Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War

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For Katerini, and Oscar and Elias

At the International Café,

two fools are laughing

telling jokes.

They say if you want to lie,

you want to make someone laugh

just try the word democracy.

At the International Café,

after they’ve finished drinking

the fools chatted some more.

They said the moment will arrive,

when the whole earth

will be embraced by a white dove.

And a young man

sat alone on the side,

listening to the two fools talking,

saying that, if everyone on earth

was as crazy as these two,

we’d really have a day of peace sometime.

Kostas Hatzis, ‘Sto Diethnes To Magazi’ (At the International Café), 1974

Introduction

But the scene is now changed, and gradually the two ranks mingle; the divisions which once severed mankind are lowered, property is divided, power is held in common, the light of intelligence spreads, and the capacities of all classes are equally cultivated; the State becomes democratic, and the empire of democracy is slowly and peaceably introduced into the institutions and the manners of the nation.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1831

WHAT IS THE story of democracy in our time? Not long ago the Western formula of democracy and free markets seemed unassailable. When the Cold War ended in 1989, the new great game played by diplomats, politicians and intellectuals alike became to promote and report on the further spread of democracy about the globe.¹

The tendency was to assume that democracy was working well still at home. The war on terror and the financial crisis have more recently framed those assumptions in a less comfortable light. By the time of the uprisings that swept across the Arab world in 2011, the dimming status of the liberal democratic formula was clear. Whatever was being demanded on the streets of Cairo it was not Western-style liberal democracy. Nor was a liberal democratic form of government any longer something that could be built on behalf of these nations, as the United States had attempted during the previous decade in Iraq. In the aftermath of 2011, as Syria imploded and Islamic State dug in its bloodied claws, the former call to democratic arms of the pundits in Washington was replaced by a faint piccolo whistling about democracy in retreat. From the point of view of the West it was not long before the high drama of the Arab Spring was drowned out by a pervasive and growing cacophony of discontent at home.

The former narrative of democracy’s historical spread has now been firmly replaced by one of its crisis and decline. Never has there been such a thin line between a positive outlook for democracy and the chance that it might go off the rails, wrote the French historian Pierre Rosanvallon in 2008. What’s gone wrong with democracy? asked London’s The Economist a few years later in 2014.²

Neither were looking across the Mediterranean to Tunisia or Algeria, but home to the disaffected banlieues of Paris, to the US Congress and the European Union. The concerns of over 4 million British voters, who in 2016 signed a petition demanding repeal of the country’s recent referendum on Brexit, or of those dumbfounded by the election of Donald J. Trump to the White House later that same year, revealed that sense of anxiety to be spreading. Democracy has survived the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth, observed Arthur Schlesinger Jr. presciently at the end of the millennium. It will not enjoy a free ride through the century to come.³

In recent years Western democracy has indeed come under threat; the basic right of citizens to habeas corpus has been pared back after centuries of struggle to flesh it out. Distrust in politics has grown. Foreign governments have been shown to have interfered in national elections. Civil liberties, including the right to privacy in the home, have been openly infringed. The growing power of political lobbies has given moneyed interests undue influence over policymaking, and has endowed a new class of politician with the ability not only to fundamentally misunderstand their constituents but to be rewarded for this. Socioeconomic inequality, which for much of the postwar era had been warded off by the welfare state, has returned.

In response to such developments, the streets of Western capitals have been marched upon by people in larger numbers than at any time since the high point of the civil rights movement half a century ago. Whether it is Occupy protesters or the gilets jaunes, white supremacists or national populists, a more assertive popular voice is emerging beneath the battered wing of liberal democracy and its representative institutions. Some of these movements are utopian; others demand greater rights, if only for themselves. But everywhere the clamor of popular disapproval is growing and is making its presence felt in the cordoned halls of liberal democratic debate. Democracy itself is changing before our eyes. But what is it that has changed exactly? That is the question I set out to answer in this book.

Stripped of its national particulars, modern democracy, as the influential Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen once argued, is the restriction of freedom by a law under which all subjects are equal.⁴

That is, on the face of it, a wonderfully simple formula. And yet the way different societies have over time sought to reconcile these two values—of freedom and equality—has fallen short more often than it has succeeded. Franchises were neither full nor fair for most of the nineteenth century. And many of the parliaments and constitutions thrown up in the wake of imperialism’s retreat did not survive long before they too needed rebuilding in the aftermath of two catastrophic world wars.

To recognize that democracy may be different things at different times is to recognize that it is both more recent and more fragile than we tend to imagine. Our own liberal democracy has almost nothing in common with the classical democracy of Athens. Scratch beneath the surface, and it soon reveals itself to have little in common either with that form of democracy inaugurated by the French and American revolutions, which placed representative institutions at the heart of the nation state and its newly constituted peoples. But if democracy changes over time it also changes from place to place. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville famously compared democracy in France with what he had recently seen of it in America. He believed that America had come some considerable way further than France in achieving the right balance between governments that ruled from above and people as they voiced their demands from below. What was distinct about democracy in America, Tocqueville suggested, was the achievement of the general equality of conditions. Looking to America as the crucible of democracy’s future, Tocqueville saw that the empire of democracy was irresistible—even in aristocratic societies such as his own.

And yet republican America was no more the end of history in the mid nineteenth century than Western democracy was after the Cold War. Liberal democracy as we understand it today in fact only properly took root across the Western world in the early years of the new century. It grew from the same bloodied soil of war, revolution, and economic crisis as its principal competitor ideologies of fascism on the right and communism on the left. The term itself had relatively little traction in America until President Woodrow Wilson roused the nation to war in its name: to make the world safe for democracy (he meant safe for America) in 1917. And it took the experience of yet more illiberal regimes and failed democracies—by 1941, there were just eleven democracies left amidst the carnage of the Second World War—before the commitment to combining liberal values and the institutions of democratic equality was reaffirmed amid the general political fatigue of the postwar moment.⁵

A more consistent set of liberal democratic political institutions locked into place across the Western countries after 1945, binding them more closely together as it did so. These same countries exceeded even their prewar trajectory of industrialization and they now bureaucratized as well. The resulting era of prosperity—the Golden Age, les trente glorieuses, the wirtschaftswunder, the miracolo economico: most countries had a term for it—was always more golden for some than it was for others. It also unfolded in the shadow of the struggle between capitalism and the communist world: indeed, it was significantly shaped by that struggle. But it nonetheless provided an unprecedented degree of political stability and economic progress that left its mark in the institutions and the manners, as Tocqueville put it, of the Western nations. The gap between rich and poor narrowed and for many there was a sense that the Western world’s political compass was pointing in the right direction. People felt they knew where they stood and that they had a good chance of getting to where they wanted to be.

This is not at all what many now think of when they think about democracy today. For all its achievements, the modern democratic state has been hollowed out. The markets upon which the delivery of political outcomes has come to rely are volatile and encourage short-term thinking. Today’s citizens are garlanded with an expanded panoply of political rights, yet they routinely lack the social protections once taken for granted by their elders. The people grow resentful of the political elite’s detachment, while the public domain through which democratic voice is exercised has been parceled out to the highest bidder. A thinly scraped notion of liberty has gained the upper hand over equality. Something has changed, in short, and in the turmoil of the present it may well be changing again.

It is imperative we now try to understand the full chain of events by which our modern democracy has changed. It is of course a difficult thing to capture something like democracy in the process of transforming itself, and that much harder when we cannot meter history by the rhythm of the drums of war alone. The changes I seek to address in this book are not best measured by the number of bodies on the ground. They provide us, rather, with a different kind of drama: one forged through institutional reconfigurations, political epiphanies, and societal changes of heart. One is dealing primarily with the cold, deep seepage of ideas as they form about, and take a hold of, the present. Such changes, too, have the potential to split history apart: and, as it happens, they do leave their share of victims on the ground.

The earlier part of the twentieth century was defined by liberal democracy’s struggle against its rival ideologies of fascism on the right and communism on the left: to the point of hot and cold wars alike. Tocqueville’s empire of democracy, by which he meant its indisputable influence as an ideal, largely won those battles in the way that Western society was reassembled after the Second World War.⁶

The defining issue of our own era has therefore been something else entirely: more a full-throated struggle over democracy itself, a struggle to reconcile democratic equality with liberal freedom in an age of capitalist globalization. To tell this story properly we must discard the conventional narrative frame of the twentieth century: for its threads weave most meaningfully together not in 1945, nor even in 1989, but in the early 1970s, the very point at which fascism and communism, as state forms, also finally began to yield their grip.⁷

It is there that the changes giving shape to the political order we have all been living through first set in.

In the half-decade between 1968 and 1974 an entire era—the postwar era—came to an end and something else began: our present age. There was no single year of upheaval, though 1971, for reasons that will become clear, cusps this change. There was no singular break, either, between some uniformly experienced before and after. But amid a perfect storm of crises that befell both East and West alike, the very structure of democracy that had sustained the Western nations through the first half of the twentieth century appeared suddenly to have run its course. That wider constellation of crises included the most dramatic transformation of the world economy since the Great Depression, and a fracturing of territorial sovereignty which, for the best part of two centuries, had underpinned national and international politics alike. It included the upheaval of rapidly modernizing societies at home, whose citizens suddenly demanded of their governments what their governments could not provide. The response to these crises in the East, we know well, was more repression at home and more credit from abroad to shore up their failing regimes: a path that ultimately led to the collapse of the entire communist system. But what of the response in the West? As historians are beginning to document, something more radical happened: the West underwent regime change.⁸

From around 1971, on the back of the social upheavals of the late 1960s, with the Nixon administration in America at its most reckless and radical groups rising across Europe; with people marching on the streets and a crisis in the international economy, the postwar consensus unraveled and the institutional arrangements of the liberal democratic order began to be reconfigured. As Part I of this book seeks to show, this played out in various ways. New class arrangements took shape as national elites transnationalized and the working class disaggregated. The international politics of the Cold War changed too, in the aftermath of Vietnam and détente, as the transatlantic alliance was rebuilt around the forces of globalization. States sought new structures of legitimacy, executive authority was augmented and individualism was encouraged as a counterweight to the decline in more social forms of citizenship. Democracy began to pivot on its axis. Freedom came to be prioritized over equality and politicians felt their way toward a system of market-oriented governance that was ever-more removed from the whims of the electorate—an undoubted advantage to governments struggling to hold on to power, but one which came at the later price of denying those same states the benefits of more active public support.

This new era of liberal governance saw a fourth pillar of political authority join the old tripartite structure of democratic rule as the institutions of the market took up their place alongside parliaments, the executive branch, and the judiciary. As the postwar institutions of democracy were challenged, new ones were found to replace them, and new—often more conservative—norms came to transform the way that they worked. Actually existing democracy was overhauled; and long before the decade was out the reinvention of the West was underway. Critically, the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991 represented a denouement to this process, rather than the beginning it is usually taken for; the now liberated countries of the East being swept up into the ongoing history of liberal reinvention in the West. Fatefully, it also provided Western political liberalism with an opportunity not only to overlook the difficulties already apparent in the new liberal democratic consensus, but in many ways to intensify their effect.

Part II of the book traces these developments until the end of the millennium, as the Western democracies sought to reboot something of the economic prosperity they had become accustomed to in the earlier postwar era. These were the years of the Clinton boom and the gradual recovery of economic dynamism in Europe. They were the heyday of economic globalization and the weightless consumerism it afforded the Western middle classes in particular. The implications of this proved significant in the forging of at least three basic elements of the post–Cold War order: first, regarding the manner in which the world economy was constructed (primarily around international finance), the variant of financialized globalization it led to, and the leverage that this afforded markets over states; secondly, regarding the timing and significance of the Cold War’s end, the lessons of which pushed the decade’s critical actors, social democrats, into a generational turn toward these newly liberalized markets as a less costly tool of distributional fairness; and thirdly, in terms of the very real social tensions that reappeared across the Western democracies during the immediate post–Cold War years.

With the world seeming to pick up speed all around, much of this went unnoticed—or at least it was not acted upon—at the time. For this was when the two Germanies were learning how to live as one nation again, and when the European Union was born at Maastricht. It was when the twentieth century seemed to deliver on so many of its technological promises—home computing and the Internet, GM food and cable television—and when it was possible to look to the world at large and, for the first time in many people’s memory, not need to interpret events in terms of the struggle between communism and capitalism. It was the self-proclaimed era of being post- everything. And yet there was much that persisted too. Yugoslavia broke apart amid the violence in Bosnia; Eastern Europe struggled under the burden of its rapid conversion to a capitalist economy. International law took great strides forward but was written mostly by—and for—the powerful. Meanwhile, an oversized and underregulated financial market thrived beyond the oversight of national states, as did the black market and the oligarchs who profited from this.

In Part III, the book follows the story of the twin shocks that did more than anything else to define the political tenor of the new millennium. In the process they began to undermine the post-70s model of political order in the West, along with the democratic peace its citizens had come to believe was now their rightful inheritance. Both appeared in the form of a deus ex machina at first; but each was in truth exacerbated by the developments of previous decades. The first blow was struck by the events of 9/11 and, more significantly still, by the way that the United States in particular responded to this. Long-cherished civil liberties were struck down and multiculturalism began to fray. Public spaces were boarded up. The backlash of the war on terror profoundly shaped political developments in Europe too, though some countries held out better than others. Above all, these years began to pose the question of a failing international order, as it was conceived at the end of the Cold War. Accustomed to projecting itself outward, the West was now subject to forces determined to break back in.

The massive costs of running the war on terror, in conjunction with the seemingly inexorable turn to a non-state-based credit rather than a savings-based economy, were among the factors that led to the second major challenge of the new millennium: the financial crisis, and its long corrosive aftermath of the Great Recession. Society was now riven by a biting austerity on the one hand and an anti-immigrant backlash on the other. Governments used up what remaining reserves of popular trust they had in fighting the fires of a seemingly unquenchable crisis. Fatefully, this was also the moment when Europe was confronted by the largest refugee influx since the Second World War (many of them fleeing the havoc unleashed by the global war on terror). The social tensions sparked by some of these developments began to raise the specter of more desperate solutions drawn from the past.

Alarmed by such developments, one ninety-year-old survivor of the Warsaw ghetto took a plea of remembrance to the international press. Fear and lies are terrible things, he warned: do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse, as ours did.⁹

Was anyone listening? In Europe, the solidarity that had underpinned the European Union’s expansion for half a century entered its gravest crisis yet. In the US, the political atmosphere grew more, not less, tense under the nation’s first black president. With public trust in the workings of Congress at its lowest ebb, and popular discontents soaring amid an antiliberal surge, the conditions favored an outsider in the presidential elections of 2016. What that outsider might then do only time, and power, would tell.

When a great many changes are upon us it is easy to lose one’s bearings. Dramatic events prove hard to grasp during the onslaught and unthinkingly we may accede to things for which the history books will later rightly ask of us: why? My aim in treating the history of democracy in this book as something that is constantly made and remade, is in part to provide clarity over how our values and our institutions interact. It is not to deny the considerable divergence that exists between national histories—readers should in fact come away with a far better sense of how different societies have variously responded to the overarching challenges of the time. Nor is it to reify the notion of the West, which like other catchall geographical descriptors (Europe or the American century, say) is a partial and a vested claim before it is a settled fact. That the West is the relevant locus for this particular history of democracy is less because of its presumed certainties than it is for the manner of its constant reinvention.¹⁰

But by suggesting that a discrete era in the history of democracy opens in the economic and political upheavals of the 1970s, and that it ends in the current succession of crises across the West, I do want to suggest that there are common threads binding the Western experience together during these years, and that the relationship between liberalism, capitalism, and democracy stands at the forefront of how we are to understand this historically. These are the pillars that sustain our modern age. They were each differently aligned around the beginning of the last third of the twentieth century, and they are each shifting in relation to one another again today. Of course, all periodizations are historical constructions: wittingly or not they reproduce the politics and the perspective of those who define them.

My aim in opening this history in the early 1970s, therefore, is twofold. Most simply I seek to write against the grain of an historiography of democratic progressivism: above all the idea that democracy is an accumulation of improvements locked in after the war, that it is always heading forward in just the right way. But I also seek to open up space: for this is not a story we can tell from within the confines of any one nation alone, nor, in modern times, can we limit our narrative to just the scale of the nation state itself. What emerges is thus a resolutely transnational history as well. And what it attempts to capture, by breaking out of the national frame, is both the wider structure of the forces pressing in upon democracy today, and the uneven and combined effects of the various efforts to address this. The real significance of the early 1970s as a turning point emerges against this fuller backdrop.

In what follows I have not set out to offer a comprehensive history of the past few decades in the West, if such a thing is even possible. My account here necessarily focuses on some countries and certain developments more than others, and some of the elements may strike the reader as surprising (although anything else would be to assume we know this past simply because we lived through it). But to offer no explanatory vision at all is to consign the recent past to a succession of isms with little sense of intellectual priority, and that is perhaps as much a part of our present dilemma as anything else. I began writing this book in 2011, when it became clear to me that there was a real need for, and the time also seemed right to attempt, a narrative overview of the past few decades. For all that I am wary of the pitfalls, nothing that has happened since then has led me to change my mind. I am if anything more strongly of the belief that until we undertake this task we will not properly be able to address the welter of challenges that confront us once again today.

Those challenges ought not to be taken lightly. Fewer Western citizens vote now than they did in the past, yet more believe the present generation of politicians is failing miserably at their task. We bemoan a lack of public trust and declining sense of community, and we demand our rights be respected. Yet few of us have the time to fulfill our obligations to others. The fault line between left and right has for some time been breaking up in favor of new divides: between the old (with their expensive pension plans) and the young (who are paying disproportionately more for them); between populists and the elite; migrants and their host countries, rich and poor. Class remains, but its geography, as with that of so much else, is changing. For most of us, it is no longer seen as a contradiction in terms to talk of public services being privately provided. Europeans take it for granted that their courts of law and national banks are not their nations’ respective institutions of last resort. For Americans it has become normal to pay both less in taxes and substantially more on insurance premiums. And yet so ceaselessly do we experience these changes that it proves hard to mark off quite when then was different to now.

My hope is that the narrative that follows will go some way to explaining what is new and what is old in the challenges before us. The last time Western society was as unequal as now was during the interwar years, when the idea of parliamentarianism was jettisoned in Europe in favor of governments prepared to do something about the seemingly endless succession of crises that erupted during that period. Today, as they look to Greece, commentators are inclined to speak not of the birthplace of democracy but of the crisis of democracy. What is more they fear, and not without reason, that the Greek crisis is in some sense also their own.

When nationalists marched in Hungary in 2015, and Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, spoke that summer of the threat posed by illegal immigrants, his speech itself goose-stepped along, in the words of one social media wag, to the theme of fear, hate, fear, hate, fear, fear, fear. Orbán’s speech was an authoritarian populist’s to make: the government was to adopt stricter regulations… allowing us to detain people who have illegally crossed Hungarian borders, and to deport them within the shortest possible time, he said, as he pointed to a sham consultation that confirmed this as the people’s will. But it was democratic Europe’s own handling of an unfolding refugee crisis, which had in those weeks packed full the grand train station in Budapest with a mass of bodies and their carted possessions: and this provided him with the tools.¹¹

These are lessons that America under Donald Trump is now learning the hard way as well.

Yet there are also signs of democratic renewal. Political parties are having more earnest discussions about their structure and purpose than in a generation. MeToo and BlackLivesMatter are just two of many movements putting injustice back at the heart of public debate. Citizens are stirring. Quite what form of democracy will emerge through the upheavals of our own time, what new answers will be found to the old and inescapable question—how are we best to govern ourselves?—remains to be seen. What is certain is that we are much more likely to be satisfied rather than terrified by the answers we give to that question when we properly understand the nature of the era we have been living through. If we are willing to revisit the recent past in this more critical light, then Tocqueville’s penetrating description of the progress of democracy remains as pertinent today as ever before. It explains why the empire of democracy is still being built and why it can still go very different ways, some of which may be more appealing to us than others.

This book—a history of the political life of the Western democracies—is the first full account of the way it has been going for most of the past half-century. It places the actions of politicians squarely alongside the background thrum of ideas and the struggle over values and institutions their actions gave rise to. But equally it foregrounds the international character of the forces they were responding to. Perhaps we will one day come to think of this era—our own—as one in which the wisdom of Prometheus was traded for the rewards of a Leviathan unbound. We must in any case come to some sort of reckoning with just how it was that the basic virtues we impute to democracy could change so dramatically, and could do so in the absence of war or revolution. The struggle between equality and liberty, and the form of democracy that struggle has bequeathed us, defines the latter part of the past century and the millennium as we have experienced it to date. This book is the story of how the last great struggle of the twentieth century and the first great struggle of the twenty-first unfolded. It is a struggle that gives shape to the entire era we have just been living through.

Prologue: Two Helicopters

I THINK OF what happened to Greece and Rome, said President Richard Nixon in the summer of 1971. What is left, he mused: —only the pillars.¹

Three years later, in 1974, West Germany’s Willy Brandt was every bit as despondent: Western Europe has only twenty or thirty more years of democracy left in it, he declared, shortly before his own departure from power. [A]fter that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictator comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference.²

In Britain, that same summer, the former colonel and minister of disarmament Lord Chalfont took his concerns about a society in free-fall to the opinion pages of The Times. Could Britain be heading for a military takeover? he speculated, as he contemplated the massive power and often ruthless action of the great industrial trades unions.³

Such fears proved, of course, to be unfounded: in Europe, it was the authoritarian regimes of Portugal, Spain, and Greece that were soon brought under democracy’s wing and the Soviet bloc that began its terminal decline. But we should not underestimate the extent to which, from the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, a genuine and deeply felt concern for the future of society pervaded the Western democracies. For the first time since the height of the Second World War, the fate of the West appeared in doubt. America was mired in Vietnam, the USSR had overtaken it in the missile race, and the NATO alliance was strained. New anxieties about the planet’s finite resources were gnawing away at the postwar model of economic growth and the nonaligned countries were snapping at Western heels.⁴

The greater problems, however, came from within.

At around midday on May 29, 1968, the streets of Paris packed with students waving banners and millions of workers out on strike in support, the towering figure of postwar French politics President Charles de Gaulle boarded a helicopter at Issy in the western suburbs of Paris and vanished into the fog. When de Gaulle did not arrive at his family home of La Boisserie later that day, as the prime minister had been informed, rumors began circulating within the government that perhaps the aging general was abdicating: "De Gaulle, au musée! some of the banners on the streets had been demanding (De Gaulle to the Museum!). Adieu de Gaulle. But de Gaulle was not abdicating. Much more dramatically, he had flown by helicopter to the French garrison at Baden-Baden to consult with the commander of French forces in Germany, General Jacques Massu, a loyal member of the French old guard. Quite why remains shrouded in mystery: was it, as de Gaulle himself later declared, a tactical ploy intended to plunge the French people, including the government, into doubt and anxiety… in order to regain control of the situation" in Paris?⁵

Or was it that he planned to abandon the country and to stay in Germany, or even, as some have suggested, that he was secretly reaching out to the Soviets, the better to restrain the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and the French Communist Party he believed to be orchestrating the protests at home? Certainly de Gaulle was worried that the fate of the Fifth Republic—his Republic—was at stake in the upheavals that were rocking the country. But de Gaulle’s actual Soviet policy sought openly to reconstruct the Cold War balance of power over Germany between his own nuclear France and the USSR, not to do deals in the dark between them. De Gaulle was as vocal as any foreign leader later that summer when, on Moscow’s orders, the tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring was brutally crushed.⁶

Most likely, de Gaulle was simply maneuvering to buy himself a little time. Prior to his departure the government had failed to contain the greatest popular upheavals the country had seen since the war, and it was deeply split over how to respond. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou’s strategy had been to offer the workers real concessions, in the hope of prising their support away from the students. But this looked to have failed when the workers themselves rejected the terms that the government had agreed with the CGT, despite the offer of a 10 percent rise in the basic wage. De Gaulle’s own preferred strategy of offering the people a referendum—while it spoke the right language of participation—was largely ignored.

Meanwhile a battle for the streets of Paris raged on outside. With students building barricades and police smashing them down, de Gaulle spent several tense days prior to his dramatic flight holed up in the Élysée, where his closest adviser, Jacques Foccart, feared for the general’s security (at one point he heard rumors that explosives were being stockpiled in the Sorbonne). Sensing things moving their way, the CGT called for a major protest on May 29. With even an establishment politician like François Mitterrand now going on record to say he was ready to form a provisional government, de Gaulle had decided enough was enough. There is no point attacking an empty palace, he declared that morning as he made his plans to depart.⁷

Whatever the truth of those few hours, de Gaulle’s secret flight from France was in many ways illustrative of what was, by now, the nub of a new and troubling problem that confronted the Western democracies: the yawning gap that had opened up between states, as they had been institutionalized after the war, and the people as they had become beneath its protective yet stifling wing. The staunchly paternalistic de Gaulle and the Paris of the sixties cultural explosion were, if anything, the very exemplification of this. Yet on his return to Paris from Baden-Baden the following day, on May 30, it looked at first as though de Gaulle had circumvented the problem, if only through the sheer calculated drama of his actions. After first meeting with a colossally aggravated Pompidou, de Gaulle acceded to his Prime Minister’s insistence that he now dissolve parliament and call a snap election. Then, in the afternoon, he took to the radio to announce that he was postponing his own unpopular proposal of a referendum.

In the last twenty-four hours I considered all eventualities without exception, de Gaulle told the French people. Against the protesters who had brought Paris to a standstill that May, he appealed to his own supporters to take to the streets, in a march that had been planned to show support for the old regime. De Gaulle used his airtime to blame the entire affair on the CGT, who had in truth struggled to control events on the streets as much as he. The Gaullist march that afternoon was larger than any of the protests to date: perhaps as many as half a million strong. And in the elections which followed, the Gaullist party was returned to power with a resounding majority, now as the Union pour la défense de la République (UDR)—the central plank of the modern French mainstream right—with a new prime minister, Couve de Murville, to lead it.

Yet if de Gaulle won the battle of 1968, his forced resignation the following year confirmed that he had just as surely lost the wider war over the future of modern France. With de Gaulle having elected to see through his earlier proposal of a referendum on constitutional reform, the campaign quickly became, after the events of the previous year, a vote of confidence in the general himself. It left de Gaulle, who championed the losing side, with no choice but to resign once the results were in. The reforms, de Gaulle had claimed before the vote, would have completed his vision of creating a modern France—and perhaps in his own mind they would have done. But the people disagreed. They had other ideas as to what their country needed. And so, shortly after midnight on April 28, 1969—in stark contrast to the high drama of the year before—it was announced that de Gaulle would be resigning the presidency of the republic, effective at midday. The general had in fact already packed his bags some days before.⁸

General de Gaulle? He no longer exists, Georges Pompidou had commented at the height of the crisis of ’68.⁹

He was right in more ways than one. When de Gaulle died, in November 1970, it was not just his vision for a modern France, or indeed for Europe, that was buried with him near the family home in Colombey; something of the tenor of the postwar era, its certainties as well as its constraints, was interred with him. The juddering reality of that was also something that Pompidou, who now replaced de Gaulle as president, was himself soon to experience at first hand. Under his leadership, France recovered from the standstill of the May events, only to succumb to the more deeply seated economic malaise that was by then afflicting the democracies at large. Le général de Gaulle est mort; la France est veuve, declared Pompidou when he heard of the old man’s death (General de Gaulle is dead; France is a widow). Again, Pompidou was right: but France was also now a widow looking forward to a whole new era in life.

Across the Atlantic, and under very different circumstances, the political career of a dashing young forty-something, Pierre Trudeau, was at this moment just getting going. Where the previous spring had seen the aging de Gaulle temporarily abandon the country, it had also seen 48-year-old Pierre Trudeau become the first Canadian prime minister actually to have been born in the twentieth century. The old were exiting the stage and the young pushing forward to take their place; or so it seemed. As befits the different generations they represented, not to mention their contrasting political styles, the two leaders could not have been more different. Where de Gaulle, the former soldier, was aloof and awkward even, Trudeau was the embodiment of style; a man who knew, as one biographer put it, that what the modern crowd wanted was the expert jackknife into a pool, beautiful and brilliant young people, and stunning women in miniskirts surrounding him.¹⁰

As even the British Spectator remarked of Trudeau’s arrival in 1968, it looked as if he would catapult the country into the brilliant sunshine of the late twentieth century from the stagnant swamp of traditionalism and mediocrity in which Canadian politics had been bogged down for years. If that was stirring praise from the British establishment, it was a reminder too that Trudeau’s politics were both pragmatic and staunchly postideological. He was elected because of a certain aura and a definite style; neither the first nor the last politician to win power on the basis of promises of change, but one who perfectly embodied the character of the moment for it. Snappily dressed in sandals and open shirts, a straight-talker with a sparkling turn of phrase, Trudeau had made his name as a reformer when he rewrote Canada’s criminal code as justice minister (on the matter of sexual politics, the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, as he famously put it). Even more so than Kennedy, the media adored him.¹¹

Like moths to a flame, he attracted intellectuals and celebrities throughout his time in office.

But in Canada too, it did not take long for the euphoria of 1968 to blow itself out. Within just a few months of taking office, Trudeau found that his ambitions for a modern, open style of politics, ideas forged as a freewheeling young intellectual, did not sit easily amid the sheer grasping unavoidability of the upheavals of the time.¹²

As the sixties turned into the seventies, his more pragmatic instincts took over and it was a hardened Trudeau that turned out to meet Canada’s first major crisis of the era, in October 1970, when members of the separatist group the Front de libération du Québec kidnapped the British trade commissioner, Richard Cross. In doing so they inaugurated what would come to be known as the October Crisis. We have had enough of promises of work and prosperity, their manifesto declared, when it was read out on national radio, when in fact we will always be the diligent servants and bootlickers of the big shots… we will be slaves until Quebecers, all of us, have used every means, including dynamite and guns, to drive out these big bosses of the economy and of politics…¹³

Five days later and angered by the lack of official response thus far, FLQ members went further and took another hostage: this time a sitting cabinet minister named Pierre Laporte. Trudeau now had no choice but to intervene. But how far was he prepared to go, an interviewer for CBC asked him? Just watch me! Trudeau famously shot back from the top of Parliament Hill. First, he invoked the War Measures Act for the first time in a generation. Then he rounded up several hundred individuals with the remotest of links to the revolutionary group. Lester Pearson, the former prime minister, had been right: Trudeau had ice water in his veins after all.¹⁴

But so too did the FLQ, and the strangled body of Pierre Laporte was the price paid for the two sides’ intransigence. In Canada as much as in France, the vivid lights of the late 1960s were receding as a more somber political mood settled across the West.

South of the border, in the United States, the optimism of the earlier age had ended, if anything, a year or two earlier. Trudeau’s election had been front-page news, when it was reported alongside coverage of the riots that erupted after Martin Luther King’s assassination. While Canadians were basking in Trudeaumania, in the afterglow of the late-sixties’ euphoria, the election of Richard Nixon at the end of 1968 marked the ascendancy, by contrast, of Nixonland: a relief to the establishment, which was roundly shaken by the events of that year, but an awakening, as if to a desperate and ringing hangover, for those who had spent much of it parading on the streets.¹⁵

Over the next few years the teach-ins and occupations of ’68 gave way to edgier protests against the Vietnam War, civil rights gave way to black power, and the hopes that a nation might be healed by the reform program of the Great Society turned to a racially tinged despair that American society would always be greater for some of its citizens than for others.

Over the next few years the national distemper descended only further. By the time Nixon’s first term in office was drawing to a close, the public mood was fast approaching a point of crisis. In the spring of 1971, the streets of Washington were engulfed by more than half a million people, marching in protest at the Vietnam War. On May 1, two weeks of rolling protests culminated in an ironically named May Day action that antiwar activists hoped might temporarily shut down the government. By May 3 the government had had enough, and the marchers were dispersed. Dissident groups then made to assault government buildings where they confronted National Guard units called in to defend them. Amid the pandemonium that ensued, anyone seen to be loitering was liable to be arrested, leading many to keep wildly running through the streets, as one participant recalled. Upward of seven thousand were taken into custody: so many that they needed to be interned at the nearby Redskins practice field.¹⁶

It was no small reminder of the extent to which the people and the people’s authorities were at odds with one another at this, the very height of the Cold War, that the director of the CIA, Richard Helms (a man later immortalized as the gentlemanly planner of assassinations), observed all this and fumed.¹⁷

Helms had headed up the nation’s intelligence agency since 1962 but his office had become inundated with casework concerning not foreign military plots but a growing civil dissent at home (although the European youth movement was also adding to his workload). Just days before the Washington protests the US Supreme Court had voted to continue the controversial program of busing black students to mixed race public schools in order to overcome segregation in schools.

As was almost inevitable in these years, it sparked its own counter-reaction—in this case of white, middle-class resentment at the intrusion of the state into what many considered a matter of personal choice—and precipitated in turn yet another round of protests. Just two months before that, the Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) whose antiwar platform was the most public strand of a wider underground revolutionism, had exploded a bomb in the Capitol building causing substantial physical damage. No fatalities were recorded, except perhaps—as the Washington Post speculated—the cherished sixties ideal of nonviolent protest itself.¹⁸

But then there were new ways of protesting as well.

One week later—at the precise moment Joe Frazier squared up to Muhammad Ali in the Fight of the Century at Madison Square Garden—a group of eight civilians, the self-appointed Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke into the Bureau’s Pennsylvania headquarters and made off with more than a thousand documents: the security guards’ attention remained glued to their radio sets throughout. The activists, in a reminder that the politics of WikiLeaks has deeper roots than we tend to recall, immediately mailed their trove to various newspapers for publication. With its revelations of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s long-running COINTELPRO program, which aimed to spy on and disrupt domestic political organizations, it was a shocking exposé of the extent to which the American state had for some time now distrusted some of its own citizens.

The more novel and the more explosive problem, however, was the extent to which citizens any longer trusted the state. This was brought home in September, when prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York took over the entire prison. The uprising had begun almost by chance, when a panicked scuffle in a corridor led a few prisoners, without having planned what they were doing, to seize a section of the prison. After years of routinely inhumane treatment—prisoners were granted only one sheet of toilet paper and were served just 63 cents worth of food each per day—they took some of their former captors hostage in the process.¹⁹

Security breached, the revolt soon spread, as dozens and then hundreds of prisoners, some grabbing baseball bats and others donning makeshift kaffiyehs, took over the central hub of the prison complex and one of the exercise yards.

Given the scale of the uprising and the shockwaves it sent through the establishment, given perhaps above all the TV crews who pitched their cameras at the prison gates to broadcast the drama to households across America, the odds of the standoff being peacefully resolved, of either side listening, were indeed slim, as Lewis Smith, a civil rights lawyer sent in as a neutral observer, remarked upon his arrival. When a prison guard who had been beaten to a bloody pulp in the initial outbreak subsequently died of his injuries the odds lengthened further still. On September 13, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom the prisoners had hoped to negotiate with, turned the riot into a massacre when he sent in heavily armed state troopers with orders to retake the prison.²⁰

In the hours that followed, and with cameras cordoned off at a safe distance outside, state troopers and reservists surged into the yard, some carrying their own personal sidearm with bullets designed to inflict maximum injury upon impact. Once inside they went on a killing spree. Prisoners were made to strip naked and crawl across the wet yard now strewn with bodies and glass. Thirty-nine people, including ten hostages, were killed as a result of state trooper gunfire (the killing of the hostages was initially and cynically blamed on the hostages themselves). The prison was soon retaken but the violence and recriminations continued behind the carefully resealed prison walls for weeks. It was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the civil war, reported the McKay Commission, charged with looking into the events the following year.

But the prisoners’ complaints, as with their earlier demands for fairer living standards, were buried out of sight. The official story—the one that Governor Nelson Rockefeller, his eye on a presidential run, was at pains to ensure the media reported—was that justice had been done and law and order restored. Attica was duly reported as a case closed: a violent bookend to the era of civil rights before it. But despite the media blackout of the riot’s bloody denouement, the sense of anger and frustration that sparked it off had long since seeped outside the prison walls and into the rest of society.²¹

As it did so, it shone a glancing light not just onto American society but onto the simmering discontent afflicting Western liberal democracy at large.

Not only in America but in Europe too the mass protests and marches that had begun in the civil rights activism of the previous decade continued in the early 1970s, but they were joined now, if their voices were not at times drowned out, by a growing cacophony of working- and middle-class protest focused on the rising cost of living. In Australia, the US embassy reported a pervasive sense of gloom, as the country headed toward recession; in Denmark in 1973, concerns over rising prices saw more than a third of the national vote go to parties outside the political mainstream.²²

The Danes were concerned about rising inflation in neighboring Germany; the Germans for their part were worried about a possible communist takeover in Italy. That same year, in Britain, 1.6 million people went on strike to protest price rises and government pay caps. As the country turned the corner of that year and came out haltingly into the half-light (it shone no brighter) of 1974 the British government was still sufficiently panicked to introduce a three-day working week to conserve electricity amid an oil crisis and with the coal miners on strike. When that failed to work, the Heath government was forced to call an election.

Writing from London in March of that year, the New York Times’ star political reporter James Scotty Reston—who had, by virtue of his profession, been witness to much of this change—sat down at his desk to write about what he now believed was a crisis of democracy gripping the Western world. Reston didn’t buy the idea that the lackluster turnout at the first of two national elections in Britain that year was simply a consequence of the cost of living crisis.²³

For Reston it was the product of a wider social and political distemper. Governments were elected on boldly worded platforms. But their policies invariably collapsed within a few months, leaving them for the remainder of their time in office scrambling to find workable solutions to increasingly intractable problems. The Tories decried Europe, only then to lead Britain into it; Labour sought to restore full employment, only to embrace the market. As Reston saw it, the British public was heaping its opprobrium not on one or other of the major political parties but on Britain’s system of government itself.

Prior to the election, the Conservative leader Edward (Ted) Heath had famously asked the voters Who governs Britain? It was a silly question, Reston mused, and in awarding none of the parties a workable majority the public had responded with a silly answer: nobody. By the time the election was rerun, later in the year, neither voters nor politicians seemed to have the stamina for it any more (the Liberals went to the polls with the distinctly uninspiring slogan: One more heave!).²⁴

So far as Scotty Reston was concerned, however, this quintessentially British saga painted not merely a dismal picture of democracy in Britain, it was a picture common to other countries too: Canada, West Germany, Israel, and Italy all sprang to his mind as suffering from a similar democratic malaise. The world is now being run by Communist governments that rule by fear and force and by non-Communist governments that do not have the confidence of the majority of their people, Reston concluded.²⁵

This was a criticism he directed most strongly at the leader of the free world itself. Writing the year before, with the war in Vietnam at the forefront of his mind, Reston had bemoaned what he called a sharp decline in respect for authority in the United States… a decline in respect not only for the civil authority of government but also for the moral authority of the schools, the universities, the press, the church and even the family. Reston was writing these words the day after Lyndon Johnson’s funeral, and he took the opportunity to vent at the state of American government, then nearing the end of the most controversial presidency in half a century. It may have been a political miracle that Richard Nixon, with all his troubles and a Democratic party in control of Congress, somehow keeps going without any visible means of political support, he said. But that didn’t change the underlying problem: The political ‘decline of the West’ is no longer a subject for theoretical debate, but an ominous reality, he concluded.²⁶

Reston was half-right about this: for it was a transformation not a decline of the West that was underway, and Nixon’s exit was a telling case in point. In his efforts to secure reelection in 1972 Nixon had first ordered and then orchestrated a cover-up of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex of Washington, DC. While the public were more concerned about inflation and the hundreds of Americans dying every week in Vietnam, the president had managed to keep a lid on the scandal that was slowly developing. But the Senate committee established to investigate the attempted cover-up of the burglary was closing in on the president. In October 1973, in a last-ditch effort to avoid special prosecutor Archibald Cox coming into possession of a set of White House tapes (which would surely reveal his guilt) Nixon fired Cox, sparking off a meltdown within his administration.

You will be returning to an environment of major national crisis, Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, warned Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who was overseas.²⁷

That was somewhat underestimating the extent to which the public had by now turned against the president. Nixon’s documentable crime was to have hindered the judicial investigation into links between his reelection committee and the documents stolen from Watergate. His greater crime was to have broken the bonds of political integrity. As state representative and civil rights activist Julian Bond lamented in public: The prisons of Georgia are full of people who stole $5 or $10, and [yet] this man tried to steal the Constitution of the United States.²⁸

With the net drawing in, and amid a near unprecedented wave of public disillusionment and anger at the state of the political class, Nixon was forced to resign.

On the day of his resignation, the formalities over and his last address given to the staff inside, the president ambled across the South Lawn of the White House, past the magnolia tree planted by Andrew Jackson, and toward the waiting presidential helicopter, Marine One. Nixon looked strangely relieved, if worn out: like the battery in his watch, which he later recalled had run out just that morning.²⁹

As he climbed up into the helicopter after Mrs. Nixon, he turned suddenly and, unsure of what to do, for one last time raised his hands in a rendition of his now infamous V for victory sign. Then the helicopter took off into skies that brightened just briefly. Rome had not fallen, but it had been forced to rethink its ways; the rethinking in fact had just begun. For while Watergate was over, and the president was gone, the wider political crisis was still in full flow.

By 1974 America was facing problems ranging from public concerns over its (actually modest) energy dependency on external producers, to international currency instability and ever-more vocal transnational protest movements. These were not all Nixon’s doing, far from it. But the manner of Nixon’s departure had somehow tied them all together. Where was the nation to go from here? Most immediately, Nixon was replaced by his vice president, Gerald Ford: a man who for being twice unelected, first after acceding to the vice-presidency when Spiro Agnew resigned and now to the presidency itself, hardly inspired a great deal of confidence. And as with Pompidou in France, Ford would confront such a deluge of changes during his five years in office that his entire presidency ended up submerged beneath the transformations. The Western democracies had converged around a similar set of achievements since the Second World War; now it was becoming apparent that they also shared a similar set of vulnerabilities. James Reston was not alone in noticing these.³⁰

In the half decade from Charles de Gaulle’s temporary departure by helicopter in 1968 to Richard Nixon’s rather more permanent adieu aboard Marine One in 1974, a change in direction was imparted to the Western democracies: not overtly, but fundamentally. Simply stated it was the felt drama of these years that provided the necessary momentum for one model of political order in the West to be rejected in the course of the 1970s and a new one called up to replace it. We cannot, however, make sense of how—and with what consequences for our own times—governments at the time responded to this cascade of crises until we first grasp the extent to which the upheavals of the early 1970s so dramatically ruptured the postwar political framework.

PART I

Democracy Unbound (1971–)

1

The Unraveling

THE