The Age of Power
As Mrs Thatcher observed in New York last Tuesday, the 1970s have not been a good decade for the western democracies. In south-east Asia, in Africa, in central Asia the interests of the United States and of the West European powers have suffered a continuous series of reverses. Those people — not all of them fools or dupes — who formerly maintained that Soviet Russia was not at heart an expansionist power have seen their theories and predictions severely confuted. Even China, which did for a long period seem genuinely isolationist, has launched a ferocious aggressive war. All of this would seem to confirm Mrs Thatcher's contention that militant communism is on the march — literally: 'The fact is that the Russians have the weapons and are getting more of them.' But there is more to it than that, as Mrs Thatcher partially acknowledged. As she said, 'the Soviet Union continues to proclaim the ideological struggle', but she most perceptively added, 'I am convinced that there is little force left in the Marxist stimulus to revolution.' As we step uneasily into the 1980s it is worth examining the implications of this qualification.
For more than 60 years we have apparently been living through a new age of religious wars. Millions of men have died, or been put to death, for ideological reasons. Marxism is the revolutionary faith which has made countless converts, is it not? It is an idea in action, is it not? Perhaps it was, but no longer. Of all the lessons that Solzhenitsyn has taught us, surely the most important is that there are no Marxists in Soviet Russia, not any more. And once that perception has been grasped it has infinitely wide extensions. Are the various terrorists contending for power in Africa 'Marxists' or 'communists' or 'socialists'? That is what they would like us to believe, and what the anti-Communist Right does believe, It is possible that, as with the Russians, to view the African revolutionaries as ideologues is to flatter them. It has been cynically said that an African Marxist is a man who has recently received more money from the Russians than from the Americans. This cynicism ought, perhaps, to offer some comfort to the West. There is another militant ideology apparently on the march, threatening not only the West but the peace of the world, an ideology invented not in the 19th century but in the sixth. The new Revolt of Islam may well prove to have been the most significant development of the 1970s threatening the established order not only throughout the Arab world and Persia but even in Soviet Russia. But, once again, appearances may be deceptive. It is a pure coincidence that the central countries of the Muslim world are those countries which possess the fuel on which the 20th century industrial civilisation has come to depend. Would we be concerned about Imans and Ayatollahs — would Islam be so self-confident — if four-fifths of the world's oil supply was in South America? To say this is to offer no consoloation to the American hostages in Teheran or to President Carter, but it is maybe to spell out the truth.
For that truth is that we have entered, not a new age of ideological struggle but the Age of Power. That is a disconcerting fact for the West, for two reasons: one is that, since the 16th Century the balance of power throughout the world has been held by the West — by Europe, and for the last 30 years by that extension of Europe in North America. Those who wield power naturally tend to assume unconsciously that they wield it benevolently. The other is that the age of European power was also the age of reason — so Europeans thought, and they were not wrong. The new age, of which the 1980s promises to see in full birth, is a reaction both against Europe and against reason.
This is not a cheerful reflection for Christmas, for the New Year, for the forthcoming decade. But it is maybe a necessary one. Europe, and the West as a whole, is going to have to take stock in the 1980s — to decide if its present civilisation, in its material aspect can be maintained; to decide what means of force and compromise will be necessary to maintain it. But it may prove in the end no bad thing if the West, confronted with a new Age of Power which it does not control, comes to realise that the material aspect of its civilisation is not the most important one.
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