The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Yet the twin urge to rape and murder remains repressed in a civilized society. It is only when civilization breaks down or is broken down, as happened in both Bosnia and Rwanda, that the urge is unleashed. And only under certain circumstances does it escalate from pogrom to genocide. To repeat: economic volatility very often provides the trigger for the politicization of ethnic difference. Proximity to a strategic borderland, usually an imperial border, determines the extent to which the violence will metastasize.

  Two quite unrelated phenomena, each dating from around 1979, suggest that the era of New World Disorder is now coming to an end. In many ways, the collapse of the Soviet Union late in 1991 and its subsequent aftershocks tended to distract attention from far more profound changes that were happening on the other side of the world. For there, another Communist regime – and another long-established empire – was working out how to have economic reform without making political concessions. How was it that the Chinese Communists were able to achieve reform – and soaring economic growth – without sacrificing their monopoly on power? The simple answer is that when a potentially revolutionary situation developed in 1989, the regime did what Communist regimes had routinely done throughout the Cold War when confronted with internal dissent. It sent in the tanks. On June 4, 1989, the pro-democracy movement was ruthlessly suppressed. Unknown numbers of the students who had gathered in Tiananmen Square were arrested. Leading dissidents were jailed after show trials. What happened in China was in stark contrast to events in Eastern Europe at the same time, where the Soviet leadership were trying to have both economic reconstruction and political reform – but ended up with political revolution and economic collapse. The Chinese wanted and got economic reconstruction without political reform. Since 1979 the Chinese economy has grown at an average rate of just under 10 per cent per annum, contributing to a rapid closing of the gap between Western and Asian incomes (see Figure E.1). This has been achieved not by right-wing Thatcherites, but by card-carrying Communists. Indeed, the man responsible for China’s economic miracle was the same man who ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square.

  When Deng Xiaoping arrived in Washington on January 28, 1979, it was the first time that a leader of Communist China had visited the

  Figure E.1 The ratio of European to East Asian per capita GDP, 1960–2004

  United States. At seventy-four, Deng was the arch-survivor of the Chinese Revolution. He had accompanied Mao on the Long March and had survived the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, when he had been labelled the ‘Number 2 capitalist-roader’ by the Red Guards. Twice after his rehabilitation, the Gang of Four, led by Mao’s toxic wife Jiang Qing, had tried to get rid of him. But Deng had come out on top. His American trip was prompted by a momentous internal upheaval within the Chinese Communist Party. In December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the 11th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the decision had been taken, at Deng’s instigation, to reorientate China’s economy towards the market. Mao’s Great Leap Forward by means of state-led industrialization had been a Great Leap Backward that had as many as thirty million lives. Deng’s strategy for a real leap forward was to break up communal control of agriculture and encourage the development of Township and Village Enterprises. Within a few years such rural businesses accounted for nearly a third of total industrial production. The other vital ingredient was a Chinese diaspora that had continued to operate within the capitalist system even as the mainland languished under Mao’s tyranny. From Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur, from Singapore to San Francisco, an experienced and wealthy capitalist elite was ready to be wooed.

  The crucial thing about Deng’s US trip was that it ensured that, as China industrialized, its exports would have access to the vast American market. It also ensured that, when Deng created free-trading Special Economic Zones along the Chinese coast, American firms would be first in line to invest directly there, bringing with them vital technological know-how. For their part, American companies saw Chinese liberalization as a perfect opportunity to ‘out-source’ production of goods for American consumers. Some analysts even predicted that the Special Economic Zones would become like American colonies in East Asia, while others thought wishfully that exposure to the free market would be bound to weaken the Communist Party’s aversion to political freedom. What better conclusion to the American century could be imagined? But it did not quite work out that way.

  Like other Asian economic miracles, China’s was propelled by trade. Between 1978 and 1988, Chinese exports rose four-fold in dollar terms, and since then they have grown more than ten-fold. The principal destination for Chinese goods was and remains the United States. More than 11 per cent of US imports today come from China, and that number is rising. Though American companies hoped to be beneficiaries of the Chinese export boom by investing in Chinese subsidiaries, barely a tenth of foreign direct investment in China has come from the United States. Instead, the roles have been reversed. As the United States trade deficit has soared to a peak of more than 6 per cent of gross domestic product, it is the Chinese who have been lending to the United States. Meanwhile, more and more American manufacturers are coming under intense pressure from Chinese competition because not only are Chinese wages a fraction of American wages; the Chinese have also restrained the appreciation of their currency against the dollar. And it is no longer just cheap shoes and clothes they are exporting to the US. More than two-fifths of the US–China trade deficit is accounted for by electrical machinery and power generation equipment. Americans had thought China would become a giant economic subsidiary of the United States, in an approximate re-enactment of the ‘Open Door’ era of the early twentieth century. Instead, they now found themselves facing a new economic rival. Some forecasts suggested that China’s gross domestic product would overtake that of the US as early as 2041. Anxious observers began to wonder if this economic competition could ultimately lead to conflict. There was nervous talk of future trade wars – and not only trade wars.

  Thus was the supposed triumph of the West in 1989 revealed to be an illusion. The revolution that Deng had launched with his visit to the United States in 1979 had much further-reaching implications than anything that had happened in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. And Deng’s ruthless suppression of political opposition in 1989 had been a far more important event than Mikhail Gorbachev’s capitulation in the face of it. Yet despite all this, Deng’s was still not the most important of the revolutions of 1979. The Chinese, after all, were embracing at least part of what we think of as Western culture – the free market, albeit a Far Eastern version, planned and overseen by a one-party state. What was happening in the Near East involved a complete repudiation of Western values. There, the revolution was not about profits; it was about the Prophet. And whereas the Far East exported products, the Near East exported people.

  In 1979, the same year that Margaret Thatcher came to power and Deng Xiaoping went to Washington, the madrassa or religious school in the grey city of Qom in Iran was the epicentre of another, very different, revolution – a revolution that would transform the world as profoundly as the globalization of free market economics. The year 1979 had brought a woman to power in England, a woman wholly committed to the idea that salvation lay in the free market. But 1979 also brought the Ayatollah Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini to power in Iran, a man just as committed to the idea that salvation lay in the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. One leader read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, the other the Koran. One revolution pointed to a world based on free trade, the other to a world based on holy writ. There were, of course, many reasons why Iranians rallied to a leader who routinely denounced the United States as ‘the Great Satan’. In 1953 it had been the CIA (along with MI6) that had overthrown the popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as a dictator. The Shah’s regime was by no means the most vicious the United States bankrolled during the 1960s and 1970s; nevertheless, his combination of private hedonism and public repression sufficed to put a powde
r keg under the Peacock Throne. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was partly a matter of settling scores against the Shah’s military and secret police. But under Khomeini’s leadership its main goal became to turn back the clock; to purify Iranian society of every trace of Western corruption. At the same time, it aimed to challenge American pretensions not only in the Middle East but throughout the Islamic world.

  This was much more than just a revival of Islam. As a religion, Islam is of course far from monolithic. There are deep divisions, not least between the Shi’ites who predominate in Iran (and Iraq) and the Sunnis who predominate in the Arab countries. But ‘Islamism’ was a militantly political movement with an anti-Western political ideology that had the potential to spread throughout the Islamic world, and even beyond it. Ironically, the United States had a hand in its spread. After all, the Soviets found their occupation of Afghanistan so very difficult to sustain because they found themselves fighting a new and highly motivated foe, the mujahidin, armed and trained by the CIA on the old principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. And which regime has done more than any other to spread the teaching of Islamic fundamentalism since 1979? The answer is Saudi Arabia, the United States’ most important ally in the Arab world. For it was not the poor of the Middle East who rushed to join the jihad; often, it was those who had received a Western education.

  The greatest of all the strengths of radical Islam, however, is that it has demography on its side. The Western culture against which it has declared holy war cannot possibly match the capacity of traditional Muslim societies when it comes to reproduction. The Islamic revolution ended at a stroke the Westernization of female life in Iran. As dictated by a strict interpretation of shariah law, women were now forced to veil themselves with the hijab in all public places. Strict segregation of the sexes was introduced in schools and public transport. Female presenters, actresses and singers were banned from radio and television. Women were prevented from studying engineering, agriculture and finance. They were systematically purged from all high-level government positions as well as the judiciary. In December 1979 the former minister of education Farrokhru Parsa was executed, having been convicted of promoting prostitution, ‘corrupting the earth’ and ‘warring against God’. Contraception and abortion were banned and the age of consent for marriage lowered to just thirteen. The constitution of the Islamic Republic spelt out unambiguously the proper role of women in the new theocracy:

  The family unit is the basis of society, and the true focus for the growth and elevation of mankind… Women were drawn away from the family unit and [put into] the condition of ‘being a mere thing’, or ‘being a mere tool for work’ in the service of consumerism and exploitation. Re-assumption of the task of bringing up religiously minded men and women, ready to work and fight together in life’s fields of activity, is a serious and precious duty of motherhood.

  Such attitudes help to explain why, although the average fertility rate in Muslim countries did decline from the 1970s onwards, it remained consistently more than twice the European average.

  Though very far from being a feminist, Margaret Thatcher herself embodied a profoundly different social change that went hand in hand with the liberalization of the Western economies in the late twentieth century. With the decline of traditional trade unions and the introduction of new flexible working practices, it became easier than ever before for British women to enter the workforce. Legislation against sex discrimination opened all kinds of careers to them that had previously been dominated by men. Market forces encouraged women to work. At the same time, the ready availability of contraception and abortion in the West gave women an unprecedented control over their own fertility. The two things went together. Women wanted to work, or maybe economic pressures obliged them to work. It was much harder to work with three or four children to look after as well; so women opted to have just two, or one, or – in the case of many of the most professionally ambitious – none at all. From the late 1970s, the average West European couple had fewer than two children. By 1999 the figure was just over 1.3, whereas, for a population to remain constant, it needs to be slightly over two. Europeans, quite simply, had ceased to reproduce themselves. The United Nations Population Division forecast that if fertility persisted at such low levels, within fifty years Spain’s population would decline by 3.4 million, Italy’s by a fifth. The overall reduction in ‘indigenous’ European numbers would be of the order of fourteen million. Not even two world wars had inflicted such an absolute decline in population.

  The consequences of these two diametrically opposite trends were dramatic. In 1950 there had been three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995 the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain. By 2050, the population of Iran could be more than 50 per cent larger. At the time of writing, the annual rate of population growth is more than seven times higher in Iran than in Britain. A hundred years ago – when Europe’s surplus population was still flocking across the oceans to populate America and Australasia – the countries that went on to form the European Union accounted for around 14 per cent of the world’s population. By the end of the twentieth century that figure was down to around 6 per cent, and according to the UN by 2050 it could have fallen to just 4 per cent. That raised at least one awkward question: who was going to pay the taxes necessary to pay for Old Europe’s generous state pensions? With the median age of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards projected to exceed fifty by 2050 – one in three people in each of these countries would be sixty-five or over – the welfare states created in the wake of the Second World War looked obsolescent. Either new-born Europeans would spend their working lives paying 75 per cent tax rates, or retirement and subsidized health care would simply have to be scrapped. Alternatively (or additionally), Europeans would have to tolerate substantially more legal immigration. The UN estimated that to keep the ratio of working to non-working population constant at the 1995 level, Europe would need to take in 1.4 million migrants a year from now until 2050. The annual figure for net migration in the 1990s was 850,000.

  But where would the new immigrants come from? Obviously, a high proportion would have to come from neighbouring countries. Yet Eastern Europe could not supply anything like the numbers needed. Indeed, the UN expected the population of Eastern Europe to have declined by a quarter by 2050. Those who feared waves of migrants from Eastern Europe were facing the wrong way – east instead of south. The reality was that Europe’s fastest growing neighbours by the end of the 1990s were, for the reasons discussed above, countries that were predominantly if not wholly Muslim. Consider the case of Morocco, where the population growth rate is seven times higher than in neighbouring Spain. At the very northernmost tip of Morocco, directly opposite Gibraltar, lies the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta, one of the few surviving remnants of Spain’s imperial past. Today, however, it is no longer an outpost of an aggressively expansionist European empire, but a defensive bulwark maintained by a continent under siege. Camped outside Ceuta are thousands of people from the Maghreb and beyond, some fleeing zones of conflict, others simply seeking better economic opportunities. Here they sit for days, waiting for a chance to sneak past the Spanish border patrols. The European Union has responded by subsidizing the construction of a five-mile border fence, equipped with razor wire, watchtowers and infra-red cameras.

  European officials admit that they have no idea how many people are making their way illegally into Europe. About 50,000 illegal immigrants are seized at Europe’s ports or at sea every year, but it is impossible to say how many get through or die in the attempt. Every week Spanish police patrolling the waters between Africa and Europe catch dozens of people, most of them Moroccans, trying to sneak into southern Spain and the Canary Islands in small smuggling boats known as pateras. For those who survive the journey, El Ejido is the point of entry into Europe. In the asphyxiating heat of the greenhouses there, 20,000 immigrants work in conditions that few Spaniards are willing to endure. And El Ejido is just one manifestation o
f what some call ‘Eurabia’. A youthful society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is quietly colonizing, in the original Roman sense of the word, a senescent and secularized continent to the north and west of it. Today, at least fifteen million Muslims have their home in the European Union, a number that seems certain to rise. Bernard Lewis’s prophecy that Muslims would be a majority in Europe by the end of the twenty-first century may go too far, but they may well outnumber believing Christians, given the collapse of church attendance and religious faith in Europe.

  Predictably, the growth of Muslim communities has generated some resentment on the part ofwhat we might as well call the old Europeans. There is clear evidence that whatever the economic benefits of immigration there are also real costs for unskilled indigenous workers. Periodically, violence flares up. There are attacks on the immigrants; sometimes on their mosques. In the eastern outskirts of Paris in 2005 disaffected youths from predominantly Muslim immigrant communities ran amok after two of their number died while hiding from the police. The fact that a minority of European Muslims – not all of them first-generation immigrants – have become involved with extreme Islamistorganizationsaddsfueltothesmoulderingfireofmutualantagonism. Once, Spaniards and Britons alike hadto worry about terrorism by nationalist minorities. The attacks in Madrid in March 2004 and in London in July 2005 have made it clear that there is a new enemy within.