Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Paris, the Berlin, the London of my youth and those cities in 2002; even Vienna, which deliberately hides its social and political transformation by turning itself into a theme park of a glorious past. Even physically the skyline of London as it can be seen from where I live on the slopes of Parliament Hill has changed – Parliament is now barely visible – and Paris has not been the same since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have left their marks on it. And yet, while New York has undergone the same kind of social and economic upheavals as other cities – de- industrialization, gentrification, a massive influx from the Third World – it neither feels nor even looks like it. This is surprising when, as every New Yorker knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen the arrival of fundamental innovations in New York life such as the Korean fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic New York lower-middle-class institutions as the Gimbel department stores, and the transformation of Brighton Beach into Little Russia. And yet, New York has remained New York far more than London has remained London. Even the Manhattan skyline is still essentially that of the city of the 1930s, especially now that its most ambitious postwar addition has disappeared, the World Trade Center.

Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the USA is part of global humanity, whose situation has changed more profoundly and rapidly since 1945 than ever before in recorded history. These changes there looked less dramatic to us because the sort of prosperous high-tech mass consumer society which did not arrive in western Europe until the 1950s, was not new in America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a historic chasm divided the way Britons lived and thought before and after the middle fifties, for the USA the 1950s were, or at least looked like, just a bigger and better version of the kind of twentieth century its more prosperous white citizens had known for two generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the Great Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the same lines as before, though some sections of its citizens – mainly the college-educated – began to think differently about it, and, as the countries of the European Union became more modernized, the furniture of life with which European tourists came into contact began to look less ‘advanced’, and even a bit tatty. California did not seem fundamentally different to me driving through it in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s from what it had looked and felt like in 1960, whereas Spain and Sicily did. New York had been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants for all my lifetime; it was London which became one after the 1950s. The details in the great carpet of the USA have changed, and are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in the short run.

As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability, large and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones. Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change of American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of American life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms its habitus or way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an eighteenth-century constitution reinforced by two centuries of talmudic exegesis by the lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the USA are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all other states in 2002. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of government. But it has also made the government of the USA largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid effective national decision-making, not least by the President, is almost impossible. The US, at least in its public life, is a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities, because it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough in the twentieth century to do so. It is the only country in my political lifetime where three able Presidents (FDR, Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment’s notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the course of US and world history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a hard case in America. This has created the foggy mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money, and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish between the real and the increasingly restricted political country. So, since the end of the USSR, the USA has quietly prepared to function as the world’s only superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower, however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the USA today. This is why, as I write this in April 2002, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world.

Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of the massive impact of cultural and economic Americanization, the rest of the world, even the capitalist world, has so far been strikingly resistant to following the model of US politics and society. This is probably because America is less of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political model of a capitalist liberal democracy, based on the universal principles of individual freedom, than its patriotic ideology and constitution suggest. So far from being a clear example which the rest of the world can imitate, the USA, however powerful and influential, remains an unending process, distorted by big money and public emotion, of tinkering with institutions, public and private, to make them fit realities unforeseen in the unalterable text of a 1787 constitution. It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most of us would not want to copy it. Since puberty I have spent more of my time in the USA than in any country other than Britain. All the same, I am glad that my children did not grow up there, and that I belong to another culture. Still, it is mine also.

Our problem is rather that the US empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits. It merely insists that those who are not with it are against it. That is the problem of living at the apex of the ‘American Century’. As I am eighty-five years of age I am unlikely to see its solution.

23

Coda

I

Biographies end with the subject’s death. Autobiographies have no such natural termination. However, this one has the advantage of ending at the moment of an undeniable and dramatic caesura in world history, in consequence of the attack of September 11 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Probably no other unexpected event in world history has been directly experienced by more human beings. I saw it on a London hospital television screen as it happened. For an old and sceptical historian born in the year of the Russian Revolution, it had everything that was bad about the twentieth century: massacres, high but unreliable technology, the announcements that a global struggle to the death between the causes of God and Satan was now taking place once again as real life imitated Hollywood spectaculars. Public mouths flooded the western world with froth as hacks searched for words about the unsayable and unfortunately found them.

Magnified by the worldwide images and rhetoric of the American age of media and politics, a sudden gap appeared between the way the USA and the rest of the world understood what had happened on that awful day. The world merely saw a particularly dramatic terror attack with a vast number of victims and a momentary public humiliation of the USA. Otherwise the situation was no different from what it had been since the Cold War ended, and certainly no cause for alarm for the globe’s only superpower.¹ Washington announced that September 11 had changed everything, and in doing so, actually did change everything, by in effect declaring itself the single-handed protector of a world order and definer of threats against it. Whoever failed to accept this was a potential or actual enemy. This was not unexpected, since the strategies of US global military empire had been in preparation since the late 1980s, indeed by the people who are now applying them. Nevertheless, September 11 proved that we all live in a world with a single global hyperpower that had finally decided that, since the end of the USSR, there are no short-term limits on its strength and no limits on its willingness to use it, although the purposes of using it – except to manifest supremacy – are quite unclear. The twentieth century is over. The twenty-first opens on twilight and obscurity.

There is no better place than a hospital bed, quintessential locus of a captive victim, to reflect on the extraordinary inundation of Orwellian words and images that floods over print and screen at such a time, all of it designed to deceive, conceal and delude, including those who produce it. They ranged from simple lies to the dynamic evasiveness with which diplomats, politicians and generals – and indeed all of us today – fend off public questions that we do not want or are afraid to answer honestly. They ranged from the patently disingenuous, such as the pretence that Sadam Hussein (admittedly an inviting target) must be overthrown because of Iraq’s world-