This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part Two begins early in the twentieth century, as older ways of doing things and habits of thought give way. What follows is an era of cataclysmic struggles over what ideas and institutions will take their place. The course concludes in the present day, as communities everywhere are transitioning into a new era of world history. Again we work hard to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? Again we are drawn to pivotal choices made at key moments by individuals and communities.
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From the course by University of Virginia
The Modern World, Part Two: Global History since 1910
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From the lesson
Decay and Renaissance (1968-1991)
Meet the Instructors
Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Hi, welcome back.
In this presentation, let's look at how bad things were getting in the 1970s.
Take the big picture on this. There are systemic crises in the 1970s.
The social democracy model, big government, big unions, big
companies, it doesn't seem to be working culturally or economically.
Those problems are evident on the surface.
For instance, on this cover
of Time magazine in 1975. Can Capitalism Survive?
Now they have this cartoon of Adam Smith saying, Don't count me out.
But think, that the question is even being posed
in a mainstream American news magazine tells you something.
In 1976, Time is also noticing the rise of communist parties now in Western Europe.
The Communist Party
in Italy is coming very close to being able to take power
in Italy in a free election, which Time regards as a red threat.
But notice that here we are, this is April 1980.
And again, the fundamental question on
people's mind is: Is capitalism even working?
The machine, as you can see, is grinding. Smoke is coming from the gears.
The problems of state socialism actually
are there, but they're not as evident to the outside world.
During the 1970s, it looks like the Soviet Union
and its allies are doing pretty well in international politics.
Also, the higher price of oil tended to favor the Soviet
Union in the short run because they produce a lot of oil.
It gives them some hard currency, they can use that hard currency
to provide more subsidies to their friends to help keep them afloat.
They in turn are borrowing money to import things
they need, more consumer goods to keep their countries happy.
They can pile up debts because the Soviet Union can help them
pay those debts with the money it's earning from its oil production.
So internationally, economically, the �70s it
looks like state socialism may be working.
But there are a couple of big alternatives that are emerging.
One really important
set of ideas in the 1970s is an answer to this question.
Are they all alike?
And in the West, this is the rise of a human rights movement.
It's partly inspired by the progress towards civil rights
in the United States and other countries in the 1960s.
But partly a broader sense that there needs to be something
more involved in world politics than just a balance of power.
It hearkens back
to issues of the early part of the 20th century, a symbol for some of this was
the American president Jimmy Carter, who took office at the beginning of 1977
in the aftermath of the resignation, from
his domestic abuses of power, of Richard Nixon.
Here's Time mocking Carter, a little bit, in August of 1977.
You see him as Daniel in the lions' den, surrounded by these more cynical
lions, like Helmut Schmidt of Germany, and Hua Guofeng in China, Anwar Sadat of
Egypt, and Menachem Begin of Israel, and
Leonid Brezhnev over there in the Soviet Union.
But beneath this bit of satire, there is something serious going on.
Human rights posed as an alternative to
continued superpower confrontation just about military issues.
In this contest of ideas, think about this from the perspective of world history.
Suppose this is an election about a battle of ideas.
Using the American metaphor of looking at the map of the states
and figuring out what the swing states are, or the battleground states,
look at the map of the world in the 1970s and ask
yourself: What are the swing areas that could decide this world election,
choosing among the struggling ideas? My argument to you is that the two real
swing areas, the areas that are in play in the 1970s and early 1980s
are really Western and Central Europe, and China.
The fate of China.
Choices made in those two parts of the world, as
we've seen through a couple of hundred years of world history,
are going to help change the flow.
And, they are pretty important regions to keep
your eye on in the 1970s and early 1980s.
We do have an interesting historical problem in understanding the great
shift in Europe and China in the 1970s and early 1980s.
You can read this, for example, as a tale of two U-turns.
The first one, pretty well known to students of
British politics, in 1972,
that's when the conservative prime minister, Edward Heath,
is going to try to take on the labor unions.
He's going to stop inflation.
In 1972, he throws up his hands, he surrenders.
He has to make a complete U-turn, give into
the unions, increase government spending, and worsen Britain's inflation.
That's one U-turn.
He was bitterly denounced for this by his rival within Britain's
conservative party, a rising young
Politician, seen here, named Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher, famously stated, this lady is not for turning.
Here you see her in 1975 as Edward Heath, her
longtime enemy, looks on with his usual expression of quizzical hostility.
In 1982, there's another U-turn that's kind of a benchmark for this period.
Francois Mitterrand, the leader of the French
Socialist Party, has taken charge of France.
He's a leader of a democratic socialist party.
He's taken charge of a government in partnership with the communists.
Aha, there is going to be a decisive move towards the left in Europe.
But no,
in 1982, Mitterrand, after his '81 election, he'll do a U-turn.
He'll join a new kind of economic and political consensus emerging in Europe.
So those are two U-turns.
Heath giving way and turning to the left,
Mitterrand giving way and turning to the right.
We can look back on this as historians
and somehow see all this as predestined and inevitable.
It seems like, well sure, it was bound to happen.
Socialism was bound to lose out in the battle of ideas.
But I urge you to examine your own assumptions.
Don't just go into this assuming that capitalism is bound
to bounce back from all these troubles of the 1970s.
Why didn't democratic socialism become the
alternative chosen in the key battleground states
of Western Europe or in China?
So, to do that, it's going to be important to
examine the alternatives they were looking at in the 1970s.
Let's look hard at the alternative of democratic socialism,
take it seriously as an option people are
considering in the battle of ideas of the 1970s.
It's already creeping its way into government and the Labour Party
that's ruling England between 1974 and 1979
and in the coalition that will take charge in France in 1981.
But for better or worse, the cause of democratic socialism
became powerfully identified with the cause of the power of unions--
unions like the one that had caused Ted Heath's U-turn in Britain in 1972,
unions like
the National Union of Mineworkers, paralyzing Britain with a
strike to shut down the coal fields when new Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, at the end of 1970s, said she
would take them on and close those fields if necessary.
It was Thatcher versus Scargill, versus the head of the unions.
The public had to decide, which side are you on?
On the side of the striking miners,
or on the side of the conservative Prime Minister?
From the union perspective, they had a lot to argue about.
The Great Inflation was hitting their workers hard.
The unions are pushing hard for wages to keep up with inflation.
But from Thatcher's perspective, the only way to combat the inflation will
be to make some very painful decisions that the unions will reject.
The British public had to take sides.
The majority of the British public
end up taking sides with Thatcher.
Another facet of the democratic socialism was the surge in popularity
of the Communist Party in Italy and the Communist Party in Spain.
Spain had been under the dictatorial rule of the right
wing guy who won the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco.
After Franco finally passed away in 1975, a lot of
people wondered what would happen to Spain.
Would it remain a dictatorship?
But Spain turned toward democracy.
It created a constitutional monarchy.
And in that constitutional monarchy, the
leading democratic faction were democratic socialists.
The general alienation from the political parties of
the powerful -- unions or big business -- also creates
a proliferation of single issue parties
about the environment, about ethnic nationalism.
But a major problem for the left is that a lot of the people in places
like Germany, Italy, France, England are more and
more seeing basic concerns about governability and public order.
They feel like their societies are breaking down, held hostage by unions,
plagued by domestic terrorists,
like the Red Brigades in Italy putting up pamphlets like this one,
strike one to educate 100,
having kidnapped this Italian prime
minister and leading politician, Aldo Moro,
whose body would later turn up on the streets of Rome.
Images like these, from 1979 and 1980, of the
American employees at the U.S. Embassy in Iran held
hostage by the Iranian revolutionaries who would overrun their embassy.
And the reaction to this sense that society
is coming apart is: We need stronger public order.
The Eurocommunists and the democratic socialists have another problem:
They can't quite free themselves from the taint of association
with socialism as defined and exemplified by the Soviet Union.
And as you can tell by the late 1970s, the Soviets are
getting a pretty bad press, the invasion of Afghanistan sure doesn't help.
Hard to look at the Soviet Union and see
anything there that looks like a model for the future.
But for the Eurocommunist parties in France, in
Italy, in Spain, it's so hard for them
to make a clean break from the Soviet
Communist Party. Since the Soviets don't feel any
incentive to reboot socialism back in Moscow,
it just becomes so much harder to reboot democratic
socialism in the communist parties of Western Europe, too.
The result then is that democratic socialism
doesn't become the wave of the future.
People turn, instead, to some different ideas.
We'll look more at those next time.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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