The Atlantic and Its Enemies (2 page)

However, the creativity has been Atlantic, not European, and that involves messiness. This was most obviously on display in England. It had been rather spoiled, post-war, and for a very long time, well into the eighties, a tiresome self-satisfaction reigned. At Oxford, I used to dread having to mark the examination scripts covering the ultramodern period of British history, because they all beta-plusly said the same things about the 1945 Labour government (of which I had, of all oddities, been an agitprop exhibit, photographed winsomely clutching a bunny and a blanket in advertisement of crèches to help the working mother). Very, very few undergraduates managed to write originally about that period, the best of them an Italian, of Communist background, and the real reason was that none of them knew how much better matters had been organized on the Continent. That England came to grief in the seventies, when, of all oddities, the very heartland of Atlantic capitalism had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund. Helmut Schmidt shook his head, and Germans in Scotland could not believe the level of poverty. And then came the remarkable turnaround. England is a place gifted with tissue regeneration. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, and there was a very bumpy period as she turned things round, in the teeth of endless criticism, often contemptuous, from the powers that had been. I myself drew some flak for writing in the press, fairly frequently, in support of her. So be it: I was right. Nowadays there are 400 German students at Oxford, the largest foreign contingent, and they are not there because the truth is in the middle.

Of course, the United States, in it all, was the great creative force. All along, you need to read American books (while I am on the subject, here is a curious fact: in the Cambridge University library, where, unlike the Bodleian at Oxford, you can go round the stacks, the books on ‘Reaganomics’ are almost never taken out). For some reason, they are much more interesting on defeat - Vietnam - than on victory, and the enormous biographies of presidents are a considerable though necessary bore. I have had to read enormous amounts of dross, have made a vow never ever again to read a book by a man with a beard, and sometimes think that America abolished feudalism only through making serfs think they were free. Still, it has huge bursts of creativity, and serious thoughts about the modern world come from there: there is a strange fact that the stars whom I have taught, with Harold James or Niall Ferguson or David Blackbourn, ended up there. America follows from
Europe Transformed
, and Niall Ferguson was quite right to explore the British parallels.

As is inevitable with a book of this sort, it brings back my yesterdays. Much of what I say about England has had to be wrenched out. It was a very good place in the fifties and I can remember what it was like, going to the old Cambridge schol. exam, through the last great fog, by a steam train from Glasgow Central Station. The Head Porter at Caius, in a top hat, an ex-sergeant major frequently mistaken for the Master, received you, and then, at 9 a.m. in the Old Schools in Benet Street, you were confronted with an examination, beautifully printed, which read, ‘For translation into French’. The passage would read: ‘choppingly, the blades flashing in the wan sunlight, the queen’s skiff moved through a brisk north-easterly towards the port of Leith (A. Fraser)’. In those days there was an interesting battle between the examiners and the schoolmasters, and I had an enormous advantage, in that I had been taught by the siege-master extraordinary, Christopher Varley, at Glasgow Academy, who had no thoughts at all - he read Balzac for the vocabulary, a siege-engine of some power, which enabled you to turn the tables on the interviewers, who would be lost as you trotted out words such as
balivot
, or is it
baliveau
, meaning a tree marked one year to be cut down the next, in English, ‘staddle’. The examiners were wiped out, but, once at Caius, I realized I could not handle literary criticism (admittedly there was some excuse: they expected me to read Gide, to whom ‘hard cheese, old chap’ was indeed the only possible response). I switched to history, and was again very lucky, in that I fell under the control of Neil McKendrick, a teacher of genius. He taught me a version of history which was an updated version of the Whig Interpretation, and I have been struggling ever since to get away from it. I remember my first supervision. I had written some drivel about the Dutch Revolt, as to how the breasts of free men could not be whatever-it-was against Inquisitions and what-not. He said, do not forget that torture can be quite efficient. I am still not sure about the Whig Interpretation of English history. The experience of the 1980s showed that there was a huge amount to be said for the Whig Atlantic, warts and all. The warts are horrible - Michael Jackson and the rest - but the Atlantic won, and is now spreading to, of all places, China. Chinese students are now all over Oxford, learning English. The resurrection of that extraordinary civilization must count as the best thing in the modern world.

There has been another resurrection: Turkey. I have been teaching there for some fifteen years, and very happily so: my university, Bilkent, a private one, was established a quarter-century ago in the teeth of considerable resistance. Its founder, İhsan Doğramacı, had a very good idea as to what was going wrong with universities in the 1970s. Inflation had been a disaster, and Turkey was one of the centres of the troubles of the 1970s. However, she too is a country with tissue regeneration, and though I was much criticized by left-wing friends for being a sort of monkey in a fez jumping up and down on the Bilkent barrel organ, they now admit that I was right. In the latter part of this book, concerning the 1980s, I have written a good bit about Turkey, because there is much interest in a process that has turned the country into a considerable economic power, with a resonance throughout Eurasia. When the country started off, in 1923, you could not even have a table made, unless by an Armenian carpenter, because the legs wobbled, the Turks not knowing how to warp wood. Now, they make F16s. Today, aged not far from seventy, I still look forward to marching into a class of Turks, the best being excellent, and the others decorative and polite. As ever, I owe much to my Rector, Professor Ali Doğramacı.

I have a great many other debts of gratitude, a book of this scope needing a great deal of outside support. The London Library is a wonderful institution, and my assistants, Onur Onol and Yasin Yavuz, have been helpful way beyond the line of duty. My agent, Caroline Michel, has been magnificently encouraging, as have Simon Winder at Penguin and Lara Heimert at Basic Books. Rupert Stone, as ever my target reader, made encouraging comments, and Christine Stone has splendidly put up with the bad patches that come up when sails flap listlessly in windlessness. Over the years I have of course learned a great deal from friends in various countries, and I can here only acknowledge a few. Manfred Bruncken, of the Hanns-Martin-Schleyer Foundation in Cologne, Francine-Dominique Lichtenhan in Paris, Sergey Mironenko in Moscow, Rusty Greenland in Texas and, on matters to do with business in England, Robert Goddard have all been especially informative and helpful. In Turkey I have as ever relied especially upon David Barchard, Andrew Mango, Sean McMeekin, Hasan Ali Karasar, Evgenia and Hasan Unal and Sergey Podbolotov. As regards the significance of the 1980s, I have been fortunate to be able to discuss them at length, and at all levels, with Niall Ferguson, Nick Stone and Robert Skidelsky. There is one final debt. Towards the end of her time in office, Margaret Thatcher took me on as speech-writer, and these were rather dramatic occasions. She did not exactly throw things, but she made her point, and you did not spend five minutes in her company without having a memory to chalk up. She represented a force of tissue-regeneration that, in the 1970s, I had not expected.

1

The War of the British Succession

The winter of 1946-7 sank into the memory of anyone who lived through it. A contemporary, the historian Correlli Barnett, writes that it was ‘a catastrophe of ice and snow’. It started early, and on 20 January produced a:

savage east wind that cut through every cranny in British houses and froze all within [and] the blizzards began to sweep in across the country again and again through the rest of January and on through the coldest February for three hundred years. In the hills nearly a third of the sheep perished. In East Anglia the snowdrifts piled to a height of fourteen feet. Off the Norfolk coast ice-floes eerily converted the North Sea into a semblance of the Arctic.

In London the temperature fell to sixteen below, and the railways were paralysed; coal could not be moved from the pitheads, and the power stations’ stocks collapsed. By February 2,500,000 people were idle because of power cuts. This lasted until the end of March (and was followed by a drought). Yet the British climate was generally quite mild, and matters were made worse because of the strange way in which the British preferred inefficient coal fires (‘cosy’) to central heating, and put up, every winter, with the phenomenon of burst pipes. Later on, George Orwell, though not complaining at the time, blamed that winter in London for the appalling condition of his lungs, which later killed him.

On the European continent that winter was still worse the further east you went. In Germany the frozen waterways and paralysed (or shattered) railways could not move stocks at all. The bombing damage had not been made good and people lived in cairns of rubble, freezing and starving; they did business by barter or in crumpled
Reichsmark
notes, marked with endless noughts. Such were the scenes that the American Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, saw from his train window as he went to a conference of foreign ministers at Moscow in the middle of that winter. In England, there had been bread rationing since the previous summer (500 grams per week for working men, half that for most others) and rations were low otherwise - 50 grams of tea and bacon, the same for mousetrap cheese, with about 250 grams for fat and sugar. Dried egg was an item of that period, eked out with water into an at least edible paste. The British were even then much better off than the French, whose official rations were considerably less. In Germany there was outright starvation, and an unknown number of people just died - maybe 9 million, in addition to the 6 million men who had gone in the war. In 1946, 6 million of them had been expelled, carrying a suitcase each, from Czechoslovakia and Poland, and they had been dumped in makeshift camps over the new German border.

Most of continental Europe was in dreadful shape. France had been fought over, and more comprehensively than in the First World War, which had affected only thirteen of the north-eastern and northern departments, whereas the Second affected seventy-four. She had also had a robber baron Nazi occupation for four years, and the outcome was terrible - with almost 10 per cent infant mortality at Tourcoing, for instance, and a whole range of growth troubles associated with vitamin deficiency, such as rickets. The railway system was so badly run down that you needed fifteen hours to go from Paris to Strasbourg and there was constant inflation, as paper money chased an industrial output less than one third of that of 1929. In Paris rations amounted to 1,500 calories per day in May 1945, as against an otherwise minimum 2,000, and the daily bread ration in the Marshall winter was at 250 grams and even at times 200. In 1946 France had to get half of her coal from the USA, not the Ruhr, and there were terrible shortages of fuel. There were shortages of grain because cattle, not people, were fed on it: the peasants would not sell grain for the paper money. In Italy, though she was spared the worst of the weather, matters were even worse. Much of the south was starving; the peninsula had been fought over; there had been a civil war in the north; there were millions of refugees; and in 1947 1.6 million were out of work. Those in work had seen their wages cut in half by inflation and survived often enough only through a subsidized canteen, eating meat only once a week. Italy was backward by other European standards, and there were millions of peasants; malaria was still a problem; and relations between the great landowners and their peasants in the south were sometimes tense, to the point of violent occupations of land, and counter-killings by the armed police.

Politics in both countries were at boiling point, and a Communist Party became the largest one, taking a third of the vote, and running the trade unions. In early March 1947, as General Marshall journeyed to Moscow through this devastated scene, he was well aware that Communist coups could be launched, to take over western Europe. Already, that had happened to the east, where only Czechoslovakia stood out as a parliamentary and democratically run country, but even there the Communists had taken two fifths of the vote. The Moscow conference that he attended - one of several, of foreign ministers, devoted to the subject of central Europe and especially Germany - dragged on for weeks and went nowhere. And now there was a very obvious problem, that the USSR would use the emergency to encourage the spread of Communism. Over Germany, the Soviet idea, said Ernest Bevin, was to ‘loot Germany at our expense’. The Russians wanted huge reparations for the damage caused to them in the war, and they also meant to keep Germany permanently down. Maybe, even, the Germans would vote Communist so as to save themselves from this miserable fate. There was no peace treaty as yet, but at the turn of 1946-7 such treaties with other countries had been settled, and Communists had won support in, say, Romania or Poland when they promised land at the expense of Hungary or Germany.

The Second World War had been, in western Europe, a civil war as well, and Communists were very strong in the resistance movements. When Marshall returned from Moscow, he could see that France and Italy were in no condition to withstand the effects of the winter of 1946-7. In fact Stalin had even been preening himself at the Americans’ discomfiture. Controlling as he did the Communist parties, he knew well enough that western Europe might be lost for the Americans altogether. The Americans might be the strongest military power, but they would be powerless if western Europe fell naturally into Communist hands, and in any case there would be an economic crisis in America once the demobilized soldiers tried to find jobs in an economy that could not export, given the collapse in Europe. He was of course informed of what was happening by spies in high positions - Donald Maclean, second man at the British embassy in Washington; Kim Philby, one of the chiefs of British Intelligence; Henri d’Astier de la Vigerie, in the immediate entourage of General de Gaulle, who in 1945 headed the French government; Anthony Blunt, also excellently informed as to British Intelligence; John Cairncross, chief civil servant in the London Cabinet defence committee, who revealed the secrets of the atomic bomb; Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White in the US machine: so many, in fact, that Stalin gave up reading what they wrote, because he could not believe that such men were real spies. When Maclean defected, he was simply sent to teach English in a remote Siberian place, and was drinking himself to death until a bright young foreign ministry man, Alexandr Lebedev, rescued him. Expecting Communism to triumph, Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, his foreign minister, refused to try to make that Moscow conference work. They dragged it out, haggling over details, and the Americans were struck by the confidence of Stalin’s tone. But this time the Americans were going to take up the challenge.