How well will western societies be able to cope with the enormous social, economic and even security stresses that they can expect over the next five years or so? Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world” Photo: Wikimedia Commons
At the end of the Second World War, George Orwell recorded several times in letters and in articles his feeling that the British people had seemed curiously happier during the War, than in the immediate past. Now of course Orwell did not mean that they were objectively bursting with life and joy, that they were happy to be bombed, or to see their husbands, sons and daughters sent off to war and in some cases die. But Orwell, a keen observer of the public mood, turned out to be broadly right, by some measures at least. Admissions to psychiatric hospitals decreased, for example, working days lost to illness and absenteeism went down, the effect of rationing was to improve health overall.
British morale in the War has been massively studied, and the conclusions have followed the usual Oedipal dialectical pattern of historical writing. First, wartime and postwar studies lauding the British spirit, then a short-lived “revisionist” school of younger historians sneering at ordinary people, and now, something of a consensus that the original picture—of a society which managed to endure a great deal of stress without actually cracking—is broadly accurate. I’m not going to go into this subject in any detail here, fascinating though it is, but rather use a couple of its features to address a larger and now quite urgent question: how well will western societies be able to cope with the enormous social, economic and even security stresses that they can expect over the next five years or so? Can they expect to do it successfully, not least burdened with governments who fear and distrust their own populations, and political parties whose only business model is division? Can we learn anything from successes and failures in crisis situations of the past, in Britain and elsewhere?
It was not as though life in pre-war Britain had been idyllic. Poverty, malnutrition and unemployment were widespread, but above all, there was a mood of gloom and fear about the War that pretty much everyone assumed was coming. It would be like the War of 1914-18 but much worse: bombing attacks on cities, probably using poison gas, would cause millions of deaths within the first few weeks. Society would break down, with or without a physical invasion from Germany. This was the apocalyptic near-future described by Orwell himself, through the nightmares of George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939), but it was also a commonplace ingredient of the popular and political culture of the time. Paradoxically, therefore, the first year of the War, at least, came almost as a kind of relief. It could have been so much worse.
It’s important to stress that the British experience was essentially unique, as the only European country fully involved in the War not to be occupied. This distinguishes its experience fundamentally from say France or Italy, where the historiography of the domestic side the War is still bitterly controversial, and families and communities still bear its scars. Taking France as the counter-example, we can ask whether it is possible to identify factors that help, or hinder the maintenance of some kind of national solidarity and unity when faced with a sense of impending disaster. In the case of France, that unity came apart.
Recall what that led to. After the stunning initial defeat of the French and British Armies in May 1940 and the evacuation at Dunkirk, the Army, led by its new chief Weygand, refused to fight on, fearing domestic collapse and even civil war and a Communist revolution. The government was intimidated into asking for an armistice, and parliament dissolved itself and handed full powers to the ageing Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, who was thought to be an apolitical figure possibly capable of saving France in its darkest hour. The regime established in the spa town of Vichy, however, reflected the interests and ambitions of the anti-Republican Right: the Army, the Church, many members of the public service, as well as many politicians, journalists, intellectuals and businessmen. These were people who had never accepted the idea of a secular Republic in the first place, and who viewed defeat, and even occupation for a few years, as a reasonable price for establishing an elite conservative dictatorship, similar to Franco’s Spain.
These people saw themselves acting in the best interests of France: preserving what could be preserved such that France could take its place among major powers again when the Germans left. (Explicit supporters of Germany and Nazism did exist but they were few in number.) But many others saw Vichy as the only sensible option, the Marshal as the only figure capable of unifying France, and almost any political system as preferably to the terminally dysfunctional Third Republic, which in the end nobody could be bothered to try to save. Vichy’s policy of active collaboration—essentially trying to secure as much influence over Berlin as possible—was much less widely popular, and recent studies show that the French people were (understandably) very hostile to German occupation, and resisted to the maximum extent possible in a complex and difficult situation. .
Finally, Resistance itself was a very controversial concept, both during and after the war, and indeed still is. For all their undoubted heroism, groups were divided in their loyalties and objectives, and it didn’t help that the Communists moved essentially overnight from being de facto allies of the Germans to claiming the major role in the Resistance. (And to be fair many ordinary Communists had ignored the instructions from Moscow and fought the Germans anyway.) For many on the Right the Resistance were simply terrorists, risking bringing the country down in civil war and staging a reign of terror when the war was over.
Yet although the events following the French defeat had very particular origins, the fact is that the whole period from say 1936-1945 (on which a new book seems to come out every month) is and always will be deeply divisive. De Gaulle when in power saw clearly that, unless a narrative could be developed and accepted, the country risked simply coming apart. His imposed narrative of “forty million resistants )” was an exaggeration, but contained enough truth to be grudgingly accepted by almost everyone, and so helped to keep the country together. The majority of the scholarship of the last couple of generations has been devoted to undermining that narrative in detail, but without replacing it with anything very substantial. And at a more popular level, the Resistance still serves as an ideological and patriotic touchstone: a new film will be released in October about the life of the Resistance hero and martyr Jean Moulin.
Whilst the history of the two countries indeed diverged sharply after 1940, their experience in the first 6-9 months of the war is nonetheless useful to compare, partly to understand what followed, and partly because it illustrates broader lessons. The first and most obvious distinction between the two countries in 1939 was that in Britain the political system more-or-less worked, whereas in France it didn’t. Chamberlain’s fall from power in 1940 was partly the result of the (probably inevitable) failure of his policy of rearmament combined with negotiations, but partly also his health (he was already suffering from bowel cancer) and a general sense of political exhaustion. His replacement by Churchill was unproblematic and generally welcomed, and there were no substantial differences among British political parties about the War. In France, the situation was utterly different. Although some efforts were made to reform the dying Third Republic, political life in France was already fractured beyond repair, to the point that there was never a formal vote in the Chamber of Deputies to declare War: it was too controversial. This was a reflection of the instability of the political system itself (some administrations lasted only a few weeks) but also of the bitter divisions within the country Divisions between Left and Right, Republicans and their traditionalist opponents, were bad enough, but the Left itself was divided because of Stalin’s insistence that the Communists treat Socialists as their principal enemies (“social fascists”) until the Popular Front of 1936, and then as enemies once more following the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Even before the fighting started, therefore, there were multiple deep and fundamental political cleavages in the country, extending even to whether it should be a Republic or not.
What made it worse was that the French government system itself functioned very poorly. Its members were often men of ability—by today’s standards, certainly—but there was no real central organisation for decision-making at all. The President of the Council of Ministers was more like the chairman of a committee than a British Prime Minister, without any personal staff of his own. Records of important decisions were not necessarily kept. And even capable figures were open to influence and to outside pressures, and could only do so much. For example, Paul Reynaud, the PCM at the time of the German attack in 1940 was a capable politician and keen to defend the country, but completely under the spell of his mistress Hélène de Portes, who invited herself to important political meetings, and whose rabid anti-British and pro-German prejudices and unauthorised personal diplomacy shaped a lot of government policies.
The result was a political system that was despised by the vast majority of the French of all persuasions, and its passing was scarcely regretted. Yet if the government and the elites failed the people, the people did not fail the country. A new generation of men left the Gare de l’Est for a war on the frontiers, as their fathers and grandfathers had done, because that was the tradition, and in those days that was what men did. The sabotage and desertions demanded by Stalin and feared by the government did not happen: Communists were as motivated to fight as anyone else, perhaps more so. And when the fighting actually began, those French units in contact with the Germans fought extremely well, inflicting casualties on the Germans as proportionately heavy as they later suffered at the hands of the Red Army.
Because the soldiers of 1940 were not fighting for a decrepit political system or an ideology, or to keep a bunch of elderly politicians in power. They were fighting, as they had been brought up to do, to defend their families and communities, in the days when there were families and communities. The schoolbooks and the instructional system taught them pride in their country and its achievements, and an admiration for the beauty and variety of its terrain, the strength of its culture and the pageantry of its history. And after the defeat, the Resistance was born from essentially the same set of motives: patriotism, the need to restore some degree of national pride and honour, and to play at least a part in the liberation of their own country. From extreme Right to extreme Left, there was surprisingly little difference in the attitudes and rhetoric of ordinary résistants. The situation in Britain was easier in 1939-40 because the political system was more stable. There was no equivalent of the organised anti-democratic Right, and neither the Church nor the Army were political actors as they were in France. After the defeat of Dunkirk, there were certainly voices advocating an armistice with Germany just for reasons of national self-preservation, but there was no equivalent at all of the lobby in France that gleefully anticipated defeat as a way of settling political debts and introducing a new form of authoritarian government. Nor was the domestic political system anything like as fragmented and contorted, and it proved easy enough to set up a National Unity government when the war began. The contingency plans that had been made since the mid-1930s generally worked satisfactorily.
The result was a country which went to war soberly and sombrely, with a sense of dread but also a recognition that there were things that could not be avoided. There was no sudden outburst of patriotism or flag-waving, but a pervasive sense, recorded in a thousand memoirs, broadcasts and family memories, that this was something that just had to be done. “Let’s get it over with,” was the most common way of expressing it. Nor was there any jingoism or manufactured anti-German hatred. Unlike in 1914 there was no need to sell the War. Everyone had seen the newsreels and knew what Hitler and the Nazis were capable of, and indeed had already done. The conviction that this was an evil to be eradicated only grew with the progress of the war, and by the time British troops liberated Belsen in April 1945, it was more or less absolute. Even in 1939, there were relatively few determined pacifists, while the intellectual Left, dominated by the Communist Party at the time, through publications like the New Statesman , and which clung in some cases to the Moscow line that this was a bourgeois civil war and British workers should stay out of it, had no practical influence on the Labour Party in or out of Parliament.
In Britain, therefore, there was a broadly accepted narrative about the War in 1939. It was not hegemonic—no narrative ever is—but it was very widely shared. It was also highly defensive in tone, rather than being based on aggression or hatred of foreigners. For all its imperfections, Britain and its population, history and culture were generally considered worth defending, and, crucially, worth making personal sacrifices for. The result was that whilst there was a lot of grumbling—the British loved to grumble—there was also a high degree of acquiescence in things like food rationing, transport restrictions and black-outs, which substantially disrupted ordinary life. Moreover, almost from the start of the War it was recognised that things could not go back to normal afterwards, and the groundwork quickly started to be laid for the successful post-1945 economic and social model, which only started to be abandoned in the 1980s. There was a feeling in other words that the War was also being fought for something.
France did not have this accepted narrative, or rather, being France, it had several competing ones. For many on the Right, a war with Germany would destroy France, and this was assumed to be the aim of the financiers of the City of London who were pulling the strings, so that they could take over France’s Empire: naturally, the British destruction of the French fleet at Oran simply confirmed this theory. Such conspiracy-theorising was nothing new in France: only the identity of the villains varied with the situation. As well as the British (pervasively), there was a rich domestic tradition of blaming Freemasons for everything from the French Revolution (a régime-change operation carefully prepared over decades, just look at the evidence!) to the Dreyfus Affair. The latter was widely interpreted as a German-sponsored plot involving Jews and Freemasons to destroy the morale of the French Army, and the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish and that the government was led by the (moderate) Radical Socialists, many of whom were Freemasons, was as much proof as anyone could want. These theories were abundantly circulated in magazines and even respectable newspapers of the time, by authors who today would have YouTube channels explaining the “reality” of the Iran war, for example.
But the greatest narrative fracture of all was over the Communist Party. Although the Party itself was hopelessly disorganised by the whiplash effect of the Nazi-Soviet pact and its leadership had fled to Moscow, it was still viewed with terror by much of the French political establishment. It was widely believed that a secret underground army was ready to take power in Paris, in conjunction with a German invasion. When the invasion was in progress, and the government had fled to Bordeaux, one of the arguments used by Weygand in favour of an armistice was that the threatened revolution had already taken place, and Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF, had been brought back by the Germans and was now installed the Elysée. A simple telephone call established that this was quite untrue.
De Gaulle was very aware that the tensions in French society that had produced this nonsense were fundamental, and that France in 1944-45 was quite close to civil war. He managed them as best he could, taking former Vichy commanders into his Army for example, and doing everything possible to promote unity consistent with the need for an acceptable level of house-cleaning, and ensuring that he retained the support of the Resistance and his fellow exiles. But De Gaulle soon left power, and the country staggered through the traumas of Indochina and Algeria, with an effective military coup in 1958 returning De Gaulle to power. It was only then, surviving another attempted military coup in 1961, as well as various attempts to assassinate him, that he felt strong enough to use the broadcast media and the education system to develop a healing myth, a discourse of unity that glossed over a lot of inconvenient facts but which among other things eventually reduced the traditional reactionary Catholic Right to a shadow of what it had been. (It’s staging a bit of a comeback now because of the stupidity of recent French governments.)
This is a breathless and highly selective canter through two very complex episodes, but I suggest that they illustrate two basic truths that you won’t find in political science textbooks. One is that people will put up with hardships, privation and even danger if they believe that they have something in common which is worth preserving. This thing, or these things, are not generally dictated by external powers and structures (although they may be shared by them) but come rather from common inheritances and common understandings that people would rather preserve than lose. The British did not endure hardship, scarcity, and danger for five years because the government told them to, or because they loved their country’s class system, and indeed studies have shown that attempts to influence popular morale in Britain during the War were no more effective than they were anywhere else. Likewise, the French soldiers of 1940 and the Resistance fighters of later years were not fighting for a discredited political system, nor for the “two hundred families” popularly supposed to control France, but for the country itself, its self-respect and honour, and in the latter case also for a better future, as set out in the programme of the National Resistance Council, which formed the basis of the successful post-1945 French economic and social model, until it was abandoned from the 1980s.
Second, when a common discourse is either absent or breaks down, it is seldom replaced by another common discourse. Rather, a struggle begins to impose discourses, generally pre-existing ones, which emerge from the shadows to do combat with each other. In general, these discourses reflect ideological positions that their authors have long held, and represent an attempt to wrestle the reality of current events into a pattern they are happy with, and think they can explain to others. Yet even so, we shouldn’t assume that ordinary people are stupid, and simply accept powerful discourses, or mechanically choose between them as between brands of shower-gel. There’s a very important distinction between a supposedly “hegemonic” discourse, and how people individually think and feel, and even more how they behave. In practice, no discourse is ever entirely hegemonic except at the most formal level, nor is a discourse simply generated by material conditions and class interests, or at least nobody has ever managed to explain exactly how that could happen. For example, the current discourse of “open borders” and “unrestricted immigration,” could be regarded as morally hegemonic in that western power structures, medias, pundits and NGOs all regard it as a theoretically essential objective, including its logical corollary, that the interests of migrants should if necessary come before the interests of the indigenous inhabitants. But in practice no government actually behaves that way consistently, and no electorate supports such views by even the tiniest majority. It’s just that you risk your career by publicly questioning the discourse.
Two important conclusions follow from this, I suggest. One is that discourses do not need to be “true” (whatever that is) to be valuable. De Gaulle’s myth of “forty million résistants ” was widely accepted because it was an exaggeration, rather than an invention, because it unified the country behind a positive message, and because it closed down a controversy which could have torn the country apart. Likewise, the post-1994 discourse of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, and its associated Commission, did not find The Truth (impossible anyway) and did not achieve Reconciliation, but that was never the point. The point was to establish an accepted discourse which would avoid catastrophe and enable the construction of a fragile national unity, which is indeed what happened. The wider population, in my experience, was not greatly interested in the process, but the discourse was effective in what it set out to do.
These are examples of elite discourses, and all governments, all the time, attempt to impose such discourses on their populations, with more or less success. But in the end, they do not have much practical effect unless they are at least consistent with the feelings of ordinary people. In both Britain and France in 1939 there was a reservoir of community feeling, social solidarity and shared culture and history, as well as the desire to preserve all of these, which reinforced the official discourse in Britain, and helped to make up for its deficiencies in France. It will become more apparent from the foregoing, I think, why I have insisted on so many occasions that any form of return to compulsory military service in the West is impossible and indeed unthinkable. The rhetoric and discourse of governments, even the amount of money they are prepared to spend, doesn’t and cannot make any difference. On what conceivable basis could a western government launch such an initiative? What collective feelings of solidarity could it appeal to? What are these “values” that our political class loves to invoke? They have no idea. And in the end you cannot motivate people entirely by hatred and fear, which is pretty much all they have left. The old days are gone, and it is our elites who banished them, with their “post-national” concept of countries as gigantic hotels in which random groups of people happen to live for a period of time. Who’s going to die for a hotel?
But the challenge won’t necessarily be as dramatic as that. I began this essay by talking about the probable stresses of the next few years, which are more likely to be economic and social than military, and I made the point that we cannot expect any useful lead from governments that despise their own populations. The question, then, is whether there will remain enough of sense of solidarity and community among ordinary people to make up for the uselessness and negativity of governments. I fear not, and in that spirit let’s remind ourselves of just how much damage neoliberal governments have actually done to the kind of solidarity I described earlier. The aim of neoliberalism, after all, is to reduce human beings to the unique status of interchangeable consumers, with no bonds of family, community, history, culture or language that might undermine their homogeneity, and make the markets that constitute their entire existence less efficient than they might be. And the western elite likes to congratulate itself that wherever it goes, history and national cultures have largely been suppressed, national identities have been scrambled, you find the same shops, hotels and restaurants everywhere, everyone watches the same TV and cinema, and everybody speaks English. If the West is not yet a perfectly featureless and obstacle-free social and cultural terrain, it is approaching that status. And for forty years now, the gospel of radical individualism and “freedom” has triumphed everywhere.
Which is fine until something goes wrong. And things do go wrong, and suddenly economic efficiency turns out not to be the only important criterion, and you realise that society still has to actually function as well. I’ll take the example of Covid, because it’s recent and also very straightforward. Now I’m not going to get mired in questions of the efficiency of the vaccines or the origin of the virus, I’m just going to point out that, as western governments went through the standard political crisis progression from denial to panic, they asked their citizens to do a number of banal and often sensible things. Because the disease was spread through the air, and once infected, people breathed it out, governments asked people to wear masks to prevent them from contaminating others. This kind of thing is standard public health procedure for transmissible diseases, and is very common in Asian countries during flu epidemics for example. The message was straightforward enough for a six-year-old to understand: please perform a simple task before going into a crowded space to avoid infecting others, and others will perform the same simple task to protect you. Everyone will be safer and the epidemic will be over more quickly.
In most western countries the reaction was at best qualified support, and was often violently negative. You mean I should put myself to a small inconvenience to help others ? What’s in it for me? After all, if I’m not infectious and I don’t wear a mask I lose nothing. Governments found that they no longer knew how to appeal to the wider collective interest: indeed, their speechwriters were not even really sure quite what it was. And whilst simple selfishness and egoism explain a lot of the resistance, this was the point—aided by a lot of government incompetence—where previously marginal discourses started to creep out of their holes. Today wearing masks, tomorrow concentration camps. It’s all a big conspiracy to increase profits, all these masks contain micro-chip tracking devices (I heard that one), but most simply and brutally, My Freedom includes the freedom to infect others with a dangerous and potentially deadly disease and if you don’t like that, tough. In some countries, at least, the right to infect others was offered as the ultimate demonstration of rugged individualism.
In idle moments, I wonder whether Covid wasn’t some kind of simple test imposed upon us by a Galactic Authority to see whether western governments were still capable of handling a health emergency as calmly and competently as they would have done fifty years before, and if they would learn lessons about the risks of globalisation and a hyper-fragile and tightly-coupled world economy. And the depressing answer is “No” in both cases. Which doesn’t suggest that we are well-placed for the uncertain but serious consequences of a combination of Ukraine, Iran and climate change. In none of those cases have governments shown the ability to talk, or even think, in anything more than clichés. And there is no sign that western societies themselves now have anything like the capability for collective action they once possessed, even if there is something defined to do.
Consider rationing, for example. On the whole people prefer not to, and even oil industry experts, obsessed with prices, talk of “demand destruction” as the preferred “solution” to just not having enough oil. When you think about it, “demand destruction” means people going hungry, hospitals and schools forced to close, trains not running, airlines going bankrupt, and many more things, some of which are quite unpredictable now. It’s hard to see that as a “solution.” Now we are used to the idea of rationing by price. Some people cannot afford to feed themselves, others cannot afford to house themselves, and that’s just the way the world is. But the idea of deliberate rationing, of the setting of quotas by government, is almost literally unthinkable politically, and it’s not even clear that modern western governments have retained the capacity, or even the will, to do it any more. And what about the popular mood? How can a society brutalised for decades by ruthless individualism be expected to move overnight to a sense of solidarity and sharing?
And the way to political power these days is precisely through the denial of the very existence of an integrated society, and by splitting a nation into warring identities isolated from each other and holding different truths. In France, Mr Macron (the first President to actively hate his own country) has claimed that “there is no French culture.” Mr Mélenchon, not to be outdone, has sought to cultivate the “New France,” of immigrants, sexual minorities, Islamic fundamentalists and urban progressives, leaving everybody else as the Other, the old, tedious France of mere history. And one of his lieutenants has recently assured the French people that the idea that France was ever a “White Christian nation” is a myth. The same can be found in many other western countries, reproduced by a media which is ever watchful for any manifestation of national unity, or genuine collective identity, as opposed to loose coalitions of Grievance Industry start-ups. It struck me the other day that, for example, the contents of the French Communist Party’s 1944 manifesto would probably now be coded as “extreme Right.” And the most dangerous consequence of this deliberately inculcated division, extending now back over decades, is that it has undermined the popular solidarity which alone can make up for the failures of government, as much at the level of discourse as at the level of organisation.
This suggests that we are about to experience a particularly nasty three-part crunch. First, governments lack the capability or even the understanding to deal with some of the foreseeable crises of the next few years, let alone the unforeseeable ones. Second, a huge gap has opened between the official discourses of governments and the way that most people see the world, and third, forty years of neoliberalism have destroyed the social structures and informal organisations that might have made up for the two earlier failings, at least in part.
If that doesn’t depress you enough, come back next week and we’ll take the argument a stage further.
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