Book Review - Napoleon the Great

Book Review - Napoleon the Great

By Andrew Roberts

”He is the Napoleon of crime”, was how Sherlock Holmes described his nemesis Moriarty, head of the London underworld, in the popular crime novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This short description sufficed to inform the reader that Moriarty must be a truly formidable character indeed, someone who has risen to the absolute pinnacle of his chosen profession, and who is not to be trifled with. That the mere mention of Napoleon’s name roughly half a century after his death was still so pregnant with meaning and subtle menace to a Victorian audience suggests that during his short but intense life, Napoleon Bonaparte managed to leave his mark on the world. Even though he was ultimately defeated and brought low by his enemies, his name remains synonymous with military genius. In Napoleon the Great, British historian Andrew Roberts has written a superb biography of history’s consummate adventurer, a man who rose from relatively humble beginnings and exploited the tumultuous events of the French revolution to become Emperor of France and the undisputed master of Europe.

Napoleon Bonaparte (at this stage Buonaparte) was born in Ajaccio, Corsica in 1769. Since he was of the island’s nobility his future prospects were relatively bright, as long as his family could stay in the good graces of the French, who were reviled by many Corsican nationalists. Indeed, as a young man Napoleon sympathized with the nationalists, and viewed their leader, Pasquale Paoli, as something of a role model. His sympathies notwithstanding, the young Napoleon travelled to France to learn a soldier’s trade, and was soon commissioned as an artillery officer thanks to his gift for mathematics. Along the way his Corsican nationalist sympathies wavered, as he was forced to navigate the tumultuous political climate in the wake of the French revolution. Napoleon agreed with demands for equality before the law and the concept of promoting soldiers and civil servants based on merit, but he was never a hardcore Jacobin.

During the siege of Toulon in 1794, Napoleon commanded the victorious French forces, leading from the front, he was injured by the thrust of a British bayonet, but survived, and earned the respect of his men as a corporal in gold braid. Victory at the Siege of Toulon helped launch Napoleon’s career and catapulted him ahead of other ambitious peers. It also showed his capacity for hard work, ingenuity and disregard for his own physical safety on the battlefield, all of which would later help him seize power in France and humble the armies of his enemies.  

Even after this victory, Napoleon’s rise was by no means ensured, his career was nearly undone by his association with the bloodthirsty Robespierre brothers, when they were toppled later that same year, but after he returned to Paris and protected the Directory from a royalist uprising, his star was once more in the ascendant. Shortly after marrying the widow Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon became a general at the age of twenty-seven. Fearful of the ideals of the French revolution, the old monarchies of Europe had forged a coalition against France, intending to restore the old order. The main theatre of war was in Germany, and the Italian theater was regarded as a sideshow. Napoleon thought otherwise. Arriving in Nice he took command of the Army of Italy, and proceeded to lead it to victory against superior Austrian forces. During this campaign, Roberts notes, Napoleon was able to use his great energy and speed of maneuver to best his opponents, who were often older than he was, and led armies that were more poorly organized.

After the Italian campaign Napoleon went to Egypt, to lead a military expedition with a contingent of scientists, with the aim of challenging Britain’s overseas empire. The Egyptian campaign was a failure from a military standpoint, but thanks to Napoleon’s soldiers bringing home the Rosetta stone, modern Egyptologists are able to read hieroglyphics.

With the political situation in turmoil and France beset by external enemies as well as internal troubles, Napoleon seized power along with a group of political allies and became first consul in 1799, his position further cemented by the results of an election that was rigged in his favor.

Even though peace was soon signed with France’s principal enemies, Austria, Great Britain and Russia (Prussia joined them later), these nations would over the coming years form new coalitions against France, and would in time ground Napoleon and his empire down.

A vigorous domestic reformer as well as a soldier, Napoleon’s reign saw France being modernized in a many fundamental ways. His legal system, the Codé Napoleon, remains in use in France and in many countries around the word today. Napoleon reorganized the French civil administration to be one based on merit. He also founded the Banque de France, as well as reforming the French education system and implementing a new tax code. Always a tireless micro-manager who was interested in controlling the minutest aspect of his realms, he wrote a staggering number of letters and dictates throughout his life. Once, when he had left France to embark on one of his many military campaigns, he wrote a letter back home demanding that a provincial priest who had given a bad sermon would be severely admonished. This restless energy and capacity for overwork was one of Napoleon’s greatest strengths, even though he was unable to remain fully as vigorous later in life as his health deteriorated.      

Over the coming sixteen years after becoming consul in 1799, Napoleon waged war almost continually against France’s enemies. Having soundly defeated the Austrians, Prussians and Russians in battle many times, he reached the zenith of his power in 1807, when he met Tsar Alexander of Russia on a barge floating in the Neman river to sign the treaty of Tilsit, in effect dividing Europe between these two absolute monarchs. Relations between the two men were initially cordial, but Napoleon, who effused about Alexander that “Were he a woman, I would have taken him as my mistress”, never got the measure about the cool-headed and cunning tsar.

One of Napoleon’s most severe weakness, besides his total ineptitude when it came to naval warfare, was his inability to modernize French trade and finance. In The Ascent of Money, previously reviewed on this blog, Niall Ferguson asserts that British trade and finance remained superior to France throughout this era, which, together with the power of the Royal Navy, enabled the island nation to stay in the fight and bankroll France’s enemies. In effect, Napoleon’s empire was funded by victories on the battlefield that brought riches through plunder, a modus operandi that was inefficient and unsustainable in the long run. The bonds of the Banque de France were never equal to those issued by the British, and naval dominance meant that overseas trade could deliver prosperity much more reliably than plundering Vienna for a third time.     

An effect of the trade imbalance was that Napoleon tried to browbeat his defeated enemies into agreeing to an embargo of British goods, called the continental system. This hurt the economies of the German states, as well as Russia. Napoleon’s anger over Tsar Alexander’s transgression against the continental system were one of the factors that led to the greatest military blunder of his career. In 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia with an army more than 600 000 strong. Even though he captured Moscow, the Russians retreated from his armies and burned everything that could be of use by the French, and the brutal winter soon started to take its toll. In November 1812, the shattered remnants of Napoleon’s armies crossed the Berezina river and retreated into Poland. This fatal defeat, which robbed the Grande Armée of most of its veterans as well as most of its cavalry, led Napoleon’s rivals to declare war against France once again. Even though Napoleon fought bravely and with great ability to defend his empire, his efforts were in vain. Roberts points out that critics who dismissed Napoleon as a spend force by this point are wrong, he remained a battlefield commander of great ability, but ultimately France’s enemies were too numerous, its armies too depleted and its population too tired of war.

After a short Exile to the Mediterranean Island of Elba, Napoleon briefly returned to power in 1815, but was defeated by a combined force of British and Prussian soldiers at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. Napoleon’s defeat was not inevitable, but a series of bad decisions led to him being defeated by Blücher and the Duke of Wellington, who had previously shown great ability while fighting against the French armies in the Peninsular war. Exiled for a second time, this time to the remote pacific Island of Saint Helena, Napoleon died in 1821, most likely of stomach cancer, the illness that had claimed the life his father and several other family members.  

The Napoleonic epic gives any biographer a treasure trove of material, and Roberts has used all of this to great effect. Napoleon the Great is a thoroughly enjoyable read that is sure to delight anyone with even a remote interested in history, and tells the tale of one of the most fascinating men who ever lived. It is true that the ears waged by Napoleon led to the deaths of many, both soldiers of civilians. It is also true, Roberts is careful to mention, that not all wars fought by Napoleon were his fault. Yes, his invasions of Spain and Russia were naked acts of imperialist aggression, but he also tried to make peace with Great Britain and her allies repeatedly, but was most often rebuffed and had to go to war only once diplomacy had failed.

In answering the question of whether Napoleon managed to achieve his dreams and ambitions, Roberts points to his childhood heroes, Alexander the great and Julius Caesar. Before Napoleon any ambitious young man wanted to be like Alexander the great and Julius Caesar. After Napoleon, any ambitious young man wanted to be like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.         

Book Review - Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet

Book Review - Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet
By Lyndal Roper

As one of the most famous and consequential characters in European history, Martin Luther is an obligatory part of any high school’s history curriculum. We all know that Luther’s famous 95 theses, nailed to the Wittenberg church’s door in in 1517, challenged the authority of the Catholic Church, especially on the issue of granting indulgences.  Luther’s ideas led to a schism in European Christianity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648. In Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet, Oxford historian Lyndal Roper gives contemporary readers a close personal look at the father of protestant Christianity, a complex character whose religious and philosophical belief continually evolved, both before and after the moment he nailed his theses to the church door. Over the course of reading the book one constantly has to remind oneself that Mrs. Roper wasn’t actually there to witness the events and talk to Luther first hand, his life and actions are so comprehensibly laid bare that you could be forgiven for thinking that was the case.

Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Saxony in 1483, but his family soon moved to the prosperous mining town of Mansfeld. His father, Hans, was a man of great stature and authority, who worked tirelessly to rise through the ranks and eventually became a mining inspector, a post which afforded his family a comfortable life. His hard work and toil were no doubt helped by the fact that Luther’s mother, Margarethe, came from a relatively prosperous mining family. It was Hans Luther’s wish that his eldest son should study law, since lawyers were much in demand in the busy mining town, and a trained lawyer would be of much help to the family. For Martin, however, his brief stint at law school proved to be an unhappy one, instead, Martin entered St Augustine’s monastery at Erfurt in 1505 to study theology and become a man of the cloth. This decision enraged Hans, who thought it a monumental waste of time, and showed little understanding for his son’s choice of career. Naturally this must have stung Luther, but he soon found other mentors to look up to for guidance within his religious order, the first and most importance of these being the noted preacher and theologian Johann von Staupitz. An anxious Luther confessed all his sins, real or imagined, at great lengths to Staupitz, who counselled Luther to pursue an academic career as a tonic for his theological self-flagellation.   

Even though he had chosen his own path in life, Luther was unhappy with the austere monastic life of a Dominican friar. He later attributed the lack of sleep, poor rations and freezing winter days spent preaching outside wearing nothing but a thin woolen robe for his poor health later in life. In 1507 Luther was ordained in Erfurt Cathedral and the following year, having earned his bachelor’s degree in bible studies, Staupitz invited him to come and teach at the newly formed University of Wittenberg, where he served as dean. Luther accepted his invitation, and his life took a turn for the better. He got on with his  work and enjoyed life in Wittenberg among his university students and colleagues. In 1512 he became a doctor of theology, reaching an important academic milestone.

At this point, the rest of Luther’s life could have been that of a rather anonymous provincial theology professor, content with his lot in life. However, it was not to be. Although criticism of the papacy was nothing new, the advent of the printing press meant that ideas could now travel far faster and further than what had been previously possible. Luther’s 95 theses were an attack on the authority of the papacy and its bloated administration, published in a form common for theological debates at the time. The theses spread all over Germany in a matter of months and became a source of debate and controversy. The core of Luther’s ideas, which he later expanded upon as he redoubled his attacks on the papacy, was that salvation lay in faith alone, and so could not be gained through alms or good works, and that all doctrines not found in scripture were to be discarded.  Essentially every man was to be his own scholar and interpreter of the bible, and did not need to look to a priest for answers. Luther was excommunicated and declared a heretic for opposing the Catholic Church, and at the Edict of Worms in 1521 he stuck to his beliefs when confronted by the Holy Roman Emperor himself, Charles V.  

Luther also attacked clerical celibacy, and married Katharina von Bora, a former nun. According to Luther the need for clergy to stay above the desires of the flesh was utter nonsense, since man was born into sin and led sinful lives no matter how devout they were, sex and procreation within the bonds of matrimony was as natural as passing water after drinking too much ale.    

Being an atheist myself, much of Luther’s criticism of the Catholic Church seems entirely reasonable, such as the abuse of the sale of indulgences, yet as Roper points out Luther’s motivations are hard to sympathize with for a modern reader. When German peasants, inspired by Luther’s writings, rebelled against their feudal lords, Luther sympathies lay firmly with the lords. He saw temporal matters as being entirely the domain of the aristocracy and the ruling classes, Roper writes, and so did not care much for the demands of the peasants. This led to Luther losing much of his popular support, and over time he became more of a symbolic character as the founder of a new branch of Christianity, himself less and less able to personally influence events.

Roper’s genius lies in being able to both place Luther’s actions in a historical context which is easy to understand, while also shining a light on all aspects of his character, good and bad. Luther was certainly an entertaining host and a good friend to many, imbued with a simple and rustic sense of humor. But he was also somewhat of a zealot, who turned potential allies into enemies because he refused to compromise on even the most trivial aspects of his beliefs. Perhaps it was that very stubbornness that enabled him to publish his theses in the first place. Luther was also an anti-Semite, and a virulent one at that, even by the standards of his time.

For all his many flaws, it is undeniable that Martin Luther irrevocably changed Christianity and the history of Europe. Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet succeeds in explaining Luther’s life and legacy to the modern reader. At times Roper delves perhaps a little too deeply into the finer points of scripture and theology, but overall, she manages to keep up a coherent and interesting narrative throughout the book.    

 

                                                                

Book Review - Harold Wilson

Book Review - Harold Wilson

By Ben Pimlott

Defining a man who has been labelled by contemporaries as well as political scholars as a particularly enigmatic, controversial and mysterious character was never going to be an easy task. Harold Wilson, a humble grammar school boy from Yorkshire became Labour leader and later prime minister during a time of great turmoil, both foreign and domestic, for Britain. Wilson stills holds the record for winning most general elections, four in total, and served as prime minister between 1964-70 and 1974-76.

Wilson joined the front benches as a fresh-faced technocrat in the post-war Atlee Shadow Cabinet, and slogged doggedly to prominence in the Labour Party. For more than a decade during the sixties and seventies he shaped the political weather and helped legalize abortion and homosexuality as well as outlawing capital punishment and founding the Open University, yet his name seems curiously omitted from Labour history if you listen to contemporary politicians. The achievements of Clement Atlee are widely celebrated while a former leader who is a lot more controversial than Mr. Wilson, Tony Blair, still looms large in the national debate.

It is a great shame that Mr. Pimlott is no longer with us, his honest and perceptive biography of Wilson paints the most accurate portrait to date. This new edition, published in 2016, features a foreword by Peter Hennessy that places Wilson’s life and works in a contemporary context. Or at least it did until the general election in early June of 2017 upended old truths about the electoral prospects of the Labour Party. I had thought that this review would be easier to write after the general election, instead it became a fiendishly difficult project. Mr. Corbyn’s success, who Mr. Hennessy comprehensibly thrashed in the foreword, while holding Wilson aloft as an example of a past grand master whose deft touch the Islington leftist sorely lacks, could mean that we are facing a watershed moment in British, as well as European, politics. Like Mr. Hennessey I firmly believe that we can learn a lot from Wilson, but perhaps not in the way he thought. To get to the root of this conundrum, and get the measure of this mammoth biography, a brief plunge into British history and the life of Harold Wilson is required.

Harold Wilson was born into a lower middle-class family in Yorkshire in 1916. His father, Herbert, was a chemist and his mother a housewife. The Wilsons were never rich, but through hard work and grit they managed to carve out a moderately prosperous life for themselves. Pimlott notes that Margaret Thatcher, born nine years later, was born too late to remember the harsh economic times that plagued the Wilsons during the post-World War I period. Wilson was a gifted and hardworking young man, and went on to win a scholarship to a grammar school before later attending Jesus College at the prestigious Oxford University. Wilson was only moderately engaged in politics during his studies at University, but later went on to do economic research regarding unemployment and the trade cycle for the progressive economist William Beveridge. During World War II Wilson served as a specialist in Whitehall, and after the war he served in the Atlee government as Secretary for Overseas Trade. Wilson’s background is important because it marks him as perhaps the most economically literate prime minister in British history.

The Atlee postwar Labour government has been widely celebrated by party historians as Labour’s finest hour, when landmark legislation was enacted which led to the creation of the Welfare State, with the NHS as the jewel in the crown. A couple of years in, however, the party leadership was increasingly demoralized and bereft of ideas. When Atlee suggested introducing some modest charges to the NHS to pay for increased military expenditure he soon had a cabinet rebellion on his hands. The Labour party, like most left of center parties in Europe, consists of a diverse coalition of social democrats and democratic socialists. As Pimlott notes repeatedly, the alchemy of the Labour party is especially volatile, some semblance of party unity is often necessary to achieve electoral success, and the task of keeping the party together is a difficult and thankless one. In the cabinet revolt that followed the defense spending row the leader of the Labour left, Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, a coalminer’s son who served as minister of health and had recently spearheaded the creation of the NHS, quit in protest. He received unexpected support from Wilson. Up until now Wilson had been regarded as a policy mandarin, not part of either the Labour left or the right. By swinging to the left to resign with Bevan, Wilson endeared himself to the left wing of the party, but it was widely assumed that his career was over.

This turned out not to be the case. Wilson soon returned to the Shadow Cabinet as the shadow chancellor, now under the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell, a leader who belonged on the right wing of the Labour party. During the following years the Gaitskell right clashed repeatedly with the Bevanite left. Wilson, who was now regarded as a creature of the left, was distrusted by the right wing and Gaitskell regularly plotted do to away with him. Wilson did his best to keep his head down while connecting with the membership rank and file and digging his trench deep in the crimson soil of the party. After Gaitskell passed away due to a sudden illness, Wilson successfully ran for Labour leadership in 1963.

Wilson has consistently been accused of being a tactician with little overall strategy, but during the early sixties he cleverly and consistently maneuvered to position the Labour Party in such a way that it could become the natural party of government. Speaking during his first party conference, Wilson laid out a bold vision where Britain would be modernized in the “white heat of technology.” Wilson’s long-term plan was to link Labour in the minds of the electorate with modernity, meritocracy and economic planning. The last part of his vision was in vogue at the time, when the Soviet Union enjoyed strong growth, and is also a legacy of his earlier mentor William Beveridge. When the 1964 general election dawned, Britain had endured thirteen years of conservative rule. There was a widespread longing for something new, as well as a sense that British industry was becoming obsolete and needed to be modernized. The incumbent Tory prime minister, Lord Alex Douglas Home, who was the last to enjoy the distinction of being elected from the House of Lords, was a soft target for the quick witted, high-tech Wilson. In a commons debate Wilson called the hapless prime minister, who had admitted that he used matchsticks to think through economic problems, “the fourteenth lord Home”. A flabbergasted Douglas Home responded by saying that surely his opponent was the fourteenth Mr. Wilson, a jibe at his rural middle-class background.

Labour won the 1964 election on a promise to fundamentally reform and renew the British economy. After thirteen years in the wilderness, everything seemed to be going Labour’s way. The press liked Wilson, the public liked Wilson, the Labour left were overjoyed that they were no longer out in the cold and the right were in no position to oust him any time soon. The rosy mood of these early days contrast sharply with the bitterness and acrimony that were to haunt the later years of Wilson’s reign, and the disastrous wilderness years Labour endured during the eighties and nineties.

This was largely down to the fact that Wilson promised the world but failed to deliver on his radical promises. During his tenure as prime minister, Wilson had the misfortune of constantly being at the mercy of events outside his control. Britain’s decline from global empire to nation state within Europe meant that the pound was dangerously overvalued, and the economy was severely hamstrung as a result. Costly military bases maintained overseas certainly didn’t help either, even if they kept up the illusion that Britain was still a heavyweight global player.  

Even though a devaluation of the sterling was necessary, Wilson knew that it would be considered a betrayal against the country. Labour was especially vulnerable on this point, since they would be accused by the Tories of being Bolshevik spendthrifts and gravediggers of the empire if they dared to devalue. After a successful snap election in 1966 that increased Labour’s majority, the agony of a devaluation denied grew steadily worse. I have never read any book of any kind, including books about macroeconomic theory, where inflation gets such a prominent role. At the time it was the ghoul whose gnashing teeth that kept Wilson and his Chancellor, James “Jim” Callaghan, awake at night. Devalue and be crucified by press and public, or keep the bloated pound and condemn any dreams about the white heat of technology to the dustbin. Added to this misery were recurring problems with industrial relations, an issue you would think that a Labour government should be able to handle, but apparently, they were not. A white paper on industrial relations labelled In Place of Strife ironically caused massive strife between Wilson and the Unions, with the unfortunate side effect, from Wilson’s perspective, of strengthening Jim Callaghan’s relations with the Unions and making him a dangerous contender for the party leadership.

On the foreign policy front, the Vietnam War was raging in the Far East, and president Johnson, as well as many Tories, consistently pressured Wilson to send British troops to Vietnam. To Wilson’s immense credit he steadfastly refused to give in, and never sent a single British soldier to Vietnam. Even when dealing with a communist insurgency in the lush jungles of the Far East, the need for devaluation reared its ugly head. To keep the British economy above the waterline, Wilson was dependent on American largesse, which meant that he couldn’t condemn the war in public. This in turn meant that he was soon under attack from the student left for being soft on the Vietnam War, a smear that was extremely unfair. Another foreign policy hotspot was Rhodesia, a British colony in Africa that broke away in the 1960s and declared white minority rule. Wilson was equally unwilling to send troops to Rhodesia, a fact he loudly declared out of fear that, you guessed it, would impact on the sterling and lead to runaway inflation. He settled for sanctions instead, which British oil companies deftly bypassed with help from their French colleagues. It is a great shame that Tony Blair didn’t share Wilson’s wisdom in avoiding unwise foreign entanglements.

As the 1960s rolled on and the euphoria of Labour’s 1966 election success wore of, the Wilson administration became increasingly embattled. In 1967 the government finally devalued, a move that helped restore the balance of payments to a surplus two years later. On a televised broadcast shortly before the devaluation, Wilson made a disastrous gaffe when he assured the public that “the pound in your pocket” wouldn’t lose its value. Although he went on later in the speech to say that prices would rise, Wilson’s detractors merrily crowed about the “pound in your pocket” for the rest of his political career. The economy was shaky following devaluation, but started to improve leading up to the 1970 election, one that Labour unexpectedly lost. For Wilson, this was a grave setback, as it is believed he had planned to retire a year or two later and hand over the reins to a chosen successor. Instead he had to lead the Labour party in opposition, at a time when the question of whether or not Britain should join the EU (then called the European Community) was hotly debated. Wilson had tried to join the EU in 1967, but had been rebuffed by French president de Gaulle. The new prime minister, Edward “Ted” Heath finally led Britain into the EU in 1973. The Labour party was dangerously split on the issue of Europe, and it took all of Wilson’s political experience as well as his mastery of the art of managing Labour’s different ideological factions to keep the party together.

Under increasing pressure from militant trade unions, Heath called a general election in 1974, and lost. Wilson was back in office after four years in opposition. Pimlott writes that Wilson was by now a changed man, no longer the energetic modernizer he had been during his first tenure as prime minister. The post 1974 Wilson was content to delegate and let his by now competent and experienced ministers get on with their job. Having been on the front bench almost constantly since 1945, Wilson’s health had started to decline, which was one of the main factors behind his resignation in 1976. He was succeeded by Jim Callaghan, whose popularity plummeted catastrophically during the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent. Callaghan was trounced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1979 election, and Labour spent the next 17 years in the political wilderness, riven by vicious internal strife.

Pimlott, who wrote Harold Wilson in the early nineties, looks back on the Wilson years with a healthy dose of forgiveness for all its shortcomings that the press did not feel at the time his resignation. Having experienced the success of Margaret Thatcher, the failure of Harold Wilson no longer feels so bad, he quotes one contemporary columnist. Unemployment was nearing one million when Wilson left office, which was considered dire at the time, but after Mrs. Thatcher that number had risen to three million. The fact that voters hadn’t rebelled en masse and the Tories were still in power at the time is something Pimlott seems to have found both disappointing and a bit depressing. Only a few years later, however, Labour under Tony Blair would go on to win a landslide victory in 1997, and today Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party looks like it could win a general election if and when Theresa May’s desperate coalition with the DUP collapses.

Harold Wilson is a very fascinating read. Pimlott paints a vivid picture of one of Britain’s great statesmen, as well as the history of the Labour Party and of the country itself. One gripe is that Pimlott assumes everyone is as knowledgeable of Labour Party history and Whitehall bureaucracy as himself, and doesn’t offer any explanations even when one might occasionally be needed. I recon myself to be fairly knowledgeable about British politics, yet I often had to go online and look things up. All in all, Harold Wilson is a fascinating biography, that succeeds in both illuminating the recent past as well as gifting its readers with a better understanding of issues that continue to be highly relevant to contemporary British politics, such as the internal strife of the Labour Party, Britain’s attitude to the EU and its need to find a new role for itself in a post imperial age.   

                   

    

                                                                   

Book Review - The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin

Book Review - The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin

By Roger Moorhouse

The Second World War is easily the most well-known conflict in human history. It was also the deadliest, with estimations of the total number of casualties running as high as eighty-five million people, including civilians. Most aspects of the war have been widely studied, yet historian Roger Moorhouse found to his chagrin that the non-aggression pact signed in August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union has largely been relegated to a footnote in history. It is often explained as merely a temporary convenience, as both sides were intent on going to war with one another, yet the pact lasted for nearly two years, during which Soviet raw materials fueled the Nazi war effort and German technological expertise enabled the Soviets to expand their industrial capacity. In The Devils’ Alliance, Mr. Moorhouse delves deeply into every aspect of the nonaggression-pact that shook the world, and tries to answer whether the pact was a temporary necessity born out of realpolitik or if, had the Germans not invaded the USSR during the spring of 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, the outcome of the war could have been radically different.

Germany, as Henry Kissinger helpfully pointed out in World Order (previously reviewed on this blog) has always suffered from being nestled smack bang in the middle of Europe, with potentially hostile nations to the east and west. In the eyes of the Western democracies, Adolf Hitler’s strategic position looked shaky during the build up to the war. Having agitated against the evils of communism for most of his political life, a détente between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union seemed very unlikely. In the event of a conflict against Britain and France, Germany’s eastern flank would be terribly vulnerable against an opportunistic Soviet attack. The Nazi high command had also grasped this fact, however, and during the summer of 1939 a tentative dialogue was initiated between the two regimes. At the same time, Britain and France made an attempt to eke out a diplomatic agreement with the Soviets that was almost comical for its ineptness. Weeks before the pact with Nazi Germany was signed, a joint delegation led by a British admiral and a French general arrived in Moscow. They had crossed the Baltic on a decrepit old steamship, a journey that took the better part of six days, and upon their arrival in Moscow the soviets were annoyed that neither half of the Anglo-French duo had the authority to negotiate a robust deal. Moreover, Mr. Moorehouse notes drily that the British admiral, an aristocrat by the name of Sir Reginald Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, was perhaps not ideally suited to rubbing shoulders and making small talk with the sons and daughters of a proletarian revolution.

In contrast to the allies quaint doddering, the Germans looked a much safer bet. Stalin had never held the Western democracies in very high regard. His suspicion is understandable given the fact that they had sent troops to fight against the Bolsheviks in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution. Merely a couple of days after talks with the British and French had broken down, the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, visited Moscow to much fanfare. A pact of non-aggression that included economic exchanged was signed between Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, on August the 23^rd. The pact became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and when it was signed Stalin declared a toast to the continued good health of the Führer. When news of the pact reached the West on the following day, it struck like a bombshell. At a stroke, this worsened the prospects for the English and the French. They could no longer hope for Soviet assistance in the event of a war breaking out, and the Americans were still firmly against being drawn into another European war.

The pact also included a secret clause that divided Poland between the two regimes. This secret clause came into effect a month later, when the Nazis invaded Poland and the Soviets followed suit a couple of weeks later. As Hitler’s panzers struck west to attack France the following year, Stalin was busy gobbling up the Baltic states to add their territory to the Soviet Union. When German soldiers marched into Paris during the summer of 1940, Britain had to come to terms with the lonely prospect of being the only major European country still standing against the Nazis. For Hitler, the war had so far gone spectacularly well, and Stalin was also mightily pleased with what the pact had helped him achieve.

Yet for all this superfluous bonhomie between the scum of the earth and the bloody assassin of the workers, the pact came with some obvious complications. For adherents to Communism or Nazism, a great deal of ideological acrobatics was now necessary to explain the new geopolitical circumstances. Communists all over Europe, who had for years been vehemently opposed to Nazi Germany, suddenly had to justify the necessity of a pact with their worst enemy. Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the British communist party, refused to tow the Comintern’s line, and welcomed the British declaration of war against Germany. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter, but following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he regained his lost standing in the party. After the war the USSR saw fit to commemorate him with a postage stamp for leaning against the wind. For the Nazis, the pact was equally uncomfortable, not least because Hitler in his work, Mein Kampf, had railed against communism and declared that it needed to be exterminated from the face of the earth.

Such ideological conundrums could at first be brushed under the rug, both sides benefited from the mutual economic exchange, but it wasn’t long until tensions flared. Soviet delegations to German factories clutched long lists detailing the different schematics for various components they were interested in obtaining. The German’s soon got into the habit of keeping their more sensitive projects classified and tried to make sure that the Soviets only got to inspect older fighter planes and tanks that were scheduled for decommission. The shipments of raw materials they had been promised in return had a curious habit of almost drying up when Stalin didn’t think he needed the German’s goodwill. When the Germans were becoming seriously annoyed by this practice, Stalin decided it was time to turn on the taps. Russian cargo trains started rattling westwards laden with oil and wheat with startling alacrity. At a summit in Berlin in December 1940, when Molotov visited the capital to negotiate plans for a new phase of deeper cooperation, the talks did not go well. The rival delegations talked past each other, the Germans giving lofty declarations that they would carve up the world between them, while the Soviets were interested in more urgent matters such as the precis demarcation of territory in eastern Europe. Molotov left without anything of import having been decided, and the future of the pact did not look promising.

Yet for all this mutual mistrust Stalin had no wish to go to war in 1941, and he trusted that Hitler would honor his commitments. Even when German forces were massing on the Polish border during the months before Operation Barbarossa, Stalin ordered that the raw materials should keep flowing and that everything should be done to appease Hitler. In the end, Hitler’s invasion ended the pact, which was pretty much the outcome that had been predicted in the West, but the short-lived treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union remains an interesting topic of academic study. As Mr. Moorehouse notes, Hitler and Stalin had a lot of similarities, and both seemed to mistrust the Western allies more than each other. Not the best foundation for building lasting cooperation perhaps, but that probably wasn’t what either side had in mind to begin with. For a more in depth look at the ambiguous relationship between Hitler and Stalin, and the events immediately preceding the invasion, I would recommend John Lukacs’s excellent June 1941: Hitler and Stalin.          

The Devils’ Alliance is a very interesting read and one that I would recommend for anyone with an interest in history and the Second World War. It delves into the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact from several angles, geo-political, economical and ideological, as Mr. Moorehouse walks the reader through the implications of perhaps the most shocking and unexpected diplomatic treaty signed during the Second World War.      

Book Review - 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed

Book Review - 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed

By Eric H. Cline

For the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean, the late bronze age was a period of great prosperity. The Egyptians, the Minoans, the Hittites, the Babylonians and many other kingdoms flourished during this time. Their economies were based on extensive trade networks with their neighbors as well as far off lands, and they erected splendid palaces from which they governed their burgeoning realms. Conflicts flared up from time to time, but disputes could often be solved with diplomacy, and many diplomatic treaties of a sort that we would recognize today were signed during this time. By learning how to forge bronze, a new and miraculous super alloy, they could field standing armies equipped with powerful weapons as well as tools for construction and agriculture. Yet, for all their sophistication and splendor, these civilizations all went extinct, or were at least greatly reduced in stature, following tumultuous events that took place around the year 1177 B.C. Eric Cline, professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, draws on his deep knowledge of the era, as well as recent archeological evidence, in an attempt to sift through the ashes and explain what lay behind this calamity.

The dominant regional power during this time was Egypt, which during the 16^th to 11^th centuries B.C. enjoyed great wealth and power. It was they who most forcefully battled the sea peoples, a marauding and migrating group of individuals of unknown origin who swept through the eastern Mediterranean during this time. Historically they have been blamed for toppling the late Bronze Age civilizations, but according to Mr. Cline the blame cannot be placed squarely on their shoulders. It might even be the case that they simply moved into abandoned settlements after the original inhabitants were ravaged by some other, untold, calamity. What we know, or at least what we know with reasonable certainty, is that the sea peoples invaded Egypt in 1178 B.C., and that Pharaoh Rameses III led his armies to defeat the invaders in a brutal and hard-fought campaign. Egypt began a period of decline during Rameses’s reign, his martial successes notwithstanding. Technological sophistication and the bountiful harvests provided by the annual inundations of the river Nile could not stave off the deleterious effects of a collapsing trade network and mounting unrest in the region. One other potential victim of the sea peoples was the ancient city of Troy, made famous by Homer’s magnum opus, The Iliad.

In trying to explain what lay behind the collapse of 1177 B.C., Mr. Cline turns to the concept of complexity theory, which in essence means that an outcome can brought about by a combination of many different factors. Just like our modern stock market is affected by many events of seemingly trifle significance, so the interconnected civilizations of the late Bronze Age were all, to some extent, dependent upon each other. There is evidence showing that armed conflict, famine, uprisings, climate change and earthquakes happened in or around this region during this time. It is possible that a combination of these factors could have brought about enough turmoil and instability to cause the late Bronze Age civilizations to collapse. After all, a civilization could probably recover from the odd earthquake or band of marauders, but if enough of these adverse events happen in close succession to one another, the impact of each individual event increases in severity. This could quite possibly spark an existential crisis from which there is no coming back. No definitive answer is provided, and to be fair to Mr. Cline it is quite impossible to give one, but complexity theory gives a very plausible explanation for how this collapse of civilizations might have come to pass.  

When reading 1177, one cannot help but wonder how stable our twenty-first century society really is. Just like the civilizations of the late Bronze Age we are part of an interconnected global system of commerce and diplomacy. We may not be dependent on foreign shipments of copper and tin to make bronze, but we certainly rely on oil and natural gas to keep our economies going. When it comes to potential harbingers of collapse such as war, famine, climate change and rebellion, we sure seem to tick a lot of those boxes as well. If it’s any consolation to worried readers, the great systemic collapse of the late Bronze Age wasn’t entirely bad news. Like a forest fire clearing away dead trees to make way for new growth, the fall of the late Bronze Age civilizations paved the way for the subsequent Greek and Roman empires to flourish. Scant consolation perhaps, but it’s all I can offer.

As the late Gore Vidal once remarked, a novelist may assign a motive to the actions of historical characters, where a historian may not. Mr. Cline is a most dutiful historian in this regard, offering several plausible explanations for what brought about the collapse of the late Bronze Age Civilizations. The target segment of 1177 seems to primarily be those who are historians or archeologists, or the layman with a keen interest in the time period. Sometimes I wish that he would focus on the grander narrative instead of going on a lengthy explanation of a comb found in soil sample 7A next to a middle eastern dirt road, but a sweeping narrative is naturally the domain of historical fiction and not a respectable professor of classics and anthropology. Considering the limited archeological evidence on offer, it is impressive that he is able to tell such a dramatic story of conflict and international intrigue, the occasional mentioning of soil samples and sub-stratas notwithstanding. All in all, I enjoyed reading 1177 B.C due to the fascinating glimpses it offered into a bygone age and the educated speculation as to how such a calamity could have come to pass.    

  

 

Book Review: Think Like a Freak

By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

In our day and age it’s fair to say that we are faced with many serious problems, most of them fiendishly difficult to solve. How can we safely create nuclear fusion? How can we predict earthquakes far enough ahead of time to evacuate vulnerable towns and cities? How do you squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube?

In Think Like a Freak, Steven Levitt, an economist from the University of Chicago and Stephen Dubner, a prominent national journalist and author, we learn how to adopt a mindset that enables us to approach difficult problems in an unconventional manner.

Most easy problems, Messrs. Levitt and Dubner explain, are not that hard to solve with fairly conventional thinking. Indeed, there is a reason that conventional thinking is…well…conventional. In most cases that’s precisely what you need. It’s the really difficult problems that requires novel approaches in order to solve them. The first step one must go through in order to move past conventional thinking, the authors argue, is to utter the three hardest words in the English language: “I don’t know”. Children can do this without too much difficulty, but as they grow older they discover that in our society it is generally better to pretend that you have the answer and then be proved wrong at a later date than admit that you don’t have a clue about something. The authors offer a simple example of this. If an analyst makes a prediction that the stock market will triple in twelve months, and this prediction turns out to be true, a hugely lucrative job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey awaits you. If you turn out to be completely wrong, odds are that people will quickly forget you even made the prediction in the first place.

The second, and much harder step, is to temporarily let go of your moral compass. This needs to be done because otherwise you might be convinced that the answers to a given problem are obvious, and you will be unable to approach the problem objectively. Having admitted your ignorance and let go of morality the third step is to gain valuable feedback. All great discoveries have been preceded by dismal failures, it is only by failing and learning from those mistakes that we can finally succeed. However, to fully learn from failure one must first be aware of how little they know, and be free from every form of prejudice and preconceived notion.  

One compelling and potentially lucrative reason to read Think Like a Freak is that it can launch you into a new career as a competitive hot dog eater. In 2000, a young Japanese man named Takeru Kobayashi was struggling to pay rent and needed to supplement his meagre income. He decided to enroll in a hot dog eating competition on Coney Island, where first prize netted you five thousand dollars. Kobayashi was a man of slight stature, with no previous history of gluttony. The chances of him breaking the previous hot dog eating record, which stood at 25 and one eight hot dog eaten in only twelve minutes, seemed slim at best. However, Kobayashi reckoned that if his personal childhood hero, the great sumo champion Chiyonofuji “the Wolf” compensated for his light weight with superior technique, he could do the same. For months Kobayashi devoted himself to the art of competitive eating, taping his training sessions with a video camera, while eating hot dogs made from minced fish since he couldn’t find the regular version in Japan. Kobayashi won that year’s tournament in a landslide, eating a record fifty hot dogs in twelve minutes, and he proceeded to win the competition for four years in a row. How was this possible? Most competitive eaters, burly frat bros who looked like they could wolf down Kobayashi himself in one sitting, all ate their hot dogs using the same technique. The rammed the hot dog into their mouth, chewed furiously and swallowed it down with a gulp of water. Kobayashi’s brilliance was due to the fact that he approached the whole ordeal in a different way. Kobayashi broke the hot dogs, both sausage and bun, in half, then let the hot dogs slide down his throat before dunking the buns in water to make them easier to swallow. Seems simple enough, but before Kobayashi came along, none of the competitive eaters had dared admit to themselves that perhaps they didn’t know the best way to eat hot dogs quickly, and none had dropped their preconceived notions as to how this was best accomplished.   

Think Like a Freak is a fascinating read, Messrs. Levitt and Dubner offers a fresh perspective on how one might break from established norms and solve problems by going off the beaten path. I’m reminded of Peter Senge’s management classic The Fifth Discipline, where he teaches the importance of understanding how mental models guide the behaviors of different actors. Often when confronted by a problem that is difficult to solve, we tend to go down the path of least resistance and apply conventional thinking to solve it, but in some situations that may not be enough. Those who aren’t afraid to embrace their inner freak may hatch a dozen mad schemes that never pan out, but occasionally they will come up with an idea that is utterly brilliant and ground breaking. After all, if the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Nicola Tesla and the Wright brothers had been afraid of unconventional thinking, we might have had to do without many of the inventions that we take for granted.

Book Review: Our Revolution

By Bernie Sanders

Before the Democratic primary for the 2016 presidential election had even begun, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was widely considered to be the anointed nominee of the party. Secretary Clinton had laboriously amassed a formidable political machine and went on to receive the endorsements of almost every democratic lawmaker of note. Taking on the most powerful political machine in the country was probably a frightening prospect for many, but not for Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats.  On April 30^th 2015, he announced he was running for president, standing behind a wobbly podium hastily erected on the lawn in front of the capitol. “Let me just make a brief comment, be happy to take a few questions, we don’t have an endless amount of time, I’ve gotta get back” He declared matter-of-factly to the assembled press, jerking his thumb towards the capitol before launching into a brief description of the policies his campaign would be supporting. Late-night talk show comedians later joked that Sanders distaste of conventional politics was so great he didn’t even take the time to comb his hair before launching the campaign, but what he lacked in polish he more than made up for with a detailed policy prescription for fixing the country’s problems.    

In Our Revolution, Sanders tells the tale of how his run for president, dismissed as a “fringe campaign” by pundits in Washington, won eighteen million votes as well as eighteen states before being narrowly defeated by Secretary Clinton. The latter half of the book briefly touches upon the wrangling ahead of the convention that resulted in a reasonably progressive Democratic Party platform, before Sanders lays out his policy agenda in detail with the help of charts and graphs.

For those interested in a detailed account of the history of the Democratic Party, I would recommend reading Thomas Frank’s excellent Listen, Liberal, previously reviewed on this blog. In order to understand the magnitude of Bernie Sander’s success on the campaign trail, one needs to be aware of the rightwards shift of the democratic party for the last forty years or so. Far from being an extreme left-winger, Bernie Sanders political views largely reflects what mainstream democrats used to stand for before the Bill Clinton era of triangulation and neoliberalism. Popular policy positions supported by Bernie Sanders, like expanding Medicare and Social Security, making public colleges tuition-free and switching to a single payer healthcare system as well as strong support for organized labor used to be mainstream positions inside the Democratic Party before the age of Bill Clinton. Bernie Sanders, dismissed as a leftie without a comb by many conservative democrats, was unfashionable enough to stand up for what he believed in and lean against the wind during a time when many democrats abandoned the party’s principles as laid down by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. As in fashion as in politics, it turned out, as growing unrest and inequality meant that his message came to resonate with a great many voters, including independents and republicans, during the 2016 election.  

Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign harnessed the potential of social media and the online community to solicit donations and turn out voters. During the 2016 election cycle, the Sanders campaign was largely ignored by the press, and was forced to go online in order to gain traction and get their message out. The mainstream media didn’t spend that much time talking about policy substance, instead they choose the focus on the horse-race aspect of the campaign and the contentious republican field. When Bernie Sander’s campaign managed to amass an incredible war chest, financed entirely by small donations by ordinary people instead of billionaires and large corporations, the media was grudgingly forced to cover the campaign.

It is painful to think back on how poorly and unfairly the Sanders Campaign was treated by the media. In Our Revolution, Sanders recalls sitting sown for an hour-long interview with a major newspaper and laying out his policy in great detail, before being asked to comment on something Secretary Clinton had said. The next day that was the headline and all talk of policy substance was forgotten. This was often the case when Sanders appeared on television, he often had to answer questions about the statements of Hillary Clinton and other candidates and was seldom asked about policy or anything even remotely concerned with the lives of ordinary Americans.

Having followed the Sanders campaign with great interest, I’m already familiar with the policy positions he lays out in Our Revolution, most of them are well thought out and reasonable. I would, however, object to his insistence on a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage. The cost of living varies greatly depending on in which state of the country you live. Surely it would be better to calculate what is a living wage in each state and then index that sum to inflation? In rural Montana, for example, a living wage might be ten dollars an hour, among the glittering skyscrapers of New York it might be twenty-five. His support for a single payer Medicare-for-all healthcare system is especially relevant today. As I write this review, republican congressmen and senators have had to face hostile crowds at several town halls, their constituents worried about what’s going to happen with their healthcare now that the GOP has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act without specifying what it will be replaced with.

Reading Our Revolution brings back all the excitement of the 2016 Presidential Campaign. It’s undeniably sad when you look at Bernie’s spirited campaign and think about what might have been, but ultimately Bernie Sanders has managed to awaken a great many young people from the millennial generation who were previously unengaged with the political process, and turn them into citizens taking an active part in their democracy. It’s hard for a presidential campaign to get higher praise then that. Elections come and go, but democracy requires constant participation at the state and local level.

Book Review: The Pursuit of Power, Europe 1815-1914

By Richard J. Evans

The Penguin History of Europe series attempts to chart the history of the continent that is perched on the western end of the Eurasian landmass from antiquity to the present day. The Pursuit of Power deals with the century or so from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the start of the First World War, when the empires of European nations dominated the world and the lives of ordinary people were irrevocably altered by numerous technological and scientific innovations. Richard Evans is a Cambridge historian who has spent many decades studying and thinking about nineteenth century Europe, this book represents the culmination of his academic life, and is not just a very interesting read in itself, but serves as an ideal springboard for those interested in studying a wide variety of topics related to this era.   

The twenty-or-so year period during which the Napoleonic Wars took place spelled disaster for people of Europe. Unlike in the First World War, the fighting took a heavy toll on civilians and devastated entire communities. During the Congress of Vienna, in 1814, the victorious powers of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Great Britain created a framework for how Europe might avoid similar conflicts in the future. Their purpose was also to quell the revolutionary fires that the French revolution of 1789 had lit. Austrian statesman Clemens von Metternich was to be the chief architect of this supposed return to the conservative order. In France, the monarchy was reinstated in the shape of the portly Louis XVIII, and Tsar Alexander I continued to rule over Russia by divine right. In Evans’s word, they were “reforging the chain of time”. Yet this chain turned out to be a whole lot less durable that von Metternich had hoped. The nineteenth century was fraught with upheaval, truly it was the age of the -isms, as such diverse ideologies as fascism, liberalism, socialism, communism, utopianism, feminism and anarchism confidently entered the political stage. A new liberal bourgeoisie spoke up loudly for human rights from their prosperous suburbs, while countless workers in Europe’s teeming industrial centers turned to socialism and social democracy to ward of the excesses of capitalism. The success or failure of their uprisings depended on the support of a mostly conservative rural peasantry. The nobility and the church, who had been important power players during previous centuries, lost most of their power and privileges, while popular pressure ensured that many of the ideals of the French revolution were far from dead and buried. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century the institution of serfdom was abolished, voting rights expanded to include most of the male population and many laws were passed to protect common people from hazardous factories and unscrupulous profiteers.

Even a conservative bastion like Russia failed to fully ward off these clamors for reform, and in 1861 Tsar Alexander II emancipated the millions of serfs who had tilled the Russian soil since the time of Alexander Nevsky. The Austrian empire was unable to stay united and had to bow to vocal minorities in its diverse realms, granting concessions to Serbs and Croats and eventually allowing Hungary semi-autonomy and its own legislative body. The nation that changed least during this time, and as a consequence was the undisputed loser of nineteenth century Europe was the Ottoman Empire. Otto von Bismarck dubbed this harried patchwork of disparate realms, with characteristically caustic wit, as “the sick man of Europe”.

In 1815 everyday life for most Europeans was not that different from the way it had been in previous centuries. People travelled by horse and carriage, like they had done since the Dark Ages and peasants tilled the soil with ox and plough. In towns and cities refuse was thrown out of your window and landed on unfortunate passersby and any operation, no matter how trivial, was likely to end in infection and death. One hundred years later the onward march of science and technology had fundamentally changed all these previously immutable aspects of life and countless more, unless you lived in some remote rural hamlet that was exceptionally backwards, or the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to railroads that soon crisscrossed Europe like great serpents of iron, distances were greatly reduced and the bulk transportation of goods and people was now possible. Agricultural innovations meant that farmers could greatly increase their productivity, which was just as well since many of their farmhands were carving themselves a pair of wooden clogs so they could leave for the city. These cities had up until then been stinking collections of hovels, unhealthy breeding grounds for all kinds of nasty diseases. The more humans that gathered in one place, the worse it got in terms of squalor and uncleanliness. During the summer of 1858, the river Thames was overflowing with industrial waste and rotting refuse, not to mention the odd human corpse that had swelled in the summer heat to become a grotesque vessel of noxious gasses. Conditions were so bad that Londoners dubbed this assault on their olfactory senses “The Great Stink”, and tasked the visionary engineer Joseph Bazalgette with building a comprehensive sewer network for the entire city. This helped make cholera epidemics a thing of the past, and other European cities were quick to follow. Such improvements in public health may seem less interesting and noteworthy than pitched battles fought by hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the roar of cannon and shot, but they had an immeasurably more positive impact on ordinary people’s lives. Medicine also changed rapidly during the nineteenth century, with improved hygiene greatly increasing chances of survival after surgical operations and new methods of dulling the pain of going under the knife, such as letting the patient imbibe chloroform or morphine.  

The nineteenth century also saw Europe becoming industrialized. Britain led this revolution in manufacturing, but other nations, most notably Germany, gave them a run for their money. Production of goods was now possible on a grand scale, and the number of laborers required to work in the new factories that sprang up in many European cities led to the rise of several of the -isms that I mentioned earlier. Europe was the first continent to embrace the industrial revolution, which gave them a crucial advantage against other nations, and these technological breakthroughs enabled European nations to impose their will on other, less developed regions, by establishing colonies all over the world. The undisputed master, both in terms of industry and colonial possessions, was Great Britain, on whose empire the sun reportedly never set. Britain’s dominion over this blue planet of ours was so complete that the Reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) was later known as the Victorian era. For all its imperial pomp and splendor however, Britain’s supremacy was about to be challenged. After having been the dominant continental power in Western Europe for many centuries, the unification of Germany, culminating in the formation of the German Empire in 1871, saw France reluctantly resigning itself to being number two on the continent. Jealous of the other “Great Powers” Germany also wanted its place in the sun, i.e. colonies in Africa, and started to expand its navy, a direct challenge to Britain. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, German industry, particularly in the fields of chemistry and electronics, led the world. Together with another rising empire of the same era, namely that of Japan, Germany was to accelerate the decline and eventually sound the death knell of Romanov rule in Russia. After having been humbled by the Japanese in the Russo Japanese war of 1905, Germany finished off the ailing colossus in the First World War.

Evans describes how a more cautious and measured generation of statesmen who remembered the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars were replaced with new blood towards the end of the nineteenth century, brash imperialists who had imbibed readily from the Kool-Aid of their own propaganda. As breakneck industrialization progressed and the Great Powers acquired more colonial possessions, they signed and countersigned a great many diplomatic treaties which soon meant that Europe was covered in a patchwork of alliances. Coupled with rising nationalism and xenophobia, the continent turned into a tinderbox waiting to go off. Worse still, shrewd statesmen like Otto von Bismarck were no longer around to restrain the more violent impulses of unsuitable autocrats like Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany or Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The First World War was surely one of the greatest tragedies to ever befall humanity. That devastating conflict, together with another world war a generation later, spelled the end of Europe’s global hegemony.

The Pursuit of Power tells the tale of a century where Europe progressed by leaps and bounds, and took the undisputed center stage in world affairs. Sometimes it tells too much, such as when the exact length of Austria’s railway network in 1855 is compared to that of France, but the reader gets the point that European countries progressed greatly in every conceivable metric during this time, except the Ottoman Empire. If you don’t want to read every chapter of the book I understand that, since it is exceptionally lengthy, but I would highly recommend The Pursuit of Power and feel that my own knowledge of this pivotal time for Europe has been greatly increased.                        

Book Review: Failed, what the ”experts” got wrong about the global economy

By Mark Weisbrot

The world economy is, by any measure, resting on shaky foundations. With the Eurozone and Britain facing a lost decade and the US in the middle of a recovery that only seems to affect the stock markets, you would have to look at China and other countries in the developing world to see any meaningful growth. Conventional wisdom, peddled by the likes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank and the World Trade organization (WTO), has it that governments need to start tightening their belts and live within their means, Budget deficits has to be brought under control, inflation kept stable and markets have to be opened up to international trade. This is to be achieved by adopting neoliberal agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and privatization of public utilities. For the countries that do all this, growth will come, eventually. At least that is what they are told. In Failed, Mark Weisbrot, Co-director for the Center of Economic and Policy research in Washington D.C, questions the core principles of this policy approach and show the countries that have enjoyed solid growth during the last decades are those that have done the exact opposite.

The preface to Failed brilliantly sets the tone for what is to follow. A prominent South Korean economist from Cambridge University explains that his country started out in the 1960s as a poor and rural backwater, yet has now managed to achieve living standards comparable to those in the West. If South Korea had followed the recipe I describe in the previous paragraph, his people would still be living in mud huts. South Korean prosperity was not created by austerity or opening the country to free trade and volatile capital flows. Instead the government invested in their own production base and infrastructure, erecting trade barriers to promote domestic industries capable of developing new technology and providing highly skilled jobs. Without this there wouldn’t have been any Samsung or Hyundai. He even goes so far as to call the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO “the unholy trinity”.

The chapters that follow takes a closer look at some of the most glaring economic policy failures of recent years and seeks to cure what the author refers to as amnesia within in the field of economic study, where the hard-earned wisdom of past scholars has been replaced by a rigid neoliberal doctrine and a Washington consensus. A great portion of the book is dedicated to South America’s economic development during the last fifty or so years. The lessons learned by that region serves as an excellent summary of the central message in Failed, and charts a blueprint for a way forward for troubled countries in Europe and beyond.

During 1960-1980, Per Capita GDP in Latino America grew by a healthy 3,3%, and poverty rates declined. During the following 20-year period, 1980-2000, Per Capita GDP grew by a paltry 0,4%, while poverty rates increased slightly. What was the cause behind the two lost decades? According to Weisbrot, America has long exerted its influence in the region to suppress or remove governments it doesn’t like, and make sure that their own interests are well cared for. The US has long viewed left wing governments in Latin America with barely disguised hostility, on occasion going so far as to overthrow them in a coup, like Richard Nixon did in 1973 when the Chilean military with the aid of the CIA overthrew Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende. He was succeeded by Augusto Pinochet, an authoritarian dictator amenable to Western interests. According to Weisbrot, quiescent leaders peddling neoliberal politics and paying fealty to the IMF were the main causes for the lost decades between 1980 and 2000.

When the Latin American people had finally had enough by the turn of the millennium and decided to change things, their situation improved markedly. During the last twenty or so years several left leaning governments have been elected in landslide victories across the region, with the effect of poverty rates and inequality being reduced. When Lula da Silva ran as the Workers Party candidate for president in the 2002 Brazilian election, he campaigned against neoliberalism and a US backed free trade deal, the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The American investment bank Goldman Sachs were so afraid of the former factory worker that they developed a special “Lulameter” where they calculated his chances of winning the election in real-time. Lula proceeded to win the election and form a progressive government that heralded a sharp break with the neoliberal policies of the past and provided solid economic growth for Brazil after decades of stagnation. This story was repeated in several Latin American countries during the 2000s, to the barely disguised dismay of many western countries and institutions. This I can attest to personally. The Economist magazine, which I read every week, seems to have an almost pathological aversion to any government in Latin America which is even remotely left of center, while they savor Venezuela’s current woes with barely contained glee. Its editorials lambast reckless spending and excessive government debt, in effect proposing the same failed remedies that led to the lost decades of 1980-2000.

It is startling, writes Weisbrot, when you consider that the positive economic development Latin America saw during last two decades or so have either gone completely unreported in the West or been dismissed as a “commodities boom”. What’s especially painful to adherents of the Washington consensus, according to Weisbrot, is that Latin America managed to recover by kicking the IMF to the curb, which has led to their influence being drastically reduced and the region becoming more independent. This standoff between the Latin American nations and foreign creditors was apparent when then president of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner, purposefully defaulted on the country’s sovereign debt. Argentina’s citizens enjoyed one of the highest living standards in Latin America, until the country was struck by an exceptionally nasty recension during the years 1998-2002. Those who looked to the IMF for help were soon disappointed, all the organization had to offer were stringent demands for paying down the country’s national debt. This was a blatant attempt to get a better deal for its creditors, at a time when Argentina was engulfed in crisis. Refusing the IMF’s draconian demands, Kirchner made the bold move of defaulting on the debt, something that only “failed” nations like Congo and Somalia had done before. The experts predicted a calamity, but the IMF folded and Argentina went on to make an exceptionally strong recovery that the editorial staff of The Economist refuses to acknowledge to this day.

It is with great sadness that Weisbrot notes Europe has been unable to what most of Latin America did and send the IMF packing. The recession that was sparked by the financial crisis in the US could have been much less severe if European institutions had acted decisively to stimulate the economy and create more aggregate demand. Greece might have needed a bit of structural reform, he admits, but the kind of abject misery that the country has been subjected to by the unelected troika of the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank was completely unnecessary. The Eurozone crisis unmasks the IMF, according to Weisbrot, as little more than a creditors cartel attempting to strong-arm its hapless debtors into ever more concessions. Worst of all, so called Article IV consultations, internal documents by the IMF, reveal that the fund and the rest of the troika used the Eurozone crisis to force policy changes on the affected nations that their electorates would probably never have voted for had they been on the ballot. These unwelcome initiatives included reducing labor protection and lowering the pension age. What’s unique when it comes to Europe’s woes, Weisbrot writes, is that this kind of financial shock treatment used to be reserved for poor and middle income countries, and had never previously been used against wealthy nations with high standards of living. As a European I read his chapter on Europe with resignation, our continent is no doubt in great financial and political trouble, and the outlook for the EU and its member states mostly seem to get worse each day. Around the world, Europe has become a byword for stagnation and failed policies. It is staggering, Weisbrot asserts, that policymakers, economists and the general public have not thoroughly investigated the causes of the Eurozone crisis and come up with anything else than austerity, a cure that seems to have been as effective as a medieval doctor using leeches to bleed his patient. Just one more concession, one more cut to public services, and a recovery will be around the corner, we keep hearing, yet the situation keeps getting worse and worse. 

Failed offers a fresh perspective on the economic woes that plague Europe and many other parts of the developed world, and points to tried and tested policies that could offer a way out of stagnation and lackluster growth.