The Atlantic and Its Enemies (53 page)

At a more serious level, in the 1970s various governments applied regulations on health, safety and the like in order to prevent imports: the Germans kept out foreign beers, for instance, because of their alleged impurities. The French insisted on certain classes of imports’ being trundled along highways and byways for a six-month-long inspection, paid for by the importer, in Poitiers (which, on the strength of the income, wrecked its medieval centre with a corrugated-iron
Salle Omnisports
and the usual gruesome concrete). One answer to this might have been a common currency. The Europeans wondered if they could not find common ground for a dollar of their own. They were more dependent upon trade than the Americans, who could coin it in from the dollar’s privileged position, and trade inevitably suffered if traders did not know what they were getting for their trade. However, from this to a European common currency was a long way, and there were detours through the Common Agricultural Policy: was the cathedral of subsidies and export-primes and import rebates and value-added tax to be translated into Marks or francs or dollars and at what rate? A Pierre Werner, of Luxemburg, commissioned in 1970 to examine these matters, came up with a central fiscal authority, though not a bank or a currency except, after a period of co-operation, in 1980. Then there was some agreement, not as it turned out lasting, that the dollar would fluctuate within agreed limits, the ‘Smithsonian bands’. The pound joined this, and its behaviour - a wriggling of the graphed values in the lower percentages - gave the whole scheme its name, ‘the snake’.

To keep the weaker currencies from going below the floor, there was a European Monetary Cooperation Fund, meaning that the German taxpayer would pay in order for German traders to have an artificially low currency. However, the weaker currencies were weakened by the oil shock, and the collapse in dollars meant that no-one wanted them, either. The Mark strengthened against the pound and against the franc as well, such that France dropped out of ‘the snake’ in 1974 and again in 1976, so that governments could go on pumping out paper money that would allegedly stop unemployment. It did, 25 per cent of the French working directly for their government, and though the French did not on paper abandon free trade, they (and the Italians) put so many informal obstacles in its way that protectionism appeared to be returning, and the effect on the arithmetic of the Common Agricultural Policy, already weird, was understood, Helmut Schmidt complained, only by one man, who could not then clearly explain it. In October 1976 there was a realignment of currencies at Frankfurt, but this suffered because the various countries had different import priorities, and there was no general agreement as to how the inflationary problem was to be dealt with. At this level, Europe was part miniature protection racket, part pulpit and entirely irritating.

‘Europe’ had initially been an American idea, and a very good one at that. However, with the decline of American power and prestige at the time of the Vietnam War, there was also trouble with the European creation. Part of this was a straightforward outcome of geopolitics: if the USA were going to be sucked into Far Eastern adventures, Europe would have to do something for her own security vis-à-vis Russia. Part of the story was, however, financial. In the later sixties, the dollar empire was weakening; in the early seventies it fell apart. These troubles had their effects in western Europe, and the seventies were far from being the happy time that the sixties had been. France was marking time; but Italy fell into trouble. Her history had been for a very long time in counterpoint with German: Guelfs and Ghibellines, Romans and Goths: in one view, healthy barbarians coming to put life into effete southern stock, and in another, naïve buffoons coming in to be seduced and robbed, or maybe used as mercenaries (the Papal Guard to this day have uniforms of the old Swiss
Landsknechte
who fought the sixteenth-century wars). Since the war, there had been an interesting Italian descant on German history as well: a miracle, with undercurrents of gloom. Here, too, was terrorism, worse than in Germany; here, too, was head-shaking, and a failure of population growth; and for the Left - Germanic Ghibellines for the greater part - the seventies turned into ‘the years of lead’. The arch-Ghibelline Paul Ginsborg litanizes: public finance fell into vast disorder, deficit growing; public industry had to be shored up; in 1971 a state institution was established to bail out even private industries, this then becoming ‘an albatross’. There was welfare, but without taxes to match, and pensions represented the largest loss. Housing laws were sabotaged. The bureaucracy was a nightmare. There was another side of this, that the unofficial economy did rather well, as a new Italy, hairdressers and small artisans working away while big industry languished, was emerging, and the black economy amounted to about a quarter of the country’s takings. This distorted perceptions. If governments attempted serious reform, there followed a tired choreography: capital flight, deficit, IMF, devaluation (in 1976 against the dollar, 25 per cent), deflation, factory closure and even, originally, a return to the land. In 1980 there was a disastrous earthquake around Naples. Of $40bn sent in relief, half was stolen, and $4bn went into bribes for politicians. Sicily had many roofless and unfinished buildings, put up with public subsidy and not finished by the private owner who would have had to pay tax. The context was a strange political system: the Christian Democrats were in charge all the way through, but they consisted of rival factions and their allies varied. An old political tactic had to be used. In 1975 the Communists were running out of steam, and were being taken over by other enthusiasms - feminism raised its head - and they were anyway much engaged purely in matters of administration since all of the cities except for Bari and Palermo were in the hands of left-wing coalitions. Left-wing infantilism of a sinister nature then took over. ‘Red Brigades’ developed, from October 1970. In May 1974 a bomb in Brescia killed eight, and another, in a Bologna train, twelve. The killing went on, amid accusations from the Left that they amounted to a provocation, and the police were slow and inept. By 1976 terrorism had started again, with an asinine hard-drugs-fuelled occupation of Rome university and battles for control of the microphones, while women slogged it out with each other, the trade union leader was shouted down, and French representatives orated in an absurd echo of the Catalan internationalist in
Éducation sentimentale.
In 1976-7 the Red Brigades killed eight and wounded Indro Montanelli, a great figure of Italian journalism, in the legs. All of this softened the Communists, who co-operated secretly with the Christian Democrats.

On 16 March 1978 came a strange episode. One of the wheezes with which the Christian Democrats kept on and on in office was to get their own dissident allies faced down by the threat of a Communist alliance - not of course a formal one, but an arrangement by which the Communists would just abstain, much as had happened with de Gaulle in 1968. One Giulio Andreotti could act as a front for these schemes. However, he was something of a puppet prime minister, and Aldo Moro, prime minister twice previously, was the long-term fixer behind the scenes. On his way to the parliament, his car was ambushed, his guards being killed, and Moro was bundled away in the middle of Rome. He was hidden for two months, issuing appeals, and the government did not give way to demands for the release of prisoners. The Communists in fact supported the government and there was even a general strike against the terrorists; but Moro’s corpse was found in a car boot in the middle of the city on 9 May. Thereafter the Red Brigade killings went on - 29 in 1978, 22 in 1979, 30 in 1980. For Moscow, Italy was therefore a soft target.

But it was Germany that offered the greatest target of all. Were not the Germans, already formidably rich, now becoming a Great Power again, and, at that, in charge of Europe? However, Germany had changed.

It was common to talk of 1945 as
Stunde Null
, but the Germany that had emerged by 1960 did have long historical roots. What was now emerging, and in politics generally dull to the point of genius, was the ‘third Germany’, a world of petty duchies and prince-bishoprics that had been smothered in the imperial ventures of Prussia and Austria. An Englishman who knew Germany well was Geoffrey Barraclough. His
Origins of Modern Germany
(1952) was a classic: he started it with a quotation from Nicholas of Cusa, to the effect that Germany’s divisions would mean domination by foreigners. The divisions went back to the Golden Bull (1356) which allowed Electoral princes, with their own capitals and coinages, to run quite free. The Church played a disintegrative role after the Investiture Contest in the late eleventh century and this also sucked Germany into Italian affairs. Later on, German history was written round the Thirty Years War, and the wreckage thereby caused; and that Catholic-Protestant war carried on in other forms far into the twentieth century. Was Germany to be united by Protestant Prussia, with her disproportionately sized army and mainly small-squireen nobility, or by Catholic Austria, with her great reach into the Balkans, her role as defender of Europe against the Turks, her fairy-tale aristocracy and her imperial rule over Slavs and Magyars? That battle had produced Bismarck, the Prussian maker of united Germany in 1871; it had also produced Hitler, who was Austrian and a believer in the unity of all Germans, regardless of religion, and therefore including Austrians. It was notoriously a formula for the end of the world: a superbly talented nation, daemonically driven. By 1943 representatives of almost every country in the world were queuing up to declare war, and in 1945, when Hitler celebrated his final birthday on 20 April, a small, bedraggled cohort of diplomats was left to totter through the rubble of central Berlin, with the wounded groaning in the lobbies of the Kaiserhof and Adlon hotels, to present their top-hatted congratulations to Adolf Hitler, raving, far below, in his bunker, as to how treachery had prevailed, that it had all been the fault of the Jews. There was a Croat; there was an Irishman; there was a Slovak; there was a Japanese. Their names were meticulously recorded in the Visitors’ Book, while the Russians occupied the old Reichsbank building on the Werdersche Ufer, a hundred yards down the road. Greater Germany ended in the blackest farce of the entire history of the world, its final scene, with Hitler’s fate, of all things, the only inefficient cremation in the history of the Third Reich.

Since 1947 there had been another Germany, and again it was an extraordinary success story. This time it was a Germany minus Prussia and Austria. It was a return to the old Holy Roman Empire, to a Germany where true civilization existed on a very local level, that of the prince-bishopric. And here there was another British historian, Tim Blanning, to do it justice. He was Barraclough’s natural successor, again asking much the same question as to what, in Germany, had gone wrong. It was a measure of the importance for England of Germany, and Germany for England, that British historians were head and shoulders better than any other foreigners when it came to looking at what went wrong. Germany in the British mirror remains an essential question. Since 1815 Germans had been asking why they were not English. After 1950, the question should have been the other way about: why was it preferable to be German? After 1980 the question changed again, and intelligent Germans asked why they had not produced a Margaret Thatcher, just as, in 1900, they asked why they had not produced a Gladstone. But in 1960 Germany was in the ascendant. ‘Neo-Nazism’ would then be shouted from the world’s rooftops. It was vastly overdone: there was never any danger of a Hitler rehabilitation: how could there be? In any case the constitution had sensible provisions for its own defence. It was true that the generation of 1933 preferred to pass over the recent past in silence. It had had to be prodded into recognition of the horrors of the era, and some monsters - though the case of Austria was worse - were allowed to live out prosperous lives undisturbed by justice. But the remarkable thing about the new Germany was the lack of any nationalist revanchism: Nazism slunk back to the saloon-bar-bore level at which it had started.

The German formula appeared to be succeeding along liberal-democratic lines. At Bad Godesberg in 1959 the Social Democrats had solemnly ceased to be a Marxist party, had promised to co-operate with enlightened capitalism (their chief leader, Willy Brandt, knew Scandinavia very well). In any case, this went along with the programme adopted by the trade union paymasters of the party. The institutions allowing trade unions a considerable say in large industry had also made them ‘responsible’ in a way that made British observers gasp with disbelief: no silly strikes, no ridiculous wage demands or inter-craft rivalries. The schools practised literacy; towns were well-organized; you could put your savings in the currency, knowing that inflation would not eat them up. And then the economy was highly successful, producing well-engineered exports that went round the world. Besides, the Germans were doing a great deal to make up for their recent past. They had done what they could to compensate the Jews, with a billion Marks paid from 1959 to 1964, and altogether DM56bn up to 1984. All of this occurred in a context that any German even of twenty knew very well: millions and millions of Germans had suffered and died in 1945-6. There were of course refugee leagues, and sometimes they made problems in political life. But it was an extraordinary comment that they did not endlessly dwell upon their grievances, got on with life, and set up museums and academic institutes where their history could be remembered. Other diasporas with grievances, especially those in the United States, never let go of them, distorted them to the point of caricature, and did damage.

The ‘miracle’ had meant a formula, that of the
Ordoliberalen
for whom National Socialism had indeed meant socialism. Alfred Müller-Arack had come up with the untranslatable
Sozialmarktwirtschaft:
private economic effort, legal protection against unfair competition or monopolies, protection for small business, and safety-net welfare that would look after people genuinely in need. These ideas were not entirely new; they had their rather tortured origins in the nineteenth century, when Catholics were looking for an accommodation with liberalism (itself at the time mainly Protestant and Jewish). However, the very word was ambiguous: ‘need’ was an elastic word. As prosperity grew, Chancellor Adenauer had read it to mean generous pensions, and these were to become a millstone round Germans’ necks later on. Housing received subsidies for renting by people of low income - a sensible enough system, provided that the incomes were genuinely low, and provided again that inflation was kept under control. The ‘miracle’ system came under a further strain, caused by its own successful application. The Mark reflected Germany’s success, and there was pressure on her government to support the weakening dollar (with a small revaluation in 1961). A country without a debt then borrowed, slightly. There were protests, but they were drowned by the noise of boom.