The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Europe, to which the world had beaten its path in 1914, collapsed into near irrelevance. I had direct experience of what happened to the great university of Louvain in Belgium in that, thirty-five years ago, I was asked to translate an admirable official history, for presentation of honorary doctorates to the usual suspects (Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron) by an institution that had become Flemish. It was an exceedingly interesting task, but also depressing: in Louvain, if in some public office, even a telephone box, you were required to speak Flemish, even if you explained that you were foreign. Being from Glasgow, and speaking decent German, I could more or less make it up, and the resulting hilarity ensured that my messages got through, but the growth of provincial nationalism is an absurd phenomenon, and in this book I make my protest by using ‘England’, often enough, to cover a country generally known, in passport-ese, as ‘UK’. We say ‘Holland’ to cover Zeeland, without resorting to ‘The Netherlands’, which is anyway inaccurate. Pace Glasgow, England saved us from civil war, and I owe her a considerable debt.

If there is a single country of which admirable things can be said in the era after 1947, it would of course be Germany. Success is boring, and Germans shake their heads, but their recovery has been remarkable. The world of late nineteenth-century progress came to an end when Germany kicked over the board, and went to war in 1914. It was an exercise in intelligent craziness that ended with Hitler’s Bunker in 1945; Downfall (Der Untergang) is, after The Third Man, Graham Greene’s Vienna of 1947, one of the grand films (and quite accurate, as I know from having seen the interrogations, in Moscow, of the Bunker witnesses). It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the counterpoint, over the centuries, of Germany and England. I would even claim that the best historians of Germany are English, and I seem to have taught German to them, from Richard Overy and David Blackbourn to Harold James and Niall Ferguson. I cut my own teeth as historian by looking at Austria-Hungary, and if I rationalize about that, now, I can see that I was really looking at two important questions, which, in the early 1960s, I was hardly able to appreciate. You are looking, in the first instance, at the question of nationalism: why, as a Yugoslav remarks, do the peasants grow up and hate their nearest neighbour, and what can be done about it? The other question is more difficult: given that Prussia ended in disaster, why was the Catholic, Austrian, alternative not more successful? In the end this is an old nineteenth-century question, boiling down to the relationship of Catholicism and Liberalism — not a happy story. An old Cambridge colleague, Tim Blanning, in his The Pursuit of Glory, produces some answers. It is about the third Germany, great-great-grandfather of the Bundesrepublik, those prince-bishoprics that were very worthy and thought that the Thirty Years War had been a mistake. The prince-bishoprics — harmless souls — took over in 1949, and have done incredibly well. 1989, the fall of the Wall, was a deserved tribute, though the Lutheran Church rather characteristically forbade the tolling of bells in celebration. Margaret Thatcher — one of the none-too-many heroic figures in this book: my others would be Charles de Gaulle and Helmut Schmidt — worried that some sort of Fourth Reich was emerging, and invited me to Chequers, along with other historians, to lecture her on the subject. I was able to reassure her that, in taking over East Germany, the West Germans were just getting six Liverpools. We shall see what they make of it. Yes, the European Union is German-dominated, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.

However, the creativity has been Atlantic, not European, and that involves messiness. This was most obviously on display in England. It had been rather spoiled, post-war, and for a very long time, well into the eighties, a tiresome self-satisfaction reigned. At Oxford, I used to dread having to mark the examination scripts covering the ultramodern period of British history, because they all beta-plusly said the same things about the 1945 Labour government (of which I had, of all oddities, been an agitprop exhibit, photographed winsomely clutching a bunny and a blanket in advertisement of creches to help the working mother). Very, very few undergraduates managed to write originally about that period, the best of them an Italian, of Communist background, and the real reason was that none of them knew how much better matters had been organized on the Continent. That England came to grief in the seventies, when, of all oddities, the very heartland of Atlantic capitalism had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund. Helmut Schmidt shook his head, and Germans in Scotland could not believe the level of poverty. And then came the remarkable turnaround. England is a place gifted with tissue regeneration. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, and there was a very bumpy period as she turned things round, in the teeth of endless criticism, often contemptuous, from the powers that had been. I myself drew some flak for writing in the press, fairly frequently, in support of her. So be it: I was right. Nowadays there are 400 German students at Oxford, the largest foreign contingent, and they are not there because the truth is in the middle.

Of course, the United States, in it all, was the great creative force. All along, you need to read American books (while I am on the subject, here is a curious fact: in the Cambridge University library, where, unlike the Bodleian at Oxford, you can go round the stacks, the books on ‘Reaganomics’ are almost never taken out). For some reason, they are much more interesting on defeat — Vietnam — than on victory, and the enormous biographies of presidents are a considerable though necessary bore. I have had to read enormous amounts of dross, have made a vow never ever again to read a book by a man with a beard, and sometimes think that America abolished feudalism only through making serfs think they were free. Still, it has huge bursts of creativity, and serious thoughts about the modern world come from there: there is a strange fact that the stars whom I have taught, with Harold James or Niall Ferguson or David Blackbourn, ended up there. America follows from Europe Transformed, and Niall Ferguson was quite right to explore the British parallels.

As is inevitable with a book of this sort, it brings back my yesterdays. Much of what I say about England has had to be wrenched out. It was a very good place in the fifties and I can remember what it was like, going to the old Cambridge schol. exam, through the last great fog, by a steam train from Glasgow Central Station. The Head Porter at Caius, in a top hat, an ex-sergeant major frequently mistaken for the Master, received you, and then, at 9 a.m. in the Old Schools in Benet Street, you were confronted with an examination, beautifully printed, which read, ‘For translation into French’. The passage would read: ‘choppingly, the blades flashing in the wan sunlight, the queen’s skiff moved through a brisk north-easterly towards the port of Leith (A. Fraser)’. In those days there was an interesting battle between the examiners and the schoolmasters, and I had an enormous advantage, in that I had been taught by the siege-master extraordinary, Christopher Varley, at Glasgow Academy, who had no thoughts at all — he read Balzac for the vocabulary, a siege-engine of some power, which enabled you to turn the tables on the interviewers, who would be lost as you trotted out words such as balivot, or is it baliveau, meaning a tree marked one year to be cut down the next, in English, ‘staddle’. The examiners were wiped out, but, once at Caius, I realized I could not handle literary criticism (admittedly there was some excuse: they expected me to read Gide, to whom ‘hard cheese, old chap’ was indeed the only possible response). I switched to history, and was again very lucky, in that I fell under the control of Neil McKendrick, a teacher of genius. He taught me a version of history which was an updated version of the Whig Interpretation, and I have been struggling ever since to get away from it. I remember my first supervision. I had written some drivel about the Dutch Revolt, as to how the breasts of free men could not be whatever-it-was against Inquisitions and what-not. He said, do not forget that torture can be quite efficient. I am still not sure about the Whig Interpretation of English history. The experience of the 1980s showed that there was a huge amount to be said for the Whig Atlantic, warts and all. The warts are horrible — Michael Jack-son and the rest — but the Atlantic won, and is now spreading to, of all places, China. Chinese students are now all over Oxford, learning English. The resurrection of that extraordinary civilization must count as the best thing in the modern world.

There has been another resurrection: Turkey. I have been teaching there for some fifteen years, and very happily so: my university, Bilkent, a private one, was established a quarter-century ago in the teeth of considerable resistance. Its founder, Ihsan Dogramac?, had a very good idea as to what was going wrong with universities in the 1970s. Inflation had been a disaster, and Turkey was one of the centres of the troubles of the 1970s. However, she too is a country with tissue regeneration, and though I was much criticized by left-wing friends for being a sort of monkey in a fez jumping up and down on the Bilkent barrel organ, they now admit that I was right. In the latter part of this book, concerning the 1980s, I have written a good bit about Turkey, because there is much interest in a process that has turned the country into a considerable economic power, with a resonance throughout Eurasia. When the country started off, in 1923, you could not even have a table made, unless by an Armenian carpenter, because the legs wobbled, the Turks not knowing how to warp wood. Now, they make F16s. Today, aged not far from seventy, I still look forward to marching into a class of Turks, the best being excellent, and the others decorative and polite. As ever, I owe much to my Rector, Professor Ali Dogramac?.

I have a great many other debts of gratitude, a book of this scope needing a great deal of outside support. The London Library is a wonderful institution, and my assistants, Onur Onol and Yasin Yavuz, have been helpful way