The New Penguin History of the World (211 page)

There followed a remarkable mobilization of world opinion against Iraq in the UN. Hussein sought to play both the Islamic and the Arab cards by confusing the pursuit of his own predatory ambitions with Arab hatred for Israel. Demonstrations of support for him in the streets of Middle Eastern cities proved of very low value. Only the PLO and Jordan spoke up for him officially. No doubt to his shocked surprise, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt actually became partners in the improbable alliance that rapidly formed against him. Almost equally surprising to him must have been the acquiescence of the USSR in what followed. Most startlingly of all, the United Nations Security Council produced (with overwhelming majorities) a series of resolutions condemning Iraq’s actions and, finally, authorizing the use of force against her to ensure the liberation of Kuwait.

Huge forces were assembled in Saudi Arabia under American command. On 16 January 1991 they went into action. Within a month Iraq gave in and withdrew, after suffering considerable loss (allied casualties were insignificant). Yet this humiliation did not obviously threaten Hussein’s survival. Once again, the turning point in the Middle East that so many had longed for had not arrived; the war disappointed both Arab revolutionaries and western would-be peacemakers. The greatest losers were the PLO, and Israel was the greatest gainer; Arab military success at her expense was inconceivable for the near future. Yet at the end of yet another war of the Ottoman succession, the Israel problem was still there. Syria and Iran had already before the Kuwait crisis begun to show signs that, for their own reasons, they intended to make attempts to get a negotiated settlement, but whether one would emerge was another matter, even if, for the United States, it was clearly more of a priority than ever to get one.

Perhaps it was an advance that the alarming spectre of a radical and fundamentalist pan-Islamic movement had been for a time dissipated. For practical purposes, Arab unity had again proved a mirage. For all the distress, unrest and discontent with which many Muslims faced the West, there was virtually no sign that their resentments could yet be coordinated in an effective response, and less than ever that they would do without the subtly corrosive means of modernization that the West offered. Almost incidentally, too, crisis in the Gulf appeared to reveal that the oil weapon had lost much of its power to damage the developed world, for, though one had been feared, there was no new oil crisis. Against this background, in 1991 American diplomacy at last persuaded Arabs and Israelis again to take part in a conference on the Middle East.

DÉTENTE

Great transformations had meanwhile taken place elsewhere and they also bore upon events in the Middle East. Yet they did so only because they shaped what the USA and USSR did there. In 1979–80 the American presidential election campaign had deliberately been used to exploit the public’s fears of the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, this reawoke animosity at the official level; the conservative leaders of the Soviet Union showed renewed suspicion of the trend of United States policy. It seemed likely that promising steps towards disarmament might be swept aside – or even worse. In the event, the American administration came to show a new pragmatism in foreign affairs, while, on the Soviet side, internal change was to open the way to greater flexibility.

One landmark was the death in November 1982, of Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor and for eighteen years general secretary of the Party. His immediate replacement (the head of the KGB) soon died and a septuagenarian, whose own death followed even more quickly, succeeded him before there came to the office of general secretary in 1985 the youngest member of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev: he was fifty-four. Virtually the whole of his political experience had been of the post-Stalin era. His impact upon his country’s, and the world’s, history was to be remarkable.

The conjunction of forces that propelled Gorbachev to the succession remains unclear. The KGB, presumably, did not oppose his promotion, and his first acts and speeches were orthodox (although he had already, in the previous year, made an impression on the British prime minister as someone with whom business could be done). He soon articulated a new political tone. The word ‘communism’ was heard less in his speeches and ‘socialism’ was reinterpreted to exclude egalitarianism (though from time to time he reminded his colleagues that he
was
a communist). For want of a better term, his aim was seen by many foreigners as liberalization, which was an inadequate western attempt to sum up two Russian words he used a great deal:
glasnost
(openness) and
perestroika
(restructuring). The implications of the new course were to be profound and dramatic, and for the remainder of the decade Gorbachev grappled with them.

What actually happened cannot have been in his mind when he started out. No doubt he saw that without radical change the Soviet economy could not provide the USSR with its former military might, sustain its commitments to its allies, improve (however slowly and modestly) living standards at home and assure continuing self-generated technological advance. Accordingly, Gorbachev seemed to seek to avoid the collapse of
communism by opening it to his own vision of Leninism, above all by making it a more pluralist system, and by involving the intelligentsia in the political nation. The possible implication of such a change of course seems to have been concealed even from himself. Essentially it was an admission that the seventy years’ experiment in arriving at modernization through socialism had failed. Neither freedom nor material well-being had been forthcoming. And now the costs were becoming too heavy to bear.

Ronald Reagan was soon drawing dividends on Gorbachev’s assumption of office. That Soviet policy was reflecting a new tone soon became clear in their meetings. Discussion of arms reduction was renewed. Agreements were reached on other issues (and this was made easier in due course by the decision of the Soviet leadership in 1989 to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan). In America’s domestic politics, a huge and still growing budgetary deficit and a flagging economy, which would under most presidents have produced political uproar, were for years virtually lost to sight in the euphoria produced by a seeming transformation of the international scene. The alarm and fear with which the ‘evil empire’ (as Reagan had termed it) of the Soviet Union was regarded by many Americans began to evaporate a little.

Optimism and confidence grew as the USSR showed signs of growing division and difficulty in reforming its affairs, while Americans were promised wonders by their government in the shape of new defensive measures in space. Though thousands of scientists said the project was unrealistic, the Soviet government could not face the costs of competing with that. Americans were heartened, too, in 1986 when American bombers were launched from England on a punitive mission against Libya, whose unbalanced ruler had been supporting anti-American terrorists (significantly, the Soviet Union expressed less concern about this than did many west Europeans). President Reagan was less successful, though, in convincing many of his countrymen that more enthusiastic assertions of American interests in Central America were truly to their advantage. But he remained remarkably popular; only after he had left office did it begin to dawn that the decade had been one in which the gap between rich and poor in the USA had widened even further.

In 1987, the fruits of negotiation on arms control were gathered in an agreement over intermediate-range nuclear missiles. In spite of so many shocks and its erosion by the emergence of new foci of power, the nuclear balance had held long enough for the first stand-downs by the superpowers. They, at least, if not other countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, appeared to have recognized that nuclear war, if it came, held out the
prospect of virtual extinction for mankind, and were beginning to do something about it. In 1991 there were to be further dramatic developments as the USA and USSR agreed to major reductions in existing weapons stocks.

A DISSOLVING SCENE

This huge change in international relations cannot be disentangled from its many consequences for other nations. They have to be artificially separated to be narrated, but one could not have occurred without the other. At the end of 1980 there was little reason to believe that the peoples of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were about to see changes unmatched since the 1940s. What was already clear was that the European communist countries were finding it harder and harder to keep up even the modest growth rates they had attained. Comparison with the market economies of the non-communist world had become more and more unfavourable to them, although this did not appear to suggest any challenge to the verdicts of 1953, 1956 and 1968, or to Soviet power in eastern Europe. The carapace provided by the Warsaw Pact seemed still to be capable of containing the social and political change crystallized over thirty years (and more, if one counts the great unwilled changes of the Second World War and its aftermath).

At first sight, communist Europe had a striking uniformity. In each country the Party was supreme; careerists built their lives around it as, in earlier centuries, men on the make clustered about courts and patrons, or the Church. In each (and above all in the USSR itself) there was also an unspeakable and unexaminable past, which could not be mourned or deplored, whose weight hung over intellectual life and political discussion – so far as there was any – corrupting them. In the east European economies, investment in heavy industrial and capital goods had produced a surge of early growth (more vigorous in some than in others) and then an international system of trading arrangements with other communist countries, dominated by the USSR and rigidified by aspirations to central planning. It had also given rise to appalling environmental and public health problems, hidden as matters of state security. Increasingly and obviously, a growing thirst for consumer goods could not be met; commodities taken for granted in western Europe remained luxuries in the east European countries, cut off as they were from the advantages of international economic specialization. On the land, private ownership had been much reduced by the middle of the 1950s, usually to be replaced by a mixture of cooperatives
and state farms, although within this broadly uniform picture different patterns had later emerged. In Poland, for instance, something like four-fifths of Polish farmland was eventually to return to private exploitation even under communist government. Output remained low, however; most east European countries could achieve agricultural yields only half to three-quarters those of the European Community. By the 1980s all of them, in varying degree, were economic invalids, with the possible exception only of the GDR. Even there, per capita GDP stood at only $9300 a year in 1988, against $19,500 in the Federal Republic. Other problems, too, were arising. Investment in infrastructure was falling and so was their share of world trade. Debts in hard currency were piling up. In Poland alone, real wages fell by a fifth in the 1980s.

What had come to be called the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ (after a speech that functionary had made in Warsaw in 1968) said that developments within eastern bloc countries might require – as in Czechoslovakia that year – direct Soviet intervention to safeguard the interests of the USSR and its allies against any attempts to turn socialist economies back towards capitalism. Yet Brezhnev had also been interested in pursuing
détente
and his doctrine reflected realism about possible dangers to international stability by breakaway developments in communist Europe. Such dangers could be limited by drawing clearer lines. Since then, internal change in western Europe, steadily growing more prosperous, and with memories of the late 1940s and the seeming possibility of subversion far behind them, had removed some grounds for East–West tension. By 1980, after revolutionary changes in Spain and Portugal, not a dictatorship survived west of the Trieste–Stettin line and democracy was everywhere triumphant. For thirty years, the only risings by industrial workers against their political masters had been in East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia – all communist countries.

After 1970, and even more after the Helsinki agreement of 1975, as awareness of contrasts with western Europe grew in the eastern bloc, dissident groups emerged, survived and even strengthened their positions in spite of severe repression. Gradually, too, a few officials or economic specialists, and even some Party members, began to show signs of scepticism about the efficiency of detailed centralized planning and there was increasing discussion of the advantages of utilizing market mechanisms. The key to fundamental change, nevertheless, lay elsewhere. There was no reason to believe that it was possible in any of the Warsaw Pact countries if the Brezhnev doctrine held, and had the Soviet army standing behind it.

The first clear sign that this might not always be so came in the early 1980s, in Poland. The Polish nation had retained, to a remarkable degree,
a collective integrity by following its priests and not its rulers. The Roman Catholic Church had an enduring hold on the affections and minds of most Poles as the embodiment of the nation, and was often to speak for them – all the more convincingly once a Polish pope had been enthroned. It did so on behalf of workers who protested in the 1970s against economic policy, condemning their ill treatment. This, together with the worsening of economic conditions, was the background to 1980, a year of crisis for Poland. A series of strikes then came to a head in an epic struggle in the Gdansk shipyard. From them emerged a new and spontaneously organized federation of trades unions, Solidarity. It added political demands to the economic goals of the strikers; among them, one for free and independent trades unions. Solidarity’s leader was a remarkable, often-imprisoned, electrical union leader, Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic, closely in touch with the Polish hierarchy. The shipyard gates were decorated with a picture of the Pope and open-air masses were held by the strikers.