CIVILIZATION

A NEW HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

ROGER OSBORNE

PIMLICO      2007

PART 6

Chapter 18: The Post-War World: From Social Cohesion to Global Marketplace (cont.)

As well as direct military spending, the 1944 GI Bill of Rights gave $13 billion for returning soldiers to enter college, enrol in training programmes or set up in business; while the government eased taxes and most people cashed in their war bonds. There was suddenly an awful lot of money around, and with an industrial sector with huge unfilled capacity, America found itself in a boom economy. The 1950s was a partial repeat of the 1920s. Legislation curtailed workers’ rights, while the revival of consumerism engendered political conservatism. In 1952 Eisenhower immediately signalled the return of big business to politics; Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was a corporate lawyer, his deputy was a former head of Quaker Oats, and the Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson, was formerly head of General Motors, while Edward Bernays reappeared as a government adviser.

In the post-war decades, discoveries and inventions made in the 1920s, 1930s and during the war itself began to be turned into practical innovations that would alter the lives of western people. Antibiotics, television, jet engines, rocket technology, computers, quantum mechanics, nuclear fission, DNA, electronics, materials, metallurgy and plastics were all, in the short and medium term, to feed into a technological revolution of western life. Organizational refinements proved just as influential as technological changes. Mass production of cars began in America in the 1920s, but in the war years and after economies of scale, organizational efficiency and improved distribution networks combined with changing technology to make American industry and American corporations the economic powerhouse of the world.

The advertising techniques first introduced in the 1920s, in which consumers were sold happiness rather than goods, came to the fore. The booming economy made people feel that satisfying their own individual desires contributed to national prosperity. The countries that best learned the lessons of American success were Japan and Germany, the defeated nations of 1945. Faced with the urgent need to start anew, they were able to devise distinctive structures in which (in contrast to the United States) their national governments made a priority of strategically guiding investment in manufacturing industry.

The war gave American industry the chance to build a continent-sized infrastructure that pushed it beyond the reach of competition from the devastated continent of Europe. Just as government war spending revitalized American industry in the early 1940s, so federal-funded road schemes gave a huge boost to the automobile, construction and engineering industries in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1950 the United States had 39% of the world’s GDP, and built 80% of the world’s cars, while the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 committed the federal government to spending $35 billion over 14 years to build a national network of roads. The freeways signalled the end of the domination of rail; after the 1950s goods went by truck and people by car and bus. Car numbers increased vastly, making them ever cheaper to buy, while plentiful gasoline made them absurdly cheap to run. Growing prosperity meant that more homes were being built, but now that everyone (except the poor) had cars there was no need for them to be close to factories or offices or schools or shops. Homes and services spread out along highways. America was, after all, a vast country with enough empty space for everyone to have a decent-sized plot. There was no need for offices or shops to be grouped in one place either, so they began to move out of the old downtown areas and relocate on to highways where they were in easy reach of commuters and shoppers. The geographical size of a city was limited only by the distance a car-driver was willing to travel. The newly expanding cities like Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston became more extensive than anything previously seen on earth, with vast networks of freeways connecting endless suburbs.  American culture was no longer centred on settled towns and cities but on cars, trucks and freeways, and on endless movement.

The development of motorized technology produced an enormous effect that began almost invisibly but over the post-war period, brought on the disappearance of a central aspect of western life dating back 5,000 years. By the 1920s and 30s mechanized tractors, harvesters and other machinery were making small farmsteads in the United States redundant. After 1945 the machines got ever bigger, and so the fields and land holdings got bigger too. By the 1950s large machines were being put to work on the agricultural landscape of western Europe first founded in Neolithic times. Ancient landscape features were routinely destroyed as the need for efficient production over-rode the customary relations of people and land.

At the same time agricultural communities, inheritors and custodians of customs that encouraged and celebrated communal working and living, became irrelevant. As George Evans showed in a series of intimate studies, before mechanization a whole village would turn out for hay-making, or harvesting or stone-picking, but afterwards a single tractor could do the work of 50 men, women and children. Farming became a solitary occupation and the meaning of village life was irrevocably altered.

The biggest break with the past was the abandonment of the strident nationalism that had brought catastrophe to the continent of Europe. Both French and German political leaders recognized the cycle of retribution that had marred their countries’ relations, and set about building indissoluble ties. In April 1951 the European Coal and Steel Community, comprising France, Italy, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, was established and, through the work of French politicians Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, was turned into an economic community covering all areas of trade, formalized in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome. In Britain’s voluntary absence France and Germany formed an enduring partnership, building a vision of European integration.

Nationalism was subsumed in the formation of other international bodies, including the United Nations in 1948, and NATO in 1949. Even before the end of the war, the Bretton Woods agreement of  1944 tied the economic destinies of western countries together under an American umbrella. Harry Dexter-White and John Maynard Keynes devised an international system of finance based on the dollar, whose value was fixed against gold and against all other major currencies. The agreement, which also set up the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and International Trade Organization, was designed to create stability and growth and open up the world to greater trade. In reality it opened up the world to American capitalism.

Apart from multilateral cooperation and defence against communism, the other great international movement of the immediate post-war years was the retreat from empire. Any possible benefits were now outweighed by the unaffordable costs of policing increasingly assertive local populations, many of whom had fought for their imperial masters during the war. In 1947 India was granted independence from Britain, with Pakistan and Ceylon given status as separate states. Britain managed to extricate itself from the ensuing communal violence but was to become entangled in colonial wars in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya and Egypt, while avoiding conflict in most of its other African and Caribbean colonies. In retrospect the biggest failure was in the Middle East, where Britain handed the mandate of Palestine to the UN in 1948, after being unable to resolve the claims of European Jews wanting a new homeland with the rights of the indigenous Palestinian population.

By 1946 French troops were already fighting rebellions in Algeria, Syria, Madagascar and Indo-China. After nine years of guerrilla warfare, the French army was lured into a trap at the remote outpost of Dien Bien Phu, and in 1954 France was forced to surrender North Vietnam to its people. An eight-year war of independence in Algeria came close to bringing down the French government, with independence finally granted in 1962.

The world might have hoped that Europeans would, in the light of the Nazi death camps, be reluctant to use violence for political ends. But torture and brutality were routinely used by the British army against the Mau Mau in Kenya, where detention camps were employed, and by French soldiers against the FLN in Algeria. By the 1970s the remainder of France’s possessions, along with the Dutch, Belgian and, latterly, Portuguese empires, were liberated. Only a handful of small possessions were left from a set of empires that, only 40 years previously, had covered much of the world.

The western powers may have withdrawn from direct political control of the rest of the world but their legacy and influence was felt everywhere. Modern Europeans had no concept of governance beyond the centralized nation state; so as they withdrew from their colonies they created a host of new nations. Some were based on ethnic or religious groupings (India and Pakistan; Ireland); others combined different ethnic or religious groups (Hausa, Ibo, and Yoruba in Nigeria; Kurds, Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq); in many, ethnic groups were divided among different states (Kurds in Iran, Iraq and Turkey); and in some the boundaries between states depended on the colonial powers (west Africa) or on the persuasive skills of local leaders (the division of Kuwait from Iraq). But in all cases the political structures were based on the relatively recent western concept of the nation state. This swept away any vestiges of the customary intricate ways of allowing and restraining authority, and instead handed enormous power to whichever individual or small group could control its centre.

• Intimations of change and of challenge to the consensus of the immediate post-war years came first through cultural expression.
• The catastrophe of the conflict and the genocidal murder of six million Jews left European artists with little to say.
• But in America, in the years from 1947 to 1960 Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller produced a series of plays, including All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, A streetcar Named Desire and Sweet Bird of Youth, that exposed the mismatch between the intricacies of personal and community life on the one hand, and the imperatives of social conformity and economic success on the other.
• When Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, opened in New York in 1942, abstract American painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell were feted in their own land.
• William de Kooning explained that his work, with its slipping planes, visual ambiguities and lack of reference points, was a deliberate analogy of the sense of disorientation of mid-century America and the world.
• The spirit of the outsider who refuses to conform found expression in the work of Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, all of whom stood in frank opposition to the mainstream values of American society; while intimations of rebellion were seen in movies like The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
• The anti-hero was born.
• The most explosive expression of rebellion against mainstream American life came in popular music.

New electric guitars were coupled with the traditional brass instruments of jazz and swing to produce a new kind of sound, while the lyrics became more sexually explicit, wittier and more self-consciously sophisticated. Joe Turner, Muddy Waters, Wynonie Harris, Julia Lee, Fats Domino and Little Richard, among many others, gave their music an extraordinary, unbelievable energy. This was music for adults who wanted a good time, this was rhythm and blues, or jump jive, or ‘race music’. Whatever you called it, it was the most instantly intoxicating, joyous, infectious, delirious sound anyone had ever heard.

• Through Elvis Presley, a white southerner steeped in gospel and race music, black music hit the heart of white America.
• Rock and roll made everything European seem dreary and old-fashioned; from the 1950s on, ‘modern’ meant American.
• American culture had the ability to speak for those who could not speak, and to articulate the life of the inarticulate. It swept the world precisely because it seemed to speak for everyone.
• While much European culture remained tied to traditional forms – novels, poetry and theatre – European cinema began to find a distinctive voice, principally through Italian and French auteur-directors like Rossellini, de Sica, Antonioni, Fellini, Carné, Truffaut and Chabrol, and the Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman.

By the 1960s, citizens of western countries began to shake off their fear of change. The new generation of politicians they elected, such as John Kennedy, Harold Wilson and Willy Brandt, reflected a new optimism; the contrast between the dull but steady Eisenhower and the dynamic, dashing Kennedy, and between the patrician Douglas-Home and the state-educated Wilson could hardly have been greater. Economic recovery in Europe allowed the full spirit of American consumerism to crash into a continent used to thrift and making do.

To be continued

CIVILIZATION

A NEW HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

ROGER OSBORNE

PIMLICO      2007

PART 5

Chapter 18: The Post-War World: From Social Cohesion to Global Marketplace

The mere six decades since the end of the Second World War have barely given people who have lived through them time to acquire a historical perspective. Personal memories, day-to-day routine, the small triumphs and disasters of normal existence, interrupted by family tragedies and celebrations, quarrels and reconciliations, all interfere with a dispassionate view of the overarching themes of post-war history. But this of course is how it has always been. The grand strategies of geopolitics, the floods and ebbs of cultural and political change, the renaissances and reformations have always been played out in the messy, emotional journeys of millions of human lives. Written history has enabled us to give structure to the past, but the times in which we have lived should make us aware how life goes on beneath the horizon of history.

Nevertheless, with the benefit of a little hindsight, we can see certain patterns in the story of the western world since 1945. Most obviously this history comprises two settled phases, with a long period of transition in between. In the first phase, lasting roughly from 1945 to 1965 the countries of the west settled into a consensus built around a strong state directing the economic and social needs of its citizens, a network of national economies tied together through fixed exchange rates and controls on movement of capital and goods, and a military alliance dedicated to the restraint of communism. Western European countries, with their state ownership of public utilities and strategic industries, and their occasional socialist sympathies, seemed radically different from their American partners, but in reality the United States federal government put a massive indirect support into its key industries, while Europe was happy to lock itself into an American-led economic system and military alliance. The institutional politics of this first phase were largely consensual (this was the celebrated, or notorious, ‘post-war consensus’) while the informal opposition was largely limited to radical socialist, Marxist or communist groups.

The second phase began in roughly 1980 (though the key to its beginning happened in 1973, and its shoots began to show as early as the mid-1950s) and has continued to the present. In this phase the inherent value of opening up all aspects of society, and all parts of the world to private enterprise and to open competition and free markets has been taken for granted. The free flow of capital is intended to encourage efficiency by allowing money to go to wherever in the world it will be most effectively used. The western military alliance against communism has been replaced by the concept of ‘coalitions of the willing’, formed for specific purposes, while the size and capability of the United States’ armed services dwarfs all others. Institutional politic revolves around the different ways in which free trade and open markets can be brought into being and managed, while informal opposition, or compensation, tends towards promoting the value of non-tangible assets, such as quality of life, community, environment and religion. The case for open markets is led by the Anglo-Saxon world, in which the ‘Washington model’ has the full backing of the world’s most powerful economy and its military. Other western countries have found it more and more difficult to resist, with those that flourished under the first phase (notably Japan and Germany) suffering from their reluctance to adapt.

The transition period between these two phases was chaotic and bitter and yet was the most politically intoxicating and culturally creative period of the recent past. This might surprise us if we had not already seen how cultural life is galvanized by, and often in opposition to, social change. The western world became clearly defined in the first post-war phase, and in the second it set out to take over the world. But in the process, the meaning of western civilization was thrown into doubt. This is the process I will explore in this chapter.

In 1945 the continent of Europe lay in ruins. Its cities were devastated, its industries destroyed, millions of its people homeless and displaced. The relief that the war was over was tempered by physical and moral devastation. As the full horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe came to light, the victors and vanquished surveyed a scene of unparalleled degradation – here in the heart of Europe, apparently the most civilized place on earth, humanity had reached its lowest point. Nevertheless, the urgent need for action overcame the sense of shock at what had gone before. Starvation, disease, homelessness, and the need for the western allies to plan physical, political and social reconstruction were compounded by the resurgence of communism. Soviet armies had driven the Nazis from their own country, and liberated Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the eastern part of Germany. There were signs that some countries in the west, particularly Italy, France and Greece, might voluntarily become communist as an alternative to the nationalism, depression and war that capitalism had bequeathed.

The key to the recovery of western Europe lay with the United Sates. After the 1914-18 war American armies had been disbanded, and the country had maintained trade barriers against its European allies throughout the 1930s; in 1945 it was possible that America would go back into its shell. But while its relative isolation had, in earlier times, benefited American industry, once it became the world’s dominant economy, the United States could only benefit from greater engagement with the world. There was another point too – if the sacrifice of United States troops was to mean anything (around 300,000 Americans had died, with another 750,000 injured) then the people of western Europe needed protection from takeover by totalitarian regimes, and that meant making western Europe prosperous as quickly as possible. The situation in Japan was similarly in the hands of the United States, where the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced an unconditional surrender and demonstrated the awesome, worldwide power of the American military. While Hiroshima remained a symbol of the human cost of nuclear weapons, the United States showed immense vision in helping its defeated enemy to build a peaceful society.

In 1947 President Truman and his secretary of state George Marshall proposed an aid package of $13 billion to 16 western European countries. A good proportion of the Marshall Plan money was, naturally enough, used to buy American goods, since theirs was the only industrial economy able to fill orders. American goods flooded eastwards and economic ties between western Europe and America became ever stronger. The Marshall Plan was sold to the Republican-dominated Congress as a bulwark against communism, and when Stalin refused the offer of help (and prevented any eastern European countries from accepting it), Europe was formally divided into two. Truman’s support for anti-communist regimes in Greece and Turkey was the beginning of the so-called Truman Doctrine, which divided the world and effectively defined the west as ‘the free world’, with the United States as its leader.

The deterioration in diplomatic relations turned into military confrontation – for 40 years the two blocs, with an ever-increasing armoury on each side, faced each other across the Iron Curtain. The real possibility emerged that humanity might destroy itself when, in 1949, the Soviet Union’s explosion of its first hydrogen bomb led to an arms race based on the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (aptly abbreviated to MAD). The fate of humanity rested on the belief that no leader would start a nuclear war that would destroy his own country. This was an extraordinary time in the history of Europe. Western European citizens were able to travel freely almost anywhere in the world, except to the eastern part of their own continent. The post-war generation in the west grew up assuming that countries like Romania and Poland, and cities such as Prague and Dresden, were for ever beyond their reach, locked away behind impenetrable borders. Visits to the east were restricted and supervised by government agents, and so hardly anyone went.

The anti-communism that had helped the Marshall Plan through Congress began to be an ingrained part of western, and in particular American, life. Fear of the Soviet Union fed increasing paranoia about communist subversion within America itself. In 1947 Republicans in Congress put the House Un-American Committee on a permanent footing, while President Truman, fearful of being outflanked, ordered a ‘loyalty review’ of all three million federal government employees. In 1948 a former member of the State Department, Alger Hiss, was arrested as a Russian spy, and five years later an apparently innocuous New York couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Communist agents were, it seemed, everywhere. In 1950 and 1952 Congress passed bills banning activities that would ‘contribute to the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship’ and blocking entry to the United States to anyone who had ever belonged to a ‘totalitarian group’. Suspicion and the fear of falling under suspicion infected every soul in the country. In 1952 and 1956 Americans elected the reliable conservative Dwight D. Eisenhower to the presidency and, in Hugh Brogan’s memorable phrase, ‘A grey fog of timid conformity settled over American middle-class life.’ In desperately trying to fend off totalitarian communism, the land of the free was allowing itself to be shackled by its own thought police.

In the decades of the Cold War, it became a strategy within American politics to imply that tolerance of diversity, willingness to negotiate, liberalization of social laws, and avoidance of war were somehow non-American. In foreign policy any enemy of communism, no matter how unsavoury, was given American support. The Truman Doctrine allowed America to get involved anywhere in the world, and fatally confused what was good for America with what was good for the world. But the United States was also instrumental in setting up the United Nations and committed itself to supporting and working through multilateral institutions. The balance between exporting American values and working multilaterally became the crucial test of American foreign policy.

Eisenhower managed for the most part to keep the United States out of foreign entanglements – including ending the Korean war in 1953 and coming down hard on the 1956 Suez debacle. But foreign policy was driven by the concerns of American corporations; in 1953 the CIA engineered a coup in Guatemala to preserve the national monopoly of the American-owned United Fruit Company, and when in the same year Dr Mossadegh deposed the autocratic Shah of Iran, the CIA and MI6 intervened to bring him back to power in order to preserve American oil interests.

In 1945 Americans had an understandable fear of slipping back into the economic depression of the pre-war years. But the industrial effort that effectively sealed the outcome of the war also secured a lasting economic boom. In the four years of their participation in the war, the United States produced 3 million aircraft, 87,000 ships, 370,000 artillery pieces, 100,000 tanks and armoured vehicles and 2.4 million trucks. The federal government spent $350 billion on the war – double what all previous governments had spent in total since independence. Between 1939 and 1945 the United States Gross National Product doubled, civilian employment increased by 20%, and corporate profits and wages rose significantly. Certain parts of the country did particularly well – aircraft and electrical production was concentrated in the west, particularly in California, which received 10% of federal wartime spending. A region known for its agriculture and movies became an industrial dynamo.

To be continued.

CIVILIZATION

A NEW HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

ROGER OSBORNE

PIMLICO      2007

PART 4

Chapter 17: The End of Civilization. Depression, Extremism and Genocide in Europe, America and Asia

The willing march into the catastrophe of the 1914-18 war defies any rational rules of historical cause and effect. We can map out the alliances, the teetering balance of power, and the growing sense of arrogance and paranoia; but we are left to wonder how a group of nations who believed themselves to be the most civilized in human history, with a generation of citizens enjoying more political and social rights and better living standards than any in the previous century, could have willingly sent millions of their young men to needless death or maiming. But if the First World War shakes our assumptions of social, political and, above all, moral progress, then the events of the following 30 years were, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer was to write from a Nazi prison, ‘utterly bewildering to anyone nurtured in our traditional ethical systems’.

• The two world wars have come to be seen as a single conflict, in which the unfinished business of 1918 festered and eventually erupted. This happened against a background of utter disillusionment and anger with the established authorities.
• In the 1920s American capitalists were worried that people would stop buying their goods once they had enough things to live comfortably. Consumerism was born. Rather than selling goods to its customers, the advertising industry sold happiness.
• Union membership declined; inequality grew; federal tax cuts favoured the wealthy; and when farm incomes fell by half the government refused to intervene – the free market was allowed to run its course.
• American industry found itself in an extremely favourable situation. The more goods it could sell, the more workers it employed and the more consumers it created; and the lower the wages the higher the company profits.
• Industry kept on producing until there was a massive overcapacity in the economy. In October 1929 Wall Street crashed taking American free-market capitalism with it.
• While the United States was becoming an individualistic society where politics had virtually disappeared, the politics of Europe became dominated by the struggles of ever-weakening liberal democracies in the face of both communism and fascism.
• It was the Bolsheviks who first showed how the heavily centralized nation state, with its monopoly of force and control of communications, was vulnerable to takeover by a relatively small group.
• In St Petersburg in the first few hours of 25 October 1917 Bolshevik forces took control of the railway stations, post and telegraph offices, telephone and electricity networks and the state bank, leaving the existing government stranded inside the Winter Palace – which was then occupied.
• Russia in the early 20^th century, like France 120 years earlier, was an autocratic society isolated in a world of change.
• Russia, later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, became the living embodiment of Marx’s final phase of history – the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had come to pass.
• Like Plato 2,300 years earlier, the task of the Soviet leaders was to bring about the ideal society that must exist.
• The Soviet Union established itself as a modern industrialized nation at exactly the time the west was imploding into economic depression and right- wing extremism.
• While unemployment and fascism stalked the streets and empty factories of the west, the Soviet Union seemed like a workers’ paradise where goods were distributed on the basis of need and services rendered according to ability.
• As a vehicle for people’s desire to do good to others, socialism became, for many people in the west, the repository of hope for the future.

In the 1920s and early 1930s it seemed to many that Soviet society was delivering much of what Marx had promised. State planning enabled food, education, hospitals and industrial goods to be provided in ever-increasing amounts. Newly trained teachers reported rooms full of peasants patiently writing their first sentence over and over: ‘We are not slaves. We are not Slaves.’ Soviet science was led by a generation including Koltsov, Chetverikov and Vavilov, who dedicated themselves to the new cause and placed the Soviet Union at the forefront of world developments in plant-breeding, population genetics, agricultural science and physics. The emergence of Russian artists, musicians, poets and novelists of world stature – Mayakovsky, Gorky, Sholokhov, Shostakovich, Pasternak, Bulgakov and others – reflected the sense of a new beginning for humanity. Nevertheless, as early as 1918, the German communist leader Rosa Luxemburg saw what the future might hold: ‘In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of the labouring masses. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience  direct and rule.

• The hopes of many Russians and western sympathizers lasted through the civil war of the early 1920s and into the 1930s. But by then power was, as Luxemburg had predicted, shared among a small elite.
• From 1928 Stalin used minor fluctuations in grain supplies to argue that wealthy peasants were hoarding grain, and that small family farms were an inefficient way to produce food crops.
• From 1930 onwards the wealthier peasants or Kulaks were deported from their villages, collective farms were introduced, and quotas given for the supply of food from each district.
• By the spring of 1933 millions of peasants in the Ukraine and western Russia – the grain belt of the Soviet Union – were starving to death.
• The famine was so widespread that officials searching for hidden grain automatically suspected anyone who did not look starved. Out of a Ukrainian farm population of 25 million, about 5 million starved to death.
• Using the December 1934 murder of Leningrad party chief Leonid Kirov as a pretext, Stalin had his fellow party leaders arrested, giving him total control over the party and the country.
• Impressed by Hitler’s purge of the Nazi party in June 1934, he set about clearing out any possible resistance.
• These were the years of the Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s term for the network of labour camps.
• The lack of resistance to the so-called Great Terror (in which no fewer than 20 million people were shot or died in labour camps) among ordinary people and senior party officials went far beyond a sense of helplessness.
• In a world where the recent past held no guidance for the future, the politics, culture and very civilization of Europe seemed to many people to be in need of renewal by whoever could seize the moment.
• The new doctrine of fascism sought to answer this need. The fascist takeover of Europe was astonishingly rapid.
• Representative assemblies were dissolved or sidelined in 17 out of 27 European countries before 1939, while another five were negated during the war itself.
• Only Britain and Finland and the neutral states of Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland maintained democratic institutions through the whole of the period from 1918 to 1945.
• In other parts of the world, including Japan in 1930-31 and Turkey in the early 1920s, democracies were brushed aside by military regimes.
• Just as important to the growth of fascism was the sense, among citizens of the defeated nations, of the betrayal of a deeply held vision.
• After the epic nature of the struggle, civilian life seemed petty and disappointing – in Italy more than half of all fascists in the early 1920s were ex-soldiers.
• All of these factors appeared in their most extreme forms in Germany, the most populous, wealthy and potentially powerful nation in Europe.
• Heightened nationalism, Jewish refugees from the east, the number of Bolshevik leaders who were Jewish, the need for an easy scapegoat all conspired to inflame anti-Semitism in Germany – a country with a small Jewish population.
• The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression changed everything. American banks called in their loans and Germany became effectively bankrupt.
• In the early 1930s the atmosphere of danger and violence on the streets and in the bars and meeting halls of Germany increased dramatically.
• The Nazi party had over 100,000 members in paramilitary uniforms – more than the permitted manpower of the German army.
• The 1930s were a good time for many Germans. Hitler’s policy of forcing the unemployed to work building autobahns and other infrastructure had a beneficial effect on the economy.
• In November 1938 the situation of Germany’s Jews, already restricted and denigrated, became much worse. The excuse was the assassination on 7 November of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris.
• While the Jews were the internal enemy, the great external threat was the Soviet Union. Russia was communist, its revolution had been led by Jews, and its people were Slavs, a race that was inferior to the Germanic Aryans. Russia was the perfect place for the German people to expand into.
• The coming war was fuelled, above all, by Hitler’s desire to see a historic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union for the mastery of Europe.
• In the decades since 1918 the internal combustion engine, paved roads, tanks, lorries, aircraft, submarines and radio equipment had all improved beyond recognition, as had methods of manufacturing vehicles, equipment and ammunition.
• The key to the astonishing success of the Blitzkrieg (lightning war) was speed of attack, coordinated through instant communication.
• In three months Hitler had taken over western continental Europe; all he had to do was wait for the British to sue for peace and thereby keep the United States out of the war.
• When no peace treaty was offered, Hitler began, in September 1940, to bomb London.
• The loss of bombers persuaded Hitler that he could not defeat Britain from the air, and he turned his attention to the east.
• To the German army and the German people it seemed that Hitler was a miracle worker. By the end of 1940 most Germans would have believed anything he said, and followed him anywhere.
• We have been brought up with these appalling facts but we do not often register them. War in Europe had become a murderous pursuit in which glory, honour and brutality merged in a lethal combination.
• By preventing Hitler from winning a quick victory, the Soviet Union began to churn out the tanks, aircraft, ammunition and supplies to equip its numerically superior forces.
• At this point we return to the most perplexing and important question of 20^th century western history – how did a civilized country like Germany slide towards not only war, but a genocide of unimaginable scale and cruelty.
• At the war’s end Thomas Mann went on German radio to tell the nation what had been found at Auschwitz.

For centuries white-skinned European Christians had regarded themselves as superior to other races, and entitled to destroy others in the name of their civilization; in the previous 150 years (and before), people of different colours and customs had been routinely subject to torture, mutilation and mass murder for no other reason than their difference; by the early 20^th century it had become routine to regard others (including the uneducated masses) as not only biologically inferior, but as an insidious threat to the health of European civilization – and to support this view with apparently rational pseudo-scientific theories. Slavery, colonization, legalized segregation were all based on the assumption of racial superiority, and a fear of the oppressed, that pre-dated and has outlasted the uncovering of the Holocaust.

• Even Roosevelt could not overcome the ingrained habits of many of his countrymen; segregation by race remained legal in the United States until the 1950s.
• Nor was America unusual – in 1948 Europeans in South Africa introduced apartheid and within a few years of the closing of Auschwitz, signs reading ‘No Blacks or Irish’ were commonplace in British boarding-house windows.
• We maintain the same attachment to the nation state that has a monopoly of violence and gives extraordinary power to a few men; we continue to develop technological instruments that are capable of killing thousands if not millions; we still believe that Nazism was a regression to some kind of tribal bestial behaviour and that human progress will help to prevent its recurrence; and we still regard our civilization as the model that the whole world should follow.

Chapter 18: The Post-War World: From Social Cohesion to Global Marketplace

THE SEARCH FOR A JUST SOCIETY

JOHN HUDDLESTON

GEORGE RONALD                       1989

PART 17

Chapter 27: The Big Picture (Cont)

The spiritual dimension to the progressive movement

These underlying universal themes concerning the existence of God, the nature of man, a spiritual life after death, and the unity of religion are, it is suggested, factors which indicate the fundamentally progressive nature of the Bahá’í Faith. The very idea that the universe is in constant motion like society itself, and the consistent use of organic images rather than the mechanistic images of, say, 18^th century deists, suggests that inaction is contrary to the norm – very different from the medieval Christian picture of a static universe and society with every man obliged to stay in the station to which he was born and to accept life as it is. Belief in God induces a sense of humility and a protection against the hubris which the ancient Greeks so rightly warned about:

I testify at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth…

At the same time such belief develops a sense of responsibility because man is the highest creation of God, and a sense of unity of both the universe and of all men and women, the children of God. There is a clear statement of the purpose of life: to develop the nobler qualities and to help create an ever-advancing civilization. Even the most humble knows that he or she has a unique contribution to make to the building of the just society. Meditation and prayer help us to keep the vision in view. Knowledge of a spiritual life after death helps to give courage and frees us from material barriers to action. No ‘pie in the sky’ escapism here, but rather a freedom from a materialism which inevitably leads to the selfish and short-sighted philosophy of ‘live for today for tomorrow we die’ – a philosophy which is hardly likely to result in a just society. We cannot sit idly by while there is pain and suffering in the world, whether it is caused by nature or by man’s injustice; it is our duty to ameliorate pain and suffering as best we can. And in these struggles we can be united at the deepest level. The quarrel between science and religion is an illusion: a scientist can become a Bahá’í without having to split his mind into two separate and conflicting parts. Similarly there is no real division in religion. A Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist becoming a Bahá’í does not give up love for Jesus, Muhammad or Buddha – on the contrary, the bonds are strengthened by greater understanding.

In proclaiming Himself to be the messenger of God for this age, Bahá’u’lláh made the central theme of His teachings the need for all mankind to unite in order to avoid catastrophe and to continue the advancement of civilization. Until the 19^th century such unity was not possible – or indeed necessary – because the world was divided into regions which had little or no contact with one another. Since then improvements in technology have revolutionized the situation so that all parts of the world are now linked together in a tight all-embracing web of communications. At the same time the major issues facing mankind – such as nuclear war, the environment, the economy, social habits and ethics – have become so extensive in scope that they can no longer be solved by individuals or even nations, but require cooperation at a world level. In the Bahá’í view, man has reached a critical point in history. He has to mature from a period of adolescence when he acquired great physical powers through the development of science, to a time of adulthood when he will learn to use these powers for the benefit of all. This requires a great strengthening of the sense of brotherhood and unity between all the peoples of the earth and the establishment of a world federal system which will put that spirit into effect by building a just society and enforcing universal peace.

Bahá’u’lláh did not confine His teachings to general exhortations or great themes about man’s relationship with the universe and God. They also cover a wide range of practical guidelines for the achievement of world unity. It is recognized that the achievement of a just society will take time, and it is foreseen that there will be two distinct phases to the process. The first will be the ‘Lesser Peace’ when nations will have agreed to abolish war and settle disputes by peaceful means. The second will be the ‘Most Great Peace’ when the majority of the peoples of the world will have accepted His principles and teachings, and there is consequently a willingness to implement a truly just society. All the fundamental forces of history are pushing man in this direction; but there still exists the grave risk that the ‘Lesser Peace’ will not be achieved before mankind has undergone the trauma of another catastrophe, worse than anything ever experienced before, if there is not a major effort to overcome present divisions and address the real issues. Bahá’ís feel a responsibility to make their contribution, within the established system, to the resolution of these issues, as well as to bring about the ‘Most Great Peace’ in the longer term.

The Bahá’í teachings on society can be thus divided into two broad groups. Those that pertain to the lesser Peace include the changing attitudes and the development of man’s nobler and spiritual qualities, and also the evolution of a new model system of government demonstrating that a world system of administration can indeed work. These teachings will be discussed in Chapter 28. Later, in Chapter 29, there will be a brief discussion of the Bahá’í vision of a future world commonwealth and the coming of the ‘Most Great Peace’.

Chapter 28: Preparing for a Just Society

PEACE RESEARCH

THEORY AND PRACTICE

PETER WALLENSTEEN

ROUTLEDGE                      2011

Back cover

This is a book by one of Europe’s leading peace researchers. It spans a distinguished career of theory, empirical research and also practice, thus showing how social scientists can inform policy, and inspire all those who hope to reduce violence in this world.

Professor Bruce Russett, Yale University, USA

Comprising essays by Peter Wallensteen, this book presents an overview of the thematic development of peace research, which has become one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of war and conflict studies.

Peace research began in the 1950s, when centers were formed in the USA and Europe, and today there are research institutes and departments on every continent, with teaching and research programmes in most countries, and peace researchers contribute to the development of international studies, development research and security analysis. Professor Wallensteen has been a witness to much of this since forming the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in the late 1960s, and brings together thirteen of his key articles and five new essays in one volume.

This book presents articles on such key issues in peace research as the causes of war, conflict data, conflict diplomacy, non violent sanctions and third-party diplomacy. In this way, it demonstrates how basic research can be conducted in fields often seen as ‘unresearchable’ and ‘too complicated to deal with’. This volume shows that it is a matter of developing definitions, creating valid measures and finding ways of collecting information, recognizing that innovations of this kind require supportive research environments. Furthermore, the results are useful not only for the growth of research activity itself, but for finding ways of dealing with actual conflicts, thus, attention is also paid here to conflict prevention, peace agreements, sanctions and third-party activity for preventing and ending armed conflict, and building a lasting post-was peace.

This book will be of great interest to all students of peace studies, conflict resolution, war and conflict studies, development studies and international relations/security studies in general.

About the author

Peter Wallensteen holds the Dag Hammarskjöld Chair of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, Sweden, and is the Richard G. Starmann Sr. Professor of Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame, USA. He leads the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and a program on sanctions. He is author of many papers and articles, as well as several books, including Understanding Conflict Resolution (3^rd edn, 2011), a leading textbook.

Preface

This book reflects the journey of one peace researcher by presenting themes and issues of significance in peace research. It reproduces thirteen articles and book chapters, some updated through 2010, as well as five new essays adding context and a contemporary perspective. In short, it attempts to portray a researcher’s intellectual evolution without being a personal story.

This book emphasizes the importance of the work environment – a milieu conducive to advances in scholarly study. Thus, one section of this volume focuses on the creation of the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University and the role of its education and training programs while another section presents the emergence of the Uppsala Conflict data Program (UCDP) – now a world-leading provider of conflict data.

Causes of war and efforts to peaceful conflict resolution are central to peace research – and UCDP – hence, these issues take two sections of this volume.

In addition, a section demonstrates ways in which peace research can relate to international policymaking, for instance through sanctions research (the so-called SPITS project). A final section shows the utility of what might be called applied peace research and direct action by peace researchers in the form of mediation and academic diplomacy.

Research is about not only individual ideas and achievements but also creative cooperation. Peace research at Uppsala University clearly demonstrates this. The department would not be where it stands today without contributions by its faculty and staff: …

PART I: MAKING PEACE RESEARCHABLE

Chapter 1: Making peace researchable by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 2: The Uppsala code of ethics for scientists by Bengt Gustafsson, Lars Rydén, Gunnar Tibell and  Peter Wallensteen

Ethical problems in research

What can we do to stop the armament race and promote peace? In particular, what can we scientists do? The obvious risk of nuclear disaster makes it necessary for any scientists to scrutinize his/her own resources, and to try new unconventional ways to contribute to global disarmament and a reasonable future. One of these resources is the scientist’s own personal appreciation of right and wrong, that is, our ethics. In the following we shall describe an attempt to mobilize this resource in order to affect the choice of research field and application of research.

At Uppsala University a small group of scientists has met regularly since 1981 to penetrate the ethical problems of research. The variety of disciplines represented (natural sciences, medicine, social sciences, technology, law, theology) has greatly contributed to making the meetings fruitful. From an early stage, the seminar has attempted to formulate a code of ethics for scientists. A first proposal for such a code was circulated in late 1982 and, based on the debate that followed, the seminar published a final version of the code in early 1984 (see Box 2.1).

Box 2.1 Code of ethics for scientists

Scientific research is an indispensable activity of great significance to mankind – for our description and understanding of the world, our material conditions, social life, and welfare. Research can contribute to solving the great problems facing humanity, such as the threat of nuclear war, damage to the environment, and the uneven distribution of the earth’s resources. In addition, scientific research is justified and valuable as a pure quest for knowledge, and it should be pursued in a free exchange of methods and findings. Yet research can also, both directly and indirectly, aggravate the problems of mankind.

This code of ethics for scientists has been formulated as a response to a concern about the applications and consequences of scientific research. In particular it appears that the potential hazards deriving from modern technological warfare are so overwhelming that it is doubtful whether it is ethically defensible for scientists to lend any support to weapons development.

The code is intended for the individual scientist; it is primarily he or she who shall assess the consequences of his/her own research. Such an assessment is always difficult to make, and may not infrequently be impossible. Scientists do not as a rule have control over either research results or their application, or even in many cases over the planning of their work. Nevertheless this must not prevent the individual scientist from making a sincere attempt to continually judge the possible consequences of his/her research, to make these judgements known, and to refrain from such research as he/she deems to be unethical.

In this connection the following should particularly be considered:

1. Research shall be so directed that its applications and other consequences do not cause significant ecological damage.
2. Research shall be so directed that its consequences do not render it more difficult for present and future generations to lead a secure existence. Scientific efforts shall therefore not aim at applications or skills for use in war or oppression. Nor shall research be so directed that its consequences conflict with basic human rights as expressed in international agreements on civic, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
3. The scientist has a special responsibility to assess carefully the consequences of his/her research, and to make them public.
4. Scientists who form the judgement that the research which they are conducting or participating in is in conflict with this code, shall discontinue such research, and publicly state the reasons for their judgement. Such judgements shall take into consideration both the probability and the gravity of the negative consequences.

It is of urgent importance that the scientific community support colleagues who find themselves forced to discontinue their research for the reasons given in this code.

N.B. The code consists of both the introductory text and the four points. We shall be grateful if, in any publication, the four points are not separated from the context.

Uppsalal, Sweden (January 1984)

The responsibility of scientists

Individual responsibility

Ecology and war

Negative or positive code?

Duty to inform

Notes

PART II: KNOWING WAR – UNDERSTANDING HISTORY

Chapter 3: War in peace research by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 4: Four models of major power politics: Geopolitik, Realpolitik, Idealpolitik and Kapitalpolitik by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 5: Major powers, confrontation and war, 1816-1976 by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 6: Universalism versus particularism: on the limits of major power order by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 7: Global governance in a new age: the UN between P1, G2, and a new global society by Peter Wallensteen

PART III: TOWARDS CONFLICT RESOLUTION ANALYSIS

Chapter 8: Widening the researchable: conflict, resolution and prevention by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 9: The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 1978-2010: the story, the rationale and the programme by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 10: Conflict prevention: methodology for knowing the unknown by Peter Wallensteen with Frida Möller

Chapter 11: Armed conflict and peace agreements by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 12: Dag Hammarskjöld and the psychology of diplomacy by Peter Wallensteen with Lotta Harbom and Stina Högbladh

PART IV: SANCTIONS AND PEACE RESEARCH

Chapter 13: Sanctions and peace research by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 14: A century of economic sanctions: a field revisited by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 15: Sanctions and peacebuilding: lessons from Africa by Peter Wallensteen

PART V: ACADEMICS IN PEACEMAKING

Chapter 16: Academics in peacemaking by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 17: The strengths and limits of academic diplomacy: the case of Bougainville by Peter Wallensteen

Chapter 18: An experiment in academic diplomacy: the Middle East seminar 1990 by Peter Wallensteen