The Atlantic and Its Enemies

clear-cut. The French and the Germans made difficulties for Israel; Bonn refused the Americans an air bridge over Germany. At the end of the year all sides did meet for the first time and in mid-January 1974 there was a new arrangement — a neutral zone on the east bank. Egypt restored diplomatic relations with the USA in 1974 and broke with the USSR in 1976; two years later, on American territory (Camp David, the President’s official retreat), there was an Egyptian-Israeli peace. Israel evacuated Sinai.

It was now Arabs who used the oil weapon. On 16 October 1973 they put up prices by 70 per cent and on the 17th OPEC announced a reduction of output by 25 per cent and an embargo on the USA and Holland. On 23 December there was a doubling of Persian Gulf prices. OPEC announced that the price would rise to $5.11, and there was a further threat, that production would be cut by 5 per cent every month — the claim being that this was necessary for the Americans to force Israel into serious negotiations. Kissinger, in his aircraft, even learned that the Saudis would join the embargo on oil sales to America and her allies because of President Nixon’s public offer of $2bn in aid for Israel. On 21 October the Arabs stated that they would nationalize the oil companies if they failed to join the embargo against the USA, the whole affair occurring in the context of the Watergate revelations, and Nixon had just lost his corrupt Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, over tax fraud. The oil embargo went ahead, against Holland (which had stood up for Israel’s cause) and the USA, and even against the American ships supposedly protecting the Saudis. The price climbed and production fell back — from over 20 million barrels early in October to 15 million; and although Iran stepped up production somewhat (600,000) overall supply by December had fallen by 4 million barrels per day. This was about a tenth of consumption, but since consumption had been rising at 7.5 per cent per annum, the dent was more severe, and in any case panic caused damage, as the companies realized what was happening. They bid for any oil on the market, anywhere — in Nigeria, in November, $16 and then $22.60; in Iran, $17. The official price went up, from $1.80 in 1970 to $2.18 in 1971, $2.90 in summer 1973, $5.12 in October and $11.65 in December. By 23 December the Gulf States had doubled the price, and of course the rise in oil and natural gas prices much profited the Soviet Union. Boris Ponomarev, of the International Department, thought the crisis of capitalism was at hand. The centre was not holding.

15. 1968: A Generation

This disintegration of the Marshall-NATO world had a cultural aspect. The biggest sign of this by far was in France, and perhaps not by chance. De Gaulle had greatly angered the Americans, with his withdrawal from NATO and his torpedoing of the dollar. France, in 1968, appeared to be extraordinarily successful, but de Gaulle received, out of the blue, a vast humiliation. In a moment that summed up the sixties, the students of Paris rebelled against him, and would have brought him down if the Communist Party had not, for Moscow’s sake, saved him. The episode in itself was farcical, but it was farce with a sinister side, edging into terrorism; it also did great damage to education in general, and particularly to European universities, which since then have declined. In 1914, as a foreigner, you beat your path to Paris or Berlin if you wanted to study anything of seriousness. By 1980 American universities were all the rage, and foreigners made for the universities of France or Germany only if they had no American (or at least British) alternative.

As so often, it was in Italy that the European starting gun was fired. She, much poorer than France, had nevertheless been another European miracle in the sense that her exports boomed. The Italian State was another matter. Parents cared about schools, which were very good, as was the press, but universities were of much less interest, and here Italy, living in the tailwind of a demographic storm, faced a crisis. Student numbers had doubled, from 1959 to 1969, to nearly half a million, while the curriculum remained the same, and there were no textbooks or classrooms. The extension of the school-leaving age to fourteen had gone together (in 1965) with abolition of university entrance examinations. Governments as ever found it easy to economize on education, because at least in the short term it could not mobilize discontent, and headlines as to educational improvements made for good politics. The university system, according to Paul Ginsborg, was therefore in ‘an advanced state of malfunction’: Rome had 60,000 students, Naples 50,000, Bari 30,000 — each institution designed for 5,000. There were too few lecturers, and they also gave few lectures — one per week; and examinations were oral, no poorly paid lecturer wanting to spend time on thousands of scripts. It was true that there was much failure, but a merciful providence decreed that the failures could go on repeating years, perhaps with some part-time job to keep them going. Even middle-class students in the then fashionable subjects of sociology or psychology would easily find that they had no job at the end of it all. Therefore the universities simmered. An absurd cult of ‘Che’ developed from 1967, when the university of Trento was occupied; then came troubles at the Catholic University in Milan and then again at Turin, in opposition to entirely sensible reform. All of this came with the usual paraphernalia of lumpish clothes and ready- made ‘anti’ talk: thus R. D. Laing’s remarks, critical of the family, in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), had much resonance in family-bound Italy where one graffito read, ‘I want to be an orphan’. Such students could at least claim partnership with ‘the workers’ — a matter generally fanciful elsewhere. One and a half million metalworkers struck; they wanted a forty-hour week and equal wages. Other workers, including state and local government ones, followed, sometimes with a view to keeping their relatively higher wage levels.

France was next. One of the wisdoms of the age was that education produced prosperity. The logic was simple enough: university = knowledge = technology = prosperity. Sputnik was in the end a deadly weapon, because it destroyed the Western university. Bureaucrats could brandish statistics of expanding education at each other, quite independently of the deeper factors involved, which were not subject to measurement. All advanced countries therefore saw a vast increase in the number of students, a raising of the school-leaving age, and a proliferation of institutions of higher learning. The number of teachers also increased, though not as fast, and the overall budget rose less fast again. French higher education had been both very exacting and unfair: there had not even been a retiring age for professors until the 1930s and aged, comic figures occupied posts at which the aspiring young resentfully gazed. They, meanwhile, would have to undergo examinations that were not just extremely demanding, but were even competitive, meaning that, to pass, you had to be classed in the top twenty or whichever number the organizers reckoned was needed. It was called agregation, and qualified you to go on with research. Even then, if a place did not fall open, you would have to go and teach in a school. This was not in itself a bad thing, because the highest forms of a French school were themselves, in terms of what was expected, a sort of junior university, and discipline in the class was kept by a special supervisor while the teacher concentrated upon the lessons. There were other routes to success, particularly through the selective ‘Grand Schools’ which were designed to produce an elite — engineers in the Polytechnic, administrators in the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) (others, some fifty, great and small, covered transport, bridges, archives, etc. and business schools followed). ENA had been supposed to be classless but in practice, with, somewhat later, business schools, became a near preserve of the bourgeoisie. Young would- be academics worked in the highest two years of a secondary school towards the Ecole Normale Superieure, which produced schoolteachers. It was a hard life, made tolerable by a sense of mission, and that sense was overtaken by ENA’s. Not surprisingly, the schoolteachers were on the Left. University teachers had similarly undergone an ordeal. There was a diploma that took ten years, and you could be under some old tyrant; if you were lucky, it might be Professor Labrousse, who saw his students on a Sunday morning or a Saturday afternoon. If you were senior you got the less uncomfortable chair, otherwise you were pose du bout des fesses far from the professorial desk and hoped for patronage in a system that was generally far from transparent in its workings. Again following a Soviet model, research was partly detached from the university system, with a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) to sort it out, and of course that body was prey to politics. Communists were particularly good at the game, and in time the great historian Fernand Braudel (who had taught once upon a time in a school in Algeria) ran his section of the CNRS like a Valois court, all over you one minute, the trapdoor the next.

Out of the blue in 1968 came troubles that caught world headlines: there was a mass revolt in universities, Paris easily in the lead. The immediate cause was the mishandling of educational expansion. France in 1958 had had a quarter of a million students and ten years later 630,000. Student-staff ratios stood at 15:1 in Germany in the Humanities, but 27.5:1 in Law, whereas in France the figures were close to 60:1. Then again, academic staff was expanded but quality declined: in France there had been 5,600 teachers in 1956 but there were 22,500 in 1967, and their salaries had not kept pace with the times. Nor had buildings. The temper of the times was made concrete in