November 28, 2011 7:48 pm
The long shadow of the 1930s
By Gideon Rachman
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Could things go bad again? I mean really bad – Great Depression bad, world war bad? The kind of cataclysmic event my generation has learned to think belongs only in the history books.
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There is certainly a sense of foreboding in Europe at the moment. Speaking in Berlin on Monday night, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, warned: “We are standing on the edge of a precipice.” President Sarkozy of France cautioned recently: “If the euro explodes, Europe would explode. It’s the guarantee of peace in a continent where there were terrible wars.”
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On the contrary, war talk seems inherently implausible to people raised in prosperous, peaceful western Europe. I have lived my entire life in a world in which, for all its ups-and-downs, things seemed to be getting steadily better. Nazism had been defeated; dictatorships fell in Spain, Portugal and Greece; the Soviet empire collapsed; apartheid ended in South Africa.
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Peace and prosperity became the norm for my generation in the West. It was easy to forget that this set us apart from most of the rest of the world. Reading a book recently by Yan Xuetong, a Chinese academic I know, I was taken aback to come across this sentence: “During the cultural revolution, we often saw people being beaten to death, so you become somewhat immune to it.”
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However, over the last 30 years, the hope for peace, prosperity and a reasonable degree of comfort has spread beyond the privileged confines of the West. The China of the Cultural Revolution has given way to the China of the shopping mall and the factory. The India of Mother Theresa is being partly displaced by the India of the IT revolution.
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Globalisation has made the world seem like a safer and more homogenous place – as the new middle-classes of Asia and eastern Europe embraced the comforts and values of capitalism. Global peace, which during the cold war seemed to depend on nuclear weapons, now seemed to be underpinned by international trade and a shared embrace of consumerism.
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Until the global economic crisis, the words of Tony Blair’s election campaign song in 1997 seemed to capture the spirit of the age – “Things can only get better”.
Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we have discovered that things can definitely get worse. The question is how much worse?
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The risk of a grave economic crisis in Europe is severe. The threats of sovereign-debt defaults and the break-up of the European single currency are rising – and with it, the attendant threats of collapsing banks, popular panic, deep recessions and mass unemployment. That would indeed feel like a modern version of the Great Depression.
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The European Union, taken as a whole, is the largest economy in the world – so economic chaos here inevitably has global ramifications. It would depress trade and threaten the global financial system.
The lesson of the 1930s is that a global depression weakens democracies, leads to the rise of radical new political forces – and, in the process, raises the risk of international conflict.
A modern version of the 1930s would see a new generation of nationalist politicians rise to power in Europe, against a background of economic chaos and the break-up of the European Union. Tensions would also rise outside Europe, as the global economic situation worsened. The balance of power in Asia would shift even faster, with a rising China facing a weakened America. In both China and America, an economic crisis would see nationalist and protectionist forces gain influence.
These scenarios are not implausible. And yet, for all the parallels, I still cannot bring myself to believe that we are heading back to the 1930s. There are three main reasons why I think we are likely to escape.
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First, the very knowledge of what went wrong, 80 years ago, may help politicians avoid the same mistakes. China’s continued emphasis on the need for a “peaceful rise” owes something to a knowledge of the terrible errors of Imperial Japan.
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Second, there is a plausible argument that the 66 years of peace between the major powers and developed nations since 1945 actually reflects the progress of civilisation, rather than a lucky cycle in world history. In his recent book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, Steven Pinker of Harvard University, argues that mankind is becoming steadily less warlike and that “today we may be living in the most peaceable era in human history”.
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Finally, the developed world is starting from a much higher level of affluence than it did the 1930s. In an economic crash people might still lose their savings, their jobs and their homes – but they are less likely to be reduced to utter destitution. As a result, they may be less prone to political radicalisation.
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The Latvian economy shrank by 18 per cent in 2009 – but in the recent election there, two centrist parties came out on top. In Spain, unemployment is already over 22 per cent – and over 45 per cent for the young. And yet a moderate centre-right party won this month’s election.
So, although the risk of a severe economic crisis is very real, I don’t believe that we are at risk of sliding back into war. But that may simply be the failure of imagination of somebody lucky enough to be raised in a period of unparalleled peace and prosperity.
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