Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  Part of my holiday reading has been an early novel by Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Stepping Westward.’ Written about a quarter of a century ago, this, too, recalled how much has changed – in Britain. A fattish, not very angry young writer goes to the States on a Fulbright. He leaves Nottingham by steam train, and crosses the Adantic by liner complete with stewards handing round beef tea. He reaches an utterly strange continent: here are universities with cement towers and wooden hutments, students who go to lectures in their own towers, couples in ranch-style houses with patios, extractor fans which start when the bathroom door opens, dental floss, paper cups, supermarkets, hot showers in private bathrooms. Everyone is obsessed by sex, and everyone wants to be masterless.

  So strange? It was then. Now it sounds like prosperous life in outer Richmond or outer Stirling – or Fontenay-les-Roses, or the new suburbs of Bonn. A gap has closed. The United States no longer seems marvellously unfamiliar. It impresses a European by its wealth and space, its Rocky Mountains and military power. But not its newness; we have the gadgets too, sometimes better ones, and gawky adaptations of the lifestyle. The grandson of a Methodist cobbler says to the girl in his Creative Writing class: ‘Hi, gorgeous, wanna get laid?’ The politics of the American cowboy Right which baffled Bradbury’s hero, for whom ‘conservatism was a defunct intellectual fashion,’ have been the rhetoric of the British Government for the last seven years.

  Western Europe has taken most of what it wanted from America. The first time I went to Warsaw, I was served Coca-Cola in a nightclub by a waiter who brought it in an ice bucket, poured a little into a champagne glass, and stepped back to let me taste it, while the other dancers crowded round to goggle. That seemed to me very comic, but I see now that it was only the carrying of British or French worship of Americans to a logical extreme. In the West, at least, we have satisfied these fantasies and begin to understand that an American type of society is only a station on our journey, not the terminus.

  The generation which has left the land and often the Church has, after all, brought something with it. This is a particular dream of liberty. Once that meant owning a field. Now it means owning a small business and a house, a determination not to be lost in the proletarian mass. Peasant politics are tough and seldom liberal. In an overcrowded continent whose industry is declining, where urban socialism is running out of energy, the children of the peasants are planting the seeds of a new turbulence.

  [1986

  Apartheid in Europe

  As South Africa burns, the world stands peering into the smoke and chanting abuse against apartheid. The very use of that Afrikaans word suggests something unique to South Africa, a localised disease. But the mechanism underlying apartheid is, in fact, world-wide.

  Most outrage boils down to several statements. South Africa is a police state, where the forces of order kill, torture and arrest at will. South Africa maintains grotesque inequality based on skin colour. It is an undemocratic place in which a white minority holds a monopoly of political power. It segregates the races, who must live, play, travel and – until recently – love apart.

  Although true, these statements suggest that apartheid is a stagnant condition, something like slavery in the Roman Empire. Americans often imagine South Africa as rather like the old South before the Civil Rights movement, a plantation where pouchy old men with shotguns invigilate black chain-gangs. All that’s needed, they may conclude, is to give blacks equal rights and a vote.

  But apartheid, at its core, is not so much a condition as an engine. Beneath the race laws lies a huge economic machine which, far more than whites-only bathing beaches, preserves white domination and prosperity and minimises their political cost. This engine, designed by Hendrik Verwoerd a generation ago, is a labour pump. It sucks in cheap black labour, pours it through the wheels of industry and agriculture, and then expels it to distant pools of unemployment until required again.

  Its name is ‘influx control.’ First, blacks in the white regions of South Africa were declared to be ‘migrants.’ Even those resident for generations in white areas were redefined as citizens of black ‘Homelands’ and denied rights of settlement or citizenship in their place of work. Labour was to be recruited on limited contracts from the Homelands (arid tribal areas established by the British as ‘native reserves’), pumped in to work and then, if and when it is no longer required, pumped out again to be ‘dumped’ in one of the Homelands.

  Migrant labour was nothing new in South Africa. But the horrible brilliance of the apartheid system was to see how the idea of the nation-state could be perverted to serve it.

  In any capitalist economy subject to slumps and booms, workers become costly and dangerous when they are unemployed. Deporting the unemployed back to their villages still leaves the Government responsible for them. But what if the workers can be transformed into foreigners?

  So there was born the idea of constructing around ‘white’ South Africa a periphery of ‘independent’ black states. Many miners, especially, already came on contract from abroad, from Mozambique or Lesotho. Dr Verwoerd and his successors now began to convert the Homeland reserves into ‘Bantustans,’ into statelets like Bophutatswana or Transkei whose independence was basically fraudulent but which took over responsibility for their so-called ‘citizens.’

  The influx-control engine pumped away, recruiting labour as it was needed and deporting hundreds of thousands of unwanted men and women back to the Bantustans. What became of them there no longer concerned the Pretoria Government or their white employers. South Africa seemed to have discovered the philosopher’s stone of economic management: how to export unemployment.

  Human beings have paid a grim price for this discovery. The price includes incessant police raids for illegal migrants and blacks with no pass. It includes the brutal bulldozing of Crossroads and the other vast squatter camps near Cape Town. It includes the misery of those dumped in camps in Homelands they had often never seen, and the shocking rise of hunger, disease and overcrowding there.

  These are South African realities. But the South African system of influx control is not isolated. There are other places where nation-states have been used as the foundations of a machine to exploit migrant labour.

  One of these engines has been pumping away on our doorstep for many years. The European Economic Community, especially the old EEC of the Six, had a structural resemblance to South Africa. The overt violence of the European machine was far less, but the mechanism was the same.

  Northern Europe, especially West Germany, came to rely on migrant labour as its own internal labour reserves were absorbed or became too expensive. In the boom years of the Sixties and early Seventies, millions of short-term contract workers were recruited from Spain and Portugal, then from Greece and Yugoslavia, finally from Turkey. Sweden, Austria and Switzerland, though not EEC members, recruited too.

  Here was another industrial heartland – the Witwatersrand of Northern Europe – served by a periphery of small states which were politically independent but economically dependent. The heart’s diastole drew in trainloads of dark, bewildered little men clutching cardboard suitcases, guitars, parcels of mother’s cake. The heart’s systole pumped them back again, richer by a Grundig stereo or a second-hand Volkswagen, to dying hill villages in Croatia or Anatolia. And West Germany’s unemployment figures remained negligible. It was all exported.

  Much the same goes on in the United States. Anyone who saw ‘E1 Norte,’ the marvellous film by Greg Nava and Anna Thomas about migrant workers in California, was watching yet another influx-control pump drawing in cheap labour from Mexico and Central America and sluicing it out again when it was no longer required. Along the Rio Grande frontier, helicopters and jeeps hunt down the ‘wetback’ illegal immigrants. The inlet valve must not open too widely.

  But when migrants are allowed to settle in the heartland, the pump can’t work. Britain, in its casual, good-natured way, brought in West Indians to correct the labour shortage of the Fifties without
any plan to export them again: it was supposed that unemployment was as extinct as smallpox. Before Algerian independence, Algerians flocked freely to France and settled in dismal bidonvilles around the cities. By the time that Britain passed immigration acts and France limited labour movement from independent Algeria, it was too late to dislodge these ‘new Europeans.’

  Even in Germany, the pump is breaking down. Recession means that the demand for immigrant labour is slack, but over a million Turks have managed to settle and acquire residence. And now Portugal, Spain and Greece have entered the EEC, which means that their citizens have freedom of movement within the Community.

  Foreign contract labour is an ugly thing. It is about cheerless barrack-hostels, about men without women bawled at by foremen of a ‘superior’ race. It is about homesickness for villages with no young men to break the earth, about the hostility of rich ‘host’ nations too mean to share their freedoms. It would be good to feel that its day is over, even in South Africa, where employers now want their workers to settle permanently and learn skills and become consumers.

  But it is not yet over. As long as there are rich nations, poor nations and trade cycles, it will go on. The world is growing small; whole continents are bursting to discharge their surplus peasants into the international labour market. The rich want them as miners and houseboys, not as neighbours or fellow-citizens on the dole. The poor used to be always with us. Now they can only visit us if they have a return ticket.

  [1985

  Toads, Journalists, Cats and Policemen

  Spring has reached Germany, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has published a truly majestic photograph of two toads copulating. The male is about half the size of the female, but both have eyes half-closed in amphibian bliss. A long, learned caption informs us that ‘toad fences’ (whatever they are) and special traffic warnings are being erected along the routes of their mating migration by the German League for Bird Protection.

  Bird protection? Yes, because in the complex hierarchy of German nature-loving bureaucracy, the Deutscher Bund für Vogelschutz (the bird people) has somehow attained a superior status which allows bird-lovers to boss around all kinds of other species – even certain mammals, which after all are supposed to incarnate a higher level of evolutionary progress than egg-laying lizards which grew wings.

  I had bitter experience of this many years ago, when we lived in Berlin. We had at the time an elegant little marmalade cat. This we had obtained from the Verein der Katzenfreunde (cat-lovers), run at the time by a bony war veteran. Whatever he may have done to his own species, his humanity to cats was beyond question, and that in a city where – I don’t know why – cats were not generally liked. They had done their bit, after all, fighting the rats which infested the city’s ruins after the war. But I often saw old Berlin ladies taking a swipe at some unoffending pussy with umbrella or shopping-bag.

  One day, our cat killed a sparrow in the small garden in front of the apartment block. Within hours, neighbours were hammering on our door and shrieking abuse through the keyhole. The police were telephoned, and next day an apologetic Berlin cop appeared on our doorstep. The neighbours, gloating, hung over their balconies, no doubt hoping that we would be dragged off to the Moabit prison.

  Two grave offences had been committed, it turned out. First of all, the cat had entirely violated its civil status. It was a ‘House Beast,’ not a ‘Garden Beast,’ and possessed no licence to prowl out of doors in an irregular manner. Second, by attacking a sparrow the cat had shown an anarchic, revolutionary contempt for constituted order. In the hierarchy which broadens out beneath the general roof of the Union of German Animal Friends, the League of Cat Friends occupied a subordinate level to the German League for Bird Protection. If the sparrow had murdered and eaten our cat, only a minor breach of civil discipline would have been involved, excusable given the cat’s crime in venturing out of doors. But the cat’s assault on the sparrow was a deliberate blow against the legal structure.

  We survived this, however. The policeman observed with a smile that spiteful (gehässige) neighbours were common in Berlin, and advised us to keep a closer eye on the cat. And the cat survived, too. His portrait was painted by Sara Haffner and exhibited in Warsaw, and when we left he took up residence with a Marxist woman professor in an altogether leafier, more tolerant quarter of the city.

  I have great affection for Berlin, in spite of that sort of rubbish. The place is now celebrating its 750th anniversary. A part of my family came from there a century ago. When inspecting the hole in East Berlin where their house used to stand, a policeman shouted at me for stepping off the kerb in that perfectly empty street to get a better look. I had forgotten that a human being was a Pavement Beast (Bürgersteigtier). The Cold War and the labyrinth of Four-Power rights, looked at in one way, are only nit-picking Berlinish legalism raised to the universal.

  At the time, I was chairman of the Foreign Press Association. The Wall was at its most impenetrable in those years, but somehow we managed to hang together: I think the only all-Berlin association to survive. The Soviet, Polish and Czechoslovak correspondents would cross over from the East to attend our meetings, and only a handful of Americans chose to break away rather than share press conferences with Commies. There were problems, like the day our Eastern members were seized in West Berlin by the police as they prepared to join an outing to Lower Saxony. But on the whole it worked.

  Now, 750 years after the first Berliner picked up his quill to inform the second Berliner that he could have no residence permit without a work permit that could only be obtained by producing a residence permit, the Foreign Press Association is again tackling a problem which I failed to solve in my time. This is the bank balance left behind by the previous Association.

  Right up to 1945, a foreign press corps survived in Berlin, Swiss, Finns, Japanese, Slovaks and so on, the journalists went to press conferences in the Propaganda Ministry or were taken on Goebbels press trips to what remained of the Front. When the city fell to the Soviet armies, they left their Association funds in the bank, in Reichsmarks.

  Ever since, the new Association has been trying to lay its hands on the money, claiming to be the legal heir. Not so simple. The West Berlin authorities say they can’t decide: the Federal government in Bonn is the legal successor to the Reich. But the Western Allies in Berlin dispute Bonn’s rights, claiming that they and the Russians have sovereignty by right of conquest in Greater Berlin. Even if the British, Americans and French agreed to pay out the money, the Soviet authorities might well veto them on the grounds that the German Democratic Republic now has sovereign rights in their sector and is entitled to a say.

  Prague, in such matters, is a contrast to Berlin. The Czech state bureaucracy is even more obsessive, pedantic and nasty than the German. The population, however, observes a sort of ‘Germanity with a human face’: where rules can be dodged and fiddled, they will be. This has been shown in the current struggle against the pigeons of Prague, who now number at least 140,000. They spoil the hats of Party members, block drainpipes, and are afflicted with mites and – so the papers say – gout.

  Everything from a pair of falcons to ultra-sound has been tried in vain, in the effort to reduce them. Now the feeding of pigeons is punishable with a fine of up to £30. The police have shown zeal in jumping on citizens, almost all old-age pensioners, who are caught sharing their bread with pigeons in public parks. But elderly Czechs refuse to cooperate. ‘I was in a concentration camp, and I know what hunger means,’ protested one old lady. ‘Have you no pity?’ The police gave up and left her to her crumbs and birds. Then the falcons vanished. One, it turned out, flew into an attic belonging to a Czech ‘League of Bird Friends’ member, who took it to a forest and released it. The other collided with a chimney and broke its wing.

  This tale of toads, journalists, pigeons and cats has a point. There is civil society – the web of private and independent associations – and there is the state bureaucracy. The latter has ce
rtainly some rights to regulate the former. But when the frontier between them is overthrown, then we have trouble.

  When the police can be summoned because a cat kills a sparrow, then the social soil could grow a police state if the political weather were right. When the excellent Mr Karel Srp and his colleagues from the Jazz Section of the Czech Musicians’ Union are sent to prison for running an independent and legal publishing house, the state’s totalitarian claim over civil society is exposed. Toad-lovers, throw off the chains of the bird-lovers this spring! Reptile rights may be human rights as well.

  [1987

  Frontiers

  The first of this year’s Christmas pantomimes opened the other day in Strasbourg. I refer to the British Euro MPs who began by singing carols and ended rolling about the floor and punching one another on the nose. This particular debate, if I remember it correctly, was about a most interesting point of principle: how much of the EEC food surplus should be sent to starving Africa or, to put it in a more refined way, whether some frontier should be set to the goodwill and charity of the Christian West.

  Setting frontiers has taken up much Christian energy in the past, especially the setting up of frontiers in other people’s countries. Writing this column in Warsaw, I have been reflecting on how many European nations have proclaimed themselves to be the ‘eastward bastion of Christianity.’ The Germans did so, as the Teutonic knights pushed along the Baltic coast and exterminated the aboriginal Prussians. The Poles still do so, who colonised the borderlands of the Ukraine and Byelorussia and Lithuania, and whose great king John Sobieski saved Vienna from the Turks. The Hungarians set their ‘bastion’ in Transylvania. The Serbs spent centuries resisting the Turkish occupiers. Even the Russians, who were eventually to add all northern Asia to their empire, still fancy themselves as the outpost of something which they no longer define as Western Christendom.