by Tony Judt
In the short-run, democracies can survive the indifference of their citizens. Indeed, it used to be thought an indication of impending trouble in a well-ordered republic when electors were too much aroused. The business of government, it was widely supposed, should be left to those elected for the purpose. But the pendulum has swung far in the opposite direction.
The turnout in American presidential and congressional elections has long been worryingly low and continues to fall. In the United Kingdom, parliamentary elections—once an occasion for widespread civic engagement—have seen a steady decline in participation since the 1970s: to take an exemplary case, Margaret Thatcher won more votes in her first electoral victory than on any subsequent occasion. If she continued to triumph, it was because the opposition vote fell even faster. The European Union parliamentary elections, inaugurated in 1979, are notorious for the low numbers of European citizens who bother to turn out.
Why does this matter? Because—as the Greeks knew—participation in the way you are governed not only heightens a collective sense of responsibility for the things government does, it also keeps our rulers honest and holds authoritarian excess at bay. Political demobilization, beyond the healthy retreat from ideological polarization which characterized the growth of political stability in postwar western Europe, is a dangerous and slippery slope. It is also cumulative: if we feel excluded from the management of our collective affairs, we shall not bother to speak up about them. In that case, we should not be surprised to discover that no one is listening to us.
The danger of a democratic deficit is always present in systems of indirect representation. Direct democracy, in small political units, enhances participation—though with the attendant risk of conformity and majoritarian oppression: there is nothing as potentially repressive of dissent and difference as a town hall meeting or a kibbutz. Choosing people to speak for us at some distant assembly is a reasonable mechanism for balancing the representation of interests in large and complex communities. But unless we mandate our representatives to say only what we have authorized—an approach favored by radical students and revolutionary crowds—we are constrained to allow them to follow their own judgment.
The men and women who dominate western politics today are overwhelmingly products—or, in the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, byproducts—of the ’60s. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are all ‘baby boomers’. So are Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the ‘liberal’ prime minister of Denmark; Ségolène Royal and Martine Aubry, the bickering challengers for leadership of France’s anemic Socialist Party and Herman Van Rompuy, the worthy but underwhelming new President of the European Union.
This cohort of politicians have in common the enthusiasm that they fail to inspire in the electors of their respective countries. They do not seem to believe very firmly in any coherent set of principles or policies; and though none of them—with the possible exception of Blair—is as execrated as former president George W. Bush (another baby boomer), they form a striking contrast to the statesmen of the World War II generation. They convey neither conviction nor authority.
Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher’s children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors. Few—once again, with the exception of Bush and Blair—could be said actively to have betrayed the democratic trust placed in them. But if there is a generation of public men and women who share responsibility for our collective suspicion of politics and politicians, they are its true representatives. Convinced that there is little they can do, they do little. The best that might be said of them, as so often of the baby boom generation, is that they stand for nothing in particular: politicians-lite.
No longer trusting in such persons, we lose faith not just in parliamentarians and congressmen, but in Parliament and Congress themselves. The popular instinct at such moments is either to ‘throw the rascals out’ or else leave them to do their worst. Neither of these responses bodes well: we don’t know how to throw them out and we can no longer afford to let them do their worst. A third response—‘overthrow the system!’—is discredited by its inherent inanity: which bits of which system and in favor of which systemic substitute? In any case, who will do the overthrowing?
We no longer have political movements. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals—fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers—are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion. In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this.
CHAPTER FOUR
Goodbye to All That?
“Finding a homeland is not the same as dwelling in the place where our ancestors once used to live.”
—KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI
When Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world would belong to liberal capitalism—there was no alternative—and we would all march forward in unison towards a future shaped by peace, democracy and free markets. Twenty years on this assertion looks threadbare.
There can be no question that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino-like collapse of Communist states from the suburbs of Vienna to the shores of the Pacific marked a very significant transition: one in which millions of men and women were liberated from a dismal and defunct ideology and its authoritarian institutions. But no one could credibly assert that what replaced Communism was an era of idyllic tranquility. There was no peace in post-Communist Yugoslavia, and precious little democracy in any of the successor states of the Soviet Union.
As for free markets, they surely flourished, but it is not clear for whom. The West—Europe and the United States above all—missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.
1989 AND THE END OF THE LEFT
“The worst thing about Communism is what comes after.”
—ADAM MICHNIK
With Communism there fell more than just a handful of repressive states and a political dogma. The disappearance of so many regimes so closely bound to a revolutionary narrative marked the death knell of a 200-year promise of radical progress. In the wake of the French Revolution, and with growing confidence following Lenin’s seizure of power in 1917, the Marxist Left had been intimately associated with the claim that not only should a socialist future displace the capitalist present, but that it must assuredly do so. In the skeptical words of the philosopher Bernard Williams, the Left simply took it for granted that the goals it sought “. . . are being cheered on by the universe”.21
It is hard today to recall this secular faith—the absolute certainty with which intellectuals and radical politicians invoked inexorable ‘historical’ laws to justify their political be-liefs. One source was 19th century positivism: neo-scientific self-confidence in the political uses of social data. On October 24th, 1884, the young Beatrice Webb describes herself in her diary as toying with facts, rolling them between her fingers as she tried “. . . to imagine that before me lies a world of knowledge wherewith I may unite the knots of human destiny.”22 As William Beveridge would later comment, people like the Webbs “. . . gave one the sense that by taking sufficient thought one could remedy all the evils in the world, by reasoned progress.”23
This late Victorian confidence was hard-pressed to survive the 20th century. By the 1950s, it was already sha
ken in many quarters by the crimes committed on History’s behalf by Lenin and his successors: according to the late Ralf Dahrendorf, Richard Tawney (the British social historian who died in 1962) was “. . . the last person whom I heard speak about progress without an apparent sense of embarrassment”.24
Nevertheless, at least until 1989 it remained possible in principle to believe that history moved in certain ascertainable directions and that—for good or ill—Communism represented the culmination of one such trajectory: the fact that this is an essentially religious notion did not detract from its appeal to generations of secular progressives. Even after the disillusionment of 1956 and 1968, there were still many who clung to political allegiances that placed them on the ‘correct’ side of the future, however troubling the present.
One especially important feature of this illusion was the enduring attraction of Marxism. Long after Marx’s prognoses had lost all relevance, many social democrats as well as Communists continued to insist—if only pro forma—on their fidelity to the Master. This loyalty provided the mainstream political Left with a vocabulary and a range of fall-back doctrinal first principles; but it deprived that same Left of practical political responses to real-world dilemmas.
During the slump and the depression of the ’30s, many self-styled Marxists refused to propose or even debate solutions to the crisis. Like old-fashioned bankers and neo-classical economists, they believed that capitalism has laws that cannot be bent or broken and that there was no point in interfering in its workings. This unyielding commitment rendered many socialists, then and for years to come, unsympathetic to moral challenges: politics, they asserted, are not about rights or even justice. They are about class, exploitation and forms of production.
Thus, socialists and social democrats alike remained to the end in thrall to the core presuppositions of 19th century socialist thought. This residual belief system—its relationship to genuine ideology being roughly that of English low-church Anglicanism to full-blown Catholic orthodoxy—provided a back wall against which anyone calling themselves a social democrat could lean their policies and thereby distinguish themselves from even the most reform-oriented liberal or Christian Democrat.
That is why the fall of Communism mattered so much. With its collapse, there unraveled the whole skein of doctrines which had bound the Left together for over a century. However perverted the Muscovite variation, its sudden and complete disappearance could not but have a disruptive impact on any party or movement calling itself ‘social democratic’.
This was a peculiarity of left-wing politics. Even if every conservative and reactionary regime around the globe were to implode tomorrow, its public image hopelessly tarnished by corruption and incompetence, the politics of conservatism would survive intact. The case for ‘conserving’ would remain as viable as it ever had been. But for the Left, the absence of a historically-buttressed narrative leaves an empty space. All that remains is politics: the politics of interest, the politics of envy, the politics of re-election. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Left it is a catastrophe.
From the outset, the democratic Left in Europe saw itself as the reasonable alternative to revolutionary socialism and—in later years—to its Communist successor. Social democracy was thus inherently schizophrenic. While marching confidently forward into a better future, it was constantly glancing nervously over its left shoulder. We, it seemed to say, are not authoritarian. We are for freedom, not repression. We are democrats who also believe in equality, social justice and regulated markets.
So long as the primary aim of social democrats was to convince voters that they were a respectable radical choice within the liberal polity, this defensive stance made sense. But today such rhetoric is incoherent. It is not by chance that a Christian Democrat like Angela Merkel can win an election in Germany against her Social Democratic opponents—even at the height of a financial crisis—with a set of policies that in all its important essentials resembles their own program.
Social democracy, in one form or another, is the prose of contemporary European politics. There are very few European politicians, and fewer still in positions of influence, who would dissent from core social democratic assumptions about the duties of the state, however much they might differ as to their scope. Consequently, social democrats in today’s Europe have nothing distinctive to offer: in France, for example, even their disposition to favor state ownership hardly distinguishes them from the Colbertian instincts of the Gaullist right. The problem today lies not in social democratic policies, but in their exhausted language. Since the authoritarian challenge from the left has lapsed, the emphasis upon “democracy” is largely redundant. We are all democrats today.
THE IRONIES OF POST-COMMUNISM
“[W]e achieved everything, but for me it turns out that what we achieved satirized what we had dreamt about.”
—KRZYSZTOF KIEŚŁOWKSI
But if we are all ‘democrats’, what now distinguishes us? What do we stand for? We know what we do not want: from the bitter experience of the past century we have learned that there are things that states most certainly should not be doing. We have survived an age of doctrines purporting with alarming confidence to say how our rulers should act and to remind individuals—forcibly if necessary—that those in authority know what is good for them. We cannot return to all that.
Conversely, and despite the purported ‘lessons’ of 1989, we know that the state is not all bad. The only thing worse than too much government is too little: in failed states, people suffer at least as much violence and injustice as under authoritarian rule, and in addition their trains do not run on time. Moreover, if we give the matter a moment’s thought, we can see that the 20th century morality tale of ‘socialism vs. freedom’ or ‘communism vs. capitalism’ is misleading. Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with right-wing dictatorships (Chile under Pinochet), left-wing dictatorships (contemporary China), social-democratic monarchies (Sweden) and plutocratic republics (the United States). Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.
Conversely, communism—while clearly inimical to a genuinely free market—can apparently adapt to a variety of economic arrangements, though it inhibits the efficiency of all of them. Thus we were correct to suppose that the fall of communism put an end to over-confident claims on behalf of planning and central control; but it is not clear what other conclusions we should draw. And it simply does not follow that communism’s failure discredited all state provision or economic planning.
The real problem facing us in the aftermath of 1989 is not what to think of communism. The vision of total social organization—the fantasy which animated utopians from Sydney Webb to Lenin, from Robespierre to Le Corbusier—lies in ruins. But the question of how to organize ourselves for the common benefit remains as important as ever. Our challenge is to recover it from the rubble.
As anyone who has traveled or lived in post-Communist eastern Europe will know, the transition from repressive egalitarianism to unconstrained greed is not attractive. There is no shortage of people in the region today who would enthusiastically second the view that the point of political freedom is to make money. Certainly this is the view of President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, and he is not alone.
But why should the sight of a handful of greedy businessmen doing well out of the collapse of an authoritarian state be so much more pleasing to our eyes than authoritarianism itself? Both suggest something profoundly amiss in a society. Freedom is freedom. But if it leads to inequality, poverty and cynicism, then we should say so rather than sweep its shortcomings under the rug in the name of the triumph of liberty over oppression.
By the end of the 20th century, social democracy in Europe had fulfilled many of
its longstanding policy objectives, but largely forgotten or abandoned its original rationale. From Scandinavia to Canada, the political Left and the institutions it inaugurated rested on ‘cross class’ alliances of workers and farmers, blue collar workers and the middle class. It is the defection of the latter that poses the greatest challenge to the welfare states and the parties that had brought them into being. Despite being the chief beneficiaries of welfare legislation in much of Europe and North America, the growing share of western electorates that identified with the ‘middle’ was increasingly skeptical and resentful of the tax burden imposed on it in order to maintain egalitarian institutions.
The growth in unemployment over the course of the 1970s added to the strain on the public exchequer and lowered its tax revenue. Moreover, the inflation of those years increased the tax and insurance burden—if only nominally—upon those still employed. Since the latter were disproportionately better skilled and educated, they came to resent this. What had once been implicitly accepted as a reciprocal arrangement came to be described as ‘unfair’: the benefits of the welfare state were now ‘excessive’.