The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (99 page)

In 1931 Albert Einstein invited Sigmund Freud to join him in establishing ‘an association of intellectuals – men of real stature’ the purpose of which would be to ‘make an energetic effort to enlist religious groups in the fight against war’. Freud replied sceptically, asserting the existence of a perennial human ‘instinct to destroy and kill’ – the antithesis of the ‘erotic’ instinct ‘to conserve and unify’:

These are, as you perceive, the well known opposites, Love and Hate, transformed into theoretical entities; they are, perhaps, another aspect of those eternal polarities, attraction and repulsion, which fall within your province… Each of these instincts is every whit as indispensable as its opposite, and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition… With the least of speculative efforts we are led to conclude that [the destructive] instinct functions in every living being, striving to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter. Indeed, it might well be called the ‘death instinct’ whereas the erotic instincts vouch for the struggle to live on. The death instinct becomes an impulse to destruction when, with the aid of certain organs, it directs its action outward, against external objects. The living being, that is to say, defends its own existence by destroying foreign bodies… The upshot of these observations… is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies… Why do we, you and I and many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life’s odious importunities? For it seems a natural enough thing, biologically sound and practically unavoidable.

Freud had already advanced this argument in his reflections on the First World War, though without the grimly Social Darwinistic conclusion he now offered Einstein. Whatever one makes of Freud’s theories, it is difficult to dismiss altogether this insight into the human condition, since it so perfectly captures that destructive urge that was to annihilate, within little more than a dozen years, the Central European German-Jewish milieu from which both he and Einstein had sprung. For all its unscientific and confessedly speculative character, Freud’s analysis went to the elusive heart of hatred itself, by capturing its essential ambivalence – its combination of
Eros
and
Thanatos
, of the sexual and the morbid. We have by now encountered that combination often enough in these pages, in the eruption of genocidal acts from sexually conjoined communities; in the combination of lust and bloodlust in mass rapes; in the relationship of master (race) and slave (race) as personified by Milan Lukić and Igbala Raferović, the widow of one of his Muslim victims, whom Lukić allegedly kept as a captive sexual partner.

Yet the twin urge to rape and murder remains repressed in a civilized
society. It is only when civilization breaks down or is broken down, as happened in both Bosnia and Rwanda, that the urge is unleashed. And only under certain circumstances does it escalate from pogrom to genocide. To repeat: economic volatility very often provides the trigger for the politicization of ethnic difference. Proximity to a strategic borderland, usually an imperial border, determines the extent to which the violence will metastasize.

Two quite unrelated phenomena, each dating from around 1979, suggest that the era of New World Disorder is now coming to an end. In many ways, the collapse of the Soviet Union late in 1991 and its subsequent aftershocks tended to distract attention from far more profound changes that were happening on the other side of the world. For there, another Communist regime – and another long-established empire – was working out how to have economic reform without making political concessions. How was it that the Chinese Communists were able to achieve reform – and soaring economic growth – without sacrificing their monopoly on power? The simple answer is that when a potentially revolutionary situation developed in 1989, the regime did what Communist regimes had routinely done throughout the Cold War when confronted with internal dissent. It sent in the tanks. On June 4, 1989, the pro-democracy movement was ruthlessly suppressed. Unknown numbers of the students who had gathered in Tiananmen Square were arrested. Leading dissidents were jailed after show trials. What happened in China was in stark contrast to events in Eastern Europe at the same time, where the Soviet leadership were trying to have both economic reconstruction and political reform – but ended up with political revolution and economic collapse. The Chinese wanted and got economic reconstruction
without
political reform. Since 1979 the Chinese economy has grown at an average rate of just under 10 per cent per annum, contributing to a rapid closing of the gap between Western and Asian incomes (see
Figure E.1
). This has been achieved not by right-wing Thatcherites, but by card-carrying Communists. Indeed, the man responsible for China’s economic miracle was the same man who ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square.

When Deng Xiaoping arrived in Washington on January 28, 1979, it was the first time that a leader of Communist China had visited the

Figure E.1
The ratio of European to East Asian per capita GDP, 1960–2004

United States. At seventy-four, Deng was the arch-survivor of the Chinese Revolution. He had accompanied Mao on the Long March and had survived the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, when he had been labelled the ‘Number 2 capitalist-roader’ by the Red Guards. Twice after his rehabilitation, the Gang of Four, led by Mao’s toxic wife Jiang Qing, had tried to get rid of him. But Deng had come out on top. His American trip was prompted by a momentous internal upheaval within the Chinese Communist Party. In December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the 11th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the decision had been taken, at Deng’s instigation, to reorientate China’s economy towards the market. Mao’s Great Leap Forward by means of state-led industrialization had been a Great Leap Backward that had as many as thirty million lives. Deng’s strategy for a real leap forward was to break up communal control of agriculture and encourage the development of Township and Village Enterprises. Within a few years such rural businesses
accounted for nearly a third of total industrial production. The other vital ingredient was a Chinese diaspora that had continued to operate within the capitalist system even as the mainland languished under Mao’s tyranny. From Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur, from Singapore to San Francisco, an experienced and wealthy capitalist elite was ready to be wooed.

The crucial thing about Deng’s US trip was that it ensured that, as China industrialized, its exports would have access to the vast American market. It also ensured that, when Deng created free-trading Special Economic Zones along the Chinese coast, American firms would be first in line to invest directly there, bringing with them vital technological know-how. For their part, American companies saw Chinese liberalization as a perfect opportunity to ‘out-source’ production of goods for American consumers. Some analysts even predicted that the Special Economic Zones would become like American colonies in East Asia, while others thought wishfully that exposure to the free market would be bound to weaken the Communist Party’s aversion to political freedom. What better conclusion to the American century could be imagined? But it did not quite work out that way.

Like other Asian economic miracles, China’s was propelled by trade. Between 1978 and 1988, Chinese exports rose four-fold in dollar terms, and since then they have grown more than ten-fold. The principal destination for Chinese goods was and remains the United States. More than 11 per cent of US imports today come from China, and that number is rising. Though American companies hoped to be beneficiaries of the Chinese export boom by investing in Chinese subsidiaries, barely a tenth of foreign direct investment in China has come from the United States. Instead, the roles have been reversed. As the United States trade deficit has soared to a peak of more than 6 per cent of gross domestic product, it is the Chinese who have been lending to the United States. Meanwhile, more and more American manufacturers are coming under intense pressure from Chinese competition because not only are Chinese wages a fraction of American wages; the Chinese have also restrained the appreciation of their currency against the dollar. And it is no longer just cheap shoes and clothes they are exporting to the US. More than two-fifths of the US–China trade deficit is accounted for by electrical machinery and
power generation equipment. Americans had thought China would become a giant economic subsidiary of the United States, in an approximate re-enactment of the ‘Open Door’ era of the early twentieth century. Instead, they now found themselves facing a new economic rival. Some forecasts suggested that China’s gross domestic product would overtake that of the US as early as 2041. Anxious observers began to wonder if this economic competition could ultimately lead to conflict. There was nervous talk of future trade wars – and not only trade wars.

Thus was the supposed triumph of the West in 1989 revealed to be an illusion. The revolution that Deng had launched with his visit to the United States in 1979 had much further-reaching implications than anything that had happened in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. And Deng’s ruthless suppression of political opposition in 1989 had been a far more important event than Mikhail Gorbachev’s capitulation in the face of it. Yet despite all this, Deng’s was still not the most important of the revolutions of 1979. The Chinese, after all, were embracing at least part of what we think of as Western culture – the free market, albeit a Far Eastern version, planned and overseen by a one-party state. What was happening in the
Near
East involved a complete repudiation of Western values. There, the revolution was not about profits; it was about the Prophet. And whereas the Far East exported products, the Near East exported people.

In 1979, the same year that Margaret Thatcher came to power and Deng Xiaoping went to Washington, the
madrassa
or religious school in the grey city of Qom in Iran was the epicentre of another, very different, revolution – a revolution that would transform the world as profoundly as the globalization of free market economics. The year 1979 had brought a woman to power in England, a woman wholly committed to the idea that salvation lay in the free market. But 1979 also brought the Ayatollah Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini to power in Iran, a man just as committed to the idea that salvation lay in the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. One leader read Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom
, the other the Koran. One revolution pointed to a world based on free trade, the other to a world based on holy writ. There were, of course, many reasons why Iranians rallied to a leader who routinely denounced the United States as ‘the Great Satan’. In 1953 it
had been the CIA (along with MI6) that had overthrown the popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as a dictator. The Shah’s regime was by no means the most vicious the United States bankrolled during the 1960s and 1970s; nevertheless, his combination of private hedonism and public repression sufficed to put a powder keg under the Peacock Throne. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was partly a matter of settling scores against the Shah’s military and secret police. But under Khomeini’s leadership its main goal became to turn back the clock; to purify Iranian society of every trace of Western corruption. At the same time, it aimed to challenge American pretensions not only in the Middle East but throughout the Islamic world.

This was much more than just a revival of Islam. As a religion, Islam is of course far from monolithic. There are deep divisions, not least between the Shi’ites who predominate in Iran (and Iraq) and the Sunnis who predominate in the Arab countries. But ‘Islamism’ was a militantly political movement with an anti-Western political ideology that had the potential to spread throughout the Islamic world, and even beyond it. Ironically, the United States had a hand in its spread. After all, the Soviets found their occupation of Afghanistan so very difficult to sustain because they found themselves fighting a new and highly motivated foe, the mujahidin, armed and trained by the CIA on the old principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. And which regime has done more than any other to spread the teaching of Islamic fundamentalism since 1979? The answer is Saudi Arabia, the United States’ most important ally in the Arab world. For it was not the poor of the Middle East who rushed to join the jihad; often, it was those who had received a Western education.

The greatest of all the strengths of radical Islam, however, is that it has demography on its side. The Western culture against which it has declared holy war cannot possibly match the capacity of traditional Muslim societies when it comes to reproduction. The Islamic revolution ended at a stroke the Westernization of female life in Iran. As dictated by a strict interpretation of shariah law, women were now forced to veil themselves with the
hijab
in all public places. Strict segregation of the sexes was introduced in schools and public transport. Female presenters, actresses and singers were banned from radio
and television. Women were prevented from studying engineering, agriculture and finance. They were systematically purged from all high-level government positions as well as the judiciary. In December 1979 the former minister of education Farrokhru Parsa was executed, having been convicted of promoting prostitution, ‘corrupting the earth’ and ‘warring against God’. Contraception and abortion were banned and the age of consent for marriage lowered to just thirteen. The constitution of the Islamic Republic spelt out unambiguously the proper role of women in the new theocracy: