Postwar

diktat, ceased to be ‘dialectically’ explicable as false moves along a true path. They became instead just what their critics had always said they were: loss, waste, failure and crime.

Furet and his younger contemporaries rejected the resort to History that had so coloured intellectual engagement in Europe since the beginning of the 1930s. There is, they insisted, no ‘Master Narrative’ governing the course of human actions, and thus no way to justify public policies or actions that cause real suffering today in the name of speculative benefits tomorrow. Broken eggs make good omelettes. But you cannot build a better society on broken men. In retrospect this may appear a rather lame conclusion to decades of intense theoretical and political debate; but for just that reason it illustrates rather well the extent of the change.

In Ma Nuit Chez Maud, Eric Rohmer’s 1969 conte moral, a Communist philosopher and his Catholic colleague argue at considerable length over the competing claims of Pascal’s wager on God and the Marxist bet on History. What is striking in retrospect is not the conversation itself, which will be familiar to anyone old enough to remember the Sixties in continental Europe, but the seriousness with which it was taken not just by the on-screen protagonists but by millions of contemporary viewers. Ten years later the topic, if not the film, was already a period piece. The resort to History in defense of unpalatable political choices had begun to seem morally naive and even callous. As Camus had noted many years before, ‘Responsibility towards History releases one from responsibility towards human beings’.[265]

The new uncertainty about ‘History’ (and history) inaugurated a disagreeable decade for West European intellectuals, uneasily aware that the disintegration of great historical schemes and master narratives boded ill for the chattering classes who had been most responsible for purveying them, and who were now themselves—as it seemed to many of them—the object of humiliating indifference. In September 1986, in a revealing solipsistic aside to a French journalist, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu bemoaned the fallen condition of the engaged public thinker: ‘As for me, I think that if there is a great cause left today it’s the defense of the intellectuals’.[266]

Intellectual self-abnegation before History was once described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘the horrible German way out of the burden of moral choice’. This is a little hard on Germans, who were hardly the only Europeans to abase themselves on the altar of historical necessity, though it is true that the idea had its roots in German romantic philosophy. But it points to an emerging vacuum in European political ideas: if there was no ‘great cause’ left; if the progressive legacy had run into the ground; if History, or necessity, could no longer be credibly invoked in defense of an act, a policy or a programme; then how should men decide the great dilemmas of the age?

This was not a problem for Thatcherite radicals, who treated public policy as an extension of private interests and for whom the marketplace was a necessary and sufficient adjudicator of values and outcomes. Nor were the times unusually troubling for Europe’s traditional conservatives, for whom the measure of good and evil in human affairs remained anchored in religious norms and social conventions, bruised but not yet altogether displaced by the cultural tsunami of the Sixties. It was the progressive Left, still the dominant presence in European political and cultural exchanges, which was urgently in need of a different script.

What it found, to its collective surprise, was a new political vernacular—or, rather, a very old one, freshly rediscovered. The language of rights, or liberties, was firmly inscribed in every European constitution, not least those of the Peoples’ Democracies. But as a way of thinking about politics, ‘rights talk’ had been altogether unfashionable in Europe for many years. After the First World War rights—notably the right to self-determination —had played a pivotal role in international debate over a post-war settlement, and most of the interested parties at the Versailles Peace Conference had invoked their rights quite vociferously when pressing their case upon the Great Powers. But these were collective rights—the rights of nations, peoples, minorities.

Moreover, the record of collectively-asserted rights was an unhappy one. Where the rights of more than one ethnic or religious community had clashed, usually over a conflicting territorial claim, it had been depressingly obvious that force, not law, was the only effective way to establish precedence. Minority rights could not be protected within states, nor the rights of weak states secured against the claims of their more powerful neighbors. The victors of 1945, looking back on the dashed hopes of Versailles, concluded as we have seen that collective interests were better served by the painful but effective solution of territorial regrouping (ethnic cleansing as it would later be known). As for stateless persons, they would no longer be treated as a judicial anomaly in a world of states and nations, but as individual victims of persecution or injustice.

Post-1945 rights talk thus concentrated on individuals. This too was a lesson of war. Even though men and women were persecuted in the name of their common identity (Jews, gypsies, Poles, etc) they suffered as individuals; and it was as individuals with individual rights that the new United Nations sought to protect them. The various Conventions on Human Rights, Genocide or Social and Economic Rights that were incorporated into international law and treaties had a cumulative impact upon public sensibilities: they combined an eighteenth- century, Anglo-American concern for individual liberties with a very mid-twentieth-century emphasis upon the obligations of the state to ensure that a growing spectrum of greater and lesser claims were met—from the right to life to the ‘right’ to ‘truth in advertising’ and beyond.

What propelled this legal rhetoric of individual rights into the realm of real politics was the coincidence of the retreat of Marxism with the international Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which had opened in Helsinki the same year that The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris. Until then, talk of ‘rights’ had long been disfavored among left-leaning European intellectuals, echoing Marx’s famous dismissal of ‘the so-called rights of man’ as egoistic and ‘bourgeois’. In progressive circles, terms such as ‘Freedoms’ or ‘Liberty or ‘Rights’, and other abstractions associated with ‘man in general’, were taken seriously only when preceded by an adjectival modifier: ‘bourgeois’, or ‘proletarian’ or ‘Socialist’.

Thus in 1969 a group of intellectuals on the left of the French Parti Socialiste Unifie criticized their own party (led at the time by Michel Rocard and Pierre Mendes-France) for supporting the reformers in Prague. The latter, they declared, had been ‘the willing victims of petty-bourgeois ideologies (humanism, freedom, justice, progress, universal secret suffrage, etc).’ This was no isolated instance. In the course of the 1960s many left- leaning Western commentators whose politics were otherwise quite moderate avoided mention of ‘rights’ or ‘liberties’ for fear of appearing naive. In Eastern Europe reform Communists and their supporters had also avoided such language: in their case because of its defilement and devaluation in official rhetoric.

But from the mid-seventies it became increasingly common to find speeches and writings from all across the political spectrum in Western Europe unrestrainedly invoking ‘human rights’ and ‘personal liberties’. As one Italian observer remarked in 1977, the idea and ideal of ‘undivided’ freedom was being openly discussed on the Left ‘without mystification or demagogy’ for the first time since the war.[267] This did not necessarily translate immediately into politics—for much of the Eighties West European Labour and Socialist parties floundered quite helplessly, resorting in many cases to the illicit appropriation of their opponents’ programmes to cover their own nakedness. But their new openness to the vocabulary of rights and liberties did give Western European scholars and intellectuals access to the changing language of political opposition in Eastern Europe and a way of communicating across the divide—just in time, for it was east of the Iron Curtain that truly original and significant change was now under way.

In 1975 the Czech reform communist Zdenek Mlynar wrote an ‘Open Letter to the Communists and Socialists of Europe’, addressed above all to Eurocommunists and appealing for support against the repression of dissent in Czechoslovakia. The illusions of reform Communism died hard. But Mlynar was already in a minority, his faith in both Socialism and its Western sympathizers already regarded with bemusement by most of Communism’s domestic critics in the Soviet bloc.

These critics, not yet called ‘dissidents’ (a term generally disfavoured by those it described), had for the most part turned away from the regime and the ‘Socialist’ language it espoused. In the aftermath of 1968 that language, with its wooden embrace of ‘peace’ and ‘equality’ and ‘fraternal goodwill’, rang peculiarly false— especially to the Sixties activists who had taken it seriously. The latter—overwhelmingly students, scholars, journalists, playwrights and writers—had been the chief victims of the repression in Czechoslovakia especially, where the Party leadership under Gustav Husak (the ‘President of Forgetting’) correctly calculated that its best hope of re-establishing ‘order’ lay in mollifying popular discontent with material improvements while energetically