Penguin Man in hard covers
Alfred Sherman
DARK CONTINENT by Mark Mazower Allen Lane/Penguin, £20, pp. 496 The historian's job is to dispel myths, but he is not immune to capture by them. Mark Mazower's bold attempt to write the history of 20th-century Europe begins by implicitly dispelling current myths, but ends in thrall to others. The most dangerous are those which are not made fully explicit (or `explicated', as the Americans say). Europe and democracy go together automatically, like fish and chips; remove the constraints of Nazism, fascism or communism, the myth runs, and European civilisation will come into its own, guided by its own inter- nal logic. Mazower is at his best when he describes the economic, political and national chaos that was interwar Europe.
President Truman said, 'The only new data are the history you don't know.' It is worth reminding us that the seeds of the second world war were sown before the ink was dry on the treaties which wound up the first. Unviable multinational states were created; the economic disruption caused by the Great War was perpetuated by the very measures chosen to overcome it. Economic theories derived from free trade and the gold standard clashed with and cancelled out 'national-economy' and autarkic mea- sures beloved of the traditional Right and State-socialist measures beloved of the Left.
Few statesmen or politicians, churchmen and media were willing to face the realities and implications of German revanchisme. Mazower's strictures on Chamberlain and his associates are valid but spare Labour pacifism and support for appeasement. The author draws a veil over Rapallo, by which Stalin ensured that the German armed forces would escape their Versailles curbs and be ready to challenge the Entente by the mid-Thirties, and over Stalin's role in helping Hitler electorally in 1928 and 1933. He is unable to confront the Nazi- Soviet pact, which was not an aberration but a continuation of Rapallo, i.e. collabo- ration with the Germans in dismantling Versailles.
In spite of shortcomings, this part of the book is valuable for newcomers to the scene; but as it moves to the present and to the author's prescriptions it becomes less so. In the first place, Penguin man cannot be satisfied to tell the story, but must emote, preach and prescribe.
I am sorry to be so critical; one would like to see the best in a work. But to write a 20th-century history of Europe, no less, would require near genius, which includes infinite capacity for taking pains, and would take a lifetime. Mazower rushes to judgment. He depends exclusively on sec- ondary and tertiary English-language sources, eschewing primary and foreign ones. He quotes copiously from socialists and Keynesians, while excluding contrary views from all those he considers right- wing, and hence irredeemably evil.
For example, he launches into ferocious denunciations of Thatcher and her works, but gives us no inkling of her views either by direct quotation or objective summary, or those of Keith Joseph, Sir Alan Walters, or even of your reviewer, who was involved at that time, and also of the IEA, which advocated in a systematic way the views he denounces in caricature. The only Tory he cites (and frequently) is Lord Gilmour, a committed adversary of Thatcher and everything she stood for.
One example will have to suffice. Mazower writes that
in 1979, monetary policy was elevated into dogma and became a new creed: mone- tarism. The State's ambitions were to be cur- tailed, its role confined to balancing the books and monitoring the supply of money — the revival of economic liberalism after 50 years in the wilderness.
This is illiterate nonsense. 'Monetarism' is an epithet which for a couple of decades was brandished against all who questioned neo-Keynesian theory and practice in the light of experience. The idea that state intervention had become excessive and counter-productive was adduced by all Tory governments and oppositions since 1950, though like Mrs Thatcher they failed to translate this into policy. Now Labour reflects this view in part. In office in 1979, Thatcher continued Labour's IMF- enjoined, neo-Keynesian squeeze with renewed vigour and Friedmanite rhetoric, though she had expressly warned against this in her foreword to Keith Joseph's sem- inal Monetarism is not Enough. Dennis Healey cleverly denounced this disastrous application of his policies as 'Thatcher monetarism', and the phrase stuck. Mazow- er fails to look behind it.
That exemplifies much of his book, a Penguin tract. It verges on student union politics when it simultaneously demands that Europe in general and Britain in par- ticular engage in costly schemes to expand employment, yet simultaneously permit mass immigration to meet putative labour shortages. Characteristically, its compulsive topicality betrays it; its adulation of the `Asian tigers', all the rage when he handed in the manuscript, is there to haunt him. It demonstrates that putting a Penguin paper- back between hard covers does not give it solidity.
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