Empire of Democracy

The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War

Simon Reid-Henry

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781451684988
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first panoramic history of the Western world from the 1970s to the present day—from the Cold War to the 2008 financial crisis and wars in the Middle East— Empire of Democracy is " a superbly informed and riveting historical analysis of our contemporary era" (Charles S. Maier, Harvard University). Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War and amidst a world economic crisis, the Western democracies were forced to undergo a profound transformation. Against what some saw as a full-scale "crisis of democracy"—with race riots, anti-Vietnam marches and a wave of worker discontent sowing crisis from one nation to the next—a new political-economic order was devised and the postwar social contract was torn up and written anew.In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our own times, Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and western history with it, was profoundly reimagined when the postwar Golden Age ended. As the institutions of liberal rule were reinvented, a new generation of politicians emerged: Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, Kohl. The late twentieth century heyday they oversaw carried the Western democracies triumphantly to victory in the Cold War and into the economic boom of the 1990s. But equally it led them into the fiasco of Iraq, to the high drama of the financial crisis in 2007/8, and ultimately to the anti-liberal surge of our own times.The present crisis of liberalism is leading us toward as yet unscripted decades. The era we have all been living through is closing out, and democracy is turning on its axis once again. "Brilliantly, Reid-Henry calls for the salvation of democracy from the choices of its own leaders if it is to survive" (Samuel Moyn, Yale University).

PART I Democracy Unbound (1971–)

1 The Unraveling

THE HISTORY OF the postwar era is usually narrated as a story of economic growth; but equally it is a story of the struggle to build a more robust democratic order on the ashes of the furnace of war. In fact it is the story of a number of quite different ways of doing this. For Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, as they began to think about this task in Sweden, in 1941, surrounded by the occupied countries, there was hope to be found in looking across the Atlantic to America. Their bestselling book, Kontakt med Amerika (Contact with America) struck a chord with their fellow Swedes and soon became a hit among the resistance in neighboring Norway; it would go on to influence reformers elsewhere across the continent as well. The Myrdals then moved to America, taking with them the lessons of Scandinavia in turn.¹ Democracy did not simply return to the Western nations in 1945, in other words, along with the homeward bound troops. As these two influential Swedes had already recognized, it needed in many respects to be imagined anew.

In Europe, the task of rebuilding democracy was undertaken predominantly by the Christian and social democrats. In Italy, West Germany, Austria and the Benelux countries it was the “popular” and “people’s” Christian democratic parties that led the way. Leaders like Italy’s Alcide de Gasperi, prime minister from 1945 to 1953, and West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, were ambivalent about the power of the national state and were anticommunists to boot.² Social democrats by contrast, like the Myrdals or indeed Einar Gerhardsen, who was prime minister of Norway for seventeen years, were much more comfortable integrating strands of socialist thinking into their welfarist policies: and they dominated Scandinavian politics for half a century by doing so.³ They also spoke proudly of what Swedes called as the Folkhemmet (People’s Home) in a way that placed the common man at the center of politics. Along with French gaullists and British liberals, though not always comfortably so, Christian and social democrats were the trailblazers in building a continental-scaled political architecture after the war.

Across the Atlantic democracy was likewise reimagined to meet the challenges of the postwar era and to ensure that something as crippling as the Great Depression never returned. American liberalism was not the same as European liberalism. Above all, it placed the demands of freedom before the claims of equality: a point reinforced in 1947–9 when Truman’s “Freedom Train” toured all forty-eight states displaying the cherished documents of American liberty.⁴ No less than in Europe, however, Republicans and Democrats converged after the war around one of the era’s defining political ideas: “Not left, not right, but a vital center,” as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it in 1948. This was a vision for democracy born of a new global outlook amidst the onrush of the Cold War: liberalism’s defense of “the ultimate integrity of the individual,” it now being argued, was the glue that could best hold capitalism and democracy together going forward.⁵

Yet if this was the basis of a new moderate center ground in America, it was moderate primarily so far as concerned the white majority population. For the main difference between Europe and America was to be found in terms of the latter’s racial inheritance. Social mobility, at least for whites, was often greater in the United States even than it was in Europe.⁶ But blacks experienced nothing of the sort, even after the civil rights movement. For all that Americans were more reluctant than Europeans to assign to national government the social obligations that national welfare demanded, the one place where the federal state was not to be prevented from performing a social function, it seemed, was in policing the bounds of the racial political order. As Cold War internationalism took shape, the social aspects of New Deal liberalism were likewise retrenched: worker democracy in particular making way for a more vociferous anticommunism.

Elsewhere the former settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada blended basic elements of the European (or rather British) and American models. Australia inherited many of its legal principles from Great Britain, but its sheer size demanded a more federal model of government of the sort found in the United States. Welfare was more generous than in America, but labor relations were more constrained than in the United Kingdom. New Zealand too brought into its Westminster-derived parliamentary system something of the constitutionally enshrined value system of the American model, in its case setting fairness as the nation’s guiding leitmotif in place of the American feeling for liberty. These societies too confronted the task of demobilizing after the war.⁷ Canada meanwhile was defined by its two primary political cleavages, in the form of First Nation and linguistic minority counter-claims on the majoritarian political state.

Despite all their apparent differences, therefore, there were certain similarities common to each of the postwar democracies that with hindsight seem compelling. The reformism of the interwar period was frequently picked up again, carrying political rights and the promise of participation with it, particularly for women. Popular sovereignty was acknowledged too, although in light of the demagoguery and the total politics that derailed liberal parliaments during the interwar years, it was also now constrained.⁸ Economic rights were formalized in the name of political stability. A new international architecture was created to further lock in these arrangements. Above all the postwar democracies made “democracy” itself a public concern in a way it never had been before: and defining what that meant (and who really was permitted to take part in it) largely set the parameters for how Western politics now developed.

Meanwhile material prosperity was prioritized through a renewed attention to managed economies and New Deal reformism. As economic growth returned to Europe it was spectacular but uneven. Given the extent of postwar destruction the bounce back was most dramatic at first in West Germany. But for Western Europe as a whole the growth rate was soon 4 percent a year for the period 1950 to 1970, compared to just 1.0 percent a year for the period 1913 to 1950. Even in the relatively sluggish Netherlands, the 3.5 percent average annual growth recorded between 1950 and 1975 was several times greater than it had been in the period 1910 to 1950.⁹ The US too, which entered the post-45 era with an economy three times larger than any other also performed strongly to start with, for all that Western Europe’s spectacular growth steadily drew them level. GIs returned home from the war and via the “GI Bill” received generous loans to rebuild both their own lives and national society alike, fueling a suburban housing boom and an expansion in the job market. American GDP grew steadily after 1947, culminating in an average of 5.3 percent growth per year during Johnson’s term in office (1964–8). As in Europe, this was growth enjoyed by the middle and lower classes above all.¹⁰

As the immediate challenge of postwar reconstruction gave way to more ambitious plans for national development, a renewed faith in the values of democracy in the West, and a set of procedural imperatives that would characterize the functioning of that democracy, steadily began to take shape around a common set of ideas and institutions. This was the backdrop against which the transformations of the 1970s were to play out.

What Went Before

The first and most basic pillar upon which Western democracy was rebuilt after the war was the nation state, which was locked in place through a concerted focus on national economic growth. Economic development took the place of interstate rivalry as the era’s principal political obsession. The new concept of “national income,” GDP, recorded that growth for public consumption and took on something of the importance once accorded the expanses of empire that could be pointed out on a map. The task of securing what, in Europe especially, were often recently reinstalled national governments was also undertaken through the exercise of political constraint, as this was levied upon the institutions of democracy itself.

A not dissimilar picture emerged in the United States. As the influential US diplomat George Kennan put it, democracy itself could be dangerous when it gave rise to populist mischief: it was like “one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin.” Hence where constitutional courts were established in countries like Italy, West Germany, and France for the purpose of ensuring that formal democracy was actively kept in line with the values and principles of society, the US relied on a more politically engaged judiciary.¹¹ Those safeguards being established, citizens were encouraged to play their role at election time, but to refrain from too much political engagement in the months or years in between. Not unlike prevailing attitudes to sex, when it came to democracy it was argued that you could have too much of a good thing.

Instead political differences were to be mediated through the major workers’ and employers’ confederations such as France’s Confédération générale du travail (CGT), or Norway’s Landsorganization (LO) or the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO). The result was a fragile yet stable “consensus” model of democracy, in which individual freedoms were protected from the tyranny of the majority and political passions were toned down in the name of a wider vision of social harmony. It was, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin formulated it in 1958, a politics based on a balance of both positive and negative freedoms. It was inconceivable without the experience of the previous years of upheaval. And for all that it provided a sense of normal politics when measured against the turbulence of recent times, it was never destined to last.

Such widespread commitment to political moderation and constraint was hardly born of altruism alone, however. As postwar governments sought to manage the new social relations of production, while simultaneously reasserting their own authority in the aftermath of the war, the nation states that left 1945 behind became, almost inevitably, more centralized ones. We remember this era today, not inaccurately, as one of board meetings and briefcases, of secretariats and ministries and the milk quotas and postal routes they oversaw. Above all we remember it for the constant presence of an active, administrative state. The federal state was the primary investor in the mass suburban housing schemes, like Levittown, that cropped up in America. In Europe, state planning boards and industry agencies proliferated (something the Japanese also cottoned on to and mastered). This enabled what was perhaps the most visible manifestation of postwar reconstruction: the discipline, and indeed achievements, of national planning.

Planning was the second central pillar supporting the revival of postwar democracy at large, and it too was about securing growth first and foremost. Roosevelt’s (ultimately failed) attempt to introduce a Second Bill of Rights in America—“true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” as he suggested in launching the idea in 1944—was an early recognition that the national state had to plan to provide for people’s needs. But the roots of state planning ultimately lay outside existing democratic experience: the IRI, Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale in Italy, was founded under Mussolini to rescue failed banks in 1933. Its virtues only really took hold in the minds of Western policymakers during the war: Jean Monnet first floating the idea of what became the French Commisariat général du Plan with de Gaulle in Washington in 1945.¹² Planning came to be seen as a way to ensure that the sorts of crises that had brought democracy to its knees were henceforth avoided. Equally it was encouraged by the counterexample of the socialist countries, who for much of the era seemed to be developing as fast, if not faster, than their Western counterparts.

Unlike in the socialist countries, however, Western planning was put to the twin ends of industrial investment (which included laying the conditions for private investment as well) and the establishment of a third pillar of postwar democracy: the national welfare state (partly as a way to nullify worker discontent). Even in Italy and West Germany, two countries which had so recently experienced the reality of a totalitarian political order, but where economic policy was notably more liberal than in Britain or Sweden, the necessity for a strong state was never really in doubt when it came to social security. In a country like Britain, achievements such as the National Health Service soon became an integral part of the national identity itself: untouchable even by later arch critics of the state.

By the mid 1960s, therefore, the big-government, Western welfare state seemed unassailably popular. There was just one hitch. For all that the economies of the Western democracies had been growing fast, national spending had been growing even faster. Between 1950 and 1973 government spending as a percentage of GDP grew from 30.4 to 42 percent in Germany, from 27.6 to 38.8 percent in France, and from 34.2 to 41.5 percent in Britain.¹³ In the United States the expansion of government spending, on welfare in particular, was if anything even more dramatic, its cash outlays amplified by its underinvestment in a European-style welfare infrastructure. In 1950 the federal government put 26 percent of its total budget toward welfare (admittedly in a context in which local and state authorities contributed more). By 1975 the ratio had increased to 55 percent.¹⁴

No less substantial increases were to be seen in Scandinavia, where Danish spending on social security doubled between 1950 and 1973 and Norwegian spending more than tripled.¹⁵ In the good times, this forged a virtuous circle between capitalism and democracy, commitments to securing basic rights for the people being also a major source of economic growth in their own right. Hence, by the end of the 1970s in Belgium 60 percent of all university graduates took up jobs either within or directly connected to the public sector. In France, a period of service in public administration became the traditional route to more lucrative private sector jobs for graduates of elite public management schools like the École Nationale d’Administration.

In place of the national-scale Beveridge plan (1944) in Britain, American welfarism developed sectorally, through pacts like that signed between autoworkers and General Motors in the Treaty of Detroit (1950), providing those workers with a set of guaranteed health, pension, and insurance benefits in exchange for relinquishing the right to strike over certain workplace issues. The US commitment to welfare was more grudging than it was in Europe, but again the powerful presence of communism as an ideological foe helped lock it into place. In this regard welfare played a central political role on both sides of the Atlantic, not least as formal testimony to the fact that liberal societies too could provide sufficient measure of social solidarity. Indeed, in America no less than in Europe, the rich accepted far higher rates of taxation during this period to meet the growing social security bill than would ever be the case again: in the 1960s the top rate of income tax in the United States was a hefty 91 percent.

The extent to which such public commitments to collective prosperity were accepted by the majority of people points toward a fourth characteristic of postwar democracy: the way that social progress relied upon the paradoxical encouragement of a consumerist culture and the satisfaction (if not creation) of individual needs. This was especially apparent in America, where the logic of consumer society and the demands of the Cold War went hand in hand. If political freedoms needed sometimes to be curtailed in the name of the wider superpower struggle, went the logic, then an expanding sphere of personal consumption could at least provide some measure of relief against this. Lying behind this was the recognition that unless one could cultivate mass consumption there would be no mass production either; and no mass production meant no meaningful stand against communism. But the upside was greater freedom of choice. In Europe, as rationing became a thing of the past, and people no longer had to queue for the basics, the market now reached out to people in their homes, whether it was the Avon lady who came knocking on people’s doors, or a Reader’s Digest or Which? magazine that flopped through the letterbox.

What most middle-class households wanted was washing machines and white goods for the w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Prologue: Two Helicopters
• Part I: Democracy Unbound (1971–)
• Part II: ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’ (1989–)
• Part III: Victory without Peace (2001–)
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright