Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (93 page)

It was the middle classes, too, who were most disturbed by the issue of ‘ungovernability’. The fear, widely expressed in the course of the 1970s, that Europe’s democracies had lost control of their fate derived from a number of sources. In the first place there was a backlog of nervousness provoked by the iconoclastic rebellions of the 1960s; what had seemed curious and even exciting in the confident atmosphere of those days now looked more and more like a harbinger of uncertainty and anarchy. Then there was the more immediate anxiety born of job losses and inflation, about which governments seemed helpless to act.

Indeed, the very fact that European leaders appeared to have lost control was itself a source of public angst—all the more so in that politicians, as we have seen, found some advantage in insisting upon their own inadequacy. Denis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the hapless Labour government of the mid-Seventies, bemoaned the billions of Eurodollars washing around the continent, the work of ‘the faceless men who managed the growing atomic clouds of footloose funds, which had accumulated in the Euro-markets to evade control by national governments’.
¹⁹⁷
Ironically, Healey’s own party had been elected in 1974 because of the Conservatives’ apparent inability to allay public discontent—only to find itself accused of comparable impotence, and worse, in the coming years.

In Britain there was even passing talk of the inadequacy of democratic institutionsin the face of modern crises, and some speculation in the press about the benefits of government by disinterested outsiders, or ‘corporatist’ coalitions of ‘nonpolitical’ experts. Like De Gaulle (in May 1968), some senior British political figures in these years thought it prudent to meet with police and military leaders to reassure themselves of their support in the event of public disorder. Even in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, where the core legitimacy of representative institutions was never seriously called into question, the disarray of the world financial system, the apparent unraveling of the post-war economy and the disaffection of traditional electorates called into question the easy confidence of the post-war generation.

Behind these nebulous stirrings of doubt and disillusion there was a very real and, as it seemed at the time, present threat. Since the end of the Second World War, Western Europe had been largely preserved from civil conflict, much less open violence. Armed force had been deployed to bloody effect all across Eastern Europe, in the European colonies, and throughout Asia, Africa and South America. The Cold War notwithstanding, heated and murderous struggles were a feature of the post-war decades, with millions of soldiers and civilians killed from Korea to the Congo. The United States itself had been the site of three political assassinations and more than one bloody riot. But Western Europe had been an island of civil peace.

When European policemen did beat or shoot civilians, the latter were usually foreigners, often dark-skinned.
¹⁹⁸
Aside from occasional violent encounters with Communist demonstrators, the forces of order in Western Europe were rarely called upon by their governments to handle violent opposition and, when they were, the violence was often of their own perpetrating. By the standards of the interwar decades, Europe’s city streets were quite remarkably safe—a point that was frequently underscored by commentators contrasting Europe’s well-regulated society with the rampant and uncaring individualism of urban America. As for the student ‘riots’ of the Sixties, they served, if anything, to confirm this diagnosis: Europe’s youth might play at revolution but it was mostly show. The ‘street-fighting men’ ran little risk of actually getting hurt.

In the 1970s, the prospect suddenly darkened. Just as eastern Europe, in the wake of the invasion of Prague, was stifled in the fraternal embrace of the Party patriarchs, western Europe appeared to be losing its grip on public order. The challenge did not come from the conventional Left. To be sure, Moscow was well pleased with the balance of international advantage in these years: Watergate and the fall of Saigon had decidedly reduced America’s standing while the USSR, as the world’s largest petroleum producer, did very well out of the Middle East crises. But the publication in English of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago
and his subsequent expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1974, followed within a few years by the massacres in Cambodia and the plight of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’, ensured that there would be no revival of illusions about Communism.

Nor, except in a very few marginal instances, was there a credible revival of the far Right. Italy’s neo-Fascist
Movimento Sociale Italiano
(MSI) never received more than 6.8 percent of the vote in national elections and in any case took care to present itself as a legitimate political party. The nationalists in West Germany were less concerned with such niceties of appearance, but like comparable parties of the nationalist fringe in Belgium, France or Britain, they had negligible electoral significance. In short, Communism and Fascism, in their classic incarnations, had no future in Western Europe. The real threat to civic peace came from another direction altogether.

In the course of the 1970s, Western European society faced two violent challenges. The first of these was pathological, in the sense that it was born of a longstanding malaise, albeit cast in a very modern form. In the Basque region of northern Spain, in the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland, in Corsica and elsewhere, old grievances flared into violent revolt. This was hardly a new experience for Europeans: Flemish nationalists in Belgian Flanders and German-speaking ‘Austrians’ in Italy’s Alto Adige (the former South Tyrol) had long resented their ‘subjection’, resorting variously to graffiti, demonstrations, assault, bombs and even the ballot box.

But by 1970 the problem of the South Tyrol had been resolved by the creation of an autonomous bi-lingual region which appeased all but the most extreme critics; and although the Flemish nationalists of the
Volksunie
and
Vlaams Blok
parties never abandoned their ultimate goal of separation from French-speaking Wallonia, the new prosperity of Flanders, together with far-reaching legislation to federalize Belgium, had temporarily removed the sting from their demands: from a resentful pariah movement Flemish nationalism had been transformed into a revolt of Dutch-speaking taxpayers reluctant to subsidize unemployed Walloon steelworkers (see Chapter 22). The Basques and the Ulster Catholics, however, were another matter altogether.

The Basque country of northern Spain had always been a particular target of Franco’s ire: partly because of its identification with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, partly because the Basques’ longstanding demand to be recognized as
different
ran counter to the deepest centralizing instincts and self-ascribed, state-preserving role of the Spanish officer corps. Anything and everything distinctively
Basque
was aggressively repressed throughout the Franco years: language, customs, politics. Contradicting his own centripetal instincts, the Spanish dictator even favored Navarre (a region whose sense of self and separateness never remotely approached that of the Basques or Catalans) with rights, privileges and its own legislature, for no other reason than to rub in the fact that the neighboring Basques could expect no such favors.

The emergence of modern Basque terrorism was a direct response to Franco’s policies, though its spokesmen and defenders always claimed deeper roots in their region’s frustrated dreams of independence. ETA—
Euskadi Ta Askatasuna
(Basquia and Freedom)—was formed in December 1958 to lead the armed struggle for Basque independence. From its earliest days as an underground organization it established working links—later given somewhat specious ideological justification—with similar groups abroad, who helped it secure money, weapons, training, safe havens and publicity: the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, as well as the OAS in France.

The strategy of ETA—and its political supporters in
Herri Batasuna
, the Basque separatist party formed in 1978—was a straightforward one of instrumental violence: to raise the price of keeping Basques in Spain to a politically intolerable level. But like the IRA and other comparable organizations, ETA also had ambitions to function as a society within the state. Catholic, stern and moralistic—in a manner ironically redolent of Franco himself—ETA activists targeted not just Spanish policemen (their first victim was killed in June 1968) and moderate Basque politicians and notables, but also symbols of ‘Spanish’ decadence in the region: cinemas, bars, discothèques, drug pushers and the like.

In the waning years of the Franco era, ETA’s activities were restricted by the very repression that had led to its emergence: by the end of the dictatorship, in the early 1970s, one quarter of Spain’s armed police were stationed in the Basque country alone. This did not prevent ETA from assassinating Franco’s Prime Minister (Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco) in Madrid on December 20th 1973, or killing twelve civilians in a bomb attack in the capital nine months later. Nor did the execution of five ETA gunmen in September 1975, shortly before Franco’s death, have any moderating impact upon the group’s activities. The coming of democracy, on the other hand, offered new opportunities.

ETA and its supporters wanted full independence. What the Basque region got, under Spain’s post-Franco constitution (see Chapter 16), was a Statute of Autonomy, approved by referendum in 1979. Infuriated—not least at the prospect of losing the support of moderate sympathizers satisfied by self-government and the right to linguistic and cultural self-expression—ETA stepped up its campaigns of bombing and assassination. In 1979-80 the organization killed 181 people; in the course of the next decade its murder rate averaged 34 a year. But in spite of this, and the fragility of Spain’s infant democracy, ETA and its political allies failed to turn their terrorist campaign to political advantage: their one success, in provoking a small group of right-wing army officers to hold up the Cortes in February 1981 in the name of law, order and the integrity of the state, turned to fiasco.

One reason for ETA’s limited impact, despite the horrific scale and wide public impact of its killing sprees, was that most Basques identified neither with its means nor with its ends. Indeed, many Basques were not really even Basques. The economic transformations of Spain in the 1960s, and the large-scale migrations within the country and abroad, had wrought changes that the old nationalists and their fanatical young followers simply did not grasp. By the mid-eighties, less than half the population of the Basque region had Basque parents, much less Basque grandparents. Such people rightly saw ETA and
Herri Batasuna
as a threat to their well-being (and implicitly to their very presence in the region).

As its political project lost touch with social reality ETA became ever more extreme—having forgotten its aim it redoubled its efforts, to cite George Santayana’s definition of fanaticism. Financed by crime and extortion, its operatives increasingly constrained to function from across the border in the Basque
départements
of south-west France, ETA survived and it survives still, murdering the occasional politician or village policeman. But it has failed either to mobilize Basque sentiment in support of political independence, or to bludgeon the Spanish state into conceding its case. ETA’s greatest ‘success’ came early in the 1980s, when its actions prompted the Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González to allow counter-terrorist hit men (the
Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación
) to base themselves illegally on French soil and pick off ETA operatives, twenty-six of whom were killed between 1983 and 1987. González’s decision, only revealed many years later (see Chapter 22), has cast a retrospective shadow across the early post-Franco years of constitutional democracy in Spain; but in the circumstances it was arguably a remarkably moderate response.

The Provisional IRA was much like ETA in its methods, and in some of its proclaimed objectives. Just as ETA sought to make the Basque provinces ungovernable and thereby secure their exit from Spain, so the Irish Republican Army aimed at making Northern Ireland ungovernable, expelling the British, and uniting the six northern provinces with the rest of Ireland. But there were significant differences. Since an independent Ireland already existed, there was—at least in principle—a practicable national goal for the rebels to hold out to their supporters. On the other hand, there was more than one Northern Irish community, and the distinctions between them went back a very long way.

Like French Algeria, Northern Ireland—Ulster—was both a colonial remnant and an integral part of the metropolitan nation itself. When London finally relinquished Ireland to the Irish, in 1922, the UK retained the six northern counties of the island on the reasonable enough grounds that the overwhelmingly Protestant majority there was intensely loyal to Britain and had no desire to be governed from Dublin—and incorporated into a semi-theocratic republic dominated by the Catholic episcopate. Whatever they said in public, the political leaders of the new Republic were themselves not altogether unhappy to forgo the presence of a compact and sizeable community of angrily recalcitrant Protestants. But for a minority of Irish nationalists this abandonment constituted a betrayal, and under the banner of the IRA they continued to demand the unification—by force if need be—of the entire island.

This situation remained largely unchanged for four decades. By the 1960s the official stance in Dublin somewhat resembled that of Bonn: acknowledging the desirability of national re-unification but quietly content to see the matter postponed
sine die
. Successive British governments, meanwhile, had long chosen to ignore so far as possible the uneasy situation they had inherited in Ulster, where the Protestant majority dominated local Catholics through gerrymandered constituencies, political clientelism, sectarian pressure on employers, and a monopoly of jobs in crucial occupations: civil service, judiciary and above all the police.