ANOTHER VOICE
A rough beast whose hour has come round at last
CHARLES MOORE
Mr Boris Yeltsin must have been through some difficult encounters in his career, but few can have been more galling than his recent visit to the European Parliament. There he met the leader of the Socialist group, M. Jean-Pierre Cot, who told him that he was 'excessive', 'irres- ponsible' and 'a demagogue'.
Mr Yeltsin also met Baron Crespo, the President of the Parliament, who said: 'The sympathies of the European Parlia- ment are rather on the side of the Gor- bachev line', and offered the opinion that 'Mr Yeltsin is a wily peasant with some- thing of the animal about him'.
If Mr Yeltsin had known M. Cot's pedigree, he might not have been surprised by his reception. M. Cot's father, Pierre, was minister for air in the Popular Front government of Leon Blum, ran a Soviet- sponsored organisation called the Ras- semblement Universelle pour la Paix, and was widely believed to be France's Philby.
The origins of Baron Crespo are rather harder to trace. According to the Elenco de Grandezas y Titulos Nobiliarios Espag- noles of 1977, there is no such person, although there used to be a Count Crespo y Rasc,on, who was ennobled in 1878. Perhaps we need a Quest for Crespo, revealing the humble beginnings of a fan- tasist who dreamed in his poverty of becoming Pope, or even President of the European Parliament. Perhaps, on the other hand, Baron is just part of his surname, rather as Michael Hare-Duke is the Bishop of St Andrews, but not in any sense a duke.
Whatever the descent and social position of Senor Baron Crespo, his remarks, like those of M. Cot, are only the most out- spoken of those that can be heard through- out the chancelleries of Europe, not least in the Foreign Office. To such people, Mr Yeltsin is a figure from nightmare. They dream of rough beasts such as he slouching towards Brussels, burping and snarling and breaking the furniture and being irritating- ly attractive to their women. As M. Cot revealingly put it, they 'feel more secure' with Gorbachev in the Kremlin.
They are probably right to do so. For the really frightening thing about Mr Yeltsin is that he is something that the Soviet Union has never produced before — he is the man of the people. And if the Soviet Union is to be run by a man of the people, what guarantee do we have that there will be a Soviet Union at all? And if we do not have a Soviet Union, how will we, the European Community, be able to deal with all the bits into which it will break when people have the chance to choose the way in which they wish to live? At the very moment when it looks as if the people of Western Europe are at last prepared to come quietly into the suffocating embrace of an 'ever closer union', the idea of union is being repudiated by the people further east who have had long and intimate experience of it. The chancelleries did not conspire to get rid of Mrs Thatcher, only to see another nationalist brute arise.
It is one of the great skills of the proponents of the European Idea to per- suade everyone that theirs is the way of the future when it is actually an ingenious reinvention of the past. They believe in a Concert of Europe in which Great Powers can act together without much reference to the wishes of the masses, but of course they cannot say so. They therefore like Gor- bachev's Common European Home, a building in which they will occupy the most commodious apartments, and the masses will be crowded in the cellars. People like Yeltsin threaten to come baying up the stairs, waving pitchforks and a schedule of uncouth demands.
The Yeltsin problem is but the most vivid current example of the chief problem besetting educated people in the 20th century, which is that they detest what they feel they ought to believe in — the advancement of the common man. Fast food and building in the countryside and the uglification of everything and Jeffrey Archer and Andrew Neil and whatever can safely be deplored at an upper-middle-class dinner party are the result of the poor becoming less poor and more free.
And so educated man has devised var- ious ways of combating the threat. The bravest — open defiance — is pursued only by Auberon Waugh. The most audaciously cunning was Marxism. You could dress up your hatred of the working classes as a theory about making them free by bringing them under the total control of the state. In England, where the poor were already rich and free enough to be able to object to Marxism, the educated beat a tactical retreat, inventing systems of social control — the BBC, council housing, comprehen- sive schools — which could keep the lower classes at bay for a bit longer, and then be modified if they became extremely un- popular. They also made tactical alliances, suborning the arrivistes by telling them how delightful they were. It is happening with Mr Major at the moment. 'He's such a nice man', is the right thing to say about him: it is the educated class's way of making sure that he does not give it anything to worry about. More than 30 years ago, the educated class began to see the possibilities of Europe. Words like 'civilisation' were bandied about, and peo- ple like Roy Jenkins were advanced. Being 'pro-Europe' was like preferring wine to beer. Being 'anti-Europe' was a bit like saying 'toilet' or 'pardon'.
If one is educated, one must feel some sympathy for the Crespos and the Cots. They are confronting a genuine difficulty, and it is silly to pretend that the end of aristocracy, oligarchy and hierarchy can be wholly pleasant for the aristocrats, oli- garchs and hierarchs (or for the people they ruled). There is nothing wonderful about the fact that the new Prime Minister likes going to the Happy Eater or the new Archbishop of Canterbury is the author of a book called The Great God Robbery.
In the end, however, one is bound to side with the Yeltsins, not because they are populists (though in the Soviet Union, a populist is a brave thing to be), but because they try to tell the truth. They identify a great injustice, a yearning for freedom or need for change, and they fight for their cause. They are frequently irritating, but they are generally right. Or, at the very least, they have something vital to say. Post-war Western politicians in this categ- ory include de Gaulle and Reagan and Mrs Thatcher. They do not include a single current EEC prime minister or president.
The purpose of being educated is surely to understand things more clearly; then you have a duty to communicate your understanding. Educated people now see it as their task to obscure understanding, in the interests of preserving their power. That is a sign of decadence.
I hope that when Gorbachev is finished and there is a truly free Russian Parlia- ment, it will contain a large painting of Mr Yeltsin's visit to Strasbourg, depicting the nervous and disdainful faces of the Euro- elite and forming in an illuminated scroll from Mr Yeltsin's mouth his reply to M. Cot: 'I have come with an open heart. But I have been treated like a schoolboy.'
Previous page
