In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  I try to meet with a few of the protagonists. The left-wing revolutionary hero Otelo de Carvalho cannot be reached. He runs a trading office these days, acquaintances tell me, and is probably in Angola at the moment. I'm able, however, to make an appointment with Fernando Rosas, currently professor of modern history, in those days a student and a favourite prey for the secret police. ‘I was fairly active in a Maoist cell, the MAPP,’ he tells me. ‘On two occasions I spent more than a year in jail, in 1971 they tortured me three times by making me go a week without sleep, and after that I went into hiding.’ I mention the fact that Western Europe's last three dictatorships all collapsed around 1975. He has an explanation for this: ‘Besides all their differences, the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese dictatorships had one thing in common: they were all pronouncedly autocratic, they tried to survive without foreign “infection”, either economic or political. By the mid-1970s that had simply become impossible. The world became too intertwined.’

  On 25 April, 1974, friends woke him in the middle of the night: come listen to the radio, there's something going on. ‘Everyone knew the army was up to something. But no one knew when it was going to happen, or how, or by whom. So, for us, those first few hours were very tense: was this going to be an extreme right-wing coup, or a more progressive one? It was only around 11 a.m. that we started to realise who was who, the crowds began cheering for the rebel soldiers, the government troops stopped taking orders from their officers, after years of waiting it was no longer a matter of thinking, but of doing. And so, finally, we all ended up at Largo do Carmo.’ Was Rosas actually there, at that historic moment when the defeated Caetano handed over the reins? ‘No, of course not,’ he says, ‘I had to go, there were resolutions to write, standpoints to establish, meetings to attend!’

  To the north-east of Lisbon lies the province of Ribatejo. First you take the highway along the Tagus, then the traffic squeezes across an old bridge, and after that the road runs through endless forests of cork oak before coming to a huge plain with low sheds, the old walled haciendas of the former landowners, villages spread out around a petrol station, fields full of tomato plants. Beside the road lies a crumpled truck, atop the TV aerials the storks have built their nests, crop-dusters roar across the horizon.

  I am on my way to Couço, a two-hour drive from Lisbon, one of the many villages where farmers seized the estates in summer 1975 and began their own cooperatives. Many of those little local revolutions were never recorded, but the course of events in Couço was excellently documented by the Italian photographer Fausto Giaconne. His pictorial report begins in spring 1975, after Spínola's aborted coup, when the four local landowners fled to Brazil. On Saturday, 30 August, 1975, the general council of Couço met in the village cinema to start the actual expropriation. The next day, hundreds of poor farming families headed for the abandoned estates on tractors and gaily decorated hay wagons. They took with them hampers of wine, bread and home-made cheese, and banners waved along the dusty roads with slogans like ‘Only when the land belongs to those who work it will we have true socialism!’ and ‘Down with the exploitation of people by people!’ Giaconne's photographs show carts full of men and women singing, glowing faces and dancing children. Between 8 a.m. and midnight, 8,000 hectares of land were seized by one huge rolling people's celebration. Sol Posto, the home of one of the local landowners, was broken into: in the photos we see farmers’ wives admiring in amazement the softness of the beds, the pillows and the tablecloth. Nothing was to be taken, the army sealed off the house. It was, if Giaconne's pictures are anything to go by, the village feast of the century.

  ‘Look, that's me,’ says Joaquim Canejo, pointing to a photo that shows him talking to two women wearing traditional high hats. Now he is a quarter of a century older, he is missing one of his little fingers, and he and his son are sitting down to a huge plate of sausages and chops. Later he will go back to work behind the bar run by his son at the cooperative. Politically speaking, the red Portuguese revolution ended with the defeat of the left-wing radicals in November 1975, but most of the farming cooperatives were only dismantled in the course of the early 1980s. Today, father and son are the only ones left from the feast of 1975. Together they run the big hall at the edge of the village which bears the sign ‘Conquista do Povo – Cooperativa de Consumo dos Trabalhadores do Couço’ (The People's Conquest – Consumption Cooperative of the Workers of Couço). Inside are long shelves full of Becel margarine, Fitness grain breakfast cereal, Servitas cheese, Huggies Nappies, Seven-Up Light, Nuts bars, Mars bars, Heineken beer and everything else that capitalism has to offer.

  A part of the People's Conquest has been sectioned off with wooden panels. This is the village café where fifteen time-worn men sit in silence, watching a football match on television. On the wall are three clocks, a football poster, a picture showing thirty different species of fish, and a printed notice: ‘Due to the proposal to eliminate section 3 of article 42, a general meeting of the Collective of the Consumption Cooperative will be held by appeal on the 30th of this month at three o'clock …’

  I go in search of Sol Posto, the house with the soft beds. Amid the stinging nettles, only the walls are still standing. In the restaurant a little further along, the proprietor comes and sits at my table.‘Things are going well in this part of Portugal, yes,’ he says. The rest of Portugal, that's a different story, but here a lot of European money has flowed in and is starting to produce results. ‘Do you know how many tomatoes we get from a hectare of land these days?’ He writes it down for me: 100,000 kilos. ‘When they're ripe, the whole plain here is bright red, it all goes to the paste factory and we sell it all the way to Russia.’ He says that's why he came back to Couço. He carried out his own private revolution by leaving the village, worked as a painter in a French body shop for twenty years, came back and now he has a restaurant and a twenty-year-old son who does nothing but work with horses, and absolutely nothing else.

  The next morning, all Portugal is dripping with rain. I drive on, a little closer to the coast. There are decaying haciendas everywhere and old factory buildings where the harvests were once dried or canned long ago. Now they are overgrown ruins with birds flying in and out. In the village of Vimeiro the houses are drab and sagging, the rotting doors almost falling apart. Beside the old abandoned factory is a wood where the crows nest, and if you climb the dark path there, past the autumnal kitchen gardens and a neglected orchard, you suddenly find yourself standing before the humble birthplace of António Salazar, tall and stern, like an overly-tended Dracula castle.

  For years Portugal was dominated by academic hubris, by the over-weening pride of this professor who thought he could squeeze a whole country into his theories. But whatever else you can say about him, he was not a man given to appearances. In the village cemetery the better families have stacked their loved ones’ coffins in neat little houses, some of them with venetian blinds at the windows, like railway carriages to eternity. There are no less than nineteen children's graves, all but three of them covered in flowers. But the Salazars rest beneath bare, grey stones, nameless, and the only thing lying on António's grave is a brown, mouldy rose.

  Chapter FIFTY-SEVEN

  Dublin

  ‘GOLD,’ THE MAN IN THE SCARLET SWEATER SAYS. ‘MARK MY WORDS, get into gold!’ The man he's talking to has bulging eyes and a red face. He starts talking about his house in Spain, the bathroom fittings, the guest house, the swimming pool. ‘But unfortunately, it's ripe for selling,’ his wife says. ‘At first the village was so cute and simple, but now the villagers have smelled money and then it all goes downhill quite quickly.’ ‘That's right, then the property loses its charm,’ the sweater man says. ‘Then it's time to divest.’ ‘Money ruins so much,’ the woman says. ‘Fortunately it's not too late, it hasn't lost its value.’

  The car deck of the overnight ferry from Santander to Plymouth is full of dusty Land Rovers, the mood in the ship's restaurant remains animated all night. The news-stand on board
sells the Daily Mail. War has broken out again, this time between England and France, over meat imports and whatnot, and feelings are running high. The newspaper systematically refers to the French as the ‘Huns’, an epithet once reserved for the troops of Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. An English footballer reveals how he was spat on by a French player: ‘I could smell the garlic.’ The editors: ‘England calls on all British consumers to do their duty: don't buy French meat.’

  Upon arrival at Plymouth, a storm is brewing. The wind whistles at the windows of the Winston boarding house, and in the communal living room a robust English girl is warming her backside before the glowing electric coal-effect fire. The BBC reports that several islands are experiencing electrical blackouts.

  The next morning the wind is still blowing hard. My van shudders in the gusts, leaves chase across the fields. Completely illegible signs begin appearing along the road, as though a cat has been walking across a typewriter. The rain washes across the asphalt. It is Saturday afternoon and the hours pass slowly, village after village, cement-grey, deserted streets, satellite dishes. All the hotels are fully booked; in one of them, a wedding reception is being held, the women dressed in bright silk, the bridesmaids draped across the steps like white napkins, exhausted even before the big dinner begins.

  In the village of Llangynog I wash ashore at the Wern Inn. I collapse into a deep sleep, but a few hours later I am wide awake again. Blasting from the pub downstairs are the strains of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ and ‘Mrs Robinson’, followed by ‘Oh, Boy’, and everyone's singing along. I get dressed. Downstairs, in the bar, the whole village is rinsing away defeat: Wales has lost to England at rugby. The regulars are singing karaoke; ‘Oh here's to you, Mrs Robinson …’

  This is South Wales, the backyard of England, the site of desperate strikes in the 1980s. In March 1984, almost 200,000 British miners, led by Arthur Scargill, walked out in protest against the government's plans to reorganise the state mines and ‘destroy the mining communities’. It was a last-ditch attempt to breathe new life into old-fashioned workers’ solidarity. Scargill succeeded through intimidation and social pressure in keeping his miners in line, but his National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) did not dare to have things brought to a vote. The Conservative government of the time stressed that fact again and again. As the mining families’ financial situation became more acute, the panic and violence increased, effectively putting an end to the public's sympathy for the strikers. And when it was revealed that the NUM had accepted money from the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, it was all over. By February 1985 half the miners were back at work, and a month later the strike ended. It was a trauma: for a year, tens of thousands of miners’ families had lived in dire poverty to save a world that was long-since obsolete.

  I notice soon enough that my pub is filled with those same miners and their wives, couples who went through the whole thing. The men stopped working in the mines long ago, they have become older and stouter, but most of them still live close to their mine. Some of them have started little farming businesses, others are still unemployed. I strike up a conversation with Thomas Frigger, a big man in a bright red jacket. After the mines closed he went to work on a drilling platform, nine months on, three months off. ‘The only thing I knew was mining, and oil is the closest thing to that. What else can you do?’ I ask whether his life has improved in the long run? He has to think about that. ‘I earn the same as I used to, but now it's tax free, so that makes a good difference. But nine months a year away from home is not something you do for fun.’ An old comrade comes over to bid Thomas farewell: he works on a platform too. ‘See you in six months, you old bastard!’ Then the music blasts out again, new lyrics appear on the screen, and everyone sings along. The men get drunk, one of them jumps up onto a table and starts stripping, the women screech, the men hang on each other's shoulders. ‘Oh, Boy! Oh, Boy!’

  And then there is the other side of the story. In the mid-1980s, the only thing these same men and women talked about was politics and the workers’ struggle. Their great foe was the Iron Lady, the nickname given to the cocksure prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Born in 1925, the daughter of a shopkeeper in the provincial town of Grantham, Thatcher brilliantly succeeded in combining classic English conservatism with the ideology of the New Right, and an unshakeable faith in the power of market mechanisms. She used the past failures of her Labour opponents to great advantage – ‘Labour Isn't Working’ was her party's election slogan – and she offered a clear alternative, not only to Labour but also to the old-school Conservatives and those floating in the middle of the road.

  When Thatcher entered office on 4 May, 1979, the country was in disrepair. Great Britain, at the start of the century the most powerful empire on earth, the victor in two world wars, had been reduced in the 1970s to an economic disaster area. The statistics resembled those of a Third World country: economic growth lagged far behind other Western European countries, inflation fluctuated between fifteen and twenty-five per cent, the country was regularly crippled by strikes, Rolls-Royce was bankrupt and, in 1976, Britain became the first Western power to appeal for aid from the International Monetary Fund.

  What Great Britain saw as its decline was, in fact, the result of the rapid modernisation of the rest of Europe. The country's traditional heavy industry – textiles, coal, iron – could not keep up with the changes, and so, on the heels of the British Empire, the British ‘Workshop of the World’ collapsed as well. The crisis applied to Europe as a whole, it was only that the abrupt end of the golden years was felt first and most painfully by the British. Three years later, for example, when the new Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers began on his ‘chore’ in 1982, the economy of the Netherlands had been stagnating for years as well: it had a budget deficit of ten per cent, annual inflation of more than six per cent, and half a million unemployed.

  Margaret Thatcher got to work hard and fast. She announced a strict regimen of cuts, she raised VAT, and lowered income tax – particularly for the highest incomes. Many utility companies – rail, water, gas and electricity – were privatised, the system of inexpensive public housing was dismantled, and public rental properties were sold.

  Thatcher's tough-minded reorganisation seemed successful. Great Britain climbed – at least statistically – out of its dip. Traditional industries were quickly and rigorously taken apart and new high-tech firms were given fresh opportunities, albeit with a change of personnel and in other parts of the country. British production was brought back into line with the European average, the country's enormous rate of inflation was tamed, and from 1983 the average household income rose by an annual three per cent.

  Still, the Iron Lady never completely lived up to what she proclaimed from the mountaintop. Public spending, which she had promised to cut as never before, had barely decreased by the end of her time in office; from 42.5 per cent (in 1977–8) to 41.7 per cent (in 1987–8), to be precise. Her neoliberalism was combined with a strikingly authoritarian system of government: local bodies, universities and other institutions lost much of their autonomy, centralised power was consolidated everywhere and – thanks to the Official Secrets Act – her intelligence services were granted unparalleled power. Within Thatcher's neoliberalism, in other words, civil liberties were limited.

  After ten years under Thatcher, Great Britain was ‘the most right-wing country in Europe’. In no other member state were there such great disparities between ranks, classes and regions. A small portion of the population had profited greatly from the privatisations and tax cuts. At the same time – according to Eurostat figures – almost a quarter of British families were living below the poverty line (a figure exceeded only in Greece and Portugal). London was thriving, but Liverpool, Scotland and Wales were in dire straits. The privatised railway and postal systems had degenerated into prohibitively expensive chaos. (All the talk at the Wern Inn that evening in 1999 was of the big train crash at Paddington, which had almost certainly been caused by negligence.
) A quarter of the male working population was jobless. The celebrated National Health Service was falling apart: those who could afford to do so were turning to private clinics. The same thing was happening in education. It was the vulnerable parts of the population – the poorly educated, the elderly, the chronically ill and single mothers – who particularly suffered.

  Thatcher's way of doing things clashed loudly with the German ‘organic harmony’, the French, Belgian and Italian patronage system, and the Dutch polder model. Yet it would be a mistake to view the significance of Thatcherism only in terms of her economic policies. The essence of Thatcher's message went much further than that. Her historical importance, as Mark Mazower has noted, had to do with the ‘reassessment of what the modern state can and cannot do’.

  The British problem, after all, was not limited to Great Britain. Ever since the 1960s, more and more European countries had been confronted with unparalleled price rises, and the sense of economic vulnerability was heightened even further by the 1973 oil crisis. During the October War between Israel and the Egyptian-Syrian alliance in that year, the Arab countries used oil as a weapon for the very first time: they raised their prices across the board and confronted some countries with an embargo. In less than three months, the price of oil had quadrupled. It was an historic turning point: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other vassal states of the West had suddenly begun flexing their muscles. It was a frontal attack on the international status quo which had been firmly in place throughout most of the post-war years, the end of almost a quarter of a century of optimism and confidence. A lengthy recession followed, marked by a combination of rising unemployment and inflation; average unemployment in the EEC rose during this period from 1.5 to more than 10 per cent. Reason enough, therefore, for the British historian Eric Hobsbawm to speak of the period following the oil crisis as ‘the Earthquake’: ‘The history of the twenty years after 1973 was that of a world that had slipped its anchors and drifted away into instability and crisis.’