By 1970 the essentials had been laid for the West’s victory over Soviet Communism. This was not, however, the perception held by the majority of people in the West at the time. The 70s opened with strikes on the increase in Britain, with what seemed like endless government/trades union talks in Downing Street, the biggest economic crisis since the war looming, rising agitation against the Vietnam War in the United States, and student/youth rebellion evident right across the West. Given this context it is not surprising that confidence regarding the outcome of the Cold War seemed, if anything, to be at a low ebb.
Amidst the turbulence generated by the overturning of many of the elements of traditional Western culture, there was a re-discovery and revival of Marxist ideas in Western Europe and the United States. But at the same time (and little noticed, given the rising socialist enthusiasm among students in the West), these same ideas were on the wane in the Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe. In 1968 Dubcek’s experiment with a “freer” form of socialism in Czechoslovakia had been quickly stifled by a combination of Russian diktat and Warsaw Pact tanks. This had provided a clear signal for all who wished to see: the doctrine of “limited sovereignty” for the countries of the Warsaw Pact spelt out clearly that what people on the ground actually wanted was of little consequence in the grand strategy for world revolution which was constantly being updated and re-programmed In Moscow. On the one hand there was, in fact, very little likelihood that now-prosperous Western Europe would turn voluntarily towards the Soviet system. On the other hand it was telling that the Soviets did not seem to recognise the absurdity of a strategy in which the bright promise of the future Communist society was to be imposed by the relentless use of force and the snuffing-out of dissent. Where the truth was recognised by activists in Western Europe and the United States, the failures of the Soviet system were put down to what was viewed as “Stalinist degeneration”, and not to Marxist theory itself.
In the West itself, particularly in Britain and the U.S., there seemed little of substance to celebrate. Defensiveness and a wariness about world developments seemed to be the order of the day. In the U.S. the bloody wars in Indo-China seemed gradually to be moving towards an end, but with nothing like the promised victory over Communism in sight. The traditional character of Western society, with its hierarchies and its God-fearing base (what would now be called social conservatism) was, after a short culture war (approximately 1956-1970), already largely in ruins. “Youth” in the form of students and “activists” had taken over the headlines and were delightedly attempting to turn the universities upside down in the name of pretend-revolutionary ardour. Elsewhere workers, skilfully organised in Trade Unions, were relentlessly using the strike weapon to try to improve their standard of living, the only problem being that the condition of the economy, outmanoeuvred in competition by Continental powers and by Japan, was deteriorating. Nevertheless most strikes were being won by the Unions, in the face of a flattened and dispirited middle class. By the early 1970s it had become difficult to imagine that this was the class which had shown such courage and endeavour in the contribution it had made in the building of modern economies across the world. Now, in Britain itself, it seemed baffled, bemused and immobilised. In the post-war atmosphere, the liberal instinct and the guilt reflex had become so deeply embedded that the members of this world-famous social class seemed to have lost the ability to defend either themselves or the guidelines for life in which they had always believed.
What was actually going on, and why? Yes, there were deep problems developing, not only in Britain but in the world economy, which would culminate in the OPEC oil price rises of 1973 and in the United States abandonment of the post-war Brettonwoods currency arrangements. There was also the important fact that while the Soviet system seemed to have become sclerotic in Europe, revolutionary Left ideas were spreading rapidly in Latin America, Africa, and, of course, in South-East Asia, where all of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were to fall to armed Communist takeovers in the space of a few years in the mid-1970s. The struggle for Communism had now very definitely moved its focus away from its original home territory in Europe towards the hope and plans for “world revolution”. During the next decade and a half many of the “revolutionary” youth of the West would make their pilgrimage to places such as Nicaragua in Latin America, where experiments in a more modern Communism were reputed to be occurring.
In countries such as Britain and the United States the most substantial reason for the climate of pessimism and defensiveness lay deeper, in the disruption to collective life wrought by the campaign (made inevitable by Cold War strategy) against all the elements which had previously provided the glue for social life in the various national cultures of the West. It was not simply a question of the organic change to which all cultures were subject. What had happened in a few short years resembled more the shock to the social order experienced at the time of the religious Reformation of the mid-1500s. In the late 1950s and 60s the opportunities had been taken by the cultural warriors who had seen a vacuum emerging in the mid-1950s, and the old ways had been swept away, including the old deference to form and all the elements of the old Christian underpinning.
What was achieved was truly remarkable. Substituted for the now-defunct reference points of cultural life was the astonishing belief that the individual could make up their ethical framework as they went along, that they needed no roots, no rules, no given responsibilities, no obligations or ties that they did not themselves construct and want, no cultural history and certainly no national belonging, with its patriotic associations and its threats to the pacifist world-view. Instead there were to be only rights, and the requirements that the State was obliged to fulfil. And there was also to be shame and guilt for an imagined past, of which the new cultural pioneers actually knew little, but which existed as a pall over British (and European and American) collective memory, a stain which apology and self-punishment could never fully remove.
In this context there is little surprise that British society in the 1970s seemed nonplussed, torn and demoralised. By 1973 economic crisis of a kind not known through the 25 years of post-war expansion affected much of the West, in some countries more than others. While the rate of inflation rose unprecedentedly, Britain appeared weak and in decline. Books were written by clever observers such as Ralf Dahrendorf, Andrew Gamble, Louis Heren in which the phenomenon of the “British disease” was dissected and analysed and the entirety of British culture subjected to different forms of collective psychoanalysis. Most British people recognised that something was radically wrong, and while there were stirrings in some quarters insisting that action of some kind be taken, there was little in-depth understanding of the way in which the Cold War tactics of prosperity and decolonisation had turned out to have side-effects which affected the entire civilisation of the country.
The new culture focussed on:
1) the equality of all people, a notion which seemed always to be linked to a preoccupation with the historic oppression and disadvantage suffered by many identifiable groups in society. These in turn led to a shared requirement (in which all participated) to “make-up”, to recompense, and to put a stop to the age-old discrimination against the groups which, when including women, added up to a significant proportion of the population. Indeed the only group left, it turned out, which had not suffered historically was that increasingly infamous category: that of the heterosexual, non-disabled young to middle-aged white man.
2) the elimination of patriotism, which went hand in hand with a complete overturning in understanding of the past. Western, particularly British, people were no longer to be told of heroism and achievement in the national story. Instead positive perspectives on the past were to be described as “myths”, or simply undermined (e.g. “The myth of the Blitz”, the “real truth” about Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes, Baden-Powell, etc.) The young were encouraged to be ashamed of a national past which was predominantly a tale of superiority, spoliation, simple theft of resources and, in different ways (including slavery), suppression of other peoples. The aim here was to establish in growing minds a) that the people of Britain had no clear origins, roots, or culture to be proud of and b) that the right way forward was to adopt the internationalist principle that only one thing really mattered: everyone who chose to live in Britain shared, by definition, a common humanity and should be treated the same without any distinction based on background, culture or history. England, or The English, were themselves to be seen as unreal and dubious concepts, based as they were on myths about genetics and muddle over history. Apart from being labels for football or cricket teams, the terms were intended gradually to cease to have any real meaning for everyday life. To concentrate on them was to commit a sin against the new culture insofar as one was excluding all the increasing numbers of people around one who did not see themselves as being English. (Scottish, Welsh, and Irish people, having a history of oppression, fell into a quite different category)
3) the establishing of a secular liberal outlook as the unifying factor in society, while allowing for the private observation of religious faith, as long as this did not conflict with the anti-discrimination goals of the secular order. “Faith-groups” themselves were to have equality of status, with no recognition of any distinctive religious tradition rooted in the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish past.
What provided the new secular culture with its essential “glue”, what gave it coherence, from the late 1950s was the willingness of huge swathes of the British population to fall in with this basically utopian world-view, and simply to ignore reasoned objections. While, for example, equality before God and equality in a court of law can be seen as feasible propositions, the establishment of equality in everyday life can be argued as representing an impossible dream, a state of affairs which has never existed, nor could ever exist in human society. Over the decades this point of view has been little considered. It has, rather, been simply discarded. Also ignored has been the point that while equality has never existed, many millions of people have been killed when groups and nations have sought unsuccessfully to impose it. Many factors made for this dive into utopianism, but what stands out is the need, felt by those who have sought to build an entirely secular order, for a clear system of ideas which would replace the Christian world-view and its attendant beliefs.
In 1970 there took place the Stop the ’70 Tour agitation, (which included putting playing fields out of action) intended to prevent sporting contacts with South Africa and to highlight the social system of apartheid which provided for official race classification and which specified that the different races should live in different “group” areas. While this system had been been promulgated into law in the years following the victory of the (primarily Afrikaans-speaking) National Party in the elections of 1948, it was true to say that most cities and towns in the country had grown over previous centuries on the principle that the cultures of the peoples who inhabited South Africa were very different from each other and that the races for the most part lived separate lives. This was so despite the fact that people of all backgrounds usually met up with each other on a daily basis in the workplace and in the street. This principle embraced also the belief that the South Africa of modern times, while incorporating the large-scale use of African labour, was a concept and design of the white racial group (English and Afrikaans-speaking) and that the electoral franchise would be strictly limited. While there had been longstanding arguments as to where this limit should be set, with old concepts of educational and other qualifications coming into play, few people of European origin doubted that the white peoples of the South Africa, despite being a significant minority in terms of numbers, represented the most advanced (at least in the technical sense) of the various cultures and should be the clearly predominant force in determining the central government of the country.
Why all of this was important was that the issues raised by the situation in South Africa connected closely with the ideas at the heart of the cultural transformation in Britain and the West at the time. The developing situation in South Africa was to be a running sore in European life throughout the 1970s and early 80s and became a symbol for Western perspectives on the world situation of the time. The need for economic and electoral equality for all races and peoples appeared so obvious to the young people of the West that any kind of disagreement with the now dominant outlook seemed incomprehensible. The resistance, over a considerable period, to the new cultural imperative of the equality of all was seen and portrayed as no more than a clinging to outdated and semi-fascist notions of race superiority. This applied both to the majority of Europeans in South Africa and to the significant numbers, particularly of the older generation in Britain itself, who were unwilling to “move with the times” and accustom themselves to the new and triumphant liberal world-view.
It was easy for those growing up in Britain, who had no direct knowledge of the complex historical web of quite different cultures in South Africa to see the stance taken by what were millions of people of European background living in that country, many of whom had been there for centuries, as being simply malign in the extreme. What worsened the situation and reinforced the utopianism at the heart of the newly hegemonic culture of the West was the picture, built and projected by teachers and activists, of a society based on interracial harmony free of the master-servant attitudes brought to Africa by the European colonists. This was to be the future which would be constructed once the backward and vicious attitudes of the white people of Africa had been swept away. In this new order inequality would begin to fall away as the indigenous people, less afflicted by hierarchic and capitalistic attitudes to life,, gradually exerted their sway over the country. To young minds in Britain, robbed by now of admiration for their own cultural inheritance and, by definition, of their morale, all of this proved to be meat and drink and served only to reinforce and amplify the shame they felt over their own country and its past.
The message from South Africa was clear. By the late 1980s, under extreme international pressure, the mood in the country had changed sufficiently to allow for the release from his 27-year imprisonment in 1990 of the African nationalist leader Nelson Mandela. In his person he seemed to embody all the ideas that the youth of Britain had ingested over the previous three decades. Mandela’s generous-spirited and gentle personality seemed to offer a blueprint not only for South Africa, but for the over-sophisticated societies of the West. Rightness and happiness belonged with those countries which could work on the principle of the equality of all in all areas of life. This would, quite properly, require rigorous anti-discrimination policies to deal with those who failed to comply, for those who had failed to keep up with the change in the country’s belief-system, for those who had been, for whatever reason, “left-behind”. With the spread of progressive ideas, the psychological adherence to the nation-state would gradually fall away in importance in the minds of the young, thus opening the way to a world-view based on the loosening of borders between countries and the freer flow of peoples of all continents. With the realisation of these ideas and the wholesale transformation of outlook which would occur, some correction would at least be achieved for the (unforgivable) cruelty and inhumanity of European colonisation over the previous five hundred years. South Africa and its malign social order of separation and hierarchy would therefore have served as a launch pad for the thoroughly transformative ideas which would become the inheritance for the new generations of Western youth.
It was into this social atmosphere that Margaret Thatcher was to sweep to power in 1979. Her preoccupations were completely out of kilter with those of the new cultural revolution. The Conservative Party that she led had, over the previous thirty years, come to see its role as that of managing the economy and the welfare state, and, increasingly, of dismantling British influence abroad and managing Britain’s decline. The clearest feature of the Thatcher phenomenon of the 1980s was that she was determined to put a stop to what she saw as the defeatism and miserabilism afflicting the country. What was to be the outcome of the collision of political and social forces (which included both rebellious youth and the buoyant Trade Union movement) that was bound to come to a head with the 1979 victory obtained at the polls by Mrs Thatcher?
Junius 2 