by Tony Judt
Margaret Thatcher may have destroyed the Conservative Party but she must be credited with the salvation and re-birth of Labour. In the short-run, of course, she crushed her Labour opponents—indeed, she could not have wrought the changes she did but for their stunning incompetence. While some Labour Party leaders in 1979 understood the problems they faced, they could carry neither conviction nor their supporters. With Thatcher in power, the British Labour movement entered a decade of turmoil. The party’s militant and unionist core saw the world much as Mrs. Thatcher did, but from the other side of the mirror: Britain must choose between a protectionist, collectivist, egalitarian, regulatory state and open markets, untrammeled competition, privatized resources and a minimum of shared goods and services. The choice, thanks to the Iron Lady, was once again clear: socialism or capitalism.
Labour’s traditional moderates, like their Conservative counterparts, were in despair. Some of them—notably Roy Jenkins, a former President of the European Commission—abandoned Labour and formed a short-lived Social Democratic Party that would in due course merge with the Liberals, Britain’s perennial third party. But most stayed, albeit with trepidation. Their pessimism was well-founded. Led by the intellectually appealing but politically ineffectual Michael Foot, the party fought the 1983 general election on a shamelessly anachronistic program committed to undoing not just Thatcherism but many of the compromises of Labour’s own past governments. The UK would retreat from the international economic arena (and from its unswerving fealty to the American alliance). There was to be no truck with privatization, open markets, ‘Europe’ or any other alien project.Safe behind the protective walls of a closed economy, the Little Englanders of Britain’s Left would defiantly build, at last, the New Jerusalem so often traduced by their colleagues.
Labour’s election manifesto of 1983 was succinctly and presciently described by one of the Party’s own dispirited parliamentarians as ‘the longest suicide note in History’. Buoyed by her recent victory in the Falklands War, in which she had established a party monopoly upon ‘patriotism’ and displayed once again her unusual taste for confrontation,248 Mrs. Thatcher won the election of June 1983 by a near-record margin. The Labour Party lost over three million voters, and 160 seats in Parliament. Its share of the vote fell to 27.6 percent, the party’s worst performance since the First World War. Whether the British people wanted what Mrs. Thatcher was selling remained uncertain (the Conservative vote did not rise); but they decidedly did not want the alternative on offer.
It took the Labour Party fourteen years and three different leaders to recover from the catastrophe of 1983. Politically, the party had to isolate and destroy the influence of Trotskyites and other ‘hard’ Left activists in some of its regional strongholds (notably Liverpool). Sociologically, it needed to come to terms with its failure to keep abreast with the concerns and aspirations of a new middle class, without whose support it could never again be elected to office, and which outnumbered the evaporating core of industrial proletarians and public sector employees on whom Labour (like all Social Democratic parties) had traditionally relied. Intellectually, Labour’s leaders needed to identify a new set of policy objectives—and a new language in which to present them.
By the mid-Nineties these goals had been reached—if only cosmetically. The party changed its name to New Labour in 1996, a year after its incoming leader, Tony Blair, persuaded his colleagues finally to abandon the controversial Clause IV committing the party to nationalization. When Labour at last returned to power in 1997, comprehensively defeating an exhausted Conservative party, there was no talk of unraveling the Thatcherite revolution. Instead New Labour’s campaign, aimed almost exclusively at marginal, ‘soft’ Conservative voters, inveighed against high taxes, corruption and inefficiency—the very objects of Mrs. Thatcher’s own attacks a generation before.
If Tony Blair and his colleagues drew a discreet veil over the Thatcherite era, this was not by chance. Blair’s successes rested squarely upon a threefold inheritance from Mrs. (now Lady) Thatcher. First, she ‘normalized’ the radical dismantling of the public sector in industry and services and its replacement with the ‘privatized’, entrepreneurial Britain whose praises Blair sang with such gusto. Second, and in the process, she had destroyed the old Labour Party and facilitated the task of those who fought to reform it: Blair had merely to reap the rewards of their work. And third, as we have seen, her asperity and her intolerance of dissent and disagreement had fractured her own party and rendered it unelectable.
Riding on Thatcher’s coat-tails, Tony Blair shared many of her prejudices, albeit in a less abrasive key. Like her, he intensely disliked the old political vocabulary. In his case this meant avoiding all talk of ‘class’, an antiquated social category displaced in New Labour’s rhetorical boilerplate by ‘race’ or ‘gender’. Like Mrs. Thatcher, Blair showed very little tolerance for decentralized decision-making or internal dissent. Like her, he preferred to surround himself with private-sector businessmen. 249 And although New Labour remained vaguely committed to ‘society’, its Blairite leadership group was as viscerally suspicious of ‘the state’ as the most doctrinaire of Thatcherites.
This, then, is the measure of Margaret Thatcher’s achievement. Not only did she destroy the post-war consensus but she forged a new one. Before she rose to power the default position in British public policy was that the state is the natural fount of legitimacy and initiative. By the time she departed the scene, this was on the way to becoming a minority view even in Britain’s profoundly state-bound Labour Party. For the first time in two generations the role of the state had been put up for discussion and fewer and fewer voices were heard in its defense, at least within the political mainstream. To be sure, there were those who continued to believe that the Thatcherite revolution wrought havoc, and that a return to direct state management of services (if not public ownership of production) was still to be desired. But in the wake of Mrs. Thatcher theirs was a case that had to be made—and except with respect to core social goods like education and medicine, it was no longer guaranteed a sympathetic hearing.
It is sometimes suggested that Thatcher’s role in this change has been exaggerated, that circumstances would have propelled Britain in a ‘Thatcherite’ direction in any event: that the post-war social pact was already running out of steam. Perhaps. But it is hard even in retrospect to see just who but Mrs. Thatcher could have performed the role of gravedigger. It is the sheer scale of the transformation she wrought, for good and ill, that has to be acknowledged. To anyone who had fallen asleep in England in 1978 and awoken twenty years later, their country would have seemed unfamiliar indeed: quite unlike its old self—and markedly different from the rest of Europe.
France, too, changed dramatically in the course of these years, and with some of the same consequences. But whereas in Britain the core assumptions of the postwar consensus were shattered by a revolution from the Right, in France it was the revival and transformation of the non-Communist Left that broke the political mould. For many years, French politics had been held in thrall to the parallel and opposed attractions of the Communist Party on the Left and the Gaullists on the Right. Together with their junior partners on Left and Right alike, Communists and Gaullists faithfully incarnated and extended a peculiarly French tradition of political allegiance determined by region, occupation and religion.
These rigidities of French political sociology, unbroken since the mid-nineteenth century, were already under siege, as we have seen, from the social and cultural shifts of the Sixties. The Left could no longer count on a proletarian bloc vote. The Right was no longer bound together by the person and aura of De Gaulle, who had died in 1970; and the fundamental measure of political conservatism in France—the propensity of conservative voters to be practicing Catholics—was being undermined by the decline in public religious observance, as the churches of village and small-town France lost their parishioners, and especially their parishioners’ children, to the metropolitan
centers.
But a deeper change was also under way. In the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, traditional French society and an older way of life—variously and affectionately described and recalled as la France profonde, la douce France, la bonne vieille France, la France éternelle—seemed, to the French, to be disappearing before their eyes. The agricultural modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, the migration of the sons and daughters of peasants to the cities, had been steadily depleting and depopulating the French countryside. The revitalized national economy was effecting a transformation in the jobs, travel patterns, and leisure time of a new class of city-dwellers. Roads and railways that had gathered weeds and grime for decades were rebuilt, re-landscaped, or replaced by a virtually new network of national communications. Towns and cities themselves, long preserved in the dowdy urban aspic of decay and underinvestment, were becoming crowded and energetic.
The French were not always comfortable with the speed of change. Political movements emerged to protest at the acceleration and urbanization of social life, the growth of cities and depopulation of the countryside. One legacy of the Sixties—the renewed interest in local and regional languages and culture—seemed to threaten the very territorial integrity and unity of France itself. To fearful contemporaries their country appeared to be modernizing and splitting apart all at once. But the state remained above the fray. In Britain the relationship between an all-embracing state and an inefficient economy, upon which Margaret Thatcher placed such pejorative emphasis, appeared self-evident to many. But in France it was the state itself that seemed to hold the key to the country’s economic resurgence. Its managers were the country’s intellectual élite; its planners saw themselves as a class of disinterested civil servants unaffected by the nation’s ephemeral ideological passions and social eruptions. Politics in France divided the nation bitterly over the question of who would gain power and to what social ends; but concerning the question of how they would wield that power there was a remarkable practical consensus.
From 1958 to 1969 the French state had been ruled by Charles De Gaulle. The President’s self-consciously traditional style, and his avowed unconcern for the minutiae of economic planning, had proved no impediment to change. Quite the contrary: it was under the camouflage of a semi-authoritarian constitution, tailored to the requirements of a charismatic military autocrat, that France had begun the disruptive modernization that helped spark the protests of 1968—indeed, it was the unsettling mix of old-fashioned paternal authority and destabilizing social changes that brought those protests about.
De Gaulle’s opponents and critics made much play with the ‘undemocratic’ way in which the General had seized and exercised power—‘le coup d’état permanent’ as François Mitterrand called it in a pamphlet published in 1965—but the resources and trappings of virtually unrestricted presidential power proved no less appealing to his successors of all political stripes. And the distinctive system of direct presidential election cast a shadow across the country’s quinquennial parliamentary elections, placing a premium upon the political skills and personality of individual candidates around whom political parties had perforce to regroup. It was in this setting that the redoubtable Mitterrand was himself to excel.
François Mitterrand, like Margaret Thatcher, was an implausible candidate for the role he was to play in his country’s affairs. Born to a practicing Catholic family in conservative south-western France, he was a right-wing law student in the 1930s and an activist in some of the most extreme anti-democratic movements of the age. He spent most of World War Two as a junior servant of the collaborationist government in Vichy, switching his allegiance just in time to be able to claim post-war credentials as a resister. His parliamentary and ministerial career in the Fourth Republic was pursued in various minor parties of the center-Left, none of them bearing any allegiance to the Marxist mainstream.
Even when he ran unsuccessfully for president in 1965 with the support of the parties of the official Left, Mitterrand was in no sense their candidate and took care to keep his distance from them. It was only after the implosion of the old Parti Socialiste in 1969, following its electoral humiliation in 1968, that Mitterrand began to plot his role in its renaissance: a take-over bid launched in 1971 with the appearance of a new Socialist Party led by Mitterrand and a new generation of ambitious young men recruited to serve him.
The relationship binding Mitterrand and the remnants of French Socialism’s proud heritage was mutually instrumentalist. The Party needed Mitterrand: his good showing in the presidential election of 1965, when he secured the backing of 27 percent of registered voters (including many in conservative bastions of the East and West) and forced De Gaulle into a run-off, revealed him to be a vote-winner—as early as 1967, during a parliamentary election, Mitterrand badges and photos were selling well. The country was entering a new age of televised, personalized politics—as Michel Durafour, the mayor of St Etienne, glumly noted in 1971: ‘France lives only in anticipation of the next presidential election.’ Mitterrand would be a trump card for the Left.
Mitterrand, in turn, needed the Socialists. Lacking an organization of his own, more than a little tainted by the compromises and scandals of the Fourth Republic in whose governments he had served, this consummate opportunist used the Socialist Party to recycle himself as a man of the committed Left while keeping clear of the burdensome doctrinal baggage with which the old Left was freighted. He once described his religious allegiances thus: ‘Je suis né chrétien, et je mourrai sans doute en cet état. Dans l’intervalle . . . ’ (‘I was born Christian and shall doubtless die in that condition. But meanwhile . . . ’). In much the same cynical vein he might have added that he was born a conservative and would die one, but managed to become a Socialist in the meantime.
This marriage of convenience worked better than either party could have imagined. In the course of the 1970s, as the British Labour Party was entering its terminal decline, so France’s Socialists were on the verge of their greatest success. The twin impediments to the re-emergence of a left majority in France had been De Gaulle’s personal appeal, and the fear of many voters that a government of the Left would be dominated by the Communists. By 1970, De Gaulle was dead; within ten years, so were the prospects of the Communists. For the former Mitterrand could take no direct credit, but the latter was unquestionably his achievement.
Acknowledging the logic of necessity, and lacking the ideological delicacy of his genuinely Socialist predecessors, Mitterrand at first aligned his new Socialist Party with the Communists; in 1972 he formed an electoral coalition with them behind a vaguely-worded, anti-capitalist Common Programme. By the elections of 1977 the Communists, the dominant party of the Left since 1945, were ten percentage points behind Mitterrand’s Socialists. Only then did Georges Marchais, the PCF’s lackluster General Secretary, begin to realize the mistake his Party had made in aligning its fate with that of Mitterrand’s young and energetic party—a decision taken partly under the optimistic, ecumenical influence of ‘Eurocommunism’—but it was too late.
After improving upon his 1965 showing in the 1974 Presidential election, when he was narrowly beaten by Giscard d’Estaing after standing as the candidate of the united Left, Mitterrand had forged a superb electoral machine, turning the Socialist Party into a catch-all movement appealing across the whole spectrum of French society, including Catholics, women, farmers and small shopkeepers, all hitherto hostile to the Socialists.250 His own image had mellowed with age: huge campaign billboards across France in the spring of 1981 showed Mitterrand’s portrait in soft focus, set against the same timeless bucolic rural landscape once favored in Pétainist propaganda on those same billboards, under the promise ‘La Force Tranquille’—Quiet Strength.
The Communists, meanwhile, were weak—the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an acute embarrassment, as were their own declining polls. During the course of the 1970s the Communist Party had ceased to be a fixed star in the ideological firmamen
t: its prestige had collapsed along with its vote, even in the industrial ‘Red Belt’ of Paris that it had dominated since the mid-twenties. Nevertheless, Marchais was determined to stand as a candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections: partly out of habit, partly from hubris, but mostly from a growing awareness of the need to cut the PCF loose from the poisoned embrace of its Socialist comrades.
At the first round of the 1981 Presidential election the two conservative candidates, Giscard d’Estaing and the young Jacques Chirac, together outpolled Mitterrand and Marchais (the latter winning just 12.2 percent of the vote). But in the run-off two weeks later between the two best-placed candidates, Mitterrand secured the backing of Socialists, Communists, environmentalists and even the normally uncooperative Trotskyists, more than doubled his first-round share and defeated Giscard to become the first directly-elected Socialist head of state in Europe. He promptly dissolved parliament and called legislative elections at which his own party trounced Communists and Right alike, winning for itself an absolute majority in the Assemblée Nationale. The Socialists were in complete control of France.
The spontaneous celebrations that greeted the Socialists’ victories were unprecedented. For the tens of thousands of (mostly young) Mitterrand supporters who danced in the streets this was the ‘grand soir’, the revolutionary eve, the threshold of a radical break with the past. On the basis of electoral data alone that would have been a curious claim. As in past electoral upheavals—the French Popular Front victory in April 1936 to which Mitterrand’s achievement was immediately compared, or Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979—the French vote in 1981 was not radically re-distributed. Indeed, Mitterrand actually fared worse, in the initial voting, than in his earlier bids for the presidency in 1965 and 1974.