During my college years one of the books we all read was Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. I never forgot it. Wilson was a great writer and literary critic, and his book was beautifully written. But his book excited me mostly because it described something unusual and extremely important: the relationship of philosophical ideas and practical events—the savage intersection where theories and personalities meet and sometimes end up changing the world, for better or for worse. Wilson described this intersection by recounting the history of socialism. He described the rise of various theories about history and economics. And he showed how Lenin and a small number of other people came along and put those ideas (altered, of course, to fit circumstances) to use in the Bolshevik Revolution, and thereby changed world history—disastrously, in that instance, as Wilson ultimately recognized.
Paul Berman is a writer in Edmund Wilson’s tradition. In Power and the Idealists, Berman’s theme, too, is the intersection of ideas and events. In some ways Power and the Idealists is a continuation of Wilson’s classic book—a story of the political left and its evolution and its effect on world events. Berman begins with the left-wing radicals from the period half a century after Lenin’s revolution—the years around 1968. A lot of us today think we know everything we need to know about 1968. In the one-line summary of history so popular in the modern media, 1968 was a crazy time. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll created a wild, irresponsible group of selfindulgent, authority-defying, flag-burning, New Left anarchists who threatened our very values, our Way of Life. This one-line summary of 1968 has energized rightwing politics ever since. Many people today still cannot abide political leaders from the center-left who, when they were young, stood anywhere near the rebellious atmosphere of that period. We have seen this in the right-wing opposition to figures like John Kerry and Bill Clinton, neither of whom was especially radical when he was young. And we have seen something very similar in Europe, where some people on the political right will never forgive political leaders like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit—who were, in fact, quite radical in their youth. The memories and myths and sometimes the misrepresentations that came out of 1968 created a fault line in American and European political life, and the fault line has aroused enmities and resentments that will last as long as the ’68ers are around.
Well, some of those myths and memories cannot be denied. The stunning events of 1968 really happened—the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, the sometimes peaceful and sometimes destructive political demonstrations in Paris and New York and Chicago, the razor-thin victory of Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey, the rage that led some ultra-leftists to join the murderous Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany two years later and led other people who should have known better to entertain some very Old Left delusions about Fidel Castro, the PLO, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and other gods that failed. For both those who indulged (in any, or every, sense of the word) and those who did not (or say they did not), the era imprinted them for the rest of their lives.
Yet there was another legacy from 1968, which many people have failed to recognize. The events of that period led some of the participants in the New Left to argue with one another about what had happened, and the arguments produced an intellectual ferment, especially in Europe. In the years that followed, some of those veterans of the New Left became thoughtful about the disasters of their own movement—about the left-wing disasters that Edmund Wilson had begun to notice long ago in To the Finland Station. Some of those veterans of the European New Left, the old ’68ers, sifted through their own beliefs, trying to separate the moral concerns that might have been valid from the left-wing dogmas that had turned out to be destructive and false. They began to look at world events with fresh eyes. Some moved beyond their original visceral anti-Americanism. To the astonishment of many, some of those European veterans of 1968 achieved political respectability, too, as the years went by, and their new ideas began to have an impact on the world of politics and policy. A lot of attention has been paid to modern movements of the right, such as the neoconservatives. But some of the veterans of the New Left, especially in Europe, produced their own approach to world politics, a post–Cold War way of thinking, and this new way of thinking eventually permeated the policy process—even though very few “decisionmakers” in the United States and other countries have fully understood these new ideas or have even been aware that new ideas were coming into existence, or where they came from.
Paul Berman has followed all this like no one else on either side of the Atlantic, and, as a veteran himself of ’68, has understood how important was the ferment among some of the European ’68ers. Now he has done something quite remarkable: out of the many internal disputes within the left (Old, New, and divided), he has found a pattern and a story line that is compelling and important. He has identified the roots of an important development in post–Cold War thinking: a turn, among a small but influential group of the ’68ers, away from some of the traditional left-wing and anti-American dogmas of the past in favor of a new kind of liberal antitotalitarianism. Berman told part of this story in his book A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (published in 1996), which focused on the American Left, though in that book he gave some attention to Europe, as well. Now he has reached across the Atlantic to examine some of the European ’68ers and their foreign policy ideas in full detail. He has described the origins and nature of the new thinking about world affairs. He has shown the powerful influence of this new thinking on attitudes and policies from Cambodia and Vietnam to the East Bloc revolutions of 1989 and the Balkan wars of the nineteen-nineties. And he has brought the story forward into the age of Iraq.
It takes some kind of determination and skill (including archival skill, in fact, for most of his sources are unknown in the United States) to excavate these precincts. But Berman is fully up to the task. By recounting the history of a handful of people from the European ’68ers, he has painted a huge canvas. He has shown how these people helped generate a postmodern approach to international affairs. His book can help policy-makers, who usually live in a hermetically sealed world of their own, to understand the origins and nature of some of their own ideas. His book could help build a broader, bipartisan consensus for an enlightened Atlantic foreign policy. Everybody knows that, on the political right, foreign-policy “realists” in the tradition of Henry Kissinger and the first President Bush have engaged in a battle for many years with the strange group of neo-cons and right-wing Wilsonians that gathered around the second President Bush. Berman shows that a parallel battle has been taking place all along on the left side of the political spectrum. He even shows some of the influence of the European left-wing debate in the United States, not just recently but from a period long before neoconservatism became a significant political current. One of the most striking anecdotes in his book is his account of Joan Baez in the nineteen-seventies—among the earliest people on the left side of American politics to recognize that if she had opposed the American involvement in Vietnam, she also had to oppose the totalitarian behavior of the North Vietnamese after they took over. Baez was roundly denounced for doing this by many of her early antiwar compatriots. But history has shown that she was right, and universal principles were on her side.
Three of the personalities in Berman’s story stand out: three men (they happen to be men), each with his own fascinating history, each of whom has contributed in a different way to the development of the new ideas. Collectively their histories illuminate the larger story:
• Joschka Fischer, who has run the gauntlet from beating up a German policeman at an ultra-left rally in 1973, as shown in some dramatic photographs, to wearing three-piece suits as Germany’s foreign minister during the period that extended from the Kosovo War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (When, as American ambassador to Germany in 1993, I first met Fischer, he was wearing a kind of transitional uniform consisting of a blue-jeans suit and a checkered shirt with an odd sort of tie; the three-piece suits came later, and does Berman have fun with them!) Fischer, who became Germany’s most popular politician, could not have succeeded politically in the United States, given his ultra-left-wing past and those terrible photographs from long ago. But there he was at the turn of the twenty-first century, pushing his country into support of the Clinton Administration’s actions in Kosovo, then a few years later confronting Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, in a public conference just before the war in Iraq. This took place in February 2003 in a Munich hotel ballroom, and, by chance, I was seated for a while almost directly between the two men, Fischer and Rumsfeld. That was the famous conference in which Fischer, switching from German to English, told Rumsfeld to his face, “Excuse me, I’m not convinced. This is my problem. I cannot go to the public and say, ‘Oh well, let’s go to war because there are reasons’ and so on, and I don’t believe in them.” Berman captures the full import of that dramatic confrontation, which was broadcast live on German television and riveted Germany—a confrontation that even received a bit of attention in the United States, especially because, as Berman shows, Rush Limbaugh took the occasion to launch one of his demagogic right-wing radio attacks.
• Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “Danny the Red” himself, the leader of the French student uprising of 1968 but legally a German citizen, a man with friends all over Europe, whose passage through subsequent history shows an admirable consistency of beliefs and a highly self-aware sense of what can be accomplished in public life. In Berman’s accounting Cohn-Bendit tends to play the role of wise, ironic commentator on the events that he has lived through.
• Bernard Kouchner, the charismatic French doctor who was also deeply involved in the 1968 demonstrations and even lent his car to Danny the Red at a crucial moment in the drama. Kouchner was originally a young member of the Old Left. But he found that the reality of such hell-holes as Biafra and Cambodia defied the easy anti-Americanism of the Old Left, and of the New Left, and of a great many French intellectuals. This restless, brilliant doctor saw that if he wanted to change the world, he had to abandon his original ideas and attack equally crimes and totalitarianism of the left and the right. Cofounding Doctors Without Borders, relentlessly pushing humanitarianism with a political face—or was it politics with a humanitarian face?—Kouchner played an immense role in shaping a new view of intervention in the internal affairs of other nations. As early as 1988, Kouchner, together with some colleagues, drew up a United Nations General Assembly resolution asserting the right to intervene in another country in case of some dreadful emergency.
Astonishingly, this passed the General Assembly—“the very first expression,” as Berman points out, “of a victim’s right to be represented by someone other than his own government.” General Assembly resolutions carry little weight in the real world, but this one launched a movement that would end with Kouchner asserting something he called the “droit d’ingérance”—the “right to intervene.” By the mid-nineteen-nineties, after the horrible lessons of Rwanda and Bosnia, many nations, including ultimately the United States and the members of the European Union, began to find reasons to accept this new formulation and apply it to Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999), where enormous numbers of people needed to be rescued. Since policy-makers tend to be oblivious to the origins of new ideas, almost no one in Washington and few in Brussels realized that the intellectual roots of intervention in the Balkans came from a doctor, who at that moment was serving as the French Minister of Health. Still fewer of those people knew anything at all about the philosophers who had influenced the doctor. Finally, in an almost accidental twist of fate, Kouchner was called upon to implement his own theories: he was appointed by Kofi Annan as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Kosovo, the war that Berman calls the ’68ers’ War.
Berman mentions in his account that I became a warm friend of Kouchner’s. This is true. I visited Kouchner during his reign in Kosovo. I was the American ambassador to the UN in those days, and I thought he was doing a terrific job—despite endless second-guessing by mid-level bureaucrats back at UN headquarters in New York. He remains a dear friend, and continues to fight for his beliefs. In French opinion polls, he always ranks as one of the two or three most popular public figures. But because he refuses to be an orthodox figure—he is sometimes called a French member of the “American left”—his own Socialist Party still sees him as a maverick.
Ideas have consequences—even in the post-ideological age in which we are said to live. Political leaders and high appointed officials are driven by intellectual forces that they can only dimly sense, but which shape their responses to specific events. The end of ideology, like the so-called “end of history” that Berman discussed in his earlier book, A Tale of Two Utopias, can be much overrated.
Berman is a passionate believer in liberal democracy and the power of ideas. For him, liberal democracy is a never-ending project that has always aroused opposition and must always be defended, must always be examined and questioned and strengthened. To the scorn that many suspicious Americans may feel for an approach to history that takes seriously the utterances of obscure French philosophes, Berman would reply: ideas do matter, although they may take years to attain acceptance. And to theorists and thinkers who live only in the world of academic debate or scholarly journals, Berman also says: events matter; they affect ideas just as much as ideas affect events. Events, in fact, can turn a good cause into a bad one, and leave intellectuals trapped on the wrong side of history. This happened, as Berman shows and as Edmund Wilson showed long before him, with the Old Left, which believed in Marxism and Communism long after events had destroyed any conceivable rationale they may have once had.
Has something similar happened to the new kind of liberal antitotalitarianism whose origins and development Berman has chronicled? Have good new ideas led to bad results—in Iraq, above all? One of the most intriguing aspects of Power and the Idealists is Berman’s account of a debate about this very question among some of the European ’68ers themselves—among precisely the people who had pioneered the new ideas. Iraq presented a quandary to the people whom Berman describes. Every one of those people detested the archtotalitarian Saddam Hussein. Every one of those people looked forward to Saddam’s overthrow—at least someday, if not right away. None of those ’68ers loved the George W. Bush administration, and most of them were revolted by it. The Bush administration, in the understated words of the Polish ’68er Adam Michnik, was “not their cup of tea.” Even so, some of the ’68ers hoped that the American-led intervention in Iraq would turn out to be a good thing, and in 2003 they gave their support to the intervention, begrudgingly in most cases. These veterans of the New Left hoped that, in spite of the unattractive qualities of the Bush administration, intervention in Iraq would end up resembling the intervention in the Balkans—a humanitarian policy with humanitarian results. They hoped that more people in Europe, instead of fewer people, would come to the aid of the intervention and of the Iraqis themselves.
Then again, some of the other ’68ers in Europe predicted dire consequences from the start. They opposed the intervention outright, in some cases because they instinctively feared the incompetence of the Bush administration, in some cases for additional reasons, as well. The European ’68ers argued with one another in a friendly and respectful way about these questions, but, as Berman shows, they argued very earnestly, too. Today the dire predictions have turned out to be all-too-true. The horrible, incompetent execution of American policy in Iraq has proved once again a cardinal rule of any policy: a policy badly carried out becomes a bad policy. This time the bad policy ended up catastrophic. Might it have been possible to work out an alternative, superior policy, as Bernard Kouchner wanted to do—an entirely different approach to bringing Saddam’s monstrous dictatorship to an end? As Berman’s book ends, the veterans of the European New Left, having succeeded in changing the rules for intervention through their arguments over the decades and their efforts in the Balkans during the nineteen-nineties, found themselves, like everyone else, up against a terrible reality in Iraq—a reality so desperate that it threatened to discredit the noble ideas that had led some of those veterans of the New Left, though not all of them, to support the original intervention.
So the intellectual debate will go on, with events in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other places playing a major role. I hope Paul Berman will return to these issues, to carry forward the story yet again, and to show how, at the savage intersection of history, ideas and events meet to form a new reality. “I am a critic and not a philosopher,” Berman wrote in A Tale of Two Utopias. But he is a bit too modest. Intellectual history of this caliber can help shape political philosophy. In the future we are going to face many new humanitarian and international crises, as we already see in Darfur and the Republic of Georgia and other places around the world. We are going to have to find the proper balance between prudence, on one hand, and effective, calibrated involvement in the international arena on the other. We are going to have to ask ourselves difficult questions about matters of principle and matters of practicality, and Paul Berman’s illuminating history of people and of ideas will help us ask these questions and search for answers.
Richard Holbrooke
New York City
January 2007