Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (54 page)

The initial newcomers were young men, without families, lodged in inadequate accommodation and poorly treated by locals. Entrances to public parks in Switzerland carried signs saying “No entry for dogs and Italians.” In English lodging houses the placards read: “No Blacks, Irish or dogs.” Greek “guest workers” in Germany were following in the steps of the forced labourers taken to the Reich during the war, barely a decade earlier: living conditions sometimes seemed little better. In Germany and Switzerland, those who came on the basis of the bilateral labour agreements were placed on short-term contracts and housed in hostels, segregated from the rest of the population.
They enjoyed minimal rights and could be deported. Although legally the situation of workers in Britain and France was better than this, socially they suffered a similar degree of segregation and discrimination. Across western Europe, immigrant workers tended to cluster in urban centres, forming 12 per cent of the Paris population, 16 per cent in Brussels, 11 per cent in Stuttgart and 34 per cent in Geneva by the early 1970s.

One reason why governments had failed to plan any kind of long-term strategy for immigration on this scale was that they assumed it was a temporary phenomenon. For at least a century, migrants had provided a useful cushion, taking up the slack in the boom and shielding the indigenous workforce from unemployment during a down-turn. In France, Germany and elsewhere, short-term and even seasonal contracts were the traditional instrument for regulating labour flows. Within a short time, however, it became apparent that not all immigrants intended to return home quickly: many Italians, Yugoslavs, Greeks and Spaniards did, but not so many from Turkey, the West Indies and India.

In a pattern identical to that observed among those European migrants to the USA in the nineteenth century, these incomers now brought over wives and started families. In the early 1970s, they were in fact pushed to do so by the threat of forthcoming immigration controls. Although they moved out of unpleasant hostels into flats of their own, their segregation did not cease, for as in the USA—though on a lesser scale—many whites moved house rather than live in a racially mixed neighbourhood, and enclaves began to appear in the cities. Soon a second generation emerged. Of the approximately 924,000 members of the “coloured” population in the UK in 1966, 213,000 had been born there: what had started out as a question of immigration policy inescapably raised issues of race, citizenship and national culture.
⁷⁴

In his 1973 film
Fear Eats the Soul
, Rainer Werner Fassbinder depicted a love affair between a Moroccan “guest worker” and an older German woman, Emmi. They are “just a rabble,” her friends tell her, “mean, filthy swine.” Surrounded by prejudice, the two get
married, however, and have their wedding meal in a Munich restaurant once frequented by Hitler. As Fassbinder implied, pre-war and post-war racism were closely linked, and the influx of foreign workers brought out the enduring sense of superiority, the cultural anxiety and prejudice that were never far beneath the surface in west European society. In 1955 it had been London’s Cypriots whom teddy boys had attacked in the name of the “white man”; three years later it was the West Indians living in Notting Hill. Although racist violence and overtly xenophobic politics were relatively uncommon, and indeed criticized by mainstream opinion, a milder form of racism was widespread and growing. In the early 1970s, the economic climate changed and became more hostile to continued immigration on a large scale.
⁷⁵

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a series of restrictions placed upon immigration, with an increasingly evident racial bias. Both Britain and France retreated from their earlier relatively liberal imperial citizenship policies; the empire had collapsed more quickly than anyone could have predicted, and citizenship rights were swiftly confined to the
métropole
. In Britain legislation between 1962 and 1971 closed the door on new arrivals, except for the Irish, who remained the largest ethnic minority in the country. From 1968 British citizenship was, for the first time, made dependent on having a British parent. Similar developments followed in France, which tightened up its immigration procedures in the early 1970s. Further immigration was halted into France in 1974, and recruitment into Germany stopped at about the same time.

But stopping immigration was easier than taking action to improve race relations. West Germany, unlike the former imperial powers, always differentiated between ethnic Germans and “guest workers.” The 1965 “Foreigners’ Act” (
Ausländergesetz)
was an even more stringent measure than the National Socialist legislation it replaced; expulsion no longer depended on the behaviour of the individual worker but simply on the needs of the state. Keeping its head in the sand, the Bonn government steadfastly refused to acknowledge the new social realities. In the resolute words of the Federal Commission of 1977: “The Federal Republic is not an immigrant country. Germany is a place of residence for foreigners who will eventually return
home voluntarily.” Yet there were 1.3 million foreign workers there in 1966 and 2.6 million by 1973; foreigners were responsible for 4.3 per cent of all births in the country in 1966, and 17.3 per cent in 1974.
⁷⁶

Most countries took a long time to grapple seriously with racial prejudice. “We were foreigners and treated as such,” recalled an East European who settled in Yorkshire. “You—every time you had to prove yourself—that you were, well, perhaps not equal, but almost.” The existence of prejudice was generally regarded as an unfortunate fact of political life, to be found on both Left and Right. There was no anti-discrimination machinery, and in most countries the state clearly believed that encouraging migrants to return home was the best answer to racial tensions (as in Bonn’s 1983 Act to Promote the Preparedness of Foreign Workers to Return). Only a few people argued that such policies actually made the problem worse.
⁷⁷

Even in Britain, where limited race-relations legislation
was
enacted, the stimulus was effective lobbying by small groups rather than widescale public protest. The 1971 Immigration Act too contained provisions for “repatriation,” though these were never publicized or promoted, to avoid jeopardizing “good race relations.” In fact, to judge from opinion polls, although west Europeans recognized that the expression of racial prejudice was no longer as acceptable as before the war, much of their underlying hostility towards foreigners, especially those from outside Europe, remained. Labour unions suspected immigrants of undercutting wages, conservatives feared them corrupting the national culture. Few seemed aware that Britain, for example, remained a net
exporter
of migrants for most of this period, that immigrants brought net economic gains to their host societies, or that immigrant populations formed a mere 2.3 per cent of the total population of western Europe (1970–71). Few would have agreed with one immigrant that “as (your) culture enriches ours, ours enriches yours as well.” As economic optimism evaporated in the early 1970s, immigrants were transformed almost overnight from valued factors of production into a threat to jobs, a drain on the welfare state and unwanted aliens.
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TEN

The Social Contract in Crisis

There is no such thing as society
.

—MARGARET THATCHER, 1987

In those days no one knew what [time] was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and below, between what was moving forwards and what backwards
.

—ROBERT MUSIL,
THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
¹

In the rethinking of democracy that took place during the Second World War, the political forms of liberal parliamentarism were supplemented by a new commitment to social provision. The Golden Age that followed was less collectivist than most wartime thinkers had imagined, and owed much to something they had not expected—the flowering in the 1950s of conservative individualism and economic growth through regulated capitalism. The social contract which grew out of this dual reform of capitalism and democracy evolved over twenty-five years. It was influenced rather less by the Cold War and superpower interventions than seemed apparent at the time, and rather more by popular aspirations, historical memories of inter-war failure, and economic performance. It rested, above all, upon the twin achievements of full employment and growth. Full employment brought in the tax revenues to finance the burgeoning welfare state; growth allowed gains in living standards to be shared out across the board. Upon these bases, the democratic nation-state was built anew.

But in the early 1970s, this remarkable period in European history—a time of extraordinary political stability compared with preceding
decades—suddenly came to an end. A sense of crisis and malaise gripped the West, and tensions between labour and capital resurfaced with a new intensity. The oil shocks revealed European capitalism’s vulnerability to the outside world. Growth was no longer seen as an unmitigated good, and its environmental dangers were spotlighted. Full employment became a memory, and neo-liberal economics came back into vogue.

Some intellectuals were quick to find evidence of a crisis of “post-modernity,” and certainly the contrast with the buoyant prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s was striking. Yet how deep a break was there with previous decades? Despite rising unemployment, and economic instability, there was no return to the 1930s. The rebuilt democratic order managed to adapt and weather the storm, far better in fact than its communist rival. Welfare regimes cushioned societies against the worst effects of impoverishment and insecurity. Conservatives momentarily feared the collapse of Western democracy; but it was actually the last remnants of the old dictatorial Right which fell—in Greece, Spain and Portugal—and then communism itself. The post-war social contract was thrown into crisis, but not destroyed, as west European nation-states came to realize the limits of their power and the need for concerted action to defend their way of life against global competition.

THE CRISIS OF INFLATION

Through the 1950s and 1960s, growth in western Europe was accompanied by a persistent gentle rise in prices. This was tolerated as necessary for social and industrial harmony, since it offered an apparently painless and unobtrusive means of buying off the working class, and avoiding the bitter social conflicts which had bedevilled Europe in the past. But as historian Charles Maier has pointed out, something began to go wrong in the late 1960s, and instead of acting as a “social lubricant,” inflation started to “aggravate not smooth over distributional conflicts.” In the 1970s inflation developed from a technical issue in economics, to a fact of everyday life and, eventually, to a determinant of politics itself. Inflation introduced a new instability into the economic order and made people vote as consumers.
²

The rise in price levels in the years before 1973 was certainly connected with the labour militancy of the late 1960s. The struggle between labour and capital coincided with the ending of the rapid productivity growth that had bought industrial peace for two decades, and the villains—according to taste—were either the workers and their exorbitant demands, or the employers and their reluctance to countenance a drop in profits. Either way, the upshot was the pessimistic view that full employment could not be sustained by west European capitalism without endangering price stability.

It should be remembered, though, that wage pressure was certainly not the sole cause of accelerating inflation. In the international economy, too, inflation was being stoked, both by the war in Vietnam (as the USA printed dollars to finance this) and by the rise in commodity prices on world markets. The two factors were connected—with the depreciation of the dollar brought about by the strain of financing the war in Vietnam forcing the end of the gold standard, introducing a new era of currency instability and encouraging primary producers to compensate by raising commodity prices. It was when the oil producers followed this course and announced a major price hike in 1973 that the world suddenly took note.
³

The inflationary disease afflicted all western Europe. For the whole of OECD Europe, on aggregate, the rate shot up from an average of 3.7 per cent in 1961–9 and 6.4 per cent in 1969–73, to a remarkable 10.9 per cent for 1973–9. At the same time national experiences were diverging more and more widely. Thus while the UK, Italy, Spain and Eire all averaged around 16 per cent per annum in the 1970s, West Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland were closer to 5 per cent. Such disparities discouraged a unified response. Floating exchange rates allowed countries to move in different directions, and for perhaps the last time, each state was in a position to pursue a separate monetary policy.
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