widespread disjunction between rhetoric and practice. Those in Paris or Berlin who aggressively declared their intention to ‘change the world’ were often the people most devoted to parochial and even bodily obsessions— anticipating the solipsistic ‘me’ politics of the decade to follow—and absorbed in the contemplation of their own impact. ‘The Sixties’ were a cult object even before the decade had passed.
But if the Sixties seemed at last to pass un-mourned and with few enduring monuments, this was perhaps because the changes that they did bring about were
It was one of the self-delusions of the age that the Sixties were an era of heightened political consciousness. ‘Everyone’ (or at least everyone under twenty-five attending an educational establishment and drawn to radical ideas) was in the streets and mobilized for a cause. The deflation of the causes—and the demobilization of the coming decades—thus confers in retrospect an air of failure upon a decade of frenetic political activity. But in certain important respects the Sixties were actually a vital decade for the opposite reason: they were the moment when Europeans in both halves of the continent began their definitive turn
Thus the slogans and projects of the Sixties’ generation, far from re-awakening a revolutionary tradition whose language and symbols they so energetically sought to reinvigorate, can be seen in hindsight to have served as its swansong. In Eastern Europe, the ‘revisionist’ interlude and its tragic denouement saw off the last illusions of Marxism as a practice. In the West, Marxist and para-Marxist theories soared clear of any relationship to local reality, disqualifying themselves from any future role in serious public debate. In 1945 the radical Right had discredited itself as a legitimate vehicle for political expression. By 1970, the radical Left was set fair to emulate it. A 180-year cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.
PART THREE
Recessional: 1971-1989
XIV. Diminished Expectations
‘The dollar is our currency but your problem’.
‘It might or might not be right to kill, but sometimes it is necessary’.
‘The death of a worker weighs heavily like a mountain, while that of a bourgeois weighs as lightly as a feather’.
‘Punk might have been invented for the cultural theorists—and the partial truth is that it was’.
Even before the effervescence of the Sixties had subsided, the unique circumstances that made it possible had passed forever. Within three years of the end of the most prosperous decade in recorded history, the post- war economic boom was over. Western Europe’s ‘thirty glorious years’ gave way to an age of monetary inflation and declining growth rates, accompanied by widespread unemployment and social discontent. Most of the radicals of the Sixties, like their followers, abandoned ‘the Revolution’ and worried instead about their job prospects. A few opted for violent confrontation; the damage they wrought—and the response their actions elicited from the authorities—led to much nervous talk of the ‘ungovernable’ condition of Western societies. Such anxieties proved overwrought: under stress, the institutions of Western Europe showed more resilience than many observers had feared. But there was to be no return to the optimism—or the illusions—of the first post-war decades.
The impact of economic slowdown was only just beginning to be felt when two external shocks brought the Western European economy to a shuddering halt. On August 15th 1971, US President Richard Nixon unilaterally announced that his country was abandoning the system of fixed exchange rates. The US dollar, the anchor of the international monetary system since Bretton Woods, would henceforth float against other currencies. The background to this decision was the huge military burden of the Vietnam War and a growing US Federal budget deficit. The dollar was tied to a gold standard, and there was a growing fear in Washington that foreign holders of US currency (including Europe’s central banks) would seek to exchange their dollars for gold, draining American reserves.[196]
The decision to float the dollar was not economically irrational. Having opted to fight an expensive war of attrition on the other side of the world—and pay for it with borrowed money—the US could not expect to maintain the dollar indefinitely at its fixed and increasingly over-valued rate. But the American move nonetheless came as a shock. If the dollar was to float, then so must the European currencies, and in that case all of the carefully constructed certainties of the postwar monetary and trading systems were called into question. The fixed rate system, established before the end of the Second World War in anticipation of a controlled network of national economies, was over. But what would replace it?
Following some months of confusion, two successive devaluations of the dollar, and the ‘floating’ of the British pound in 1972 (belatedly bringing to an inglorious end sterling’s ancient and burdensome role as an international ‘reserve’ currency), a conference in Paris, in March 1973, formally buried the financial arrangements so laboriously erected at Bretton Woods and agreed to establish in its place a new floating-rate system. The cost of this liberalization, predictably enough, was inflation. In the aftermath of the American move of August 1971 (and the subsequent fall in the value of the dollar) European governments, hoping to head off the anticipated economic downturn, adopted deliberately reflationary policies: allowing credit to ease, domestic prices to rise, and their own currencies to fall.
Under normal circumstances this controlled ‘Keynesian’ inflation might have succeeded: only in West Germany was there a deep-seated historical aversion to the very idea of price inflation. But the uncertainty produced by America’s retreat from a dollar-denominated system encouraged growing currency speculation, which
