Chapter 20
And the Living Is Easy – For Some
In This Chapter
Warily watching the development of nuclear power
Enjoying flying and listening to singles
The twentieth century, especially its second half, saw bigger and faster changes in people’s lifestyles than any century in history. Travel and communications meant that people could contact each other and travel much farther and more quickly than ever before. Long-held beliefs changed and so did the traditional roles of men and women. In the 1950s a strange moody, nocturnal animal called the teenager was discovered, grazing from kitchen fridges. This chapter rounds off the twentieth century by showing how it affected, well, you.
Techno Beat
Technological change didn’t suddenly start in the twentieth century: After all, the nineteenth century saw a complete industrial revolution. But the twentieth century saw change happening much faster than before and reaching into everyone’s everyday world. New products and inventions were only expected to last a few years before they went out of date, or just fell out of fashion. And thanks to television and the Internet, something that happened in one place could very quickly spread all round the world.
The mighty atom
For war
Scientists working on nuclear energy didn’t take long to realise that their work could be used for military purposes. Nazi Germany certainly realised the possibility and set up a programme to develop an atomic bomb; luckily, some of the leading German physicists in Nazi Germany, most famously Albert Einstein, were also Jewish and had managed to get out. As a result, American and British scientists were responsible for developing the first atomic weapons. The Cold War (see Chapter 10) kept them all in business for years to come.
And for peace
During the 1950s and 1960s the world felt as if it was living in the shadow of a nuclear war that might break out at any moment. But scientists were keen to show that nuclear energy wasn’t just for making bombs. The energy it produced could be used to drive other machinery with enormous power. Producing electricity was the most obvious use. Electricity was generated in enormous power stations whose dynamos were run on coal: Old power stations have those huge chimneys for that reason. Most of the coal mined around the world didn’t go onto people’s fireplaces: It powered the generators that fed electricity to the light bulbs or the kitchen. But coal was messy and dirty and the job of getting it was filthy and dangerous. Nuclear power could drive a power station much more cleanly, more efficiently, and (the key consideration for many governments) at a fraction of the cost.
So the 1950s and 1960s saw a large number of nuclear reactors and power stations being built. Most people welcomed this new ‘clean’ source of energy.
Nuclear energy had one ever so slightly enormous drawback: It produced large quantities of highly radioactive waste, with a half-life (that is, the time it takes for half of it to decay) of hundreds of years. Throwing that lot in the bin with the newspapers and potato peelings just isn’t possible. Nuclear waste has to be buried in vast sealed concrete storage dumps deep under the ground. And all nuclear facilities run the risk of leakages, as happened at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979, or catastrophic explosion, as happened at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1985. That disaster helped spearhead a major youth movement campaigning against nuclear power in the 1980s.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Some writers and filmmakers in the first half of the century tried to imagine what life would be like in the second half, and quite often the image they came up with was pretty scary:
H. G. Wells imagined a journey in a time machine which saw the twentieth-century world being destroyed in a cataclysmic war. His novel Things to Come described London being destroyed in a terrifying air attack. (Wells also came up with The War of the Worlds about a Martian invasion of Earth, so you can see he was a real bundle of laughs.)
Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis showed a future high-tech world in which people were reduced to the level of cattle.
Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World imagined a future where the people were bred like animals by an all-controlling State.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four was so scary that people spent the 1970s anxiously counting down the years. Orwell pictured a gloomy world where the State had complete control over people’s lives, even their innermost thoughts.
What these dark predictions all had in common was technology: They all imagined that technology would transform people’s lives and make them easier to control. Some people would say that they got that part right.
We’re on the telly
Incredible though it may seem, when television started in the 1930s no one was sure that it would catch on. The image quality was very poor compared with the cinema, and no usherettes came round selling chocolates or ice creams. But in the 1950s, American TV produced comedies, westerns, and adventures which went down well with audiences all over the world. Other countries copied the format of American TV game shows and adapted them for their own audiences. By the 1960s television was well on the way to becoming a major part of Western domestic life, even among poorer people, and it was one of the main consumer goods that people elsewhere in the world aspired to.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Television beat cinema hands down in documentaries and factual programmes. Cinemas showed newsreels before the main feature, short films about world events or about the olive harvest in Morocco, with a commentator – plus what sounded like a full orchestra – speaking over it, and you had to sit through it all and like it before they let you watch Singin’ in the Rain.
Television, on the other hand, could have studio-based shows, interviewing important people and challenging their answers. Some of the interviewers became well-known characters in their own right. Talk shows and celebrity interviewers helped make the new medium seem more exciting and cutting edge.
The tragedy of the tests
In the 1940s and 1950s, when atomic weapons were still new, the nuclear powers held tests to check that their bombs actually worked and to measure their effects. The American and British governments tested their bombs on remote Pacific islands and deep in the outback of Australia (which shows what they thought of Pacific islanders and Australian Aborigines). They sent large numbers of troops to witness the explosions from what they reckoned was a safe distance. They were wrong. The troops were far too close and were given feeble protection, such as extra-strong sunglasses or being told to stand with their backs to the actual explosion. Many of these men later developed leukaemia and cancer as a direct result of the radiation they received witnessing these tests. Which shows what their governments thought of them, too.
It ain’t real if it ain’t on TV
Before television got going, most people could only see the world outside through cinema and the press; people who grew up after 1945 expected to see things on television first. Some of the landmark events of the second half- century, such as the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, the moon landings, or the terrorist attacks on the Munich Olympics, were all played out on television.
Sometimes, television actually made events happen. King Juan Carlos of Spain and Boris Yeltsin in Russia both defeated military coups in their countries by timely appearances on television calling on people to defeat the plotters. Politicians agree that TV footage of Vietnam helped turn Americans against the war. To many people in the second half of the century, television was reality.
Some politicians latched onto this powerful new medium very quickly. Kennedy was a made-for-TV president and so was his old enemy, Cuba’s Fidel Castro (see Chapter 13 to find out why they were such enemies). Older politicians had mixed reactions: France’s President de Gaulle was very effective on television; Churchill tried it once, looked awful, and never touched it again. By the end of the century, though, no politician anywhere in the world could expect to succeed without being very adept at appearing on television.
We’ll be back after the break
One novelty that started in American television was the ad break. Advertising became a sophisticated social exercise: Advertisers identified their different types of audience and what TV programmes they were watching and when, in order to sell to them more directly. Some very clever people worked in advertising: The novelist Salman Rushdie coined a famous slogan for advertising cream cakes at a time when dieting was all the rage: ‘Naughty. But nice’.
TV adverts were so good for business that advertisers could afford to pay top stars huge sums just for reading one or two lines, even one or two words, in an advert. Actors love adverts.
By the 1980s and 1990s broadcasters were beaming their signals down from satellites in space. Satellite TV channels could be sent into homes in many different countries, so satellite TV potentially was a very powerful medium. One of the leading satellite TV companies was Sky, owned by the Australian-born broadcasting billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch had already built up a newspaper empire for himself in Britain, Australia, and the United States; by the 1980s he was using his control of Sky to help persuade China to open up more to the rest of the world. Many people thought – and still think – that it was a bad idea to put so much power and influence into the hands of a TV executive.
See It Now!
The American broadcaster Ed Murrow made his name sending back reports from London during the Blitz in the Second World War. In the 1950s he fronted a ground-breaking TV show called See It Now, which nosed out the big stories and asked the awkward questions. In 1954 Murrow took up the challenge that the rest of America’s press was ducking and denounced Senator Joseph McCarthy for his harassment of people accused of communist sympathies. You can see the show recreated in the film Good Night and Good Luck (that phrase was Murrow’s sign off). See It Now pushed out the boundaries of what investigative TV could do and set a standard for TV around the world to match. Oh, and McCarthy wasn’t able to refute Murrow’s charges.
You spin me round (like a record)
If one invention can be credited (or blamed, if you prefer) with having created the twentieth-century teenager, it was the 45 rpm single record. Pre-war records were made of heavy vinyl, they turned very fast at 78 rpm, and you needed whole stacks of them to play any decent-length piece of music. The single was small, lightweight, and funky, and it was just long enough to hold a single hit song (plus the B side so you could hear what your pin-ups sounded like on a bad day). The single was perfect for parties, bedrooms, jukeboxes, and radio stations. Nothing marked out the cool young dudes from the saddo parents more than the great 45 v 78 rpm divide.
The age gap between parents and their offspring, especially those in their teenage years, was probably the biggest social difference between the second half of the century and almost every century that had preceded it. Pop music, more than anything else, was the thing that really created a global youth culture. The earliest pop music had a clean wholesome image, but in the 1960s pop – especially rock – developed its distinctive message of rebellion and defiance of the older generation and its values. The biggest bands, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, became enormously popular global phenomena – well, popular with young people anyway – and the more successful they were, the more outrageous their music, their image, and their lifestyles became. The 1970s took the rebellion still further with glam rock, heavy metal, and, if they didn’t seem outrageous enough, punk.
By the 1990s, as the 1960s and 1970s generation found they had teenage children of their own, the musical age divide became less marked. The different generations listened to different bands but they were all part of the same pop culture. Middle-aged people even carried on wearing the same sort of fashions they had worn in their rebellious youth and in Britain pop and rock stars like Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger were knighted by the queen. Youth culture had been absorbed into the mainstream.
Planes, trains, and automobiles
The railways had allowed people to travel much greater distances than they had ever done before, and thanks to Henry Ford cars were much more affordable by the middle of the century than ever before. But transport was completely revolutionised in the post-war years in ways that even Ford hadn’t anticipated.
Reach for the sky
‘Hi. I’m Trudy. Fly me.’ Pan Am airlines used that sort of advertising line in its sixties and seventies heyday. The idea, though, was that most people who saw the advert could never dream of flying Trudy or any of her equally pretty and inviting colleagues: Flying was for the rich businessman with an expense account – not for nothing were the beautiful people known as the Jet Set. Flying was exotic and exciting and definitely not for the hoi polloi. But that situation began to change in the seventies, as various airline entrepreneurs, led by Freddie Laker’s ‘Skytrain’, looked at ways of opening up the sky to the people. By the 1980s people of even relatively modest backgrounds were flying off for foreign holidays and thinking nothing of it.
For hash get cash
A separate youth culture developed first in the States, mainly because young Americans were flush with cash so they could afford their records and clothes (and drugs): The sixties tended to swing much less in poorer parts of the world. But in the West, the meanie capitalist manufacturers and retailers of jukeboxes, convertible cars, hi-fi equipment, televisions, guitars, drum kits, amplifiers and recording equipment, posters, backpacking trips to India, leather jackets, paisley pattern cloth, hair ribbons, and small round spectacles all made a very tidy profit out of the anti-capitalist drop-out generation, thank you very much. And so did the drugs barons, man.
Engine trouble
For a long time the train seemed to be the great loser in the transport revolution. Diesel was replacing dirty old steam in most countries by the sixties, and trains were certainly useful; They just seemed rather dull. Trains were what you took to work each day; holidays increasingly meant packing up the car or heading for the airport. Not until the eighties, when electric trains such as the Japanese Bullet Train or the French TGV began to reach seriously fast speeds, did trains suddenly become sexy again. And when fears about global warming made flying something you had to do in private, between consenting adults, trains became the green way to get around.
You need wheels
Late twentieth-century cars developed in ways the pioneers of motoring could never have imagined. Driving became a way of life for millions of people around the world, and Sunday morning worship often took the form of kneeling before the family car and washing it. Cars even seemed to develop national characteristics:
Citroën (France): Sleek, smooth, and streamlined, looked as if it might whisper ‘you ‘ave ze most beautiful eyes’.
Rolls Royce (Britain): Grand and posh. And broke by the 1970s.
Chevrolet (USA): Enormously long and flashy, built for driving down the freeway with the cover down, raising one’s arms and whooping. Basically, ‘I’m rich. I’m cool. Get outta my way.’
Volkswagen Beetle (West Germany): A Nazi design that found a much more peaceful – and effective – way to take over the world.
Volvo (Sweden): Square and sensible. And rather boring.
Mitsubishi, Toyota, Datsun, and so on (Japan): Small, perfectly formed, steadily overtaking everyone on the outside.
You could argue that the biggest changes in motoring in the late twentieth century weren’t so much in the cars as in everything else that cars need. Petrol stations stopped being places where you could loftily tell an attendant to ‘Fill her up!’ and became petrol self-service supermarkets. Motorways became enormous, with multiple lanes and huge, fiendishly complicated junctions. Road signage began to be standardised across countries so motorists could know exactly which rule they were ignoring. Motels were joined by ‘drive-in’ cinemas and ‘drive-thru’ fast food outlets. If you couldn’t do it from a car, it wasn’t worth doing.
Computers take over
The world’s first programmable computer was enormous. Codenamed ‘Colossus’, it was built by British codebreakers in the Second World War to crack German codes. Films and TV programmes showed computers filling whole rooms, and the people who knew how to use them were always incredibly brainy. That image changed in the 1970s when IBM developed the personal computer – a piece of hardware that could sit on a desk. By the 1980s computers were moving out of the office accounts department and into the home. But the PC was still essentially a combination of a very clever calculator for doing hard sums and a word processor. The computer revolution occurred when Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web. Suddenly the world found it had a mind-bogglingly big superhighway running past its window (or, usually, its Windows) just waiting to be filled with information. On anything.
The full implications of the computer revolution took time to sink in. The Internet wasn’t just an enormous public library: It became an information exchange, connecting people across whole continents. E-mail, which had begun as a way for geeks to exchange bad jokes, became the standard means of instant global communication. Suddenly everything from shopping at the supermarket to running the nation’s defence forces could be done from a computer screen.
Information is power
Any politician or general knows that information is the most important weapon, and the computer revolution had created information banks beyond previous imagining.
The IT revolution is still going on, and the speed of change can leave us a bit breathless. You’ll have your own thoughts and experiences, but from a historian’s point of view, IT raises some very familiar issues about the way powerful people have always sought to control the less powerful. Where governments exercised control using secret policemen and prison camps; now technocrats with computer files wield power. The technology has changed massively: The motives and the dangers haven’t changed one bit. Consider the following:
China cracks down: When the Chinese government confronted pro-democracy campaigners in Tianenmen Square in 1989 (see Chapter 16), it tried to cut off the Chinese people from any information about what was happening by the usual means of censoring the press and blocking foreign TV and radio signals. But Beijing couldn’t block satellite TV, and it couldn’t stop fax machines working, so people in the outside world simply faxed outside news reports of what had happened to contacts inside China. By the turn of the century, though, China was an enormous emerging market which the big IT companies needed to do business with. The price? Internet giant Google had to agree to censor its Chinese version to omit any mention of the events of 1989.
ID data: ID storage systems became so sophisticated that enormous amounts of personal information could be stored on a single microchip or on the magnetic strip on an ID card. But who held this information? Governments passed laws protecting data and privacy but microchips and data disks are physical objects and can be lost or stolen just like anything else. News reports all over the world began to carry stories of huge files of personal data being lost because some official had had a laptop stolen and computer-literate criminal gangs discovered just how easy it is to steal someone’s identity – and their money – just by sitting down at a computer terminal.
Live long and prosper
Medical science made huge advances in the second half of the century (it did in the first half too, remember). The United Nations set up the World Health Organisation to co-ordinate efforts to combat some of the world’s biggest killers and it has had some huge successes against diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis. The WHO sponsors vital research which has helped limit the effects of AIDS and made huge inroads into the treatment of cancer.
The result of medical advances? On the whole people are living much longer than they used to. In the past, people in their forties were regarded as old and sixty was a great age. Not any more. In the developed world, people who stay reasonably fit and healthy (not, of course, an option for many people in the developing world) can expect to be around to burden their great-grandchildren. Medicine has also helped cut the infant mortality rate. More people living longer + more babies surviving infancy = one massive population explosion.
Ok gr8 cu l8er
Translation for older readers: ‘OK, great. See you later.’ Mobile phones began as the ultimate executive toy, a way of showing the world how very important you were and that you had to be contactable at every hour of the day or the world would stop turning. And even then, the important message usually consisted of the words ‘I’m on the train!’ shouted so loudly that the phone wasn’t necessary in the first place.
What turned the mobile phone into the world’s must-have was teenagers discovering the joys of texting. A whole new language was born, which left the older generation like, I mean, totally left out? LOL :) But the mobile phone also developed other uses: It could be a camera, a video camera, a small TV, or a computer – in fact, it had become a general communications device. A way of keeping tabs on people.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Not only technology changed lives in the late twentieth century. Attitudes and ideas changed enormously. Assumptions that had held good for centuries were suddenly questioned and thrown out with the rubbish.
Imagine there’s no heaven
The big new ideas of the first half of the century, fascism and communism (you need Chapters 4 and 5 here), rejected belief in God, though some fascist regimes shared their anti-communism with the Catholic Church. Some historians argue that this rejection of religion was one of their greatest weaknesses: Certainly the churches were an important force in resisting Nazi rule and bringing communism down. The consumer world of the second half of the century didn’t try to destroy or control religion: It just ignored it. In Europe, shops opened on Sundays, people ignored Church teaching on abortion and contraception, and fewer people bothered going to church on Sunday morning.
A very different picture developed in the United States, where evangelical religion became a significant force, especially in the Midwest. Billy Graham had led the way in the 1950s and 1960s, and by the 1970s and 1980s many evangelists had turned to television as a way of taking their message – and their appeal for funds – to a wide audience. No politician could ignore the ‘Bible Belt’ and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement had a big influence on government under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Moral issues such as abortion and gay rights proved much more dangerous for American governments than for Europeans.
Outside the developed world, the Church has played two very different roles:
Leading the people in their fight for justice: In South America and in Africa the Christian churches have been at the forefront of movements to spread education and healthcare and to oppose governments that rule by tyranny and force.
Helping dictators to oppress their countries: Churches have also helped right-wing dictators in Spain, Portugal, and Vietnam on the grounds that they were standing up against the spread of communism.
Suffer, little children
Nothing damaged the authority of the Church more than the revelation that priests in many different countries had long been engaged in the systematic abuse of children, and that the Church authorities had covered it up. This discovery wasn’t just a case of a few rogue priests: The compensation bill faced by the Catholic Church in Boston, Massachusetts was so huge it threatened to bankrupt the diocese. Staunchly Catholic countries such as Ireland and Italy were shaken by the revelations that began to emerge in the 1990s. Hypocrisy is the kiss of death for any religion, and this was one of the worst scandals imaginable. Churches introduced changes and worked more closely with the authorities to try to stamp out child abuse in their schools and parishes, but for many around the world the damage had been done.
Allah is Great
During the 1970s Islam seemed to be going the same way as Christianity: Sidelined by Western commercialism. That situation changed with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Like all big revolutions, the Iranian revolution had an impact far beyond its own country: Muslims all over the world, including the growing Muslim communities in the West, took inspiration from Iran not to undermine Western society (though that was what the Ayatollah Khomeini hoped to do) but to stand up for Islam with a degree of pride and not to try to hide it away, as they saw more and more Christians doing with their faith. The result was that by the 1980s and 1990s, Islam was becoming a major force in world politics. And since the United States was the country the Ayatollah had identified as the ‘Great Satan’, this clash of religions and culture was always likely to see fireworks – as the first few years of the twenty-first century amply proved.
A woman’s place
Look at adverts or photos from any time up to the sixties and seventies and you’ll find it hard to believe how they portrayed women. The stereotypes were:
Housewife: Servant. ‘Here’s your supper, dear.’ Also willing dupe for washing machine salesmen.
Secretary: Airhead.
Nurse: Dolly bird; unless a senior nurse, in which case: Dragon.
These stereotypes didn’t just exist in adland. Women earned less than men in the same jobs, they could be – and were – excluded from the upper ranks of professions and even from whole areas of work. In Britain women’s railway tickets were stamped ‘W’ for ‘woman’. Even more seriously, male-dominated legal systems found it hard to take violent crimes against women, especially rape, seriously: In fact, women who brought legal cases could often end up being accused of having brought the whole thing on themselves.
Burn those bras
The liberation of women – which is still far from complete – began in America in the late 1960s as a radical feminist movement. Angry protestors disrupted beauty pageants and defaced posters portraying women simply as sex objects. They symbolically burned their bras as representations of restrictive male control, while bemused men looked on wondering what all the fuss was about. This radical phase was vital to break down centuries of entrenched attitudes – and this was the situation in the developed West; attitudes were going to be even harder to change in some other parts of the world.
Pad those shoulders
By the 1980s women had moved away from the radical ‘Women’s Lib’ phase and into the boardroom. Not yet into the top jobs – many companies operated a ‘glass ceiling’, ostensibly being entirely open to women but in fact restricting them to the lower levels – but they were on the inside. ‘Power dressing’ was fashionable, using big shoulder pads to make women look, well, male.
Can we get a better icon?
Women looking for powerful role models in the 1980s and 1990s could look up to singers such as Madonna or Cher (none of those male-dominated surnames conferred by a patriarchal society, you see) but the political world presented more of a problem. The most obvious figures were powerful women leaders like India’s Indira Gandhi or Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, but they weren’t necessarily icons you’d want. Mrs Gandhi led a brutally repressive regime; some people say the same for Mrs Thatcher, but whatever you think of her politics, she hated feminists. Hillary Clinton was a good role model – tough, intelligent, and a wronged wife to boot. But everyone’s favourite by a long way was Britain’s Princess Diana, the beautiful, caring, jet-setting, doomed star of every magazine cover in the world. The women who launched the feminist movement in the sixties could never have dreamed that by the end of the century the woman most other women looked up to would be a fairytale princess in a tiara.
Let’s talk about sex
Sex didn’t actually begin in the 1960s, though you could be forgiven for thinking so. What did begin then was an openness about the subject and an acceptance that it was what people do. What didn’t get going in the sixties was an acceptance of the consequences.
The starting point for the sexual revolution in the late twentieth century was probably the publication in 1948 and 1953 of two reports on American sexual behaviour by Professor Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey conducted detailed confidential surveys about sexual behaviour and came up with findings that shocked fifties America. Kinsey reported that various sexual practices that had always been thought of as bizarre, immoral, and the sign of a degenerate and perverted mind, were actually entirely common and mainstream. Or to put the matter simply: Most ordinary, normal, and respectable people have sex in many different ways and enjoy it.
Let it all hang out
What happened in the sixties was that free sex became part of the big youth revolution against the attitudes of their parents. Having sex and not feeling embarrassed or ashamed of it went with not being ashamed of listening to rock music or of not wearing a tie. The next stage was to get the rest of society to accept sex as part of ordinary life. The ‘Permissive society’ was the term used, which sounded rather grand but actually just meant a huge growth in strip clubs and porn magazines. Sales of old raincoats went up as well.
Gay people had a much harder fight for acceptance. Homosexual acts were illegal in many countries until the 1960s, and in some countries were (and are) punishable by death. In 1978 a gay San Francisco city official called Harvey Milk was shot and his killer received only a five-year sentence. Gay opinion in San Francisco was outraged and the case helped wake America up to the prejudice that existed against gay people. By the 1990s attitudes had become much more tolerant, but both the military and the Christian churches still found accepting equal rights for gay people impossible.
Maybe babies?
Alongside the Pill, some Western countries began to legalise abortion in the sixties and seventies. This legislation was mainly a way of saving women from the horrors of ‘backstreet’ abortion, but by the 1980s and 1990s opponents of abortion were complaining that women were using abortion effectively as a form of birth control. This issue is a standard topic for college debating societies and the bitter controversy surrounding it shows no sign of dying down.
Oh, I hadn’t thought of that
The sexual revolution may have been fun, but it had two unintended consequences:
Many women complained that sex, and particularly pornography, turned them into toys for men and could lead to sexual violence
AIDS
AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) began to appear among the gay community in America and had the medical world baffled. Much to the delight of the religious right, AIDS was nicknamed the ‘gay plague’. But AIDS quickly moved into the rest of society, especially through infected blood. Still principally spread by unprotected sex, hetero- or homosexual, AIDS has reached epidemic proportions in Africa. Medical science has made enormous progress in stemming the impact of AIDS, but, as always, most of the money has gone on the strains most prevalent in the West; Africa gets much less money spent on its version of the disease.
North and South
In 1977 the former West German Chancellor Willi Brandt sat down to chair a special UN commission on the relationship between the developed world, which he called, broadly, ‘the North’, and what was then called the Third World, or ‘South’. The commission’s reports pointed out that the different parts of the world depend on each other and that the wealthy North had to help the South not just when disasters happened but regularly. Brandt called on the developed world to devote part of its annual GDP to overseas aid. Some countries did so; a lot said they would but didn’t.
The Brandt report was significant because it changed the way commentators and world leaders thought. Before Brandt, most people in the West thought of the developing world as a sort of irritant, always having disasters and asking for money. The Brandt report brought home to people in the West the idea that North and South are interdependent: What happens in the South affects what happens in the North and vice versa.
Destroying the planet
Environmentalists in the 1970s and 1980s concentrated on criticising pollution and the effect it was having on the environment, but by the 1990s the stakes were clearly a lot higher than polluted rivers. The world was using up energy and emitting carbon into the atmosphere at such a rate that it was eroding the earth’s protective ozone layer, the only thing between us and the full force of the sun. The result was a change in the world’s very climate and a growth in global warming. Some people tried to say that the idea of global warming was over-hyped but scientists are now in overwhelming agreement that this challenge is real and urgent.
Identifying the problem is a lot easier than solving it. People in the West are now much more aware of their ‘carbon footprint’ – the amount of carbon they produce every day through ordinary activities like driving to work or using dishwashers. Governments put out messages appealing to people to change their lifestyles and reduce their carbon emissions, but without much effect. Westerners show no sign of flying less frequently, even though the carbon impact of air travel is well-publicised and widely known.
Part of the reason for the lack of progress in the developed world is that people there are aware of the enormous impact on the environment of the emerging countries in other parts of the world, especially India and China. As these new economic giants start to get used to their new status, their peoples want to enjoy some of the perks of life that people in the West have enjoyed for so long, and that includes gas-guzzling cars, air travel, and homes full of carbon-emitting gadgets. Telling people in these countries that they have to hold back from enjoying their new-found prosperity was never going to be easy: Too often their response is ‘Why should we?’
Governments signed up to promises at special ‘Earth Summits’ at Rio in 1992 and Kyoto in 1999 to try to reduce carbon emissions, but the United States held back and so did China, which was rapidly overtaking America as the world’s biggest emitter of carbon. The 2007 summit at Bali nearly broke down until the United States finally gave way and agreed to sign up to targets for cutting carbon emissions. As so often in history, politicians take time to catch up with the real world and its problems.
To the New Millennium
Back in the tenth century, Europeans were fearful that the first Millennium would mark the end of the world. As the 1990s drew to a close the world awaited the Year 2000 with a similar mixture of excitement and trepidation: Scientists were concerned that the world’s computers would succumb to the dreaded ‘Millennium Bug’ and stop functioning because they couldn’t tell the difference between 1900 and 2000. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Celebrations were held around the world to mark the end of one century and one Millenium and the start of another, but when it actually arrived the new Millennium felt much like the previous one. People soon got used to writing dates beginning with ‘20’ though no one could quite decide what name to give the first decade of the new century. The clothes and the cars of the first years of the new century looked much like those of the last years of the old one. Life, like history, carried on.