Archives for May 2019

Elzbieta Matynia, ed.: The Uncanny Era: Conversations between Vacláv Havel and Adam Michnik. Translated by Elzbieta Matynia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

 

Prophets and philosophers alike often doubt or deny that truth may be found in political life. The truth shall set you free, Jesus teaches, but attention to ‘this world’ will enslave you, block you from finding God. Socrates discharged his civic duties without enthusiasm, devoting his life to private conversations in which he dismissed even the great Pericles as a mere builder of walls.

Yet the Kingdom of God Christians seek is, after all, a kingdom, a regime. The God of the Bible chooses a particular people, establishing not one but several regimes for it, adjusting His political strategy to his people’s changing circumstances, and eventually exiling most of them to the Babylonian monarchy when he runs out of patience with their uncivil behavior. Universalizing Jesus denies the distinction between Jew and Greek, but nonetheless calls out His people for membership in His assembly or church—founding a regime, if not one ‘of this world.’ As for Socrates, he initiates not philosophy but political, dialogic philosophy, engaging citizens and foreigners in dialectic while eschewing the practice of previous philosophers, who had sought to behold the truths of nature directly, without regard to the opinions that prevailed in the polis.

From time to time, the late Vacláv Havel—Czech playwright, sometime dissident, eventual president of the Czech Republic—joined longtime friend and fellow dissident, Polish essayist and sometime politician Adam Michnik to discuss these and related matters. Both men preferred the Socratic direction. Havel had participated in the Prague Spring of 1968, when the political underground of dissidents in Czechoslovakia surfaced in street demonstrations against the Communist regime, installed two decades earlier by the Soviet Union. The Red Army rolled in and suppressed the uprising. In her informative introduction to this volume, New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty member Elzbieta Matynia (no stranger to political activism in her native Poland) recounts that Czech and Polish dissidents held a secret meeting in the mountains along the border of the two countries in August 1978, a decade after their early hopes for freedom had been disappointed. Havel and Michnik met at that time.

Their hopes had been disappointed, but not killed. At the meeting, they “plott[ed] democracy in both countries,” and not, as it transpired, in vain; eleven years later, in 1989, the Soviet empire collapsed and many of these same dissidents themselves took positions of authority as founders of the new, republican regimes of Central Europe. Revolution came first to Poland, where, “the principle of a nonviolent, self-limiting revolution, guided by an unrelenting commitment to create alternative institutions outside the state’s control, [had] led to the first solid promise of democratic change” in the states dominated by Moscow since the Second World War. When Michnik and several other newly-elected Polish parliamentarians visited Havel in the summer of 1989, Michnik told the incredulous Czech, “Before year’s end you’ll be President” of Czechoslovakia. And so, astonishingly, it was; not for nothing does Matynia consider the era “uncanny,” taking the term from Michnik’s own title for a published conversation with Havel held in Prague in 1991. But the term “uncanny” refers not to the peaceful overthrow of the old regimes—in Czechoslovakia, they called it the “Velvet Revolution”—but to the end of ‘post-communism,’ the end of the aftermath of those revolutions. Revolutions clarify; post-revolutionary conditions see the return of complexity, ambiguity.

As it happens, Americans are (or should be) quite familiar with many of the questions raised in this and the subsequent conversations recorded here. After the American Civil War, a victorious United States government attempted to ‘reconstruct’ republican regime in the states of the defeated Confederacy. Slaveholding plantation oligarchs had established their rule over the Southern states decades before the war; in firing on U. S. forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, they had asserted the independence of what had been an anti-republican (and therefore unconstitutional) regimes for a long time. Now that they had been defeated, what would become of these oligarchs? How would these states be returned to the American Union in conformity with the United States Constitution? The results of Reconstruction were to be mixed, as many ‘old South’ grandees re-established themselves, re-subordinating if not re-enslaving their former slaves. How would Czechoslovakia and Poland fare, as they attempted to consolidate regime changes of their own? We have six conversations between Michnik and Havel, from the years 1991 to 2007, followed by two pieces published by Michnik after his friend’s death.

Michnik opened the 1991 conversation by asking if there might be a restoration of the Communist ‘old regimes’ in Central and Eastern Europe. Havel considered this “out of the question.” He did, however, accurately predict the rise of former Communists “return[ing] under a slightly repainted banner,” namely nationalism. But the Soviet Union as an empire won’t return. The problems now were the huge state-owned enterprises and state bureaucracies, complemented by “the habits of normal average citizens” who “got accustomed to the fact that the omnipotent state towers over them,” like a father who doesn’t want his children to grow up. This has indeed proven to be a real problem, and not only in post-communist countries.

Michnik identified two approaches to consolidating regime change, one seen in Poland, the other in Czechoslovakia. Polish republicans drew “a thick line between the past and the present,” saying that “the only criterion for judging bureaucrats would be their competence and their loyalty to the new order.” Czech and Slovak politicians preferred the policy of lustration, a term derived from the Christian idea of penitence followed by purification. Havel advocated an in-between ground leaning toward lustration; penitence and purification, yes, but followed by forgiveness on the part of the victims of the former regime for those who served in that regime. There were gradations of guilt, ranging from genuinely evil characters to those who were forced to collaborate by the regime, and even some whose role in the underground organizations was precisely to collaborate, in order to gain access to information or to inflect regime policies in a liberalizing direction. “The boundary can be designated only by something intangible or something that does not lend itself to legal norms, such as feelings, taste, understanding, prudence, wisdom”—what Aristotle would immediately recognize as natural right. In his own case, “Shortly after I became president, I was given a list of all colleagues who had informed on me, but that same day I not only lost the piece of paper but on top of that I forgot who was on the list.” But that was on the personal level. “As president I have to take into account that society needs this kind of accountability, because they have a sense that the revolution has not been completed”; those who “terrorized the population and in obvious ways abused human rights” must be removed from office.

Ever the secularist, Michnik remarked that although the Catholic Church has a firm understanding of sin, forgiveness, and absolution, it also organized the Inquisition. Havel replied that “absolution is always connected with confession,” acknowledging sin, “whereas the Inquisition is about tracking down the hidden sins.” Michnik concurred, concluding as Havel had done that “we can absolve only those wrongs done to us, but to absolve the wrongs suffered by others is not in our power.” He worried that revolutionary revanchism may never end, as indeed it did not, in France, until the despot Napoleon redirected French hatreds outward, to the destruction of large swaths of Europe. Havel acknowledged that the pent-up hatreds were real, because Communism had the opposite effect its practitioners intended. Instead of accelerating ‘History’ or the course of events toward a benign and wondrous culmination, Communist regimes actually “postponed [history’s] natural development and movement,” interrupting what, by the early twentieth century, had looked like a gradual democratization of civil societies accompanied by republican regimes. “Here in Czechoslovakia, in every little town or county, one can see that people are reaching back for traditions were destroyed over forty years ago”—that is, in the 1930s, initially by the Nazi invasion. Long suppressed, both good “spirits” and bad “demons” are now “awakening,” the demons being both religious and ethnic hatreds, anti-Semitism among them. If such demons prevail, the political result will be not a return to communism but a return to fascism, which in the Czech region was secular, but in the Slovak region allied with elements of the Catholic Church. This ties in with the problem of democracy: “Democratic rule, when compared with the prior totalitarian rule, inevitably appears indecisive, uncertain, insufficiently strong or energetic,” a “feeling [which] constitutes fertile ground for those who yearn for rule with an iron hand” by “the so-called strong personality.” This notwithstanding, Havel rejected Michnik’s worry that “anti-Communism” by itself inclines toward fascism. “I think that if nothing intervenes in this normal development, then in time the political spectrum will stabilize” because “concrete political work will begin” under the new republican regimes. And Michnik himself, after all, remained a critic of Communism: Under such regimes, “It was enough to know a few formulas to be wiser than Plato, Heidegger, or Descartes.”

What will replace the Communist ideology? “Ideas,” Havel replied, by which he means a kind of post-modernist globalism—’post-modern’ in its rejection of the grand thought-systems produced by the likes of Hegel and Marx (exactly the sort of system easily vulgarized into the “few formulas” criticized by Michnik), globalist in a sense that he does not immediately make clear, but which seems to involve both a sense of international law fortified by international institutions along with the variation of natural right seen in environmentalism. Michnik challenged Havel on this point. “Is the era of ideology really ending? Isn’t that just wishful thinking, the yearning of humanists and intellectuals?” His concerns about the rise of nationalism were more intense than Havel’s. Havel conceded that national sentiments will remain strong, if only because they do not require mastery of even the most elementary philosophic doctrines: “Everybody knows his nationality.” Xenophobia arises from closed societies where people do not speak with one another, do not learn to live together, and from the desire to assign guilt for whatever troubles confront us. Xenophobia thus has both a ‘regime’ basis and a natural basis. “I think a lot of time must pass before civil society will respect all the dimensions of our ‘self’ will appreciate the matter of national belonging but not encourage a sense of superiority, and will not turn it into an ideology or the organizing principle of the state.” In this, perhaps without not knowing it, Havel took the stance of that Frenchman of the previous generation, Charles de Gaulle.

Michnik wanted to know what Havel thought of “the role of religion,” now that the Communist regimes are gone. “Under the Communist dictatorship it was for all of us a source of strength, whether we were religious or not. It was our only recourse to a natural law that we all had to answer to.” What now? Havel found in religion “two dimensions,” one indispensable to good politics, the other dangerous to it. Religion “puts things into perspective, as it directs human attention upward, reminding us of the metaphysical anchoring of our conscience and our responsibility, because it emphasizes brotherly love and unselfishness.” But it also may enter political life more directly—this “might be stronger in Poland than here”—and remains lethally strong in Muslim countries. A regime founded upon “seemingly” religious but actually “ideological and doctrinal principles” becomes “in its essence intolerant, because it reduces the human being to one dimension of his life, constrains him and manipulates him,” just as such secularist ideologies as communism and nationalism do. Havel suggested that “after the collapse of Communism religious or nationalist fundamentalism may come to the fore,” but the “force that acts against them, a force that I hope will succeed,” is “the power of the survival instinct of this planet.” In other writings, Havel refers to this as the “Gaia hypothesis”—that the earth itself, including the human beings living on it, has a sort of organic wisdom, which rebalances itself when some portion of it runs to any extreme. For example, he cited the international military response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, “which could be interpreted as a sign of those survival mechanisms.” So yes, fundamentalism endangers us, but it “fac[es] forces that are capable of withstanding it.” But those forces are not simply mechanistic or automatic; they will require statesmanship to “quickly strengthen democratic institutions, mechanisms, and the rules of the game. Democracy has to earn its authority quickly,” or it will have authority rested from it by ‘authoritarians.’

Such institutions will include a stronger executive branch of the Czechoslovak government (not popular election of the president, but veto power and the right to dissolve the legislature and call for early elections), an institution which can serve as “the most effective weapon against those who come in with the idea of rule by an iron hand” by imparting decisiveness to a regime in which the legislature, the ‘talkative’ branch, currently enjoys too much power. Political discussion, to be sure, but also political decision must be a hallmark of republicanism, lest more forceful ‘deciders’ persuade the people, unaccustomed to the republican way of politics, that republicanism itself must go. On the other side (and glancing at his own political rival, Vacláv Klaus), while a free-market economy underlies lasting prosperity, Havel denied that “the market mechanism is a magical key that will solve everything, nor do I think that the free market is a worldview or the meaning of life,” a conviction familiar to Americans who read Ayn Rand. Libertarianism makes such a sensible institution as private property and the law of supply and demand which follows from it into yet another ideology aiming at yet another utopia. The law of supply and demand should rather be understood “as something that has been tested for centuries,” something that “resonates with human nature, and functions in a natural way.” “This is not a religion.”

Havel and Michnik next met four years later, also in Prague. By 1995, Havel was no longer president of Czechoslovakia because there was no longer a Czechoslovakia; he had resigned in protest when Slovaks declared their independence in 1992. Promptly elected president of the new Czech Republic, he recalled that “with the collapse of Communism the structure of habits, values, and ways of life also collapsed”; “people had to organize their lives anew,” not fully understanding that they would need to do this, that it wouldn’t be done for them by rulers ‘from above.’ In democratic republics, “those who come to power will only be of a kind that the society is capable of generating,” and post-communist societies had suffered serious deformations. He marvels at the success of the American Revolution, attributing it to a situation in which people did not win “over others but rather that principles won.” (He was half-right: Principles did win, but the Tories left for Canada and their property was expropriated.) Principles or no principles, human nature remains the same, regardless of the regime, and human nature is a mixed bag. Given the experience in ruling large organizations and their extensive interpersonal networks built during their years in power, ex-Communist officials enjoyed political and economic advantages, leading to “some kind of Velvet Restoration,” in the years after the Velvet Revolution.

Unlike Czechoslovakia, Michnik observed, Poland entertained few such starry-eyed hopes. “Our revolution was a revolution without a utopia”; “we had no illusions like those of the Jacobins or Bolsheviks.” Accordingly, his concerns focus not on internal faction but on international military alliance. He awaited Polish accession to NATO, impatiently. Havel, with experience foreign policy, explained that the delay had occurred because “contemporary politicians are much more constrained” by mass-media pressures than the framers of NATO were. What is more, “Today there are no politicians as courageous and magnanimous as Adenauer, de Gaulle, and Gasperi after the war.” He worried that Americans especially tend to assume that now the revolutions have been accomplished, all will be well. But not so. Russia remains both insecure and ambitious, located as it is on the eastern part of the Great European Plain. Eastern and Central European countries will need protection from Russian irredentism, even if the full reconstitution of the Soviet empire under the new regime in Moscow remains improbable.

Meanwhile, and disturbingly, nationalist and religious factions had boiled up in the Balkans, in the form of exercises in ‘ethnic cleansing.’ The Kosovo War “can only be stopped by outside force,” but for the moment “there is no political will” to exert it because “Western politicians are not prepared to make quick decisions,” often lacking firm executive authority in their regimes but also, even with such authority, constrained by media scrutiny. “If the new European order is not created by democrats, nationalists will take care of it.” But if Czech and Polish democratic republicans can “notice the dangers lurking in the contemporary world and to articulate them in the right way thanks to the specific experience of Communism and our entire history,” this may spur West European and North American politicians take action. For Havel, this is what ‘thinking globally’ means: the defense of commercial republicanism against a new, ‘authoritarian’ nationalism, fueled by revenues from state-owned enterprises and fired by an ideology of ethnic triumphalism and domination. Medium- and small-sized countries like Poland and the Czech Republic can in this way take the lead in world affairs, even without the material resources of the major powers. In the event, the Czech Republic did support NATO’s intervention in the Balkans, the following year.

By November 1998, the time of their third conversation, Havel had been re-elected president. He was still “not worried about Russia” as a genuinely imperialist force in Europe. He now worried more about what he called “a fundamental issue for the future of our civilization,” challenged by politicians and intellectuals in Asia who argued that “democracy is a great thing but it has to stop somewhere, because democracy without limitations leads to a crisis of authority and sooner or later brings about chaos.” Havel wasn’t concerned about anarchy, but he did contend (as André Malraux had done, thirty years earlier) that “if our civilization does not somehow deepen spiritually, if it doesn’t realize anew its own spiritual roots, if it doesn’t start to respect moral principles, we are threatened with a disintegration of our human bonds, the loss of a sense of responsibility, and totally unbridled self-interest.” “To some extent, I’m a product of the sixties”—a product, that is, of a “decade of cultural, spiritual and social rebellion against all establishments.” True enough: unlike Malraux and de Gaulle, however, it’s hard to tell if he sees that the rebellions of the ‘Sixties lacked precisely the “spiritual roots” he saw missing from the West of the uncanny era.

In 2003, when they next met, this time in Poland, Havel had left office (his rival Klaus succeeded him) and was recovering from cancer. He continued to discuss the “crisis of civilization,” a crisis “deeper than the crisis of democracy.” He set himself resolutely against historical determinism. “I believe that all people are agents of historical events, except that there are many people, and they are different, and so history depends on lots of factors.” The overall trajectory of technological mastery over nature has yielded “a huge variety of benefits that make daily life easier” while it also threatens the environment and (with the prospect of modern weapons in the hands of terrorist gangs) “coexistence on this planet.” Such a civilizational contradiction stems from the contradictions of human nature itself; “a human being remains a creature full of contradictions, as he always was.” We are not only the first planetary civilization but “the first atheist civilization.” By what light can such a civilization illuminate its path?

Michnik replied, “You are on the same wavelength as John Paul II,” and “I don’t agree with this.” Atheism, no; secularism, yes. The West still has principles, an orientation towards ‘Being,’ even if they remain unstated or poorly stated. Further, religion isn’t enough; Muslim terrorists are religious. “As long as civilization exists, the need for metaphysics will endure.” For example, “nobody reasonable will accept the thesis that it’s a matter of moral indifference that there is a regime in Iraq which chops people’s hands off, plucks their eyes out, cuts off their ears, and the world is to look at that quietly in the name of the holy rule of sovereignty.” Neither he, nor Havel, nor the Pope partook of pacifism in such matters, even if they preferred velvet revolutions to violent ones. Havel didn’t dispute Michnik’s correction, except for one important caveat: “The state is the work of people, while the person is a work of God. There is some hierarchy here.” His metaphysics has religious dimension, albeit one consonant with the natural rights of individual persons. The media-driven, publicity-hound politics which prevents the formation of outstanding statesmen, reducing politics to “public relations” and thereby establishing a “cult of mediocrity” becomes possible when human beings keep their eyes on what is around and beneath them, and never on what, or who, is above them. The youth of the ‘Sixties has seen the crisis of civilization more clearly now, precisely because he has engaged in politics. In that sense, a man can indeed seek and find truth in political life.

Their next conversation occurred in October 2007, the year Havel published his memoir, To the Castle and Back. Havel asked Michnik about the political circumstances in Poland, where the Kaczynski brothers had been elected on a nationalist platform. Michnik said that a coalition of three right-wing parties had been “changing the system” in Poland “in a stealthy, creeping way”—attempting a revolution of the velvet glove, as it were, a garment that leaves no fingerprints behind. What he called the Polish “Fourth Republic,” with its “permanent ‘moral revolution'” backed by the security services and the Polish equivalent of the attorney-general’s office, used wiretaps and denunciations by informers to enforce a never-ending purge of regime ‘enemies,’ especially of anyone who could be accused of having had ties to the Communist regime. Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kacynski had been “able to persuade many people that Poland is ruled by a secret pact that ought to be tracked down and destroyed”—that is, he made use of a populist conspiracy theory to aggrandize his power. “The real model is the consistent and effective authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin” in Russia. “We should look at the practices of Putin to understand the nature of the threats to democracy in the countries of post-Communist Europe,” which amounts to a sort of Slavic Francoism. All this notwithstanding, Michnik remained guardedly optimistic. “Poland is a country where no nastiness ever wins out in the end. In Poland, everything is possible: even change for the better.”

The following year, Havel had returned to his first love, the theater, writing several plays before his death in 2011. They met in the offices of Michnik’s newspaper in Warsaw, the city in which Havel chose to stage the premiere of his first new play in many years. Recalling the Soviet invasion ending the Prague Spring of 1968, Havel recalled that the attack “opened the eyes of the Western left” to the character of the Soviet regime, an awakening that seemed to occur about once every decade or so, and needed to, given the somnolence of the Left when it came to threats from that quarter. Michnik and Havel worried that some former dissidents in Russia, Solzhenitsyn by far the most important, might now be the ones who have fallen asleep, when it comes to the depredations of Putin and other rightists. Havel remarked, “In Russian society there lurks a peculiar complex, an anxiety as to whether it will be taken seriously in the West. This, the biggest country in the world, appears to itself to be small, and that is why it glances at neighboring states as though it doesn’t know exactly where Russia begins and where it ends.” This anxiety has given us Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but also Stalin and Brezhnev and Putin—not to be confused, to be sure, when it comes to the amount of blood on their hands, but not to be trusted, either, when it comes to the independence of Eastern and Central Europe. “There are no totalitarian pressures any more, that doesn’t mean we have won.”

Shortly before Havel’s death, Michnik published “When Socrates Became Pericles,” an article marking his seventy-fifth birthday. Michnik recalls how Havel would bring drinks to the secret police agents who were freezing outside the door of his house on winter nights—a characteristic gesture of compassion and good-humored irony. “Theater of the absurd is Havel’s specialty.” But far more than a mere sense of the absurd: “I was struck by how he evaded all attempts at simplistic classification: he was not a mutinous Communist… nor was he a Catholic. He was neither a conservative nor a liberal, nor was he a Social Democrat…. Simply put, he was a democrat, a shy, gentle, and modest man with great courage, imagination, and determination.” He understood that it’s not enough to ‘stand on principle’ because most people can’t afford to do that; they need a way to survive. Michnik finds “as good an illustration as could be found of the historical legacy with which Havel wrestled throughout his life” in a 1938 essay by the novelist and playwright Karel Capek. At the time it seemed as if those living under Nazism could choose among “shared culpability, cowardice, or martyrdom.” “But there is a fourth way,” Capek wrote: “Refusal to betray one’s spiritual discipline, no matter how difficult the circumstances and no matter what pressures, refusal to deny the spirit of independence and conscious awareness,” a spirit which tells us “that reason can be universal, and experience, cognition, laws of the spirit, and laws of conscience can still have binding power.” The question of how to win the Cold War, how to secure a decent regime in its aftermath, had been preceded long before by the question, “How to lose?” In an open letter to Alexander Dubcek, who had wanted “Socialism with a Human Face,” Havel had warned that the Communists’ “desire to bring you to your knees will not be satisfied simply because you no longer have power; they need more; they need you to lose face.” The only thing that can be salvaged, for now, is self-respect. This was no situation in which political calculation would serve. Like Lincoln in 1861, de Gaulle in 1940, “the sudden assertion of human criteria within a dehumanizing framework of political manipulation can be like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape.” Dubcek wasn’t up to such an assertion. Havel was.

In a letter to Dubcek’s Soviet-installed replacement, Gustáv Husák, Havel predicted the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire and of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. He was right, but also came to think that the modern project itself, especially the “technological society” it has produced, eventually would suffer collapse, as well, for the same reason: its denial of the human person. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, the ancient Greek poet wrote, but she will return. That is, Havel concurred with Heidegger regarding technology and the conquest of nature it is intended to effect, but refused to follow Heidegger into radical historicism, much less suffering illusions about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. Closer to his Czech home, he is following the lead of Capek, who wrote extensively on the challenges technology poses to the human person, and indeed popularized the word ‘robot’ in a play first staged in 1920. For Capek and Havel alike, nature, not ‘History,’ will have the last word.

It was this intention to assert “human criteria” that guided Havel in his decision to remain in Czechoslovakia and go to prison instead of fleeing to the United States. The simple fact that by 1979 the regime preferred not to kill him but to offer him a choice between incarceration and exile proved that the regime itself was beginning to hesitate, by then, to question its ideology. By going to prison he could put his principles into practice, proving himself to his friends, to God, and to himself. As Michnik writes, the “dissident subculture had snares of its own”—”demonizing the enemy” and “angeliz[ing] oneself.” But for Havel, “the enemy was the Communist system, not the Communists”; a Christian would call that hating the sin, not the sinner.

On the matter of religion, too, Michnik provides a just assessment of his friend, who “rejected the atheist worldview”—possibly in part because it is a worldview, a too-confident system of ‘totalizing’ belief. Havel was rather a “philosophically inclined homo religiosus” who delivered himself of the extraordinary sentence, “I accept the Gospel of Jesus as a challenge to go my own way.” That doesn’t sound quite like what Jesus had in mind, but it does indeed bring Socrates to church. This “outlook” (not “worldview”) inflected his politics, Havel’s considerations on Machiavelli’s modern ‘state.’ Michnik quotes him as identifying the origin of lo stato to “a moment when human reason begins to ‘liberate’ itself from the human being as such, from his personal experience, personal conscience, and personal responsibility and so also from that to which, within the framework of the natural world, all responsibility is uniquely related his absolute horizon.” Understanding that ‘Machiavellian moment’ in Western thought enabled him to “unmask Marxism-Leninism as a para-religion offering ready-made answers to all questions”; against this, he (“in his own way”) upheld “a religion that demands humility in the face of Mystery.” Politically, such humility issued in a commitment to “political and economic pluralism, along with dialogue between democratic representatives and expert opinion”—the two components of modern republican government.

The choice for Havel, then, was between attempts to take an idea (or more usually a closed system of ideas) and institutionalize it and the attempt to live in the world of politics Socratically, “living in the truth.” Michnik observes that Havel never claimed to have coined that phrase, although it came to be identified with him. It was Jan Patocka, “an intellectual mentor and moral authority for the Czech dissidents,” who did so, associating it with Socrates and pointing out that Socrates eventually was put to death by the regime of his city. Havel “chose, like Socrates, uncompromising conflict with the authorities. And astoundingly, by happenstance, this time Socrates became Pericles.” And although his vocation ended less grimly than Socrates’, his move to abolish the death penalty (and, it might be added, to pardon most of the old-regime operatives) brought unwelcome grumblings from a less-than-Socratic public stuck in a “Czech small-mindedness” that Michnik perhaps too quickly associates with “petty bourgeois provincialism” instead of with democracy itself. There weren’t many bourgeois in Socrates’ Athens, and no Czechs at all, but there were plenty of democrats. In this, Michnik relies too much on the formulas of the nineteenth-century European ‘Left,’ insufficiently on Tocqueville.

The continued rise of rightist populism in Europe and elsewhere shows that concerns of Michnik and Havel were far from groundless. Some of the appeal of these groups may arise from hyper-nationalist sentiment, but one must also notice that it responds to the persistent moral flaccidity of many contemporary democratic republics, and also to the longstanding political problems raised by bureaucracy—especially by international and ‘globalist’ bureaucracy, which hardly deserves the name of either democracy or republicanism. Solzhenitsyn had pointed to the moral crisis of the West as early as 1978, in his much-misunderstood commencement speech at Harvard University. This must explain, at least in part, his late-life sympathy for Putin. Among European thinkers now, Pierre Manent may best articulate an answer to these concerns, and to these groups themselves, but how many are listening?

Adam Michnik: The Trouble with History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution. Elzbieta Matynia, Agnieszka Marczysk, and Roman Czarny translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

 

A worrisome thing that’ll cause you to sing the blues in the night: That’s history, all right, and Adam Michnik knows it like a Pole—in his bones. Part of the troublesomeness of history derives not only from the history we mean when we think of the course of human events—often more a slaughter-bench than a stream—but from history held up as a source of moral and political authority, as a dialectical unfolding of some form of ‘Absolute Spirit,’ of class- or race-consciousness which acts rather in the manner of Biblical Providence, revealing truth to all who have ears to hear and rubbishing those graceless souls who don’t. Situated squarely between Germany and Russia and its sometime imperial provinces, Belarus and Ukraine, Poles have witnessed and suffered the consequences of those ideologies for a century.

In inaugurating a series of books exploring “democracy and its discontents,” Yale University Press chose one of the best of the secularist Poles. A red-diaper baby born in 1946, in the aftermath of the Soviet-enforced ascension of the Polish Communist Party, he proved one of those rare persons who thinks his way free from the idols of the cave, perhaps with some help from the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, whom he met as a university student in Warsaw. His political activities earned him expulsion from Warsaw University in that unrestful year, 1968, and the next two decades found him sometimes in prison, sometimes in exile, but never removed from engagement in the efforts of Poles to liberate themselves. As those efforts gained traction in the early 1980s, Michnik founded Gazeta Wyborcza at the behest of Polish Solidarity labor union leader Lech Walesa; the newspaper quickly established itself as more than just the voice of the Solidarity Citizens’ Committee but as a serious source of reliable news and political analysis. Briefly a member of the first real Polish parliament of the postwar era, Michnik settled into his true vocation as a writer and editor, which he fills to this day.

Michnik divides his book into two parts. In Part One he looks at the 1989 revolution against the Soviet-imposed oligarchy prospectively—concerning West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik of the 1970s and its status as a proximate cause of that revolution—and prospectively—showing how, in the aftermath of that revolution, politicians in Poland and the other “young democracies” have manipulated historical truth in ways that injure the newly-founded regimes in which they operate. In Part Two he thinks about how history might be used instead of abused by looking at the aftermath of the French Revolution through the eyes of a non-historian, Stendhal, that Napoleon of French novelists who came both to extend and finish the Revolution. Extending and finishing a revolution requires of politicians and of writers the imagination of a realist novelist; trained as a historian and tried in politics revolutionary and post-revolutionary, Michnik finds a path to truth in a certain well-measured use of the imagination.

Michnik titles his essay on Brandt “Morality in Politics,” involving his readers in the dilemmas confronted by both Brandt and the Central European dissidents who watched him, dilemmas of compromise between what one wants and what one can do, “between the voice of conscience and the pragmatic dictate of common sense.” What Aristotle calls “moral courage”—remarked by Michnik—proves necessary but not sufficient in politics, as Aristotle himself knew and taught in his account of phronēsis or “practical wisdom.” Holding moral courage and practical wisdom together comes hard. Michnik admires those who do, criticizing them with sympathetic firmness when they fail.

Brandt visited Poland as the newly-elected president of West Germany in 1970. As a social democrat, he represented a party with its own troubled history with the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat Marxists of East Germany and in Central and Eastern Europe generally, but such partisan tensions on the ‘Left’ seemed insignificant compared to the gestures he made in his capacity not as a socialist but as a German head of state. In Poland to sign the Treaty of Warsaw, officially recognizing the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish-German border, Brandt laid wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Ghetto Heroes Monument—memorials to the victims of Nazi aggression against Poles generally and against Polish Jews, respectively. At the Monument, he startled his hosts, his own people, and the world at large by kneeling in remorse for German war crimes. Closely related to this act of national contrition, Brandt implemented Ostpolitik—his diplomatic opening to the Soviet bloc—as a signal that West Germany politely asserted itself as “a fully independent political actor on the European scene”—independent, that is, of the quarter-century of Allied domination of his country that had begun with its occupation and partition after the defeat of the Nazi regime. As Brandt riposted to his critics in West Germany who objection to his recognition of the border, which transferred nearly one-quarter of territories ruled by pre-Hitler Germany to Poland, the Federal Republic of Germany didn’t lose those lands; the “criminal National Socialist regime did”—a regime, it might be added, that Germans of the hapless Weimar Republic had effectively voted to establish when the elected Hitler as Reich Chancellor in 1933, a regime that Brandt had opposed from the day of its founding until its welcome destruction.

Further, given the anti-Jewish animus of some within the existing Polish communist regime in 1970, a sentiment shared by certain Polish nationalists who detested that regime, Brandt had emphatically pointed to a moral limit to Ostpolitik: He would not allow it to serve as an occasion for any recrudescence of xenophobia, then or in the future. And finally, by disproving the Polish communist regime’s claim that republican West Germany somehow wanted to attack Poland, in imitation of the Hitler tyranny, and to seize the lost territory, Brandt opened political space for the anti-communist resistance that would culminate in Poland’s own independence by freeing that movement from charges of intentional or unintentional collaboration with German revanchism. “Brandt’s Ostpolitik was directed not only against the ruling communists, but also toward the society that was standing up to the dictatorship.” It had been, after all, the Soviet Union which had destroyed hopes of a ‘popular-front’ coalition of communist and non-communist workers in the 1930s, when it signed the 1939 pact with Hitler as a prelude to dividing Poland between the two tyrannies, and of course it had been the Soviet Union that had betrayed the Allies’ agreement at the Yalta Conference of 1945, pledging free and fair elections in Poland after the war.

Like de Gaulle before him, Brandt wanted a Europe free of both American and Soviet military occupation. As the former mayor of West Berlin, he knew very well the reluctance of the NATO allies to “die for Berlin,” despite the resolution shown in the 1948-49 airlift and the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961. He wanted to break the impasse between West and East, between democratic and commercial-republican Europe and the states of the Soviet empire.

While admiring Brandt’s courage and prudence at Warsaw in 1970, Michnik criticizes the Ostpolitik as it came to be developed, throughout the decade. Like the Nixon/Kissinger policy of détente, “the politics of consistent rapprochement with Moscow and East Berlin and the language of ‘concern for peace’ practically drove out concern for human rights in Central and Eastern Europe.” The era of what American detentists called “quiet diplomacy” too often meant neglect of the very feature of the communist oligarchies which made them tyrannical: their rejection of human rights in principle and in practice. “When he accepted the Oder-Neisse border in the name of the Federal Republic, Brandt had spoken to all Poles. Later he spoke only to Poland’s communist governing elite”—and none too effectively, at that. ‘Top-down’ reform just wasn’t going to happen. At the same time the Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel “wrote about ‘the power of the powerless,’ Willy Brandt demonstrated the moral powerlessness of the powerful.” Only revolution ‘from below’ would work, and that was where Poland’s Solidarity trade union came in, allied with a new generation of Polish intellectuals and also with Polish farmers who detested the system of collectivized agriculture. (It would be well to observe that those classes were supported by the Roman Catholic Church to which no small number of Poles belonged, and its Polish pope, John-Paul II; the Church and its pontiff are oddly absent from Michnik’s account, here—perhaps a token of his secularism.)

The new revolutionaries in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Central Europe, supported across the political spectrum in many of the commercial republics—from Ronald Reagan on the ‘Right’ in America to François Mitterand on the ‘Left’ in France—insisted that while the Soviet Union and its empire “was no longer a system of Stalinist-totalitarian oppression… it retained the institutions of a totalitarian state.” The time of “ideology” had not passed; the time of an interests-based, allegedly pragmatic politics of peace—often masking moral cowardice and imprudence—had not begun. While détente and Ostpolitik “contributed to the destabilization of communist regimes… that was not either Kissinger’s or Brandt’s goal.” It was the goal of Reagan and Mitterand, of Michnik, Walesa, and Havel, and they set a different course to arrive at that different goal. The forthright assertion of human rights by all of these statesmen and statesmen-in-waiting “did not trigger war,” as their alarmist critics feared.

Michnik thus begins his book with an essay exhibiting both a sober acknowledgement of the realities of politics and a firm adherence to the humane, genuinely liberal principles that policies and political regimes should secure. A ‘man of the Left’ himself, he has always refused to say, ‘No enemies on the Left’ or ‘No friends on the Right.’ He understands and appreciates international politics, especially geopolitics, as any sensible Pole must do. At the same time, he sees the importance of what Aristotle calls the politeia or regime, both within a countries and in relations among countries. Aristotle describes the regime in four dimensions: the person who rule (one, few, or many and also, crucially, good or bad); the forms or institutions by which those rulers rule; the Bios ti, the way of life rulers and institutions encourage and sustain; the telos or purpose of the rulers, the forms of rule, and the way of life. Michnik keeps track of them all, with special attention to the conditions and consequences of regime change, or revolution.

As seen in the essay on Brandt, political revolutions involve us in profound moral, theological, and even epistemological questions. Fascist and communist tyrannies alike not only committed he worst crimes ‘against humanity,’ as the saying goes; by being what they were and therefore acting as they did, the marked the souls of both victims and predators long after the regimes themselves had undergone revolution. This is part of “The Trouble with History,” the title of Michnik’s second chapter, concluding Part One. Characteristically, Michnik sympathetically identifies the constraints imposed upon heads of state like Brandt while unflinchingly pointing also to their failures to see when and where those constraints were more apparent than real—understandable failure, but still failures of courage and of prudence. At the same time, he points to the much more salutary constraints that ought to prevail among the revolutionaries and the beneficiaries of the revolutions against the communist regimes. This sympathy, combined with such criticism, distinguishes Michnik’s writing from those of the majority of journalists and scholars of his own, and of any generation.

One of the illusions prevailing among well-meaning communist moderates (as it were) during the Cold War was the notion of “socialism with a human face”—a slogan coined by the Czech communist reformer Alexander Dubçek during the Prague Spring of 1968. Considering an apologia for McCarthyism written by a Polish right-winger in the aftermath of the far more successful Central European ‘Spring’ of 1989, Michnik calls this new turn “anti-communism with a Bolshevik face.” He means that such neo-McCarthyism in Central Europe rests on “the belief that by using the techniques of intimidating public opinion one can build a world without sin.” This amounts to a sort of millennialism of the ‘Right’ matching that of the ‘Left.’ Although this Rightist campaign had not (yet) moved against the lives or personal liberties of its targets, and hardly aimed at the enormities of Nazism, it did move against their livelihoods, aiming to disqualify ex-communists from all government positions and moreover to discredit their participation in democratic political life. It treated all members of the previous, justly defeated regimes as irreconcilables.

The Polish Right was beginning to use history as a means of persecution. Under the new regime envisioned by the Right, only those entirely free of association with communism might wield public authority, can and should take a different turn from the purges that followed the revolution of 1945.

As compromised and polluted beings, the others must shut up and go away. In this anti-Bolshevik appropriation of Bolshevik-like practices, Michnik sees another deformation of historical dialectic: “It is clear that communism created as its antithesis not only an attitude of dialogue and pluralism”—underground men and women who established a civil society unseen by their uncivil, would-be totalitarian rulers—”but also a philosophy of replacing communist monologue with an anti-communist monologue.”

Exercising the freedom to write guaranteed by the 1989 revolution, Michnik interrupts the new monologists by making some reasonable distinctions. As Aristotle would argue, circumstances alter cases: The harshness of Nazi rule in Poland had far exceeded the harshness of the Soviet and Polish communist rule that followed it there, although Hitler had nothing on Stalin when it came to genocide in other places. Similarly, the peaceful revolution that removed the communist regime “had nothing in common with the end of the Nazi occupation”—coming, as it did, during a world war and resulting in the very oppression now deplored by the new Polish Right. This means that the politics of Polish republicanism, post-1989, can and should take a different turn than the purges that followed the revolution of 1945.

“There is only one thing everybody agreed on” in 1989: “that the past had to be de-falsified.” Such de-falsification must not entail de-fenestration of those associated with the thuggish and tyrannical but not genocidal regime of Polish communism—a regime which, to its credit, collaborated in its own demise by negotiating with the revolutionary dissidents. Some on the Right in post-communist, democratic-republican Poland claimed that “all those who after 1945 took part in supporting communist rule” were quislings to be “taken to court for high treason against their own nation.” Such persecution will not tend to establish a civil society in a country still recovering from tyranny. Similarly, in the United States of the late 1940s and early 1950s it was one thing to prosecute Americans who had acted as Soviet agents, another to accuse anyone who had associated with the Reds with treason.

Michnik wants no one to mistake his intention: Communist tyranny deserved its political ‘deconstruction.’ But in its four and a half decades of misrule it had moved “from Stalinist fanaticism and terror to a dictatorship that tolerated an independent Catholic Church and private farming, and periodically allowed some margin of freedom in artistic expression and scholarly research”—the very things that eventually helped to bring about its collapse. What is more, even and especially the dissidents who lived under that regime and undermined it necessarily got some dirt on their hands by the very act of pushing back against dirty things. The dissidents what every sane person does, and not only in politics; they won gains by making compromises. They too had to think ‘dialectically’ in one sense: the sense (moreover, the common sense) of the communists’ old slogan, “Two steps forward, one step back.” “Can one mechanistically classify all of those people”—surely including Michnik himself and his colleagues—”as traitors to Poland?” By that standard, only those who did nothing at all could now qualify for full participation in Poland’s new civic life.

Michnik coins a word to describe the partisan, self-serving abuse of history: “historiosophy.” Historiosophists attempt to exploit the understandable passion to avenge past injustices by precluding all the ‘impure’—in this case anyone who held a government position in the old regime and indeed anyone identified in the police records of that regime as a collaborator with it—from any form of government position, now and in the future. This is a Right which imitates the very partisans the Right has long (and properly) condemned: the Jacobins of France and the Bolsheviks of Russia, who claimed that the proverbial slate needed cleaning (by themselves) and that only then, “with them” ruling, a “new era of national history begins.” The sophistry of historiosophy consists in believing that such a thing is possible and, if possible, just. What begins with an attempt to prevent an old, historical regime from returning risks the founding of a new tyranny.

Michnik admires Aristotle, and he evidently appreciates Aristotle’s approach to politics. Aristotle famously identified three kinds of rule in the household and thus in the polis, that community consisting of households. There is parental rule—one-way rule of command and obedience, rightly exercised for the good of those ruled. There is masterly rule—one way rule of command and obedience, exercised for the good of the master. And there is marital rule, reciprocal rule, “ruling and being ruled,” as Aristotle describes it. Only the latter is political rule in Aristotle’s strict sense of the word. Michnik wants Polish politics to be political in that strict sense. Beginning with “a democratic opposition [that] confronted the monologue of the communists’ version of history with a polyphonic voice”—a real dialectic, not a pseudo-scientific or sophistical one—Polish democratic republicans understood history as “the real teacher of life,” of a life with a purpose, namely, “a persistent striving after truth.” This means (and not incidentally) that the founders of Polish democracy rejected not only the grand narratives of the Left, with their dubious claims of having discovered a ‘scientific’ socialism that made further civic discussion unnecessary in principle, but equally the Nietzschean or quasi-Nietzschean claims of the Right, which subordinated the quest for truth to the will to live, conceived as the ‘will to power.’

To understand one’s husband or wife, to understand one’s fellow-citizens, indeed to understand any human being, one must enter into the kind of dialogue Aristotle and Michnik esteem. “One cannot understand the French Revolution or the American Civil War,” Michnik writes, “by adopting only one perspective, whether monarchist or Jacobin, that of Lincoln or the southern generals.” One needs to listen to them all, attentively. Leaving it at that would indeed bring on the moral relativism or soft nihilism deplored by the historiosophists of the Right. But of course one need not leave it there. Having studied the writings of both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee (or better, John C. Calhoun), one can still in the end conclude that Lincoln was nearer to the truth. Still, only those who listen to the testimony presented by all sides may honestly judge with (as that eminently civil saying goes) malice towards none and charity towards all.

A historian’s responsibility “is to cultivate a spirit of heresy” with regard to all claims, but especially those that reinforce claims to rule in the present or the future. Such heresy may extract a lesson from piety. The historian “has to believe that the truth is worth caring for, and that only the truth has the power to liberate”—to set you free, as the Polish pope would have been quick to add. Free from what, and from whom? From those who would parent adults and master the un-slavish. Freed from those who overestimate their own virtue and underestimate yours.

 

David Cannadine: Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 55, Number 3, June 2018. Republished with permission.

 

Concluding this incisive biography of “the undisputed alpha female of her generation,” David Cannadine observes, “There are times when nations may need rough treatment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.” So she did, first transforming her conservative Party, then using it as an instrument to excise her country’s slowly metastasizing post-imperial funk, diagnosed in her tart 1979 campaign slogan, “Labour Isn’t Working.”

Getting to work was exactly what Margaret Hilda Roberts like to do. Her father, a grocer, active in local politics and civic assiociations in the provincial market town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, was a Liberal in the English sense of the word: a political heir of John Locke and his esteem for civil and economic liberty. The way of life in a Lockean republic has been described as a joyless quest for joy, but joylessness does not preclude satisfaction; hardworking and religious, the Robertses led sober and productive lives and prized education, sacrificing to send their daughter to Somerville College, Oxford, where her diligence earned her “a sound secon-class degree”in chemistry. “We were Methodists, and Methodist means method,” she recalled, pointedly.

Before graduated in 1947, Miss Roberts rose to the presidency of the Oxford Conservative Association, making connections with the national party and exercising her (as it turned out) very considerable gift for debate. The Party indulged the ambitious young stalwart, permitting her to run twice for Parliament as a sacrificial lamb in a district firmly controlled by the Labour Party. In 1951 she did what so many successful politicians do; as the old saw goes, she ‘married above herself.’ Denis Thatcher was an army veteran, the manager of his family’s successful manufacturing concern (household and industrial chemicals). “Much richer” than his bride, Mr. Thatcher had both business sense and a bit of dash; “he drove a Jaguar.” From then on Mrs. Thatcher could devote her full attention to politics—characteristically training herself for it by obtaining a law degree and qualifying for the bar.

The year 1958 saw her diligence rewarded, as she won the Conservative Party nomination for a safe seat in the “moderately prosperous, petit-bourgeois, owner-occupied London suburb” of Finchley. The Conservative administration of Harold Macmillan was still dealing with the political aftermath of the Suez Canal War, during which Britain and France learned that their great wartime ally, the United States, did not invariably return Cold-War loyalty with indulgence toward habits of empire long ingrained in the European republics. Thatcher ‘grew up’ as an MP in the atmosphere of great-power rivalry in which her country could no longer claim great-power status. This realization led to the inward-turning rule of Labour from 1964 until the end of the decade In those years, Mrs. Thatcher held a variety of shadow-cabinet positions, in each instance taking the opportunity to learn the business of the relevant departments in preparation for debate in Commons. She was being apprenticed, although her superiors doubtless assumed that she would be limited in her rise. She was, after all, a woman in a man’s game.

When the Conservatives returned in 1970, the eleven-year veteran of Parliament was given the post of Secretary of State for Education. She dutifully fought for more money in the budget, although she found “the ethos of the department” to be (as she put it) “self-righteously socialist.” Her colleagues may have returned her distaste. When she proposed abolishing the school milk program as a cost-cutting measure, no one in the department warned her that this might make her controversial; “Mrs. Thatcher, the mild-snatcher” found herself pilloried by Labourites and their allied journalists. One might be permitted to think that she should have seen it coming, but it turned out to be a rare political misstep. Prime Minister Edward “Ted” Heath restrained himself from sacking her, and she lived to fight on.

Heath and the Conservatives themselves got the sack from the electorate in 1974. The Labour Party, under the lackluster stewardship of prime ministers Harold Wilson and James “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, presided over a half-decade of rising inflation and unemployment. Coached by think-tank director Keith Joseph, Thatcher began studying the works of Hayek and Friedman, and headed a portion of the Conservative Party which eschewed the paternalist/aristocratic heritage that saw in the welfare state a sort of extension of ancient landlord-tenant relations. This split the party between the traditionalist Conservatives (now called the ‘Wets’), and the Thatcherites, who startlingly resembled the Liberals of her father’s generation. So armed, intellectually, she defeated Heath for leadership of the Party (he never forgave her, but that came increasingly not to matter), and then took her party to victory in the general elections, scoring Labour for failing to deliver jobs to the workers it represented but even more for the spiritlessness of life under social democracy. She had not believed a woman would rise to the office of prime minister in her lifetime; with the unintended help of her enemies in and out of the Conservative Party, she proved herself wrong.

Monetarism, tax cuts, and welfare-state retrenchment initially made things worse, as unemployment rose and urban riots agitated the ‘Wets,’ then as always fearing for “the social fabric of the nation.” Fortunately for her, Labour chose a literatus to lead it. Michael Foot was precisely the sort of fuzzy-headed, disarmament-minded socialist intellectual George Orwell had delighted to lampoon, and in debate Thatcher dined out on him. Although things looked bad for Conservatives by 1983, victory in the Falklands War proved a political tonic, and its effects lasted long enough for her liberal reforms to take hold, including a broad-scale sell-off of nationalized industries, which raised revenues lost by the tax cuts. Perhaps the most successful of these was the program of incentives to induce renters to own their own homes, which not only caused money to circulate more freely but turned a substantial number of voters into property owners less likely to smile at taxation supporting the welfare state. Between 1983 and 1990, Britain added three million new jobs; between 1981 and 1987, average wages rose three percent per annum. “Instead of being a nation of unionized producers, Britain was becoming, as Thatcher hoped it would, a nation of individualized consumers.” Low inflation and low interest rates made Britain “one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Community” by 1986.

Conservatives won re-election in 1984 and again in 1987. As Cannadine remarks, with perhaps a shade too much breathlessness, “no one man had achieved so many victories since before the Great Reform Act of 1832, and for a woman to have done so was even more remarkable.” Still, a decade is a long time in republic politics. By 1989, the Prime Minister had saddled herself and her party with an unpopular poll tax, and the needed shift from an industrial to a service economy had caused economic hardship for many citizens distant from London and its financial economy. The ‘Wets’ still hated her, and many of the younger Conservative MPs had no contact with her. Her approval ratings in polls declined to twenty percent as the economy showed signs of stalling out, again. Her cabinet split over her refusal to join a proposed European currency, and she resigned after it became clear that her former Cabinet colleague, Michael Heseltine (who had opposed the poll tax) would defeat her in a contest for Party leadership.

In foreign policy, Thatcher proceeded unsentimentally. In Rhodesia and Hong Kong she cut her losses, leaving Rhodesian whites to the untender mercies of the Maoist tyrant-in-waiting, Robert Mugabe, and making the best deal she could with the Communist Chinese, who, like Lenin before them, didn’t mind some capitalist infusions of wealth so long as it could not threaten their rule. In one of the most important Commonwealth countries, South Africa, the rise of the African National Congress party raised her worries about another communist, or communist-leaning regime in the region, and she was late to recognize Nelson Mandela’s merits. But she was prescient regarding Europe. With British membership costing nearly one billion pounds by the late 1970s, she became “increasingly suspicious of the unelected and unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy,” and her quarrel over European integration with her own Chancellor of the Exchequer precipitated her eventual defeat, years later. Since then, as we know, many Britons have come round to her suspicions of European Union governance.

Her most important foreign-policy triumph came in 1982, 8000 miles from the United Kingdom, when Argentina captured the Falkland Islands, a land “settled by sheep farmers who were fiercely loyal to the crown.” The British Foreign Office had wanted to be rid of them, and tried to induce the 1,800 Falklanders to accept independence, but the preemptive Argentinian gambit stiffened English backs. Two months after the Argentine invasion, Thatcher ordered the British Navy to throw them out; in doing so, they (and behind them, she) saved Conservatives from likely defeat at the next general election. “She had saved Britain’s honor, avenged the failure of Suez, reversed national decline, and made the country great again”—or so it felt at the time, and for the time it was a real achievement. Britain was a country that needed a ‘win,’ and Thatcher got it one.

She proved equally firm in what turned out to be the endgame of the Cold War, where she partnered with the Reagan Administration in its ambition not merely to contain but to roll back the Soviet empire. She first visited America in the late 1960s, coming away not with an impression of a country in the grips of n unpopular war and ‘counterculture’ ferment, but of “entrepreneurial energy,” “belief in the free market,” and a spirit of “simultaneous pursuit of wealth and self-improvement.” Compared to stagnating Britain, even Great-Society America seemed an “an example of a governing and fiscal regime that was less intrusive in its reach and less punitive in its taxation.” “America’s values and aspirations bore a striking resemblance to those she had learned at her father’s knee, and the United States would become the model for what she wanted to achieve in Britain.” President Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” accordingly enthused rather than offended the Prime Minister. She faced down the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (another of Michael Foot’s ill-considered enthusiasms), spearheading European resistance to Soviet domination of Central Europe.

When Reagan ordered the invasion of communist-controlled Grenada, a Commonwealth country, without consulting his friend the Prime Minister, Thatcher coolly shrugged it off, concluding “that she must get even closer to him.” She was among the first to recognize Mikhail Gorbachev as a man “we could do business with,” although she seems not to have supposed that a real detente between the United States and the Soviet Union (in contrast to the false detente of the 1970s) would lead to the superpowers negotiating over the heads of her own government and those of the rest of Europe. When the Soviet empire finally fell, the Allies’ success brought her unexpected headaches. Not only was the newly-elected U. S. president George H. W. Bush less sympathetic to Thatcher and her policies than Reagan had been—Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ smacked of Tory ‘Wet’-ness more than Lockean liberalism—but the more-or-less consequent reunification of Germany brought a new economic and political powerhouse onto the Continental Plain, one that would, she foresaw, disrupt British relations within Europe and with her American allies. Her sudden departure from Downing Street saved her from needing to figure out what to do about the brave new world that had such creatures in it. Statesmen since her time have been trying to do that, with very middling success.

“Throughout her premiership, she was the dominant figure in British public life, and she not only made the political weather, but went some way towards changing the political climate, too,” doing “more than anyone else to disrupt the political consensus that had existed from 1945 to 1979” and “shift[ing] the centre ground of public debate to the right.” From then until now, “British politics on both the right and the left have largely played out in her shadow.” Her greater predecessor, Winston Churchill, had quite arguably saved the country as much as any one man could do, but his enduring legacy was in that alone, inasmuch as postwar Britain soon turned to a self-stultifying mixture of demi-socialist egalitarianism and international embarrassment. Lacking Churchill’s intellectual brilliance and greatness of soul, Margaret Thatcher still had the practical judgment and toughness needed in her own time, at the service of a Lockean liberalism well-suited for a longer and more peaceful journey beyond her own years in power.