cutting-edge weapons systems. Being a public good, defense attracts free riders who get the benefit without bearing their proportional share of the cost.9 I think it is not unreasonable to say that over an extended period some, at least, of the

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The American Way of Peace

West European welfare states could afford subsidized leisure for all10 because the rich “naifs” on the other side of the Atlantic picked up the tab for the common defense. Of course, in economic terms free riding is not the moral equivalent of freeloading. While morally it may be an example of situation ethos, economically it is a rational consequence of public goods supply. But still. The American position on nationalization, which West European Social Democrats, but others too, regarded at the time as an ethically attractive, efficient, and stress-relaxing prescription for an array of economic and social conditions, was surprisingly muted, given American dislike of socialism in general and invasions of private property rights in particular. The United States was then the only country in the world where capitalism was a word you could use in polite company. In Germany, plans for the nationalization of industry, pushed by the reconstituted German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and initially favored by British Labour and the French, were blocked by Konrad Adenauer, “one of the most gifted statesmen of modern times.”11 At bottom, American economic philosophy and external policy in the wake of World War II were unequivocally partial to the competitive market system with private property as the principal form of ownership and first line of defense for individual freedom, and they favored classical-liberal—that is, unobstructed to the degree possible— international mobility of ideas, goods, services, capital, and, in a longer view, labor. The Marshall Plan combined substantial foreign aid, the bulk of it in grant form, with preferential access by West European exports to the huge U.S. market, a combination that enabled the European participants (all sixteen of them, including such anomalies as comfortably well-off Sweden and Switzerland, but excluding Franco’s Spain and a Finland hog-tied by the Russians) to quickly solve their dollar cash flow problem through export-led growth. The package included transfer of state-of-the art (nonnuclear) technology and guarantees of dollar returns made by the U.S. government to American venture capitalists who invested in OEEC countries. An interesting feature of the program was the so-called counterpart funds. The grant dollar aid monies were used by European governments to buy goods and services (raw materials, food, fertilizer, machinery, equipment, vehicles, fuel, know-how) from the United States. The commodities and services so obtained were sold to domestic users by their govern-

The Marshall Pl an and Containment

ments for national currencies, and the money receipts were deposited in each country’s counterpart fund. They were then used, with the often quite pro forma approval of the Economic Cooperation Administration, a body that managed the recovery program from the American side, for projects such as the development of modern railway infrastructure and industrial upgrading in France and the retirement of government debt in Britain. In other words, this method had a multiplier effect on economic recovery.

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5 German Wirtschaftswunder

S

e c re ta ry M a r s h a l l’s “friendly advice” that “the initiative . . . must come from Europe” was taken up by Germany. Even though it was not directly represented in the OEEC until the establishment of the Bonn Federal Republic in 1949, West Germany had been receiving large-scale American assistance through the Government and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) program since 1945. Before the Marshall Plan kicked in, the United States had already spent more than $9 billion on aid to Europe, equivalent to roughly $76 billion in 2004 dollars. On June 20, 1948, Ludwig Erhard, director of the Bizonal Economic Council, introduced, ostensibly on his own initiative and technically exceeding his formal authority, a sweeping currency and price reform. The reichsmark was replaced by a new deutsche mark, and most wage and price controls enacted by the occupying powers were abolished, first for consumer goods, and a few months later for food. The German variant of the market system fused free enterprise economics with governmental social concerns, including mandated codetermination (Mitbestimmung) of management and labor on the governing boards of corporations. Known as Sozialemarktwirtschaft (social market economy),1 it ushered in an era of robust growth, an economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) that lasted uninterrupted for seventeen years. The mark became fully convertible a decade after its introduction.2 By the early 1960s West Germany had the third largest economy in the world, just behind that of another World War II loser, Japan. When Germany was reunited in 1990–1991, the gross domes

German W I R T S C H A F T S W U N D E R

tic product (GDP) of East Germany was barely one-tenth that of its Western neighbor, largely made up of armored capital goods and threadbare leftovers for the consumer, keine Überflussgesellschaft—not quite what you’d call a society of abundance. In truth, like every other country in the group, certainly as regards the goods and services that ordinary people want to buy, the German Democratic Republic conformed to the socialist storecounter principle of Gibt’s nicht mehr (we’re out of it). Marshall’s encouragement of local resourcefulness and Erhard’s bold strategic initiative illustrate another aspect of the postwar American stance that persists to this day, which is to clear out the driftwood, get the job done, transfer power to the natives, and get out as soon as possible, but not before. This is more than impatience or obsession with short time frames. It springs from deep anticolonial instincts and results in a reluctance to assume imperial control.3 Germany, however, was not the only country that made exemplary economic strides during the three years of the Recovery Program, and for some time thereafter. Specific results varied among individual partners, but, taken as a whole, the success across Western Europe was spectacular. By 1950 productive capacity was back to prewar levels. More important, American optimism, the idea “to give people realizable hope” mentioned earlier, communicated itself to America’s transatlantic partners who, traumatized at first by the unspeakable material and human devastation of their homelands, put this newly gained confidence to good use. It was, on balance, a joint effort voluntarily entered into. Nevertheless, somebody had to provide the financial liquidity, give the initial push, and follow up with a friendly nudge now and then when spirits flagged.

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6 The Berlin Blockade

Four days after the introduction of the new currency in the three Western occupation zones of Germany, Soviet troops encircled Berlin, stopping all land access to the city. Within a couple of days the United States, joined by Britain, began a massive, logistically intricate, and expensive airlift of food and other essential supplies, including coal, from bases in West Germany to Berlin. An attempt to resolve the problem multilaterally by bringing it before the United Nations was nixed by a Soviet veto in the Security Council. The Soviets gave up after eleven months (May 12, 1949), but the flights continued until the end of August. By then about 2 million tons of goods had been transported over the aerial bridge in 280,000 hazardous trips through three twenty-mile-wide air corridors, averaging one plane every 61.9 seconds, with Soviet fighters watching for any signs of planes straying from the permitted path and, from time to time, buzzing them within the corridors themselves. Characteristically, just before Christmas “Operation Santa Claus” delivered presents to ten thousand German children. The German Federal Republic came into being in May 1949, the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in October. The rift was complete. That year the Soviet Union created the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), which was supposed to be a replica of the Marshall Plan, except that in this arrangement economic resources flowed the other way: from the Central/East European putative beneficiaries (Albania— until 1962—Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania) to the 

The Berlin Blockade

ostensible Soviet benefactor. Later Cuba and Mongolia were added. By the end of 1949, 125,000 Berliners had fled the Soviet zone, and three million East Germans had fled by the time the infamous Berlin Wall and its appendages equipped with minefields and lethal watchtowers went up in 1961. On August 29, 1949, the Russians detonated their first atomic device, putting an end to America’s nuclear monopoly. Within the next fifteen years, Britain (1952), France (1960), and China (1964) had joined the club. The rush to proliferate was on. In 1949 remnants of Chiang Kaishek’s defeated army embarked for Taiwan. In Peking the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on October 1, adding more than five hundred million people to the communist camp. It was not a very good year. From then until the Soviet Union and its imperial possessions fell apart forty years later, defending the noncommunist world, free Europe in particular, became increasingly America’s responsibility and national interest. To dissuade Stalin from his brutish habit of “prodding the capitalist world with the tip of a bayonet”1 —which rubbed off on his coarsely jovial successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and reappeared, equipped this time with a nuclear warhead, in the Cuban missile crisis of 19622 —required more than reflex responses à la the Berlin airlift. It was time to place such chivying in a larger context, to clarify for oneself, one’s friends, and adversaries the general moral principles that undergirded America’s purpose and conduct in the era of ideological and great-power confrontations. Moreover, as the number of possible, unthinkably calamitous flashpoints increased and spread beyond Europe, the time was ripe to inform one’s selectively thrifty allies that the United States was not prepared to shoulder the security burden all by itself, that freeloading on defense was not the thing to do, and that it was therefore necessary to form durable military coalitions, sort of neighborly potluck affairs where everyone chips in.

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7 The Truman Doctrine

A doctrinal statement had already been made on March 12, 1947, by President Harry Truman in his address to a joint session of Congress, after the British had informed him that, being financially embarrassed, they could no longer carry out their economic and defense commitments to Greece, then in the midst of a civil war against communist insurgents (the People’s National Liberation Army, ELAS, led by the communist National Liberation Front, EAM), and to Turkey, which sat on the fence through most of World War II, joined the war on the winning side seventy-one days before its end, and was now being prodded by the Soviets to give them control over the Dardanelles Straits, cede territory in east Asia Minor, and transfer a large part of northeastern Anatolia to Soviet Georgia. Known as the “Truman Doctrine,” the address was short and to the point. Noting the imminent threat to both countries and its likely repercussions on the Middle East, the president struck what was to become a familiar theme—the “U.N. link”—for years to come: “A Commission appointed by the United Nations Security Council,” he said, “is at present investigating disturbed conditions in northern Greece and alleged border violations along the frontier between Greece on the one hand and [communist] Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia on the other. . . . We have considered how the United Nations might assist in this crisis. But the situation is an urgent one requiring immediate action and the United Nations and its related organizations are not in a position to extend help of the kind 

The Truman Doctrine

required.”1 Zut alors! Never on Sunday. So “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure. . . . We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. . . . We must take immediate and resolute action. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.” That put an official end to prewar U.S. isolationism in peacetime. The National Security Council document (NSC-68, April 1950), approved in September 1950, provided the intellectual foundation and theoretical rationale for America’s eventually massive military engagement or, as some would rather put it, foreign entanglement: military commitments to forty-seven nations, 675 overseas bases, and a million troops abroad by the mid-1980s.2

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8 NATO and Its Cross of Lorraine

The military coalition took the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The treaty was signed in Washington, on April 4, 1949, by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Italy, Iceland (which lacked an army but had a dandy strategic location), Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Portugal. Greece and Turkey were added in 1952 (Greece left in 1974 and rejoined five years later), the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955, and Spain (by then already democratic) in 1982, a total of sixteen members before the meltdown of the Soviet Union and its dominions. Military headquarters were located in France. The spirit of the North Atlantic Treaty is articulated in Article 5: “An armed attack against one or more of [the Parties] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” If that happens, each of them “will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” Remark the original regionality of NATO’s terms of reference. At that time Article 5 was designed to put the Soviet Union and its associates on notice that an attack against any NATO member, the European ones and Canada, would be treated as an attack on the United States and meet with appropriate response—a nuclear umbrella life insurance policy for Western Europe. Later, in 1966, NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group developed the “first strike” doctrine; the organization reserved the right to 

NATO and Its Cross of Lorraine

respond with nuclear weapons to an attack on any of its members. Already at the end of 1962, following the Cuban missile crisis, the United States, which until then had exclusive control over NATO’s nuclear weapons, agreed that part of its nuclear arsenal was to be put under the auspices of the organization. It is ironic that Article 5 was invoked for the first time in the wake of the terrorist assault on the United States of September 11, 2001. It then raised a problem, at least seen as such by some European members, of what NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson called the “out-of-area” question.1 Although at the time of NATO’s foundation the danger posed by the armed might of the Soviets was real, continental wits were spreading the word that the tacit purpose of the new organization was “to keep the U.S.A. in, the USSR out, and Germany down.” Despite the official ending by the Western allies of the state of war with Germany (July 9, 1951),2 there was still in Europe enough worry about Germany’s acreage bulimia and ambivalence about the wisdom of rushing toward German remilitarization to make the French-conceived European Defense Community (EDC: six European countries, Germany included) dead on arrival. After more than three years of negotiations, the project was aborted by communist and Gaullist votes in the French National Assembly on August 30, 1954. The communists saw it as baiting the Russian bear, the Gaullists as giving too little military decision-making power to France. In any event, a year later, rearmed West and East Germanies were members, respectively, of NATO and its me-too equivalent, the Warsaw Pact, which had just been formed, comprising the USSR, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. In a referendum held in 1955, industrial Saarland opted for union with the Bonn Republic, accomplished on January 1, 1957. The French, but they were not alone in this, were never quite happy with NATO, both about it and in it, principally because of what they saw as the organization’s checks on their sovereignty; its neglect of France’s (later Europe’s) specific interests; and too much, in their estimation, leadership pushiness by the Americans. As time went on, one could also detect a positive correlation between the increase in French displeasure and the growth of France’s GDP, a case of money talking. In February 1960 the first French-made atomic bomb was exploded in the Sahara desert. In May 1966 (the year in which the Sino-Soviet Party split became official) General

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The American Way of Peace

de Gaulle, in his reincarnation as president of the Republic, pulled France out of NATO’s integrated military command but not from the organization’s civil decision-making North Atlantic Council, where agreement must be unanimous,3 and where France continues to this day its nuisance politics (des petitesses) with cultural topping, to German rhythmic claque, recently (February 2003) in connection with proposed NATO aid to Turkey—which was, in fact, scuttled—in the event of a war with Iraq. France’s withdrawal was phased. Nevertheless, French forces ceased to be under NATO operational control, NATO-commanded forces had to leave French soil, NATO’s military headquarters and political council were moved to Brussels and its environs, and France created its own nuclear deterrent, a symbolic force de frappe. The French insisted that they would cooperate with NATO forces in the event of war, provided they decided to enter the war in the first place. For good measure, France, after opposing British entry into the European Economic Community in 1961, vetoed it again in 1967, one reason being Britain’s special relation with the United States. Shaken by student and labor unrest in May 1968, which was capped by a general strike, de Gaulle stepped down in April 1969. He died in 1970, a reclusive, disappointed man. But his presence is felt still. Although by his aloofness, emotive grandiloquence, Olympian generalities, bombast, pomposity, and tiresome contrariness he made the “Anglo-Saxons” bear the cross of Lorraine to the bitter end—and beyond—he will long be remembered for salvaging what was left of the country’s self-respect in 1940; for his stabilizing constitutional reforms, from which emerged an institutionally more sturdy Fifth Republic; and for his personal courage, abiding, almost palpable love of his country, and unshakable belief in France’s mission civilisatrice.4 To Aristotle “virtue” meant excellence of character. Charles de Gaulle had that and inner nobility to spare. In a manner of speaking, the United States created NATO from its own rib, raised it so it would be ready to confront grave emergencies, and resorted to it responsibly on the whole, with cool and cautious restraint. In the past, and to this day, though in a dissimilar world environment, NATO was and is only as good as America’s economic and military capacities and political will to stay the course. On several occasions during the second postwar period (1948–1989/1991) NATO was put to the test. There are, I think, three criteria that could be, were in fact, and still are used for

NATO and Its Cross of Lorraine

this purpose, not always explicitly, sometimes as an expedient excuse for carefully considered inaction. First, there is the “member question.” In the event of an armed attack, it asks whether the party assailed is a member of NATO. Second, there is the “out-of-area” question that we met before. Does the attack occur in the geographical area specified in Articles 5 and 6 of the treaty? (At a stretch, the area is geopolitical, as when a member’s ships are hammered in international waters.) This invites lawyerly hairsplitting. At any rate a vehicle is provided for the parties to keep aiming and talking instead of firing—if, that is, someone wants to make use of it. Third, there is “the link to the United Nations Charter” question. In the treaty the linkage is explicit and repetitious—raised in Articles, 1, 5, and 7—but it is flexible. After all, the United States was a leading cofounder of the United Nations Organization and, to the extent possible, did not want to see it bypassed frivolously.

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9 The Korean War

Hardly had the ink dried on the North Atlantic Treaty when with Stalin’s knowledge and approval North Korea’s Kim Il Sung interpreted a rather careless speech by Secretary of State Dean Acheson (January 1950) as a green light for a full-scale invasion of its southern neighbor (June 25, 1950). The speech appeared to exclude the thirty-eighth parallel separating the two Koreas from the tripwire lines drawn by America’s containment strategy and the Truman Doctrine. Moreover, one did not have to be a stickler for geographical minutiae to argue that the Korean Peninsula was not part of the North Atlantic area of NATO’s responsibility, that it was an “out-of-area” matter. In any event, the alliance was new and deployment was incomplete. Nevertheless, the United States drew the line, but for a number of domestic and external reasons did so by using the UN linkage. Nominally the war became one between North Korea (soon helped by huge numbers of Chinese conscripted volunteers) and the United Nations. It came to an end in 1953, nearly five months after Stalin’s death, with a precarious armistice that has held to this day because of the U.S. military presence right next to the demilitarized zone, not because of South Korea’s off-and-on, hands-across-the-DMZ Nordpolitik. Contrary to the contention of some historians, although now “forgotten,” the war in which thirty-four thousand young Americans gave their lives in combat was not purposeless. It gave South Korea’s economy a chance to grow impressively for half a century and South Korea’s polity time to grow up into an Asian values-type democracy. 

The Korean War

The fact that by happenstance Japan became the main wartime Asian supply base for American and allied forces gave a boost to the ongoing resurgence of the Japanese economy. Taiwan, too, benefited, though for different reasons. North Korea remains a rogue (nuclear) pauper run by a disturbed loose gun. The war, as all wars do, had unforeseen consequences. It put on the back burner for almost a decade the simmering tensions between communist China and the USSR. These concerned a rich choice of economic, political, ideological, and territorial issues. The degree of irritation that they provoked on both sides went largely undetected at the time by Western intelligence. The rift between the two communist powers that converted the Soviet Union to a strategy of China containment for quite a while deepened with the armed clashes on the Ussuri River in 1969. It created a new international configuration that offered possibilities of strategic triangulation (for example, President Nixon’s trip to Beijing in 1972). This second Cold War dragged on spasmodically for about thirty years, from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, even while the détente was on, further west. For some time now, there has been talk about a new “strategic partnership” between China and Russia, mostly in Moscow, not much among border oblast and krai party and government bosses who, like their Tsarist precursors, fret about the “yellow peril.” Together with the civil war in Greece, the Korean conflict was an early example of Soviet prodding by proxy: delegating someone, the more distantly related the better (not the Warsaw Pact lot), to prod anybody, anytime, anywhere in the world. In this logic, no regional, out-of-area restrictions applied to the choice of the hit man because the Soviet Union was now a global power. It, and it alone, through the medium of Stalin, comprehended and correctly interpreted the arcana of Marxian historical materialism—that is, the direction the world necessarily would take. The concrete problem with that is that another world power believed the thesis to be infallibly wrong, and blocked history’s way. That power was not the Security Council veto–wielding Britain or France, each just beginning to shed its imperial robes, and it was not (yet) China either, certainly not Chiang’s Republican China (another veto power). That power was the United States, which proceeded to encourage other regional coalitions of those willing to resist communist expansion. Some were effective for a time, others less so. Thus, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO: United States, Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the

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The American Way of Peace

Philippines, Thailand) was formed in 1954 after France’s withdrawal from Indochina. Prevented by its unanimity rule to intervene in Laos and Vietnam, the alliance was eventually disbanded. Another mutual security alliance, CENTO (Central Treaty Organization, a successor of the Baghdad Pact: Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Britain, encouraged by the United States) was glued together in 1955 to contain Soviet ambitions in the Middle East. Shaken by revolutions in Iraq (1958) and later Iran, the collage came unstuck in 1979.

10 The Hungarian Revolution and the Berlin Wall

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u ri n g t h e 1 9 5 0 s a n d e a r ly 1 9 6 0 s , before America’s attention was distracted, then for all intents and purposes taken over, by concerns over the bloody Vietnam imbroglio left over from France and the domestic unrest, countercultural shenanigans, and hedonistic horseplay associated with it, four other major events, three in Central Europe and one ninety miles from Florida, came to test America’s containmentcum-deterrent strategy and its bearing on NATO’s job description. They were the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the erection of the Berlin Wall (1961), the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).1 Thematically, the first three go together. They concern what the Soviet Union considered to be affairs internal to its zone of influence in Central Europe given imprimatur at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 by the big trio. The fourth was another kettle of fish altogether, not just by reason of its presence smack in the middle of the NATO in-area area but also because of the nuclear weapons involved and the snap judgment Khrushchev had made about a green, as he thought, new U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, whom he had first met for a day or so in Vienna sixteen months earlier and treated to his inbred boorishness and “brutal behavior,” as Henry Kissinger was later to put it.2 Also, being of agitated disposition, Khrushchev was overbuoyed by the Soviets having shot into orbit the world’s first space satellite, Sputnik I (1957); downed an American U-2 spy plane in Russian 

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The American Way of Peace

airspace (May 1, 1960); and put in space the first human being in history, the astronaut Juri Gagarin (April 1961). What was the response of the West (NATO included) to Budapest, the Berlin Wall, and Prague? Shock, ambivalence, worry about not doing anything rash that might unleash a global war of apocalyptic proportions, and wistfulness, in Europe most of all, about the fate of “constructive initiatives” and the good times afoot. And so nothing was done beyond expressions of verbal outrage and refugee assistance, which was in the circumstances a wise decision. It was essentially an American decision (even though, as the French might say, there is something about les cowboys that doesn’t like a wall), reached, to be sure, in consultation with Canada and America’s transatlantic peers. On a strictly constructionist interpretation of the North Atlantic Treaty there was no need for NATO to do more than what it did: send tanks to Checkpoint Charlie and armored personnel carriers to the no-man’s-land unilaterally designated by the DDR on the West zone side of the wall; talk tough and have resolutions passed condemning violations of human rights; and so on. In a wider context, on the longer view and with higher wisdom, as some argued, the objective of liberating the “captive peoples of Europe” but not right away, set by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the early 1950s, became more forbearing now that the nuclear club was fast becoming a clan. When it came to life-and-death decisions, Eisenhower’s first principle was to avoid war by exercising “clarity, firmness, caution and wisdom” without dithering.3 During the Hungarian revolution, Radio Free Europe (RFE), an American station in Munich broadcasting to Central/East Europe and, as we know, not financed exclusively by private charitable donations and folkloric dancing by children in Times Square, was accused of raising Hungarian expectations above what the U.S. government was prepared to do in the way of helping the uprising. RFE was subsequently investigated, told to play more pop music, tamed, and, I am told, demoralized by congressional committees. The Free Europe College in Strasbourg, which gave scholarships and attainable hope to hundreds of young refugees from Central and Eastern Europe for study at West European universities, was closed after seven years in 1958. Arrangements were made, notwithstanding, to terminate the financial assistance only at graduation. Practically all students graduated and as skilled professionals made valuable contributions to the lands of their exile.

11 The Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev

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he problem with higher wisdom is that it is usually confirmed only by twenty-twenty vision in a rearview mirror where oncechaotic events fall into neat patterns arranged by historians. No doubt one of the reasons for Khrushchev’s decision to ship his nuclear missiles— and fighters, bombers, surface-to-air missiles, and personnel—to Cuba in the spring and summer of 1962, and for his tantrum when caught in flagrante delicto, was that he had taken, wrongly as he was to discover, the American inaction on the Berlin Wall to be a sign of permissiveness, indecision, weakness, waffling, and lack of will. There were other reasons that prompted the Khrushchevian missile move into Cuba. First, Fidel Castro wanted protection from another American invasion, which he fully expected to be bigger and not botched like that of April 17, 1961, which had been carried out by zealous Cuban frogmen from Miami in old vessels, backed by the CIA but without U.S. military support. More important, Khrushchev was concerned about the overall missile imbalance, which was running significantly against him. It was believed at the time that once the missile sites identified by American aerial surveillance became operational, forty warheads could be dropped on the United States, as far away as Wyoming and Montana. The death toll from that operation alone could have been as high as eighty million.1 The president was informed about the missiles on October 16. Several options were considered and rejected. The decision was finally made to 

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The American Way of Peace

impose a naval quarantine of Cuba—that is, to stop and search all vessels bound for the island. After several exchanges of letters between the Kremlin and the White House (there was no telephone hotline between them at that time) and some very close encounters on the high seas, Moscow announced on October 28 that Soviet missiles, fighters, and bombers would be removed from the island provided the United States promised not to invade Cuba. This was verified, the crisis was over, and the Chinese had a good laugh.2 Later it became clear that NATO’s American Jupiter missiles (already obsolete) would be withdrawn from Turkey, where they had been placed five years earlier. In his reminiscences Henry Kissinger reveals that the conflict was settled by a simple understanding, a kind of gentlemen’s agreement, to stretch a phrase, that was never formally buttoned down. It held for almost eight years, until Leonid Brezhnev decided to give it one more try by slipping a Soviet submarine base into the Cuban port of Cienfuegos. By then America’s allies were ready to do business with Castro, tourism included, something that another U.S. naval quarantine would have made even more problematic than did the dilapidated state of Havana’s hotels. The matter was resolved by quiet two-way (Soviet-American) diplomacy. But what of the UN link? The United States had requested an emergency session of the Security Council. Addressing that body on October 25, 1962, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson argued that “the time has come for this Council to decide whether to make a serious attempt to bring peace to the world or let the United Nations stand idly by while the vast plan of piecemeal aggression unfolds, conducted in the hope that no single issue will seem consequential enough to mobilize the resistance of the free peoples. For my own Government, this question is not in doubt.” In an illuminating display of implausible deniability, Soviet Ambassador V. A. Zorin countered that “the Soviet delegation hereby officially confirms the statements already made by the Soviet Union in this connection, to the effect that the Soviet Government has never sent and is not now sending offensive weapons of any kind to Cuba.” Whereupon he was shown the aerial surveillance photographs projected on a big screen in the council chambers. Son et lumière. In October 1964 Nikita Khrushchev was given the elbow by his erstwhile apparat colleague Leonid Brezhnev with assist from the KGB. A month later, at a Kremlin reception (in the midst of an acrimonious Sino-Soviet

The Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev

dispute), an intoxicated Soviet Defense minister, Rodion Malinovskii, convivially, as between comrades, told China’s Chou En-lai: “So, we did our job and threw out our old shoe—Khrushchev. Now you get rid of your old shoe—Mao—and then things will work out for us.”3 Chou left the function, packed his bags, and returned to Beijing. That’s how history is made. In a suburban dacha, Khrushchev devoted his retirement to amateur photography and hydroponics. He died in 1971 of natural causes. What can one say? Of civility Khrushchev had none—not even a trace of ceremonial suavity, but plenty of lumpen bonhomie, which at the time was progress. His second thoughts were his best, on Stalin and missiles, for Russia and the world. But the talk on Moscow streets was that he fell because he tried to clear an abyss in two leaps. His son Sergei became an American citizen and teaches at Brown University.

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12 The Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Brezhnev Doctrine

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he facts of the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Warsaw Pact blizzard that froze it solid in silence for twenty years are now well documented, so there is no need to belabor them here. A few words may be said, however, in the context of outside reactions to the event. Joined at Versailles in an arranged, loveless marriage with the Slovaks, the Czechs sought to survive the advances of outside intruders by preemptive surrenders. Their neighbors, particularly the Poles, who prided themselves on their historical destiny as messianic martyrs for country, Christianity, and Europe (polska martyriologia), thought that what the Czechs were about was bad form. So did the Hungarians, murmuring about lack of fortitude and the Czechs’ always doing the Schweik two-step. The dates that stood out were November 1938–March 1939 (Munich and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia) and February 1948 (the communist coup d’état). On the night of August 20–21, 1968, Czechoslovakia (already truncated by an earlier confiscation by Russia of its Ruthenian tail end) was invaded by an unspecified number of troops (estimates range from two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand, with the truth probably being nearer the former) from fraternal Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany. “We support self-determination,” Khrushchev had said.1 The reformist Czechoslovak government called “upon all citizens of the Republic to keep the peace and not resist the advancing armies, because the defense of our borders is now impossible.” The army was given orders 

The Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia

to stay in its barracks and not engage the invaders. Obeisance to the government’s plea and order was complete. Between August 21 and October 18, 1968, one Bulgarian soldier was killed by Czech citizens, sadly ironic since Bulgaria was the least antagonistic and most hesitant of the Warsaw Pact countries to move against Czechoslovakia. One hundred unarmed Czech citizens were killed by Soviet troops firing at demonstrators. Nineteen Soviet soldiers were wounded in traffic accidents; a few were executed by firing squads for refusing to obey orders; some committed suicide. The ukase to stop Alexander Dubcˇek’s ongoing transformation of Stalinist socialism into socialism “with a human face” was the Kremlin’s— Roma locuta, causa finita est —abetted by satellite leaders in other Warsaw Pact states (except Romania) who were fearful, not without reason, that the ineffectual Dubcˇek’s fiddling with freedom meant trouble for them. Also, within some of those countries, in society at large outside the ruling communist nomenklatura, there were unfraternal “gotch’a” and “servesthem-right” comments about what was being done to the Czechs—how widespread is difficult to say. Altogether ugly stuff. There was also shame, a smattering at the time of commission, more afterward. Mikhail Gorbachev, on a mission from Moscow doing agitprop work among Czech youths, recalled years later: “We walked among the people with their backs turned to us. Not one face greeted us, not one person turned around. It was like walking through a furniture store. . . . The trip to Czechoslovakia opened my eyes. I saw that we had humiliated a nation.”2 As we say of raindrops in the Sonoran Desert, one detects here a trace of human compassion for men in deep distress and of simple human decency. On January 16, 1969, a student, Jan Pàlach, immolated himself in protest against the invasion and surrender. A “Central Group of Soviet Forces” totaling between seventy-five and eighty thousand soldiers remained stationed on Czechoslovak territory until July 1, 1991. At the canonical level, what happened was the implementation of a “Brezhnev Doctrine” proclaimed in Bratislava on August 3, 1968, at a meeting of the Warsaw Pact members, sans Romania. Styled dyslexically on the Truman Doctrine, it narrowed the limits of a socialist state’s sovereignty and required one and all to succor any member or members threatened from within or without by bourgeois or any other freedom. The Brezhnev Doctrine was also the equivalent at the state level of the Berlin Wall: once you’re in socialism, you stay in. Preoccupied with weightier

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The American Way of Peace

matters, President Lyndon Johnson called on the Soviets to withdraw from Czechoslovakia. NATO stayed out-of-area. Western communist parties thought the whole thing was unbecoming. In the UN Security Council the Soviet Union vetoed a resolution condemning the invasion. Thirty years later, a remembrance ceremony was held at the grave site of Jan Pàlach in Prague. Fewer than twenty people attended.

13 Cultural Shift

For the United States the late 1960s and the decade of the 1970s were a witches’ brew of uncertain détente; a Vietnam War quagmire; Frank Church’s senate probes, which disabled American intelligence collection for a generation; inconsistent humanitarian diplomacy tending at times toward affable fatuity; urban racial riots; inflation, stagflation, and unemployment; a scandal-enfeebled presidency (1973–1974) followed by two waffling and fumbling ones; a dispersed national will; growing strains, rifts, and cracks in the Western more-or-less-united front; very sharp and sudden increases in the price of crude oil (1973, 1979); nuclear near-disaster at Three Mile Island (1979); and a libertine countercultural uprising, drugs included, intended not so much to tweak middle-class proprieties as to change the meaning of human experience by bringing about a concerned, more inclusive, value-neutral, nonjudgmental, emotion-laden, let-it-allhang-out, follow-your-bliss, make-love-not-war, and, in the argot of the time, “relevant” society, “a period in which the old culture was alchemically transmuted into something new.”1 As a consequence of the liberalized Immigration Act of 1965, the number of legal immigrants, as counted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, rose from 297,000 per year in 1965 to 850,000 in 2000, and the ethnic topography of the land was significantly altered. Prior to 1965, nine out of ten legal immigrants had come from Europe or Canada. By the end of the 1990s, more than half came from Asia or Mexico.2

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Colonial empires, which Cecil Rhodes (of De Beers and the Oxford Fellowships) had called “philanthropy plus five percent,”3 were well on the way out, replaced by a congeries of newly independent states and statelets, some old, others not much more than rinky-dink tribal cut-outs run by caciques, copied from areas drawn on the map by nineteenth-century European conquerors, some of them probably under the influence. Most were and remain economically underdeveloped and undemocratic, overstocked with tanks of diverse provenance, and occupying one seat each in the UN General Assembly.4 A dozen or so control the bulk of the global oil supply. This is the “third world” that found its voice at Bandung in 1955, officially nonaligned but mostly tilting to the left. In 1973, to persuade the United States into recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and reining in Israel, but for hard currency reasons as well, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of a barrel of oil from $3 to $11.65. Petrodollars so amassed were deposited in American and West European banks; some were used to finance imports of modern technology by countries such as Poland. Since the socialist centrally misplanned economies were unable to absorb the loans productively, the recycling operation was in large measure wasted, endangering in the process the solvency of the creditor banks. Even though the late 1960s and the decade of the 1970s witnessed a relative decline in American influence and composure, it was not all darkness for the United States. Significant legislative (and in due course, actual societal) progress was made on civil rights (the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965) and in the provision of social services (Medicare was enacted in 1965); in July 1969 American astronauts landed on the moon, just eight years after the decision had been taken to do so; the Vietnam War, which was hemorrhaging the country on the battlefield and had already been lost on the home front, came to an end in 1975—not victoriously, not gloriously, but to an end. The shocks were absorbed, wrenching experiences weighed, lessons drawn, compromises negotiated, and reconciliations reached without corrosive rancor, but not without disappointment, disillusion, and bitterness. It was a time for weeping and a time for healing. Vietnam War veterans were for a while sidelined by segments of civil society. Former President Nixon and ten thousand draft evaders were pardoned by President Ford, including those who had taken shelter in Canada. They came back, not

Cultural Shift

exactly to unanimous acclaim, hale in body, with barely a scratch on their conscience and not a twitch of remorse. Nihilism went into remission.5 But other contemporaneous extravagances remain—showered, morphed, but still recognizable in the inner person. Not least has been the dubious aesthetic legacy of the 1960s and 1970s in manners, language, dress en déshabillé, the visual arts, and even ways of worship. There are those who have argued, in conservative forums no less, that, on the positive side, the domestic “emotional fuss” of the sixties and seventies should be seen as a joyful going home to the characteristics I spoke of earlier that define being an American. I find this line of reasoning unconvincing, even if the fuss had some positives, which is undoubtedly true. The questioning goes on, as it should in a free society. In their inimitable way, Americans pulled together to build and reshape a bustling, more supple economically and scientifically, and technologically more productive country, just and wholesome. Then they saw the wall fall and the Iron Curtain rust in peace. Little noticed at the time was the emergence in the political and ideological soil of the 1970s, among the until then “silent majority,” of an intellectual ferment, the beginnings of a coherent conservative ideological and programmatic countercounter revolution that was given body in national policy in 1981.6

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14 Détente

In t h e m i d - 1 9 6 0 s t h ro u g h t h e 1 9 7 0 s (actually until 1982), the U.S. strategy of containing the Soviet Union was revised in the sense that emphasis shifted—with interruptions caused by out-of-the-blue contingencies — from bipolar ideological confrontation and occasional, near or by proxy, armed conflict to multilateral and transnational negotiations, in search of a more stable relationship between East and West. Contributing to this change was America’s Vietnam exhaustion, its domestic preoccupations, Kissinger’s realpolitik, and insistent pressures from the now more rotund, less amenable European partners, France and Germany in particular, uncomfortable as they felt with being on the front lines of a potential conflict, impatient to enjoy the good life, and keen to pursue on their own their specific national (for example, German reunification) and, increasingly, intra-European agendas. Dumping on America became a popular European sport, next only to soccer, in a way better because it could be done indoors as well as out and didn’t require any more brains. Western policy making was less consensual than it had been, more scattered in its origins, and occasionally caught in a web of baffling contradictions.1 Détente as an idea and policy was not a bilateral U.S.-Soviet phenomenon. One variant of it, dealing with humanist strategy, was conceived in Europe. Normalization of interbloc relations was widely accepted and broadly interpreted there — in some cases to the point of Pollyannaish appeasement, especially in West Germany (Ostpolitik’s quest for German national reunification)—mainly but far from exclusively by the broad West 

Détente

European all-purpose left. The Europeans were going through their own homegrown equivalent of the American cultural perturbation, accompanied in Germany by terrorism of the Bader-Meinhof stripe. The West European troubles derived their impetus from both long-standing and ephemeral sources: widespread rudimentary anti-Americanism, opposition to the U.S. role in Vietnam, social rigidities, and the alleged imposition by local establishments of irrelevant, obscurantist moral norms on selfproclaimed, and in campy progressive circles feted, spoiled baby boomers. After 1968 the Soviet Union subsided into stasis, or what after Brezhnev’s decease was named the “Brezhnev stagnation” (zastoi).2 From 1966 until 1978 (counting aftershocks) China was rocked by massive Mao-inspired eruptions dialectically misnamed “Cultural” Revolution, then settled down to the serious business of economic development, market-oriented this time, at which, interrupted briefly by interludes of old-fashioned brutality (at Tiananmen Square; in the treatment of Falun Gong), it has done very well. Let us look for a minute longer at détente. How did it come about? Probably from a percolating (but not at the same rates) realization by both sides in the grand dispute of mutual vulnerability to weapons of utter obliteration. What was it? It was an attempt to deemphasize ideological warfare and menacing armed prodding and hard-core containment policy (become balance of terror) through bilateral and multilateral negotiations of the opposing parties, by swapping linkages—that is, mutual inducements and restraints, carrots and sticks. Immediately, of course, the question arises: how can we know that the agreed-on concessions will actually be carried out? This is where the premises come in. First, how far can our interlocutor be trusted? Trust is obviously essential to proceed with normalization, but how much of it and how far? One way is to look at the record of the other side, not just what they said but what they did, supplemented by the not always foolproof intelligence acquired about them informally — na lewo. Another way, not recommended, is to find your interlocutor’s soul by looking into his eyes. Is he like us? Is Brezhnev the equivalent of Carter, as Cyrus Vance apparently thought in the summer of 1979, until the Soviets (175,000 of them) marched into Afghanistan in winter? That comes dangerously close to sliding into the morass of moral equivalence (ethical symmetry). Naturally, it is necessary to check, but verification is not easy when dealing with a closed paranoid society that

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treats all information as classified state property and sends its citizens to Lubyanka for talking to a foreigner on a park bench. Second, how many times can you let pass perceived infractions of the agreement by the cosigner without looking terminally stupid? Flowing from this, how far can one go with quid pro quos without tying one’s hands to the point where to threaten force to correct abuses is no longer credible because, realistically, it is no longer possible? And, of course, the transgressor knows containment on the cheap when he sees it. Peaceful coexistence of two mismatched social organisms and worldviews through tinkering with sociopolitical systems at their edges, as détente gently recommends, is not a durable solution. Only systemic defection is: complete transformation of first principles and institutional structures from the ground up. That is what happened to “real socialism” in Central/Eastern Europe and to the “developed socialism” of the Soviet Union in 1989/1991, and about halfway in China (in economics only) after 1978. The French, Germans, and other West Europeans did not intend that détente should bring about the removal of communism as a state system in Russia or anywhere else, nor did those who from well-meaning motives supported détente in America. Under the détente umbrella both sides were expected to adjust and give a little, the West a little more than that. Systemic convergence theories buried in the early sixties were exhumed by professors, and quickly reinterred. When it happened, the almost instant disappearance of state socialism, the “real” as well as the “developed,” took the social engineers of détente by surprise mixed with uneasiness, but not for long. They took credit where credit was not due, even though what happened was not what détente was supposed to do.3 No point looking a gift horse in the mouth. Interestingly, beginning in 1998 the “sunshine policy” of South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung toward his nuclear-armed namesake in the North, Kim Jong Il, a man of disturbed and disordered mind, was to all appearances a variant of détente with some local rituals but similar results. A flurry of détente-related, U.S.-USSR strategic arms limitation talks (SALT I) took place from 1969 on. The talks culminated in the signing by Nixon and Brezhnev of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972. Because of asymmetries in arms composition between the two signatories, many complex and precise (or accurate-looking) figures had to be calculated and put down on paper, which ultimately—because of rapid technological-

Détente

generational changes and hanky-panky in interpretation—turned out in actuality not to be that important. SALT I was followed by a second round of negotiations (SALT II), which produced an agreement signed on June 18, 1979, by Carter and Brezhnev. Six months later the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The SALT II agreement was not ratified by the U.S. Senate. In 1982 President Reagan said that the United States would not undercut the unratified treaty so long as the USSR did the same, which the Soviets agreed to do. However, two years later and again the year following that (1985), the United States charged that the Soviet Union had reneged on its commitment and, therefore, the “United States must [henceforth] base decisions regarding its strategic force structure on the nature and magnitude of the threat posed by Soviet strategic forces, not on standards contained in the SALT structure.” This gave rise to a good deal of nervousness and soul-searching in Western Europe. While he is on occasion opinionated, Paul Johnson is an excellent, insightful historian. His judgment on the American détente interlude is critical, not to say scathing. He believes that it created in Washington an arms control lobby populated by State Department bureaucrats who took it upon themselves to become guardians of SALT I arrangements at some risk to the country’s defense policy.4 At that time, America’s SALT negotiations were one of several attempts to replace martial tension with good fellowship. Another was the Conference on (since 1995 Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe, which in 1975 saw its accords (the Helsinki Final Act) subscribed to by thirty-five countries (now fifty-five), including the United States and the USSR. The accords contained a statement on basic human and civil rights (rule of law) valid everywhere, with discreet but easily decipherable applicability to then existing conditions in Central/Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. To the relief of some and the dismay of others, the agreements also gave official recognition to European national borders as these had emerged from World War II. The German Federal Republic recognized its frontier with Poland, a theoretically unresolved problem, which like an inflamed appendix had been hanging out there in the middle of Europe waiting to burst for the previous thirty years. Noblesse oblige, the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) were recognized as being an integral part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Helsinki Accords enabled groups of gutsy individuals in Central and East Europe to form human rights watches and monitor compliance

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with the human rights provisions of the accords, not at first without danger and nasty personal consequences. The participating states agreed to act in conformity with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other resolutions, declarations, amendments, expressions, and agreements on the subject, including the International Covenants on Human Rights. There is a tendency in the European Union, among the German “68ers” in particular, to credit the 1989/1991 demise of state communism in Central/East Europe and the Soviet Union principally to the European brand of détente and, in this context, to put Mikhail Gorbachev on the fast track to sainthood, a canonization withheld from him so far by his own people.5 Additionally, the veterans of the early 1980s European peace movement claim to have rescued the notion of détente from Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by disseminating new relevant ideas; organizing collective practices such as theatrical political action, statement art, transaction links, antipolitics, and petitions to the world like the Prague Appeal of 1985; and discoursing about a bloc-free Europe in and among nongovernmental groups in East and West (informal ones in the East). The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe remains to this day “notoriously weak.”6

15 Eurocommunism

A ppended to the West European cultural unease and mirroring détente, there arose in the late 1960s a curious but not altogether surprising phenomenon that by the mid-1970s had entered the political vocabulary under the name Eurocommunism. In conformity with the MarxEngels-Lenin tradition of philosophy-cum-praxis,1 Eurocommunism emerged in both theoretical and policy forms, causing considerable commotion in the ranks of European communist parties and fellow-travelers, a brief stir in mainstream West European intellectual and political milieus, and unalloyed displeasure in Moscow. Theoretically, in the political sphere, Eurocommunism proposed to ditch the concepts of violent seizure of power and eradication of the bourgeois state machinery (parliament included), dictatorship of the proletariat, annihilation of all opposing classes, the leading (monopoly) role of the Communist Party, and the withering away of the workers’ state en route to communism. The implication of the Eurocommunist thesis is that the political superstructure and its sustaining thought (hence by extension all thought) are autonomous, not determined in the economic base (mode of production) by the dialectical interaction of the material productive forces and social relations of production (which class works, which class owns the means of production). In economics, Eurocommunism sanctioned the indefinite continuance of existing property relations, that is, the ascendancy of private ownership and private appropriation of profit (“unearned” increment) after taxes. Such a formulation goes against the idea of socially 

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necessary labor being the sole source of value. It destroys the foundation of the theory of surplus value, the centerpiece of Marx’s and Engels’s economic thought structure, and reduces the whole Marxist theoretical edifice to ashes—something that did not pass unnoticed or uncensured by communist ideological purists. Behaviorally, the lure of profits condemned by socialist ethicists and satirized by party propagandists is seen on the Eurocom construction as a serviceable productivity-enhancing motivator. As for policy—the strategy and tactics of coordinated action—the Eurocommunist revision suggested replacing violent seizure of power by peaceful, incremental transition to socialism through parliamentary means within the established bourgeois multiparty system and electoral rotation of governing political parties. However, to implement that scenario is doctrinally to ignore the fundamental energy-generating materialist dialectic that in Marxist phenomenology propels history forward and ever upward all the way to communism, notwithstanding Lenin’s making allowances for tactical one-step-back, two-steps-forward maneuvers whenever things get too awkward for the revolutionaries—which, incidentally, Mao Zedong practiced during his guerrilla years. Moreover, it is to be guilty not only of rank insensitivity to historical necessity—which, experience tells us, reduces itself in actual practice to legitimation of power by self-appointment2 — but also of regressing into Menshevik social-democratic mushiness. In the Eurocommunist view the same placidly accommodating guidelines used in conducting external relations were to be applied to the internal organization of the Communist Party itself. Since each national party would likely have its own recipe conforming to its country’s temperamental dispositions, traditions, and cultural tastes, the doctrinally sought unity and unbreakable, centripetal concord of the international communist movement and the internationalization of the proletariat would be endangered, perhaps irreparably disabled—unless, of course, the parties’ autonomy was merely a feint intended to achieve a unified, unchanging purpose: the putting to death and burial in unconsecrated ground of the bourgeois order (just like the old shoe said, “We shall bury you,” one way or another). Significantly, the Stalinist leader of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, who in October 1939 deserted from the French army for the Soviet Union and later, in 1945–1946, under de Gaulle, became French minister of state and vice president of the National Council (1946–1947), construed the idea as an opportune tactic. In 1946 he remarked

Eurocommunism

that “the path towards socialism is of necessity different for each country. We have always thought and declared that the people of France, rich in a glorious tradition, will find their own way.” But there is more; more ominous. At the time of its emergence and virtual flowering (late 1960s through mid-1980s, after which it wilted), Eurocommunist theory and practice, lacking as they did the notion of unquestioned obedience to a foreign (Russian) center, were seen as inexcusably anti-Soviet: “social-chauvinist”; a mortal sin, worse than being “social reformist” like the Mensheviks once were — and everyone knows what happened to them. In the eyes of the Kremlin, apostasy was compounded by outright treachery. What saved the West European communist parties that embraced these ideas and policies—albeit with various degrees of conviction, enthusiasm, and adulteration—from the wrath of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and Soviet armed might, but not, as we shall see, from KGB intrigue and subversion, was that they were Western, which meant they were protected domestically by the ground rules and democratic constitutional procedures (rule of law) of their countries of origin and residence, and externally by NATO’s (that is, realistically, America’s) military deterrent.3 No question of being out of area here; hence no Prague Spring surprises, not without awesome consequences for the aggressor. Who and what was responsible for articulating and putting into effect, after a fashion, Eurocom concepts? It is perhaps a bit of a stretch to attribute (though it is done) the conceptual origins of Eurocommunism to Antonio Gramsci, an early leader of the Italian Communist Party who, while in Mussolini’s prisons from 1927 to 1937, wrote what one sympathetic observer calls “the greatest treatise on Marxist politics.”4 In it Gramsci dealt with passive as opposed to violent revolution, the distinction between “war of position and war of domination,” and the connection between violence and civilization, which, he argued, were not narrowly exclusive binary alternatives. He dealt also with the problem of the individual in Marxism, specifically of who is an intellectual (thought and its relation to class).5 More intriguing than Gramsci’s prison notes was the impact on West European, Soviet-rite theoreticians of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret” report to the twentieth congress of the CPSU (the deStalinization or anti–“cult of personality” harangue), in which the parliamentary road to socialism was laid out essentially as a way of utilizing the

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democratic process for communist ends—or as the Chinese say, “hiding a dagger in a smile.” “The working class,” Khrushchev said, “is in a position to inflict defeat on the reactionary and anti-popular forces, to gain a solid majority in parliament, and to transform this organ of bourgeois democracy into an instrument of real popular will . . . an organism of real democracy, of a democracy for the workers.” The choice of method would be dictated by the particular constellation of circumstances at any given time: “Undoubtedly, for many capitalist countries, the overthrow by violence of the bourgeois dictatorship and the brutal aggravation of the accompanying class struggle, are inevitable.”6 The most comprehensive account of Eurocommunism is given by Santiago Carrillo, exiled from Franco’s Spain from 1937 to 1976 (France, Mexico, Soviet Union), general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE, illegal and legal) from 1960 to 1982. The theoretical blueprint I have outlined earlier, which in the 1970s and 1980s became identified with the lifeblood of Eurocommunism, is contained in Carrillo’s Eurocommunism and the State, published in Spanish in 1977, with an English translation the same year.7 Abstracting from caveats, conditional clauses, and evasions, the crux of the message is: no violent seizure of power; no slaughter after power is seized. Carrillo drew very different, less dogmarooted conclusions from the heinous horrors of the Spanish Civil War than did Marx from the class rage of the Paris Commune in his The Civil War in France (1871), but Carrillo did not consistently follow those conclusions. What he saw from his exile and on his return was the relaxation of institutional rigidity in Spain from 1966 on; the selection by Franco in 1969 of Juan Carlos de Bourbon as his successor with the title of king; accelerated economic growth and modernization beginning in the late 1960s; a comparatively smooth transition of power on Franco’s death, disrupted by the terrorism of Basque nationalists (ETA) and others; democratization of the country under Juan Carlos I and a centrist government of Adolfo Suarez from 1976 to 1981; legalization of political parties including the PCE in 1977; and the adoption of a democratic constitution in 1978 establishing a parliamentary monarchy. Spain joined NATO in 1982 and the European Community in 1986. What Carrillo also saw was that in free, aboveboard elections his party got 9 percent of the vote in 1977, 10 percent in 1979, and 4 percent in 1982, after which he stepped down, leaving the party fragmented, murmuring that history was going back-

Eurocommunism

ward. His eccentric, off-the-cuff contributions, verbal and written, in his declining years have not burnished his reputation in the Marxian Pantheon, which itself has fallen on hard times. An influential hands-on member of the Eurocommunist camaraderie was Enrico Berlinguer, who in 1969 had become the deputy general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and from 1972 until his death in 1984 was its general secretary. This is what he did: For openers, in 1969, as the PCI’s deputy secretary, he took part in an international reunion in Moscow of eighty-one national communist parties where he refused to follow the Soviet line on the Sino-Soviet ideological and interstate dispute then reaching its paroxysmal peak, and specifically to cast out the Chinese from the communist fold. Adding insult to injury, he thereupon condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, lecturing Brezhnev (politely, we are told) on such thorny subjects as the correct meaning of socialist democracy, national sovereignty, party autonomy, and cultural diversity. To top it all, he and his delegation abstained from voting on the conference’s final document. The following year he entered into a dialogue with Italian and foreign corporate capitalists and made it known that the PCI was interested in market-oriented models of economic development. In 1973, having reflected on Pinochet’s coup in Chile, he proposed a “Historic Compromise” (Compromesso Storico) for Italy, the core of which was the formation of a coalition between the PCI and the Christian Democrats, an idea that an appalled KGB informer on the PCI central committee described to his Soviet paymasters shortly before it was implemented in 1976 as a “cowardly rejection of Leninism.” During the parliamentary elections that year in which the PCI obtained more than a third of the popular vote, Berlinguer came out in support of Italy’s continuing membership in NATO and entered a coalition government with the Christian Democrats that lasted three years. On a trip to Moscow that same year, Berlinguer spoke to five thousand communist delegates about the virtues of a pluralistic system and his aim of constructing a socialism suitable for Italy. Meanwhile, the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, instructed the Czech security and intelligence agency to give operational support to the Italian Red Brigades in their campaign of terror culminating in the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democrats, for which the PCI was widely blamed. This did not sit well with the

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establishment communists in Rome who, like Tony Soprano, felt they did not get the respect they deserved, historic compromises or not. Relations between the Soviet and Italian parties deteriorated to the point of rupture (strappo) after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. A little earlier, in 1977, the Romance axis of revisionist praxis—Berlinguer, Carrillo, and Georges Marchais (the last a tepid, changeful cofounder of the Eurocom heresy)—came together in Madrid to exchange experiences and work out the basics of their deviation. The PCI did not show up at the 1980 international Communist Party convention in Paris, its leader being otherwise engaged visiting Deng Xiaoping’s reformist China. Back in Rome, he upbraided the Soviet handling of Poland’s attempt to be Poland and that country’s rectification through martial law. In Italy the Historic Compromise fell asunder by and by. In 1991 the communists began to style themselves the Democratic Party of the Left. Six years later they tried “Left Democrats” (Democratici di Sinistra). Having found changes in theory, strategy, and tactics to be ineffective in their quest for power, they settled for a change of name. Then there was Georges Marchais, secretary-general of the large French Communist Party (PCF) from 1972 to 1994, whose Eurocommunist convictions were spasmodic, shallow, limited, short-lasting, transparently more opportunistic, and given to more atavistic relapses into Stalinism than those of his two fellow ideological trapezists. At heart he remained a Stalinist, but being an equal opportunity employer the KGB had a plant in his central committee too, one with the unfortunate name of Gaston Pissonier. In 1976 when Berlinguer addressed the communist delegates in Moscow on the merits of pluralistic systems and Carrillo was busy correcting the proofs for his Eurocommunism and the State, with KGB informer Ignacio Gallego kibitzing over his shoulder, the PCF congress rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat and panned the curbs imposed on democracy by a party or parties unknown. But four years later the PCF, Marchais in the lead, was again obediently toeing the classical Soviet line the way its most influential leader, Maurice Thorez, had done from 1930 to 1964, including a brief (September 1939–June 1941) but unseemly irregular conjugation (as such liaisons were called at the court of Louis XV) with Hitler in full public view, the sight of which moved many party members at home and abroad to quit in disgust. For all its Eurocommunist live-

Eurocommunism

and-let-live, Marchais’s PCF backed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and applauded the quashing of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1981. Six years later Marchais, his party financially troubled, pleaded with Gorbachev for an advance of 10 million francs ($1.6 million in 1986, a good bit of change at the time) to help him with election expenses, which the usually tightwad Soviet Politburo agreed to do. He died in 1997. The PCF disavowed the principle—not necessarily interchangeable with practice—of democratic centralism in 1992, three years after that principle and its embodiment, the Leninist party, had been deposited in Russia and Central/Eastern Europe on the toxic dump of history. By then what the French did, did not really matter. Now, what brought about Eurocommunism? First the unflinching, unsatisfied desire for total power: its seizure, consolidation, and unchallengeable exercise. The three hapless minor personages I have discussed realized, a little late in the day, perhaps, that their all-engrossing aim of controlling others’ behavior without those others being able to influence theirs — the essence of total power — had not been attained: not since 1939 in Spain; not since the end of World War II in Italy and France. Moreover, the probability of total power coming to pass was declining in inverse proportion to the rise in their compatriots’ self-confidence, personal security, education, and material well-being (the masses ate cake at last, and lots of it). By and large, the people, drained but made wiser and repelled by the abominations inflicted on them by recent civil and world wars, were not receptive to, indeed, would not let themselves be bamboozled by, promises of an imminent snake-free paradise on earth. They were leery about auguries of doubtful provenance, justified by convoluted, abstruse, often incomprehensible reasoning and cubistic logic, and achievable only — and this they understood clearly — by yet another bout of revolutionary frenzy and mass murder. In sum, the communists and their creedal sources were more and more out of tune with public sentiment in the American-protected, democratic, increasingly market-oriented, peaceful West: isolated, estranged, “alienated,” as Marx liked to say, from society. Second, their Soviet backers’ model of earthly Wonderland (which all the leading Western Eurocommunists had eagerly accepted and tried to import earlier)—now seventy years old, bloodied under Stalin, sclerotic since, pushing for socialist self-sufficiency and abstinence from capitalist-

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dominated international trade—and that model’s genetic copies hoisted on Central/East Europe were no longer good selling points, not even in Albania. As I shall note in a moment, the model in its theory and execution was an unfailing prescription for poverty: material and of the spirit. Voltaire, ever on the ready, once remarked that primitive men may have been communists but only because they had nothing.8 All that was ample reason for the West European communist leaders circa 1970 to devote lots of quality time to thinking about how to reconfigure their strategies and policies. Third, the potential recruits to the communist cause who sprang up all over the West as part of the cultural shift were slipping through the party’s fingers: the 68ers in search of more relevant fields to conquer; feminists; greenies; antiwar activists; practitioners of alternative sex; students who, in the name of equality or whatever, demanded free admission to, and exam-free exit from, universities, with a degree; seminarians turned worker priests; uniglot multicultural activists; and other youthful protest-prone contra-establishmentarians. Inconveniently for party recruiters, the new left’s cutoff age for relevance was thirty, way under the average age of Politburo members. Moreover, these new-generation, rebellious, freewheeling celebrants of instinct, untamed spirits raised on permissiveness, willing to be enticed but not drafted, proved too much for the dour apparatchiks to subdue and keep in line within the rigid confines of party discipline. Fourth, there was nationalism, which Marx never understood and relegated to the superstructure of his taxonomy of human destiny, right up there in the attic with religion and other opiates, and treated as a variable dependent on the economic base where the real action was (the Sturm und Drang of materialist dialectic). In everyday reality, nationalism could not be so lightly dismissed in a Europe still gripped by the idea of the nation-state, which was fathered three centuries earlier by the Treaty of Westphalia and was just beginning to get a hold on the emerging ex-colonial countries of Asia and Africa pining for Uhuru (freedom from European colonial overlordship), national sovereignty, and the right to misgovern themselves like everybody else. Fifth, there is no greater menace to belief based on revelation by authority than the appearance of doubt that no amount of exorcism by reflection, reasoned argumentation, or alcohol seems able to dispel. George Crile

Eurocommunism

is right: “Something dies in a man when he loses his faith in the purity of a cause.”9 I am not suggesting that the three high priests of Eurocommunism— Spanish, Italian, and French—ever renounced the faith of their youth, in their own conscience or publicly, certainly not its impure promise of power, which remained for them inerrant. On the contrary, like other exegetists and would-be reformers before them, they affirmed their loyalty to the Word and vehemently rejected being branded renegados like the “renegade” Karl Kautsky.10 Their only quarrel was, they explained, with those who interpreted the Word (the Russian patriarchs in the Kremlin) and how; specifically, with how to acquire unlimited power without murder and keep it that way until things settle down. “Other than the killing, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” As an idea, Eurocommunism had been on a downward trajectory from its conception, with nowhere to go. As a variant of open-door or outreach policy, it had no takers except in Italy, and there only for a brief period and not without spilled blood. It was vilified by the Soviets and by the Soviets’ gadfly, Albania; bypassed by the majority of voters at home; shrugged off by the Chinese, who had enough factional trouble at home and little love for the Soviets; suspect, if only by reason of its name, in Central and Eastern Europe; liked but not embraced by the détentists; welcomed, but prissily so, by the State Department because it gave the Russians one more headache and the United States an extra accoutrement in the long-term struggle with the Soviet system; dismissed by the New Left as the fantasy of old left fogies in search of the fountain of youth; and rejected by the right as simply the United Front tactic resurrected, dusted off, and updated. Too little, too late. It was the topic du jour of featherheaded cosmopolitan salons where sophistry passes for sophistication, but only of peripheral interest to the habitués of blue-collar saloons, and not the subject of much substantive academic attention partly because, by the time the scholars had its contradictions disentangled and lined up all in a row for publication, it was dead. To people familiar with communist techniques, it looked like just another stunt. Attempts have been made since its expiry to depict it as a major European contribution to the dissolution of communism as state power. This assuredly it was not. Its appropriation of parts of the greens’, feminists’, sit-in students’, and ethnic

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minorities’ agendas was widely seen as an opportunistic ruse, and the “historic compromise” as a way for the party, lacking other workable alternatives, to insinuate itself into market democracy so as better to transform it into its opposite on the parliamentary road to an unchanged socialist destination. There were no epiphanies; just cold political arithmetic that did not add up.

16 Negotiated Cold War

In the United States, détente—symbolized by the picture of Jimmy Carter hugging and pecking Leonid Brezhnev on both cheeks à la française at the signing of the SALT II Treaty, aborted shortly thereafter—ended abruptly. A different reality set in with the overthrow of the shah of Iran in early 1979, followed by fundamentalist Islamic terror, the seizure in Tehran of American embassy hostages in November, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan after a Soviet-engineered putsch in December, and the deployment in Central Europe of SS-22s (an appropriate abbreviation), intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles pointed at Western Europe. This combination was in the popular mind associated with the way the détente policy of constructive engagement was being carried out under President Carter in places such as Brazil (1977), Iran (1978–1979), and Nicaragua (1979), where American disengagement in the name of universal human rights resulted in the replacement of unwholesome rightwing regimes by worse ones on the left, or by Islamic fundamentalists who in Iran, in the first two years alone, executed more than eight thousand citizens for allegedly opposing Allah. These developments helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency of the United States in the 1980 elections. The fall of the shah of Iran and the ensuing tyranny there were causal factors in the Afghanistan civil war and the Soviet invasion of that country in December 1979. For the French, the Germans, and others in the European Community, these were by necessity and choice out-of-area affairs. For the United States they were and are not. 

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In the following decade, to the consternation of many Western skeptics and doomsayers, the American way of peace traced a less tortuous course with no detours, no inconsistent traffic signals or contradictory road signs. Its surface was hard, its direction straight, its destination unchanging.

17 The Errors of Socialism

The course of Pax Americana has been summed up in three propositions stemming from economic, political, social, military, and, not least, moral analysis and reflection, some of it going back to the beginnings and early years of Marxist-Leninist thought and communist action; in economics, for example, to F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. First, economics. “An economy is the sum of every action people take to provide more with less.”1 Contrary to widespread belief that included early (pre-1870) market-classical theories, with their search for a unilateral, supply-side (mainly labor cost) causative sources of value, and Marxism, which borrowed heavily from that exploration without reference to the theoretical ferment occurring on the other, demand/marginal utility side, economics is among the least material of social disciplines, dealing as it always has and increasingly does with “ideas as the prime objects of economic output and consumption.”2 The Soviet economic model—and derivatives thereof—is based on authority rather than on reason and represents a fundamental error of logic, not a venial mistake. It is without prices—multidimensional value signals—that in a single mathematical expression convey to dispersed choicemakers precise information about relative scarcities in the system that no single mind could ever hold.3 Hence the system is compassless and rudderless, not knowing where it is going, indeed, what it is doing, the planners’ utopian, quantitative, mandatory targets (wishful thinking, slavery 

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of tonnage) notwithstanding. It has no scientific theory to explicate itself; only a cap-and-bells political economy heavily dosed with secular theology where history is the theos and neo-Hegelian dialectic the logia (discourse). Instead of minimizing scarcity, which is the raison d’être of an economic system, it maximizes shortage; instead of adding value, the system, if indeed it can be called that, subtracts it: valuable inputs go in at one end, less valuable ones come out at the other, consumer end. The compulsively irrational miseconomy is moneyless in the sense that its money and the associated numbers attached to products (“socialist prices”) are accounting devices only, counting the wrong things, badly. It has an uncanny aptitude to locate failure and go for it. What the “real” and “advanced” (“developed”) socialist economy brings is immiseration of the proletariat and everyone else within it, which is what Marx predicted capitalism would inevitably do, but did not. Reagan understood this better than those economists and philosophes, and they were legion, who thought this Russian-made super Trabi could be fixed with lengths of econometric duct tape. Central administrative command planning, the Soviet-type socialist economic system, Reagan believed, would self-destruct through sheer genetic ineptitude, or it would be dismantled, like the Berlin Wall, by those who had lived their unlived lives within its confines—from forty to seventy years, depending on accidents of birth, location, and luck in avoiding the attention of its tentacular bureaucracy. It could then be replaced by a type of market system most compatible with the cultural, temperamental, and other profiles and preferences of the people who would make their living in it, even, perhaps, by a Sozialemarktwirtschaft with, say, Estonian or Slovenian characteristics. The corollary was that, by comparison, the basics of the American economy were strong—despite bouts of recession and Vietnam—productive, sound, and structurally in good shape. It could sustain and prevail in a qualitative race—commercial, technological, and military—with the Soviet Union. Peace could be preserved through strength, backbone, and meaningful negotiations, in that order. America’s words counted. Rather than opt for conflict, the Soviet world would come around to seeking understanding and cooperation with the West, which it would receive (as it in fact did), to rebuild its crumbling economy on totally new foundations. Such a “provocative,” “irresponsible,” intellectually “simplistic,” “one-dimensional,” “either-or” position, as it was described, sent shivers

The Errors of Socialism

down many spines and not just of those whom Prime Minister Thatcher used to call the “wets,” and whom Abraham Lincoln referred to as those who had “the slows.” A loose coalition of liberation theologians, environmental activists, Parisian and Kurfürstendamm boulevardiers, and aspiring politicians had a field day. Second, ideology. Marxist-Leninist socialism and its Stalinist, Maoist, Pol Potist, and other so-called creative extensions were essentially cabalistic acts of faith and prophecy, necrotic lust, not scientific theory (“scientific socialism”) as was claimed. Whatever the validity of Marx’s motivation at origin — empathy for the poor and the downtrodden — any commendable motive was blighted by ferocious hatred of predetermined class exploiters and oppressors (look again at the venomous language of Das Kapital ) and an unquenchable thirst for revenge—insatiate because the savagery went on long after the alleged enemies of the people, nonpersons, Untermenschen, people outside the people (capitalists, landlords, kulaks, and other categories subsequently invented by Mao) had been socially reduced to nothing, sent to rot in the gulag, or shot in the back of the head. The communist ideology was based on class hatred, a social racism not very different from the ethnic abomination practiced by the Nazis: a poor foundation on which to build a better world, but a fitting one for an evil empire. Ronald Reagan understood that; his critics did not, or pretended not to. Hatred and paranoia engulfed the faith with Lenin and Stalin, terrorists both, without conscience. Besides being conjectural and deleterious to good morals, historical and dialectical materialism and the dogma of surplus value (the sine qua non of Marxist economics) are counterfactual, disproved by history, wrong. Proletarian immiseration—a social ailment causing a skatchok that inaugurates a higher historical stage, socialism—the holding pen of full communism—did not occur under capitalism as prophesied by the scriptures of “scientific socialism.” In the capitalist stage the capitalists had not bankrupted themselves to swell with each new crisis the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat as “historical necessity” demanded. On the contrary, under capitalism properly practiced, not like in Peru or Zimbabwe, the proletariat (in free translation, blue-collar workers) instead of being pauperized into revolutionary violence keeps shrinking because large numbers of its members move upward in knowledge, expertise, skill, and income to become a huge mobile modern stratum of educated white-collar employees,

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armed with cell phones and manufacturing mostly medium- to high-tech ideas and services, nonmaterial goods that you cannot touch or spill on the carpet.4 So, where’s the beef? I will grant this: because MarxismLeninism is wrong, it does not follow that it is not, like prejudice, firmly ensconced in many people’s minds, academic ones in particular; a fine example of “the obstinate survivability of dead ideas.”5 Third, politics. The political system is wrapped in secrecy. It operates in its intentionally fragmented totality on the cellular principle that elsewhere, in a saner world, governs only intelligence (spy) organizations: rationing of information (all of it chopped up, some purposely but randomly false for cross-checking purposes), tier by tier, cubicle by cubicle, person by person, on the basis of minimum need to know determined by furtive characters at the top. Opacity and distorting mirrors are the rule. There is fear, and no trust, in the ranks of the privileged. The official polity—the monopoly party and its interlocking, unelected state administration—is staffed by anonymous clerks, worker ants, faceless in the sense that it is next to impossible for those subject to their command and control to know who is responsible for what. Even if they knew, the knowledge would be no good to them, for their power of appeal is nil (except when the system is already breaking down), as is their hope of changing what had been decided for them in the entrails of the bureaucratic Moloch. Massively they sink into a swamp of crapulence. There is a built-in problem of succession, no way to tell (Kremlinological divination notwithstanding) who will come out on top after la belle Dame sans merci makes a call, as she is wont to do. Hence it is hard to make provision for orderly transition of power other than by intrigue or assassination. Finally, the socialist political system’s ambitions could not be met by the socialist centrally planned economy because both had been designed by the same distraught architectural school and built of the same defective material.

18 Ronald Reagan and His Critics

When Gorbachev discovered in 1985 on his accession to the general secretaryship of the Soviet Communist Party (perhaps even before) that the emperor had a knout but no clothes, and concluded that to make clothes (and not just for the emperor), the country needed much perestroika (restructuring), and that to heal its pustulating wounds—sunlight being the best disinfectant — it needed glasnost (openness, transparency), the snickering and barbs directed at Ronald Reagan for his verbal indiscretions by correctly sensitized people in the West subsided long enough (late 1980s) for Gorbachev’s iconic proceedings to begin. Derision then resumed with extraordinary hubris and continues to this day, President George W. Bush being the latest target of those disdainful of America’s “infantile idealism,” which as it happens has made it possible for them to be around today, self-satisfied as they are in their conviction that they hold the high moral ground. In December 1979, after the Soviet Union had modernized its intermediate-range ballistic missiles and installed the SS-22s (range 5,000 kilometers, carrying nuclear warheads of 150 kilotons that could be dropped within a target radius of 400 meters), destination Western Europe, NATO’s Political Council made a dual-track decision: 108 new-generation Pershing II rockets and 464 cruise missiles were to be placed in West Germany by the end of 1983, unless Soviet missiles had already been withdrawn from Central Europe. The deployment had to be, of course, approved by

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The American Way of Peace

the West German legislature. U.S.-Soviet talks on this subject began in Geneva on November 1, 1981. They ended inconclusively two years later. In the meantime, a massive movement was unleashed in West European countries and a sizable but somewhat smaller one in the United States, directed against NATO’s proposed missile deployment and nuclear power in general. It was concurrently a campaign for peace at all costs: Krieg ist immer der falsche Weg! Kein Krieg! Nirgends! (War is always the wrong way! No war! Nowhere!); for a bilateral moratorium on nuclear testing or, even better, a unilateral one (by NATO only, this while SS-22s were staring the vacationers in the face) to set a good example for party, KGB, and military people in the Kremlin (Brezhnev, Andropov, Andrei Gromyko, Dmitri Ustinov, Mikhail Suslov, and Boris Ponomarev—not a liberal combination); and for environmental protection, a big green umbrella that was not only appealing but under which one could slip in all manner of extraneous, less attractive agendas (as evidenced by the emergence of Green left-of-center-left parties in West Germany and elsewhere, in which Germany’s current foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, earned his spurs). A major motivating reason was fear by many Europeans, the Germans, Belgians, and Dutch in particular, that the two superpowers would annihilate them by nuclear war in Europe in the process of settling their bilateral dispute, despite (probably even because of ) the American president’s assurance that a nuclear war could not be won by anyone and should never be fought. The Soviet Union, throughout, displayed an active if clumsily executed interest in the fortunes of the West European peace/ pacifism movement, to the point that alert people, in Central/East Europe in particular, began to identify the word peace as used by the Western sandalistas with Kremlin manipulation. In the early 1980s NATO missiles were deployed anyway, after lengthy, contentious parliamentary debates, especially in the Bundestag, where by 1983 a Christian Democratic coalition under Helmut Kohl was in charge. The president’s many critics noted that to add insult to the oratorical injury of “evil empire” (“what those who suffered under its rule knew it to be”),1 the president launched in 1983 what they described as an unrealistic, extravagant, warmongering, immoral, SALT-breaking Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which the Witzmeisters promptly labeled “Star Wars” after the Hollywood movie (you get the drift). Reagan pointed out that the Defense Initiative’s intent was to explore the technical feasibility of a system

Ronald Reagan and His Critics

of defense (parts of it installed outside Earth’s atmosphere) against incoming nuclear missiles. The goal of this exploration was to find “a way to move away from a future that relies so heavily on the prospect of rapid and massive nuclear retaliation and toward greater reliance on defensive systems which threaten no one.” Concurrently, “the United States is committed to the negotiation of equal and verifiable agreements which bring real reductions in the power of the nuclear arsenals of both sides . . . and eventually, even the elimination of ballistic missiles and the nuclear weapons they carry.” In other words, SDI was represented as a shift in American containment policy from reliance on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation to deter nuclear aggression, to the development of effective defensive systems to fulfill the “government’s constitutional responsibility for the [country’s] common defense.”2 Then, in 1987, the Soviets allowed that they had a similar program going, its missiles not as accurate perhaps, but big enough. They dropped their demands that the United States abandon its SDI program and went along with the American proposal for arms reduction and removal of all intermediate nuclear weapons from Europe. Understandably, when the Soviet Union became the Russian Federation, the American SDI was modified into a less ambitious National Missile Defense (NMD) project, at first opposed by Russia’s new (as of 2000) head of state, Vladimir Putin, but subsequently recommended by him for pan-European use, with a few cosmetic changes designed to avoid violating the letter of the 1972 AntiBallistic Missile Treaty. Bill Clinton nearly axed the program. It was revived by President George W. Bush in yet another form. On December 8, 1987, in Washington, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which by May 1991 removed all intermediate nuclear emplacements and their contents from Europe: 31 NATO sites in West Germany, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and the United States and 130 sites in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. This represented 3 percent of all ground-based, nuclear-armed, ballistic and cruise missiles deployed worldwide at that time. Also in the 1980s American friendly advice (persuasion, dissuasion) to the governments of both Taiwan and South Korea, suggesting that the time had come to ease off authoritarian rule, contributed to the two east Asian economic tigers going democratic. The evolution of the American attitude and time frame on this question in a

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specific geostrategic environment (the menace to sovereignty represented by compatriot communist states next door) was not the only reason for this democratization, but given the alternatives it was decisive. A brief coda about the Soviets’ Vietnam-in-Afghanistan experience from December 24, 1979, when the first units of what was officially termed the “Soviet Limited Contingent of Forces in Afghanistan” were airlifted into Kabul, until February 14, 1989, when the last Soviet soldier left the country. Approximately 120,000 Soviet troops were embroiled in what was a seemingly endless Afghan civil war, made up of tangled and irresolvable ethnic, religious, factional, clan, tribal, and family relationships, turf battles, and venomous score settlings, poorly understood and underestimated by all outsiders, always; “a bad mistake” as Gorbachev put it fourteen years later.3 The mistake, which involved looking through a Marxist-Leninist doctrinal lens at the realities of a prehistoric society, cost the Russians 28,000 dead and 37,000 wounded (that’s the Soviet count). The cost to the Soviet treasury was six million gold rubles a year, not including goods shipments. Afghan dead are estimated at about one million; five million fled the country (respectively, 6¼ percent and 31¼ percent of the total population). Nobody won, but because the war aggravated an already catabolic situation at home, the Soviet Union lost two years later—this time for good as a sociopolitical, economic, and belief system. The decision to invade was taken in secret at the topmost party level by a tiny group within the Politburo (Andropov, Gromyko, Ustinov, Ponomarev), rubber-stamped by the other members, and approved by the physically and mentally impaired Brezhnev. I cannot enter here into the short- and longer-term reasons for the decision. Suffice it to say that the decision was made on December 12, 1979 (the date of a handwritten document “On the Situation in ‘A’” signed by the Politburo members) and that on December 23, the day before the invasion, Pravda dismissed Western, “especially American” reports in the mass media “about some sort of ‘interference’ by the Soviet Union in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. They have gone so far as to claim that Soviet ‘military units’ have been moved into Afghan territory. All these assertions are pure fabrication, needless to say.”4 Needless to say, Pravda lied. The defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was due mainly to the fierce guerrilla resistance of Muslim fundamentalist warriors, the mujahedin, “America’s surrogate soldiers,” supplied, equipped, trained, and

Ronald Reagan and His Critics

instructed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency with Pakistani cooperation, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, a secret war carried on under the political radar. A “noble cause” at the time. Also a “cautionary tale.”5 Ronald Reagan died on June 5, 2004, after a long illness. As much as anything, he may be remembered for restoring confidence in the presidency at a time when that seemed to be sliding away. His sunny self-assurance, his insistence that there really were simple answers to difficult problems, his knack for actually making things happen—all were soothing changes for a country that had endured Vietnam, Watergate, a presidential resignation, an energy crisis, double-digit inflation and the seizing of American hostages in Iran in the course of one tumultuous decade.6

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19 Solidarity

Pol and, to its misfortune, has been placed by Providence in the middle of the flattish north European plain through which political fault lines have run for a thousand years and more. It was used through the ages as a highway by predators from east, west, north, south, and points of the compass in between. When fortune smiled, the Poles engaged in a bit of predation of their own, but such opportunities were rare and of short duration. The Poles had had big troubles way back when, also more recently, with the Germans and the Russians, and with Tartars, Ukrainian Cossacks, Austrians, Swedes (before they gave out prizes for peace), and Muslim Turks whom King Jan III Sobieski and his winged hussars stopped dead in 1683 at the gates of Vienna, in grateful remembrance of which the Austrians cobbled together a little stone chapel that, the last I checked, was still there overlooking the battlefield. In 1980–1981, as the Kremlin Politburo wrestled with the Afghan dilemma, Poland added to the Russians’ discomfiture by erupting again in antisocialist tremors presaging a quake likely at any moment to register something awful on the political Richter scale. The proximate reason for the Polish eruption was mundane, that is, economic: shocking increases in state-determined food prices ordered by the government (meat prices more than doubled in July 1980), followed immediately by strikes all over the place. Because prices were fantasy figures issuing from the central planners’ imagination, as were wages (the price of labor), wage increases, offered to cool things down, did not work this time, 

Solidarit y

at least not at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdan´sk, which employed seventeen thousand workers. There, under the freely elected leadership of Lech Wałe¸sa, an electrician turned political activist, an interfactory strike committee, which became known as Solidarity (Solidarnos´c´ ), was formed to deal with the problem, both on the level of ideas and on that of institutional/ regional coverage, in a more comprehensive way than in times past. Up until August 1980 the workers’ disapproval of the monoparty government’s economic policies—in 1956, 1970, and 1976—had three major attributes: first, it was limited, overtly at least, to the economic issues in dispute; second, it lacked intellectual input — conceptual and organizational analysis and open moral support—from the intelligentsia;1 and third, true to national form, it quickly turned into revolt, insurrection (bunt, powstanie), and bloodshed (wylewanie krwi ). The novelty of the Solidarity struggle was at first twofold: the alliance of workers and intelligentsia,2 and the early crossing of the ideological/ political Rubicon in defiance of the taboo that ruled out questioning the inerrancy, both of ideas and governance, of the Polish Communist Party (PZPR). In August 1980 Gdan´sk strikers nailed on the shipyard gate their 21 Demands, the first of which was enough to give the communists the bends. It read: “Recognition of Free Trade Unions, independent of the [Communist] Party and employers [the Communist state], based on Convention 87 of the International Labor Organization, referring to the freedom to form trade unions, which has been ratified by the [Communist] Polish People’s Republic.” A third novel trait of the 1980 resistance now came into play. Faced with widespread sit-in strikes, the communist authorities agreed to hold negotiations in the Gdan´sk shipyard itself instead of in Warsaw, pretty much alfresco, watched by the workers and Western reporters and relayed by loudspeakers to thousands of supporters outside the shipyard gates. How’s that for glasnost? On August 31 the Gdan´sk Agreement was concluded. It recognized the fundamental right of workers to establish free trade unions (a first in the COMECON system) in exchange for a pledge by Solidarity to acknowledge the country’s constitution plus the sacrosanct Leninist principle of the “leading role” (that is, political monopoly) of the party—freedom of association and totalitarian governance being, as it happens, two contradictory and incompatible notions. Soon Solidarity counted three million members—one in every ten citizens, including one in three members of the Communist Party itself—

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and spread to rural areas. By fall 1981, at its First National Congress, Solidarity made it transparently clear that it intended to work for a change in the country’s political and economic system, a real one, from first principles, rather than a Kosyginisque rearranging of deck chairs on the unseaworthy S.S. Lenin of Liberian registry. Radical voices from the labor movement called for free elections and a national referendum on whether the communist government should be retired—yes or no. Large-scale maneuvers of Soviet troops (code name “West 81”) in the vicinity of Poland’s northern and eastern frontier were suddenly in progress (a little pressure—pripodnyat — on the Poles), and Warsaw Pact armies stood ready to move in from the west (East Germany) and the south (Czechoslovakia—payback time), while within the Polish communist leadership “active and influential, dogmatic, conservative circles also existed. Even worse, some of these cooperated in various ways with [Poland’s] neighbors and even exhorted them to intervene in Poland. This, in effect was tantamount to treason.” Nevertheless, according to this statement by the commander in chief of the Polish armed forces and the country’s party leader, Wojciech Jaruzelski, he “never claimed that the Soviet Union was quivering with a desire for military intervention in Poland. This for them, too, was a black scenario.”3 Black scenario or not, on November 21, 1981, the Soviet Politburo via Brezhnev addressed an ultimatum to Jaruzelski along the chilling lines of the missive sent to Dubcˇek back in 1968 by the same hand. For good measure, the Soviets also threatened to drastically reduce as of January 1, 1982, supplies of oil, natural gas, and other vital materials to a Polish economy already in a state of advanced putrefaction. On December 13, 1981, four days before a planned general strike, Jaruzelski responded by outlawing Solidarity, arresting its cadres, and imposing marshal law on the country, the “purgatory,” as he called it fourteen years later. Solidarity went underground but not under, and the economy went south even more. The movement lost its former cohesion and split, in accordance with a cherished Polish liberum veto tradition and out of sheer contrariness, into a zillion factions advocating different approaches and tactics ranging from outright confrontation to negotiation and compromise, but not surrender. Wałe¸sa adopted a moderate middle course favoring negotiation and compromise with the PZPR, which body also naturally fractionalized. Round Table talks between a Citizens’ Committee backed by a much altered Sol-

Solidarit y

idarity (legally restored on April 5, 1989) and the PZPR began in February. Within six months agreement was reached. In free parliamentary elections held in July, Solidarity trounced the PZPR, winning the majority in the Senate (98 of 100 seats) and all the seats allotted to opposition parties in the Sejm (lower house) by honest, not Stalinist, count. Jaruzelski became the country’s compromise(d) president. The communists being unable to form a government, in August 1989 Poland had its first noncommunist prime minister in forty years—a Solidarity man, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The disintegration of the external Soviet threat, however, contributed to a further splintering of Solidarity and the proliferation of political groups and parties: 1,140 of them registered for local elections in May 1990 (including a beer party candidate). That year the PZPR disbanded, reorganizing itself as a far-left socialist party. Wałe¸sa was elected president of Poland in an election held in December 1990. On March 11, 1996, in his speech at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, quoted above, Jaruzelski explained his decision to impose martial law on Poland fourteen years and three months earlier. It is essentially an apologia, a reasoned, posé explanation and defense of action taken, not an apology or expression of regret, remorse, or sorrow for a wrong done (“I can say that I am still firmly convinced that the introduction of martial law was the optimal, indeed, salutary decision”). It is an apologia of an unapologetic Marxist, an old communist with a nagging conscience who, like Gorbachev, has not outgrown his constrictive Marxist terms of reference. Such cases are not uncommon. In clinical nomenclature they go, I believe, by the name of “cognitive dissonance” or, more popularly, riding a dead horse to nowhere. Jaruzelski still conceives of the world as a movement of historically determined, dialectically driven forces that unfold “in specific political formations, in concrete psychological, social and economic conditions . . . in a concrete historical moment,”—“a marche générale toward a telos”4 —and justifies his actions with scriptural reference to one man’s arrogant simplification: Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.5 History made me do it. But history is not immanently causative. Reagan, according to the general, was to blame for the sanctions imposed on the Polish economy, which “harmed the reform process, and pushed us even deeper into the embrace of the USSR, making the economy dependent on Poland’s socialist partners. That was when the bitter

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saying was coined that President Reagan should be awarded a medal for what he did for COMECON.6 . . . But one should never forget the historical part played by perestroika, Gorbachev, and those democratic currents which made their way to the East, above all to Poland.” It makes for sad reading.

20 Gorbachev and His Nemesis

Gorbachev is by all accounts an appealing man, remarkable given the spiritual and physical environment into which he was born in 1931. In the next fifty-nine years he made his way safely through the life expectancy–reducing labyrinths of Soviet power intrigue—with just the right amount of protection from Andropov and Suslov—to the highest posts in the Communist Party and Soviet state: general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee (March 1985–August 1990), chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (October 1989–March 1990), and for a year president of a rickety USSR, elected by the Third Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1990. In August 1991, while taking the waters in the Crimea, he and his wife, Raisa, were put under house arrest by highly placed but not exceptionally adroit communist hard-liners headed by KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkhov. Concurrently, the conspirators, among them army Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev and Interior Minister Boris Pugo, launched what was to be a putsch of Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, which fizzled three days later, on August 21, 1991. Yeltsin, who in June 1990 had been elected president of the newly independent Russian Republic with 57 percent of the popular vote, and quit the Communist Party the following month, was the hero of the moment. On August 18, supported by crowds of citizens and units of the army that apparently, in an almost Keystone Cops scenario, had not been given orders as to what precisely they were supposed to do, he confronted the opposition outside the Russian “White House” in the capital and triumphantly 

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carried the day. Whereupon he banned the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, confiscated its property, and sent a rescue team to Crimea to bring a shaken Gorbachev—his prestige down, his political influence gone— safely back to Moscow. In December 1991, following the example of the Russian Republic, Ukraine declared its independence. On the twentyfourth, Russia took over the USSR seat at the United Nations. The next day, Gorbachev resigned from the presidency of a country that had not only lost its name but had also ceased to exist as a system; signed a decree transferring to Yeltsin control over strategic nuclear weapons; and entered the history books, the lecture circuit, and the life of foundations. He ran for president in 1996 but lost, coming in seventh. In 1997 he appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial in the United States, and in his Green Period (early 2000s) introduced the CD tracks of Peter and the Wolf narrated by Sophia Loren and Bill Clinton, a portion of the proceeds earmarked for Green Cross International, whose president Gorbachev has been since 1993. Why is it, I wonder, that Gorbachev makes me think of Aleksandr Kerensky? They’re nice enough chaps both, overwhelmed by events. Engaging personality apart, Gorbachev’s not negligible but widely misunderstood contributions to Russia, the West, and world peace for which he is venerated in certain European circles are due not to what he did but to what he did not do, either because he made a conscious decision not to do anything at all, as when he let the Central and East European peoples go,1 and when he did not push his domestic liberalization (glasnost) and his institutional restructuring programs (perestroika) to their logical limits, or because he had no say in it, as when Russia, Ukraine, and other European and Asian domestic dependencies of the Soviet Union decided on a divorce. All he had to do then was step down, which, having no choice in the matter, he did with virtual grace. Some things he did, such as the excision of communism from Russia and its neighborhood, were in their consequences not even remotely what he had wanted to do. What he wanted was cosmetic surgery for the scarred and scowling communist face to make it look more human, as if a nicer, kinder-looking face could change what was inside. Can’t be done. It is like trying to put a human face on Nazism. Not possible. Dubcˇek learned that, but never quite understood the whys of it. It is because of the philosophical premises that make such a match of the face, the body, and the man inside impossible, a utopian myth holocaustically costly beyond belief.

Gorbachev and His Nemesis

Moreover, Gorbachev had a hefty Marxist blind spot for the nationality question. If only you’d not humiliate the Latvians, say, they’d love you, love Pushkin, learn Russian, and go shopping in Moscow’s empty furniture stores. Like religion, nationalism (which Stalin used to the hilt in the Great Patriotic War when all else failed) is, to this way of thinking, if not quite an opiate, then an obsolete survival from the past, lodged in the cracked reliquary of society’s superstructure, ready to drop into history’s dustbin with help from persistent hammering by the vanguard party and its twin, the totalitarian state. Nationalism was to be replaced by proletarian internationalism or, as I read Gorbachev’s pronouncements nowadays when that term has become something of an embarrassment, by green globalism. But ism there must be—“new thinking” by fashionable progressives, preferably outside the parameters of the Western democratic and free market tradition, because, we are told, there is always something of usable value to be found in every philosophy, however outlandish. The dusty basement stacks of college libraries are full of such valuable opinions. In the meantime it is recommended not to underestimate the correct Marxist precepts one had been taught in one’s youth, at school. and in the Komsomol. Why? Because “in his own reassessment, Gorbachev underscores the task of rescuing the ideals of the Revolution from a Communist system that was ‘not socialist but totalitarian.’”2 In short, it was all a mistake. The two pillars that buttress the warm feeling for Gorby, ein wunderbares Wunderkind, among segments of the European, American, and Indian intelligentsia are Gorbachev’s disquisitions on glasnost and perestroika. Glasnost (Mehr Licht! ) was in a way like Mao’s “Hundred Flowers” of 1957: it either truly was what it purported to be, or it had to be treated like blooming weeds in the socialist garden. The notion of openness—freedom of thought and expression, the absence of fear, a free competitive market in ideas—is fundamentally incongruent with totalitarianism, after-thefact casuistic reassessments and pietistic parsing notwithstanding. If glasnost succeeded, the communist system would choke to death. It is a simple either-or choice; no change given, no wiggle room. For Gorbachev, who had no taste for violent repression, glasnost was not intended to do away with the communist creed, its guardian the CPSU, or its Central/East European equivalents. Yet even in sparing doses it ate away at the system’s institutional foundations. When during Gorbachev’s Wasserhellkunde stint

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in the Crimea, Yeltsin in his fleeting democratic period opened the sluices (primarily to drown his rivals), the whole socialist mental construct was flushed out, but to this day not out of every mind, Gorbachev’s for one, where only the left totalitarian effluent has been purged but not the communist font of it. The wall in the head remained. It was worse, and certainly quicker, with perestroika. As I have long preached — but my birds would not listen3 —perestroikal restructuring (intrasystemic reorganization) could not cure the terminal cancer of the Soviet or of any other centrally planned, administratively commanded economy. It didn’t. Why? Because it did not, nor did it ever propose to, address the fatal root flaws and change the basic laws of the economic command system. For one thing, it did not marketize and privatize (decollectivize and destaticize) the property structure—in other words, introduce institutional vehicles for rational economic decision making, not even partially, as the Chinese have done since 1979. Instead, Gorbachev’s perestroika, “a paralyzing timidity in economic reconversion,”4 wandered off into the traditional Soviet pseudo-pharmaceutical snake oil swamp of incantations, Band-Aids, and pain-relief ointments, more helpful to what at that time ailed Afghanistan (withdraw from), the interests of the United States (negotiate arms reductions with), and Central/East Europe (less interference in) than to sanitizing the fundamentals of the domestic Soviet economy. Such measures would probably reduce the budgetary deficit but not the deficytny thinking underlying the system.

21 The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification of Germany

T

he obscene Berlin Wall, in its several garbs, all deathdealing, not only disfigured the city it divided but also ran along the entire boundary separating, literally, the two German states. The actual wall in Berlin was high, thick, and strong enough to delay individual human beings trying to flee the socialist paradise long enough for them to be mowed down by East German guards scanning the environs from their watchtowers. But the physical quality of the wall, like that of other socialist consumer goods, was poor. The concrete was brittle, a result of too much water and sand having been used in its manufacture. It turned to powder and goo once the wrecking balls and bulldozers were done with it. In fact, the whole course of events leading up to the night of November 9, 1989, when the wall was breached by having become immaterial since everybody was going around it anyway, was rapid in historical time. The system fell like a house of cards; pfut, just like that. Faster than the Bastille. Quicker than it took to put it up and “perfect” it—as the Soviets used to say of their institutional accomplishments. To refresh your memory of the sequence: In April, in Poland, Solidarity was relegalized. The government agreed to demonopolize itself and to put itself out of business—that is, to submit to free elections in June, which Solidarity won hands down. By August, Poland had the first noncommunist government and prime minister. The first card had fallen. This being Urlaub season, inmates of the German Democratic Republic, tens of thousands of them, 

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decided in August to go see how things were abroad, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in particular, both of which were not only near but bordered on free Austria. The government balked, the frustrated vacationers demonstrated in Leipzig every Monday and were beaten by the security goons, some filtered into East Berlin and headed straight for the West German representative offices, where they were granted asylum. In early September, Hungary opened its border with Austria. In no time at all, sixty thousand East Germans transited through Budapest on their way to Vienna. About the same time six thousand others camping out in the West German Embassy in Prague were given ex-post permission by the Soviet and East German governments to leave the DDR, a gesture interpreted by the Czechs as signifying that things were looking up. In October, the Hungarian Communist Party renounced Marxism, converted under a new name to democratic socialism, ended its monopolistic leading role, and scheduled multiparty elections for the following year. While all this was happening, the DDR’s president, Erich Honecker, bowed to mass demonstrations and resigned for the good of the country on October 18. On November 3, DDR citizens were given permission to leave the country for Czechoslovakia. In the following couple of days fifteen thousand of them did just that and headed for West Germany. East German asylum seekers in Warsaw got the same deal. On November 8, the East German Communist Party (SED) disbanded. The next day the Berlin Wall was opened (people asked to produce passports showed the guards vaccination certificates of their cats), and then breached with picks, hammers, and such by jubilant crowds. An estimated five million people from east and west made their way to Berlin by Trabis (sometimes pushing them) and Volkswagens for a celebration. The Czechs joined the parade in midNovember with mass demonstrations in Prague, and by early December a coalition government was formed, communists in the minority. Other red apples fell to the ground in December, not till the end of the month in Romania, to the accompaniment of much violence, culminating in the summary gunning down of the Ceaus¸escus. After the wall’s fall came the fall of the wall’s only reason for existence, the German Democratic Republic. It took some time, a lot of wisdom, strong nerves, and conviction not to stumble at this point and, in turn, fall for the last-ditch ruses of East German envoys, who all of a sudden became enlightened. I met one of them, in August 1990 at a CEP-related

The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification of Germany

function near Bonn, the East German minister of defense, as I recall, who looked a bit like Lenin, cap and all, but sounded-off like the legendary Greeks bearing gifts. East Germany under Prime Minister Hans Modrow wanted—no, demanded—that in exchange for the dowry of East German cooperation on what to do next the Bonn Republic agree to a contractual association, the sort of loose, live-in arrangement very much in by then, instead of going for a fully consummated, blessed, and sealed union. Chancellor Helmut Kohl, head of the then reigning conservative-liberal coalition in the Bundestag, whose steadfastness in brokering an ecclesiastically kosher fusion of the two Germanies never wavered, came up that same fateful November with a compromise ten-point marriage contract based on the idea of confederation. This was in due course agreed to by both sides: the two of the 2  4 negotiators, the other four being the nominally occupying powers (United States, Russia, Britain, and France) who were concurrently involved in the marriage negotiations and gave the proceedings a politically desirable and internationally necessary legal approval. The deutsche mark became legal tender of the DDR on July 1, 1990 (a monetary union anticipating a later euro zone), and after high-decibeled public debates the reunification of Germany was accomplished on October 3, 1990. Of course, not everyone—hard core communists to begin with—both in and out of Germany, approved of the affair, especially of the torrid haste with which the two rushed into each other’s arms. Mrs. Thatcher admits to having had deep misgivings. She decided not to go to Berlin for the tenth anniversary celebrations, so as to not spoil the party.1 For sundry domestic political and economic reasons, including allegations of financial misconduct, the former chancellor and architect-in-chief of unification, now citizen Kohl, was not invited to the tenth-anniversary Novemberfest. The French, too, were unsure but, out of character, kept their peace this time. They may not like Americans, but they fear the Germans—one wonders why. And then there are the Poles, and the Russians, and . . . But not the Americans. The U.S. government gave the union thumbs up, wished Germany Godspeed in immersing itself in Europe, and expressed the hope that it would join NATO, provided Mr. Gorbachev had no objections, which he did not. New Germany (the enlarged Berlin Republic) did both under Kohl. To this day it remains an exemplary member of the European Union and, since 1995, a member in good standing of NATO.

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Many in the left-of-center West German parties, which in 1989–1990 were, shall we say, cool-to-tepid about unification through absorption, preferring to see a social democratic-to-green, ecologically sensitive, neutralized country emerge from the fray (even two noncommitted republics), were well represented at the event.

22 The End of an Era

It is often asked who is responsible for the freedom revolution of 1989/1991: the dissolution of the Soviet Union; the comparatively bloodless dismantling of the communist socioeconomic, political, and cultural systems; the massive prison break of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe; the reunification of Germany and its entry as a united entity into the European Union and NATO, and the rush of Central and East Europeans to join NATO (where the Americans are) for insurance purposes, just in case an emergency arises, as it already has, even while the European rapid-deployment force is not yet of one mind, not deployed rapidly enough or at all, and the UN Security Council is on its umpteenth final resolution, still aiming. First, let us look at those who are not responsible. Here is a partial listing in no particular order of importance: Most of the 68ers in Western Europe and here; the hippies and mandolinistas; American lodgers in Canada, Scandinavia, and other drafty havens; the timorous; the appeasers; unilateral disarmers; utopian socialists and New Leftists; those in Germany to the left of the democratic left (some of them now in office) who just before the wall fell wanted two Germanies, neutral and nonaligned (since one should not be judgmental in such matters), Bandunging it in the middle of Europe; Webbians, graduates of the London School of Economics who took Laski seriously, and other deluded persons (latter-day Steffensites) who looked at Stalin’s Russia and thought they saw a future that worked;1 normless neo-Sartrists; Fondaist pilgrims to Hanoi; professional 

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demonstrators, including stroller-pushing mamas concerned about whatever the occasion demanded; guilt-ridden progressive theologians and antinuclear nudists; Western European left-bending, sometimes well-meaning romantic academics, soit disant savants, journalists, radio and TV talkfest anchors, pop philosophers, performers, personalities, and politicians who say they love America but not the Americans, the American government least of all; and here at home, the hoary Weathermen and their defenders, the deconstructionists in letters and politics, the blame-America-firsters, and the handwringers of America, including not a few limousine radicals.2 What I have just said is not a “rush to judgment,” to use a modish phrase. It is not meant to question, censure, or abridge the unalienable right of these individuals and communities to act on their beliefs peaceably, or to express their dissent in onomatopoeic, one-syllable words or turbid dissertations, as they choose. It is intended, however, to explicitly disassociate these people—many of whom are not coy about demanding to be included—from having played any constructive part in the freedom revolution and to exclude them from the company of those who may reasonably stake a claim to a pat on the back for their keener insight and a job well done. There is no blanket culture of inclusion on this score. I am sure that the list, which will no doubt be disputed by all but the most lethargic clusters on it, is not off base. It leaves several plausible candidates for the distinction of having helped bring about peace in freedom through the termination in one century of two detestable regimes and social systems. A distinction should be drawn between root and proximate causes, interacting internal and external contributing factors and actors, and the interplay of talk and force (diplomacy and arms) in the liberation process. Some of these topics have already been dealt with in my catalog of the errors of socialism, so all we need to do now is make brief mention of them. The unicausal, all-embracing explanation that constitutes the Marxist-Leninist canon is best left to those currently doing the autopsy on the corpse, known among the remaining faithful as a “reappraisal.” The problem with that is that in this kind of crash the canon has been totaled and there is nothing left to reappraise. But they will come up with something; they always do. To give them heart, Lenin’s remains still repose in a place of distinction if no longer honor on Red Square, though there had been talk at one time of taking them on a tour of the European Community to raise hard cash, preferably deutsche marks,

The End of an Era

which would have made the Germans subsidize Lenin twice, the first time on his trip to the Finland station. The indigenous causes of the end of communism as a system of concepts and institutions are, in order of importance, the collapse of the centrally planned economy, loss of faith, and political osteoporosis of the ruling regime in the Soviet Union and its appendages to the west. The economic system was preposterous. Corrupt ruling elites apart, it was by reason of its genetic makeup unable to provide the mass of its people with anything much above a Laotian standard of living. Neither could it support the expansionist appetites and great power pretensions of the Soviet regime. This long-term economic constraint inherited from Marx and real socialism’s founding fathers, as distinct from the Warsaw Pact’s immediate military threat posed to Western democracy, had been recognized, understood, and acted upon — with the occasional demurrals of ineffectual presidents—by successive American administrations, most perspicaciously, effectively, and forcefully, with prudence and panache in equal measure, by the one in office during the 1980s. Jaruzelski in his 1996 Kansas selfexamination, basing himself on an American book, gets it almost right for once. “The USA,” he says, has pursued and continues to pursue a global policy the major purpose of which was to put the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in the defensive, to undermine and disintegrate it. The long-term goal is such transformations as would eliminate the bipolar structure of the world and disseminate the basic standards of democracy, the market economy and human rights. It has to a large extent been the West, above all its principal force—the USA—which has led to this coming about.3

The Soviet-type economic system was the weakest link in the chain that bound the peoples of Russia and Central/Eastern Europe. After Mao’s death, the Chinese communist reformers, more venturesome than Gorbachev, spotted the problem right away and restructured the system incrementally into something one might call “capitalist corporatism,” facilitated by traditional but cost-inflating Chinese “connections” (guanxi )—invisible webs of double-entry bookkeeping that record and store in the back of the mind favors rendered and repayments due in kind, preferably to and from people sharing the same birthplace. The market system (venture capitalists and global investors at the center) is a risk-taking and risk-processing

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machine, pliable and not averse (think of the Krupp empire) to profitable dalliances with authoritarians of unsavory reputation, even, as in the 1920s, with left totalitarians set on destroying it. (“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them”—credibly attributed to Lenin.) Economic and political systems and their chief operating officers do not live in a philosophical vacuum; not for long. They need a body of organized ideas, a syntax, vocabulary, and mystique of their own. I have touched on this above under the heading “The Errors of Socialism.” Suffice it to say that what we have here is betrayal by doctrine—the total failure of a total formulaic, unicausal explanation of revolutionary ascent (historical and dialectical materialism) toward both the “end of history” and a luminous beginning of history in the fullness of time. By some sort of reverse social-Darwinist survival of the unfittest, the ideological firebrands and secular true believers evolved within a couple of generations into opportunistic officeholders—shrewd puppet survivors.4 Comatose immobilism born of fear, caution, incompetence, divorce from real people, and secular faith fatigue gripped the mechanism of governance. Glasnost was of no avail: too little, too late, lacking depth and, above all, conviction; not more light, just crepuscule. In China in the eighties, surfeited by Mao’s lunatic contributions to the Marx-Lenin-Stalin creed, fearing for their lives should the radical Gang of Four, Jiang Qing in the lead, take over the helm of party and state, the party cadre survivors simply looked the other way—toward economics: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white [or red] so long as it catches mice” became Deng Xiaoping’s First Commandment—up to a point. The point is the Second Commandment: the inviolability of the “leading [monopoly] role of the Party.” At which point, exeunt the cats; enter the tanks. The communist political system was caught in a time warp. Organized vertically on the principle of priority access to goods and intangible amenities, plus the right connections and protections by reason of belonging to the correct class, the interlocking party and government privilegentsia was envied, feared, and detested. It was now also faithless, fat, lazy, overbureaucratized, and much too large. Unfortunately, the freedom shock, the need to assume personal responsibility in a newly debarterized and remonetized environment after 1989/1991, gave rise to deceptive nostalgia for the good old days when decisions were made for you and your wage was in effect underemployment compensation, not only in the ranks of

The End of an Era

those who had lost their positions of bureaucratic prerogative but among many people contaminated by the former handout ethos of “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” the socialist counterpart of the kollektiver Freizeitpark at a lower material plane. But not everybody was nostalgic. During the Yeltsin and subsequent transition, a sizable number of former members of the communist upper crust used the inside information in their possession and their manipulative skills to engage in asset stripping (capital theft), extortion, kidnapping, money laundering, assassination, and other gangster routines parading as entrepreneurship. Before the cave-in, already in the early 1980s, anomie, a dislocation of the spirit, set in. As the decade progressed, the senselessness of the doctrine compounded by the high cost of breaking and entering into Afghanistan (hiked by the huge, hardly covert American military aid to the mujahedin), disagreements within the Politburo, the accelerated natural death rate of the top gerontocrats (Brezhnev, Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, all three dead within three years), and the poorly hushedup catastrophe of the nuclear plant at Chernobyl in 1986 sounded the death knell of will—the will to resort to repression, and the will to go on in the same way. Two Russian statesmen qualify for consideration as being proximately involved in the peaceful removal of communism from the political and economic map of Europe and a large part of Asia: Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, very different men who never really got along but had in common what was needed at that crucial turning point. Gorbachev, the Goody Two-shoes of continental West Europeans, did indeed perform a signal service to the cause of world peace by being unsure about the alternatives, which he remains to this day when it no longer matters. In this he instinctively followed the ancient injunction: “First, do no harm.” In not damming up the high tide of revolution and pensively looking on as it gently lapped the shores of socialism, eroding them, he averted a sea of blood. And, paradoxically, the same can be said of his failing to work through and comprehend the content and, temporarily at least, painful implications of administering full-bodied, undiluted glasnost and perestroika to a moribund system. That was done by his nemesis Yeltsin, high on democracy during a coup when the empire was already gone, then partly retracting when sobered up. If one acknowledges the contribution of Gorbachev, one should also, I think, give credit to Yuri Andropov, former

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chief of the KGB (1967–1982), secretary-general of the CPSU (1982–1984), and chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1983–1984), who despite the taxing demands on his time of successive and concurrent secret police, party, and government duties, had the wit to notice the affable, intelligent, and promising Gorbachev and rather than letting him try to improve the negative productivity of Soviet collective farms from provincial Stavropol — a forlorn assignment — brought him to Moscow and promoted his career at the center of Soviet power. Among the various people’s movements from below, Solidarity is a shoo-in. It dared do the impossible and succeeded. For a while, but a crucial one, it demonstrated the classlessness and unity that Poles had aspired to for centuries and that socialists of all stripes only dream about. Its gutsy, peaceful, nonpacifist initiative shattered not only the pretentious claim to a leading role by the party but also the party itself; it opened wide the gates to freedom and provided a blueprint for others of like mind and determination. Then, reverting to form, its members fractioned and bickered, and still do, but at least they do so democratically. Other popular movements and activist groupings merit honorable mention and the objective attention (if possible) of historians. They were the spark that did not start the prairie fire, arriving at the dramatic moment, just in time to make a difference by their presence. The demonstrators in Leipzig and East Berlin in the final days of the decaying DDR, the clergy who held vigils and gave inspiring sermons reminding their congregations of what is always right and wrong, writers and poets who with metaphor aplenty exposed the villainous absurdity of the regime and its credo, signers of Charter 77, Andrei Sakharov, men of the velvet left such as Václav Havel, and so on. Their contribution, open or veiled, has been important and honorable. So has the work of exiles. The Paris-based Kultura comes to mind. Not only did it keep alive the sense of justice and the spirit of freedom through the darkest of times, but it also contributed elegantly to literary excellence. The devotees of détente ascribe much the greater share of the happy outcome (although nowadays they seem to be more hesitant about the happiness of it) to the Final Act (1975) of the Conference on European Security and Cooperation known as the Helsinki Accords, an effort by the United States, Canada, and thirty-three European governments (USSR, Monaco, and San Marino included) to lower tensions through

The End of an Era

swapping formal recognition of postwar state boundaries in Europe (essentially a problem for Germans on both sides of the Curtain) in return for the Soviet Union’s and its muppets’ recognition that how they treat their citizens is of legitimate concern to countries outside the dysfunctional socialist family, a vigilance actually implemented within that family by courageous individuals and the so-called Helsinki Watch groups despite diligent counterwatch exertions and cruel retributions by resident Andropovs. The proximate external contributions to the demise of communism include the unacknowledged but real defeat of the Soviet Union in the Afghanistan conflict (1979–1988). This largely self-laceration exposed not only deficiencies in the Soviet war machine but also troubling problems of military morale, not to dwell on the financial drain on an economy already in an advanced state of decay. It also resurrected Islamic fundamentalism, which has been around but relatively dormant since the Saracens, and secessionist unrest in Chechnya. Not sufficiently discussed was the role played by the spectacular worldwide breakthroughs in information technology — speed (compression of time), comprehensiveness, storage capacity, miniaturization (compression of space), and learning accessibility. In the presence of electronic communications networks that enable information to be instantly available and processed, physical distances lose their meaning.5 The underlying, concurrent scientific revolutions helped make genuine glasnost technically possible even in the technologically challenged, snooper-infested countries of developed socialism. In the last analysis, in both the long- and short-run perspectives, and in the way the interplay of force and talk was sagaciously and resolutely managed throughout, humanity’s laurels for the avoidance of another world conflagration and the morally sound termination of the Cold War symbolized by the tearing down of the wall—the raising of the Iron Curtain, if you will—go to America. I have here chronicled the wise, unrelenting long-term care given by the United States to this thankless task, quickly forgotten as it happens by its selectively amnesiac European beneficiaries, except perhaps the Churchillian British. It remains to pinpoint the critical near-term contribution that tipped the scales and to name names—the last, as you can guess, an exercise that may cause dyspeptic political discomfort in some.

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Granted, the Berlin Wall, unlike the ramparts of Jericho, did not fall on November 9, 1989, because Ronald Reagan trumpeted his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” two years before, which incidentally, like his earlier (1983) discerning “evil empire” aside, set off waves of dismissive hilarity among sophisticates on the Upper East Side and raised the dew point of the European wets. So here’s the deal. When in the late seventies and early eighties, after détenting for some years, the Soviets reassumed their former militant posture, rolling into Afghanistan and pointing their SS missiles at the West’s soft underbelly in Europe, the post-Carter administration correctly diagnosed this as a case of overextension, a death wish given the gangrened condition of the Soviet economy. Whereupon Washington initiated a series of, then as still now, controversial, global rollback policies to hasten the process of the system’s disintegration and help it pass peacefully into eternal rest. Here are a few of the steps taken: Restrict Soviet access to Western credits and technology, and pass on some technological and other disinformation to Soviet military and KGB data gatherers. Launch the SDI program, which if the Soviets were to match, would bankrupt them for good. Provide covert and not-so-covert arms, financial, and other assistance to the Afghan guerrillas, Nicaraguan contras, and Poland’s Solidarity in roundabout ways, which meant dealing with sterling, sympathetically inclined authorities like those in the Vatican, as well as tarnished ones like General Mohammed Zia-ul Haq in Pakistan and the Saudi royal family, a method of venerable standing in foreign affairs, known as “secret diplomacy.” Shoot down Soviet-made Libyan fighters that fire at American airplanes in international air space, and take out Muammar Khadafi’s tents for blowing up airliners over Scotland. If diplomatic persuasion has no effect, remove by force Marxist regimes imposed on various locations in the vicinity of the United States (for example, Grenada), even if it’s only to rescue American medical students who, for reasons unknown, had not tried or had been unable to enroll in American medical schools. Persuade American allies in Europe, Germany in particular, to respond to the placement of Soviet missiles in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary by accepting, free of charge, NATO’s intermediate ballistic missiles on their territory. You get the picture. The rollback policy, anathema to many, was basically designed to make things more difficult for a Soviet economy already fatigued by the arms race and to shut down the Soviet system as a whole. But remember, at the time some influential (which is not neces-

The End of an Era

sarily synonymous with being right) economists in the West, John Galbraith for one, did not share that view of the Soviet economy. They believed that if that assessment was true, the disintegration of the Soviet empire would have incalculably serious consequences for world peace. The policy put the European far left and left-of-center, and much of the center itself, into a state of nerves verging on hysteria. Not to worry. It worked. The bottom line is this. Had it not been for the American way of peace, which first helped the doughty British—who resolutely faced Nazi Germany in 1939–1940 —and then proceeded to crush Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, and with armed force, wisdom, and patient direction saved a prostrated continental Europe from communism, Europe—and not it alone— would now be enslaved in the abyss of barbarism by the Thousand-Year Reich or the Soviet Empire of the Gulag.

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ii And Now (1991–2004)

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23 After the Fall Celebratory Foresight and Ominous Speculations

On the first stage of our journey I surveyed the past, looked at what has been, and described the political and economic landscape, the events, and the people along the American way of peace. Now the time has come to stop, rest a while, water the horses, fix the wagons, look at the here and now, and think about where we’re going and how best to get there. We must be steadfast and resolute but also cautious, watchful, and alert, for we are entering unexplored territory for which there are no maps. Despite the old adage, popularized by Santayana I think, that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” history’s lessons are often ambiguous or misleading. France’s Paul Valéry tells us that “history is a science of what never happens twice”—actually a wonderful art, not a science. To successfully rummage through the past, bring to life people long since gone, bring order into scattered events, try to understand them in the context of their time, and in the end tell a coherent, interesting story is as nothing compared to making sense of the present. The now overwhelms us with information, much of it confusing, most of it useless and lacking the perspective needed to make sensible judgments. Like flies (or, where I live, scorpions) attracted to those sticky strips you put in the bathroom or the garage, we are glued to the television set, caught up in the bad news and hot-button issues of the moment, enervated by garish,

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mostly gory virtual realities and special effects flashed onto the screen between commercials. One gets caustic. More problematic is the ancient, by now almost venerable, temptation to prophesy or, as we prefer to say (because it sounds less revelatory and more secularly technical), “predict” what will happen in a future already conceived but not yet born. Quantum mechanics tells us that randomness abounds even within what once was regarded as the systematic, determinative domain of natural science, never mind in the softer fields of sociology, government, economics, and psychology. No matter how authoritative it may claim to be, omniscient prescience is fictive by whatever name it goes because the future is largely unchartable, while less sweeping predictions are guesses, partially informed, but usually not impartially proffered. It is not uncommon for the soothsayer to protect himself from the wrath of his clients if his auguries come a cropper by resorting to high abstraction, the pure universal idea that few can follow; or he speaks in riddles, or talks of the future event coming to pass in the long run when we are all dead and cannot check it out. In contrast, with Germanic precision, G. W. F. Hegel fixed the end of history, which he understood to be “mankind’s ideological evolution,” at October 14, 1806, I forget now the hour, when Napoleon’s victory over the Prussians at the Battle of Jena announced the “universalization of the state incorporating the [French Revolution’s] principles of liberal democracy,” égalité famously among them.1 Amazed but puzzled by such absolute certainty, I am reminded of the reply a friend of mine got when he wondered aloud how come the serpent in the Garden of Eden could talk, telling Eve to pick and eat of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which she did, as did her spouse—a fateful turning point in mankind’s divinely ordered destiny. “Snakes don’t talk,” my friend said. “It was different then,” his wife shot back. At twilight of the last century it was expected in some quarters, not universally mind you, that having in the past fifty years, with axial American intervention, rid the streets of Nazi, Soviet, and Imperial Japan’s felons and the propagandistic antiaesthetic of fascist and socialist realism à la Speer’s and Stalin’s bunker and wedding cake deco, the world would enjoy a tranquil present and enter upon a civilized, less bumpy, and incomparably more flourishing future in the realms of ideas, human affinities, civil governance, and material well-being; a global Shangri-la; an El Dorado. The instrument of that uplifting global transmutation was the spread of

After the Fall

Western liberal democracy in its moral, legal, political, and social manifestations—a genuine cultural changeover, not the Maoist or Eurocommunist chinoiseries of still fresh memory—equipped with a throbbing, selfregulating, self-correcting, bountiful, free market of global reach, with no need for Marshall Plan bailouts, Berlin airlifts, and other taxing accessories. A much-talked-about embodiment of this notion is to be found in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?” composed when communism was on the run, followed by a fuller, more reflective treatment in The End of History and the Last Man published in 1992, a year after the Soviet Union stopped breathing on December 26, 1991.2 In the earlier piece Fukuyama, a former pupil of Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, saw in the end of communism the annunciation of “the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” albeit “primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness . . . as yet incomplete in the real or material world,” and “in the long run.”3 The inspiration comes from Hegel via Alexandre Kojève, a less prominent, to put it mildly, also marginally less obscurantist Russian émigré French Marxist philosopher of the 1930s who in later years became a European Community bureaucrat. The evolution is dialectical, coherent, not linear, and universal. It “would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings,” when on its rough, dialectical, upward ride it reached the stage of liberal democracy, where the fundamental internal contradictions would go away: “good news has come.”4 Keen insight or rush to print? Fukuyama’s theory is provocative, but not novel in its reliance on historical determinism or its prediction of an end to a coherent, directional, dialectically propelled, upward-evolving (over the long run at any rate), uppercase, thinker’s History that takes account of “the experience of all peoples in all times” — not random, not unintelligible, not open-ended, not the conventional “occurrence of events,” the humdrum, everyday life that ordinary mortals think of as history.5 As first formulated, the thesis had about it the scent of post–Cold War celebratory triumphalism, but given that war’s high risk quotient, only a crotchety party pooper would begrudge a little victory celebration when the nastiness was at last over. Notice also, that as with the greatly enlarged reach of economics, World War II and the Cold War of ideologies extended

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the West’s (America’s in particular) political, strategic, and cultural horizons and substantially altered the West’s perceptions of and its behavior toward the nonwestern world, the gradual, mostly peaceful handover (Algeria notably excepted) of territorial colonial possessions being one example of this change. The reciprocal was the great awakening and reawakening of nonwestern cultures, a surge of new, still loosely defined, and conflicted national self-awareness, the burgeoning here and there of unreceptive feelings about economic and social modernization and about the proper share of “local characteristics” in this tradition-upsetting process, and above all the conviction, both official and popular in the newly independent countries, that the West—rich, young America first in line — owed them an exponential debt carried forward from the West’s hegemonic past. While not pleading guilty but merely non contendo, Western policy makers figured that the granting of independence together with settlement of the alleged debt in the form of developmental aid (hard cash, preferential loans, technological transfer, and system-building advice), directly and through the intermediary of the World Bank and other multinational agencies, as well as apprenticing the newcomers to international organizations, the United Nations above all, would wean the emerging countries from traditional native bonds and solidarities, overcome cultural hesitations and misgivings, and encourage them to try on custom-tailored modernization and modernity Western style. In this mutually consenting approach, modernization is seen as the technical, positive, relatively computable component of an ideally more comprehensive phenomenon that comprises the normative, not readily quantifiable notion of modernity. Modernization on this understanding refers primarily to wealth; modernity to wellbeing or “virtue”—and that’s where things get touchy. On this interpretation modernization is synonymous with the market system—a rambling, three-hundred-year-old roomy mansion of many architectural genres, constantly renovated, refurbished, upgraded, and updated (mostly by Americans of late), built of economically rational choice exercised by informed buyers and sellers, private property, factor mobility, money market price coordination, scientific and technological innovation, and demographic transition (having fewer babies). In the same perspective, modernity deals with what all this means in moral terms and includes the notion of verifiable trust; fairness; rule of law; democracy (individual freedom circumscribed

After the Fall

by personal responsibility and institutionalized in the representative government of a national or regional community); civil society, meaning in this context the coming together of individuals in voluntarily constituted, autonomous (that is, independent of the state) associations for the conduct of affairs and the attainment of purposes specific to them (associational pluralism); and character, the “inner check,” an endogenous legal code of honorable behavior and internalized humane values that transcend the whimsy of convenience, where honesty is not the best policy, honesty is best. That is the blueprint. In its application by fallible men and women there have been exceptions ever since the incident in Eden, and, for once, it is safe to predict that they will continue, and not just in the long run, way beyond the horizon. (See the Appendix for a fuller exploration of modernization and modernity.) As I read him, to Fukuyama, the end of history means that “all of the really big questions had been settled,” all contradictions are resolved and all human needs are satisfied. The really big questions are the underlying principles (liberty, equality) and institutions of society, and the terminal, universal settlement takes the form of Western liberal democracy and the capitalist free market, as fine a combination as you can get. The End of History and the Last Man, appearing after a heated, but on balance positive, reception accorded the article by legions of luminaries, is more nuanced, accommodating, replete with qualifiers, and dominated by an added, elaborate, focal explanation of how it came about that Western liberal democracy (in the classic English, not the Massachusetts, sense of the term but close to the American understanding of equality)6 is, and cannot but be, History’s final destination where—behold—a “creature . . . emerges at the end, the ‘last man,’” homo fictus, a little chestless perhaps, bored with consumerist overindulgence (kollektiver Freizeitpark? ), bereft of the striving and aspiration that through the ages had been a key ingredient of his selfidentification.7 I will not burden you with the philosophical minutiae having to do with human beings’ spiritedness (thymos), the part of the soul that causes people to seek recognition of their own worth, a value of dignity with which they invest the self, raised by Plato in the Republic, perhaps adding a 5 percent margin for self-importance. Ever the evolutionary dialectician, Fukuyama in his book conceives of this thymotic search for self-discovery through recognition as an uphill struggle of neo-Hegelian

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contradictions that with occasional backward downhill slides replicates itself through successively higher stages of history. The End of History and the Last Man takes the edge off the argument made three years earlier in the article. The question mark in the original title is removed, even though the question itself remains. One misses in Fukuyama’s book the article’s youthful self-assurance and cogency that, free of the philosophical meanders en route to self-recognition, had made the reader who is not a professional philosopher and whose whole life is not in the head but just one darn thing after another—a conventional, actual, real invasion of everyday events—sit up and pay attention to begin with. The problem seems to be that history has more messy contingency to it—the unforeseen, uncertain, unintended, unplanned, and unexpected— than Fukuyama’s two-part argument (in the article and the book) and the subsequent flow of apologia will allow.8 There are few preordained inevitabilities in history, but much fortuitousness with many crevices within which conscious choice can be exercised by people who in adversity do not abandon their free will to passivity or defeatist despair, and who purposefully can bring a measure of humane order, decency, and peacefulness to their world, provided they do not listen to tales of historical ineluctability. “The past is elastic,” as they say, “the future uncertain.” The conviction that the principles and institutions of liberal democracy and free market capitalism will inevitably triumph worldwide and put an end to history is questioned as “an illusion of harmony” by a contrarian, partly overlapping, but more down-to-earth interpretation of where the world order is going, proposed by Samuel Huntington. Like Fukuyama’s work, Huntington’s theorem was first developed in an article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” which appeared in the summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, followed in 1996 by an intellectually impressive but controversial book The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. It was preceded, and no doubt influenced by, Bernard Lewis’s article “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” published in the September 1990 issue of Atlantic Monthly. (Lewis was then a professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton.) In Huntington’s view, buttressed in the book by truckloads of historical evidence, for a century and a half after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which marked the beginning of the modern international system, the evolution of Western history was driven by conflicts among monarchs (absolute and

After the Fall

constitutional), mainly over territorial control, but also over mercantilist economics and army- or bureaucracy-building, resulting in the creation of nation-states. With the French Revolution, certainly by 1793—tumbrels rolling, Madame La Farge seated in the front row under the scaffold, ne’er dropping a stitch—on into the nineteenth century, and up to the Russian Revolution and the end of World War I (1917, 1918), the clashes (contradictions?) of ruling dynasties were replaced by collisions of nation-states, and thereafter by ideological warfare, first between communism, fascismNazism, and liberal democracy and then, after 1945, between communism and liberal democracy—the global Cold War—commanded respectively by the Soviet Union and the United States, “neither of which was a nation-state in the classical European sense, and each of which defined itself in terms of its ideology” (perhaps “ideas” would be more appropriate for the American side). All the conflicts, including the Cold War, unfolded primarily within Western civilization; they were “Western civil wars.”9 That was then. And now? And now, with the Cold War finished and our planet still in place, “international politics moves out of its Western phase” and into the “interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among nonWestern civilizations,” all of them, not just the West, becoming “movers and shapers of history.” The “potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations” and escalate into fault-line wars. Such hostilities, we now know, need not erupt only on the geographically defined fault lines—in, say, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, or Mindanao. The terror of 9/11 demonstrated that seething resentment and hatred of one civilization can be flown by an organized handful (nineteen) of candidates for martyrdom, with help from elementary modernization (basic pilot skills learned in Florida), to be rammed in the form of hijacked passenger airliners into what the jihadists believe to be Satan’s lair. Let me back up a little to make sure I have it right. For Huntington, Western history—not in the head, but on the ground, with Hobbesian characteristics—evolves through clashes; first between and among monarchs and other lesser rulers, then between and among nation-states, later among and between antithetical ideologies, and now, after the Cold War, between civilizations. For Fukuyama, History—a consistent universal idea

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invigorated by clashes of antagonistic contradictions that stem from the human striving for self-recognition—climbs from a tribal stage founded on slavery and subsistence agriculture, up through theocracies of all kinds, monarchies, and feudal aristocracies (shades of Marx), until it reaches the penthouse, which liberal democracy shares, without benefit of clergy, with technologically and materially affluent sugar-daddy capitalists. After an appropriate gestation period (the long run), having already delivered the world from until then irreconcilable enmities, History gives birth to the last man, and—fulfilled—dies, while its bored ingrate offspring heads for the Freizeitpark. Huntington defines civilization as a cultural entity: “the overall way of life of a people . . . a culture writ large.” Civilization and culture both involve the “values, norms, institutions, and modes of thinking to which successive generations in a given society have attached primary importance.”10 These values, norms, manners, tastes, and so on, comprise common objective elements: blood, language, history, customs, institutions, and religion (especially religion, the author emphasizes and subsequently amplifies in connection with Islam versus the West). They also comprise the subjective “self-identifications of people,” as when people identify with a village, region, religion, ethnic group, and nationality “at different levels of cultural heterogeneity.”11 Huntington lists seven, possibly eight, contemporary civilizations.12 Passing over the housekeeping chore of deciding which civilizations deserve to be included and which do not, or not yet, we arrive at two questions that lie at the core of Huntington’s thesis, as I understand it: (1) which contemporary civilization is dominant, and (2) how will it and the others interact and fare in the future? The answer to the first question is: the West. Born circa 700–800 AD to families of modest means, the West today comprises Europe (plus European settler countries, like Australia and New Zealand) and North America, forming a “Euroamerican” civilization (but don’t tell the French), or what in less secularist times used to be called “Western Christendom.”13 One is alerted to the great schism and centuries of Tatar rule; despotism; and limited exposure by parts of eastern Europe to stressful but ultimately improving Western intellectual currents like the Renaissance, Enlightenment, the Reformation, and other culture-shaping experiences, to posit the presence of a separate European Orthodox civi-

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lization centered on Russia. While Western civilization has been paramount for a millennium, and peaked in the 1920s (Map 1.1 of The Clash of Civilizations), its overall power (territorial, economic, demographic) relative to that of other civilizations is declining (“fading”) because these other civilizations are reasserting themselves.14 The reassertion applies tellingly to postMao China—like Japan a civilization all by itself—due mostly to China’s now more than two decades old extraordinary economic dynamism, the many structural weaknesses of which, diagnosed by domestic and foreign economists, have not so far inhibited rapid growth and the beginnings of modernization. How America will deal with China’s probable attempt to exercise hegemony in its large East Asian neighborhood, maybe even farther afield, is presumably a longer-term question, assuming that a sudden attack on Taiwan does not make it a very short-term or immediate problem for America. One might add that what is more convincingly predictable in this highly hedged speculation is the response to such a hypothetical Chinese move by the non-U.S. members of the Euroamerican civilization, Canada included. If recent experience is any guide and the mood of angstdriven irresoluteness continues, their response is likely to be a geopolitical version of laissez-les donc faire! (just leave them alone!), and the West becomes wets plus America. Angst is contagious, tending to affect particularly the left side of the body politic. That is fading. Fine scholarship aside, what made The Clash of Civilizations a public event was its discussion of the resurgence of militant Islamic civilization that stretches crescentlike over tens of thousands of miles across many disunited states, united by one all-embracing faith, and the implications of this for a global intercivilizational conflict-in-the-making between Islam and the West in general, the United States in particular. Muslims find the American way of life and what they believe to be its missionary zeal morally offensive, America’s hegemonic power humiliating, and loathsome its subversion and contamination of their culture under the guise of modernization and modernity. And yes, execrable our support of Israel. The problem is not, Huntington argues, between the West and Islamic fundamentalism, as leading politicians in the West repeatedly assure their constituencies and listeners abroad. Nor is the antagonism superficial and transient. For the better part of a millennium it has been a rankling divisiveness about two very different conceptions of life here and in the hereafter; not just

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The American Way of Peace

about power (here), but about “what is right and what is wrong,” the acid test for admission into eternal bliss — about temporal might and ethereal righteousness.15 It is good to have this historical reminder, the possession of which, however, is unlikely to change the official political stance in the West, especially in Europe, where in countries such as Germany and France, as a result of what some call the “countercrusades,” a significant and rising portion of the population consists of quite unassimilated Muslim economic immigrants, many of them longtime residents by now (the German Gastarbeiter phenomenon; the French illusion of a francophone cultural community).16 The difficulty the Muslim world experiences in translating Islamic identity and consciousness (the great faith) into Islamic cohesion17 (a grand alliance at the level of nation-states) has given rise to clandestine, dispersed, small-group, often kamikaze-like suicidal assaults on a motley of hard and soft infidel targets, from Trade Centers and railroads to discotheques, an urban guerrilla warfare taken into the enemy’s territory (hitting “the far enemy”) and practiced in their own or neighboring Muslim countries (battering the “insufficiently religious homeland governments” in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia, to rid those regions of—“liberate” them from—“ruling regimes enslaved to the U.S.” and replace them with Islamic governments), a duality of reassertive terror that includes the beheading of hostages. These are not new tactics (ask the Russians, the Spaniards, and the Irish), but now, for the first time, they span the globe. Lowbrow, certainly, and relatively low tech so far, but probably not for long, they wreak havoc, sow fear and confusion, and induce a sense of catatonic helplessness in the targeted countries, sometimes influencing—as in Spain in 2004 —elections in the liberal democracies in a direction desired by the assailants. One source of the instability is attributed to demographic factors, the “youth bulge”: steep natural population growth and a high proportion of teenagers and people in their twenties (more than 20 percent in Muslim countries), urban, unemployed, with no prospects and nothing to do, “slum radicals,” “God’s vigilantes,”18 quick to riot, beat, smash, torture, mutilate, and set on fire at a call from the clerics. So what’s to be done or not to be done, on the one hand and on the other? As I read The Clash of Civilizations, what has to be done is for Americans to brush up on their identity and reaffirm their Western civi-

After the Fall

lization as unique but not universal, and strengthen it so it can better preserve them from extramural challenges. To do that, world leaders must accept and work together to maintain “the multicivilizational character of world politics.” America should promote the unity of Western civilization by moving closer to Europe, not just militarily and economically but “also in moral terms and commitment to Western values.”19 Presumably the same should be required of Europe. And what should not be done? America has a missionary culture. It likes to bring democracy.20 The evangelistic urge must be restrained so as not to estrange, affront, discomfit, and otherwise stir up the non-Westerners, especially in our fading condition, the more so since the non-Western civilizations’ cultural sensitivities are already on edge. It is “most important to recognize that Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.”21 And all this time I thought it was terrorist interventions in American affairs. I do not mean to be argumentative or flippant, for I recognize and appreciate Professor Huntington’s erudition and meticulous research, but as I read it, what in sum has to be done is to be nice to everybody: your cultural nephews, your friends, your enemies, which Uncle Sam has been to the point of naïveté, as the recipients of that niceness are quick to point out with patronizingly subdued hilarity. It would follow, I presume, that as concerns our friends, allies, and fellow civilizationists, even the solecistical ones, we should consult them, listen to them, empathize more, cooperate and coordinate, and pull together like the jolly old college rowing team. If they propose to outvote us in, say, the Security Council because they resent our being a hegemon, then we should ignore it, keep on negotiating, compromise, or, if all else fails, submit with some face-saving words. Espouse Atlanticism to bolster the shared civilization. (But the problem is not so much that it takes two to tango as that our partners keep stepping on our toes. It’s a nuisance more than anything else and calls at some point for a change of partners: Merci mademoiselle. Adieu.) Above all, don’t proselytize your adversaries who want to do their own thing, however fetid it strikes you as being. Using relativist cultural standards, no one can really tell what’s good and what’s bad, where, when, and for whom. Do not forcemodernize them or push them into your kind of modernity however

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The American Way of Peace

unique it is or however universally superior it may seem to you. Do not marketize and democratize without explicit consent. Laissez-les donc faire! Abstain! Then all might well be well in the world. If that is the message, it is too simple, too sweeping, too excessive, and, like the death of ideal history, too academic in both the scholarly and “irrelevant in practice” meaning of that term. Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s theses are interesting, intellectually titillating attempts to peer into the future; sophisticated second cousins to Stufenlehre (loosely rendered as the science or, better, knowledge of historical stages) in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, Friedrich List, Arnold Toynbee, Walt Rostow, and others. Unfortunately, Stufenlehre often offends common sense and almost always fails the test of time, not for want of cleverness, erudition, or passing appeal but because of hit-and-miss history’s uncanny ability to play tricks on scholars, social scientists most of all, when they don the robes of seers and consultants on the future. It is true, as some critics have remarked, that the two treatments have much to offer in the way of insight and suggestions, that they are moderate (“conservative” has been used, mistakenly I think, to describe them), and that in places they creatively complement each other—judgments confirmed by the intellectual ferment and campus fisticuffs they engendered. Stanley Kurtz, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, thinks that what is missing from both works (“the missing link”) is a well-grounded theory of modernization, “a clear conception of how, why, and when modernization blends, or fails to blend, with particular social forms.”22 The absence of such a theory makes it impossible, Kurtz argues, to adjudicate the Fukuyama-Huntington debate. Some years ago, pen and paper in hand, I joined the throng milling around this issue. With apologies for self-cribbing, here is the conclusion I reached then about modernization and modernity.23 Modernization is synonymous with the market system. Among the more important institutional attributes of modernity are democracy, civil society, and the rule of law. The modernizing economic system of free markets and the political system of democracy, civil society, and the rule of law—the repository of modernity—reinforce and complement each other in many critical respects to make possible, but not inevitable, the founding of a humane commercial republic. Such a republic, combining modernization with modernity, reason with conscience and

After the Fall

decency, is not a utopian construct but an actual social arrangement approached, although never fully realized, by a growing number of market democracies.

It is also the American way of peace. Whether to continue along that way in good if fractious company or alone, make a detour for safety’s sake, take a different path, or give up, walk off the job, go home, bolt the shutters, and stay put in splendid isolation and despair, has been the subject of animated debate at home and abroad throughout the sixty years covered by this survey. Some of the debate has been reasoned, some acrimonious, some Gaullish, some laced with threats and actual attempts to blow up the works. Yet during those six decades—three generations, one of them admittedly a little strange about the extremities—a world war had been prevented that would have killed history down to the last man on his paid vacation. Hardly two years after the celebratory wake held on the occasion of the Soviet Union’s passing, the festivities were over and the mood turned not to nostalgic blues about the past (except among those of the former communist privilegentsia now out of the loop, more by reason of bad luck than as a result of sentences passed by some court of international justice), but to pessimism about the future. This pessimism is detectable in the work of Huntington and exemplified in the writings of five other men of letters and politics: the late Daniel Patrick (“Defining Deviancy Downward”) Moynihan, Walter Laqueur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Donald Puchala, and Paul Kennedy.24 Moynihan’s concern was with ethnic wars, of which there were forty-eight in progress worldwide as of 1993. Since not much in the way of effort or resources was being expended by the hyperbolized world community on putting out these genocidal conflagrations in Rwanda, the Sudan, and other trouble spots, nor could much be done to remove the root causes of the madness in a proximate future, the possibility of imminent escalation and wildfires devouring whole continents looked starkly real. Instead of dreams of peace, interethnic accommodation, multicultural understanding, prosperity, gender equity, sagely weighted multipolarity, and multilaterally self-regulating Ordnung, or just a little human kindness, there would be uproar and chaos. For thirty years a student of political violence, Laqueur saw both more, and more diverse, terrorism in the offing drawing upon “a huge reservoir of aggression.” Brzezinski agonized over the erosion of American values by mindless overindulgence

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in a “permissive cornucopia” of ethical relativism, hedonism, and conspicuous consumption — social and moral deterioration — that put to question the future capacity of America, the only superpower left in a world of ambitious power clusters, to provide the moral leadership and the muscle needed to avert total world chaos. One of the members of the Conference on European Problems, Donald Puchala, expressed his apprehensions in a remarkable paper presented at a CEP meeting in 1998. In it he conceives of the Atlantic community (“Atlanticism”)—a transnational society, “the most highly institutionalized international system in history,” a “geocultural unity”—being eroded and drifting apart. On the American side the main agent of corrosion is, in Puchala’s view, multiculturalism or cultural relativism become dogma in the 1990s, with its “deconstructive onslaught” on traditional Western values in the name of “pluralism,” “diversity and all manner of group ‘rights.’” “[T]he meekness of the defense against [it] . . . is explained in part by the almost total collapse of traditional culture-carrying institutions—families, schools, churches—as well as by the government’s performance as a socializing agent.” On the European side of the Atlantic, the cultural coming apart is driven in large measure by “south-to-north and east-to-west immigration” into Western (and now also Eastern and Central) Europe of members of other cultures: first, guest workers (cheap foreign labor, that is); then their families (I would add that this often means whole villages); more recently refugees and asylum seekers who “wish to live within their cultures” while living outside their homelands. Paul Kennedy, he of the “imperial overstretch,” predicted America’s imperial decline on almost every front. “The use of the word ‘empire,’ in the American context,” reflects Charles Krauthammer, “is ridiculous. It is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first instinct upon arriving on anyone’s soil is to demand an exit strategy. I can assure you when the Romans went into Gaul and the British into India, they were not looking for exit strategies. They were looking for entry strategies.”25 In Western Europe, after the wall’s fall and the Soviet departure, oracles on America’s adverse fate abounded. This is understandable, knowledgeable at firsthand as the European experts on America’s future are with the frail condition of the moral fiber in their own lands. Their concern, however, is less with what will happen to America than with how severely what happens there might destabilize the rest of the world, their slice of it

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in particular. All things considered, in their present frame of mind they are inclined to take heart in the old Chinese tag: “Better to be a shattered jade vessel than an intact clay pot” in the made-in-the-U.S.A. arrangement of the universe.26 But their vatic concerns and mouthings about America’s demise through a combination of moral shrinkage, heavy-handedness, and growing arrogance of power are extravagant, more of a contrived wish than a scientific prognosis.

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24 After the Wall What Happened on the Ground

W

hen the dust from the breakup of the Berlin Wall began to settle and the old Reichstag building that sat right next to it was outfitted with a symbolic glass cupola from which German voters can look down into the legislative chamber to see how their representatives are spending their money, vague outlines and portents of the future began to take shape. Here is a list. A common threat to the West—the Soviet Union—was removed, and that was good. What was less good was this: A credible common enemy usually encourages unity among those he menaces, except for the faint of heart and the uncommitted who stand on the sidelines, hope for the best, and sell to both sides. The others, more out of necessity than from true affection for one another, elect to hang together rather than separately. When the enemy is gone, they say “thanks very much” and go their separate ways. But this time there was a twist. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was gone because socialism Soviet-style died institutionally, but Mother Russia survived—leaner and marginally less maleficent because less powerful, but barely democratic and far from exuding goodwill to men. She is still around as she had been for centuries, a fact not lost on her smaller, next-door neighbors to the west who, in the blink of an eye, were outside NATO’s headquarters in Mons, Belgium, applications for

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After the Wall

membership in hand, Poland and the Baltic countries at the head of the line. But older Cold War companions, Turkey for instance, showed signs of restiveness verging at times on mild rebellion, and not for temperamental reasons like la Marianne, or due to suppressed insecurities, or simply out of spite. Besides a change of generations (important but not so instrumental as is thought), another reason for this restlessness of America’s fellow Natoists was their desire to demonstrate their stakeholding in the emerging European Union led by France and Germany by standing up to America (not much risk there), the hegemon du jour. The recently liberated European states east of the Oder-Neisse line, seeking not only entry into NATO but membership in the Union club as well, had to be more circumspect, more “European” so to speak, more Catholic than the pope, as the saying goes, in order to minimize the chances of their membership application being stalled or blackballed down the road by the Paris-Berlin axis. World institutions, including the United Nations, its General Assembly and Security Council, NATO, the World Bank, IMF, and other international political, security, and economic organizations founded just before or shortly after the end of World War II by what was sometimes referred to as “the Washington Consensus,” shaped and battered for a half century by bipolar confrontations of power and ideology, showed signs of wear and obsolescence. They called for reappraisal, redefinition, and restructuring to meet changed circumstances, face new challenges, and perform unfamiliar functions. There was one unification at the nation-state level, across what only a few years earlier had looked like an unbridgeable ideological, systemic, and military divide, and that was Germany. But it was a reunion within redrawn, somewhat trimmed, territorial frontiers of an existing nation professing, with various degrees of ardor and skepticism, two political faiths, not the creation of a brand new nation and state carved out of the decomposed body of a Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, or simply created from nothing, out of sand, Las Vegas–like. Nor was it, as had been the case at the conclusion of World War II, the restoration to formal statehood, but not to independence, of nations ground to powder by Hitler’s Germany or swallowed by Mother Russia after the conclusion in August 1939 of the secret Hitler-Stalin spheres-of-influence-and-Poland-dismemberment pact.

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Neither was it yet, and the qualifier is important, the establishment of a federation of nation-states or the creation of a unique stateless union of nations. Nevertheless, the contractors for the original architects of the panEuropean idea—for Adenauer, Robert Schuman, and two generations of Americans tired of acting as lifeguards for a suicidal Europe—were at work, quietly, doggedly, methodically, brick by brick, sometimes (May 2004) yielding to exuberance, ten bricks at a time, erecting a historically unprecedented, because nonimperial, supranational edifice. It was a great and noble undertaking, hopefully not too top-heavy with Brussels bureaucrats. For every unification, integration, ecumenism, and reach for globalization (the last in economics) there were multiple disintegrations, some quite benign, even cordial and healthy for all concerned. Thus, Czechoslovakia, which at first tried the hyphen and capital S to please the antsy Slovaks (Czecho-Slovakia), became by mutual consent two countries on January 1, 1993: the Czech Republic and Slovakia; no alimony. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the last two with substantial Russian minorities (nearly 30 percent) who had settled there uninvited during the long Soviet occupation, categorically rejected an invitation to rejoin the now non-Soviet Russia. Yugoslavia, once seen by some Western admirers of this cubist collage as God’s gift to the Balkans, fell apart along all kinds of fault lines, not just intercivilizational ones, with considerable collateral damage. When in the 1990s, in one of its recurrent fits of abulia, Western Europe was unable to stop the itch in this, its intimate in-area, which soon became a catastrophe, the United States came to the rescue. In a process of fragmentation historically known as Balkanization, up popped fragilely sovereign, multilaterally hostile Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia (parts of its territory disputed, guns drawn, by Croatia); Macedonia (Albanian rebellion in the north, the use of its very name objected to by Greece on grounds of cultural desecration); and Bosnia-Herzegovina (44 percent Sunni Muslim, 31 percent Serbian Orthodox, 18 percent Roman Catholic, mutually antagonistic with a vengeance, and 8 percent nonbelievers—in the circumstances, who can blame them?). But that is not nearly the end of it. Kosovo and Montenegro riot in the wings, as do the Albanians descended from ancient Illyrians, the Gheks in the north, the Tosks in the south, the two not getting along, but ready to pick up any Kosovo crumbs that may fall their way, to become a Greater, but still dirt-poor, Enlightenment-bypassed Albania. By 1993 there had accumulated 164 territorial-ethnic disputes over

After the Wall

the exact delineation of the former Soviet Union’s borders, thirty of them involving armed clashes of one sort or another.1 No wonder that, surveying this Hobbesian mess, many fine intellects succumb to anticipatory pessimism and through their writings depress wider circles of their readers. The Soviet Union itself, consisting of fifteen tightly controlled nominal republics, was split into twelve more or less independent states including the Russian Federation, loosely associated in a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS, founded in 1991)—not what one would call a comity of nations.2 The number of successor states remains fluid because of ongoing border disputes and further armed secessionist aspirations. Georgia, for example, at first refused to join the CIS because it argued, and rightly so, that it had been dragged by force into the Soviet Union to begin with. It did join later, after a civil war in which Russia intervened to save the Georgian government. Brittle and fragile, it is having trouble with Abkhazia in the northwest. Armenia and Azerbaijan have a double problem: with the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan separated from the rest of the country by Armenian territory, and over NagornoKarabakh, which lies within Muslim Azerbaijan and is administered by it but has a disgruntled Christian Armenian majority. Then there is Chechnya in north Caucasus, an area denominationally, ethnically, culturally, tribalistically, demographically, linguistically, and in every other way more complex and snarled than the Balkans, but equally rugged. Since 1994, post-Soviet Russia has been mired there in two brutal, dirty, inconclusive wars started to prevent the Chechens from leaving the Russian Federation, which they tried to do in 1991, interrupted only by a stalemated peace of sorts whenever both sides become totally exhausted. The Chechen declaration of independence was rejected by Moscow and remains unrecognized internationally. An estimated twenty-five thousand Russians died and more than fifty thousand have been wounded since 1994 when Russia launched its first military assault.3 Russian obduracy on this point cannot be explained by blanket conceptual generalizations about intercivilizational fault-line tremors. It has more to do with Stalin’s deportation of the whole Chechen nation, and the Chechens’ Ingush relatives, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in 1944 for having allegedly collaborated with the German invaders. One-third of the half million men, women, and children forced to march to the gulag in the midst of winter perished. The survivors were allowed by Khrushchev to return to their homeland in 1957. That

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The American Way of Peace

particular genocide had more to do with Stalin’s being a narcissistic, paranoiac, non compos mentis thug than with Russian Orthodox civilization’s gripes about Muhammad—even though the Georgian Iosiff Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili Stalin did do a short stint as an Orthodox seminarian before switching to bank robbery for the Revolution and writing poisonous pamphlets on the nationalities question to establish his ideological credentials for posterity. More mundanely, it has also to do with Russian access to oil pipelines in Chechnya and, on the other side of the equation, with what the Russian novelist Mikhail Lermontov said of the Chechens back in 1832: “Their god is freedom, their law is war,” and their biggest, undying hatred is reserved for the Russians: red, white, tall, short, whatever. Alexander Iskanderyan, head of the independent Center for Caucasus Studies in Moscow, reasons, “Islam does not strike deep roots among the Chechens and has played only a slight role in their rebellions against Russian rule in the past. . . . Religion is not the key to understanding Chechens: their painful past is.”4 “Painful” is a gigantic understatement. But then, over the centuries they gave the Russians as much as they got, and then some for good measure, not sparing anyone who stood in their way, without distinction of race, religion, or national origin, but with Islamic fervor and tribal gusto. In 1989, according to the last available census (though I find it hard to envisage how such a count can be conducted, much less believed, in a place like this) there were one million Chechens, some in Afghanistan fighting the Russians, who are still there now, fighting us. Bean-counting countries—old, merged, newly emerged, fractured, and submerged—is only one way, not necessarily the best, to try and understand what happened in the not so distant past. There also took place in Central and Eastern Europe, even in the CIS but less and only virtually so, some significant internal business restructuring and systemic reform tending in the direction of capitalism in economics (“socially responsible” capitalism, as the reformers, still nervous about that monster, are quick to clarify) and democracy in politics (not a copy of the sham “peoples’ democracy,” but with some backsliding now and again). In the meantime, China under a readjusted but still recognizable communist dictatorship has been economically booming, imbibing modernization by the bucketful, wary of modernity, which to a number of leaders still represents an insidious spiritual infection. Modernization, broadly a domesticated form of capitalism, is good for the economic base. Moder-

After the Wall

nity, or liberal democracy, however, is like yellow fever, bad for the health of the superstructure, still after all these years a kind of spiritual pollution, but currently fairly well under control. That’s how the Chinese leaders want it kept, with the help of nightsticks, tanks, and such, if necessary. And then came 9/11.

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25 Drifting Apart Multipolarity and Hegemony

Multipolarity

L et us take a closer look at these post mortem sovieticum developments. First, the parting of friends. However selective and illusory it may be, anyone not instinctively given to nursing grudges is tempted to wax sentimental about a suitably bowdlerized past. It holds true, too, for remembrances of old friends and good companions. During the Cold War, Gallic pirouetting and AWOLs notwithstanding, the Atlantic Alliance was like a convoy crossing a submarine-infested sea—one for all, but also all for one, out of necessity. Occasional tactical zigzagging by détenting, ostpolitiking, or strategic-nuclear-weapons-allergic captains had to be routinely corrected by the admiral in charge, and those responsible called to order in the interest of concerted action. The stakes were just too high for idiosyncratic frivolities to be given free rein. The rationale for the perilous crossing and its strategic direction—the basics—were, however, generally agreed on and not disputed as a rule, except on the European portside. Now, it would appear, we are like ships passing in the night, lights out, using different charts, inviting collision. The difference between us is no longer tactical but strategic, increasingly one of how we look at and interpret the world. And that could, but need not, mean danger of shipwreck ahead for everyone. 

Drifting Apart

At the concluding symposium of the CEP and its German sister organization held in Heidelberg in May 2003, a German colleague said: “Please, do not make us choose between the United States and France.” I was a little baffled and taken aback by this remark: puzzled because, to my knowledge, nobody was making the Germans choose anything. And anyway, a coerceless decision in favor of anti-American France (and Russia) had, in fact, already been made in a recent federal election, which had returned to office Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who, having not much to show for the domestic economy, ran—to the delight of the French—on an American hegemon-denigrating platform, and won; not big, but by enough. I was taken aback by the flight from choice psychology implicit in the plea. “Please, do not make us choose.” Period. That, and worn references to Gibbon1 sprinkled by others over hours of genteel conversation, encapsulated for me how much of its entente the old transatlantic entente cordiale had lost since 1991. We parted cordially, of course, resigned to differ. Let me explain, but first acknowledge my indebtedness to Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, which I do not agree with in all respects but respect for its insight and analytical incisiveness.2 Helped economically when it mattered most, deliberating under the cover of American military might for the deployment and maintenance of which they proffered many suggestions but few tactile resources, the Europeans — the French and the Germans in the lead — built a united Europe, a work still in progress, against colossal odds, in the face of widespread domestic skepticism and opposition, right under the Soviets’ eyes. The monumental project they worked on—about which little had been reported in the American mass media, next to nothing on TV—is now a highly institutionalized embodiment of European international reconciliation after centuries of grave-digging Machtpolitik, an exemplar of economic near-integration and prosperity; a borderless paradise of reason, sophistication, civilized discussion, forbearance, goodwill, patience, tolerance, indirection, diplomacy, heavy government involvement, multilateral mediation, international law, and positive incentives. The fundamental premise is that there is no threat that cannot be resolved by such civilized means and procedures. Proximately, it is presumed, there are no internal or external threats to the grandiose project of building a Europe from the Atlantic to—who can tell—maybe the Urals and Armenia, one that cannot be talked out of existence, or at least deferred

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The American Way of Peace

by the application of these same qualities of cultured restraint. The worst thing that can be done, so goes the argument, when faced with an unlikely but, who knows, always possible threat to your life, home, family, and property is to reach for the gun. It follows that (and I am simplifying a little, but not much) there is no need for weapons, except for display on uplifting historical occasions, like the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy Landing, or sale to the third world (but not to places such as Taiwan, which though democratic and able to pay, is not recognized by the United Nations, and is not even allowed to join the World Health Organization). Weapons represent brute power; they kill people and lead to war. So resign from power, especially if you happen to be militarily powerless already, for weakness in a good cause is virtue. In 2002 Germany spent 1.3 percent of its gross domestic product on defense, France 2 percent, the United States 3.4 percent or $350.7 billion, roughly six and a half times the combined expenditures of France and Germany. So, lay low. Play dead. Drop out. Or if you’re in, take a powder on the Spanish model, or tiptoe away, whichever. Savor the peace dividend. You will not sully your repute for mettle, because your courage resides in the loftiness of your intellect and the justness of your cause, not in brawn. Foreign policy is about international social work. The world’s hot spots—East Asia, Israel, the Middle East—are not, or are no longer (alas!), of direct relevance to your specific concerns (unless oil is involved, but even then things can be arranged). You cannot bite the bullet because there is no bullet, and you have no teeth. If by chance you are called upon to make, let’s say, the Israelis and Palestinians break matzo in the desert, address the root causes, approach the problem from the teleological standpoint, preferably in cloudy, flowof-consciousness prose (idées générales obscures) choreographed by Gallic air-sculpting gestures, or in milelong composite German words, or use paleontology, or whatever will distract them from throwing rocks and grenades at each other. Invite them to the Folies Bergères. But the best counsel of all is not to get mixed up in that low-class sort of thing in the first place. Make friendly noises and stick to the phatic discourse of postmodernism: “Have a nice day!” Take a vacation or a walk in the park. Huddle together for security. But that alone may not do it. So, if things get really out of hand and the sheriff happens to be still in town, let him take care of the nasty business, but warily, because you never know; he is

Drifting Apart

a hyper, a “hectoring hegemon,” an outlaw with a badge, part of the problem not the solution.3 The cowboy allegory, which we have met before, is a European putdown favorite, not just because of America’s self-imposed policing duties in a troubled world. “Americans are ‘cowboys,’” Europeans love to say. And there is truth in this. The United States does act as an international sheriff, self-appointed perhaps but widely welcomed, trying to enforce some peace and justice in what Americans see as a lawless world where outlaws need to be deterred or destroyed, often through the muzzle of a gun. Europe, by this Wild West analogy, is more like the saloonkeeper. Outlaws shoot sheriffs, not saloonkeepers. In fact, from the saloonkeeper’s point of view, the sheriff trying to impose order by force can sometimes be more threatening than the outlaws, who, at least for the time being, may just want a drink.4

The unstated corollary of the European postmodernist philosophic ecstasy is simply this: disarm the sheriff by multilateralizing him, persuade him to become a saloonkeeper, or run him out of Dodge. In postmodern French and German, “multilateralism” translates into hidden, ax-grinding agenda (une petite idée de derrière la tête). The lawman should be instructed by the townsfolk that whenever the thought of pulling a gun in an emergency enters his thick head, he must mount his horse and gallop to the East River for permission. There his request will be expertly scrutinized, leisurely debated, and reported on by 191 countries (a goodly number of them certified outlaws5 ), each armed with one vote, and by a Security Council of fifteen members, five of them seated permanently by virtue of their big-power status bestowed on them at the end of World War II—a decision that, incidentally, needs to be looked at since it described at least two of them incorrectly then, and still does now. Council decisions, other than procedural ones, must receive nine affirmative votes that include the concurring votes of all the permanent members, thereby giving each of the permanents a veto.6 In the General Assembly, the United States has one vote like everybody else, like Tonga, but the European Union now has theoretically twenty-five, if they play their cards right. Of the regular United Nations budget for 2004, the assessed share of the United States was 25 percent, equal to that of 183 other members put together, and

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The American Way of Peace

pretty much the same as it had always been since the creation. The total contribution of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia was under 24 percent, Russia’s share in her chronically straitened circumstances being assessed at about 1 percent.7 Also, since the mid-1970s the United States has been a big contributor of cash, manpower, and materiel for the UN police functions in Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, southern Serbia, Macedonia, Liberia, East Timor, and Afghanistan. In any event, the United Nations, that diverse body, “the wilderness of mirrors,” will trot out the right analgesic for whatever ailment is presented for its arbitration, such as genocides in Rwanda-Burundi, or leaking oil-for-food programs for Iraq. This is where in an atavistic moment, setting aside restraint, I reach for my gamma knife to probe, but leniently, beyond the outward glitter into the darker recesses of the European mind. Behind the bonhomie, the smiles, and the politeness, good manners (waiters excepted), and picopecks on each cheek, the finessing, the finely turned phrase, diplomatic minuets, ritual courtesies, and reflexive sinuous evasions, the baise main and küss die Hand that knocks American women off their feet, and all manner of ministrations that make life pleasant, the sun shine, and the wine taste good, I detect unsightly layers of fearfulness, selfishness, posturing, affectation, disingenuousness, self-indulgence, meanness, and envy. One of these, at a minimum, qualifies for what the nuns in my first grade called deadly sin. (I hadn’t a clue what that meant until a worldly classmate told me in confidence that it had something to do with coveting thy neighbor’s ox. Or was it his ass [osioł, burro]? He couldn’t remember which.) But all this it is not new. It did not drop from nowhere just the other day, after the Cold War. It’s been around a long time, fertilized by centuries of mistrust, enmity, bloodletting, persecution, and intolerance; a curse, a hex, a legacy passed down from generation to generation, in full display just before World War II. Sensing it all around him, this je m’en foutisme born of old apprehensions, suspicions, insecurities, and concern with “seeming,” aged Charles de Gaulle more in the first six months of 1939 than Roosevelt’s offhandedness toward him did in six years of war.8 But that is an explanation, not an excuse for dumping your hangups on a friend who pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for you while you were discussing Nietzsche. The frame of mind is not confined to Europe, of course, but has found in our time, right there in der Mitte Europas, its modern, arguably most

Drifting Apart

barbaric, manifestation. It is certainly to the credit of the Europeans that they want to leave all that ugliness behind, try the healing art, wash and shake hands, change course and move on, beginning with a Franco-German reconciliation recommended by Winston Churchill back in 1946, a durable one, not an evanescent liaison. In word and deed they have done their level best to demonstrate that “the German problem” (which, unlike the Japanese and their problem, the Germans admit existed) is over with, schluss, which is probably true: it was solved in the first place by American military intervention back then. However, “the American problem” is not solved, not for the Germans without whom European integration is nothing. To them, and to the French, the American problem is hegemony, whereas what they want is multipolarity—disarmament of the hegemon, the one entity in the world that can, if need be, protect their physical and spiritual paradise-in-the-making from destruction, not by global warming, but by an un-Lockean universe bulging with weapons of mass destruction available for the asking to religious extremists, tribal fanatics, or rogue states on the open world black market. The terrorists will not be appeased and lie down with the lambs by having Immanuel Kant or the collected speeches of Jacques Chirac and Joschka Fischer read to them at bedtime. Europe’s physical (military) weakness, compounded by irresolution, is more evident now than it was during the Cold War. The German army has 300,000 soldiers. The French have 260,000. That is Europe’s armed backbone, not counting Spain. The 200 or so French special operations forces on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan have had to rely on American helicopters for moving around themselves and their supplies, not because they don’t have their own helicopters, but because they don’t want to give them. Michelle Alliot-Marie, the French minister of defense, had to be transported by the U.S. Army on her inspection of these troops. Passim for state-of-the-art military technology and inadequate training. “The problem is that [the] donor countries (and their electorates) are unwilling to invest in their armed forces. The trends are still towards further cutbacks of force structure, equipment, and training alike.”9 Since the overthrow of the Taliban, NATO has had great difficulty obtaining from individual countries a few helicopters, air-traffic controllers, and other crucially needed resources to assure security in Afghanistan. France went a step further. It was opposed to letting NATO provide more security to Afghanistan during that country’s first post-Taliban election by

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The American Way of Peace

sending there all or some of NATO’s six-thousand-man rapid deployment force, which has not been deployed since its formation in 2002 mainly because of French foot-dragging about using NATO forces “out-of-area,” meaning out of Europe. “We should not be using the wrong tools in the wrong place,” President Jacques Chirac has said, in response to a plea by Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.10 The French also do not want NATO to help train the new Afghan army. Why? It is not an in- or outof-area question at all. Were there a risk of France losing her force de frappe testing grounds in Polynesia, Paris would be the first to push for redefining what is in and what is out for NATO. The reason is what it has been since Lafayette passed away in 1834. It is to put America in its place. One way to do that is by politicking NATO into immobility. And it is not just Chirac. “In France,” we are told, “there is a strong suspicion that NATO is becoming an instrument of U.S. dominance.”11 There was talk at one point, during the Yugoslav upheavals, of forming a joint GermanFrench, perhaps even trans-European, rapid response force of sixty thousand men, principally to have them outside NATO so they could not be deputized by the sheriff. That necessitates, however, shifting resources away from domestic social programs and relying more on individual initiative. Unthinkable right now. As of the time of this writing the latest version of the European Defense Community idea remains where it was in 1954. While physical weakness is important, a deeper, more troubling problem is mistaking complacency for moral prowess, akin to mistaking hemlock for parsley.12 I have already suggested that high on the European list of cherished values are forbearance, patience, indirectness, avoidance of confrontation, tolerance for threats, and political, diplomatic, and commercial cajoling of despots, parading as geopolitical maturity. There is not much wrong with that except for the narrow definition of the terms and their assumed exclusivity—exclusion of resort to hard power even as a means of last resort, even when the flood of seducements goes right over the dam. Were it true that resort to force is forbidden unless legitimized by an amorphous international community with enough veto power to guarantee immobility, “the German problem” would still be with us. As for definitions: Passivity tends to become pacifism on a continental scale. Imperceptibly, forbearance, toleration of threats, and seduction out of weakness become appeasement, a Chamberlainesque delusion that first affects the mind, clouding judgment and arresting the will. Appeasement

Drifting Apart

is the incremental surrender to fate — giving up by giving credence to one false promise at a time and passing it off as worldliness. In selfdefensive justification, pacifism and appeasement are rationalized as wisdom and goodness in the service of peace in our time. Few Europeans “like to recall that the military destruction of Nazi Germany was the prerequisite for the European peace that followed. Instead, most Europeans like to believe that it was the transformation of the European mind and spirit that made possible the ‘new order.’”13 Hegemony It is not easy, popular, or cheap to be a good hegemon. First of all, it sounds ugly. Even though the word descends from the civilized Greek for “leader,” it has acquired in the course of time a negative connotation of land-grabbing, hence insinuating, not without cause, imperialistic ambition and a culture of impunity—at any rate something more than giving direction, guidance, sustenance, subsidies, and free security umbrellas to more or less appreciative followers. That is what my German friends had in mind when, in a scintillating but, I think, misguided display of familiarity with classical history, they harped metaphorically on the fate of the Roman empire. Yet in its hegemonic age, after the wall’s fall and Gorbachev’s assumption of the presidency of Green Cross International, the United States acquired not an inch of territory, but got more than its share of abuse. It would have been surprising however if, after the seismic changes of 1989–1991, American strategic thinking had not undergone revision, as it also had in Europe. For the West Europeans the dissolution of the Soviet Union signaled the disappearance of the principal military threat to them, although you’d never know it from the désinvolture with which it was received as a natural consequence of diplomatic whisperings and seductive offers by an old roué who knows what it’s all about and where the silver is hidden. The major interest now was less in the doings of “the West” than with building a greater Europe, institutionally bound together more than ever. Eurocentrism at home, with multilateralism and multipolarity abroad, equivalent to apolarity, leaves a vacuum, “the worst of all possible worlds” given the shriveled European resolve and its peripheral defense capabilities.14

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The American Way of Peace

Americans arrived at different conclusions. Surveying the post-Soviet world, they saw it not as a garden of contemplative serenity to relax and travel in, do business with, and clean up the air and water of, but as an untamed land of opportunity whose inhabitants had to be on the lookout for snakes lurking in the grass, not one but many. The serpents had to be defanged before they struck, not just contained. Several things followed. First, given in this regard the European posture of denial, inadequate, obsolete arms, and propensity to party, the United States concluded that the unrewarding job of assuring the common defense had to be done by itself (again) if it was to be done at all; naturally with consultation and input from everyone concerned, hopefully accompanied by tangible combat assistance and intelligence sharing—but on the basis of unipolarity, which meant that America would listen, but not forever, and ultimate decisions would rest in U.S. hands. Unipolarity is incompatible with tolerance of endless delays on matters of moment, but not synonymous with unilateralism, which is the axiomatic disdain of consultation and the opinion of others, a refusal to listen. Second, in view of the demise of a once mighty USSR, its nuclear and other weapons of mass annihilation scattered among several members of the Commonwealth of Independent States and leaking in both a physical and a commercial sense, the 1947 strategy of containing a behemoth and his appetites by credible counterforce was thought to be no longer apposite. The danger to the “new world order” arose not from a single identifiable totalitarian state but from a coming apart, a disaggregation that to some observers, you will recall, portended global anarchy, pandemonium. The “thousand points of light” turned out to be a thousand murderous fires lit by arsonists and hooded barbarians, mostly of fundamentalist Muslim provenance. The missing ingredient that would make these erupt in a worldwide firestorm was coordination by well-financed, enraged individuals and movements driven by grievances, frustrations, humiliations, real and imagined, some self-inflicted, and instinctual hatreds. That and the apathy of the designated victims would assure the advent of another cycle of violence, mindless cruelty, and massacres of innocent bystanders, a surfeit of blood. Third, the doctrine of containment expired at about the same time as the Soviet Union, perhaps shortly before. In the new political and security setting, the American decision, vociferously contested by many for-

Drifting Apart

eign friends, all adversaries, and fluctuating numbers of worried people at home, has been to confront terrorism militarily and defeat it in asymmetric warfare, stamp out malignant ideologies, and politically transform the threat and the threat-makers by assertive action, preemptively if need be. A plateful. With respect to friendly, or at least amenable but brittle and doggedly oppressive regimes, especially those in the Middle East, where they proliferate, the old formula of live and let live in the interest of stability (don’t rock the boat) gave way to enthusiasm for prying open their political systems (regime removal) and systemic reconfiguration—no slamdunk to be sure, full of pitfalls, and requiring some consultation with existing historical precedents and alert multitrack thinking about stirring up unpremeditated consequences (opening a can of worms) capable of undoing the best-laid plans and good intentions. Changes of this magnitude in strategy and doctrine invite attempts to attribute their inspiration to specific venerable personages and to entrap them with the charge of naive theology: “Gospel according to whom?” The answer has been: “according to Bernard Lewis,” an attribution that Lewis himself self-effacingly sidesteps. The embodiment of this doctrine in American foreign policy has been prominent since September 11, 2001.

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26 Aggregation The European Union

S

ome of you will think by now that my interpretation of the European, or more exactly the continental West European, grassroots and governmental demeanor toward America, and the motivational flotsam I find clustered at the back of the European mind, has been too sweeping, harsh, and sardonic, particularly when set against a background of what may sound to you like the Battle Hymn of the Republic. In the interest of balance and as proof of heeding counsels of moderation, let me now tell the story of Europe’s most notable achievement since the end of World War II—perhaps ever—of the imposing, complex enterprise of conciliation, understanding, coming together, and pacific fusion of twentyfive countries and 450 million people (with another 100 million waiting at the gate) and twenty languages so far. The monumental Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) is, of course, not yet completed—if indeed it can ever be fully and securely driven into a soil soaked with the blood of countless generations. Nevertheless, the progress made in implementing the institutional means to those ends in barely sixty years — economic integration, political federation, and initial cultural commingling and melding, hopefully without future sacrifice of the richness and variety that make Europe so appealing but also volatile—has been phenomenal. The greater part of credit for what has been accomplished goes to the Europeans themselves, those leaders in particular, both in the early years and since, including newcomers from the east, whose vision, conviction, 

Aggregation

and persistence had made the impossible feasible and exemplarily successful. The recognition for encouraging (I am tempted to say setting) them on that course, giving them a hand in hard as well as comfortable times, and, most important, protecting their creative labors from those who would wish them harm, goes to America. The last, unfortunately, may have contributed by an odd twist of fate to the entrenchment of a psychology of resentful dependence, which after 1991 increasingly manifested itself, as such conditions have a tendency to do, in thinly disguised rudeness and overconfidence in the ability of one indivisible Europe to stave off all intruders by sheer force of character, philosophy, experience, and good example. However, there remains enough common, still undamaged, ground on which future transatlantic relations can be rebuilt, not quite to what they used to be, differently conceived, but better than they are now. To endure, friendships, like love, need careful tending. “Nothing is more uncommon than a friendship of long standing,” Helvétius wrote in De l’esprit (1758), and the French, at least, have done their best to prove him right. Speaking of his friendship with his household philosopher, Voltaire, Frederick the Great of Prussia added this piece of cynicism: “One squeezes the orange and throws away the peel.” Americans certainly feel relieved that one major source of past death-dealing eruptions has been deactivated. They wish the European Union well and, as is their habit, welcome keen economic, scientific, and technological cooperation and competition, played by the rules, the more of that the better. In garnering materials for this presentation I have been struck by how little information about Europe in general and the epoch-making panEuropean construction project in particular is available on our hundred or so network and cable television channels from which most people get their news. The silence is as deafening as the background drumbeat announcing commercials and bad news from the home front or Iraq. Turning to Deutsche Welle, beamed courtesy of our university’s public television service, does not help. In modulated, objectively sounding voices, well-groomed announcers read the government line on Europe-building in German, English, and—this being Arizona—Spanish, interspersed with classical music and samples of the latest white-on-white avant-garde statement art from Schleswig-Holstein. In the twenty years between the two world wars, after the dismemberment of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and the emergence

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The American Way of Peace

of a Europe of prickly, chauvinistic nation-states, some brand-new, others long-suppressed, most sovereign in name only, talk of European unification was just that. It was based in the 1920s—until the rise of Hitlerite Germany in 1933—on the idea of a pan-European concord to be brought about on this rowdy chessboard in two moves. The first was to publicly admit that Imperial Germany had been wronged in the Treaty of Versailles, which caused the dregs of German life to rise to the top. The second was to sign multilateral, but in effect unilateral, disarmament treaties, and bilateral, mostly nonobserved nonaggression pacts with recidivist aggressorsin-waiting. The rest is history. A number of interwoven questions arose from the very beginning of the post–World War II enterprise of European unification. How long would it take to do the job before it was too long? After an initial neophyte surge (in the wrong direction) the answer was: it would take long. Maybe a century, depending on what transpired in the Kremlin, the principal unknown quantity, the joker, in a manner of speaking, in the highstakes poker game. Actually, it took sixty years, but there is still much rough terrain to cover. What should be tackled first: politics or economics? And what about defense? Important questions, seeing that the German problem was at that time not a theoretical abstraction but a painful reality at Europe’s doorstep. And connected with that, what to do with Germany? Deindustrialize it, turn it into a pasture, and risk new social dross floating to the top again, for there was plenty left (the “what did you do in the war, daddy?” syndrome)?1 Or should one treat it with tough love, firmly but with fists wrapped in velvet, let it find its way back into the once dysfunctional European family, draw on its unquestionable intellectual abilities, superior craftsmanship, and discipline, hope for the best, but see to it that it became a force for good in Europe and the world? As early as May 1950 the answer was: economics first, politics second, because it is easier to bring people together in a reasonably good mood on a full than on an empty stomach. But economics was always understood in Europe in the sense of “political economy,” with emphasis on the descriptive adjectives taken to mean “state intervention,” administratively determined rules, regulations, statutes, ordinances, decrees, directives, and other ways of alerting, influencing, and channeling individual and group behavior into appropriately sanctioned public interest grooves. And, yes, the traditionally preferred source of these instructional aids has been a cen-

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tralized hierarchy of salaried, unelected officials—an officialdom, bureaucracy, or, more tactfully, the civil service. This is the fly in an otherwise restorative ointment that one hears about from Europe’s citizens when Brussels comes up in conversation. As for defense: it was to be taken care of—you guessed it—by the United States, but within the framework of NATO, which understandably was structured to have a military and a political wing, but for all practical purposes only one source of revenue. And as for Germany: after hauling those responsible for war crimes (and not at the time residing in Argentina, Bolivia, or Peru) before the Nüremberg Tribunal and, later, cleaned-up German courts, Germany was to be treated as a partner, converted or reconverted to democracy not only because it was the right and proper thing to do but also because the Iron Curtain had fallen, the immediate threat now came from the Soviet east, and the West needed an ally. Please pardon the approaching hail of initials. In bureaucratic locales like Washington or Brussels, the ability to rattle them off and instantly decipher the oncoming ones without looking innocent certifies to your status as an insider better than a photo ID hanging from your neck. In 1951 France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed and, in striking contrast with the interwar parchment treaties (such as the Pact of Paris, 1928), delivered on a pledge—in the new Treaty of Paris (1951)—to put their coal and steel industries under joint management and direction in accordance with the Monnet/Schuman plan announced the previous year. Thus, out of ashes and dust was formed the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The driving forces for this decision were economic rationalization through merger and, more immediately convincing, the felt need to house-train Germany by putting its potential armaments industries under transnational command. Britain was invited to join but declined, partly from traditional reserve but also because of its involvement, as it believed, with its overseas Commonwealth, which, as it turned out, was already shrinking and was more of a common drain on the exhausted and impoverished by combat British Isles. Until the railroad tunnel linking England and France was built under the English Channel, the British used to say that “Africa begins in Calais.” This was dismissed on the other side of La Manche as an uninformed and disrespectful assumption of superiority by an insular neighbor, and it ruffled the French chanticleer’s feathers no end. Moreover, and most important in General

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de Gaulle’s view, the British were too chummy with the Americans, always plotting some understated insult. It came as no surprise, therefore, that when, on second thought, the British decided to apply for membership in the coal and steel six in 1961, and then again in 1967, all they got for their trouble was a non from France personified by de Gaulle, obliging them to wait until the general had permanently left the scene. They were allowed in on January 1, 1973, but their forebodings about the bureaucratic, supranational, corporatist superstate with possibly utopian imperial pretensions that they believed was being planned by French and German governmental Euroenthusiasts were not thereby assuaged, and still are not. Their substitute, more conventional construct, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA, 1960), did not work out as expected. It was originally a grouping of seven countries committed to reduce and, over time, eliminate trade barriers among themselves, but not to fuse politically. Despite defections, including that of its founder, it still exists, a shadow of its former self, in the form of a commercial compact among Switzerland (the confidential banker to the world), Liechtenstein, Norway, and Iceland— except for the first two, economies not noted for their complementarity. Concurrently, two politically sensitive projects engaged the attention of European policy makers. They proved, however, to have been well ahead of their time; one, in fact, was so far ahead that it remains in limbo to this day. The first went by the name of the European Political Community (EPC), the idea having been to federate the West European nation-states by broadening and deepening the essentially consultative competencies of the Council of Europe located in Strasbourg since 1949, which some skeptics saw as an off-the-beaten-track rhetoric-and-resolution-producing mill. Strasbourg is today the seat of the European Parliament, a body that since 1979 is directly elected by universal suffrage in the member countries, so far “the only democratically elected organ of the European Union,”2 but for various reasons, which we cannot enter into here, it does not get much press. The EPC was quietly shelved after the French National Assembly refused in 1954 to endorse the creation of a European Defense Community (EDC)—basically a Franco-German army, an idea that came before its time—because of concerns by Gaullists about who was going to be the boss in this arrangement, opposition by French Communist Party deputies, and partly also because it was evident that the Americans, through NATO, were willing and better equipped to take care of such a financially costly

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proposition. The EPC and EDC ideas, however, lived on in the form of a Common Foreign Security Policy (CFSP) embedded in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty establishing the European Union (not that treaty’s strongest or soundest pillar) and the European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF) that is still under consideration. Having absorbed the lesson of which comes first, economics or politics, the coal and steel six under the presidency of Jean Monnet (1952–1955) pushed forward on the economic front in the direction of further integration and membership enlargement culminating in the establishment in 1957 (effective January 1, 1958) by the Treaty of Rome—a turning point in modern European history—of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), which were to pool the research and development efforts of the six members in the area of nonmilitary nuclear power (peaceful uses of nuclear energy). The purpose of the EEC was to bring into being a customs union, a single harmonized economy, a sort of modernized version of the Zollverein that had laid the groundwork for the unification of north German states in the 1800s (but minus the Prussian army and Bismarck), with no intramember barriers to trade, and a unified, not national, determination by the group of tariffs and other foreign trade taxes and subsidies vis-à-vis third parties. In 1967 “economic” was dropped from the name. Renamed simply European Community (EC), the organization was composed of the three original bodies (coal and steel, EEC, and atomic energy), similar in structure, identical in membership, and run by a single administration, rather than by three separate ones as had been the case before. Its purpose was to work toward the goal of an eventual free movement of goods, services, capital, and labor among its member countries, the final objectives to be reached at different speeds, unhindered mobility of labor being implemented more slowly and with many differentiated caveats so as to avoid inciting massive worker migrations from lower- to higher-wage countries, at that time from south to north and later from east to west. The 1957 Treaties of Rome and subsequent agreements launched the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as it exists today. Within its purview are all supranational laws applying to the three communities and their successors, including the umbrella European Union (EU) made official by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 (a revision of the Rome Treaty). The court, located in Luxembourg, has been instrumental in providing the legal

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framework for the union, evolving thereby “a quasi-constitutional legal order that was at best implied in the founding treaties of the EEC and its successors.”3 In 1958 a conference at Stresa, Italy, came up with a blueprint for Europe’s agricultural future. Known as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), it has been a bone of international, cross-Atlantic, and intra-European contention as well as a magnet for ethically challenged sharpies ever since. From a free-trade perspective, the less said of it the better. But let us just say, anyway, that the CAP spends half the EU budget to protect (as in “protectionism”) French and German farmers, and not only or even mainly the family subsistence ones, and spends annually 700 euros (€) on each European cow.4 Now, almost every highly developed economy has some program to protect its farmers from competitors in less developed economies. For example, 18 percent of the income of American farmers comes from government subsidies of one kind or another. But in the present-day European Union, that share is 35 percent. About €90 billion ($109 billion) a year—and that is after a reduction in 2003—is spent on farm subsidies, half of them linked to production, which makes the farmers overproduce because the more they grow, the more they get, irrespective of market signals.5 If it is true that economics is not the most important artifact of the human mind, but that it is the most powerful, it is equally true that within economics the fusion of monies—monetary union—is the most powerful single agent of international integration. If done thoughtfully, with unhurried deliberation and a little luck, as was the case in Europe between 1992 and the adoption on January 1, 1999, of the single currency, the euro, by eleven (twelve by 2002) EU countries, monetary unification is to the nation-state what monetization is to barter: it makes it irrelevant, not overnight but by and by. And short of a catastrophe, it is irreversible. The Euroskeptic Lady Thatcher knows this: “We are,” she says, “at or very near the point of no return.”6 There is one requirement, not mentioned so far, that has to be observed to ensure that disaster does not strike, reversal does not occur, and euro hopes are not shattered. And that is to correctly comprehend the meaning of the market price system (“capitalism,” which continues to be an unclean word in Europe, west and east). The understanding of it, common enough in Europe—in the axis countries especially—as a jungle that has to be

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civilized by energetic government intervention from on high, for reasons that market logic does not sanction, is mistaken. If the architects of the new Europe are in earnest, as one must assume they are, about the money market price system being the operative resource allocation and economic choice mechanism, such misconstrued perception of the guts of that system is tantamount to an invitation to retrogression from the European ideal, defying even the potentially enormous integrative power of the single currency. Other than that, the job was done well. The transition period was long enough for the European Currency Institute (ECI 1994), the predecessor of the European Central Bank (ECB, Frankfurt, 1998), to carry out the needed studies of what had to be done to synchronize and harmonize the monetary policies of the candidate countries and, as a preliminary step, to make the key functions of the national central banks, such as the setting of basic interest rates, autonomous—that is, free or as free as possible from politically motivated government engineering, in ways pioneered by the U.S. Federal Reserve system and more recently in Europe by the prestigious, because accomplished, Bundesbank.7 On January 1, 1999, when euro banknotes and coins were introduced, the foreign exchange rates of the euro zone’s national currencies were locked in. After a relatively short spell of uncertainty, when the value of the euro fell steadily against the U.S. dollar, the new currency was stabilized and subsequently perked up.8 However, there is common belief among the citizens of the euro zone that the introduction of the currency has been responsible for higher prices. The twenty-five-car European Union train heading eastward, peaceably and by invitation9 (no suggestion this time of any of the Drang nach Osten customary over the past seven centuries), is pulled by two locomotives: the European Council and the European Commission. Until recently the 732-member deliberative European Parliament (EP), staffed with directly elected (in the member countries) representatives of political groups rather than national political parties, has been largely a decorative appendage, a boxcar of sorts, but what with the emergency brakes being gradually removed by the Brussels head office and the European Court of Justice from the state governments and their national parliaments, it is expected to gain in legislative power, electoral prestige, democratic standing, and economic influence; the last when it acquires the right to make the passengers pay for the trip — to tax them. Meeting in Strasbourg one week each

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month in plenary session, plus two days in Brussels, it already possesses the power to approve or reject the union’s budget. Its committees meet in Brussels, close to the commission. The parliament is the only one of the union’s bodies that conducts its deliberations in public. In the early years of the unification process, before 1974, the buzz was less about supranational integration (never mind a European hyperstate) than about closer cooperative interaction of nation-states, the exchange of letters, reaching a conclusion in the fraternal spirit of multilateral agreements, convivial visits, joint cultural events, trading Grüss Gotts between passers-by—that sort of thing. Prior to 1965, key decisions regarding the ECSC, EEC, and Euratom were made by each organization’s unelected, opaque-to-nontransparent, Council of Ministers of the six countries and by appointed executive commissions whose constitutional legitimacy was unclear. These were merged in 1965 (the Merger Treaty) into a single council and one commission (“High Authority” in the case of the ECSC) for the three. The debate between proponents of opposing interpretations of federalism (loose versus tight) reached an impasse in 1965. It lasted seven months and came to be known in local lore as the “crisis of the empty chair” precipitated by France’s refusal to attend meetings of the Ministerial Council unless major decisions on Europe’s future continued to be made by unanimous vote of the council (giving France a veto). De Gaulle’s aim had always been a cooperative Europe of sovereign — not melted down—nation-states inspired, coordinated, tastefully improved, and guided by France. Since the mid-1970s, under the concerted impetus of France and Germany, the trend has been away from collage politics, a consummation rewarded by a large family of European citizens with nationally issued EU passports for use primarily outside EU borders, a more perfect union, which the dissenters call “leveling.” Whatever it is, it puts the need to provide for the common defense on the back burner. The unified council became in 1974 the European Council (the Council of the European Union today), composed of the heads of government of member countries (prime ministers, chancellors, and the French president). The strength of the council derives in large measure from the distinguished positions of its members in the governments of their respective states, perhaps also their camaraderie, and the fact that they are more likely to steer through

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their respective national legislatures the council’s collective pan-European decisions. A number of complex constitutional questions remain to be settled, difficult but resolvable with reasonably gracious give-and-take. They include protocols and the weighting of votes within the council on matters of concern to the ten smaller, less affluent and domesticated, but not thereby more timid newcomers. Legal basis for the European Council has been provided by the Single European Act (SEA) that went into effect in 1987 and was formalized and extended by Maastricht in 1992 (Treaty of the European Union, TEU), both of which events passed largely unnoticed by the man in the street in America. Nor did they exactly rivet the attention of people in Europe, whose major immediate concern in those days was finding a job. Put in the simplest terms, the European Commission based in Brussels is the government of the emergent European Union, a supranational executive branch to be precise, dating back to the Rome Treaty of 1957. Its first duty is to assure that the legions of Europe-building treaties, acts, agreements, pacts, and acronyms do not lack sustenance by being ignored on the national level. In this the commission has been aided over the years by legal cases submitted to and considered by the European Court of Justice, including the (not totally unconditional) acceptance by all the supreme courts of the member states of the principle that European Union law promulgated by the ECJ is constitutional. In the 1960s and 1970s cases adjudicated by the court established the doctrines of direct effect and supremacy: that EU law is directly applicable to citizens of the union’s member states, and that as such it overrides national laws.10 Not to get bogged down in the swamp of supervisory, regulatory, and other pan-European organizations staffed by swelling numbers of hierarchically stacked, taxpayer-financed, supranational employees, but without seeming to ignore their importance in scotch-taping a traditionally fractious and fraction-prone Europe into a monolithic but diverse superpower, formally united now, here is a short list of these bodies: The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), charged with articulating the views of civil society, that is, of nongovernmental organizations, a sort of clearinghouse for changing public opinion on social and economic issues collected from all corners of the European Union. A Committee of

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The American Way of Peace

Regions, which does the same for regional and local authorities. There are also structural and cohesion funds: the European Agricultural Guidance Guarantee Fund (EAGGF), the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and the European Social Fund (ESF). They provide financial support from the EU budget for problem sectors, such as agriculture, “less favored [lagging] regions,” and countries undergoing transition from a regime of nation-states to one of supranationality. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and southern Italy have benefited in the past decade or more —Ireland very successfully—from these cohesion subsidies, and most of the 2004 accessionists expect to do likewise. There is the Office of the European Ombudsman (EO). It receives and acts on citizens’ complaints about unacceptable or wrongful treatment they say they have received at the hands of the various EU administrations. The European Court of Auditors (ECA) keeps an eye on the money, to make sure the euros go where they are supposed to and not, as was discovered in 1999, to eiderdown the lifestyle of the cashiers. There is the European Investment Bank (EIB) with a proposed 2001–2010 budget of €50 billion. It raises funds on the world markets and lends them out, as well as its own funds (paid-in capital and reserves), on favorable, that is preferential (nonmarket-determined), terms, for capital projects that comply with the integrative objectives of the Union. Police, investigative, and judicial cooperation and coordination on illegal (“undocumented”) immigration, political asylum, international crime, terrorism, and so forth are handled by the European Police Office (Europol). With the accession of the ten Central and East European countries on May 1, 2004, the European Union became the largest socioeconomic and political conglomerate and an almost (nearly, virtually) supranational entity; the biggest in terms of current gross domestic product: $12.5 trillion, compared with America’s $11.7 trillion. In 2004 the ten newcomers contributed just 5 percent to the Union’s GDP coffers on marriage day, more than half of it by Poland, which, however has the third lowest GDP per head of the lot. The lowest was Lithuania ($8,400), the highest Slovenia ($19,200). The novices’ living standards were on average one-fifth of those of the fifteen old-timers. As of the date of entry tariff barriers between the established and newly arrived member economies were dismantled.11 But all is not sweetness and light in Euroland. Many of the union’s quandaries are of ancient lineage, their causes rooted in the component cultures. Others

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arise from the recent en masse membership enlargement, hinting at future diseconomies of political scale. Of Union Problems The first problem concerns the locus of power. Despite spirited denials, the preference in the west of the union, except for the British Isles (and beyond, in America), is for power to be centralized democratically, of course, in the most central of public hands: the executive branch of topmost government. Most of the arrivals from the east, chastened by more than four decades of socialist democratic centralism and/or several years of Nazi occupation, and by their own homespun authoritarianisms during the interwar years, are less enamored of the centralizing preference à la française. But because, by and large, they do want the union to succeed, since other avenues are unattractive or impracticable, and perhaps also because they are not sure what to think of or how to deal with what, during their communist interlude, they have been taught is heartless capitalism, they go along reassured somewhat by the promised insurance of a welfare superstate, writing off the inconveniences as the price of admission into the park. In this general context, centralization applies to three things: the way theories are formulated, the philosophy and practice of law, and institution-building. Traditionally, continental European thinking was inclined to be deductive, disaggregating general propositions inferentially from the top down, applying rules of formal logic to arrive at specific conclusions on the ground. One could call it a theological approach, from the ideal conclusion, on down to the details. By contrast, what General de Gaulle called “AngloSaxon” reasoning (American included) has typically preferred the inductive, the empirical, making one’s way up from experiment, factual observation, and specific experience at each level of the progression to arrive at broad conclusions open to revision whenever warranted by newly available, verified evidence—like climbing a mountain, rock by rock, making sure the ground is not slippery and the boots are right. From the abstruse general to the concrete particular, and the other way round. It is, I think, reasonable to propose that the risk of rigidity looms larger in the first than in the second way of thinking.

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Jurisprudence—the philosophy and practice of law and the legal architecture issuing therefrom—has followed these two trends. It is worth noting, first, that what we still call “the West” adheres to the rule of law most of the time, to the law’s civilizing spirit and substance, not just to the letter, and that, unfortunately, this is still something exceptional in our world. However, Europe’s continentals approach the legal order and much else in the realm of thought differently from the “Anglos”—not better or worse, just differently. There is on the continent of Europe, over a wide swath of it, a tradition of administrative laws and edicts and statutory laws enacted by legislative assemblies, derived from principles of Roman jurisprudence and in more recent times influenced by the Napoleonic codification of civil law (1804–1810), whereas in the other West, the one of dissenting, generically “Protestant,” individualistic values, common and case law and trials by juries of one’s peers play an important role. There is said to be under the latter system less rigid formal logic (no ironclad “three unities” analogous to those that in the seventeenth century governed French drama), more flexibility and diversification, greater heed paid to special circumstances, wider dispersal, say its defenders, hence less inclination to keep the law at arm’s length and, when opportune, whip the devil round the post—the law being the devil. On the negative side, however, there is the danger of excessive litigiousness, a bad case of torts, and of replacing the rule of law with rule by lawyers.12 On May 1, 2004, eight of the new members of the EU had to incorporate into their bulging legal codes (a legacy of four decades of communism where law-manufacturing was a priority heavy industry) eighty thousand extra pages of EU legislation dealing with representative democracy and the market system as understood by the EU administrative and legislative bodies in Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg.13 Under Franco-German tutelage but also from constitutional habit and disposition, the European Union has relied on precepts of institutionbuilding that emphasize centralization. The motive force is lodged in the elitist council of top government leaders. The regulatory vehicle (the European Commission) is driven by Brussels-trained deputized national drivers, along the interstate and provincial highways, through prefectures, Länder, districts, counties, cities, towns, and villages, right down to the local government office, where it is parked, so the inspectors can pay a visit to a fam-

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ily home and check up on whether an old tree in the backyard, which had been unwell for some years, had actually been removed as ordered. After a few weeks’ delay for home and garden surveys and paperwork, inspectors determine that the rotting tree had in fact been replaced by a biologically exact replica in conformity with environmental regulations expressed in meters of height and centimeters of circumference, and planted in the approved manner and emplacement, costs being borne by the homeowner. If you think the example is off the rails, you are right. But it is factual, obtained from a distraught homeowner in the Ruhr, whose nerves will never be the same again. The larger lesson, as I see it, is that on the way down to the reality of the person as a legitimate, creative, and indispensable, autonomous decision-making unit, private space is lost in a Kafkaesque profusion and entanglement of red tape, with individual initiative gelded by bureaucratic, overdetailed oververification. But wait; the individual is not totally lost, because after filling out the mandatory forms, he can complain to the Ombudsman in Brussels, and under the comprehensive social security system, the cost of his medical therapy is nominal. In Germany, which like France has a mandatory thirty-five-hour workweek (first introduced in 1995),14 the time ceiling applies only to union workers in big industry, whereas France has improved on the arrangement by extending it to white-collar workers and smaller companies, and prosecutes the noncompliant. In these conditions the notion of civil society, of voluntary nongovernmental organizations, is further emasculated not only by officialdom in Paris, Berlin, or Lisbon as before, but also by those more distant administrations (not in kilometers, but in power status and modes of thinking) in Brussels. Continental or insular, having put up for centuries with feudal inequalities and inequities of birth, class, status, rank, religion, and income, the Europeans are avid redistributionists, especially when it comes to cash— by means fair (taxation) or foul (revolution). Were I to rank in order of importance the problems that Europeans in their quest for unification must resolve—or at least dilute—I would put the spawning of bureaucratism, a cultural phenomenon, near the top of the list. To make matters worse, with few geopolitical exceptions, administrative fatness is wedded to secretive centrophilia, which does not cohere with the overt objective of coupling civil administration with a vibrant,

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open, competitive market system and is an invitation to ethically deficient officials to feather their own nests to the public detriment. That is why the European Union has a commissioner of competition, to manually bring more light in (mehr Licht). Briefly, as I see it, bureaucratism or the administrative way of going about business, any business, involves, not invariably but often enough to make it characteristic, unidimensional (one-track) thinking; evasion of personal responsibility (facelessness); looking up for orders and down for someone to order around; an urge to cultivate interpersonal protective connections or “pull”; nepotism; dislike and avoidance of spontaneous adjustments, particularly of free-market-generated solutions to economic breakdowns; and distrust of private property because allegedly it gives countervailing power, too much of it, to often irresponsible, always self-interested individuals on the ground floor. Bureaucratism is a cultural ailment that spares no society and for which the only known, temporary remedy is sunlight. The Iron Lady is on record that what makes Europe “the ultimate” bureaucracy is not the absolute number of its civil servants, but that this bureaucracy “is ultimately sustained by nothing else. . . . It is, therefore it does.”15 One Vincent Van Quickenborne, the Belgian secretary of state for administrative simplification (really), has launched a “Kafka Initiative” to try and thin out the choking thicket of inane regulations.16 He has seventeen bureaucrats to help him. He will need more. Mismanagement, corruption, and fraud are, of course, not far behind bureaucratism, nor are they, as the proponents of nationalization would have one believe, the disfigurement solely of private-sector big business (especially in America). Late in 1998 and in the early months of 1999, Americans distracted by the imbroglio in Washington did notice, in passing, a scandal of majestic proportions affecting the European Commission. Allegations of fraudulent diversion of hundreds of millions of dollars in CAP farm subsidies and of humanitarian aid monies earmarked for Bosnia, Rwanda, and Burundi, as well as mismanagement of the European Regional Fund, were made by European parliamentarians (whose writ to advise and consent does not run large), and by a report of the European Court of Auditors. The entire European Commission, inclusive of its president, the union’s head executive, Jacques Santer, resigned in March 1999, amid “chaos and hysteria.”17 Because of the continuing opacity and

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verticality of the European Union’s administrative and policy-making procedures, and the defensive retreat into legalistic technicalities by commercial politicians accused of misdeeds, the situation apparently remains unsatisfactory, and not limited to the commission. An investigation by a member of the European Parliament, called “uncivilized” by those subject to it, brought to light boondoggles and lavish perks in the legislative branch as well. When the problem is dealt with, it is en famille, without anyone concerned, so far, having been seriously called to account, much less taken to the woodshed, despite assurances by the commission’s new leadership of old politicians that “a new era of efficiency” is at hand.18 That must be news to Mr. Van Quickenborne, the modern D’Artagnan, and his (seventeen) musketeers laboring in their paperless offices on the Kafka Initiative. Another problem has to do with comparative corporate taxation. Way back, in the days when integration was just a twinkle in the eyes of Euroboosters, each European country tried to attract foreign direct investments (FDI) in ways it thought most advantageous for itself and, through the miracle of competition, concurrently for those who agreed to the deal. Such arrangements usually involved either comparatively low corporate taxes on FDI or fiscal inducements such as tax holidays, the provision of duty-free industrial development areas, or export processing zones (which had proved very effective in Taiwan and post-Mao China). At least in the early stages they also involved a plentiful supply of comparatively lowcost labor of various degrees of skill, some of it quite sophisticated (engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists), recruited from local universities and paid a fraction of what would have been needed to attract such trained people from their countries of origin. With unification, the intercountry disparities were gradually narrowed, if not perfectly leveled, at least in the west. The EU rule is that tax incentives are not to exceed 15 percent of an investment, and lowering corporate taxes to lure venture capital from one EU location to another is a no-no. Chancellor Schröder called it “tax dumping” in what was advertised as a “tough love” (that is, short on subtlety) speech of welcome to the eight novices from the east in their Russian-made suits. As of 2004, not only were their wages 25 percentage points lower on the average than in the tightly unionized west, but their average corporate tax rate was 10 percentage points below that of their western counterparts. The German tax

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rate on corporate profits, for example (local taxes included), was 38 percent, the highest in the EU, compared with the EU average of 31 percent, whereas in the Accessionist Eight (Cyprus and Malta excluded) it was 21 percent, broken down as follows: 19 percent in Poland and Slovakia, 16 percent in Hungary, 15 percent in Latvia, and zero in Estonia provided profits were not repatriated.19 Labor participation rates in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia were among the lowest in the thirty-member worldwide Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Poland being the lowest with 50.5 percent. The OECD believes that these new EU members need to bring more people into the labor force, by cutting unemployment benefits and taxes on labor (43 percent of labor costs in Poland, which has a nearly 20 percent rate of unemployment).20 It thinks that, to attract more foreign direct investment, these countries should lower corporate tax rates even more, something the four have, in fact, been doing for a while before accession. But in his “welcome to the European Union” speech, Chancellor Schröder warned the freshman class not to follow the four-leaf-clover Irish example of low corporate (and, by implication, labor) tax rates (13 percent on corporations, 24.5 percent on labor, the lowest in the old European Union) and high FDI benefits procured by such unbecoming practices. Mirthlessly, the luck of the Irish was ascribed by the chancellor and other Bundesrepublik spokesmen to a combination of bountiful West European regional subsidies and “tax dumping” (that is, competitive reductions). This caused foreign and domestic capital to shun high-tax, high-wage, regulation-ridden Germany, thereby contributing to unemployment of around 9 percent of the labor force (and more than twice that in the newly absorbed eastern part of the country, the former DDR). In 2004, labor and social security taxes were 52 percent of total labor costs in Germany and 48.3 percent in France, while they were 31 percent in the United Kingdom, 29.4 percent in the United States, and 24.5 percent in Ireland.21 And speaking of the DDR, the German alternative to the Irish economic model was a politically/ patriotically motivated, massive disbursement of subsidies from west to east Germany financed by a 5.5 percent “solidarity surcharge” (Solidaritätszuschlag) on the income of west German taxpayers; from fraternity, for equality. In years since the 1990 reunification, these transfers have amounted to $1.5 trillion (at the 2004 exchange rate) in infrastructural investments, industrial subsidies, wage increases to 80 percent of western

Aggregation

levels (at the behest of west German labor unions, even though the average labor productivity in east Germany is still less than two-thirds that of the west) and the transplanting of west Germany’s pension and welfare systems and the black forest of regulations to the east. Contrary to Chancellor Schröder’s tutorial for the new members of the enlarged European Union—this being an internal German affair of rejoining, not joining—private investors were allowed to deduct for tax purposes 50 percent of their investments in the east, a kind of tax dumping, one would think. The centrally directed recovery program, a huge industrial policy (Industrialpolitik), which transfers about 4 percent of Germany’s gross domestic product from west to east every year, has come to be called by some opinion makers “the trillion euro flop.” Like the Lorelei it rose mystically from the mists of the Rhine Republic, begat by a political conception of economics that attaches high value to proactive administrative immixture in the higgling and bargaining of the market, harbors strong reservations and leftover classical leftist prejudices about unregulated competition, and has this thing about market breakdowns, although governments break down too, even in Brussels, as we have seen. In mid-2004 the Germans launched a campaign to add the post of European commissioner for industrial policy, which some officials in Brussels translate as old-style Industrialpolitik and find worrisome—especially one would think, the commissioner for competition. Were these contentious issues treated simply as differences in economic analysis, collegial variances in the interpretation of technical evidence within a spacious (and dismantleable) school of economic thought, they would not pose a seriously divisive and potentially corrosive hazard to the project of European unity. However, economics is never pure on a continent not only attractively diverse but also scarred in its soul by innumerable inherited and contemporary splits and divisions lightly covered by courteous manners, the coded meaning of which the initiated instantly pick up and then anxiously proceed to unscramble. And so, before you can say Socialemarktwirtschaftspolitik, a simple difference of opinion on economics will have become a muddy mix of ideology, mushy sociology, and factional politics distilled into demagogy: multiculturalist on the left extreme, jingoist on the right. Thus the successful Irish model of economic growth and development, a first in Irish history, and the Central/East European interest in it, have become embroiled, as was to be expected, in

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multifaceted arguments involving historical memories (“perfumes of the past”), some accurate, others imagined, national sensibilities, and transnational concerns. The newly minted members of the European Union—some, not all of course, with discreet moral support from sections of the European Commission—think they detect in Schröder’s jarring tax dumping admonitions a desire by Germany and her prompter France to assume leadership of the emerging union, unjustified by their historical record (certainly in the last century and then some), without a European constitution being yet agreed on, and to steer the ongoing constitutional conversation in the direction of their national self-aggrandizement under a veneer of Europetalk. What should be done, they argue, is to let the market deregulate east Germany into a low-tax, business-friendly economy on the Irish model and make it a special economic zone. This would presumably attract investors in droves, but naturally, without cutting off the union’s regional farm subsidies (which, in any case, are at present only one-quarter of what farmers get in the old European west) or the Danegeld for systemic reconstruction, to help finish the job of digging the east out of the communist institutional morass, which has been done quite well already by seven of the eight, the laggard being Slovakia. Interestingly, the ideological-political extension of this reasoning goes beyond intra-European matters. Shortly before joining the union, the Polish president, Aleksander Kwas´niewski (ex-communist lite), told reporters that “in foreign policy, our priority first and foremost will be taking care that the European Union does not diminish the importance of the transatlantic relationship.”22 When Poland and others in that part of Europe liberated by regime change decided to join not only the European Union but also the American-led Coalition of the Willing in Iraq, President Jacques Chirac, in what qualifies as prize-worthy infelicitous phrasing, told them to shut up (il faut savoir se taire). Not tremble and obey, just submit in silence, poliment. There are other difficulties ahead that have to be resolved, many challenges that must be met, of which the twenty languages or thereabouts is one. So long as the language problem is treated as a technical one of linguistics and transliteration and not primarily as a cultural imponderable, it is, I think, a relatively minor perturbation. The continent is not all that big, labor is supposed to flow freely (in about seven years for the easterners, if all goes well), there is no speed limit on the autobahns, and

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those who move around or just go to what some call the “hard” schools pick up one or two extra languages rather quickly, even mountain people in the Tatras. Now, of course, if somewhere further down the road you throw in Ukrainian, Turkish, and, if the closet Euroimperialist dreamers have their way, Armenian, the Babel-factor problem is notched up a bit. But you can always use just French or German. Or, in the long run, Turkish. So, in the briefest way, I will draw attention to only a few potholes and bumps ahead, which if overlooked can ruin the suspension, necessitate expensive repairs, even halt the trip to let some disillusioned passengers get off and thumb a ride, while others climb on. A traffic violation, a misdemeanor, that came up recently is speeding. The main reason for the sudden acceleration of the drive toward enlargement has been the out-ofa-clear-sky disintegration of the Soviet empire and of the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t USSR. The wall cracked, the watchtowers came tumbling down, a window of opportunity opened, and the east Europeans scrambled through it without asking. It was now or never. To let the former inmates into the free, supranational European community then (as now) under construction, was for Western Europe generally, and particularly for divided Germany, a politically understandable and reasonable thing to do, but in other ways—economic, for one—unexpected for the unprepared west, and systemically jolting for the east. Like in some gargantuan Oktoberfest, too much was swallowed in one gulp, even though counsels of moderation were heeded to the limits of what seemed at the time politically digestible. But there is little to be gained by second-guessing. Even though the motives for entry differ from country to country, on balance it is better for the easterners to be out of the Russo-Soviet grasp and for the Western Europeans and America to be rid of the Soviet presence. There are also those who, in the privacy of their homes, think it preferable that the Germans share their decision-making power with the French, bear the cross for a while, than for that immense energy to be all bottled up in Berlin. In this way, it is reasoned, the Germans are kept down and the Americans out. And the French? Well, the French have culture. The accessionists’ suspicions—and having lived for forty years with the Soviets, these people are a wary lot—that French and German motives for letting them into the European home (and in due course letting them replace their ragged pengös, złotys, lats, and litas with euros)23 are not as pure as the driven snow have been confirmed not so much by being told

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to keep their mouths shut when they entered the unfinished mansion as by the bedroom farce of state budgetary deficits. Under currently applicable, but so far selectively applied or altogether ignored, agreements to safeguard the stability of the euro (the Stability and Growth Pact), members of the monetary zone are required to keep their state budgetary deficits at or below 3 percent of each country’s gross domestic product and to showand-tell balanced budgets every year or, better still (A), budget surpluses. In 2004, half of the twelve euro-zone countries (France, Italy, and the Netherlands included) were expected to go through the mandatory ceiling. Germany—the union’s largest economy — made it clear that it would break the ordinance again in 2005, for the fourth year in a row, with no questions asked, just a few tut-tuts from Brussels and consternation from worried west German citizens looking down from the Bundestag dome on their national legislators. Six of the ten accessionists were also expected to exceed the limit, but they are not yet in the euro zone, the inner circle. Their average budget deficits in 2004 were 5 percent of their GDP. As a matter of fact, as of June 2004, twelve of the twenty-five EU member countries ran deficits above the mandated 3 percent of GDP.24 Greece (the Greeks apparently cheated) and the Netherlands were censured by the Brussels Commission and told they might be fined. Égalité had to be observed. The fiscal rule itself is an example of the tendency for the continental elite’s legal mind to legislate or ordain economic laws from on high, then slide down the learning curve with a thump. It is arguable, and has in fact been argued by economists, that scribbling mandatory budgetary ceilings for all countries on an office calendar in the École Supérieure d’Administration or its equivalents does not make much macroeconomic sense, notably in situations of anemic growth. Professional politicians, on the other hand, use a different calculus. They believe that if you can’t or won’t carry out the rule, you should change the rule. In the fall of 2003, in comradely spirit, the finance ministers of the euro zone suspended the budget rule. In an unexpected snit, the European Commission filed a suit with the European Court of Justice signaling that the time had come to ask the axial duo to cease and desist from acting as if EU norms did not apply to them. Just growing pains and family tiffs, some say. Nothing serious. No problem. Just one of those things. In the June 2004 unionwide elections for the European Parliament, the world’s largest—342 mil-

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lion eligible voters, 14,000 candidates for 732 seats—the turnout was (for Europe) an unimpressive 44 percent in the European Union as a whole, 29 percent in the ten new member countries (eight of them formerly communist). Apparently, as the competencies of the EU Parliament have expanded, public interest in that institution has declined. The Parliament now decides whether to approve or reject the union’s €95 billion budget and can dismiss the European Commission (the European government), but it still lacks the power of taxation, has no say in immigration matters, and has no effective input into the formulation of foreign policy, including defense, if any. One small codicil. Anyone who has driven in Rome, Paris, Belgium, or on the autobahns knows that speeding can quickly become a bad habit and a dangerous addiction, even when not mixed with bumper-tailing, reckless passing, and cutting the other fellow off within an inch of his life. So it is with enlargement. The reunification of Germany in 1990 and the great leap eastward of 2004 can be rationally justified, fair and square. Not everyone will necessarily agree, Mrs. Thatcher for one, but that’s all right, it’s as it should be. The common denominator in these instances was unique historical opportunity, to be seized and acted upon, unilaterally so to speak, instead of being forwarded to the UN General Assembly for deliberation and approval. All the same, it took roughly fifty years for the fifteen West European countries to nearly unite, and they had a lot in common going for them ideologically to begin with—economically, politically, culturally—plus American empathy and support, and not on the cheap, in words only, as has often been the case in international relations (“we sympathize and will closely monitor the situation”). For good and sufficient reasons, it took fourteen years to get the ten Central and East European states in. With one or two exceptions, they shared less with the older members of the union than they imagined. This included having missed out on forty years of recent Western European democratic political history and having a level of economic development one-fifth of what one would have desired. Now, however, when it comes to further EU expansion into Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine (the eastern part of it especially), and most of all into Turkey, which, some Euroskeptics say, has been waiting patiently at the gates of Vienna since 1683, and which by 2020 is expected to be the most populous member of the union, one is dealing with a qualitatively different continuum in every respect, and in

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many ways a very delicate one. There is need now to slow down to a trot, define more soberly where sustainable borders of the European Union are to be drawn, if the disintegrative, Yugoslav-type morbus balkanicus is not to set in by way of a new European imperial overstretch — “diseconomies of scale,” as economists, stumbling across a helpful euphemism, while thinking only of numbers, would put it: 68 million Muslim Turks, sporting $3,000 of gross national produce (GNP) per head (a little better than one-third of Lithuania’s minimal level), one-quarter of it generated by organized-crime activities, like kidnapping and selling children to childless families, selling body parts taken from the poor, drug trafficking, loansharking, and prostitution. An unresolved turf issue among the different branches of the European Union and national authorities concerns bailouts and mergers of manufacturing and financial firms, how to handle corporate bankruptcies and consolidations. If the issue is settled, it could bring the United States into the picture through sharper competition in both business and equity acquisitions on world markets in key fields such as steel, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, airlines, postal services, telecommunications, electricity and gas utilities, banking, insurance, and so on. Drawing not on Krupp but on the European Coal and Steel Community precedent of what now seems eons ago, and on the model of the more contemporary and publicly supported (French-German-Spanish) European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, the parent of Airbus, which gives Boeing and Lockheed Martin CEOs occasional sleepless nights, French and German government officials have more or less agreed to initiate the formation of European business “champions,” industrial and financial giants. These are to compete for custom with the low-tax, low-wage, restructured (now relatively more efficient) industries of the European Union’s freshmen members until the east-west comparative tax and wage levels become less uneven. More important, they are to take on American multinational corporations, financial services included. To help the future champions fend off Yankee takeover attempts, their expected economies of scale and diverse portfolios would be enhanced, it is reasoned, by a touch of corporatism in the form of subsidies and administrative advice. Three dissonances have apparently cropped up: the first between France and Germany (the axial odd couple); the second between the Berlin-Paris duet and the rest of the EU, the east especially; the third involving juris-

Aggregation

dictional turf battles and ideological discordance between the French and German governments, on the one hand, and the European Commissioners for Competition, for Transport, and for this and that, on the other. France, especially, is reluctant to let go of French property (controlling ownership shares) in strategic and not so strategic (wine and cheese) state and private corporations—a dirigiste and at times stifling mother’s concern for her sometimes brilliant, sometimes wayward children. The Germans are concerned, too, perhaps less emotionally in public than the French. And, come to think of it, so are the Koreans and the Japanese, and the American steel lobby. Thus, when a corporation, such as the TGV bullet train maker Alstom (at 110,000 employees, certainly not an infant industry), gets into trouble with the bank during the downswing of a business cycle, or just anytime, mother is there with her purse to calm the nerves, pay for the damages ($2.4 billion), shoo away the out-of-state bullies about to grab the loot, and bring the kids home. The neighbors don’t like it, the Germans especially, ever since their Siemens AG was debarred by mother from taking over a chunk of Alstom. Nor do the commissioners in Brussels, some of them anyway, who have been taught that nationalism causes crime, and who are paid to build a transnational market economy and supranational polity. Compromises are arranged, but they remain conditional deals in need of frequent massaging. Alstom, for example, got the nod from Brussels for its bailout in exchange for a commitment over several years to divest itself of some noncore businesses. One more thing. While it is true that in economics the purpose is to produce more with less, in corporate consolidation, like with the dinosaurs, less could often be more. As for denationalization, deregulation, privatization, and marketization of key European industries, the question remains not only one of strategic heights in an economic or military sense but also one of a common disposition against such loosening up, acquired at birth or shortly thereafter and enshrined in ideological iconography by instruction, habit, and tradition. Besides, it is very delicate politically. It gets all these crowds out into the streets at the drop of a hat, in defense of job security and more social benefits. Europeans are on a long, transformatory trek to their own vision of market democracy, prosperity, reconciliation, and healing. During my generation and the one before, when Europe was down, there was America, contagiously optimistic, its young hands extended in friendship, its pockets

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wide open, full of good things for friends and former enemies alike. Four hundred thousand of its youths who went to bring hope would never come home again. Americans don’t want meaningless thanks, however nicely phrased or late in the day, nor do they cultivate grudges or harbor resentments. They are not subject to political amnesias or bouts of selective memory loss. What they find a little confusing, and very sad, is that when America stumbles, as everyone does once in a while, there is more cheering and jeering in the world than there are hands extended in help. They get up, dust themselves off, put the best face on gibes and undeserved affronts, and move on distributing freedom and good cheer in places where they are scarce or nonexistent, and from where others would rather stay away. Too often they blame themselves. They wish Europe well. The young hope to visit there as tourists, not soldiers called in yet another European emergency. Or they will learn to live without Europe: Ich bin kein Berliner—I am not a Berliner. Not any more. But I suspect that, being American, they would do the decent thing, and go to help again. However, because of unworthy-friends fatigue, they would go this one more time not with their hearts on a platter, for the vultures to feast on, but only if they are convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that the journey is really necessary in America’s national interest. Losing innocence once is enough. Losing it three times is ridiculous.

27 Disaggregation Civil War in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The southern and southeastern part of the Balkans is where hyphenated ethnic strains, hostile tribes, frustrated nationalities (fifteen in the late Yugoslavia), irreconcilable religious beliefs, and imperial ambitions crossed and locked in combat for centuries, most recently in the 1990s, in a display of inhumanity and on a horror scale unmatched in Europe since the end of World War II, reminiscent in savagery of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Rwanda, and the ongoing carnage in the Sudan. The concentrated expression of this butchery was in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosnia in the north, Herzegovina in the south), “the most vicious and genocidal battlefront in the Balkan conflict,”1 whose unassimilable and unmeldable Sunni Bosnian-Slav Muslims (circa 44 percent of population in 2001), Orthodox Serbs (31 percent), and Croat Roman Catholics (17 percent), with a generous sprinkling of Albanians, Montenegrins, and Catholic Slovenes, coexisted in hatred since 1463–1482, first under Ottoman Turkish rule, when much of the local people converted to Islam, not without pressure but also out of self-interest and careerism; then at the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish War, from 1878 to 1918, under the AustroHungarian Empire (formally annexed in 1908), when growth of Serbian nationalist consciousness culminated in the 1914 assassination at Sarajevo of the successor to the imperial throne, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, which ignited World War I, at the end of which, the Austro-Hungarian 

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Empire gone, the area’s Slav Sunni Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats and Slovenes (the last, except for a brief Napoleonic entr’acte, had been under Austrian suzerainty), and sundry others, were put into an absolutist Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, run by the Serbs, that in 1929 became the heterogeneous country called Yugoslavia (the Land of the Southern Slavs), which was invaded by the Axis Powers in 1941 and occupied until 1945 by German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces, during which time the Croats were given a puppet state by the Nazis and set about slaughtering sixty thousand Serbs, Jews, and others. Then, back in Yugoslavia, communist this time but not subservient to Moscow after 1949, Bosnia and Herzegovina became one of six republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which after the death of its leader, Josip Broz Tito, and a flare-up of suppressed ethnic animosity, broke apart in 1990, when, following the example of Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina under Bosnian-Muslim (Bosniac) nationalist President Izetbegovicˇ, who headed a coalition government composed of Muslims and Croats (who under the German occupation had got along as well as could be expected in cultures of violence, by ganging up on the Serbs), declared its independence from what was left of Yugoslavia in March 1992. That’s when the real trouble started. The minority Bosnian Orthodox Serbs would have none of it. Led by a character by the name of Karadz˘ic´, they proclaimed the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska) of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which, with military assistance from Yugoslav (Belgrade) Serbia, inflicted a litany of defeats on the coalition of Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats whose fighting capacity was hampered by an international arms embargo, despite the influx of mujahedin volunteers from all nooks and corners of the Islamic world and its subterranean terrorist networks. During this time, in areas under their control (about 70 percent of the country by 1995), the Bosnian Serbs, with Belgrade’s backing, committed atrocities known as “ethnic cleansing,” intended to make BosniaHerzegovina racially pure and of one belief by killing off the descendants of Bosnian Muslim-Slav traitorous apostates and anyone who stood in the way, Croats in the forefront. The cleansing involved egregious violations of human rights, bordering on genocide, a cycle of madness, rapine, and violence that was to reappear in Kosovo in 1999. The other side reciprocated in kind, as opportunity allowed. The odds began to turn against the Serbs in May 1994 when a Muslim-Croat Federation was carpentered

Disaggregation

(forged would be too strong a word, suggesting a durability that just wasn’t there). All this despicable bedlam went on for years, right in the European Union’s backyard. What did the EU Europeans do to stop it? While tending to their garden (mais il faut cultiver notre jardin),2 they excogitated, negotiated, and mediated, chiefly and by preference through the United Nations, patiently, diligently, continually, diplomatically, multilaterally, trilaterally, bilaterally, and one-on-one, with no malice aforethought, and no effect. The United Nations sent blue-casqued peacekeepers, some armed, some insufficiently so, others not at all, including an inglorious Dutch battalion (Dutchbat) dispatched to Srebrenica, a little mining town designated as a UN “safe area.” And what happened? Nothing. The wholesale slaughter went on. By 1994 it began to dawn on the negotiators on one side of the conference table that the other side, the Bosnian-Herzegovinan, wasn’t listening, that it was beyond the reach of language and reason, absolutely obtuse; that it was like talking to inert matter, to a wall, to antediluvian relics. What to do? It was concluded, rather sheepishly, that the time had come to stop shooting from the lip and call on the U.S. marshal (for the maligned sheriff had risen in rank and stature in the meantime) to please come and bring his deputies. It worked in 1944, and the sheriff hadn’t even been in town then, so why not now, fifty years later? All things considered, it was also cheaper. These Americans had been paying 30 percent of the UN peacekeeping (UNPROFOR-mandated) budget for years—for 130 participating nations, some of them richer than Croesus, and very involved in the peacemaking business (Sweden, Italy, Netherlands), the backbone of it in fact, while at the same time selling arms and munitions to the very places where they were employed by the United Nations to keep the peace.3 The Americans came, packed off the Muslim Bosniacs, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs to Dayton, Ohio, in August 1995, and not surprisingly (if you know Dayton) had an agreement ending the bloodshed (for the moment at least) in five days flat. But promises on paper stay on paper if they are not enforced. The European Rapid Deployment Force not being quite ready yet, NATO, on American initiative and under American command, deployed sixty thousand men to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the slaughter stopped. The agreement put into effect an admittedly imperfect plan that had been masticated for two years and more. It set up

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The American Way of Peace

an “unloved state” of Bosnia and Herzegovina composed of two cartographically roughly equal parts: a Bosnian-Croat Federation, its seat in Sarajevo, and the Serb Republic (Srpska Republika) with its capital in Banja Luka, both fairly autonomous as such Lego constructions go. A UN high representative was dispatched to make everything internationally legal, smooth, and aboveboard. Since then he has done a creditable job of ramming various needed measures through the unwieldy governmental mechanism, usually over the heads and out of the hearing of tonedeaf local officials. The mechanism is not terribly workable, not because of its well-intentioned, democratically inspired, formal design or due to some byzantine conspiracy hatched in Ohio, but because of the intransigence (and there are better words for it) of those for whose benefit it had been drawn up. It stopped the hemorrhaging but not the dread. Of 1.3 million people who left their homeland, a million have not returned.4 They burned not only their bridges, as the saying goes, but also their homes, right to the ground, before they left. A word or two about Srebrenica. It had been declared by the United Nations as one of five “safe areas” for Muslims, this one under the protection of a UN Dutch battalion, sent there for “window dressing,” says one report.5 The Serbs surrounded the town and took a few Hollanders hostage. In exchange for the hostages, the stolid Dutch surrendered Muslim men and boys to the Serbs, participating in the triage. Whereupon, after forcing the prisoners to dig their graves, the Serbs shot allegedly more than seven thousand of them in five days, while the Dutch guardians sent by the United Nations stood by, gripped by the law of inertia, immobilized by indecision, fear, and moral paralysis. “The worst massacre of any kind in Europe for fifty years,” the Srebrenica tragedy was instrumental in expediting the Dayton Accords and getting NATO to stop the mass murder.6 In the spring of 2000, Radislav Krstic´, a Bosnian Serb general, was sentenced by the UN War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague to forty-six years in jail for what he did in Srebrenica. Three years later, the first six hundred identified victims of the massacre were buried. One can almost always tell, with little fear of error, whom even the more cautious and responsible European press will end up blaming. In London, not Paris or Berlin this time, on September 6, 2001, the Economist opined in its review of a book by David Halberstam, that while perhaps it was “conspiratorial to assume that America’s tardy reaction to Srebrenica

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reflected calculation rather than negligence,” the question nevertheless needed to be asked.7 In other words, this time the Americans tarried and came too late, perhaps for calculated reasons. Or perhaps such speculation is what in the literature is known as “projection” — the unconscious ascription of a personal impulse, usually an unfavorable one, to somebody else; to someone, especially, who has just done you a favor.

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28 Chinese Shadows

Three questions: (1) Will China go democratic? (2) Does China present a long-term threat to America? (3) Does China threaten her neighbors in the short term? I first visited China in February 1974 when it was reeling from the aftershocks (a succession of hard-to-decipher political witch hunts) of the cataclysmic Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as the decade-long mass insanity engineered by Mao Zedong was called. Shenzhen, today a swinging metropolitan hive of capitalism Chinese style, was then a dot on the map where the rail line from British Hong Kong ended. Arriving there, you picked up your baggage, schlepped it across the rails to the Chinese side, and after a perfunctory passport and customs inspection boarded the soft-seats car reserved for “foreign friends,” thus entering another world, another century. I had been interested in the Chinese economy since the collapse of another Maoist eruption, the 1958–1960 Great Leap Forward that, contrary to contemporary opinion in the West—of the genre “whatever else you can say, at least there are no famines in communist China”— resulted in a mind-boggling number of deaths from starvation (technically called “excess” deaths, that is, statistically abnormal ones) and significantly reduced birth rates. Preliminary Western and Chinese post-Mao estimates (there was a statistical blackout in China from 1959 to 1982) had put such deaths caused by manmade famine in 1959–1961 at between 16.6 and 23 million. Later studies pointed to between 23 and 30 million dead, and some went as high as 40 million.1 I will deal here only with Chinese develop

Chinese Shadows

ments after 1978 as these affect American attitudes and policy. However, a little background information needs to be given first. After Mao’s death in September 1976, his embalmment, and what was intended as the permanent public display of his remains in Tiananmen Square (a Leninist socialist-realist tradition that keeps the waxworks in business), China’s economy under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping began to undergo an epochal transformation, a true intersystemic reform, still in progress. The traumas of the Great Leap Forward and the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution had made even the most stalwart Chinese communists realize not only that Mao’s utopian anarchomasochistic economics of permanent class turmoil was literally a dead end (like “turtles in a jar,” the Chinese say), but also that to save the nation the whole corpus of MarxismLeninism-Stalinism as it touches on the everyday business of making a living (economic life) had to be abandoned. And so it was. That’s what’s called intersystemic reform: the replacement of one system with another that is fundamentally different. To be fundamentally different, the new system must have qualitatively different and hopefully superior, closely interrelated institutional arrangements for (1) the conveyance of information about relative resource scarcities, in other words, a universally and readily understandable, multidimensional, mathematical language, some sort of math Esperanto, only better; (2) coordination of exchange activities between sellers and buyers, producers and consumers, preferably a mechanism that is automatic, involving relatively low transaction costs that can be obtained through voluntary transactions, compulsion being as a rule costly; (3) motivation of participants in the system, that is, a set of effective positive (carrots) and negative (sticks) incentives, with emphasis on the former; and (4) a legally, unequivocally defined, enforced, and protected statement of property rights: of what belongs to whom.2 It is my conviction that the last — property — is by far the most important. This was understood by the early Scholastics and, unfortunately, also by Marx. The Chinese reforms launched in December 1978 retooled the economic system under all four headings, least under the fourth one. As regards (1): Information is the continuous generation, transmittal, and processing of intelligence about resources, goals, and supply and demand (costs and utilities) in the economy. Administrative, unconditional commands formulated at high bureaucratic levels, expressed in

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unidimensional, often internally inconsistent weights and measures, and, subsidiarily, in accounting notations erroneously called planned “prices,” were replaced (but slowly, not all along the line, and with much hedging and many qualifications) by multidimensional-opportunity cost-approaching prices that emerged from voluntary buyer-seller negotiations (demand/ supply choices). Nicholas Lardy notes that by 1999 more than nine-tenths of all retail Chinese sales, more than four-fifths of the sales of farm products, and almost nine-tenths of all producer goods were made at market prices, perhaps not as pure and frictionless as the textbooks would like, but market-determined, information-only, take-it-or-leave it prices all the same.3 As regards (2): Coordination is the reconciliation and harmonization of disparate pieces of information into a coherent system of production, exchange, and distribution. Central, bureaucratic, hierarchical, command planning by an interlocking monoparty-state, using material and financial balances that emphasized gross value of output expressed in phony prices, was replaced by an as yet imperfectly but increasingly competitive, almost autonomous, and almost automatic market coordination. As regards (3): Motivation is the provision of incentives to economic units to engage in wealth-producing activities, and to do so efficiently— to produce more, in fewer hours worked. “Moral” (nonmaterial) incentives—citations (“hero of socialist labor”), medals, employee-of-the-week snapshot displays, and other brownie points — both positive (rewards) and negative (punishments), with stress on the last, have given way to differentiated monetary incentives, not always corresponding to marginal revenue product, especially where influence peddling is concerned, but by and large more effective in stimulating productivity and improving the quality and variety of output. As regards (4): Property is a socially enforced group of economically valuable rights to the acquisition, use, and disposal of assets. It has important implications for the apportionment of wealth, income, and power in the economy and for incentives. Property rights have been the lagging indicator of the reform’s performance. Destatization of key (“strategic”) industries (privatization by government policy) has been slow and reluctant, and “commercialization” of firms remains obfuscatory and often managerially self-serving. Discrimination against self-propelled private busi-

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nesses (privatization through new entry), especially when it comes to obtaining credit from the state banking system, is widespread, harassment and extortion of the owners not uncommon. Although private entrepreneur is no longer a term of ideological invective (and, in fact, such people can now nominally join the party and become communist capitalists), knee-jerk doctrinal prejudice against them is so ingrained in society, even though the doctrine itself is a shambles, that it is advisable not to test too persistently the limits of tolerance on this score. It is safer to be an adroit “wind sailor,” knowing how to shift with changing political winds, like in the old days, and keep an open line to powerful friends. Decollectivization of agriculture has been accomplished, but full privatization of land has not. Property rights consist of three intertwining but separable elements: the right of use or control over a thing (object, resource, information, personal faculty); the right of disposal over residual income (income after all costs associated with the use of the thing owned have been met); and the right of transfer (to sell, rent, give away, or bequeath what one owns).4 Decollectivization in China gave the former members of the collective, usually family units, broad rights of use to a limited amount of what had been collectively owned but state-controlled land, and later also the right of disposal over residual income (privatization of net revenue), but only a restricted right to acquire or dispose of the property. More important, rule of law everywhere is to property what oxygen is to life. At its most basic it means the supremacy of the law and equality before the law (law applied equally to all, lawgivers and attorneys included; equal justice under the law).5 That lies within the province of what elsewhere (see the Appendix) I call “modernity,” which economically reformed, modernizing China does not yet have The market-oriented transfigurement was not confined to in-depth changes in China’s economic institutions. It extended to the way people, especially policy makers, think about the everyday business of making a living (from economic life, to economic theory), and to what they believe the everyday business of making a living should ideally look like—that is, to economic ideology. Before 1979 there was no positive economic theory in China. The Khrushchevian socialist economics textbook had been discarded by the Chinese during the Sino-Soviet dispute of the 1960s as a perfect example of buffoonery, which it was. Chairman Mao’s plastic-cover

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collection of revolutionary aphorisms was useless. (On a visit to a medical school in Canton in 1974, I saw students in a library, which had its bookshelves emptied of books, bent over the little red book, memorizing Mao’s quotations. Not long before, a scholar had been severely punished for saying, “If a man can’t climb a pole and reads Chairman Mao’s quotations, he still won’t be able to climb the pole.” It was far worse for the patient of a surgeon who has only read Mao’s quotations.) Effectively, economic theory was identical with whatever Maoist version of Marxist-Leninist sloganeering ideology was in good odor at any given moment. So one of the functions of the post-1978 economic reform was to learn Western micro and macro market theories (including financial ones, money and banking, as they were once called), adopt and adapt them to Chinese conditions, infuse them with “Asian values,” hopefully, but in practice not invariably, the better ones—in short, sinicize them a bit, and give the reformed system the safe name of “market socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This was done with remarkable dispatch and ability, belying predictions of a “lost generation” caused by the “ignorance in command” of the Cultural Revolution decade. As in Europe, the Problematik here is to find the golden mean between the politicization of markets and the marketization of politics, to untangle the government-business entwinements, preferably out in the open, not under the table on the model of what not long ago used to be known admiringly among the cognoscenti as the Japanese consensus. I think that a mature, effectively functioning, internationally competitive market system, wherever it may be located, and whatever its specific historical experience, requires for its long-term survival and good health five elements that are present in the neoclassical (“Anglo-American”) model: impersonality of commercial transactions (as opposed to collusive, neomercantilistic, personal networks of influence); informational transparency, or full disclosure as the rule (not opacity; truth, not make-believe); clarity (not ambiguity, especially of property rights); personal accountability, name, address, and cell-phone number included (not the anonymity of bureaucratic protective strata and clubby connections); and dominance of private property rights protected by rule of law.6 That requires modernity, which is another story, to which we shall return. The Chinese market-tending transformation took its time. Mao once wrote (and I quote from memory), that “there is only movement in Heaven

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and on earth,” by which he meant rapid, dialectical leaping, a permanent revolutionary upheaval fueled by antagonistic class contradictions. As he grew older, instead of slowing down as nature demands, he accelerated the earthly commotion to no positive effect. The shell-shocked apparat survivors of his Cultural Revolution, in charge of affairs after the liquidation of Mao’s Gang of Four—his wife, Jiang Qing, included—and peaceable removal of his anointed successor, an out-of-his-depths party hack named Hua Guofeng, embarked on the reforms very deliberately, step by step: “crossing the river while groping for the stones,” deferring the resolution of the hardest problems to a later time, hence, say the skeptics, piling up troubles for the future. Experiments were carried out with this and that capitalist novelty in trial areas, then generalized if they worked, not, as under Mao, only if they conformed to ideological preordainments. The same held for ideal ideas. The communist belief in the virtue, honorability, and strategic value of national self-sufficiency, carried by Mao down to the level of province, county, and commune, went overboard. It was replaced by zeal for exports, by imports of know-how and technology, and most of all by a warm welcome extended to foreign investment, with indifference to its origin, although some infant-industry and strategicheights type strings were attached and still remain, often informally, removable only by greasing the right palms, and perhaps in good time by China’s obligations as a member since 2000 of the World Trade Organization. Venture capitalists from all over the economically developed world responded enthusiastically, largely because of their unshakable belief in the potential benefits to them of the potentially limitless Chinese market—the undying “oil for the lamps of China” syndrome, looking like it might pan out anytime now. The leading investors, however, and the ones first in, were overseas Chinese from near (Hong Kong, Taiwan) and far, the worldwide Chinese diaspora put at 60 million well-filled pockets. China’s international trade, exports especially, rose steeply, principally to the United States, a substantial share transshipped through Hong Kong. In 2003 China’s trade surplus with the United States reached a record $124 billion. The educated are no longer spurned and persecuted, so long as they keep their views to themselves on politically incorrect issues. They travel abroad and come back with useful knowledge aplenty. But a residuum of party suspicion of intellectuals remains and can turn ruthless at the drop of a word.7 In any event, the once prevalent adulation of the

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innate wisdom and genius of the class-correct masses—the more uncultivated the class, the greater the merit—is gone, for the time being. Incrementalism, caution, partial modifications of capitalist blueprints, and cultural adaptations mean that the reform process remains incomplete, the parts don’t always fit together easily or properly, or at all; frictions, inconsistencies, and gaps abound, and breakdowns happen. But the system works if judged by the criteria of growth, development, overall material welfare, and progressive integration in the world market economy. In fact, as we have seen, the economy that by the time of Mao’s mummification had been pushed as far left as it would go—while many transient Western visitors praised it for its imagined égalité, which they took to be better for the Chinese than its conspicuously absent liberté—reacted to these market-tending reforms by exhibiting an unprecedented upsurge in growth and development, helped by massive foreign direct investment, a joint venture of near and far Chinese, a hungry American market, and some Japanese inputs. The pace of growth has been sustained to this day. Benefits in higher living standards have accrued mainly, but not exclusively, to the eastern coastal provinces and the larger cities but are dribbling outward to the more backward western inland regions. In aggregate statistics, at least, China has “reached levels of prosperity, urbanization, industrialization, post-industrialization and linkage to the outside world that far exceed anything seen or, perhaps, even much imagined in 1989.”8 Except for an inflation-related problem that required reining in growth in 1986; three politically sensitive years, 1989–1990 (the years of Tiananmen and its psychological aftermath); and the 1999 suppression of the Falun Gong mass protest movement, gross domestic product rose by about 8 percent a year, with a great upward leap of 15 percent in 1992 (two years after what by then was being referred to as the Tiananmen incident, unfortunate but irrelevant). Latest tentative projections are that, terrorism permitting, the almost-twenty-year trend will continue into 2008. This does not mean that the latest economic transformation in Asia is free of problems. There are lots of them, some serious, most amenable to correction provided the available remedies are not held back by exogenous forces.9 The four large state-owned banks—among the biggest financial institutions in the world, which hold the bulk of China’s individual savings in a nation that is as thrifty as they come, and account for half of the country’s financial assets — are plagued by huge bad debts because the

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banks’ owner, the government, orders them to bail out its uncreditworthy state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which have not so far learned that since China is not run on Islamic teachings, loans have to be paid back with interest, if minimum economic sanity is to prevail in the system. The same disability (alas!) afflicts what were once thought to be nimble, entrepreneurial, well-connected, second-tier “commercialized” banks at the provincial and municipal levels, especially in the southeast, in which foreign financial institutions hold equity shares as a clever (so they thought) way of avoiding restrictions on foreign bank ownership in China. In the past, when its enterprises (the SOEs) did not pay up, the government bailed out its banks by routinely dipping into the national treasury: bad economics all around—for the banks, for the government, and for society at large. The problem from which the eleven “commercial” banks suffer is due to an amalgam of mismanagement and corrupt practices, the last related to their bureaucratic linkages gone sour. In early June 2004 the total liabilities of these banks were 4 trillion yuan, teetering on an asset base of 4.15 trillion yuan. Economic fraudulence, a huge termitarium, is of unrivaled magnitude and coverage. Other problems include uneven regional and sectoral development; local protectionism; and a restructuring of the labor force that accompanies all economic development, especially a surging one, and leaves many by the wayside, creating new social cleavages in the process, among them massive migrations of peasants and unskilled laborers into metropolitan areas in search of employment. Changes in the incentive system have cut big holes in the social safety net, which was basic to begin with. Sharp interpersonal, interregional, intersectoral, and rural-urban inequalities persist, and despite the trickling down of income and the spreading across of what the Chinese call “initial wealth,” social tensions cumulate, in large part because they are etched in the popular perception as inequalities of social status and political power, as a brazen injustice. The social stability of China’s society that the ruling stratum is understandably concerned with and advertises on every occasion, and which foreign traders and investors buy, rests, it would seem to me, on unstable foundations, not because of the many developmental and systemic transition problems that beset it (such problems are not confined to China), but because the reforms have been confined to economics, and incompletely at that. The Maoist position that “politics is in command of economics” went the way of Mao, but (quasi) market economics was not allowed to be in

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command of party politics, except among individual officeholders and their relatives and friends, near and at the top of the leadership ladder (but by imitation and contagion at lower echelons too), where it assumed the contorted shape of privilege, graft, and corruption. Not that there have been no political changes. Other than the crackdowns, the political climate became less severe and the atmosphere more relaxed. Although internal party investigative committees had found that during his lifetime Mao had been right two-thirds of the time and wrong only one-third, people could see for themselves that he was now safely in his crystal casket and sensed that the party’s crazies were no longer in charge, if not altogether out of the picture. This by itself made life easier for most people, not all of the time, but for more of it than before. Of course, it was still advisable to keep a loose tongue under control; cultivate useful contacts, connections, propitiations, and reciprocations (guanxi) in one’s garden; and be a good “wind sailor” who knows how to read changing air currents and alter course accordingly. But there was no longer that state of constant all-encompassing apprehension about one never knew quite what. Totalitarianism morphed into hard authoritarianism, sometimes softened, as in 1987–1888 into what one of my China-hand colleagues called “consultative authoritarianism,” which, however, abruptly stopped consulting in the morning hours of June 4, 1989, on Tiananmen Square. Other than initial shock, the stoppage had no permanent effect on foreign and overseas Chinese traders and investors or, after a few years, on hardly anybody outside China. No political reform has been implemented before or after Tiananmen, in the sense of fundamental changes in institutions and political thought or the right to the free exercise thereof, only repairs and renovations, intrasystemic largely procedural adjustments (easements) in the texture of the nation’s one-party polity. At the institutional level these have included village elections (with more than one candidate running for each office, but only after local party clearance); some increased leeway given to the National People’s Congress, the parliament without free parlance; and less intrusiveness by the party in micromanaging governmental affairs, except in emergencies—it being for the party to decide what an emergency is and when it arises. So what have we here? We have a country of continental size and with a supracontinental population, one that is able and hard-working, living in one country with two systems: quasi capitalism for economics, com-

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munist quasi fascism for politics, both with Chinese characteristics (the quasi) by reason of the country’s longevity-honed genes. It’s an odd combination, but it has led to growing wealth at home and growing influence in the neighborhood today, which it is anticipated will reach further afield tomorrow. Through imports of advanced technology and reform of military doctrine China is improving and flexing its military muscle and associated militant rhetoric, impelling the Taiwanese to spend a large share of their budget on defense. While this is going on, the Taiwan private sector pours billions of dollars into China’s dual-use modernization, hollowing out the island’s industrial economy and provincializing its relative economic status vis-à-vis the mainland. Now, China’s so far successful social combination of crypto capitalism and neofascist authoritarianism raises a French-like question: “It works in practice, but will it work in theory?” If it continues to work in practice, we can expect a rush of clonings from other economically less developed societies, faced with the question of what political system to combine with a locally adapted market orientation in economics, and deciding to go for a Chinese-type answer. The cause of individual freedom, civil and human rights, and rule of law would not gain from this arrangement, although enforced social stability might be preserved. Whether it would be a tenuous and an impermanent construct depends on the answer to the question “raised, at least obliquely, by the Democracy Movement of 1989— the relationship between economic development and political democracy in reform era China—[which] remains unanswered in 2004. . . . Marketbased economic prosperity and the absence of political democracy cohabitate more comfortably in China circa June 4, 2004 than they did circa June 4, 1989.”10 The question can be recast in terms of the relationship between modernization and modernity outlined in the Appendix and in several places in the body of the text. In broad terms this relationship concerns the correlation between calculation and artistry, functionality and style. Briefly, on that argument, a free economy, the key to sustainable prosperity (not just an initial and passing one like in Argentina), accords with modernity. Economic modernization requires a change in the economic structure that involves the spread and deepening within the system of institutional transparency and informational accuracy (truth); monetization of the system’s language associated with money-price coordination and rational

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optimization of alternative/competitive choices; private property and autonomy of transactors (free choice); impersonality of commercial exchanges (not interpersonal back-rubbing); and personal accountability for decisions freely arrived at. Within the purview of modernization, these rest on a philosophy and attitudes that invest the human person with the capacity to comprehend and shape the world through rational free thought and action, open and subject to questioning, contestation, and revisions, and backed by market-friendly government policies that enhance and complement rather than restrict, distort, or erase market-generated allocative decisions. Modernization, concerned with the means and mechanics of wealth creation, is insufficient, incomplete, and often harmful without modernity. Modernity is the soul or conscience of modernization. It deals with the art of living in society: with fairness, rule of law, democracy/civil society, and character, including probity, personal responsibility, and the selfrestraint that makes trust possible and meaningful—with rectitude and humaneness. It is my contention that, when understood in this sense, modernization (synonymous with the market system) and modernity (synonymous with just and compassionate democratic governance) make a desirable combination of interacting and mutually reinforcing elements. Discovered in the West, but accessible with material and civil benefit to anyone, anywhere, willing to construct, nurture, and apply it, and not just tap into the mother lode of market economics, the humane commercial republic of free markets and individual liberty with democratic governance and rule of law is not an idle abstraction, a dream, or chimera. It actually exists— in approximation—in the American republic and, in various renditions, in Western and Central Europe, Taiwan (early rowdy stages), and Japan (qualified by its peculiar proto-democratic, de facto one-party system and hypogeal labyrinths of old school, graduating class, business-state connections). Contrary to philosophical speculation, samples of which we have examined earlier (as with Fukuyama), there is no inevitable predestination to the emergence of a commercial republic whose two major components are accordant and mutually supportive—market economy and democratic polity; modernization and modernity—as there was to the self-destruction of central administrative command planning by the built-in errors of socialism. Contrary to common belief, there is also no automaticity to a market economy’s conversion of authoritarian governments, whatever their

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cat-color, to “the soft, the amiable virtues of candid condescension and indulgent humanity. . . those milder virtues” (as Adam Smith phrases it in the Theory of Moral Sentiments) of empathy and compassion that are the components of modernity—style, in short. But there is an improvement of the odds in favor of modernity’s emerging. Economic modernization can help modernity surface and take root (see the Appendix) through the spillover effects of money and market prices (pluralistic, color-blind, and democratic contrivances both), private property, competition; by the resolutions of conflicts through peaceful, voluntary exchanges instead of Robin Hoodery; and because of the free (or at least freer) movement of people and flow of technical information across the porous border separating economics (more in the mind than in practice) from politics. A German colleague of mine once calculated that when an authoritarian economy reaches a per-capita income level of $8,637 its polity will turn democratic. But there is really nothing preordained, inevitable, or illuminist about the process, and no seamless transformation of one economic system into the other. The change has to be wanted, worked on, put up with, and sometimes sacrificed for, the last being a notion that has disappeared, because it implies discomfort, from conversations on modernization. The same is true of the reverse spillover effects of freedom, pluralism, fluidity, secularism, transparency, democracy, and civil society on the economic system, as happened in most of Central/East Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989/1991, where political revolutions (comparatively bloodless, as revolutions go) converted the socialist centrally planned system to the capitalist, albeit somewhat reformed, faith. The fact that authoritarian China has taken the capitalist road part of the way, sinifying it as it went forward, does not mean that modernity will of necessity follow. But it may. We cannot tell for sure. The odds are certainly better than they were when the economy was overdosed on MarxistLeninist Stalino-Maoism. So far, not quite twenty-five years into the long march to modernization, which is nothing in terms of China’s fourthousand-year life span, the signals are mixed and the future, as always, remains uncertain. Only fortune tellers know for sure, and they are not to be trusted. However, for all its twists and turns, local coloring, and restrictive regulatory curlicues, were the economic reform to generate a transition to modernity, the second question posed at the beginning could be answered optimistically and with greater assurance.

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The American Way of Peace

The question, you will recall, is: Does China present a long-term threat to America?11 Cognizant of the pitfalls of clairvoyance, the short answer is that if China’s presently dormant modernity catches up with China’s modernization, there will be no problem. There will be plenty of mutual annoyance, of course, and bickering, something on the lines of our French problem, perhaps less suave, but no lethal threat, long-run, short-run, or in-between. Democracies do not, as a rule, go to war with one another. (I insert the qualifier in case someone at Humboldt University comes up with an example or two to the contrary.) Moreover, there are plausible reasons to think that even if China does not go democratic in our lifetimes (notice the resort to plural to make it longer-term), its economic plate being so full of unsolved problems, and my German colleague’s $8,637 critical mass so distant, the probability of a threat to America—economic, political, military—is small, not to be ignored, but small. Besides, the “initial prosperity,” as they call it in China, has brought to the long-suffering Chinese people, many of them anyway, the good times for the first time in memory, and they want this situation to continue and get better. The regime’s legitimacy depends on it. The people’s love of country (first cousin to nationalism) apart, it is the only thing the rulers have going for them; a social contract of sorts to be breached only at great peril to the breaker. My personal experience in China, including a visiting teaching appointment in 1987–1988 at Nankai University in Tianjin, persuades me of the enormous reservoir of ability, intelligence, skill, and application that is there, waiting to be tapped for the greater good of the people possessing these laudable qualities. Even in 1974 this came right through the thick layers of Maoist derangement. Then the trains were full of people traveling hither and thither, to and from self-criticism sessions, group-think seminars, and anti-Confucius, anti-Antonioni, anti-Beethoven rallies. By 1987 the trains were full of people going to and from useful work. But as always, there is that other hand; or as the Germans say: “Why make things easy when they can be complicated.” China is enormously talented and culturally appealing, but it is also erratic and can be very cruel. Despite the elaborate rituals governing interpersonal relations at all levels of society, in that respect there are no shadings. Karaoke good fellowship can turn to violence just like that, for no apparent reason—to a Westerner at least. Throughout fifty years of communist rule China has

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been prone to bouts of mass hysteria. Unstableness has been in overt remission since 1978, belied in 1989 and again ten years later, and no one can be confident that maniacal outbursts will not occur again. Addressing weaknesses in the economic arena while leaving others—including those in politics, the party, culture, the restless “minority nationalities” (Muslim ones included), religions, and the millenarian movements—to the ministrations of factional struggles, discreet intra-elite purges, and Tiananmentype repressions by the army and the People’s Armed Police does little to change China’s reputation for unpredictability. In fact, throughout its history China has displayed an uncanny knack of messing things up when they were going well, and then having to wait several centuries for them to pick up. What would mess things up, but good, this time around would be a Chinese armed attack on Taiwan. Taipei allegedly leaked the news that if attacked by mainland China, it would bomb the huge Three Gorges Dam (an environmental atrocity). General Liu Yuan, son of the former president of China Liu Shaoqi, murdered during the Cultural Revolution, responded in an interview with China Youth Daily that an air strike by Taiwan would provoke a retaliation that would “blot out the sky and cover up the earth.”12 Armed conflict in the Taiwan Straits would not directly affect Europe but would bring in America, so the Taiwanese believe and the Chinese fear. Actually, China has been spending lavishly on the military since the mid-1980s, in large measure by purchasing from Russia arms, military technology, and assistance in expanding its own defense industry. According to the Congressional Research Service, since 1999 China has concluded arms import agreements in excess of $11 billion and in 2002 alone purchased abroad $3.6 billion of weapons systems. Other suppliers include the United Kingdom, the future “European Industrial Champion” EADS (owned by France, Germany, and Spain), and peaceloving Sweden.13 The third question: Does China threaten her neighbors in the short term? China says no. Whatever happens on her initiative, she insists, always results in win-win outcomes all around. China’s neighbors, down-at-heel Myanmar (Burma), a Cambodia still traumatized by memories of Khmer Rouge atrocities, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, which China in 1986 tried to “teach a lesson” by invading it (and failed), are of different opinion but are loath to voice it openly. Japan, uneasy about China’s military modernization and her recently acquired habit of launching missiles eastward

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across the sea (just experiments), does not say much either because it wants to continue doing business with China, and because in that part of the world people have long memories and history matters. They know that after World War II the Japanese were Swedefied and turned their attention to automotive, electronic, and high-fashion industries. But suspicions linger. Japan’s concern is both economic and military. Despite being very comfortably ahead of China in economic development and although in many ways the Japanese and Chinese economies are complementary, the Chinese are nibbling away at Japan’s global export markets, becoming increasingly assertive in their claims to oil reserves in disputed areas of the Sea of Japan, and solidifying their political influence in the region. The smaller nations fear economic dependence on and political domination by surging China. China’s push for an East Asian Economic Community (EAEC) sounds to the smaller neighbors more like a call for a Greater China Economic Commune than like something on the pattern of the European Economic Community. The groundwork for the EAEC is being laid by a spate of bilateral commercial treaties (for example, twenty-four treaties with Myanmar signed in March 2004), loans, and military agreements with Cambodia, which, the southeast Asian countries complain, but quietly, benefit mainly China’s exports. The dean of the Communist Party School in Beijing reassures anyone who will listen that “this is by no means a bid for hegemony.”14 Whatever it is not, it is an almost natural consequence of a rapidly expanding and modernizing Chinese economy, regrettably one with a democratic deficit.

29 9/11 and the War on Terrorism

Two hijacked airliners crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Soon thereafter, the Pentagon was struck by a third hijacked plane. A fourth hijacked plane, suspected to be bound for a high-profile target in Washington, crashed into a field in southern Pennsylvania. The attacks killed 3,025 U.S. citizens and other nationals. President Bush and Cabinet officials indicated Usama bin Laden was the prime suspect and that they considered the United States in a state of war with international terrorism. In the aftermath of the attacks, the United States formed the Global Coalition Against Terrorism.— U.S. Department of State

The viol ation of American home territory by Muslim terrorists was not only a gruesomely spectacular and traumatic event caught on television when it happened but also a turning point of history that will have incalculable consequences for the world. This last uncomplicated fact has not been fully comprehended, especially by the European Union. In Spain, a charter member of the original Global Coalition Against Terrorism, the response to its own 3/11, two and a half years after 9/11, was to blame America, excoriate the Spanish government for siding with the Americans on Iraq, replace the government with socialists, and hasta la vista amigos! The Spanish contingent of the Global Coalition was bused out of Iraq, and the extortionists won. Spain won a temporary reprieve and, like the Dutchbat, lost a great deal more. The clue as to who America thought was to blame and what unhesitatingly it was going to do 

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about it is to be found in the State Department’s penultimate flat sentence in the extract above, that Osama bin Laden was the prime suspect and that the United States considered itself to be in a state of war with international terrorism.1 Among other unsavory sentiments, Osama bin Laden has expressed his hope for “the disappearance of the United States and the infidel West.”2 Because of America’s and the West’s infidel beliefs and behavior (just being anti-American is not sufficient to exempt an infidel from that accursed category), there are no limits to intimidation, suicide bombings, kidnappings, torture, televised beheadings, and other unspeakable abominations. Short of prostrated surrender, there is no middle ground. The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed and crucified, or have their hands and feet and alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom; Save those who repent before ye overpower them. For know, the Allah is forgiving and merciful. (Koran, 5:33–34)3

Earlier, in my discussion of what it is to be an American, I inserted a warning just after the summary disquisition on the Americans’ big heart and decency: “But the core is hard, not to be trifled with.” That note of caution is for those who would do America harm. I should have added, and do so now with the aftermath of 9/11 in mind, that more than any other people, Americans mean what they say. The warning that Americans “do not like to be taken advantage of by those to whom friendship is only a value-in-use” is addressed to the schmoozers posing as friends and allies. Being fair, Americans give a second, even a third chance. But three strikes and you’re out. I sense that in the hearts and minds of Americans this multiplier is being revised downward. Let us now see how all this unfolds on the ground. The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (28 CFR, Section 0.85) defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian populations, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” What is meant here is terror from below (for example, Lenin and his mob before seizure of state power). It is an adequate, diplomatically phrased summary of what is involved, but religious objectives should be added to

9/11 and the War on Terrorism

the terrorists’ political aims in the Islamic jihad, Kashmir, the IRA and the Loyalists of Northern Ireland, as well as perversive racial/ethnic cleansings, like those of the Arab militias in Sudan or of the warring parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is not clear whether or not terror perpetrated by terrorist governments—terror from above, of which, sadly to say, there are numerous contemporary examples (including Leninist and Saddamist state power)—is included in the definition, for it displays some special characteristics. Like corruption, terrorism is not new. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, it is the world’s oldest profession, made much of in the Bible and the Koran. According to the U.S. Department of State,4 from 1961 through 2003 (forty-three years), a period that includes the Gulf War of 1990–1991, 245 significant terrorist acts were committed throughout the world by an array of groups, networks, and freelancing assassins, an average of 5.7 a year. Of these, 60 percent are attributable to Muslim causes and executioners, often acknowledged with pride by the perpetrators eager to squirrel away promised rewards in the Hereafter. In the period 1961–1999 (thirty-nine years), the total was 129, of which 38 percent were linked to Muslims. In the four years 2000–2003, major terrorist acts came to 116 (an average of 29 per year), close to 90 percent carried out by those Muslims who take seriously and literally the 5:33–34 injunction of the Koran and many others of like tenor. The number of deaths and mutilations per incident has risen steeply. It is imperative to take countermeasures right away to put an end to this savagery, give the murderers a one-way ticket to paradise or capture and bring them to justice, block off the funds that flow to them and their accomplices through the sewers of illegitimate international finance, and expose the fund-raisers and money launderers, be they mullahs, petty imams, sympathizers, profit-maximizing CEOs of financial houses, government officials, or international civil servants. In this endeavor, interstate cooperation and coordination of the efforts of antiterrorist intelligence services would be welcome. Since such essential teamwork is of necessity secretive, it is difficult to say for sure whether it has, in fact, materialized and, if so, how extensively, deeply, and effectively. What we do know is that homeland security and the relentless pursuit of terrorist cells and networks here and abroad have been high on the agenda of the U.S. government, to the accompaniment of the de rigueur chorus of laments, moanings and groanings, dire predictions of the end of days, outpourings

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of outrage and relativist ethics, and harassments from ad hoc coalitions of Cassandraic objectors, foreign and domestic, many of whom, along with their spiritual progeny, we have encountered already on our travels through the past sixty years, and who come up like mushrooms after a rain whenever resolute, determined, unwavering action has to be taken against what can be clearly identified as wicked by any self-respecting, life-affirming infidel. That is, however, how it is and should be in a peppy democracy. During a presidential election year the cantatas of complaints rise in an unmajestic crescendo. When the election results are in, people go back to work. This being said, it is necessary to concurrently explore the underlying social and other causes of terrorism’s moral deformity, so long as such etiological exercise does not distract from, or unilaterally and indefinitely suspend, the sovereign duty of swatting the swarms of the righteously fanatical and tearing the Ku Klux Klanish hoods off their heads. Urgently needed action cannot be deferred until the basic (approfondie; gründlich) research is completed, and thereafter submitted in a voluminous report (with dissenting addenda), in several languages, to the appropriate deliberative and executive organs of the world community, then waiting to see it tabled or adopted as resolutions, unanimously or by simple majority vote, with high expectation of inaction. Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic jihad, and multifarious other mugger lodges are unlikely to accept the recommendations. As for the research: We can dismiss the contention that the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11 had been plotted by the Jews, a view popular in the Arab world and on the demented fringe elsewhere, which partly overlaps with those who deny that the holocaust ever happened.5 Among the in-depth reasons for the Muslim terroristic jihad against the outside world that researchers have come up with are religion in which violence plays a prominent role, and within which intra-denominational tensions, enmities, and conflicts are common; frustrated and humiliated nationalism compounded by tribalism; a paranoid sense of being exploited and robbed of resources and territory (the last assuming the form of statelessness with the Palestinians and the Kurds) by Israel, the West, and each other; hatred of Israel and of everyone siding with it; deprivation (poverty); rampant chronic unemployment, among the young especially; and plain ignorance. If found to be generally valid, such root causes will be very

9/11 and the War on Terrorism

difficult to change or remove, because rational dialogue is not effective where minds are unreceptive or closed. But it is not impossible. Together with firm short-term measures to stop the indiscriminate killings, a longrange effort is needed to bypass the desperadoes and converse with and encourage those in the Muslim world whose interpretation of Islamic doctrines puts stress on mercy and forgiveness and the precious gift of human reason, rather than on barbarous punishment, ruination, and doom. But the conversion to civilized behavior must also come from within. We have been told repeatedly that the Chinese, encased in their millennial history of absolutist rule, know nothing about democracy; ergo, no country ruled by the Chinese can be democratic or, in a wider, more inclusive sense, modern. (See the Appendix.) Wrong. Taiwan is democratic and has a thriving market economy. Turkey has shed the more constrictive elements of Islamic instruction and secularized itself since the presidency of Kemal Atatürk (1923–1938), not enough to fulfill the human and civil rights criteria for entry into the European Union but at any rate sufficiently to be considered for membership—not just yet, but anon. So it can be done from inside, with persuasion and dissuasion from outside.

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30 Lessons

1. I had a physician once, who when consulted on matters of moment demanding immediate professional intervention, alleviation, possibly even cure, would counsel me to let nature take its course—and charge me for it. I interpreted this advice to mean that we should part. I think that as Americans, after due consideration, not rashly, we should part on good terms from those who give us poor advice, not because they wish us ill (sometimes that too), but by reason of incompetence, laziness, indifference, ennui, troubles at home, or whatnot. In international relations, as in market transactions, you do not do what you do because you want to be popular; only insecure juveniles do that in school and (used to) get in trouble. You do it because, on grounds of rationality and in good conscience, it is what you should do for the country. Being a unipolar superpower, the more outstanding your achievements and sterling your behavior, the more you risk becoming, in the schoolroom analogy, a threat, a teacher’s pet. To be applauded by the general assembly of nations, so long as the rogues abstain, is nice; it’s a good thing, but not necessary. Friendship is good too, a precious human bond, the next best thing to home, which, as you know, is where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in. The perceptions, perspectives, and interests of America and some of her onetime friends— participes curarum (sharers of cares) to the Romans—have diverged in the natural course of time—as my erstwhile doctor would have put it—to the point of conflicting strategic interests that no amount of official chers amis events can paper over. So let us shake 

Lessons

hands with those who, as Benjamin Franklin found out back in 1770, “never speak of us but with evident malice,” bid Godspeed to our once companions, and go our separate ways in a collegial spirit of concord, with goodwill to all and malice toward none, in friendliness, but no longer in friendship. We can respect their views, no problem; we can consult, cooperate, work, wine and dine (preferably in France), and have a jolly good time together, leaving, however, a large empty private space between us, where once, we thought, friendship resided. This is not a counsel of isolation or despair but only one of prudence. You take the high road, and we’ll take the low road, and we’ll be at the peace gates afore ye. 2. In the six decades explored here—a quarter or thereabouts of United States history—America has resisted and conquered the onslaught of two philosophical and institutional evils: fascism in its most venomous strains of German Nazism and Japanese Imperialism, and communism in the most debased form of the Soviet imperium. In the process, America has restored liberty to millions of enserfed people in Europe and Asia, sown the seeds of democracy in parts of the world where absolutism had always been the rule, and promoted the economic system of capitalism (appropriately modified to suit local conditions and cultural sensitivities), a modernizing arrangement of free markets that has produced the greatest upsurge of material well-being for the greatest number of ordinary people in the shortest time known to history. From these ideological and armed confrontations, America has emerged internally more assured in its identity; open as always; more cosmopolitan, just, and efficient; stronger. Indeed, economically, scientifically, technologically, politically, culturally, and militarily, it is the single most influential country in the world—the world’s unique unipolar superpower. But it is not thereby safe from danger. Since the Khomeni revolution of 1979, a decade before the downfall of Soviet communism, and for a quarter of century now, America has faced a third disrupter of world peace and civilized order, a hydra-headed, monstrously cruel, ruthless, and elusive enemy who knows no reason and presents itself in the ubiquitous form of nihilistic Arab-Islamic terrorism that, after a failed attempt in 1993, reached our shores from the skies, on target in Lower Manhattan, on September 11, 2001. The American response was immediate, awesome in its retaliatory and preemptive military power, and politically constructive. In Afghanistan it eliminated the fulcrum of an abhorrent regime responsible for harboring

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The American Way of Peace

and training the Al-Qaeda operatives responsible for the crime, and in Iraq, where an odious autocrat and his perverted satrap sons perpetrated atrocities on their neighbors and their own people, of a loathsomeness that puts Auschwitz’s “Dr.” Mengele to shame, it removed a vile Keeper of the Rack from power and laid the ground for freedom from mass graves, as someone aptly put it. In both places, on American initiative, with help from a smaller than global coalition of the willing, began the laying of the groundwork for transition to a democratic alternative in a region where this had never existed, not even in the Garden of Eden.1 The means were appropriate, as was the conviction in the nobility and rightness of the vision that is at the core of the American conception of peace with freedom through resolute implantation of “organic and self-developing” democracy.2 Those at home and abroad—the visionless, ends-only realists, liberal internationalist dreamers, and unreconstructed 68ers — who see in such undertaking only arrogance, naive idealism, and a hegemon’s extraordinary hubris, but offer no better alternative other than Annanization, need to be reminded that “[t]he spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests,”3 and that, on the evidence of the past sixty years, that interest correlates with the rising well-being and expansion of the realm of freedom in the world. 3. Just as it is advisable to carefully pick your friends—the company you keep—so it is necessary to ration one’s enemies, and the tools to be employed in dealing with them. The tyrants of this world are not in short supply, and more are being conceived and nurtured as we speak, in the Middle East, Hamburg, and other places. It would be unwise to take them all on at once, or employ identical weapons in dealing with them. But taken on they have to be; confronted head-on, and removed by the only power capable of doing this without flinching, although with a medley of protestive noises in its political wings. At the most general level, in arriving at decisions, there has to be multidimensional thinking: a consideration of alternative courses of action, of differing time frames, of acceptable other means, of potential side effects, and of the law of unintended consequences popularly (but in the present state of the classics, perhaps not that popularly anymore) known as the Pandora’s box effect, or the morning-after surprise. Such thinking has to be illuminated by factual information drawn from overt and covert sources, the latter, not exclusively but more signifi-

Lessons

cantly than heretofore, obtained from people on the ground (humintel) who speak the language, know the area, and understand the culture. The same goes for analysis and interpretation of the raw data. 4. America has dealt with global terrorism, albeit mostly of the statesponsored variety, twice in the last century, very successfully from a historical perspective: the net balance has been positive for America and the world. When grappling with escalating global terrorism from below, we do not have the convenience of evaluating our actions from afar and lack the soothing effect on our emotions of such historical distance. We live within history in the making. We try this and that, argue, and criticize, especially criticize, especially in election years, and look for instant, preferably perfect, answers, which in reality are as rare as winning lottery tickets. Memory tells us that the challenges we face now we have met many times before in a different but not incomparable context, and one of equally extreme gravity. We overcame them then and we shall do so now, alone if need be. For the wages of inaction by America is the vacuous vacuum of disunited nations and of the meddling middle powers on the axis of Europe.

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Appendix Modernization and Modernity in the Process of Economic Growth and Development

Outline of Argument

I

re g a rd m o d e r n i z at i o n through economic growth and development as historically a Western process without precedent outside its own tradition, conceived, elaborated, and applied in Western Europe and North America in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and subsequently extended with varying degrees of success, by a variety of means (copying and free riding included), to other parts of the world. Following Manning Nash, I regard it as an ongoing, “inherently unfinished business”1 of replacing or reshaping one set of values, attitudes, incentives, and institutions with another set that is most often at odds with the prevailing culture, and consequently makes the changeover painful for some social classes, particularly the former elites whose legitimation by lineage, caste, wealth, charisma, supernatural anointment, or successful revolution, allegedly representing historical necessity, is put to question. They usually experience significant welfare losses as a class but not always as individuals, a fact recently illustrated by the proliferation of successful “biznessmeni”— communist party capitalists—in postsocialist Russia, East-Central Europe, and mainland China. Although some of the “new” values, attitudes, incentives, and institutions have existed in premodern times (for example, the utilitarian drive

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Appendix

to improve one’s own condition, money, and private property),2 modernization weaves them into a systemic fabric with a distinctly economic, here-and-now usage. I see modernization as the “technical” or positive, relatively computable component of an ideally more comprehensive phenomenon that includes the normative, not easily quantifiable notion of modernity, or what it all means in moral terms. Modernization refers primarily to wealth; modernity to well-being or “virtue.”3 I identify wealth promotion with the market system (capitalism) and argue that modernization without or with significantly lagging modernity represents an unstable equilibrium, a social pathology no less, which if not corrected can lead to breakdowns or reversals of modernization (demodernization). Post-1978 China, Japan in the 1930s, Nazi Germany, Peronista and post-Peronista Argentina, and contemporary Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia may be cited as examples of partial modernization with lagging, little, or no modernity. These instances should be clearly distinguished from such modernizing dead-ends as Maoism, Castroitis, Sukarno’s Indonesian Merdeka, and Kim Il-sung’s North Korean Chollima and Chuche. While recognizing the frequent existence of a gap between modernization and modernity, I argue that this gap is bridgeable and must be bridged if modernization is to be made to serve humane ends. Indeed, as I indicate in the penultimate section, some key components of market modernization are a necessary condition of and can promote modernity, but not automatically and inevitably. In some instances causality runs the other way, as when the introduction of political pluralism enables the denationalization and reprivatization of segments of a formerly state-owned economy. Modernization For expositional purposes modernization may be classified into four partly overlapping and interacting categories of indices: those dealing with philosophy and attitudes, economic and social structure, technology, and demographics. Within each category certain indices are more amenable to statistical representation than others.

Moderniz ation and Modernit y

Philosophy and Attitudes Rationality and personal inventive action. Modernization requires a change in cognition, a shift away from seeing the world of everyday experience (“nature,” “reality”) through the prism of mysticism, mythology, emotionalism, passion, fantasy, sentimentality, romanticism, drama, trance, metaphor, analogy, hallucination, millenarianism, ritualism, utopianism, portents, omens, divinations, dreams, and revelations—a change from regarding the here and now as an epiphenomenon, “a mask behind which all the really important events [take] place,”4 to the view that the world of everyday experience is capable of providing its own interpretation, that this interpretation can be discovered and comprehended by man, and that to a considerable extent it can be consciously shaped by him; a transition to what in the Manifesto Marx and Engels disparagingly refer as “personal inventive action.” The change is from regarding man as the object of unexplainable superior exogenous forces to which he has to submit, their defenseless plaything, “a mere cork dancing on a current he cannot control,” to investing him with the capacity to direct his own affairs. Openness, secularism, fluidity, and freedom. The knowledgeable intervention of man in all spheres of his worldly endeavor is made possible by resort to exploratory, rational modes of thinking that use testable, organized information, or science (not séance). It relies on reason and logic rather than intuition, seeks out causal relations, adopts the secular outlook, emphasizes pragmatism, personal responsibility and accountability, questioning, debate and dialogue, and thrives on restless curiosity unbounded by ritualistically sanctified taboos, on intellectual ferment, experiment, openness, resourcefulness, receptivity to novelty, challenges to and reformulations of established concepts, fluidity of ideas, and unceasing change. It draws its intellectual sustenance from sources other than ethereal antiphonaries or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The “[modern] intellectual world is . . . a voluntary system. Its central creed is that opinions are to be formed from free discussion on the basis of full disclosure of evidence. Fraud and coercion are equally repugnant to the scholar. Freedom of thought is preserved by open competition of scholars and ideas.”5 Economic applications. Modernization attributes importance to counting time, the timely performance of tasks (“being on time”), and what might

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Appendix

be called contractual conscience, that is, strict adherence to contract terms voluntarily entered into, and backed—in case of lapsus—by contract and tort law. Increased attention is given to addressing and resolving mundane economic problems, to the application of science and technology to that end, and to self-discipline and efficiency in bringing it about. Economic thought is accorded legitimacy, indeed a measure of prestige (which, however, it has to continually re-earn), exemplified by the emergence of an autonomous economic science separate from moral philosophy. Economic exchange relationships are depersonalized, that is, delinked from traditional hierarchical networks of interpersonal favors, tributes, obligations, and subservience. Occupational rigidity due to professional heredity is abated. Economic and Social Structure Institutional transparency and informational accuracy. Fluidity of ideas and the attention given to economic thought and exchange relationships require institutional transparency, that is, uninhibited access by all transactors to information regarding supply costs, demand preferences, and relative scarcities; in other words, the elimination of secrecy and opacity from the economic structure. This shared information must be accurate (not based on rumor, gossip, or wishful thinking) and couched in universally understandable numerical language that synthesizes all relevant dimensions of economic conduct in a single mathematical expression that we call market price. Monetization. The free flow of factual information on costs, utilities, and relative scarcities is greatly promoted by monetization of the economy. Primitive and restrictive systems such as War Communism, Maoism, and Stalinist and neo-Stalinist “classical” socialism barterize the economy by abolishing or significantly reducing money’s role as means of exchange, store of value, and economizing unit of account. They thereby raise search costs by necessitating the double coincidence of wants and precise timing of transactions, and increase storage costs by temporarily housing purchasing power in commodities rather than in intangible monetary claims.6 Assertions of scientific validity notwithstanding, the Marxist aim of a moneyless system is a manifestation of utopianism incompatible with modernization. Under classical socialism, money loses both internal and exter-

Moderniz ation and Modernit y

nal convertibility. Domestically, money is tied up in horizontally nontransferable, administratively determined budgetary boxes (for example, investment money is not convertible into wages money), thus inhibiting the rational substitution of factors of production. Because of low priority accorded to the production of consumer goods, taut planning, and builtin excess demand everywhere, money is also most of the time inconvertible into consumer and producer goods; it cannot buy anything, not even officials with access to such goods, unless it is “hard” dollar, yen, or euromoney. Externally, the national currency is not convertible into foreign currencies.7 Market price coordination and optimization. Money prices emerging from voluntary, lateral, competitive8 offers and demands in the market enable buyers and sellers to calculate the opportunity costs of their decisions (profits or losses for sellers) and thus to optimize the use of scarce resources and products—to allocate them efficiently, that is, rationally. Internationally, optimization takes the form of comparative advantage based on a worldwide division of labor and calculated by reference to world market prices. The more active the money, the more unequivocal is the efficiency signal function of prices, and allocative efficiency, the avoidance of waste, is at the center of the notion of modernization. The classical socialist system of administratively set producer and consumer prices is premodern in the sense that it disseminates no useful information at all regarding the substitutability of input and output alternatives (allocative optimization). It does not even perform the function for which it was originally intended, that is, of a backup financial weighting system to arrive at administratively determined and commanded aggregate volume targets. Private property and autonomy of transactors. Private property — the vesting of broad legal rights to the use, transfer, and residual income from things, in individuals and voluntary associations of individuals (firms, corporations, partnerships, cooperatives) created in response to the requirements of exchange—and the protection of those rights from detailed and extensive state regulation (autonomy of transactors) are the indispensable conditions for the creation, operation, and preservation of market price coordination, that is, for communicating through money prices. “The crucial point,” says Hayek, “is that prior development of several [private] property is indispensable for the development of trading, and thereby for the formation of larger, coherent and cooperating structures, and for the

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Appendix

appearance of those signals we call prices.”9 Give me that which I want, and you shall have that which you want. I can give you this because it is mine, and you can give me that because it is yours, and we shall exchange our private property rights according to the regard we each have for our own interest synthesized in money prices. Kornai’s argument in favor of private property centers on the spontaneous motivational function of such property, that is, on private property’s built-in incentive to its holders to take risks (engage in entrepreneurial action), use resources efficiently, and take good care of assets.10 Industrialization, postindustrialization, and the role of government. Although the old stage theory or Stufenlehre (from List to Marx to Rostow), with its upward-bound economic stages, contains a fair share of silliness, it does point to the need for sequential changes in a modernizing economy’s sectoral—agrarian-industrial-services—balance, and within each sector for continual improvements and refinements of knowledge, skills, organization, and techniques, the precondition for which is investment in human capital, or education, both literacy and numeracy, for both sexes, a task that devolves in large measure on government—how large a measure being a matter for argument. Transitions toward higher productivity and higher value-added activities (industrialization and postindustrialization) are closely related to the allocation of resources to high-yield investments. From the perspective of modernization, the choices involved in this investment, or dynamic optimization, should by right rely heavily on the signals emitted by workably competitive money market prices. Changes in the sectoral balance, including changes in the occupational structure of employment (from self-employment, to wage employment, to higher-skill occupations), even though they lend themselves to selective manipulation by growth-oriented governments, should not be imposed through the purposeful neglect or outright exploitation of one sector, profession, or trade for the benefit of another. This, among other errors and horrors, was the undoing of the socialist system, which built its soon-to-be obsolete heavy industry on the backs of a deliberately exploited peasantry (“squeezing blood out of a turnip,” as Stalin graphically put it). Where, as in post– World War II East Asia (until 1978 mainland China excluded), governments have successfully participated in the developmental process, such purposeful intervention has tended to be generally market-conforming and market-augmenting, carefully delimited in its attempt to correct per-

Moderniz ation and Modernit y

ceived market failures, and characterized by a changing mix of mutually reinforcing policy feedbacks—by “pragmatic flexibility.”11 In addition to helping basic education, among the more important legitimate functions of modernizing, market-friendly government is to encourage and protect through relevant legislation effective, secure (not fraudulent), and stable financial — including credit and risk — systems that make it possible for money and market prices to perform their allocative and incentive tasks. It is also, as the post–World War II experiences of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan demonstrate, to initiate and carry through nonviolent, nonpunitive land redistributions benefiting rural entrepreneurs (land to the tiller), support small and medium labor-intensive, often export-oriented industries that put to productive use the latent market and entrepreneurial talents of urban and rural residents and expand the extent of the market (Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea), and to supply some portion of basic infrastructural services in the housing and public health areas (Hong Kong, Singapore). The overall objective of such government interventions is to ensure that income generated by growth is equitably shared, not so much by altering market outcomes through fiscal redistributions — a procedure that, unless carefully calibrated, risks extinguishing incentives to work, save, and invest — but by increasing and expanding the competitive market system’s natural propensity to provide everyone at the outset with rough equality of opportunity to earn income and accumulate wealth.12 Technology and Science Technological innovation is one of the principal driving forces of modernization. It comprises three elements: compression of time, miniaturization of volume, and expansion of conceptual values. Compression of time. In the simplest terms, compression of time means instant availability of information worldwide at decreasing unit cost conveyed in internationally comprehensible mathematical-symbolic language, on an ongoing (“online”) feedback basis, and the ability to extend memory, store a rapidly expanding volume of past data in ever smaller physical spaces, instantly retrieve the ones needed, and combine them with present knowledge and models of simulated future events from a wide and expanding variety of separate and distinct knowledge sources — a drive

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tantamount to synthesizing the past, present, and future into timelessness. The “scientific codification of modern engineering and the detailed specifications and documentation that must accompany the use of automation and computers in design and production, greatly decrease the training time needed to absorb a new technology,”13 and hence speed up technological diffusion. Underlying the miniaturization of time is the widespread and spreading application of new, always newer, processes and methods in phonetics, fiber optics, semiconductors, digital electronics, integrated circuits, microprocessors, high-temperature engines, carbon-fiber composites, fine ceramics, and so on.14 Accelerated innovation and its rapid spread both stimulate competition and drive down the cost per unit and are themselves driven by pressure from all corners of the world to be at the cutting edge of competition not only in terms of cost but, above all, in their precise fit to customer requirements with regard to design, appearance, precision, quality, timely delivery, and prompt, reliable after-delivery service.15 Miniaturization of volume. Miniaturization of volume means making an object smaller without decreasing its efficiency: the compression of space needed for the generation, storage, conveyance, and processing of intelligence, the transportation of physical goods over long distances, and for the goods themselves, in volume as well as weight. Technically, the downsizing, strengthening, and lightening of goods has been made possible by quantum jumps in materials science and engineering. It should be noted that progress in this field goes beyond miniaturization and other significant alterations of existing materials. More important for the future, it permits a qualitative shift from processing (changing the shape, composition, and function) of natural resources in order to satisfy user needs, to creating, from scratch, completely new manmade materials (such as carbon-fiber composites) to meet specific complex and rapidly changing demands in dispersed markets, with far-reaching implications for the future development of natural resource–poor economies, particularly where such materials are created from renewable natural resources used by existing industries such as textiles. In this respect the materials revolution is akin to the revolutionary changes in biogenetics. Expansion of conceptual values. The downsizing of economic goods has been made possible by increased substitution of ideas for physical volume, the progressive replacement of physical goods by conceptual values that now account for a significant and rapidly rising share of modern

Moderniz ation and Modernit y

economies’ real output value and employment. In the United States, for example, services contribute close to 60 percent of gross national product (GNP), a share expected to grow to 70 percent by the turn of the century [2000], while manufacturing and agricultural employment devoted to the production of tangible goods now stand respectively at 15 and less than 2 percent of the labor force. Conceptual values are “created by new scientific insights and knowledge”—in other words, by ideas or advanced cultural technologies.16 They are composed, as noted above, of high valueadded (“up-market”), low volume (“intangible”) specialized (“customized”), increasingly knowledge- and skill-intensive services. Technology, science, and economics. The close association of technological and economic change—of technology, science, and economics—in the process of modernization is clear. Five effects of the compression of time, miniaturization of volume, and expansion of conceptual values on the economy should be noted. The first effect is to transform the output structures and procedures of modern economies. Increasingly and insistently, supply is tailored to the precise and volatile needs of buyers through the application of specialized knowledge to production, market-segmented distribution, and financing. Some (for example, Alvin Toffler) see in this the emergence (or reemergence) of a personalized craftsmanship of the mind, a demassification that reduces the once important advantages of economies of scale derived from mass-produced standardized goods and long capital-intensive production runs and mass markets born of the Industrial Revolution, analyzed by Karl Marx, and put into practice by Henry Ford. A second effect is to transform the genetic encoding of international trade from a relatively leisurely exchange of physical bulks to the frenetic, almost instantaneous, electronic transmission of impalpable economic values: of data, designs, analyses, models, strategies, claims, insights of all kinds, and electronic monies, including digital cash, which allows online financial transactions to be carried out with near-total anonymity. A third effect is on labor mobility. Lower cost and easier and much speedier access to information give people greater freedom and flexibility in their choice of residence and employment. The last two will increasingly tend to be synonymous because of the possibility of hooking up personal computers to markets, databases, and the organizations for which individuals work.

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A fourth effect is on labor cost, and hence on the cost advantages that producers can reasonably expect to derive from moving their plants to offshore locations with comparatively (albeit ephemerally) low labor cost. In a world of rapid transfer of high value-added impalpables, the share of labor expense diminishes as a component of total manufacturing cost and represents today only a small part of such cost. This has perilous implications for the comparative advantage, as conventionally calculated, of relatively low labor cost, developing economies. (Conventional calculation ignores “efficiency wages” that take into account the educational ability and motivation or demotivation of nominally low-cost workers to perform the tasks required of them.) The fifth effect is on the state’s protectionist role as guardian of the gates and enforcer of the law. Because international trade is dominated, increasingly so, by very fast multilateral transfers all over the globe of data, analyses, contracts, and money claims, intervention in this swirling international market by slow-moving national state bureaucracies that react to often contradictory domestic special interests would seem prima facie to become more difficult to implement. In the spring of 1989 daily foreign exchange trading worldwide, which had doubled in just three years, came to more than U.S. $500 billion. By comparison, the annual volume of world merchandise trade in 1987 was $2.5 trillion; that is, five days’ trade in fast-moving impalpables was equivalent to one year’s trade in more easily controlled physical goods. The increasing technical feasibility of computer anonymity (diffusing anonymous and untraceable messages through cyberspace via computer remailers, pseudonyms, and secret coding) raises vexing questions of freedom of expression; of the right to privacy in a time of massive collection of computerized personal, financial, medical, and other information on individuals; and of the oversight responsibilities of governments and the governments’ ability to carry out these tasks. If, for example, “total anonymity becomes the model for a cyberspace cash system you open the door to push-button money laundering, copyright violations, fraud, and other potential abuses. Tax collection becomes a problem, and it’s harder to track down crimes.”17 Even in the most modernized economies, telegraph-era laws have not caught up with the computer age, and billions of dollars’ worth of software are traded (pirated) each year on a worldwide black market. Productivity-driven growth. The application to production of improving

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technology, business management, incentives, and skills, within a competitive market system, translates into modernization of economic growth. Modern “intensive” growth is generated by increases in factor productivity. It is generally accompanied by the diminished importance of traditional (and classical socialist) “extensive” sources of growth that consist in the addition of factors of production. Demographics The constituent elements of modernization’s demographic transition, of changes in family patterns, are: a decline in death rates and birth rates (declining fertility) resulting in lowered rates of natural population increase; greater longevity; a transition from extended family, kin, and clan ties to the nuclear family (a phenomenon partly tied to urbanization, which is another indicator of modernization); free choice of marriage partner by mutual agreement of the parties directly involved in the marriage (that is, a decline of arranged marriages); a narrowing in ages between husband and wife;18 more democratic structure (less paternalistic verticality) of family governance; and birth of the first child later after marriage than in earlier times—or, increasingly, before marriage. “Without stakes in familial property, without major economic skill transfer within the kinship unit, and with other agencies of socialization (school, job, peers, etc.) that provide the major means of social location, the family cannot be the central locus of attachment.”19 In fact, the modern family as a basic social institution and (perhaps sometimes overidealized) repository of moral values is subjected to great stress and, in the most modernized countries, evident signs of decomposition. In this as in some other respects (for example, the intrusion of economic calculation into interpersonal relations, or how much is my friend worth in money terms?), modernization clashes with modernity. Modernity Whereas the Wealth of Nations focuses on the mechanics of wealth creation, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and his jurisprudence are concerned with the civility, urbanity, propriety, grace, and integrity of that creation, the gentility of manners, the morality of wealth distribution, and the aesthetics of it all. In the pursuit of development, modern economic

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thought and policy have been, by and large, unconcerned with the dissolution of manners or the declension of decency, grace, gentility, and decorum and quite uninterested in “the soft, the amiable virtues of candid condescension and indulgent humanity. . . those milder virtues” of empathy and compassion that are the components of modernity. While the civilizing influence of rising consumption has been wrongly disparaged by critics of the market system and belittled by them as “neon aesthetics,” it is, I think, undeniable that even the most rapid and efficient growth of wealth, income, and consumption tells only part of the story; the most powerful part, but not necessarily the most important. The political, civil, civic, and ethical dimensions of modern life skirted by mainstream economic theory and development policy need to be considered if the “harmony of society” is to be more than an impractical abstraction.20 This is as much as to say that the behavioral attributes of modernization cataloged earlier have their limitations; that in enriching, they often impoverish. The erroneous impression has been created, says Hayek, “that only that which is rationally justifiable, only that which is provable by observational experiment, only that which can be experienced, only that which can be surveyed, deserves belief; that all else must be repudiated” as irrational, nonempirical, nonpositivist, and nonutilitarian.21 It is the purpose of modernity to help redress the balance and minister to the soul. Modernity, I would argue, deals at one level with the inner self, the interior life, and at another with the polis. It involves four things: fairness, rule of law, democracy/civil society, and character. Fairness In the developmental context, the notion of fairness, equity, or distributive justice can be approached from two sides. The first emphasizes outcomes and focuses on the positive association between growth of product and declining inequality in the distribution of income with resulting reduction in poverty. Quintile analysis (the ratio of the income shares of the richest fifth to the poorest fifth of the population), the Gini coefficient, and the Lorenz curve are used to measure and illustrate distributional inequality. With some qualifications (South Korea in certain years comes to mind), rapid growth with declining inequality has been typical of Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Indonesia, from

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the mid-1960s through the late 1980s. The band of high performers includes countries with very interventionist but market-supportive governments like South Korea’s, and actively noninterventionist, relatively laissezfaire ones like Hong Kong’s. The outcomes approach to equity is not synonymous with striving for an equal sharing of the fruits of growth. Rather, it represents a prudential preference for less inequality, or avoidance of very large, socially and politically, perhaps morally, destabilizing income and wealth differentials. In terms of incomes policy it usually, but not invariably (an exception is Hong Kong), involves governmental measures of fiscal redistribution. Because alteration of outcomes is for the most part motivated by extraeconomic (social, political, moral) considerations, the economic question of how far redistribution (which some regard as legislated theft) can be carried without eroding or destroying market incentives to effort, risk-taking, and accumulation (as in post–World War II, Labour Party Britain) poses itself at all times. Welfare economics does not provide clear answers to this question. The second approach to equity, favored by most of the high-performing economies of East Asia, focuses on rough equality of opportunity at the outset. It sees that outset not as a fixed post in terms of income, wealth, and bargaining power distribution, but as a moving point that could become a revolving door, depending on what one does with the opportunities that are presented. In other words, this approach to equity is concerned with ensuring that market competition—the presence of alternatives—is not impaired, indeed, that it be enlarged, and hence that all, from the start, have roughly the same shot at upward mobility and income earning in accord with their respective marginal contributions to production as determined by the market calculus—the market adjudged just share as set by free bargaining. The two approaches are not incompatible, but whereas the first emphasizes market deficiencies, the second relies on the market system’s built-in capacity to provide everyone, through competition, with reasonably equal access to income-earning opportunities—put differently, with realizable hope. Rule of Law Fairness in the expanded sense of decency and fair play enters into the concept of the rule of law, legal order, or ordered liberty. The reign of law

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is not the same as positive laws (although the presence of laws is indispensable to it) because rule of law raises the question of justice and the morality of man-made laws; that is, it posits the possibility of moral knowledge. Hitler, Stalin, and other criminals had laws but no legal order.22 Mao dispensed with both: wufa wutian (without law, without god). Justice comprises due process, the right of redress, and juridical equality, that is, equal applicability of and equal protection under the law. The morality of laws means that people are treated with human dignity. The troubling question is where that dignity comes from. One answer is that it comes from God, or—for those uncomfortable with theocentrism—from Natural Law, which Hume divorced from God and Bentham, some say, killed with Utility.23 In natural-law tradition, “natural law represents the ultimate objective foundation by reference to which positive laws must be evaluated,” and postulates an intelligible design, that is, the existence of a preexisting intelligence.24 In an age of unfaith, the answer to the question of the origin of human rights, of the idea that each life is inviolable and no life is unworthy, that “human nature is constant and moral truths are permanent”25 quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, is no longer axiological but turns rather on considerations of convenience and expediency. That, one might say, is very thin ice on which to skate to shared wealth. But those distrustful of moral absolutism on grounds of religious prejudice, and fearful of conformism and uncompromising allegiance to Virtue, argue that, all things considered, the utilitarian approach to moral norms, where morality is a matter of opinion, probably causes on balance less human pain, grief, and suffering than did competing, often irreconcilable interpretations and applications, through religious wars and other abnormities, of Divine edicts taken on faith.26 They prefer “a norm that emerges from society and is imposed on no one . . . a virtue that produces superiority by consent and without command: the virtue of the society that is suspicious of virtue.”27 “Values,” they say, “are not discovered, they are created; not found, but made by an act of imaginative creative will, as works of art, as policies, plans, patterns of life are created.”28 Still, one comes away unsatisfied from this intellectual confrontation with the apparently unanswerable “Good? Yes; but good for what?”—complaining of spiritual disorder, normless societies, absence of permanent things, desultory and interchangeable standards, nihilistic deconstruction,

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behavior unconstrained by any limits set by abiding values, and an ethic of circumstantial grays that seem to impoverish the notion of modernity and diminish the worth of modernization. Democracy and Civil Society Democracy (or polyarchy—“high” democracy) is individual freedom circumscribed by personal responsibility, and institutionalized in the representative government of a national or regional community—a messy bundle of compromises much of the time, but not chaotic, as some actual or incubating “new authoritarians” would have one persuaded. It is a situation that subsumes legal order, instrumentally one in which every adult has a chance to choose—that is, vote in a genuine political competition— and has enough civil rights to make the choice meaningful. I would argue, moreover, that two indispensable elements of the modernity of democracy are limited government (that is, overall limits placed on and separation of powers applied to the always potentially tyrannical, albeit necessary, “social apparatus of coercion and compulsion”) and adherence to the principle of subsidiarity, which requires that “none of the polity’s tasks . . . be assigned to a body larger than the smallest that can satisfactorily perform it.”29 Although a plausible case can be made that strong, authoritarian, marketsupportive governments have been in some instances (Bismarckian and Wilhelmian Germany; Taiwan, South Korea in the past; currently Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and mainland China) associated with economic success, there are many more examples of such governments being paired with economic stagnation or decline: “If dictators made countries rich, Africa would be an economic colossus.”30 Moreover, under one-man rule the market system is vulnerable to human mortality and the uncertainty of succession. “For the long-run health of capitalism . . . democracy, with its methods of peaceful succession, is . . . a necessary condition.”31 On balance, democracy works best for economic growth (and hence for opportunity of personal material advancement without envy), a proposition that has been demonstrated both descriptively and by application of econometric techniques to the direction of causation (determining whether democracy affects economic growth or the other way round). Democracy applies to the public life of societies and deals with the

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aggregation of individual choices in a political futures market where voters elect candidates who promise to deliver public goods in the future. Its necessary, private, grassroots obverse is found in the notion and institutions of civil society: the coming together of individuals in voluntarily constituted, autonomous (that is, independent of the state) associations for the conduct of affairs and the attainment of purposes specific to them—the myriads of gutsy groups and private communities, large and small, that free people set up, maintain, and re-create in all areas of life, through which they express aspects of their personalities, and which, together with private property, help preserve and protect the cultivation of private life and act to limit the fearsome power that is the modern state.32 Character It has often been said that it really is of importance not only what men do but also what manner of men they are who do it. It is not a matter only of the substance of modern attitudes discussed earlier, and of the competence in implementing decisions, but of character. Modern attitudes and skills can be acquired by living in a competitive market environment, and they can be learned through schooling in science, technology, accounting, business management, and differential calculus. Character, the “inner check,” comes primarily from within, although formal moral education at an early age and in an environment of wholesome values does make the crucial difference. In regard to the formulation and implementation of public policy, the professionalism and personal integrity of the technocratic elites have to be nourished by insulating the civil service from outside pressures and the lure of lucre by means of merit-based competitive recruitment and promotion, compensation that is comparable to that which can be earned in the private sector, ample reward for achievement, and strictly enforced dismissal for cause. Even the most carefully devised mechanisms of bureaucratic insulation, however, fail in the absence of an endogenous code of honorable behavior and internalized immanent values that transcend the whimsy of mere convenience.33 Honesty is not the best policy; honesty is best. In this respect, traditional cultural norms can help (perhaps some part of the Confucian ethic) or hinder the process of character building.34

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Reconciling Modernization with Modernity It is possible, but not desirable from the standpoint of their well-being, for adult people to live in a modernized system lacking modernity, to lead a life of tutelage, intellectual villeinage, and overgrown infantilism, just as it is possible, but not recommended, for them to live in a polluted physical environment. Fortunately, some powerful components of modernization attract elements of modernity as here understood. Similarly, some elements of modernity promote modernization. How Modernization Attracts Modernity Possible spillover effects of money and market prices. To recall: unlike passive administrative or political prices, which are unidimensional measuring rods, free relative market prices are the synthetic expressions of all available competing alternative courses of action or ends to which traded scarce resources can be put at any point in time. They readjust spontaneously and kaleidoscopically in concert with changes in the underlying combinations of cost and utility conditions, which they register arithmetically in monetary terms. Contrary to what happens in centrally planned administrative systems of command, in the modern economy money market prices, supplies, demands, outputs, and quality are simultaneously determined. As systemic informational instruments, such prices perform an integrative and optimizing function. Granted. But they also contain the seeds of two political-civic functions that have to do with modernity. These noneconomic potentials of money market prices may materialize, but there is no guarantee that they will, no inherent automaticity or historical determinism to the process—merely an improvement of the odds. Money, it has been said, has the same color. In a monetized system, anyone with money has, in principle, mobility and access to goods. Also, “people making money. . . aren’t worried about differences in culture.”35 As a device to ration who gets what, money is more democratic than party or religious affiliation, skin color, or national origin, provided there are no structural breakdowns or exogenous obstacles to individuals’ earning money income and one is not dealing with subnational tribalism (as in ex-Yugoslavia) that rejects all reasoned discourse. Given the permeability of the border between economics and politics, to

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monetize the rationing device is to introduce germs of democracy into the economic system with the possibility and, indeed, high probability, but no guarantee, that they might penetrate the political and civic spheres. Similarly, the indispensable condition for the emergence of money market prices is voluntariness of transactions, or freedom disciplined by competition. In a real sense, money is, as Dostoevski put it, “coined freedom.” This freedom could expand into the domains of politics and civic life. But there is no inevitability about the promise; just better chances of its actually happening. The flexibility of money market prices, factor prices included, subsumes the free migration of people, goods, and capital to places, callings, and ventures that provide the “best”—that is, the highest—returns. The value put on mobile (some would say rootless) labor according to labor’s marginal contribution to production—the “justice” sensu stricto of the market calculus—can spill over into the sphere of status or social ranking, flattening hierarchies, rejecting notions of social phylogenetic constraint, and breaching ancient walls and newer ones erected by Marxist class analysis. The money market price-driven class reformulation reinforces the essential dynamism and fluidity of modernization and its emphasis on economic producers and achievers (economic meritocracy). Nevertheless, the path away from traditional social divisions can lead to new ones based in large measure on the willingness and relative ability of individuals and communities to absorb and adapt to the information revolution. New classes of information haves and have-nots, an informationage elitism and peonage, could arise magnified by the need to keep up with the frenetic exponential growth of information. To a degree, the potential rift may be reduced by the relative ease with which much modern information handling can be learned by those who have the desire and will to do it. (See the subsection above entitled “Technology and Science: Compression of time.”) Spillover effects of private property. Private property is a sovereign economic-legal domain, a free sphere for its possessor, a “foundation on which a distinctive personality can be formed and a distinctive environment created within which particular individual aims can be pursued.”36 It is a good schoolmistress who teaches individual responsibility and personal accountability, that is, concern with the present and future consequences of one’s current actions. Its potential for promoting individual

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liberty in the widest sense is enormous, if and when the right of private ownership is understood not as exclusively or mainly a convenient economic instrumentality, but as a fundamental imprescriptible human right not granted or delegated to the human person by government and that it is, therefore, not within the moral compass of government to extinguish or regulate into impotence — an understanding that raises contentious issues of Natural Law (see the subsection entitled “Rule of Law”). Spillover effects of economic competition. Economic competition is both the presence of alternatives and a disaggregated procedure of discovery through trial and error that reduces human ignorance. It is the modern economic system’s natural selection mechanism. But it can also be a liberating factor outside its inter- and intra-buyers/sellers realm. The free exercise of choice by individuals in their capacity as economic decision makers is theoretically applicable to modernity, particularly to the choice of political authorities. It can be supportive of democracy and inimical to political diktat. Again, the spillover is not automatic or preordained, but possible and likely. Another way of formulating this effect is in terms of the scattering of individual and group interests that the market system naturally produces, a “splitting up of economic interests into many different foci,” a “principle of division” that tends to be reciprocated in the makeup of democracy’s representative political institutions, making unlikely universal majorities and the tyranny that could come with them.37 Conflict resolution through voluntary exchange. The relationship between seller and buyer is among the more important social relationships, “the bond which unites men into society.”38 Assuming reasonably symmetric information available to the contracting parties, voluntary market-system exchange of private property rights entails the resolution of conflicts of interest at the micro level of individual transactions and at a relatively low resource cost. The consummation of an act of exchange ipso facto resolves conflicting buyer-seller interests: conflict becomes cooperation through freely given assent. In a regime of central planning, conflicts cumulate and compound until they are bureaucratically arbitrated by highly aggregated levels of ministry or planning commission and at correspondingly high real costs to society. Or the conflicts may simply be left to fester. In short, market system–type buying and selling (the “higgling and bargaining” of the market as Smith calls it) contributed to an overall alleviation of social

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tensions, and hence to a more civilized society. This conflict-resolving and psychic-cost-saving aspect of higgling and bargaining has been ignored by many critics of the market system who tend to focus on the roughand-tumble, unseemly as they see it, aspect of private commerce. Technological spillovers. Information is at the core of the technological revolution that is transforming the world. The acceleration of information transmittal, miniaturization of storage capacities, greatly facilitated retrieval, and other mechanical attributes of the revolution are only as good as the freedom with which knowledge is available to everyone who takes the (relatively small) trouble to seek it and chooses to make use of it. Free flow of economic information is indispensable to the proper functioning of the modernizing market system. While it is obviously possible, although increasingly difficult, to prevent access to certain kinds of information (as, for example, by banning private ownership or rental of satellite dishes, à la Dengist China); even though some information may be functionally separated (one does not have to be an automotive engineer or even just an auto mechanic to drive a car); and inconvenient “extraneous” disturbances can be ceteris paribus’ed away, a great deal of information is indivisible, interpenetrating, interlacing, or so closely related that no amount of insulation will keep it out or quarantined, unless one is prepared to pay a price in modernization, which some new authoritarians seem to be willing to do. Although the Internet is arrayed against them, the Chicago School of Marxists now running mainland China propose over the next few years to connect a quarter million Chinese computers to it: “Either they don’t understand it and it’s all happening on the sly, or they fully understand it and appreciate that it’s a new world out there. I don’t see how they could possibly control data in and out of that network.”39 In short, technologically driven economic freedom has a way of spilling over into modernity—provided the character is there. But to some there is also a gloomy side to this incursion into modernity by interactive electronic informational modernization. It is, they say, the decline, maybe even death, of the wonderful Gutenbergian culture of books and the tradition of the printed word, and its replacement by cyberspace. Perhaps, like the predicted end of ideology, this future without literature, “the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness,”40 will not

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happen. Or, when it occurs, it will be in a totally different, exciting, and, as of now, unimaginable context. There is also concern that “most of our science, physical and social, operates as if there were no interior life, or at least assumes that the interior life has nothing to do with the outside world. . . . There sometimes seems to be an inverse relationship between information and wisdom. . . . [W]e conceive education to be about skills and information, not about depth of feeling and imagination.” The concern is about spirituality, which “asks for some small measure of withdrawal from a world set up to ignore the soul.”41 This is not a trivial concern in a rapidly modernizing world. On the other hand, experience suggests that a good deal of what passes for wisdom, otherworldliness, and depth of feeling and imagination, particularly in the arts, is in reality fuzziness, posturing, intellectual laziness, or outright fraud. In any event, the rapidity and relative ease with which enormous amounts of information can be acquired under the new technological dispensation should leave one more time for reflection and cultivated withdrawal, not less. The confrontational juxtaposition of information and wisdom may well be a false one. How Modernity Can Promote Modernization Spillover effects of freedom, pluralism, fluidity, secularism, and transparency. Unlike what happened in mainland China, in large measure as a consequence of the traumas brought about by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, both of which combined to bring the classical socialist economic system in its most radical Maoist form to its knees, the emergence of a modernizing market system could not have occurred in the former Soviet Union and East-Central Europe when it did without a prior removal of totalitarian monoparty rule. There, the treadmill of intrasystemic economic remedies (the boldest of which, the so-called NEM, had been applied in Hungary for more than twenty years) would in all likelihood have continued until economic collapse. In fact, collapse of the economic system occurred in Poland and Romania under communist rule in the early 1980s, without giving rise to any systemic restructuring whatsoever, that is, without real intersystemic reform. Although the successor arrangements vary from place to place, they are more politically and

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socially variegated than before, deserving in a few places (such as the Czech Republic, Poland) the name of full-fledged, if fractionalized and fragile, democracy (run by recycled communists in Poland). Whereas in mainland China the construction of capitalism, albeit with a viscid mercantilistic overlay, has begun to exert centrifugal pressures on popular culture and politics, in Russia and East-Central Europe relative political freedom, pluralism, fluidity, secularism, and transparency are helping to change the socialist economy into one dominated by market coordination and private property rights. Spillover effects of democracy and civil society. While it is true that the revolutionary innovations in information technology tend, on balance, to work in favor of democracy, the relationship is complex, fraught with dangers, not inevitable, and certainly not one-directional. “In history, nothing is inevitable before it happens,” chance and accident having a great deal to say in the matter.42 Sustained scientific discovery, technological advance, and their translation into higher living standards require that the right to think freely and freely exchange thoughts be constitutionally enshrined in institutions embodying the notion of legal order and that that right be effectively protected by these institutions. So far the proven best guarantor of such freedom over time has been democracy and its companion, civil society. Democracy, one might say, attracts technological advance on a broad front in much the same way that private property and private activity attract market coordination.43 Conclusion Modernization is synonymous with the market system. Among the more important institutional attributes of modernity are democracy, civil society, and the rule of law. The modernizing economic system of free markets and the political system of democracy, civil society, and the rule of law—the repository of modernity—reinforce and complement each other in many critical respects to make possible, but not inevitable, the founding of a humane commercial republic. Such a republic, combining modernization with modernity, reason with conscience and decency, is not a utopian construct but an actual social arrangement approached, although never fully realized, by a growing number of market democracies. Michael Novak sums it up well: “I would not want it to be thought that any sys-

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tem is the Kingdom of God on Earth. Capitalism isn’t. Democracy isn’t. The two combined are not. The best that can be said for them (and it is quite enough) is that, in combination, capitalism, democracy, and pluralism are more protective of the rights, opportunities, and conscience of ordinary citizens (all citizens) than any known alternative.”44

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Notes

Preface 1. Jan Prybyla, presidential address, “The Role of the United States and NATO in Central-East Europe,” to the final symposium of the Conference on European Problems, Kansas City, Mo., June 8, 2003. 1. Pax Americana 1. The goal of overall peace means prevention of world war through the containment, abatement, and settlement of verbal or armed conflicts. From the end of World War II until 2002, there were 130 local and regional wars, civil and international, almost all of them in the third world, with a death toll of nearly twentyfive million. This figure does not include genocides committed in times of peace by despots against their own people. The planned Soviet famine in the Ukraine and the 1958–1961 Great Leap famine in Maoist China caused an estimated four million and thirty to forty million deaths, respectively (R. J. Rummel, “War Isn’t This Century’s Biggest Killer,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 1986, A10). 2. The late Judith Martin, aka “Miss Manners,” summed, “There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.” 3. Paul Shepheard, New York Times Book Review, August 6, 1995, 16. 4. Economist, July 15, 1995, 75. 5. For example, Simone de Beauvoir, L’Amérique au jour le jour (Paris: Morihien, 1948), trans. Patrick Dudley, America Day by Day (New York: Grove Press, 1953). For an instructive background on “intellectual irresponsibility,” see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Cf. Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). “An examination of the moral and judgmental credentials of certain leading intellectuals to give advice to humanity on how to conduct its affairs” (ix). 

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6. Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). 3. Bretton Woods 1. Roy Davies and Glyn Davies, A Comparative Chronology of Money: Monetary History from Ancient Times to the Present Day, 3d ed. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), 19, 397. 2. In July and August 1948, Harry Dexter White, one of the leading architects of the Bretton Woods international monetary system, was accused by former communists and Soviet agents Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers before the House Un-American Activities Committee, of having leaked information to Soviet intelligence since the late 1930s. White vigorously denied the charge and died three days after being accused. Some months later, Chambers produced White’s handwritten notes, known as the “Pumpkin Papers,” to substantiate his charges. The Venona documents—2,900 decrypted, top-secret cables exchanged by Moscow and the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.—tend to confirm these allegations, but the debate continues. 3. Benjamin J. Cohen’s essay “Bretton Woods System” is one of the clearest and most succinct expositions on the subject that I have come across. One need not, of course, agree with all the conclusions drawn by its author in this excellent précis. See Routledge Encyclopedia of International Political Economy, ed. R. J. Barry Jones (New York: Routledge, 2002), 84–91; also http://www.polsci.ucsb. edu/faculty/cohen/recent/bretton.html. 4. International Monetary Fund, “Money Matters,” http://www.imf.org/ external/np/exr/center/mm/eng/mm_cc_01.htm. In Germany “by 1929 it was cheaper to burn Reichsmarks than to buy kindling wood with them” (International Monetary Fund, “Money Matters,” http://www.imf.org/external/np/ exr/center/mm/eng/cc_sub_2.htm). 5. I am indebted to Benjamin Cohen for what follows; see his “Bretton Woods System.” 6. The balance of payments is the difference between the total amount a nation pays to other countries, including movements of capital and gold, investments, and tourist spending, and the total amount it receives from foreign countries. 7. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan edition (1776; repr., New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1937), 651. 8. Cohen, “Bretton Woods System.” 9. The Oxford Essential Dictionary of Word Histories, ed. Glynnis Chantrell (New York: Berkeley Books, 2003). 10. De Gaulle, we are told, was not informed by General Eisenhower of the planned Normandy landing until two days before it happened.

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11. Eugene Davidson, “The American Condition,” in Reflections on a Disruptive Decade: Essays from the Sixties (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 201. 4. The Marshall Plan and Containment 1. Not even in name. Upright words like democratic, people, and republic were degraded when used in connection with the German Democratic Republic, democratic centralism, and the People’s Republic of Romania. Unfortunately, our own culture has not been immune to this linguistic decadence. Think of the word adult to describe “adult movies.” 2. The cost of the European Recovery Program from April 1948 to June 1952 was $13.2 billion. Of this amount, Britain received $3.2 billion (24.2 percent), France $2.7 billion (20.5 percent), Italy $1.5 billion (11.4 percent), and West Germany $1.4 billion (10.6 percent), which is nearly 70 percent of the total (Jan Palmowski, A Dictionary of Contemporary World History: From 1900 to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 414. For Ernest Bevin’s comment, see John T. Bethell, “The Ultimate Commencement Address: On the Making of George C. Marshall’s Routine Speech,” Harvard Magazine, May 1997, http:// www.westol.com/fforward/history/plan19.htm. 3. The European Coal and Steel Community was formed on French initiative, specifically that of France’s foreign minister, Robert Schuman. It was the seed from which grew the European Common Market and European Union. Another French official, Jean Monnet, was greatly responsible for the progressive realization of the Pan-European idea. Monnet was also instrumental in joining the concepts of planning and market with the notion of “indicative planning” or, as Paul Johnson calls it, “economic diplomacy,” that is, planning by persuasion and consent (Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties [New York: Harper and Row, 1985], 591). The role of Konrad Adenauer, who served as chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1963, was equally important. In March 1946, he outlined his vision of a United States of Europe in a speech at Cologne University. According to Johnson, it was “one of the most important in the post-war world” (ibid., 581). 4. This recommendation was included at the end of Chinese imperial decrees in ages past. 5. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). For a critical evaluation of what George F. Kennan did do, and what he did not, see Wilson D. Miscamble’s “Generation ‘X,’” Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2004, A14, and his George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947– 1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 6. Willy Brandt, My Life in Politics (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992) and Peace: Writings and Speeches (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1971); Terence Prittie,

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Willy Brandt: Portrait of a Statesman (New York: Schokey, 1974); Viola H. Draht, Willy Brandt: Prisoner of His Past (Radnor, Pa.: Chilton, 1975). 7. Washington Times, March 12, 1990, A2. 8. In the mid-1990s, the tax rates, including payroll taxes, were 40 percent in the United States and 59 percent in Germany and France. The workweek was 25.9 hours in the United States, 19.3 hours in Germany, and 17.5 hours in France (Edward Prescott [University of Minnesota], paper, Federal Bank of Minneapolis, 2003). European Union (EU) regulations limit the weekly working time for corporations in the union to forty-eight hours. To get around this well-intentioned bureaucratic measure, designed to protect workers’ health and safety, but also to keep labor costs down, British firms have used opt-out agreements with their workers, whereby the latter waive their right to the forty-eight-hour workweek. About one-third of the British workforce has used this loophole, with 16 percent, or 4 million people, actually exceeding the ceiling. Brussels planners, headed by the European Union’s Employment and Social Affairs commissioner, Anna Diamantopoulou, promised that by fall 2004 they would come up with draft legislation designed to take care of the violations (Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2004, A12). 9. “Germany spends on defense about half of what the U.S. spends relative to GDP. The United States spends more on defense than the next ten largest spenders. This defense protects others as well as us.” In Kosovo “the Europeans showed themselves incapable of agreeing on and executing a policy to defend their region from renewed tyranny. They behaved as free riders do, waiting for the United States to supply the public good” (Allan H. Meltzer, “Leadership and Progress,” speech, 2003 Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute Annual Dinner, Washington, D.C., February 26, 2003, http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.16231/ news_detail.asp). 10. Walter Laqueur, “Leisure for All,” Europe in Our Time: A History, 1945– 1992 (New York: Viking, 1992), 249–52. 11. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 584. 5. German Wirtschaftswunder 1. The social market economy has sometimes been referred to as “Rhineland capitalism.” It includes the notion of “stakeholding,” a civil, as distinct from a stock market, shareholding, or equity claim on economic benefits by the system’s actors. 2. When leaving East Berlin in 1985, I had some East German marks left. Having found nothing in the stores to spend them on, I asked a woman at a kiosk at the metro station what I should do with them. She pointed to a trash can nearby and said, “See that? Throw them in there.” At that time an arrière-

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gardist economist colleague of mine was writing a learned article on how the East German economy was once and for all disproving the failure and omniincompetence of the socialist economic system alleged by Western detractors because, unlike the sloppy, slapdash Slavs to the east, the Germans took their central planning and Marx seriously. “We are different from our fraternal countries,” said Karl-Heinz Stiemerling, an East German economist (Barry Newman, “East Germany Opens a Front in Cold War: The Kitchen Freezer,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 1989, A1). Erich Honecker agreed: “The German Democratic Republic ranks among the most productive industrial nations and lands with the highest standard of living.” The Republic, he insisted, had multiplied its gross-produced national income by eleven times since 1949 (Ferdinand Protzman, “East German Anguish,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 1989, F1, 14). 3. “The United States Is, and Should Be, an Empire: A New Atlantic Initiative Debate,” American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., July 17, 2003, http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.428,filter.all/event_detail.asp; Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). That the United States finds the colonial idea offensive is borne out by the quick erasure from the list, at the time of the Marshall Plan, of West European requests for U.S. financial assistance to European colonial possessions and by President Eisenhower’s almost instant stamp-out of the FrancoBritish invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956, following Nasser’s nationalization of the waterway. There were, of course, other reasons for Eisenhower’s action, but the aversion to the revival of colonialism was certainly one. For a dissenting view, see Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 6. The Berlin Blockade 1. The phrase is Nikita Khrushchev’s (Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties [New York: Harper and Row, 1985], 441). 2. Before the Cuban missile crisis, in his Berlin ultimatum issued on November 27, 1958, Khrushchev demanded that the three Western powers withdraw their troops from West Berlin and that, within six months of the withdrawal, West Berlin become a “free city.” Memories of Danzig, however, were still too strong, and the deportment of America’s allies was still relatively correct, so nothing came of that try. 7. The Truman Doctrine 1. “There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn. No other nation,” according to Truman [other than the United States], was “willing and able to provide the necessary support for a democratic Greek government” (President Harry S. Truman’s Address before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947, the Avalon Project of Yale University, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/

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trudoc.htm). For more on Harry Truman, see David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), and Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996). 2. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 443. 8. NATO and Its Cross of Lorraine 1. In view of later French obstructions in February 2003, Lord Robertson’s assessment of NATO’s internal amity, made at the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung on December 12, 2002, was perhaps too optimistic. The allies, said Lord Robertson, “agreed [at the Prague Summit on November 21, 2002] that in facing new threats, artificial geographic limitations make no sense. They agreed that NATO should deter, disrupt, defend, and protect against threats wherever they come. And that our forces must be able to go wherever they are required to carry out their mission” (http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/s02115a.htm). Another item that preoccupied the French in February 2003 was the NATO members’ “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence” recognized by Article 51 of the United Nations (chapter VII of the UN Charter, http://www.un.org/aboutun/ charter/chapter7.htm). This linkage made for interesting, at times acrimonious, discussions in the U.N. Security Council. 2. A generous peace treaty with Japan was signed in San Francisco in September 1951. 3. It was understood and practiced, until the 2003 French obduracy in the North Atlantic Council over the Turkey/Iraq vote problem, that NATO unanimity was, at worst, achieved through “supportive silence.” 4. The Fourth Republic (1945–1958) went through twenty-six governments in thirteen years. However, the bureaucracy and, in the Fouché tradition, the police, remained unchanged. The same men reappeared in successive governments, but in charge of different portfolios. De Gaulle’s love of France comes through poignantly in his war memoirs, especially L’Appel, 1940–1942 (Paris: Plon, 1954). 10. The Hungarian Revolution and the Berlin Wall 1. For reasons of space I am omitting the 1953 worker uprising in East Germany and make only passing reference here to the British, French, and Israeli attempt to take over the Suez Canal in late October 1956, just as the Hungarian Revolution was turning in favor of the insurgents. The Central European University Press in Budapest has published three archival books on some of the Central and East European events. The books contain previously inaccessible materials on the Soviet and Warsaw Pacts. See Christian Ostermann, ed., Uprising in East Germany, 1953: The First Cold War, the German Question, and the First Major Upheaval behind the Iron Curtain (2001); Jaromír Navrátil et al., eds., Prague Spring ’68 (1998); Malcolm Byrne, ed., The 1957 Hungarian Revolution: A History in

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Documents (2002). Books to be published in 2004 included documents, with explanatory notes, on the Solidarity crisis in Poland in 1980–1981 and the implosion of communism in 1989, with separate volumes devoted to U.S. and Soviet responses and the specific experiences of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. 2. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 113–14. 3. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 463. 11. The Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev 1. Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 171. 2. In 1962 Khrushchev also made a veiled nuclear threat to the Chinese in the course of a border dispute with them. The Chinese reply was to detonate the nation’s first nuclear device in October 1964. 3. Elizabeth Wishnick, Mending Fences: The Evolution of Moscow’s China Policy from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 29. 12. The Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Brezhnev Doctrine 1. Khrushchev made his statement about self-determination to a Japanese delegation on September 15, 1964, shortly before he was swept aside for being, among other things, “a buffoon on the international political stage,” as the Chinese put it (Elizabeth Wishnick, Mending Fences: The Evolution of Moscow’s China Policy from Brezhnev to Yeltsin [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001], 210n42). 2. Gorbachev interview with Matt Frost and Jeremy Bransten, Prague, August 10, 1998, published on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline Online (http://www.rferl.org). 13. Cultural Shift 1. Francine Prose, review of Guggenheim exhibit “1900: Art at the Crossroads,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2000, A24. “[A] culture is constituted by the meaning it imposes on human experience” (Michael Novak, The Experience of Nothingness [New York: Harper and Row, 1970], 23). The countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s propagated “absolutistic relativism” (Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Postmodernist History,” in On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994], 136). 2. Illegal immigration, most of it from south of the border, also began to gather momentum. The number of people living in the United States illegally at the end of the 1970s was estimated at under 5 million. By the end of the 1990s that number had risen to an estimated 8.7 million, probably understated by a wide margin, given the difficulty of counting those living in the U.S. illegally

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(Public Agenda online, http://www.publicagenda.org/issues/overview.cfm?issue_ typeimmigration). 3. L. Gordon Crovitz, “Empire’s Enthusiast,” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2003, W19. At the time of his death in 1902, Cecil Rhodes had brought one million square miles of Africa under British control. The philanthropy was considerably smaller for one of the worst colonizers, Belgium, and the percentage correspondingly larger. 4. The United Nations was founded by 51 states, and the majority of its members at that time were democracies. By 1975, the organization had grown to 144 members, with all but 25 of them being autocratic and leftist (Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties [New York: Harper and Row, 1985], 689). 5. Michael Novak defines “nihilism” as “an ideological interpretation imposed on the experience of nothingness,” and “nothingness” as “an experience beyond the limits of reason. It arises near the borderline of insanity. It is terrifying” (Experience of Nothingness, 12, 13). 6. Kiron K. Skinner, “Lessons from the Demise of Détente” (Bradley Lecture Series, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., June 2, 2003, http: www.aei.org/events/filter.all,eventID.226/transcript.asp). 14. Détente 1. It was at that time and for some years thereafter that, in the United States and in Germany, the members of the Conference on European Problems experienced some of their finest hours of joint and person-to-person encounters with their German counterparts, congenial and amicable, but not without rough moments, all instructive. 2. Brezhnev himself had been seriously incapacitated for several years before his death. Some claim he was brain-dead. 3. For example, see the article by Mary Kaldor, a 1980s peace activist, “Who Killed the Cold War?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 5, no. 4 (July/August 1995). 4. Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 673. For a different perspective on the issue of détente, see Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985). 5. The “68ers” refers to activists who made the “emotional fuss” in 1968 and subsequent years. These people, according to a young German, “run this country’s politics and media, collect as much German war guilt as they can, and deny arguments saying that British, French, and American appeasement made the war longer and worse. They deny that America achieved German reunification against British, French and Russian opposition, that American power had anything to do with a positive outcome for Germany. They do this because their guilt is the seedbed for their pacifism and escapism, without which they wouldn’t know what

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to think, without which they would have to engage the real world with its real dilemmas” (Adam Garfinkle, “Germany in the Spring,” E-Notes [April 7, 2003], Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, Pa., http://www.fpri.org/enotes/ 20030407.europe.garfinkle.germanyinthespring.html). 6. Eurasia Daily Monitor 1, no. 43 (July 1, 2001), Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C., www.jamestown.org. 15. Eurocommunism 1. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it” (Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” thesis 11). The theses, written in 1845, were later edited and published in 1888, with the original (unedited) theses published in 1924. See Georges Labica, Les “Thèses sur Feuerbach” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987). 2. János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap. 4, 55–57. 3. In 1977, Enrico Berlinguer, the general secretary of the Italian Communist Party and one of the founders of Eurocommunism, said in an interview with Corriere della Sera that he felt “safer under NATO’s umbrella” (Enrico Berlinguer, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Berlinguer). 4. The statement was made by Christopher Brooke, Dixie professor emeritus of ecclesiastical history, University of Cambridge. 5. In the Marxist perspective, the individual is a derivative of social class. He can see the world and act only through his class. The individual can fulfill himself only through socialized labor and is caught in mass historical movements from which he can liberate himself only by submission to historical necessity. This, in turn, gives rise to the problem of intellectuals, Marx included. Marxism also has always had problems with the concept of nationalism and with the peasantry. 6. “Xxe Congrès du Parti Communiste de l’Union Soviétique, Recueil de Documents,” ed. Les Cahiers du Communisme (1956), 46–47, 45–46; Jan Przybyla, “Communism and the Democratic Parliament: A Study in Infiltration Theory and Tactics,” Quarterly Review (London), no. 611 (January 1957): 72–84. 7. Soviet secret police (KGB) documents that came to light after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 show that the KGB received proofs of Santiago Carrillo’s book from Ignacio Gallego, a mole on the Spanish Communist Party’s Central Committee, who in 1982 formed a breakaway party financed by the Soviets. For his services, Gallego allegedly received $35,000 a year from his Soviet sponsors (David McKnight, “Eurocommunism and the Soviet Union” [November 2000], http://www.search.org.au/news/sovunion1.htm; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB [New York: Basic Books, 1999]). 8. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Voltaire: A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756, with Special Emphasis on the Conflict between

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Religion and Philosophy (New York: MJF Books by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, 1965), 378. 9. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 99. 10. V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 28: 227–325. 17. The Errors of Socialism 1. Thomas Petzinger Jr., “There’s a New Economy Out There—and It Looks Nothing Like the Old One,” Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2000, R31. 2. George Gilder, “The Faith of a Futurist,” Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2000, R28. 3. Heinz Kohler, Economic Systems and Human Welfare (Cincinnati: SouthWestern College Publishing Company, 1997), from F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Cf. János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Jan Prybyla, “The Economic Crisis of State Socialism: Its Philosophical and Institutional Foundations,” Orbis 26, no. 4 (Winter 1983). Not unlike Hitler’s totalitarian corporatism, Soviet-type central administrative command planning was essentially a national socialist (costumed in the terminology of proletarian internationalism) mobilizational war economy capable of pursuing, for a limited time, a limited number of military assignments, and doing a pretty good (that is, destructive) job of it. It was not, however, a wealth-creating, human welfare–enhancing arrangement for peacetime, not even with Kosygin “reforms,” which were really intrasystemic adjustments, or perestroika. 4. Santiago Carrillo criticizes those Marxists who “speak of a proletariat that no longer exists” (http://www.heggy.org/books/imperative/chapter_3.htm). Carrillo’s criticism is expressed in Eurocommunism and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977). 5. Robert Conquest, “Getting Communism Wrong,” Wall Street Journal, September 15, 1992, A14. Cf. his The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (New York: Macmillan, 1968, 1973); The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). 18. Ronald Reagan and His Critics 1. Joseph Loconte, “Wilson, FDR, Truman, Bush,” Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2004, W15. 2. Ronald Reagan, “Foreword Written for a Report on the Initiative,” December 28, 1984, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 21, no. 1 (January 7, 1985): 8–9.

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3. Johnson’s Russia List, February 15, 2003, in Russia’s Soldiers magazine on the fourteenth anniversary of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, http://www .cdi.org/russia/johnson/7063-4.cfm and http://www.afgha.com/?afarticle&sid 30335. Apparently, according to Soviet sources declassified after the dissolution of the USSR, the Soviet military was strongly opposed to the deployment of troops in Afghanistan and was toying with the possibility of withdrawal as early as January 1980 (Rafael Reuveny and Aseem Prakash, “The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union,” Review of International Studies 25 [1999]: 693–708). 4. CNN Perspective Series, www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/20/ 1st.draft. For more on the reasons for the invasion, see John Prados and Svetlana Savranskaya, eds., “Volume II: Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War,” October 9, 2001, National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 57, http:// www2.gwu.edu/~ns.archiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/soviet2.html; Cold War International History Project Bulletin, nos. 6–9 (Winter 1996/1997); and Human Rights Watch, “Backgrounder on Afghanistan: History of the War,” October 2001, http:// www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/afghan-bck1023.htm. 5. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), ix–x. 6. David Wessel and Gerald F. Seib, “Changing Course: How Reagan Recast Debate on Markets, Taxes — and Deficits,” Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal, copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc., All Rights Reserved Worldwide, license number 1005420026039. 19. Solidarity 1. The term intelligentsia is frequently used in the Central/East European context. It refers to “intellectuals considered as a group or class, especially as a cultural, social, or political elite” (Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 1996 edition), or “the most intellectual or highly educated members of a society” (Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary, 2001 edition). It came into general usage around 1905–1910 in Tsarist Russia. 2. The Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR) was formed by intellectuals. In the late 1970s, in defiance of the law, it printed and disseminated uncensored books, pamphlets, and leaflets. At the same time an informal alliance was forged between the anticommunist opposition and the Catholic Church in Poland, which through the centuries had been firmly in the Polish nationalist camp. In 1979, John Paul II, the “Polish pope,” visited Poland and led a mass for three million people. 3. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, former president of Poland, 105th Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kans., March 11, 1996 (http://www .mediarelations.k-state.edu/WEB/News/NewsReleases/jaruzelskilandon.html). In the first passage quoted, the word conservative is misused in the same way that democracy has been misused in Left circles. Jaruzelski actually uses that word a little

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later in his speech, seemingly without quite understanding its etymology and unpolluted current meaning. 4. Daniel Bell, “The Fight for the 20th Century: Raymond Aron Versus JeanPaul Sartre,” New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1990, 3. 5. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) is also known as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, they do not make it under self-selected circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (chap. 1 from the German edition of 1869, trans. Saul K. Padover). In other words, freedom is the recognition of historical necessity. This is not the definition of freedom most Solidarity people had in mind, determined as they were to change the inherited given circumstances—to change history, not to earn an ignoble place in it. Unlike Jaruzelski, those who supported Solidarity rejected the idea of limited sovereignty for their country and for themselves. 6. The saying came from the Jaruzelski corner. The argument cuts both ways. In 1989, following the Willy Brandt proactive tradition, West Germany was pumping about two billion dollars a year into East Germany, including rebates on import duties and generous treatment on currency conversion. Beyond prolonging the life of an oppressive polity and a failing economy, clearly the West German plan did not work either. 20. Gorbachev and His Nemesis 1. Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 6. 2. Robert V. Daniels, review of Gorbachev: On My Country and the World, by Mikhail Gorbachev and trans. George Shriver, Nation, January 3, 2000. The reference is to what used to be called the “Great October Socialist Revolution” of 1917. 3. I was challenged at a CEP-Studiengesellschaft symposium in Germany, probably in the mid-1980s, by a colleague who had heard me arguing, again and again, that the Soviet economy was structurally fatally flawed, on grounds of logic, not seership, that is. “If so,” he said, “then how come it is doing so well? It’s like the law of aerodynamics,” he continued, “which says that the bumblebee cannot possibly fly. But it does!” I checked, and there is no such law, nor is there an economic law that says a command economy cannot fly, especially in wartime when choices among competing alternatives are extremely exiguous. All comparative economic analysis suggests is that such a craft will eventually crash, not from lack of fuel or metal fatigue, but from bad engineering based on meshugehne blueprints. 4. Martin Malia, “The Soviet Union Has Ceased to Exist . . .” New York Times, August 31, 1990, A27, and his “The Soviets’ Terminal Crisis” (published

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under the pseudonym “Z”), New York Times, January 4, 1990, A23. The “X” disease seems to be catching. 21. The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification of Germany 1. Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 3. 22. The End of an Era 1. The roster of homebred practitioners of the devious ideology that in the late 1920s and early 1930s exalted Stalin’s genocidal mania on the grounds of progressive intentions includes the Pulitzer Prize winner Walter “You Can’t Make an Omelet Without Breaking Eggs” Duranty of the New York Times; his traveling companion Stanley Richardson of the Associated Press; the educational guru John Dewey; and academics Samuel Harper of the University of Chicago and Bruce Hooper of Harvard. See David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 2. And, of course, those Americans who had clandestinely worked for the enemy. For example, see G. Edward White, Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass War: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 3. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, 105th Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kans., March 11, 1996 (http://www.mediarelations.k-state.edu/ WEB/News/NewsReleases/jaruzelskilandon.html). 4. A Czech graduate student, who in a quiet way prided himself on his communist ancestry, once told me: “My grandfather was a true believer. My father was an opportunist. And I am a refugee in the United States.” He is now back in Prague, certainly not a true believer. 5. James K. Glassman, “Is Government Strangling the New Economy?” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2000, A22. 23. After the Fall: Celebratory Foresight and Ominous Speculations 1. Roger Kimball, “Francis Fukuyama and the End of History,” New Criterion 10, no. 6 (February 1992): 9–15. 2. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest (Summer 1989); Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Irving Kristol’s reaction to Fukuyama’s thesis was: “I don’t believe a word of it.” 3. Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 4. 4. Fukuyama, “By Way of Introduction,” in The End of History and the Last Man, xii, xiii.

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5. Ibid., xii. For more on historical determinism versus historical contingency, or fortuitousness, see Nicholas Rescher, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995), chap. 2. 6. See the second item the list of traits I offered in the first chapter. 7. Fukuyama, “By Way of Introduction,” in The End of History and the Last Man, xx–xxi. 8. An interesting critique and comparison of Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s positions on the past, present, and future of history is Stanley Kurtz, “The Future of ‘History,’” Policy Review, no. 113 (June/July 2002): 45–58. 9. Samuel Huntington “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49. The phrase is attributed by the author to William Lind. 10. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 1996), 41. The last quotation is Adda Bozeman’s from “Civilizations under Stress,” Virginia Quarterly Review 51 (Winter 1975): 1. 11. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 43. 12. Huntington’s list of contemporary civilizations includes: Sinic (China), Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, Latin American, and possibly subSaharan African, with South Africa as its anchor state (Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 45–47). 13. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 46. According to Huntington, the central characteristics of the West include the classical legacy; Catholicism and Protestantism; European languages; separation of spiritual and temporal authority, that is, “God” from “Caesar”; rule of law; social pluralism; representative bodies; and individualism (ibid., 69–72). 14. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, various pages; “Many World Orders,” interview, David Gergen and Samuel Huntington, Online Backgrounders, Online NewsHour, January 9, 1997, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/january97/ order_1–10.html. 15. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 212. 16. France’s 2000 population of 59 million included 2.2 percent Algerian and Moroccan Berbers and 1.3 percent Moroccan Arabs, for a total of 3.5 percent, or close to 2 million people. As for religious affiliation, Muslims accounted for 7.1 percent, or 4.2 million (atheists included at 4.4 million). Germany’s 2000 population of 82.4 million was 3.4 percent Turkish (of which 0.7 percent were Kurdish), or 2.8 million; by religious affiliation (which included nonreligious 17.2 percent and atheists 2.2 percent), Muslims were 4.4 percent, or 3.6 million (Encyclopaedia Britannica Almanac 2003, 471, 480). These figures should be adjusted upward, perhaps significantly, for reasons broadly similar to those that beset the counting of Hispanics in the United States. 17. The terms are Huntington’s, Clash of Civilizations, 174–79. 18. Andrew Higgins, “Morocco’s Fragile Democracy Tests U.S. Prescription for World,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2004, A8.

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19. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 20–21, 311–12; “Many World Orders.” 20. The phrase is Gergen’s in “Many World Orders.” 21. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 312. 22. Kurtz, “The Future of ‘History,’” 54. 23. Jan Prybyla, “Modernization and Modernity in the Process of Economic Growth and Development,” Issues and Studies 31, no. 4 (April 1995): 1–27. The full text of this article is reprinted in the Appendix. 24. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); “Daniel Patrick Moynihan in His Own Words,” interview by Ben Wattenberg, PBS Think Tank, July 8, 2004, http .www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1108.html. Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century (London: Continuum International, 2003); Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twentyfirst Century (New York: Collins, 1994); Donald Puchala, “The U.S., Europe, and the Future of Democratic Peace” (paper, twenty-fifth international meeting of the Conference on European Problems [CEP] and Studiengesellschaft für Fragen mittel- und osteuropäischer Partnerschaft, Norman, Okla., October 1–4, 1998); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). 25. Charles Krauthammer, Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World, 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, February 24, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2004), 2. 26. Gao Yuan, Born Red (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 59. 24. After the Wall: What Happened on the Ground 1. Cited by Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, 1996), 35. 2. In alphabetical order, the member states of the Commonwealth of Independent States are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. 3. The Chechens, says Vladimir Dimitriyev of the Russian Institute of Ethnology in St. Petersburg, “are absolutely unreconciled to being a part of the Russian Federation” (Fred Weir, “Chechnya’s Warrior Tradition,” Christian Science Monitor, March 26, 2002; also Johnson’s Russia List, http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/ 6156.txt). The estimate of Russians killed in Chechnya is from the Russian organization called the Union Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers (Eurasia Daily Monitor 1, no. 3 [May 5, 2004], Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C., www.jamestown.org). 4. Weir, “Chechnya’s Warrior Tradition.” On October 23, 2002, Chechen terrorists invaded a Moscow theater, taking seven hundred to one thousand theatergoers hostage. They threatened to blow up the building if Russian troops were not immediately withdrawn from Chechnya. After three days, Russian

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commandos stormed the theater after throwing in sleeping gas. The terrorists were shot while unconscious and 115 hostages died apparently as a result of the gas, the nature of which was not identified. 25. Drifting Apart: Multipolarity and Hegemony 1. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776; repr., New York: Random House, Modern Library, 2003). 2. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 3. Ibid., 43. 4. Ibid., 35–36. 5. Khadafi’s Libya chaired the 2003 United Nations Human Rights Commission, 40 percent of whose members were countries that continued to violate basic human rights (“Two UN Activities Demonstrate Need for Reform,” AEI Newsletter, May 2004, http://www.aei.org/news/filter.all,newsID.20334/news_ detail.asp). 6. The permanent members of the Security Council are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. On important questions before the General Assembly, a two-thirds majority of those present and voting is required. On other questions, a simple majority will do. Taiwan was expelled in 1971. It is not a member today, nor does it have observer status, even though it is the first democracy in Chinese history and a thriving market economy. 7. Global Policy Forum, “Assessed Contributions to [the United Nations] Regular Budget of the 15 Largest Assessed Contributors, 2003–2004,” http:// www.globalpolicy.org/finance/tables/reg-budget/assessedlarge04.htm. 8. De Gaulle puts the blame for the general condition of the French (the je m’en foutisme) on “lack of will” or défaut de volonté (Charles de Gaulle, L’Appel, 1940–1942 [Paris: Plon, 1954], 34). 9. David Isby, “Afghans Get Financial but Few Security Commitments,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 1, no. 3 (May 5, 2004), Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C., www.jamestown.org. 10. Philip Shishkin and Marc Champion, “NATO Splits on Afghanistan Mission,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2004, A7. 11. Ibid. Quote attributed to Maxime Lefèbre of the French Institute of International Relations. 12. Denis Diderot in a letter to Voltaire, 1719, in Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Voltaire: A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756, with Special Emphasis on the Conflict between Religion and Philosophy (New York: MJF Books published by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, 1965), 630. 13. Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, 56. 14. Niall Ferguson, “The End of Power,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2004, A16.

Notes

26. Aggregation: The European Union 1. Sabine Reichel, What Did You Do in the War Daddy? Growing Up in Germany (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989). 2. Jan Palmowski, Oxford Dictionary of Contemporary World History from 1900 to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 207. 3. Ibid., 205. 4. Radek Sikorski, “Europe (Almost) Whole and Free: EU Enlargement and Its Implications,” European Outlook, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., May–June 2004, 3. 5. “Europe, U.S. Are Criticized over Farm Subsidies,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2004, A7. 6. Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 322. The twelve countries of Euroland’s euro zone as of 2004 are: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. 7. As a matter of fact, preparations for a Europe-wide monetary system go back to 1979 when the ecu (European Currency Unit), the forerunner of the euro, was tried. Member countries participating in the experiment were tied to a 2.5 percent fluctuation band in their currencies and committed to coordinate their monetary systems. 8. On the adoption of the euro, see Comparative Economic Studies 46, no. 1 (March 2004): 1–190. 9. In referenda held by the candidates for accession in 2003, the votes cast in favor of the proposition were as follows (in percentages of valid total votes cast): Slovakia, 92; Lithuania, 91; Slovenia, 90; Hungary, 83; Poland, 77; Czech Republic, 77; Latvia, 67; Estonia, 67; and Malta, 54. 10. Palmowski, Oxford Dictionary of Contemporary World History, 204–5. 11. Christopher Rhoads and Mark Champion, “As EU Expands, It Re-Examines Its Old Ways,” Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2004, A14. 12. Walter Olson, Rule of Lawyers (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003). 13. Sikorski, “Europe (Almost) Whole and Free,” 2. 14. Industrial wages in Germany are negotiated across whole industries by powerful unions at the national level. Employment laws are quite rigid, as is labor mobility. This version of the social contract makes cost relief for companies problematic. It is being subjected to price pressures from the new East and Central EU member economies and from the possibility of outsourcing production to Asia. 15. Thatcher, Statecraft, 324. 16. John W. Miller, “Belgian Invokes Kafka to Cut Red Tape,” Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2004, A11. 17. Toby Helm, EU correspondent, “Brussels Budget Blocked in Row over

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Corruption,” Telegraph.co.uk, October 7, 1998, http://www.telegraph.co.uk; Roger Hardy, “Jacques Santer: Out of His Depth?” BBC News Online, March 16, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk. 18. Julian Coman (Paris), “Mismanagement and Fraud Cost EU Taxpayers £4 Bn,” Telegraph.co.uk, November 19, 2000, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main .jhtml?xml/news/2000/11/19/weu19.xml; “The Continuing Decline and Fall of the European Commission,” European Options Online, http://www.navatec.com: 9002/media/meoo.dsb?0003. 19. Marc Champion and Adam Z. Horvath, “EU Expansion Fuels Debate on Taxes,” Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2004, A18. 20. Marc Champion, “New EU States Are Urged to Cut Taxes” [by the OECD], Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2004, A13. 21. Ibid. 22. Christopher Rhoads and Marc Champion, “As Europe Expands, New Union Faces Problems of Scale,” Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2004, A1. 23. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), a powerful EU authority, has warned the new EU members not to rush into the euro zone until they fulfill the European Union’s convergence criteria, including budget deficits of not more than 3 percent of GDP. The decision to join the euro zone, he argued correctly, is in a substantive, not nominal, way irrevocable and, therefore, should not be taken lightly. It must be sustainable. Whether to join the euro zone is ultimately up to the heads of state of the individual countries, but the advice of the ECB cannot be dismissed lightly (G. Thomas Sims, “New EU Members Get Advice: Skip the Euro for Now,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2004, A15). 24. “Greece, Netherlands Breach EU Deficit Rule,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2004, A10. 27. Disaggregation: Civil War in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1. Gendercide Watch, “Case Study: The Srebrenica Massacre, July 1995,” http://www.gendercide.org/case_srebrenica.html. 2. Whatever else happens in the world, “we must tend to our garden” (Voltaire, Candide ou l’Optimisme [1759; repr., Paris: Librairie Larousse, Larousses Classiques, 1939], 67). 3. UN peacekeeping, Wikipedia, June 1, 2004, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ UN_peacekeeping. 4. Jan Palmowski, Oxford Dictionary of Contemporary World History from 1900 to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 74–76, 167; Encyclopaedia Britannica, Almanac 2003 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 2002), 410–11, 690–92. 5. Srebrenica Aftermath, http://www.warchronicle.com/netherlands/ AfterSrebrenica.htm.

Notes

6. Gendercide Watch, “Case study: The Srebrenica Massacre.” 7. “Inside Out,” review of David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Scribner, 2001). 28. Chinese Shadows 1. On death tolls see “Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm,” http://cgibin.rcn.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm. See also Hixhe Peng, “Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces,” Population and Development Review 13 (1987): 639–70; V. Smil, “China’s Great Famine: 40 Years Later,” British Medical Journal 319 (December 18– 25, 1999): 1619–21; and Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Free Press, 1998). 2. Jan S. Prybyla, Market and Plan under Socialism: The Bird in the Cage (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1987), 3. 3. Nicholas Lardy, Integrating China into the Global Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), 24. Ten years earlier, in 1988, I could not buy some delicious-looking candies in a department store in Tianjin because, the sales clerk explained, their prices had not yet arrived from the competent government pricing bureau. There being no air-conditioning, the candies were melting as I left half an hour later. 4. János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), chaps. 5 and 6. 5. According to Randall Peerenboom, the most basic idea is that “law is able to impose meaningful restraints on the state and individual members of the ruling group” (China’s Long March toward Rule of Law [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 2, 8). 6. On Asian values and where they depart from this model, see Jan S. Prybyla, “China and Taiwan: A Comparative Study of Economic Problems since the Asian Financial Crisis,” American Asian Review (Winter 2000): 76–79; “Asian Values,” Economist, May 28, 1994, 13; Michael Backman, Asian Eclipse, Exposing the Dark Side of Business in Asia (Singapore: John Wiley and Sons, 1999). 7. For a picture of how intellectuals were treated in the past, see Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1991). 8. Jacques deLisle, “Fifteen Years after Tiananmen: Persistence, Memory, and Change in China,” E-Notes (June 4, 2004), Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA, www.fpri.org/enotes/20040604.asia.delisle.tiananmen15.html. 9. Nicholas Lardy, China’s Unfinished Economic Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998). 10. DeLisle, “Fifteen Years after Tiananmen.” 11. Andrew D. Marble, editor of special issue, “The ‘China Threat’ Debate,” Issues and Studies 36, no. 1 (January/February 2000); Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, Coming Conflict with China (New York: Random House, 1997); Gerald

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Segal, “Does China Matter?” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 5 (September–October 1999): 24–26. 12. Willy Wo-Lap Lam, “The End of Sino-American Honeymoon?” China Brief 4, no. 13 (June 24, 2004), Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C., www.jamestown.org. 13. Richard A. Bitzinger, “A Prisoner’s Dilemma: The EU’s China Arms Embargo,” China Brief 4, no. 13 (June 24, 2004), Jamestown Foundation, Washington, D.C., www.jamestown.org. 14. Michael Vatikiotis, “China’s Growing Clout Alarms Smaller Neighbors,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2004, A12. 29. 9/11 and the War on Terrorism 1. “America’s War against Terrorism,” University of Michigan Documents Center, September 11th Attack, Library of Congress Subject Heading, September 11th Terrorist Attacks, 2001, http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/usterror.html. 2. Gerald F. Seib, “Terrorists’ Tactics Could Undermine Their Objectives,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2004, A4. 3. This note is intended to parry the expected thrust of outrage from those who think that by implication I am equating Islam—the Koran and the Hadith, that is, the teachings of Muhammad as conveyed by tradition—with what sometimes is designated as “Islamism,” the extreme interpretation of the doctrines and teachings of Islam and its prophet. Moreover, the argument that there is as much violence in the Bible, especially in the early part of it, as there is in the Koran is often heard from those interested in such matters; it all depends on which chapter and verse you pick. Without the anger, combativeness, and cruelty, both books would be considerably thinner. From the secularists, one hears that, even though there is a lot of bad temper and cruelty in the early Bible and the Koran, most Jews and Christians pick the good parts from the menu, and those who don’t drink at that source ignore the Bible’s teachings altogether and use a humanitarian ethic, if they consciously use one at all, to sustain them. 4. U.S. Department of State, Historical Background, Office of the Historian, “Significant Terrorist Incidents, 1961–2003: A Brief Chronology,” http://www .state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/5902pf.htm. 5. The holocaust is a shorthand term not limited to the wholesale extermination of Jews by the Nazis. It covers many other cohorts and nationalities considered subhuman by the Nazi regime, irrespective of age; Poles and Russians are in the forefront, together with gypsies and the physically and mentally handicapped who were used for horrific, twisted medical experiments. Thanks to the oppressors’ obsession with careful record keeping, I have in my files copies of documents found in the archives of the Kommandantur of the Auschwitz concentration camp certifying to the arrival at the camp of my uncle and aunt who were murdered on August 11 and October 11, 1942 (note the diabolic symmetry). The bureaucratic

Notes

categorization of their detention and subsequent execution was: (1) polnisch (Polish); (2) politisch (political). 30. Lessons 1. As of July 2004, forty nations had contributed armed forces and other personnel to Afghanistan, and thirty nations had supplied troops and other personnel to Iraq. 2. Charles Krauthammer, Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World, 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute, February 24, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2004), 15. 3. Ibid. Appendix. Modernization and Modernity in the Process of Economic Growth and Development Reprinted by permission of the editor of Issues and Studies, Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, vol. 31, no. 4 (April 1995): 1–27. Some footnotes omitted. 1. Manning Nash, Unfinished Agenda: The Dynamics of Modernization in Developing Nations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984), 80. 2. Frederic Bastiat [1801–1850], The Law (New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1993), 6. 3. “The necessity of material survival [modernization] and the equally pressing need to live in a meaningful universe [modernity]” (Nash, Unfinished Agenda, 49, 16). See also Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). 4. Nash, Unfinished Agenda, 17. 5. George J. Stigler, The Intellectual and the Marketplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 146. 6. Parth J. Shah, “Money and Capital in Economic Development,” in The Collapse of Development Planning, ed. Peter J. Boettke (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 20. 7. János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 131. 8. Workable competition is essential. Competition in the simplest, but not simplistic, terms is the presence of alternatives. It is also, according to F. A. Hayek, a process of dispersed search and discovery, a learning process, and the market system’s social selection mechanism (Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. W. W. Bartley III [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989]). 9. Ibid., 31. 10. János Kornai, The Road to a Free Economy: Shifting from a Socialist System—The Example of Hungary (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 51. “A person

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who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan edition [1776; repr., New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1937], 365). 11. World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 84–87. 12. “Slicing the Cake” and “Inequality: For Richer, for Poorer,” Economist, November 5, 1994, 13–14, 19–21; Amartya Sen, On Economic Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 13. Lewis M. Branscomb, “Technological Change and Its International Diffusion,” in Capital, Technology, and Labor in the New Global Economy, ed. James H. Cassing and Steven L. Husted (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1988), 108. 14. Harald B. Malmgren, “Technology and the Economy,” in The Global Economy: America’s Role in the Decade Ahead, ed. William E. Brock and Robert Hormats (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 92–119. 15. Yotaro Kobyashi, “Changes in International Marketing Techniques,” in Cassing and Husted, Capital, Technology, and Labor, 127–35. 16. Alan Greenspan, “Goods Shrink and Trade Grows,” Wall Street Journal, October 24, 1988, A9. 17. Steven Levy, author of a book on data security, cited by Peter H. Lewis, “Computer Jokes and Threats Ignite Debate on Anonymity,” New York Times, December 31, 1994. See also Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee, Quicksilver Capital: How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World (New York: Macmillan/Free Press, 1991). 18. Alex Inkeles, “The Generalists and the China Specialists,” American Asian Review 9, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 78–79. 19. Nash, Unfinished Agenda, 94. 20. The references are to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Reprints of Economic Classics, 1966), 23, 26. “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. . . . In the race for wealth and honours, and preferments, he may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and every muscle in order to outstrip his competitors. But if he should justle or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectators is entirely at an end. It is a violation of fair play, which they cannot admit of ” (ibid., 3, 120). Cf. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 21. Hayek, Fatal Conceit, 61. 22. Strictly speaking, the “laws” of autocrats and lesser authoritarians are edicts, decrees, and ordinances that, beneath the veneer of legal forms, are manifestations of lawlessness (Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties [New York: Harper and Row, 1985], 289–91).

Notes

23. N. E. Simmonds, “Natural Law,” in The Invisible Hand: The New Palgrave, ed. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987, 1989), 223–26. 24. Simmonds, “Natural Law,” 223. 25. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993). 26. Calvinist ethic justified unequal distribution not in terms of marginal revenue product but rather as “a special dispensation of Divine Providence, which in these differences, as in particular grace, pursued secret ends unknown to men” (Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958], 177). 27. Harvey Mansfield, review of New French Thought: Political Philosophy, ed. Mark Lilla, Wall Street Journal, December 21, 1994, A12. I find the last phrase disconcertingly deconstructionist. An alternative answer based on the rather controversial discipline of evolutionary psychology, a modern development of Darwinian evolutionary biology, is provided by Robert Wright in his interesting The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are (New York: Pantheon, 1994). 28. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), 42. 29. George Will, “Pre–New Deal America Reborn,” syndicated column, November 14, 1994. 30. “Why Voting Is Good for You,” Economist, August 27, 1994, 15. 31. Michael Novak, “Democracy, Capitalism, and Morality,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 1994, A16. Cf. Dietrich Rueshemeyer, Evelyne Hubber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 32. Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992); Larry Diamond, “Rethinking Civil Society,” Journal of Democracy 5, no. 3 (July 1994): 4–17. 33. James Q. Wilson, On Character: Essays by James Q. Wilson (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1995). 34. To attribute to culture that which cannot be readily explained is a bad habit, the last refuge, one might say, of the distraught scholar. A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhon catalog 236 definitions of “culture,” then add one more, in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge: Harvard University, Peabody Museum, 1952). 35. Dana Milbank, “Some Go Business Class in Peace Corps,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 1994, A10, citing a Peace Corps business volunteer in Budapest working on cross-border participation between Hungarians, Slovaks, and Ukrainians. To ensure that the principle of mobility and free access is observed, the passing and effective enforcement of appropriate laws may be necessary. 36. Hayek, Fatal Conceit, 63. 37. Novak, “Democracy, Capitalism, and Morality.”

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38. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 3d rev. ed. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963), 194. 39. David P. Hamilton, “Asians Taste Free Speech on Internet,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 1994, B4, citing “a Western executive familiar with the plan” to connect 250,000 computers in mainland China to the Internet. 40. Sven Birkets, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Faber and Faber, 1994). 41. Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 205, 207, 211. 42. Arturo Fontaine Talavera, “The Future of an Illusion,” in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Revisited, ed. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 107. 43. Kornai, The Socialist System, 103. 44. Novak, “Democracy, Capitalism, and Morality.” “We must choose between feasible alternatives in this world and not between utopias. The capitalistic order, as it has evolved, is the least bad one I know, and it is the order most susceptible and amenable to reform and improvement” (G. Warren Nutter, Political Economy and Freedom: A Collection of Essays [Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983], 21).

Index

Accessionists to European Union: their GDPs, living standards, tariffs, 144; Schröder’s tough love speech to, 149– 50; their corporate tax rates, 150; told to shut up by Chirac, 152; their suspicions, 153; as cost competitors, 156 Acheson, Dean, 38 Adenauer, Konrad 26, 120 Afghanistan: Soviet invasion of, 4, 53, 55, 62, 63, 67, 98; experience in, 76, defeat in, 76–77, dilemma, 78; guerrillas in, 76, 98; and perestroika, 86; Chechens in, 122; U.S. policing in, 128 Albania: conditions in, 32; membership in Warsaw Pact, 35; Soviet model unappealing to, 64 vilifies Eurocommunism, 65; and Macedonia, 120; missed Enlightenment, 120 Alliot-Marie, Michelle, 129 American values, 4, 5–7, 51 America’s liberation of enserfed people, 185 Andropov, Yuri: tells Czechs to support Red Brigades, 61; KGB Head, 61; protector of Gorbachev, 83; death of, 95–96 Annanization: as alternative to terrorism, 186 Anti-Americanism: tendentious, 7; as European sport, 52; sources of in West Europe, 53 Appeasement: Pollyannaish, 52; practitioners of, 91–92; defined, 130; Chamberlainesque, 130

Argentina, 137, 173, 190 Armenia, 121, 125, 153 Asia: economic tigers of, 22, 75; values of, 38, 168; ex-colonial, 64; removal of communism from part of, 95; as hot spot, 126; government participation in developmental process in East, 194; high performing economies of East, 201 Atatürk, Kemal, 183 Atlanticism, 113, 116 Auschwitz, 186 Australia, 39, 110 Austria(n), 92, 102, 103, 183 Axis: Italy, 10; of revisionist praxis, 62; Paris-Berlin, 119; countries, 140; odd couple, 156; of Europe, 187 Azerbaijan, 121 Bader-Meinhoff gang, 53 Bad Godesberg Program, 25 Bailouts: of firms in EU, 156, 157 Balance: of payments, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20; of terror, 53; sectoral, 194; of behavioral attributes, 200 Balkans, 120, 121 Ballistic missiles, 73–76 passim, 98, 177 Baltic countries: recognized as part of USSR, 55; apply to enter NATO, 118–19; refuse to join Russia, 120. See also Accessionists Bandung: Third World voice found at, 50 



Index Barter: nether regions of, 13; euro and, 140; aim of restrictive systems, 192; manifestation of utopianism, 192 Basque nationalists, 60 Belgium, 24, 34, 75, 118, 137, 155 Bentham, Jeremy, 202 Berlin: wall, 9, 22, 31, 41, 42, 43, 47, 51, 70, 87, 88, 91, 97, 98, 118, 131, 153; airlift, 30, 31, 105; East, 88, 96 Berlinguer, Enrico, 61–62 Bevin, Ernest, 24 Big Three, 21, 41 Bin Laden, Osama. See Terrorism Bismarck, Otto von, 139, 203 Bonn Republic. See Federal Republic of Germany Bosnia-Herzegovina, 109, 120, 128, 148, 159, 160, 161, 162, 181 Bourgeois: state machinery, 57; multiparty system, 58; order, 58; democracy, 60; dictatorship, 60 Brandt, Willy, 24, 25 Bretton-Woods System, 10–22; exchange rates problem, 14; par value system in, 14; disequilibrium in balance of payments, 14; aim of, 15; sets up IMF, 15; multilateral design of, 17; as liquidity provider, 17; dollar exchange standard under, 18; and U.S. deficit, 19–20; increases world trade, 20; U.S. ends dollar exchange system of, 20 Brezhnev, Leonid: coup against Khrushchev, 44; doctrine, 46–48; signs ABM Treaty, 54; signs SALT II Agreement, 55; lectured by Berlinguer, 61; health impaired, 76; ultimatum to Poland, 80; death of, 95 Britain, 27, 30, 31, 39, 40, 45, 89, 128, 137, 145, 150, 177, 201 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 115 Bulgaria, 30, 32, 35, 46, 155, 160 Bureaucracy: State Department, 55; European, 137; transgressions dealt with en famille, 149 Bureaucratism: as European cultural phenomenon, 147; its characteristics, 148 Burma, 177, 178 Burundi. See Rwanda-Burundi Bush, George W., 73, 75, 179

Cambodia, 159, 177, 178 Canada, 43, 50, 59, 60, 106, 112, 127 CAP. See Common Agricultural Policy Carrillo, Santiago, 60–61, 62 Carter, Jimmy, 33, 55, 67 Castro Fidel, 43, 44, 190 Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae, 88 Central Intelligence Agency, 43, 77 Centralization: EU’s preference for, 145; in EU’s institution building, 146 Centrally planned economy. See Planning Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), 40 CEP. See Conference on European Problems Chamberlainesque delusion, 130. See also Appeasement Character, 6, 21, 107, 135, 174, 200, 204 Charter Seventy-Seven, 96 Chechens, 121–22 Chechnya, 97, 109, 121, 122 Chernenko, Konstantin, 95 Chernobyl, 95 Chiang Kai-shek, 31, 39 China, 164–78 passim Chirac, Jacques, 129, 130, 152 Christian Democrats: Italian, 61; German, 74 Church, Frank: 49 Churchill, Winston: his Iron Curtain speech; 4; saying by, 18; and Yalta Agreement, 23; recommends FrancoGerman reconciliation, 129 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency CIS. See Commonwealth of Independent States Civilizations: Western, non-Western, 109; fault line wars among, 109; defined, 110; list of, 110; paramount, 111; fading, 111 Civil society, 107, 114, 143, 147, 174, 175, 200, 204, 210 Civil war(s): in Greece, 32; in Spain, 60; abominable, 63; in Afghanistan, 67, 76; Western, 109; in Georgia, 121 Class: and thought relation, 59; struggle, 60; exploiters, 71; hatred, 71; low, 126; turmoil, 165; class-correct masses, 175; analysis, 206

Index Clinton, Bill, 75, 84 Coalition(s) of the willing, 39, 152, 186 Codetermination of management and labor in German corporations, 28 Cold War: end of, 9, 87; dragged on, 39; triumphalism at end of, 105; of ideologies, 105; global, 109; civilizational wars after, 109; allies restive after, 118; Atlantic alliance during, 124; Europe’s military weakness during, 129 Collective amusement park: and German social welfare, 25; its socialist counterpart, 95; and consumer overindulgence, 107; the last man heading for, 110 COMECON. See Council for Mutual Economic Assistance Commercial republic, 114, 174, 210 Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, 140 Common Foreign Security Policy of the EU, 139 Commonwealth of Independent States, 121, 122, 132 Communist Party: of East Germany, 25, 88; of the Soviet Union, 59, 83, 84, 96; of France, 58, 62, 63, 138; of Italy, 59, 61, 62; of Spain, 60; of Poland, 79, 80, 81; of Hungary, 88; of China, 94, 172, 177 Conference on European Problems, 88– 89, 116, 125 Conflict(s): armed, 52; global, 113; resolution of, 175, 207; of interests, 207 Conscience: terrorists without, 71; in commercial republic, 114–15, 210; contractual, 192; of ordinary citizens, 211 Containment, 24, 38, 39, 41, 52, 53, 54, 75, 132 Corporatism: market system, 25; capitalist, 93; superstate, 138; for EU’s business champions, 156 Corruption: in European Commission, 148; of Chinese state-owned banks and firms and commercial banks, 171; in Chinese leadership, 172; punishment of in Koran, 180; not new, 181 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance: formed, 30; members of, 30;

Jaruzelski’s view of how Reagan helped, 82; mentioned, 79 Council of Europe, 138 Counterculture, 41, 49 CPSU. See Communist Party: of the Soviet Union Crile, George, 64 Croatia, 120, 160 Cuba: member of COMECON, 31; nuclear missiles in, 43; no missiles in, 44; missile crisis, 31, 35, 41, 43–45 Cultural Revolution: Mao-inspired eruptions of, 53; political witch hunt of, 164; traumas of, 165, 209; ignorance in command during, 168; apparat survivors of, 169; China’s president murdered during, 177 Culture(s): of accomplishment, 6; populist, 6; shift in, 49–51; perturbation of, 53; tastes in, 58; diversity of, 61; of inclusion, 92; hesitations of, 106; culture-shaping experiences, 110; missionary American, 113; relativism, 116; culture-carrying institutions, 116; of restraint, 126; of impunity, 131; commingling of, 134; bureaucratism of, 147; shared by West European countries, 155; influence of American, 185; differences in, 205; Gutenbergian, 208; popular, 210 Cyprus, 109, 150 Czechoslovakia: member of COMECON, 30; member of Warsaw Pact, 35; invasion of, 46– 48; Gorbachev’s mission in, 47; Berlinguer condemns invasion of, 61; nuclear emplacements in, 75; ready to invade Poland, 80; DDR citizens arrive in, 87–88; Soviet missiles in, 98; becomes two countries, 120 Czech Republic, 120, 150, 210 Davidson, Eugene, 22 Dawes Plan, 13 Dayton Agreement, 161, 162 DDR. See East Germany Deaths, 87, 162, 164, 181, 199 Decency, 6, 108, 115, 180, 200, 201, 210





Index Deconstruction(ists): in letters and politics, 92; onslaught of, 116; nihilistic, 202. See also Nihilism Defense: need to provide democracies with, 8; U.S. pays lion’s share of common, 18; decline in West European outlays on, 25; attracts free riders, 26; allied freeloading on, 31; British commitments to, 32; policy by U.S., 55; antinuclear, 75; of its values inadequate in the West, 116; proportion of German GDP spent on, 126; U.S. assumes common Western, 132; question about Western, 136; to be handled by U.S. through NATO; 137; on the back burner for Europe, 142; EU has little input to, 155; Taiwan budget for, 173, Russia’s assistance to Chinese, 177 De Gaulle, Charles: not every Frenchman like, 6; chip on his shoulder, 21; and Bretton Woods, 21–22; leaves NATO, 35–36; his virtues, 36; and Thorez, 58; and the French, 128; and Britain’s membership in ECSC, 137– 38; his view of European unification, 142; his view of “Anglo-Saxon” reasoning, 145 Democracy: institutions of, 8; Western, 8, 113; Asian values-type, 38; constitutional procedures of, 59; in Spain, 60; socialist, 61, 88; curbs on panned by PCF, 62; in Taiwan and South Korea, 75; principles of liberal, 93, 104, 107, 108, 109; Yeltsin and, 95; defined, 106–7; terrorism influences elections in Spanish, 112; political system of, 114; and modernity, 114, 122–23, 200; Russia barely, 118; sham people’s, 122; Germany converted to, 137; in EU legislation, 146; Movement in China, 173; not an abstraction, 174; proto-democracy, 174; and war, 176; American peppy, 182; America sows seeds of, 185, 186; as necessary condition of market system, 203; applies to public life, 203; economic competition supportive of, 207; spillover effects of, 210; market, 210

Democratic centralism, 63 Democratic Party of the Left. See Communist Party: of Italy Department of State, 55, 65, 179, 181 De-Stalinization: Khrushchev’s partial, 24; harangue at 21st CPSU Congress, 59 Détente, 4, 24, 39, 49, 52–56, 57, 67, 124 Dialectics: Marxist, 57, 69; materialist, 58, 64, 71; evolutionary, 105 Dictatorship: of the proletariat, 57, 62; communist, 122; African 203 Dignity: of every person, 5; human, 202 Diplomacy: Soviet-American over Cienfuego, 44; inconsistent human, 49; in liberation process, 92; persuasion of, 98; like minuets, 128; cajoling of, 130; whisperings by, 131; in negotiations, 161; phrased in language of, 180 Disarmament, 25, 127, 129, 136 Dostoyevski, Fyodor, 206 Draft evaders, 50, 91 Dubcˇek, Aleksander, 47, 80 Dutchbat, 161, 162 East Asia. See Asia East Germany: GDP of, 28–29; goods shortages in, 29; established as German Democratic Republic (DDR), 30; member of Warsaw Pact, 35; and the wall, 42; and invasion of Czechoslovakia, 46; nuclear emplacements in, 75; armies poised to invade Poland, 80; citizens travel out of, 87– 88; defense minister of, 89; decaying, 96; former, 150 East Timor, 128 EC. See European Commission ECA. See Economic Cooperation Administration ECB. See European bank(s) ECI. See European bank(s) ECJ. See European courts Economic Cooperation Administration, 27 ECSC. See European communities EDC. See European communities EEC. See European communities

Index EFTA. See European Free Trade Association EIB. See European bank(s) Eisenhower, Dwight D., 42 Elites, 189, 204, 206 Employees. See Workers End of history, 94, 105, 107 Engels, Friedrich, 58, 191 Environment(al): protection, 74; regulations in EU, 147; competitive market, 204; distinctive, 206. See also Green(s) EO. See European office(s) EP. See European parliament EPC. See European communities Equality: American understanding of, 5, 107; as principle of liberal democracy, 104; as principle of society, 107; in Germany, 150; in EU budgetary policy, 154; under law, 167; impressed foreign visitors to Mao’s China, 170; in distribution of fruits of growth, 201; of opportunity in East Asia, 195 Equity, 115, 171, 195, 200, 201 Erhard, Ludwig, 28, 29 Errors of socialism: economic, 69–71; ideological, 71–72; political, 72 ESF. See European funds Estonia. See Baltic countries Ethic(s): symmetry of, 53; relativist, 116, 182; deficiency of in officials, 148; of circumstantial grays, 203; Confucian, 204 Ethnic: topography, 49; minorities, 65– 66; abomination, 71; group, 110; accommodation, 115; wars, 115; disputes, 120; complexity, 121; cleansing, 160, 181 EU. See European Union Euratom. See European communities Euro(s): example of financial integration, 20; spent on farm subsidies, 140; banknotes and coins introduced, 141; zone, 141, 154; budget of EIB in, 144; as Euromoney, 193 Eurocommunism, 57–68 passim; theory and practice of, 59; concepts of, 59; camaraderie in, 61; demise of, 65–66

European bank(s): commercial, 50; Central, 141; Currency Institute, 141; national central, 141; Investment, 144 European business champions, 156–57, 177 European Commission: as key institution of EU, 141, 143, 146; scandal of, 148–49; sides with accessionists, 152; files suit with ECJ, 154; can be dismissed by EP, 155; lacks powers of taxation, 155 European commissioners, 148, 151, 157 European committees: Economic and Social, 143; of Regions, 143–44 European communities: Coal and Steel, 24, 137, 142, 156; Defense, 35, 130, 138; Community (EC), 60, 67, 92, 105, 153; Political, 138; Economic, 139, 142, 178 European Council: as key institution of EU, 141, 146; composition of, 142; now called of the European Union, 142; law, 143 European court(s): of Justice, 139, 141, 143, 154; of Auditors, 144, 148 European Free Trade Association, 138 European funds: Agricultural Guidance Guarantee, 144; Regional Development 144, 148; Social, 144 European office(s): of the Ombudsman, 144, 147; Police (Europol), 144 European parliament: only democratically elected EU organ, 138; expected to gain in legislative power, 141; now approves/rejects EU’s budget, 142; investigation of EC by member of, 149 European Rapid Deployment/Response Force: not yet of one mind, 91; talk of forming, 130; still under consideration, 139; not quite ready yet, 161 European Recovery Program: put together promptly, 24; exemplary performance of, 29 European Union, 134–58; joined by enlarged Germany, 89, 91; stakeholding in, 119; made official, 139; its protectionist budget, 140; its GDP, 144; adopts euro, 140; its budgetary





Index support for agriculture, 140, 144; heading eastward, 141; passports, 142; puts defense expenditure on back burner, 142; borders of, 142; law, 143; problems of, 145–57; centralized locus of power in, 145; deductive thinking in, 145–46; jurisprudence, 146; institutional centralization, 146; bureaucratism and overregulation 146–48; corporate taxation in, 149–50; subsidies and industrial policy, 150–52; twenty languages of, 152; acceleration of membership enlargement, 153, 155– 56; state budgetary deficits, 154; bailouts and mergers in, 156–57 Euroskeptics, 140, 155 Factionalism, 80, 177 Fair(ness), 5, 174, 180, 200–201 Faith: loss of, 65, 93; fatigue of secular, 94; political, 119; somewhat reformed capitalist, 175; Divine edicts taken on, 202 Falun Gong, 53, 170 Fascism: antiaesthetic realism of, 104; ideological war with liberal democracy, 109; quasi, 173; its venomous strains, 185 Fault line: wars, 109; tremors, 121 Fear, 72, 85, 94, 112, 128 Federal Republic of Germany: established, 28; joins NATO, 35; recognizes its frontier with Poland, 55 Finland, 26, 93 First do no harm, 95 Fischer, Joschka, 74, 129 Ford, Gerald, 50 Ford, Henry, 197 France: during drôle de guerre, 10; borrows from IMF, 16; communist subversion of, 23; Marshall Plan aid to, 27; reaction to U.S. discarding dollar exchange standard, 31; signs NATO treaty, 34; opposes British entry into EEC, 36; veto-wielding in UN, 39; member of SEATO, 39–40; less amenable U.S. partner, 52; Carrillo exiled in, 60; communist power not attained in, 63; occupies Germany,

89; Muslim immigrants in, 112; leading emergent EU, 119; its GDP expenditure on defense, 126; opposes NATO help to Afghan elections, 129; its force de frappe, 130; signs Treaty of Paris, 137; precipitates crisis of empty chair, 142; thirty-five-hour workweek in, 147; taxes as proportion of labor costs in, 150; expected to exceed EU budget deficit limit, 154; reluctant to privatize, 157; co-owns EADS, 177 Franco, Francisco, 26, 60 Franklin, Benjamin, 185 Fraud: in EU, 148; function of government to prevent, 195; passing for wisdom, 209 Frederick the Great, 135 Free(dom): trade, 16, 140; market, 25 85, 148, 174, 185, 199, 210; riding, 26, 189; individual, 26 106, 173; bourgeois, 47; of association, 79; thought and expression, 85, 174, 198, 210; revolution, 91, 92; shock, 94; and Paris Kultura, 96; will, 108; of Chechens, 122; Americans distributing, 158; economy, 173; choice, 174, 199, 207; action 174; as component of modernization, 191; through speedy access to information, 197; disciplined by competition, 206; coined, 206; availability of economic information, 208; constitutionally enshrined, 210 Freedom revolution: those not responsible for, 91–92; unicausal explanation of, 92; indigenous causes of, 92–95; two Russian statesmen involved in, 95; contribution of people’s movements to, 96–97; external contributions to, 97; and Ronald Reagan, 98– 99; and American policy 99 Free Europe College in Strasbourg, 42 Freeloading, 26, 31 Friedman, Milton, 69 Friends: clarifying America’s purpose to, 31; parting of, 124; America’s foreign, 132–33; China’s foreign, 124; of Chinese office holders, 172; schmoozers posing as, 180; onetime, 184; carefully picked, 186; money value of, 199

Index Friendship, 6, 157, 180, 184, 185 Fukuyama, Francis: as author, 105; meaning of his theory, 107–8, 109–10; and historical stages, 114; Huntington debate, 114; and predestination, 174 Gagarin, Juri, 42 Galbraith, John, 99 Gang of Four, 94, 169 Garden of Eden, 104, 107, 186 GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gdan´sk, 79 GDP. See Gross Domestic Product General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 16 Genocide: in Rwanda, 115; of Chechens, 122; in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 159, 160 Georgia, 121 German Democratic Republic. See East Germany German problem, 129, 130, 136 German Social Democratic Party, 25, 26 Gibbon, Edward, 125 Glasnost: as openness, transparency, more light, 73, 85; in Gdan´sk shipyards, 79; as domestic liberalization, 84; appeals to intelligentsia, 85; would choke socialist system to death, 85; of no avail, 94; implications of administering undiluted to moribund system, 95; and scientific revolution, 97 Gorbachev, Mikhail: recollects invasion of Czechoslovakia, 47; canonization of, 56; loan to Marchais, 63; becomes General Secretary of CPSU, 83; signs INF treaty, 75; calls Afghanistan invasion “bad mistake,” 76; does not outgrow Marxism, 81, 85–86; Green Period of, 84, 85; compared to Kerensky, 84; his glasnost and perestroika, 85–86; no objection to German unification, 89; and Chinese reformers, 93; his contribution to removal of communism, 95; compared to Yeltsin, 95; and Reagan’s call to tear down wall, 98; as president of Green Cross International, 131 Gorbachev, Raisa, 83

Government and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA), 28 Gramsci, Antonio, 59 Great Leap: eastward, 155; forward, 164 Greece, 23, 32, 34, 39, 154 Green(s), 65, 74, 90 Gromyko, Andrei, 74, 76 Gross domestic product: of East Germany, 28–29; growth of French, 35; of newcomers to EU, 144; share of German transferred from west to east, 150; EU countries violating budgetary deficit rule as share of their, 154; annual increase in Chinese, 170 Growth: economic, 8, 20, 28, 60, 151, 154; productivity-driven, 198–99; efficient, 200; of product, 200; fruits of 201; of information, 206 Guillaume, Günter, 25 Gulag, 71, 99 Gutenberg, Johannes, 13, 208 Hatred(s): class, 71; instinctual, 132 Havel, Vaclav, 96 Hayek, Friedrich, 69, 193 Hedonism, 41, 116 Hegel, G. W. F.: and dialectic, 70; dates end of history, 104; inspires Kojève, 105; and contradictions, 107–8; and historical stages, 114 Hegemon(y), 124–33 passim; Uncle Sam’s, 20; defined, 21; the West’s past, 106; China’s probable, 111; Muslims find America’s humiliating, 111; friends resent U.S. being a, 113; du jour, 119; an American problem to Germans and French, 129; China denies, 178; hubris of, 186 Helsinki: Accords (Final Act), 55, 96; watch groups, 97. See also Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Helvètius, Claude, 135 Historic(al): necessity, 58, 71, 81, 189; materialism, 71, 94; stages, 71, 108, 110, 194; time, 87; determinism, 108, 205; contingency, 108; fortuitousness, 108; occasions, 126; precedents, 133;





Index opportunity, 155; experience, 168; perspective, 187; distance, 187 Hitler, Adolf: Thorez’s irregular conjugation with, 62; his Atlantic Wall; 99; Germany under, 119; his pact with Stalin, 119; had laws but no legal order, 202 Holocaust(ically), 84, 182 Honecker, Erich, 88 Hong Kong, 164, 169, 195, 200, 201 Hostages, 77, 112 Hua, Gouofeng, 169 Hume, David, 202 Hungarian revolution, 41–42 Hungary, 12, 24, 30, 35, 46, 88, 98, 150, 209 Huntington, Samuel: his interpretation of where the world is going, 123–29; and Fukuyama’s work, 130; and lack of modernization theory, 130–31 Hussein, Saddam, 181, 186 Iceland, 34, 138 IMF. See International Monetary Fund Imperialism, 6, 29, 31, 39, 50, 159 Inaction: three criteria for, 36–37; on the Berlin wall by America, 43; on terrorism and cost of, 182 India, 116 Indonesia, 112, 190, 200, 203 Industrial business champions: initiated by France and Germany, 156–57; as suppliers of weapons, 177 Industrial policy, 151 Inequalities, 147, 171, 200, 201 INF. See Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty Infant industries, 18, 169 Infidels, 180, 182 Inflation, 11, 13, 15, 49, 77 Institution(s): democratic, 8; international financial, 10–11; system of, 12–13; structures of, 54; accomplishments of Soviet, 87; of society, 107; as part of civilization, 110; of Atlanticism, 116; building, 145, 146; level of in Chinese political reforms, 172; no fundamental changes in Chinese political reforms, 172;

transparency of required by modernization, 173; of civil society, 204; political, 207; embodying legal order, 210 Integration: near, 125; European, 129; economic, 134, 139; inter- and supranational, 142 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, 75 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. See World Bank International Monetary Fund: created by Bretton Woods, 15; quotas, 16; reserves, 17; lending activities, 17; as world institution, 119 Investment: controls, 15, 20; American private, 18; Europeans’ in armed forces, 129; attempt by European countries to attract foreign direct, 149; EU rule on tax incentives to, 149; infrastructural in east Germany, 151; in human capital, 194; highyield, 194 Iran, 40, 67 Iraq: possible war with, 36; member of CENTO, 40; UN oil-for-food programs for, 128; Poland and war in, 152; Spaniards excoriate their government over, 179; Keeper of the Rack eliminated in, 186 Ireland, 112, 141, 150, 181 Irish economic model, 150, 152 Iron curtain: mentioned by Churchill, 4; descends on Europe, 17, 137; rusts in peace, 51; Germans on both sides of, 97; raising of, 97 Iskanderyan, Alexander, 122 Islam, 110, 111, 122 Islamic fundamentalism: resurrected, 97; Huntington’s views on, 111; identity, 112; cohesion, 112; and homeland governments, 112; fervor, 122; world, 160; jihad, 181, 182; reasons for, 182– 83; terrorism, 185 Israel: U.S. needs to rein in, 50; U.S. support of, 111; as reason for terroristic jihad of, 182 Italy, 10, 23, 61, 63, 75, 137, 144, 154, 160, 161

Index Japan(ese): implantation of liberty in after World War II, 3; given access to American markets, 18; charged U.S. with hegemonic bad faith, 21; by midsixties, second largest world economy, 28; Korean War boosted economy of, 38; imperialist felons subdued, 104, 185; a separate civilization, 111; does not admit to past problems, 129; rule by consensus, 168; its de facto one-party democracy, 174; uneasy about China’s modernization and rocketry, 177–78; 1930s had partial modernization with lagging modernity, 190; government support for export-oriented industries, 195; rapid growth with declining inequality, 200 Jaruzelski, Wojciech: on possible Soviet invasion of Poland, 80; outlaws Solidarity, 95; speech at Kansas State University, 81–82; as unapologetic Marxist, 81; criticizes Reagan, 81– 82; analyzes U.S. policy on Soviet Union, 93 Jews, 160, 182 Jiang Qing, 94, 169 Jihad, 124, 207, 209, 210 Johnson, Lyndon, 48 Johnson, Paul, 55 Juan Carlos I, de Bourbon, 60 Jurisprudence, 146, 199. See also Law(s) Justice, 5, 181, 200, 202 Kafka(esque): profusion of red tape in EU, 147; initiative, 148, 149 Kagan, Robert, 125 Kant, Immanuel, 129 Karadz˘ic´, Radovan 160 Karzai, Hamid, 130 Kashmir, 109 Kautsky, Karl, 65 Kazakhstan, 121 Kennan, George, 24. See also Containment Kennedy, John F., 41 Kennedy, Paul, 116 Kerensky, Aleksander, 84 Keynes, John Maynard, 12, 13, 15

KGB. See Secret police: Soviet Khadafi, Muammar, 98 Khmer Rouge, 159, 177 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 185 Khrushchev, Nikita: his partial deStalinization, 24; Stalin’s successor, 31; overbuoyed by Sputnik launch, 41; his decision to ship nuclear missiles to Cuba, 43; given the elbow by Brezhnev, 44; old shoe, 45, 58; rhetorically supports self-determination, 46; said “we shall bury you,” 58; his “secret” report to 20th CPSU Congress, 59; allows Chechens to return to their homeland, 121; and socialist economics textbook, 167 Khrushchev, Sergei, 45 Kidnapping(s), 95, 189 Kim Dae Jung, 54 Kim Il Sung, 190 Kim Jong Il, 54 Kissinger, Henry, 41, 44, 52 Kohl, Helmut: and collective amusement park, 25; in charge of Bundestag, 74, as Chancellor and citizen, 89; accused of financial misconduct, 89; guides New Germany into EU and NATO, 89 Kojève, Aleksandre, 105 Koran: specifies punishment for infidels, 180; and terrorism, 181 Korea: trouble spot, 19; South, 38, 54, 75 195, 229; North, 38, 54, 190 Korean War, 38–39 Kornai, János, 194 Kosovo, 109, 128, 160 Krauthammer, Charles, 116 Kremlin, 44, 47, 59, 65, 74, 78 Krstic´, Radislav, 162 Krupp, 94 Kryuchkhov, Vladimir, 83 Kultura, 96 Kurds, 182 Kurtz, Stanley, 114 Kwas´niewski, Aleksander, 152 Laborers. See Workers Labour Party, 201 La Farge, Madame, 109





Index Lafayette, Marquis de, 130 Language(s): as problem for EU, 152; mathematical-symbolic, 195 Laos, 40, 93 177 Laqueur, Walter, 115 Lardy, Nicholas, 166 Laski, Harold, 91 Latvia. See Baltic countries Law(s): economic, 11; rule of, 55, 59, 106, 114, 146, 167, 168, 173, 174, 201– 3, 210; martial, 62, 80, 81; manifestations of, 105; code(s) of, 107, 146; international, 125; supranational, 139; EP’s increased power to make, 141; of EU, 143; cases of, 143; national, 143; philosophy and practice of, 145, 146; architecture of, 146; its civilizing spirit and substance, 146; administrative, statutory, common, and case, 146; technicalities of, 149; tort, 192; positive, 202; morality of, 202; natural, 202, 207 Leading role of the party, 79, 88, 94, 96 League of Nations, 13 Leipzig, 88, 96 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich: tradition of, 57, 165; his maneuvers, 58; rejection of his system, 61; socialism, 71; as terrorist, 71; shipyard in Gdan´sk, 79; principle of party’s leading role, 79; his remains, 92; his canon/creed, 92, 94; saying attributed to, 94; terror from below, 180; terror from above, 181 Lermontov, Mikhail, 122 Lewis, Bernard, 108, 133 Liberia, 128 Liberty, 3, 170, 174, 185, 201, 207 Lincoln, Abraham, 71 List, Friedrich, 114, 194 Lithuania. See Baltic countries Liu, Shaoqi, 177 Liu, Yuan, 177 Loren, Sophia, 84 Lubyanka, 54 Luck, 140 Luxembourg, 24, 137, 146 Macedonia, 120, 128, 160 Malaysia, 190, 203

Malinovski, Rodion, 45 Malta, 150 Mao Zedong: old shoe, 45; his ideology, 58, 71, 85, 94, 168, 169, 171; death and mummification of, 93, 170; China’s economy after, 111, 149; China’s economy during, 164; his anarchomasochistic economics, 165, 209; quotations from, 167–68; his gang of four, 169; his derangement, 176; and modernization, 190; and absence of legal order, 202 Marchais, Georges, 62–63 Market system: rational self-interest postulate of, 21; extent of, 24; free, 25; German variant of, 28; compatible with cultural profiles and preferences of people, 70; a risk-taking and riskprocessing machine, 93–94; modernization synonymous with, 106, 114, 190, 192, 210; need to comprehend, 140; five elements of mature, internationally competitive, 168; vulnerable under one-man rule, 203; calculus and justice of, 206; and principle of division, 207; free flow of information indispensable to, 208 Marshall, George C., 23, 24, 28, 29 Marshall Plan, 18, 23–27, 28, 30, 105 Martial law. See Law(s) Marx, Karl: his economic thought, 58; predicts immiseration of proletariat, 70; his motivation at origin, 71; longterm constraint of socialism inherited from, 93; and historical stages, 110, 114, 194; recognized importance of property, 165; coauthor of Communist Manifesto, 191; mentioned, 63 Marxist/Leninist socialism: and West German social democrats, 25; and historical materialism 39; its theoretical edifice reduced to ashes, 58; politics, 59; individual in, 59; Pantheon of, 61; borrowed from classical value theories, 69; its creative extensions, 71; doctrinal lens of, 76; its blind spot on nationalism, 85; its precepts, 85; Hungarian Communist Party renounces, 88; canon, 92; creed,

Index 94; its whole economic corpus had to be abandoned in China, 165; sloganeering, 168; Stalino-Maoism, 175; class analysis, 206 Mass murder, 63, 162 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 81 Mengele, Josef, “Dr.,” 186 Mensheviks, 58, 59 Mexico, 49, 60 Middle East, 19, 40, 126, 133, 186 Military: providing security, 8; outlays, 19; engagement, 33; commitments, 33; headquarters (NATO), 34; command (NATO), 36; American casualties, 38; and UN linkage, 38; threat, 93, 176; divide, 119; assault, 121; without, 126; weakness (Europe’s), 129, 130; doctrine, 173; muscle, 173; modernization, 177; agreements, 178; influence, 185; power (preemptive), 185 Mises, Ludwig von, 69 Missiles. See Ballistic missiles Modernity: Western style, 106; defined, 106, 114; communist Chinese critical view of, 122–23; relation to modernization in China, 173–76, 204–10; as humane commercial republic, 174–75; not predestined, 174; prospects of in China, 175; components of, 199–204; promotes modernization, 209–10 Modernization: Western style, 106; defined, 106; communist Chinese, 110, 111, 173; theory of missing in Fukuyama and Huntington, 114; relation to modernity, 173–76, 204– 10; requires personal accountability, 174, 191, 206; as humane commercial republic, 174–75; and accuracy, 173; military, 177; historically a Western process, 189; indices of, 190–99; attracts modernity, 205–9 Modrow, Hans, 89 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 24 Monetization: makes barter irrelevant, 140; of the economic system’s language, 173; systemic meaning of, 192– 93; of the rationing device, 206 Money: hard, 11, 50 (as petrodollars); soft, 11; central bank, 13; convertible,

15; hot, 15; the rich have too much, 18; receipts, 27; talks, 35; moneyless miseconomy, 70; market prices, 106, 173, 194, 195, 205, 206; fusion of, 140; ECA keeps an eye on, 144; for humanitarian aid, 148; spillover effects of, 175; launderers of, 181; role of, 192; investment, 193; electronic, 197; claims, 198 Mongolia, 31 Monnet, Jean, 137 Montenegro, 120, 159 Moral(ly)(ity): equivalence, 53; analysis, 69; ground, 73; manifestations of liberal democracy, 105, 121; offensive, 111; leadership, 116; fiber, 133; shrinkage, 117; prowess, 130; incentives, 166; deformity of terrorism, 182; philosophy, 192; of laws, 202; norms a matter of opinion, 202; education, 204 Moro, Aldo, 61 Morocco, 112 Mother Russia, 118, 119 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 115 Mujahedin, 76, 95, 160 Multiculturalism, 116, 151 Multilateral(ism): trade and payments, 15; policy, 17, 30; negotiations, 52, 53; activists, 64; treaties, 136; agreements, 142 Multipolarity, 115, 129, 131 Munich, 42, 46 Muslim(s): economic immigrants, 112; world, 112, 183; countries, 112; Azerbaijan, 121; fundamentalist provenance of, 132; Bosniacs, 159, 160, 161; Muslim-Croat Federation, 160; “safe areas” for, 162; minorities in China, 177; terrorists, 179, 182; causes, 181; executions, 181 Mussolini, Benito, 59 Myanmar. See Burma Napoleon, Bonaparte: his victory over Prussians at Jena, 104; his codification of civil law, 146; Slovenes briefly under his system, 160 Nash, Manning, 189





Index Nationalism: impulses of, 24; Marx never understood, 64, 85; causes crime, 157; Serbian consciousness of, 159; Muslim humiliated, 182 National Missile Defense, 75 Nation-states, 109, 112, 119, 120, 140, 142, 144 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nazi(s)(m): values, 4; war criminals, 12; ethnic abomination practiced by, 71; trying to put a human face on, 84; felons, 104; ideological war with liberal democracy, 109; Germany, 99, 131, 190; occupation, 145; formed Croat puppet state, 160; German, 185 NEM (New Economic Mechanism), 209 NMD. See National Missile Defense Netherlands, 24, 34, 75, 154, 161 New Left(ists), 64, 65, 91 Nicaraguan contras, 98 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 128 Nihilism: in remission, 51; Arab-Islamic terroristic, 185; deconstructive, 202 9/11, 123, 179, 182 Nixon, Richard, 20, 39, 50, 54 Nobel Peace Prize, 25, 78 Nongovernmental groups and organizations, 56, 143. See also Civil society Nonpersons, 71 Normandy landings, 12, 126 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 34– 37; out-of-area question, 35, 38, 48, 59, 130; and Korean war, 38; missiles withdrawn from Turkey, 44; protects Western communist parties, 59; Spain joins, 60; Italy in, 61; dual-track decision on Pershing missiles, 73; deploys missiles in Europe, 74; removes missiles from Europe, 75; new Germany joins, 89, 91; Russia’s neighbors apply for membership in, 91, 118–19; as world institution, 119; has difficulty getting resources for Afghanistan, 129; its rapid deployment force, 130; and defense of West Europe, 137, 138– 39; intervenes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 161; stops mass murder, 162 Norway, 34, 138

Novak, Michael, 210 Nüremberg tribunal, 137 Nuclear: nonproliferation treaty, 24; proliferation, 31; umbrella, 34; weapons, 41, 75, 84, 124, 132; club, 42; neardisaster, 49; armed Kim Jong Il, 54; testing, 74; war, 74; retaliation, 75; emplacements, 75; energy for peaceful uses, 139 OEEC. See Organization for European Economic Cooperation Oil: prices, 49; supply, 50, 80; pipelines, 122; oil-for-food program, 128; for the lamps of China, 169; reserves, 178 Organization for European Economic Cooperation: multilateral, 24; American capitalists invest in countries of, 26; Germany not directly represented in, 28 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe: Helsinki accords (Final Act), 55, 96; notoriously weak, 56 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, 50 Ostpolitik(ing): Brandt’s, 24; in quest of German reunification, 52; tactical, 124 Pacifism, 74, 130, 131 Pakistan, 40, 77, 98, 129 Pàlach, Jan, 47, 48 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 50 Paradise: promises of, 63; socialist, 87; borderless, 125; one-way ticket to, 181 Parliamentary transition to socialism, 58, 59–60, 66 Party of Democratic Socialism. See Communist Party: of East Germany Passivity, 108, 130 PCE. See Communist Party: of Spain PCI. See Communist Party: of Italy Peace: U.S. brought overall, 3; is safe in American hands, 7; Truman on, 33; through strength, 70; at all costs, 74; Gorbachev’s contribution to, 84, 95; in freedom, 92; Yeltsin’s contribution

Index to, 95; fall of Soviet empire and, 99; American way of, 99, 115; of Westphalia, 108; dreams of, 115; dividend, 126; peace-loving Sweden, 177; disrupter of world, 185 Peacekeeping: U.N budget for, 161 People’s Republic of China: proclaimed, 31 Perestroika: meaning of, 73, 84, 86; historical part played by according to Jaruzelski, 82; appeals to intelligentsia, 85; implications of applying to moribund system, 95 Peru, 71, 137 Philosophes, 70 Pinochet, Ugarte Augusto, 61 Pissonier, Gaston, 62 Planning: for growth, 8; defined, 13; Keynes’s advice on financial, 13; central administrative command, 70, 72, 86, 174, 175, 205; collapse of, 93; taut, 193; conflicts cumulate in, 207 Pluralism, 116, 175, 209, 211 Poland: gold reserves returned to, 10; Marshall Plan offer rejected by, 24; Brandt’s treaty with, 24; joins COMECON, 30; joins Warsaw Pact, 35; and invasion of Czechoslovakia, 46; using petrodollars, 50; frontier of recognized by West Germany, 55; tries to be Poland, 62; and Solidarity, 63, 78–82, 87, 96; proliferation of parties in, 81; applies for NATO membership, 119; dismemberment of, 119; GDP of, 165; rates of taxation, labor participation, unemployment in, 150; transatlantic relationship of, 152; collapse of economic system in, 209; recycled communists in, 210 Politburo: Soviet, 63; members’ age in Western, 64; tiny group within Soviet makes decision on Afghanistan invasion, 76; Afghan dilemma for, 78; its ultimatum to Poland, 80; disagreements on Afghanistan invasion, 95 Pol Pot, 71 Ponomarev, Boris, 74 Portugal, 34, 144 Potsdam, 11, 41

Productivity, 18, 58, 151, 194, 198–99 Proletariat, 58, 71 Protectionism, 140, 171, 198 Prussia(ns), 104, 135, 139 Puchala, Donald, 115, 116 Pugo, Boris, 83 Put America in its place, 130 Putin, Vladimir, 75 PZPR. See Communist Party: of Poland Quotas, 15, 16, 18 Radio Free Europe, 42 Radicals, 92, 112 Randomness, 104, 105 Rapid response force: NATO’s, 130; German-French, perhaps transEuropean, 130 Reagan, Ronald: European peace movement veterans claim to have rescued détente from, 56; elected U.S. president, 67; his understanding of socialist economy, 70; calls Soviet Union “evil empire,” 71, 74, 98; snickering directed at, 73; signing INF Treaty, 75; death of, 77; restored confidence in presidency, 77; calls on Gorbachev to “tear down that wall,” 98; blamed by Jaruzelski, 81–82 Realizable hope, 4, 42, 201 Red brigades, 61 Reforms in China, 165–77 Relativism: ethical, 132; cultural, 116 Revolution: Hungarian, 41–43; Gramsci on passive, 59; violent, 59; scientific, 97; French, 109, Russian, 109 Rhodes, Cecil, 50 Roberts, Lord, 35 Roll-back policies, 98 Romania, 4, 10, 30, 35, 47, 88, 155, 209 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 21, 23, 128 Rostow, Walt, 114, 194 Rueff, Jacques, 21 Russia(n): Backstabbing Poland, 10; talks about strategic partnership with China, 39; U-2 shot down over, 41– 42; Khrushchev’s second thoughts good for, 45; occupies Ruthenia, 46; West Europeans did not want





Index removal of communist state in, 54; dumps democratic centralism, 63; republic of, 83; takes over USSR in the UN, 84; in 2  4 negotiations, 89; Steffensites look at, 91; peoples of, 93; revolution, 109; Orthodox civilization centered on, 111; survived institutionally, 118; swallowed neighbors, 119; Baltic countries refuse to join, 120; mired in Chechnya wars, 121; Germans choose, 125; its contribution to UN budget, 128; war with Turkey, 159; sells arms to China, 177; “biznessmeni” in, 189; its transition to market-type economy, 210. See also Soviet Union Rwanda-Burundi, 115, 128, 148, 159, 160 Saar, 23, 35 Sakharov, Andrei, 96 SALT I, II. See Strategic arms limitation talks Santayana, George, 103 Santer, Jacques, 148 Saudi Arabia, 112 Schröder, Gerhard, 149–52 passim Schuman, Robert, 120, 137 SEATO. See Southeast Asia Treaty Organization Secret police: East German (Stasi ), 25, 88; Soviet, KGB, 44, 61, 62; intrigue, 59; heads of, 61, 74, 76, 83, 96; Czech, 61; spying on the PCI, 61; spying on the PCF, 62 Security Council. See United Nations Organization SED. See Communist Party: of East Germany Seizure of power, 57, 58, 59–60, 63 Serbia, 120, 128, 160 Serb Republic, 160, 162 Sheriff, 127, 130, 161 Singapore, 190, 195, 200, 203 Sino-Soviet dispute, 35, 44–45, 167 Slovakia, 120 Slovenia, 70, 120, 128, 144, 160 Slows, the, 71 Smith, Adam, 15, 24, 199, 201 Sobieski, Jan III, 78

Social market economy, 28 Social racism, 71 Solidarity (Solidarnos´´c ): and Marchais’s PCF, 63; actions of, 78–82; responsible for freedom revolution, 96; U.S. assistance to, 98 Solidarity surcharge, 150 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, 39–40 Sovereignty: of socialist states, 47; national, 61, 64; in name only, 136; of private property, 206 Soviet Union: its military might, 23, 30, 46, 47, 53, 55, 59, 76–77, 91, 97; invades Afghanistan, 55; its economic model, 69; defeated in Afghanistan, 76; its economy, 86, 97, 98, 99 Spain: excluded from Marshall Plan, 26; enters NATO, 34; communist party of, 60; and Carrillo, 60–61; its totalitarian past, 63; familiar with terrorist tactics, 112; taking a powder, 126, 179; its military, 129; and EU subsidies, 144; co-owner of EADS, 156 SPD. See German Social Democratic Party Speer, Albert, 104 Srebrenica, 161, 162 Sri Lanka, 109 Stages of history, 108, 110 Stalin, Joseph: and Yalta agreement, 23; his wrath, 24; death of, 24; his prodding, 31; as medium for historical materialism, 39; and Thorez, 58; and Marchais, 62; his discredited model, 63–64; doctrinal extensions of, 71; terrorist, 71; use of nationalism by, 85; Russia, 91; pact with Hitler, 119; deportation of Chechens, 121–22; as narcissistic paranoiac, 122; as Orthodox seminarian, 122; economic system abandoned by Chinese, 165; restrictive system, 192; “squeezing blood out of a turnip,” 194; criminal, 202 Stevenson, Adlai, 44 Strasbourg, 42, 138, 141, 146 Strategic arms limitation talks, 54, 55, 67 Strategic Defense Initiative: launched, 74, 98; intent of, 74–75; modified, 75

Index Suarez, Adolfo, 60 Sudan, 115, 159, 181 Sukarno, Achmed, 190 Suslov, Mikhail, 74, 83 Sweden, 12, 26, 78, 161, 177 Switzerland, 12, 26, 138 Taiwan: trouble spot, 19; Chiang evacuates to, 31; benefits from Korean war, 39; abandons authoritarian rule, 75; China’s attack on, 111; not recognized by UN, 126; export processing zones in, 149; invests in China, 169, 173; at early democratic stage, 174; China’s armed attack on, 177; a democracy, 183; land redistribution in, 195; expands the market, 195; authoritarianism and economic growth in, 203 Taliban, 129 Terrorism: its assault on U.S., 35; by Red Brigades, 61; diverse, 115; practitioners of will not be appeased, 129; needs to be confronted, 133; handled by Europol, 144; networks of, 160, 181; global coalitions against, 179; Muslim, 179, 181; international 180; defined by U.S. Code, 180; and Osama Bin Laden, 180; by governments, 181; not new, 181; moral deformity of, 182; global, 187 Thatcher, Margaret: détente saved from, 56; and “the wets,” 71; has misgivings about German unifications, 89, 155; Euroskeptic, 140; on EU bureaucracy, 148 Third world, 16, 18, 50, 126, 173 Thorez, Maurice, 58, 62 Tito, Josip Broz, 160 Toffler, Alvin, 197 Triffin, Robert, 20 Truman, Harry, 11, 32–33, 38, 47 Trust, 5, 11, 20, 25, 53, 72, 106, 174 Turkey, 32, 34, 36, 40, 44, 112, 119, 155, 183 Ukraine, 84, 155 United Kingdom. See Britain United Nations Organization: Security Council, 30, 32, 39, 44, 48, 91, 113,

119, 127; linkage, 32, 37, 38, 44; charter, 37; General Assembly, 50, 119, 127, 155; resolutions, 56; international covenants, 56; budget, 127–28; police functions, 128; peacekeeping budget, 161; safe areas, 161, 162 USSR. See Soviet Union Ustinov, Dmitri, 74, 76 Valéry, Paul, 103 Vance, Cyrus, 53 Van Quickenborne, Vincent, 148, 149 Vietnam: war, 19, 41, 49, 50, 70; SEATO and, 40; America exhausted by, 52, 77; W. European opposition to U.S. role in, 53; China tries to teach a lesson to, 177 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet, 64 Wałe¸sa, Lech, 79, 81 Warsaw Pact, 35, 39, 41, 46, 47, 80, 93 WB. See World Bank Watergate, 77 White, Harry Dexter, 12, 15 Worker(s): priests, 64; blue-collar, 71; white-collar, 71–72, 147; Solidarity, 79; union, 147; unskilled, 171; motivation and demotivation of, 198 World Bank, 16, 18, 106, 119 World Trade Organization, 16, 169 World War I, 13, 109, 159 World War II: concepts before, 8; U.S. power at end of, 12; damaged European industrial economy, 18, 23; European borders resulting from, accepted by Germany, 24; competitive market system favored by America after, 26; Turkey neutral during most of, 32; Helsinki Accords recognize European border created by, 55; extends Western horizons, 105; and Washington Consensus, 119; big power status in UN Security Council at end of, 127; European apprehensions before, 128; Japanese Swedefied after, 178; East Asian governments economically interventionist after, 194; Labour Party economic policy after, 201





Index Yalta, 23, 41 Yeltsin, Boris: Russian Republic president defeats putsch, 83; bans CPSU and gets control of nuclear weapons, 84; his fleeting democratic period, 86; his contribution to peaceful removal of communism, 95

Yugoslavia, 4, 32, 119, 120, 130, 156, 160, 205 Zia-ul Haq, Mohammed, 98 Zimbabwe, 71 Zorin, V. A., 44