Not all political leaders who become heads of government make much of a difference. This chapter is primarily about those leaders within a democracy who do – redefining leaders who challenge previous assumptions, who redefine what is thought to be politically possible, and who introduce radical policy change.1 Redefining leadership does not always come primarily from the head of the government. It is not unusual for the most important policy innovation to be very much a product of collective leadership. At other times there is an individual within the top team, other than the head of government, who is the prime mover. However, presidents and prime ministers have greater opportunities than their colleagues to set the tone of government and to influence its priorities. When redefining leaders emerge, more often than not this person is, indeed, the head of the executive. The political resources available to that leader are greater than those accruing to any other member of the top team.
AMERICAN PRESIDENTS AS REDEFINING LEADERS
The twentieth-century American presidents with the strongest claim to be regarded as redefining leaders were Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson (although a case could also be made for Theodore Roosevelt).2 The unusual legislative success of FDR and LBJ has already been illustrated in the previous chapter. Both were formidable leaders in the sense that they used to the full the powers of the office of president and were more than usually dominant in the policy process. Both of them during their presidencies radically changed policy as well as the assumptions about what was possible within the American system. Successful outcomes, I argue throughout this book, are rarely associated with the kind of leadership in which one person tries to dominate the entire policy-making process. Indeed, as we have seen, this is impossible in the American system. Redefining presidents tend, therefore, to be those who maximize the use of the political resources they do have. In the United States the impediments in the way of radical change in domestic policy are especially formidable.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt did not attempt systemic change, nor did he preside over a qualitatively new order. He does not, therefore, fit the criteria of transformational leader, but he is a notable example of a redefining one.3 Roosevelt’s imaginative response to economic depression in the 1930s contributed to a revival of the existing economic and political system at a time when it was falling into some disrepute, although the USA was by no means on the verge of revolutionary change. The power of the presidency, especially over foreign policy, had been consolidated by his older relative, the early-twentieth-century president Theodore Roosevelt. It was carried much further by FDR. One important measure was the creation in 1939 of the Executive Office of the President, which, not without difficulty, he persuaded Congress to approve. Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State for War, confided to his diary his dissatisfaction with Roosevelt wanting ‘to do it all himself’ and his irritation that Roosevelt tolerated, or perhaps even encouraged, an atmosphere in Washington ‘full of acrimonious disputes over matters of jurisdiction’.4 Roosevelt was reluctant to delegate power. Even his sympathetic biographer, James MacGregor Burns, describes Roosevelt as a ‘prima donna’ who ‘had no relish for yielding the spotlight for long’.5 But playing off officials and factions against one another was a mechanism for hoarding as much power as he could in a system in which authority was highly fragmented.
Roosevelt used his powers, not least his power of persuasion, to good effect. He did his best to prepare American public opinion for possible involvement in a war against Nazi Germany at a time when Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador to London from 1938 to 1940 and father of the future American president, was saying that ‘democracy in Britain was finished, and that the same fate might well await the United States if she foolishly entered the war’.6 After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to remove the ban on exports of armaments, which, under the Neutrality Act of 1937, had prevented the US from supplying any arms to allies.7 Following the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which brought the United States into the Second World War, Roosevelt, as commander-in-chief, took charge of the American war effort in a way comparable to Churchill’s wartime prime ministership in Britain – with the difference that the United States was by this time far the stronger of these two major powers in the democratic component of the anti-fascist alliance with the Soviet Union. Two War Powers Acts gave Roosevelt a remarkably free hand for an American president, enabling him to establish a host of wartime agencies, including an Office of Censorship, and extensive control over the domestic economy. In one of his radio ‘fireside chats’ of 7 September 1942, Roosevelt laid claim to additional regulatory economic powers and indicated that he would not tolerate inaction by Congress in conferring them, for ‘in the event that Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act’.8 The extraordinary powers he planned to exercise would, said Roosevelt, ‘automatically revert to the people after the war’. Writing in 1946, the constitutional specialist Edward Corwin observed that the president appeared to have been claiming ‘some peculiar relationship between himself and the people – a doctrine with a strong family resemblance to the Leadership principle against which the war was supposedly being fought’.9 Many, though not all, of the powers that Roosevelt accumulated during the war were, however, explicitly delegated to him by Congress.
Unusually powerful war leader though he was, it was, above all, his domestic policy which made Roosevelt a redefining leader. That he held as many as 337 press conferences during his first period of office, which began in 1933, and 374 in his second term (1937–1941) reflected, as did his radio ‘fireside chats’, the high priority he placed on communicating with the electorate and with restoring public morale. With Roosevelt’s backing, Congress passed within the space of a hundred days in 1933 a wide range of legislation aimed at overcoming the economic depression. The measures included the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act (TVA), the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, the Home Owners’ Loan Act and the Railway Coordination Act. The TVA in particular has been described as ‘Roosevelt’s most unalloyed example of presidential leadership’.10 It brought together public and private bodies, linking industry and agriculture, forestry and flood prevention, and provided an example of social and economic planning at the regional level. It was a policy which Roosevelt ‘authored, proposed, and oversaw to passage’.11
Although a number of the specific New Deal measures fell by the wayside in subsequent years, Roosevelt’s presidency, it has convincingly been argued, ‘removed psychological and political obstacles to using government to protect people from the vicissitudes of the marketplace’.12 The New Deal was, however, a collective enterprise. Much of it was conceived by people other than Roosevelt, but his beliefs and political popularity underpinned it. Its programmes required legislation, which meant that in addition to their enactment by Congress, these measures were subject to continuing congressional oversight and investigation. That might have been enough to scupper them had it not been for the popularity both of the programmes and of the president. Roosevelt deliberately kept himself in the spotlight and took full political advantage of the high esteem in which he was held by many voters (even though he was loathed by others).13
To get the New Deal through Congress, Roosevelt required the support of Southern Democrats who formed a solid bloc of votes and he took pains to cultivate and flatter them. They willingly went along with policies that placed constraints on business and the stock market, supported large-scale public infrastructure projects, backed the National Industrial Relations Act of 1935, which broadened the possibilities of unions to organize, and approved the Revenue Act of the same year, which raised the surtax on incomes over $50,000 from 59 to 75 per cent.14 The support of Northern Democrats and of liberal Republicans would not alone have been enough to enact what were in the American context such radical measures. Yet the same Southern Democrats opposed every attempt to extend the citizenship rights of black Americans. The South remained in Roosevelt’s time white supremacist. Thus, at the heart of the New Deal, as Ira Katznelson has put it, lay a ‘rotten compromise’. Roosevelt did little to challenge the ‘rights’ of Southern states to treat African-Americans abominably. Yet, without the economic measures of the New Deal, including some political support for the advance of labour unions, the conditions of black Americans would have been even worse. These policies – especially when taken in conjunction with the subsequent participation of black servicemen in the American war effort – created preconditions for the civil rights movement and advances of the post-war era.15
Among the most significant influences during Roosevelt’s presidency was his politically active wife who was, in many respects, more radical than her husband. Eleanor Roosevelt admitted that if her husband had not been running for the presidency in 1932, she would have voted for the Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas.16 She diligently sought to improve opportunities for women and for African-Americans. She tried hard to get more women appointed to public offices and was especially active in attempting to counter the institutionally embedded racism which pervaded American politics. Her husband felt too constrained by the need for the votes of Southern Democrats, both in popular elections and in Congress, to offer much more than tepid support for civil rights. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 when they refused to allow the great black American singer Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall. That American society as a whole was less bigoted than that organization was suggested by a Gallop poll, which showed 67 per cent approval of her decision.17 Yet every step towards securing civil rights – even the anti-lynching legislation that Roosevelt supported during his second term – encountered fierce opposition in the South. It was approved in the House of Representatives by a large majority, but did not survive a six-week filibuster of late 1937 in the Senate at a time when that body had an overwhelming Democratic majority.18 Very cautiously, however, Roosevelt backed incremental improvements in the civil rights of black Americans, for whom the New Deal brought some gains socially and economically. By the end of the 1930s, black Americans constituted ‘a key element of the Roosevelt vote in northern states’.19
In a broadcast in November 1934, Roosevelt declared that ‘we must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed’.20 Public works to reduce unemployment were at the heart of the New Deal. Yet, we should not exaggerate Roosevelt’s role as an initiator of the new policy. The president was at first very cool towards the idea of public works. That they became an important part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, one of the notable pieces of legislation in FDR’s first hundred days, in large measure resulted from the pressure and persuasion of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and of New York Senator Robert F. Wagner.21 Roosevelt’s successes with Congress were greatest during his first three years as president – and, then again, in the special circumstances of the Second World War. In the second half of the 1930s he had greater difficulties with the legislature. A conservative coalition gradually formed that was capable of thwarting him, and he increasingly resorted to the use of the presidential veto.22
Lyndon B. Johnson
If Roosevelt was a complex personality but undoubtedly a redefining leader and successful president, Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of still more contradictions and greater deviousness. Moreover, Roosevelt’s presidency ended only with his death, Johnson’s in failure. The bitterness caused by the unsuccessful Vietnam War, in which the United States was enmeshed, eventually led Johnson not to seek a second term. Yet, what he achieved domestically was remarkable. It owed a good deal to the political environment in which he entered the White House. The shock of the assassination of his predecessor gave a fillip to causes Kennedy had espoused but on which he had made little headway with Congress – most notably civil rights. Pressures from below were strong, particularly from black Americans, for whom Martin Luther King was an inspirational leader. They came also from a broader society, especially educated youth that was more politicized than in the 1950s, partly as a result of the Vietnam War and its concomitant military draft, but also in response to the leadership of King and other civil rights activists. On the opposite side stood many Republicans and their allies on the civil rights issue, the Southern Democrats. No more sympathetic to the causes Johnson embraced was the long-serving Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover whom, Dean Acheson told Harry Truman, ‘you should trust as much as a rattlesnake with the silencer on its rattle’. While paying scant attention to the murder of peaceful black protesters, Hoover did all in his power to discredit the civil rights movement by spreading rumours of Communist penetration of its ranks. King’s response was to say that it would be encouraging ‘if Mr Hoover and the FBI would be as diligent in apprehending those responsible for bombing churches and killing little children, as they are in seeking out alleged communist infiltration in the civil rights movement’.23
Unlike many other southern Democrats, Johnson had supported the Supreme Court’s Brown v. the Board of Education decision, during the Eisenhower administration, which mandated the desegregation of schools. As president, Johnson’s supreme achievement was to get the most important civil rights legislation passed, overcoming sustained Senate resistance. He also introduced Medicare – and Medicaid for the poor, which was to be administered by the states – and within two years of accidentally ascending to the presidency, his legislative accomplishments had put real substance into his rhetoric about the Great Society and the War on Poverty. The lowest level of inequality ever recorded in the United States was achieved in 1968.24 Johnson has a good claim to be regarded as the greatest American lawmaker of the twentieth century, even if we consider his presidency on its own – unquestionably so, if his years as Senate Majority Leader are added in. Focusing on Johnson’s first two years in the White House, Stephen Graubard has observed: ‘Although Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman established credible records that gave proof of their ability to collaborate with Congress, to secure passage of the domestic legislation they insisted on, none was master of the arts of persuasion in the way Johnson proved to be in 1964 and 1965.’25 How did he do it? One of his major biographers, Randall Woods, notes that the telephone was the ‘true instrument of the Johnson legislative will’, adding:
From late 1963 through 1966, Lyndon Johnson interacted with senators and representatives on a daily and even hourly basis. He became personally familiar with the details of the more than one thousand major bills Congress considered during this period. His memory banks were still full of information concerning the personal characteristics of the various congressional and senatorial districts and the personal peccadilloes of those men and women who served them. ‘There is but one way for a President to deal with the Congress’, Johnson would observe, ‘and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption . . . He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves . . .’26
LBJ was living proof that the president’s greatest ‘power’ was ‘the power to persuade’. Nevertheless, his reputation was low among the highly educated advisers who surrounded Kennedy, and Johnson himself felt keenly the inadequacies of his education compared with ‘the Harvards’, as he called them.27 His ruthlessness and lack of scruples, as he made his political ascent, have been thoroughly documented, not least by Robert Caro in his magisterial multi-volume biography. In the summer of 1957 Johnson, as Majority Leader, pushed through the Senate a Civil Rights Act which made only modest advances, but which, nevertheless, extended black voting rights and paved the way for the major Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 when he was president. It was against all expectations that Johnson used his influence in 1957 in favour of civil rights, for he had voted over a twenty-year period both in the Senate and before that in the House of Representatives in the same way as other Southern Democrats – against improvement in the civil rights of black Americans.28 Any other course of action would have put an end to the rise of a Texan politician.
Even when Johnson was pursuing a liberal policy, he displayed, writes Caro, ‘a pragmatism and ruthlessness striking even to Washington insiders who had thought themselves calloused to the pragmatism of politics’. He was ‘deceitful and proud of it’, as he talked ‘first to a liberal, then to a conservative, walked over first to a southern group and then to a northern’, telling ‘liberals one thing, conservatives the opposite, and asserting both positions with equal, and seemingly total, conviction’.29 But his deviousness went alongside ‘political genius’.30 Considering Johnson’s career in the round, Caro is able to conclude: ‘Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.’31
Johnson had learned during the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 (which John F. Kennedy secured) that the state governors could be effective in putting pressure on senators and representatives. Immediately after the funeral of President Kennedy in November 1963, before the governors had a chance to leave Washington, Johnson called them to a meeting in his office. He told them that he had spent two and a half hours the previous day with Eisenhower, ‘the great President who led our forces to victory’ who made him realize that no party has ‘a single mortgage on patriotism’ and that, regardless of party, they should help him to save the country. He got more and more passionate as he spoke. They had to do something to stop the hate and tackle the injustice, inequality, poverty and unemployment ‘that exists in this land’. The best way to deal with these problems, Johnson said:
is to pass the tax bill and get some more jobs and get some more investments and, incidentally, get more revenue and taxes, and pass the civil rights bill so that we can say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly, and you are going to be judged on merit and not ancestry, nor on how you spell your name.32
Johnson had always been concerned with the fate of the poor, not least the injustices suffered by poor blacks, but he had been concerned, above all, with his own political advancement. Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had long been ambivalent about him. ‘With Johnson,’ he said, ‘you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet.’33 He finished up admiring him. When Johnson’s ambition and compassion had been in conflict, then it was compassion that came off second best. From the moment he became president, however, that conflict was over and, as Caro observes, the cause of social justice ‘moved forward under the direction of this master at transmuting sympathy into governmental action’.34
Of course, the contrast between Johnson’s domestic successes and his foreign policy failures could not have been starker. His inability to understand nationalism and Communism in Asia was shared by his immediate predecessor and also by his advisers, and it was fear of ‘losing’ Vietnam (which was never America’s to lose) that brought about his political downfall. Yet Johnson was a redefining leader. He changed the terms of political debate, not only making American poverty a salient political issue but tackling it head on, while playing a decisive role in ending the virtual disenfranchisement of black voters in a number of southern American states. In his State of the Union address to Congress in January 1964, Johnson said that ‘many Americans live on the outskirts of hope – some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both’. The task, he said, was to ‘replace their despair with opportunity’, adding: ‘This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.’35 At the time of Johnson’s death in 1973, the black writer Ralph Waldo Ellison acknowledged that Johnson had been widely despised both by conservatives and by many liberals. He would ‘have to settle for being recognized as the greatest American President for the poor and for the Negroes’, which, Ellison added, was ‘a very great honor indeed’.36
Ronald Reagan – Redefining Leader?
The United States has had some notable presidents since Johnson, but none who was a redefining leader in the sense in which both Roosevelt and Johnson were. Ronald Reagan is sometimes accorded great significance, but there has been a tendency to exaggerate the difference he made. Leaders and especially their most enthusiastic supporters are prone to assume that momentous events which occur during their time in power are attributable to them. Such arguments have frequently been advanced on behalf of Reagan, but he did not make things happen in the way that Johnson did. Notwithstanding the importance of the United States in world politics, fundamental change can occur internationally, as it did during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush the elder, without it being primarily a result of contemporaneous American policy. The liberalization of the Soviet Union, democratization of East-Central Europe and the end of the Cold War were very largely the result of change in Moscow to which Reagan and Bush were responsive but for which they were not responsible. More specifically, the transformation of Soviet domestic and foreign policy in the second half of the 1980s owed little or nothing to Washington hardliners, triumphalist Western accounts notwithstanding.
Domestically, neither Reagan nor (still more obviously) Bush comes into the category of a redefining leader, although Reagan, while less knowledgeable than Bush, was more successful in imparting a distinctive tone to his presidency as well as, in further contrast with his successor, comfortably winning a second term. There was, as noted in the previous chapter, a large gulf between Reagan’s rhetoric and the realities of his presidency. His legislative achievements were modest and ‘in spite of promises to shrink federal spending, the size of government and the deficit, all grew larger under Reagan’.37 The biggest difference he made in moving the United States in a more conservative direction was almost certainly through judicial appointments – more than four hundred federal judges with lifetime tenure and four Supreme Court appointments, with William Rehnquist promoted to Chief Justice and Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy becoming Supreme Court judges.38
BRITISH REDEFINING LEADERS
Within a democracy there can on occasion be a fine line between leaders and governments we would wish to call redefining and those not meeting the criteria. Changes of government will almost invariably produce some difference: democratic leaders do not last long unless they have a political party behind them, and parties offer policy choices. Yet, if we turn to the British case, there have been just three governments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with strong claims to be regarded as redefining – the Liberal government of 1905 to 1915 (when a wartime coalition was formed) and which was led by Herbert Asquith from 1908; the Labour government headed by Clement Attlee from 1945 to 1951; and the Conservative government during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership from 1979 to 1990. That is not, of course, to say that there was no significant policy innovation by other UK governments over the last century. The Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan between 1957 and 1963, the Labour government of 1964 to 1970 during the prime ministership of Harold Wilson, and the Labour government headed by Tony Blair from 1997 until 2007 witnessed quite substantial change – and we shall come to them shortly.
The Pre-First-World-War Liberal Government
During the first four decades of the twentieth century the only redefining British government was that formed by the Liberal Party in December 1905 and confirmed by that party’s landslide victory in the 1906 election. In its first two years it was headed by the cautious Henry Campbell-Bannerman, but it was especially after his ill health (and death shortly thereafter) led to his replacement as prime minister by Asquith in 1908, that most of the far-reaching change took place. It included a raft of legislation which constituted the building blocks of what would become known as the welfare state. The driving force behind much of this legislation was David Lloyd George who succeeded Asquith as Chancellor of the Exchequer when the latter became Prime Minister. Old age pensions had already been planned by Asquith when he was Chancellor, but they were carried into law by Lloyd George in 1908.
The government was open to ideas from elsewhere. Pensions for the aged had already been introduced in New Zealand, which Asquith described as a laboratory for political and social experiments that provided instruction for ‘the older countries of the world’.39 Lloyd George’s enthusiasm for unemployment insurance was sparked by a visit to Germany where some of the earliest welfare state measures had been brought in by Bismarck.40 The National Insurance Act of 1911 introduced compulsory health and unemployment insurance in Britain, paid for out of taxation of both employers and employees. Earlier (in 1909) Winston Churchill, as President of the Board of Trade, had established labour exchanges to boost employment. He, too, had been influenced by German experience. As the youngest Cabinet minister for a generation (he was thirty-three at the time of his appointment in April 1908), he wrote to the prime minister, Asquith: ‘Germany with a harder climate and far less accumulated wealth has managed to establish tolerable basic conditions for her people. She is organized not only for war, but for peace. We are organized for nothing except party politics.’41
A major constitutional reform was the reduction in the power of the House of Lords. The upper house was no longer allowed to hold up financial legislation or permitted to delay any bill for more than two years. This was a fundamental change whereby ‘a chamber of veto was forced to reinvent itself as a chamber of scrutiny’.42 The clash with the House of Lords was triggered by Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. Among other measures, it raised income tax, increased death duties on the larger estates, imposed land taxes, and introduced a tax on petrol and motor-car licences at a time when cars were owned only by the rich. The revenue was used partly to pay for substantially increased defence expenditure. Although the House of Lords had long accepted a convention that it did not block a Budget approved by the House of Commons, the overwhelming Conservative majority in the hereditary chamber, outraged by what they saw as an attack on the rich and on landed interests, rejected this legislation. Feelings ran high. The Duke of Beaufort said he would ‘like to see Winston Churchill and Lloyd George in the midst of twenty couples of dog hounds’. The Duke of Buccleuch informed a small Scottish football club that because of the land tax he would be cancelling his subscription to them of just over a pound a year.43 Asquith called an election at which the Budget and the need to reduce the power of the Lords were major issues. Surprisingly, the Liberals lost over a hundred seats in that election of January 1910 and became dependent for the continuation of their government on the support of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs. The portrayal of the government as extremist evidently resonated with an electorate in which many male workers and all women still did not have a vote.
Trade Union rights to raise money for political purposes, which had been undermined by the judiciary, were extended by the government in 1913. Now workers who did not wish to contribute to the political levy had to contract out, rather than contract in. Domestic pressures on the government were still more decisive than foreign example. Much suffering that had previously been accepted as an unavoidable by-product of capitalism began to be tackled from fear of socialism and as a result of the demands of an increasingly organized labour movement. Trade union membership more than doubled in size between 1900 and 1913 (to over four million members), and from 1910 the influence of Labour Members of Parliament was greatly enhanced by the government’s dependence on their votes.
What makes this Liberal government a redefining one was, above all, its laying the early foundations of the welfare state. In that enterprise, as well as in its attack on the hereditary privileges of the House of Lords, it owed at least as much to Lloyd George as to Asquith, the Prime Minister. Asquith was not a domineering prime minister and the more important of the changes introduced were very much the achievement of the government collectively, in which, however, two members were of particular consequence. The Cabinet Asquith headed benefited from the driving force provided by Lloyd George and Churchill, two magnetic personalities who have been described, not unreasonably, as ‘the two British politicians of genius’ in the first half of the twentieth century.44
The Post-Second World War Labour Government
The government led by Clement Attlee from 1945 until 1951 was an especially clear case of redefining leadership. As the previous chapter has already touched upon, it was no less striking an example of that leadership being provided by senior ministers collectively rather than by the prime minister individually, important though his contribution was in managing large egos and playing a calm, coordinating role. Of the Labour Cabinet of twenty (nineteen men and one woman) formed in 1945, none had been born in the twentieth century. The youngest, Aneurin Bevan, who had been regarded as an incorrigible rebel and who was Attlee’s surprise choice as Minister of Health, was forty-seven. They had accumulated a lot of experience in different walks of life, and a number of them had the advantage of having served in the wartime coalition government – in the cases of Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton at a very high level. Attlee’s wartime role as deputy prime minister, chairing Cabinet committees and the Cabinet when Churchill was absent, had not put him in the public eye as much as Bevin and Morrison, and the latter aspired to take Attlee’s place as Labour leader and potential prime minister when the war ended.
Harold Laski, who held the main Chair of Political Science at the London School of Economics, happened to be Chairman of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party in 1945 (it was an office which rotated), and he tried both then and later to have Attlee replaced as Labour leader, since he believed him to be insufficiently socialist, excessively anti-Soviet, and lacking the ability ‘to reach out to the masses’.45* Laski wrote to Attlee during the 1945 election campaign to tell him that his leadership was ‘a grave handicap to our hopes of victory in the coming election’ (in which Labour was soon to gain a huge majority over all other parties, winning 183 more seats than the Conservatives and their allies).46 For the most part, Attlee put up with the constant stream of criticism patiently. As early as 1941, after Laski had accused him of being in danger of following in the footsteps of Ramsay MacDonald (the Labour leader who was expelled from the party when he became head of a predominantly Conservative coalition government in 1931), Attlee replied: ‘I am sorry that you suggest that I am verging towards MacDonaldism. As you have so well pointed out, I have neither the personality nor the distinction to tempt me to think that I should have any value apart from the party which I serve.’47 When, however, Laski used his position in 1945 to speak in the name of the recently elected Labour government in interviews to foreign newspapers, Attlee wrote to him that ‘Foreign affairs are in the capable hands of Ernest Bevin’, that the Foreign Secretary’s task was ‘quite sufficiently difficult’ without the embarrassment of Laski’s irresponsible statements, and that ‘a period of silence on your part would be welcome.’48
The Labour government did introduce a substantial number of socialist measures, nationalizing the Bank of England, the railways, long-distance transport, the electricity and gas industries, the coal mines, civil aviation, and the iron and steel industries. These concerns remained in public ownership for at least a generation after the defeat of the Labour government in 1951 with the exception of the iron and steel enterprises, which were denationalized by Churchill’s Conservative government. Since the House of Lords had been determined to delay the Iron and Steel Nationalization Bill, a new Parliament Act was passed, reducing their 1911 powers of delay from two years to one.49 The government pursued egalitarian and redistributive policies. Britain had been devastated economically by the war, and as shortages were still severe, food and petrol rationing continued for the remainder of the 1940s, with only the rationing of clothes ending in 1949. Free milk for schoolchildren and other welfare benefits, however, saw a steady improvement in the standard of health of all ages as compared with the inter-war years.50 The National Insurance Act of 1946 provided vastly extended benefits for the sick and unemployed and ‘remained a basis of the welfare state for the next thirty years or more’.51 Most important of all was the creation of the National Health Service, under Bevan’s leadership – a service that was to become so popular that governments a generation and more later who wished to introduce a greater element of private health provision had to do so by stealth, after swearing fealty to the NHS. As recently as 2010, Attlee’s latest biographer contended: ‘The National Health Service remains today, with its central principle of healthcare free at the point of delivery, almost entirely intact.’52 Its iconic status in post-war Britain was reflected when a substantial part of the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, no doubt puzzling for American viewers, consisted of artistic homage to the National Health Service.
Margaret Thatcher as Redefining Leader
Many of the principles established by the first post-war Labour government remained a basis for policy until the advent of the government headed by Margaret Thatcher. Britain’s first (and, thus far, only) woman prime minister, Mrs Thatcher undoubtedly ranks as a redefining leader. Her eleven years as prime minister from 1979 to 1990 constituted also the longest stint of any premier in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. She was hyper-active in both foreign and domestic policy. Although she was by no means displeased with the term the ‘iron lady’, first conferred on her by Soviet journalists, in practice her foreign policy was more nuanced than her belligerent image suggests. It was also rather different in government from what it was before she became prime minister and from what appeared in some of her retrospective observations after she had been forced out of the premiership.
In office she was influenced by able civil servant advisers in 10 Downing Street, by government colleagues, including successive Foreign Secretaries, as well as by outside academic specialists, consulted on an ad hoc basis. (Along with her strong convictions, she had a prodigious appetite for relevant facts and the capacity to work an exceptionally long day, sleeping for only four hours a night.) Out of office, she had less expert advice and was more prone to listen to zealots. As prime minister, she became an early proponent of the idea that Mikhail Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader from any of his predecessors. She was the most vigorous advocate among conservative politicians, whether in Europe or in North America, of the view that his reforms were of far-reaching significance. Thatcher’s political instincts had not led her to suppose that fundamental change could be initiated from within the upper echelons of a ruling Communist Party. Rather than rely purely on her gut feelings, however, she listened to a broad spectrum of specialist opinion and reassessed some of her previous views on the prospects for change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.53*
Contrary also to her belligerent reputation, Thatcher took a sceptical view of American military strikes in Lebanon and Libya, saying: ‘Once you start to go across borders, then I do not see an end to it and I uphold international law very firmly.’54 Her willingness to use force to take back the Falkland Islands, following their seizure by Argentinian troops, should not obscure her extreme reluctance to endorse military intervention where there had been no external attack on Britain or on a British dependency. She was enraged by the American invasion of Grenada in October 1983 to reverse an internal coup. This was an especially sore point since Grenada was a former British colony and remained part of the Commonwealth. Thatcher, however, speaking on a BBC World Service phone-in, drew a much broader conclusion, saying:
We in . . . the Western democracies use our force to defend our way of life . . . We do not use it to walk into independent sovereign territories . . . If you’re going to pronounce a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people, even though it happened internally, there the USA shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world.55
Although Thatcher took a very dim view of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office as an institution (making exceptions for several of its distinguished members who worked for her in 10 Downing Street as close aides), on a number of issues her policies were not out of line with those of the FCO and of her last two Foreign Secretaries, Sir Geoffrey Howe and Douglas Hurd. Her views on dealing with the South African apartheid regime, the European Union and the unification of Germany were among the major exceptions. On those issues she lived up to her ultra-conservative stereotype, and on them she and the Foreign Office were far apart.56
It is, though, the domestic policy of the Thatcher government which makes it one of the three redefining administrations of twentieth-century Britain. And in this case, unlike that of the Attlee government, it is entirely reasonable to single out the prime minister individually as a redefining leader.57 On the economy, trade unions and the welfare state, Thatcher came to the premiership with very firm views which she was determined would become government policy. The contrast between the programmes of the Attlee and Thatcher governments could hardly be greater. Moreover, the difference between her Cabinet meetings and those of Attlee was at least as striking. Unlike Attlee, Thatcher stated her opinion on issues on which she had a strong point of view (and they were many) at the outset, thus biasing the discussion in the direction of her convictions. Many important issues did not even come to the Cabinet table. In the words of a highly critical member of her first Cabinet, Ian Gilmour: ‘Collective decision-making was severely truncated and with it, inevitably, collective responsibility’.58
At least half the members of Mrs Thatcher’s first Cabinet were people whose outlook was very different from her own – among them, the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, Michael Heseltine, Jim Prior, Peter Walker and Gilmour himself. At that time Geoffrey Howe, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a close ally of the prime minister. Gradually, individual resignations and prime ministerial reshuffles changed the composition of the higher echelons of the government, but Thatcher succeeded in alienating even some of her earlier supporters. Howe’s resignation triggered her downfall in 1990, but it had been preceded by the departure of other very senior ministers who were explicitly critical of Thatcher’s style of rule. This was notably true of Michael Heseltine’s resignation as Secretary of State for Defence in 1986 and of Nigel Lawson’s as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1989.59 Lawson, like Howe (but unlike Heseltine), had initially seen eye to eye with Thatcher on economic policy, but their views increasingly diverged, not least on Britain’s membership of the European monetary system, the independence of the Bank of England, and on taxation.60
An important attribute of Thatcher as prime minister was the thoroughness with which she did her homework and her insistence on being well briefed. She was not much given to self-criticism, but her official biographer notes that in old age there was nothing for which she would rebuke herself more than the thought that ‘I had not prepared thoroughly enough for something’.61 She had an excellent memory and absorbed a great deal of information in the course of methodical preparation, whether it was for a meeting with Gorbachev or for the more routine twice-weekly prime minister’s questions.62 Although she kept officials on their toes and could even be feared in government departments – ‘she sent tremors through the whole of Whitehall’63 – she gleaned a great deal from the civil service. In some ways, she preferred them to her Cabinet colleagues, since, in addition to supplying the facts she wanted, they could be more relied upon to do her bidding. So much so, that Thatcher said to her principal private secretary Clive Whitmore: ‘Clive, I’d be able to run this Government much better if I didn’t have ministers, only permanent secretaries.’64
Although her style of government was to be her ultimate undoing – with practically her entire Cabinet telling her in 1990 that she could not survive as prime minister – it makes it easier to classify Thatcher as a redefining leader and not simply the head of a redefining government. There is surprisingly broad agreement, among both critics of Thatcher’s policies and those sympathetic to them that she was a leader who altered the terms of political debate, changed opinion on what was politically possible, and introduced radical change.65 She was also a highly divisive leader who polarized opinion within England and became especially unpopular in Scotland. She ultimately lost the support of most of her Cabinet colleagues (as a direct result of treating them much less than collegially) and she left the Conservative Party more divided than it had been for many decades. One outcome of her foreign policy, which no one would have dared to predict at the start of her premiership in 1979, is that she made many more friends in Eastern Europe than she did in Western Europe, and finished up popular in Moscow, Prague and Warsaw and a bugbear in Bonn, Paris and Brussels.
Thatcher’s predecessor as Conservative Party leader (and prime minister from 1970 to 1974), Edward Heath, had adopted a rather similar style of domineering leadership, but the only major mark he left was to lead the United Kingdom into the European Community (later called the European Union). As Anthony King has written: ‘Despite his frequent changes of policy direction, Heath undoubtedly exercised a more complete, more continuous control over his administration than any other prime minister since 1945 . . . The fact that the Tories lost in February 1974 – and the fact that, apart from Britain’s entry into the European Community, almost the whole of Heath’s policy legacy soon lay in ruins – does not mean that Heath was not a dominant prime minister. It merely means that not all dominant prime ministers are successful.’66 It is worth adding that prior to becoming prime minister, Heath was ‘considered “weak” by a large section of the population’.67 His case illustrates three points. The first is that before a leader has held the premiership, it is harder for that person to be perceived as ‘strong’. The second is that popular opinion about whether a leader is strong or weak, in the sense of being a dominating or domineering decision-maker, can be extraordinarily wide of the mark. The third is that there is no reason to suppose that ‘strength’ of a prime minister’s leadership (in the sense of domineering relationship with Cabinet colleagues) leads to successful government.
While the leadership styles of Thatcher and Heath were not all that far apart, they differed significantly on important issues. Heath, who never forgave Thatcher for displacing him as Conservative leader, did not share her admiration for unfettered capitalism. One of the senior figures in the Thatcher government argued that ‘the two key principles’ for which the Attlee government had stood, ‘big interventionist government and the drive towards equality’, had remained effectively unchallenged for more than a generation – until, in fact, Mrs Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street.68 The Thatcher government removed many of the regulations on commercial institutions (including banks), freed capital markets, and acted on the belief, for which the prime minister was an evangelist, that there was no substitute for market forces. Part and parcel of such an approach was a programme of privatization, with two-thirds of state assets being sold off within a decade. More traditional Tories disapproved of this. When Harold Macmillan was invited back to 10 Downing Street at the time of the Falklands dispute to advise Mrs Thatcher on ‘how to run a war’, he looked around a room which had been partly emptied to make space for an evening function. ‘Where’s all the furniture?’ he wanted to know. ‘You’ve sold it all off, I suppose.’69 Thatcher defeated a prolonged strike by coal miners (whose union solidarity had helped earlier to bring down the Heath government) and drastically curtailed trade union power. She allowed council house occupiers to buy their properties at favourable prices as part of a policy of encouraging greater home ownership and reducing the size of the publicly owned sector.
More generally, the Thatcher government shifted the public–private balance within the British state substantially in the direction of the private. This included bringing business experience into the civil service and introducing measures which reversed the egalitarian policies that had first been introduced by the Attlee government. Income tax rates paid by the wealthy were reduced, and a new local tax, officially called the community charge but universally known as the poll tax, was brought in. Since it was designed to take the place of a tax on property (the rates), and was based instead on a head-count, its opponents objected that the same sum would be paid by a duke and a dustman. It provoked fierce opposition, and contributed to Mrs Thatcher’s growing unpopularity during her later years in office. Her Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, Nigel Lawson, believed that it had been ‘a colossal error of judgement on her part to seek to turn a form of taxation which had been notorious throughout the ages into the flagship of her Government’. Lawson concedes, nevertheless, that with this particular policy, despite ‘her profound personal commitment, she observed the proprieties of Cabinet government throughout’.70 The Chancellor opposed it vigorously, noting in an internal memorandum of May 1985 that a ‘pensioner couple in Inner London could find themselves paying 22 per cent of their net income in poll tax, whereas a better off couple in the suburbs would pay only 1 per cent’.71 However, Thatcher carried the Cabinet with her and the measure was approved in 1986. The tax was introduced a year earlier in Scotland than in England and Wales. It proved to be a gift to the Scottish National Party as well as to Labour and added to the already high level of Scots’ disenchantment with the Conservative Party.72
Significantly Innovative British Governments
There are three other British governments in the period with which we are concerned that, while falling short of providing redefining leadership, were responsible for especially noteworthy innovation – those led by Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. However, the most important changes brought about during the lifetime of the Labour governments led by Wilson and Blair were not primarily the doing of these two prime ministers.
The government headed by Macmillan came to terms, however hesitatingly, with decolonization. This sparked outrage directed at the Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod and, to a lesser extent, at Macmillan himself – both for his ‘wind of change’ speech in South Africa and for appointing the relatively liberal Macleod to the office responsible for colonial policy. The attacks came not only from fringe organizations such as the League of Empire Loyalists but from a substantial body of opinion on the right of the Conservative Party. In economic policy, there was less of a sharp break with the Churchill and Eden governments in which Macmillan had served, latterly as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Macmillan himself took a dim view of Treasury orthodoxy, was Keynesian in his economic philosophy, and sceptical of some of the activities of the City of London, privately referring to bankers as ‘banksters’.73
Constitutionally, the most significant change brought in by the Macmillan government was the Life Peerages Act of 1958. This created a new category of non-hereditary peers who were subsequently to include people with impressive achievements in different walks of life, as well as notable politicians who were ‘kicked upstairs’. The legislation gave a new lease of life to the House of Lords, raising the quality of many of the debates. The Labour Party, it should be added, had been in no particular hurry to abolish the second chamber, having hitherto been reasonably content that its hereditary basis made it indefensible and no possible threat to the supremacy of the House of Commons. In another measure of long-term significance, the Conservative government headed by Macmillan set up in 1961 a prestigious committee to investigate the condition and future of higher education in Britain under the chairmanship of the economist Lord (Lionel) Robbins. The government’s subsequent acceptance of the Robbins Report, published in 1963, led to a great expansion in the number of British universities.74
The most important achievement of the Labour governments led by Harold Wilson in the 1960s was – contrary to the stereotype of Conservative and Labour governments – a substantial widening of personal freedoms. Wilson presided over very important social change, including a liberalization of the divorce laws, the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adult males (which brought the law for men into line with that for women), the abolition of the death penalty and the legalization (subject to certain safeguards) of abortion. In order to increase the likelihood of criminals being convicted in trials by jury, the need for a unanimous verdict, which had existed in England since the fourteenth century, was ended.75 The right of the Lord Chamberlain to censor theatre productions was abolished.76 This cluster of liberalizing measures was the most lasting legacy of the Labour government of the 1960s, and its main promoter and driving force was not Wilson (who was socially rather conservative), but the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins – another example of why we should stop speaking of prime ministers as if they are synonymous with governments.
Of the legislation mentioned, only one item – the vote to abolish the death penalty – was carried while Jenkins’s Labour predecessor, Sir Frank Soskice, was Home Secretary.77 That bill was sponsored by the backbench Labour MP Sydney Silverman, and was the culmination of decades of parliamentary endeavour by him to end capital punishment.78 All the other changes (as well as the abolition of capital punishment) had been advocated by Jenkins in a book he published in 1959. He had the ability and drive to push them through when offered the Home Secretaryship by Wilson who expressed surprise that Jenkins wanted that job.79 Even when a bill was introduced by a backbencher, as was the case with abortion law reform – on which Members of Parliament had a free vote – the Liberal MP who sponsored the bill, David Steel, benefited from a ‘strongly favourable ministerial speech’ by Jenkins.80 Neither that bill nor the Sexual Offences Act (which freed ‘homosexuals over twenty-one from the rigours of the criminal law’, and of which the backbench sponsor was the Labour MP Leo Abse) would have got through the legislative process but for the support of Jenkins as Home Secretary.81
One other major initiative of that government was, however, very much Harold Wilson’s idea. He regarded it with pride and it was the achievement for which he most wished to be remembered. This was the foundation of the Open University, which made use of radio and television in teaching and aimed to extend higher educational opportunities to many who had missed out when they were younger. The use of the broadcasting mass media was combined with innovative teaching materials and part-time personal instruction to enable adults of all ages, working from home, to study at their own pace up to degree level. Wilson entrusted the task of turning into concrete reality what he had initially called a ‘University of the Air’ to a politician who became by far the most formidable ‘junior minister’ in the government of 1964–70. This was Jennie Lee, who won numerous battles with the Treasury (as well as with her own nominal immediate superior, the Secretary of State for Education) through imperious political will, her standing with party members nationally, and Wilson’s respect for her and for her late husband, Aneurin Bevan, the minister in the Attlee government who had introduced the National Health Service.82 In her dual capacity of Minister for the Arts and minister charged with bringing the Open University into being, Jennie Lee aroused the envy of colleagues of Cabinet rank (which she was not) with her ability to obtain vastly increased funding, even in difficult times, because she could, whenever the need arose, call the prime minister and enlist his support.83
The Asquith, Attlee and Thatcher governments were redefining across a broad spectrum of policy. The only lasting impact of the Labour government led for a decade by Tony Blair (continuing fallout from the Iraq war apart) is likely to be the constitutional change which was enacted. But that was on a scale which made it not far short of redefining. House of Lords reform was carried much further, with a radical reduction in the number of hereditary peers – 90 per cent of them removed in one fell swoop. A Human Rights Act, which has been described by Vernon Bogdanor as ‘the cornerstone of the new British constitution’,84 and a Freedom of Information Act were introduced. A Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly were created and there was both executive and legislative devolution to Northern Ireland in a power-sharing agreement between the divided communities. Many people – including previous British and Irish prime ministers, successive Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland, Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell, Senator George Mitchell and even President Bill Clinton – had been involved in the last of these achievements, but Blair’s role was recognized by the principal protagonists in Northern Ireland, and by the Irish Republic premier Bertie Ahern, to have been important. Northern Ireland apart, constitutional reform (as was noted briefly in an earlier chapter) was a result of policy Blair inherited and for which he showed little fervour. Later, indeed, he viewed the Freedom of Information Act, in particular, as a mistake which benefited mainly journalists and as something that would in future inhibit people within government giving frank advice, for fear of early disclosure of what they had said.85 Devolution of decision-making to Scotland and Wales, the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act contributed in their various ways also to a diminution of Blair’s own powers. That, together with the fact that they were not policies for which the prime minister could take personal credit, meant that the most momentous achievements of the Labour government during the decade in which it was led by Blair were not trumpeted from 10 Downing Street.86
The leading historian of twentieth-century British politics (and of the Labour Party especially), Kenneth Morgan, has noted that only in respect of constitutional reform was the government led by Blair bolder than was Asquith’s ninety years earlier. Morgan appositely observes that in this area of policy Lord (Derry) Irvine’s influence was ‘of central importance’.87 One change of constitutional significance which Blair backed – Britain’s entry into the European common currency (the euro) – did not happen, for the prime minister was easily outmanoeuvred by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.88 In 2000 Blair asserted: ‘I will decide the issue of monetary union’, but he was unable to do so.89 He went so far as to indicate to Brown that he would retire earlier, to make way for him, if he would ‘take a more sympathetic view of the euro’, but to no avail.90
In the Introduction to this book, I noted that redefining leaders, individually or collectively, seek to move the centre in the direction of their party rather than simply trying to place the party in the centre ground as defined by others. Blair chose the latter course. It is fair to say that he and, to a lesser extent, Brown, as Chancellor for a decade and as prime minister from 2007 until 2010, allowed a genuinely redefining leader, in the shape of Thatcher, to establish different limits of what was politically possible and desirable.91 There were, however, distinctions between the political convictions of Blair, on the one hand, and of Brown, on the other, which were somewhat obscured by ‘New Labour’ rhetoric. Robin Cook, one of the leading figures in the government led by Blair until he resigned from it in protest against the Iraq war, praised Brown (with whom his relations had in the past been frosty, to say the least) for taking ‘millions of children and pensioners out of poverty’. But he told Blair, Brown and other ministers at a Chequers meeting that ‘when I talk proudly of what we’ve done for the poor, inside I feel vaguely uneasy as if I’ve somehow gone off message’.92
Blair describes Brown in his memoirs as the more thoroughgoing ‘public service guy’ of the two of them and notes his concern that Brown would not, if he succeeded him, carry on with an ‘authentic New Labour’ agenda.93 Given the extent to which manufacturing industry had left Britain’s shores, the financial sector was a very important source of tax revenues. That was a major reason why Labour Chancellors (Brown for the decade when Blair was prime minister and Alistair Darling during the three years of Brown’s premiership) treated it gingerly. Nevertheless, the ‘light touch regulation’ of the City of London was in the tradition of the Thatcher government – or, at least, in the post-Thatcher centre ground. Until the financial crisis struck in 2008, revealing a host of dubious practices, ‘the Conservative opposition was arguing for even less regulation’.94
Alex Salmond – and the Possible Break-up of Britain
There is one candidate for redefining leader in contemporary British politics – the leader of the Scottish National Party, Alex Salmond. If – and it is a big if – Scotland were to vote in a referendum for separate statehood, thus ending a political union which has been remarkably stable and comparatively successful for over three hundred years, this would, indeed, constitute systemic change. Salmond, in such circumstances, could even be counted as a transformational leader, although opinion in Scotland and in the UK as a whole would doubtless remain divided on whether this was a positive development. It would certainly be consequential, and not all of those consequences foreseeable. Although there are a number of important reasons for the rise of the Scottish National Party quite apart from the debating skill, personality and persuasiveness of Salmond, he is recognized by his adversaries as well as his supporters to be a formidable politician. It is also the case that a political party which is a latecomer on the political scene depends more than do long-established parties on the particular talents of its leadership, including their ability to attract public and mass media attention.
Founded in 1934, but with minimal representation in the House of Commons until the 1970s, the Scottish National Party has benefited from the creation of a Scottish parliament, for Scots have voted for the SNP in much larger numbers for the Edinburgh parliament than for the House of Commons.* Just eight years after the first election for the Scottish parliament in 1999, the SNP, led by Salmond, formed a minority administration, and having demonstrated that they could govern (and were more than a one-man band), secured an absolute majority four years later in the election of 2011.95 And that, moreover, in a highly proportional electoral system, deliberately designed to make it difficult for any one party (not least the SNP) to gain an overall majority.
Many factors are involved in an explanation of the Scottish Nationalists’ rise. The international context is one. There has been a proliferation of new states, with seats at the United Nations, in recent decades. The end of Communist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe saw the re-establishment of statehood of countries which had formerly been independent and the creation of many new states with far less continuity of national institutions or tradition of national consciousness than Scotland. The Labour Party, the strongest in Scotland from the end of the 1950s onwards, lost some of its popularity north of the border during the Blair years. Part of the new support the SNP gathered came from voters attracted to policies that were closer to those of the Labour Party prior to its ‘New Labour’ makeover.
Alex Salmond himself came originally from the left of his party, and the Scottish Nationalists were by this time far removed from the days when they could be dismissed as the ‘Tartan Tories’. The SNP benefited also after 2003 from the unpopularity of the Iraq war, of which Salmond, a Westminster MP at the time, was one of the most effective critics. Salmond led the SNP from 1990 to 2000 and then took a break from the leadership for four years. Its support lessened during that period. Having earlier announced that he was ‘fed up with going up like a rocket and down like a stick’, he presided over the party’s most spectacular rise when he resumed its leadership in 2004.96 Salmond has described himself as ‘a great fan of Harold Wilson’, and, like Wilson, he has been adept at lacing invective with humour and at talking himself out of tricky situations.97 Not the least of these has been jettisoning an earlier strong commitment to the idea of the euro as Scotland’s post-independence currency once the euro ran into severe difficulties and its popularity plummeted. Forced to fall back on using the pound and accepting the ministrations of the Bank of England in a hypothetically independent Scotland, Salmond consoled himself by reminding everyone that the Bank had been founded by a Scotsman. He has exemplified the contention that detailed arguments are less decisive for political success than making emotional contact with the electorate.98
REDEFINING LEADERSHIP IN POST-WAR GERMANY
Post-war West Germany and – from 1990 – the unified Germany have been success stories, both economically and politically. The country has prospered and the quality of its democracy has been high, as has that of its leaders. It is reasonable to see a linkage between good leadership and democratic consolidation, even if this connection is less overwhelmingly obvious than the link between Germany’s ‘strong’ and charismatic leadership in the 1930s and the country’s oppressive totalitarian political system from 1933 until 1945. Three of the post-war chancellors, Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl, have persuasive claims to be regarded as redefining leaders. The chancellor is not head of state in Germany – that is the role of the president who is a political figurehead. A holder of that office can provide significant moral leadership, as Richard von Weizsäcker, in particular, demonstrated in the 1980s and ’90s. But it is the chancellor who heads the government and wields more power than anyone else in the country. He or she – for Germany’s first woman chancellor Angela Merkel, another talented politician and astute leader, was elected in 2005 – is not chosen directly by the electorate but by the German parliament. Each party nominates its candidate for the Chancellorship in advance, and so this knowledge is a significant consideration in voters’ choice. Party allegiance is sufficiently strong, however, that the candidate is hardly ever the decisive factor. A major study of post-war German elections found ‘the role of party identification’ to be ‘by far the most important single determinant of voter choices’.99
Once in office, the chancellor has very substantial authority, although it is greater (as is true of many other heads of government) in foreign than in domestic policy. The chancellor is granted the right to determine the broad guidelines of policy – in a way in which the British prime minister is not, even if some holders of the office attempt to act as if they were – and is responsible to the legislature for government policy outcomes. Nevertheless, ministers in Germany enjoy quite a high degree of autonomy, which is constitutionally enshrined. Even while operating within general lines laid down by the chancellor, they are in full charge of their own departments, and the chancellor is not constitutionally permitted to issue specific orders to ministers. In cases of conflict between one department and another, the Cabinet has a role to play in reconciling the differences, but the main political actor in the conciliatory process is the chancellor.100 The Constitution for a democratic Germany had been drawn up by representatives of the various parties who came together in a Parliamentary Council in 1948. They were intent on creating institutions that would avoid not only the totalitarianism of the Third Reich but also the weakness of the Weimar Republic that had preceded it.101 Thus, they made it difficult to dissolve parliament and to overthrow governments between elections. That could only be done through a ‘constructive vote of no confidence’. This meant that a chancellor would be forced to resign only if a parliamentary majority had agreed on the name of his or her successor – quite a high hurdle.
Two of the main constraints upon the chancellor’s powers follow from the nature of the electoral system and the federal character of German government. Germany’s system of proportional representation rarely gives any one political party an overall majority and so most German governments since the end of the Second World War have been coalitions. The chancellor, whether a Christian Democrat or a Social Democrat, has, therefore, to do deals with the other party in the coalition – usually the Free Democrats, although, when the Social Democrats are the largest party, it can be the Greens.*
The Christian Democrats did so well in the September 2013 general election, in which they made the most of the popularity of Angela Merkel, that they came close to winning an outright majority, but still fell short of it. Although Merkel thereby was assured of a third term as Chancellor, the electoral system presented her with a major problem. The Free Democrats failed to reach the quite demanding 5 per cent threshold for parliamentary representation, thus leaving her little option but a ‘grand coalition’ with the Social Democrats, to which the SPD responded warily, since the Christian Democrats would be very much the senior partner. A deal was struck between the party leaderships in late November and ratified by the SPD membership the following month.
Konrad Adenauer
The top leader of a political party obviously has special opportunities to set the tone for the party he or she leads, and for the country when that person becomes chancellor. This applied to an exceptional degree to the first chancellor of post-war Germany, the Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, whose responsibility for re-establishing German democracy, following more than a decade of Nazi rule, and in a country in ruins, was profound. Support for democracy was shaky, to say the least, in the early post-war years. It was a time when ‘many West Germans still assented to the statement that Hitler would have been one of the greatest statesmen there had ever been, if only he had not lost the war’.102 Adenauer was already seventy-three when he became Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. He had become Mayor of Cologne as long ago as 1917, an office he held until 1933 when he was removed by the Nazis, becoming Cologne’s mayor again, briefly, in 1945, before going on to become Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union.103
The recovery of the German economy, over which Adenauer presided and from which his popularity benefited, owed a great deal to his Economic Minister, Ludwig Erhard, the architect of what was called the ‘economic miracle’. Adenauer himself put the idea of the Social Market Economy into the Christian Democrats’ programme in 1949, and may have been influenced by Roman Catholic social teaching. The same is often – and wrongly – said of Erhard. Along with most of the economists who supported him, Erhard was a Protestant and a politician who believed that sweeping away the bureaucratic controls that had been put in place by the Nazis and which had continued under the Allied occupiers would itself promote social welfare. The resultant policy of the government, however, combined private enterprise and competition with a consensus-seeking approach to industrial relations and with the construction of a welfare state (whose origins went back much further – to Bismarck’s social insurance legislation of the 1880s).104 Although he was to serve as chancellor from 1963 to 1966 as Adenauer’s successor, Erhard was less effective in that role than he had been as a key member of Adenauer’s administration, helping to lay economic foundations for democracy. Growing prosperity underpinned support for democratic norms, reversing the pattern of German democracy after the First World War when economic failure, hyper-inflation and subsequent unemployment had much to do with the demise of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler.
If Erhard helped to make Adenauer a redefining leader domestically, it was Adenauer himself who radically redefined West Germany’s foreign policy. Given the division of Germany, and the fact that the United States emerged from the war (and the early post-war occupation of Germany) as clearly the strongest Western power, Adenauer unsurprisingly established and maintained good relations with the Americans. Moreover, he welcomed their continued presence in Europe as a bulwark against possible Soviet expansionism. What was more distinctive and momentous, in the context of German history, was his establishment of good relations with France – not least, with General de Gaulle after his return to power in Paris in 1958. Adenauer was strongly in favour of European economic and political cooperation, and supported a joint European military organization. He also, however, wished the Federal Republic of Germany to have access to nuclear weapons, and in retirement he was vehemently opposed to German acceptance of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the signing of which was one of Willy Brandt’s first acts as chancellor. Under Adenauer’s leadership, West Germany joined NATO in the mid-1950s, and in 1957 was a founder signatory of the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union. Adenauer was able to claim: ‘I am the only German Chancellor in history who has preferred the unity of Europe to unity of the Reich.’105 He has also been described as ‘the first German statesman who was able to overcome the unconscious tendency of his countrymen to believe that leaders could only be taken seriously if they wore uniforms’.106 Adenauer, however, stayed in the office of chancellor for far too long, and to diminishing effect. Like many leaders, he increasingly thought of himself as indispensable and could see no one worthy to take his place. When he was finally persuaded in 1963 to retire from the most powerful political post in West Germany, he was aged eighty-seven.
Willy Brandt
The conservative Catholic, Adenauer, could also be ruthless in the way in which he fought electoral battles. Willy Brandt noted that the Chancellor spent ‘half an election campaign on the issue of my birth’ and the day after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961 referred to him as ‘alias Frahm’.107 Brandt’s mother was an unmarried salesgirl who gave birth to him in 1913. The boy grew up as Herbert Frahm, taking his mother’s name, and not knowing who his father was. Both his mother and her father, who shared in his upbringing, were active members of the Social Democratic Party, and they enrolled him in the children’s section of the party’s sports club ‘almost as soon as I could walk’.108 He grew up, and remained, a socialist of a social democratic kind, tempted by neither Communism nor fascism. In 1933, when anti-Nazi activity had become increasingly dangerous, necessitating clandestine activity, he took the name Willy Brandt. He was an active anti-Nazi before and after Hitler came to power, working mainly from other European countries, especially Norway, but also spending a dangerous period back in Germany in the guise of a Norwegian student. Brandt escaped again to Norway in 1938, and after Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1940, he moved to neutral Sweden. Although Brandt had been working not for the defeat of his homeland but for its liberation, in the early post-war years he was regarded by many of his fellow countrymen as a traitor. He was still a Norwegian citizen when he returned to Germany in 1945. He rejoined the SPD, and regained his German citizenship in 1948.
Brandt’s rise in German politics was quite rapid. He proved no less resolute in standing up to Communist than to Nazi repression. He was a leading figure in the government of Berlin by 1948–49 when the Soviet blockade took place, and the city survived thanks mainly to the allied airlift of food and other supplies. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, Brandt had already been Mayor of Berlin for four years, and he did more than anyone to maintain the morale of the city’s residents. During almost a decade as mayor of divided Berlin, he continued to provide inspirational leadership. It was his years as Chancellor, however, from 1969 to 1974 which firmly established him as a redefining leader. His political style was not only more collegial than that of Adenauer, but also relaxed, conciliatory and ‘patient enough to permit the building of an authentic cabinet consensus’.109 Collegiality, however, was not incompatible with an outstanding personal initiative on an issue of major international, as well as inter-German, importance – West Germany’s relations with East Germany and, more generally, with the Eastern part of the European continent. This Ostpolitik was the major achievement of Brandt’s chancellorship. The policy led to an acceptance of Germany’s post-war borders in the east, an amelioration of relations between East and West Germany and recognition (without legitimation) of the status quo that they had become two separate states. Human contacts between the two Germanies became more frequent, and Brandt was greeted with great enthusiasm by the East German public when he visited the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in March 1970. Taking advantage of a period of détente during the Nixon presidency between the United States and the Soviet Union, Brandt also became the first West German leader to establish a working relationship with Moscow.*
There was serious opposition within Germany to Brandt’s Ostpolitik, not only from Christian Democrats, but from some of the Free Democrats who were in coalition with Brandt’s SPD. A number of them defected from the coalition and at one point Brandt survived a parliamentary vote of no confidence by only two votes.110 Brandt’s acceptance that Germany would not regain territory that had belonged to it before the war – Silesia and East Prussia – enraged his political opponents as well as influential associations of expellees. Moreover, it appeared to many, both in Germany and abroad, that Brandt was giving up on the ultimate goal of reunification of East and West Germany and getting little or nothing in return. Reasonable as that objection sounded at the time, it could not have been further from the truth. Hatred and fear of Germany, for understandable reasons, was still rife in Russia in the mid-1960s. It had greatly dissipated by the mid-1970s.111 Brandt’s lifelong anti-fascism and his anti-Nazi activities during the Second World War earned him the respect of East Germans, of ordinary Russians, and even of the Soviet leadership, headed by Leonid Brezhnev. Brandt was especially highly regarded by the most reformist members of the ruling parties of Communist Europe.* That became particularly relevant with the arrival in 1985 as Soviet leader of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose own political evolution during the second half of that decade was very much in the direction of social democracy.112 Gorbachev established excellent relations with Brandt who by then was President of the Socialist International, the organization of social democratic parties which had for long been regarded by Communists as the most dangerous of their enemies.113 Most fundamentally, it is inconceivable that the Kremlin leadership would have quietly accepted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and acquiesced in the unification of Germany in 1990, had Germany still been seen as the kind of threat it was perceived to be a little over two decades earlier before Brandt became West German leader.
The public image of Brandt most vividly remembered is of him on his knees in front of the Warsaw memorial dedicated to the Jewish ghetto and the countless Polish Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. On this visit to Poland in December 1970, the German chancellor had not planned that gesture. It took even his closest colleagues by surprise. Brandt later wrote: ‘From the bottom of the abyss of German history, under the burden of millions of victims of murder, I did what human beings do when speech fails them.’114 A journalist put it no less aptly at the time when he wrote that ‘he who does not need to kneel knelt, on behalf of all who do need to kneel, but do not’.115
Domestically, Brandt’s record both in resistance to fascism and in the post-war reconstruction of a divided country played an important part in the consolidation of democracy in Germany. But his contribution internationally was even more redefining. He put it fairly himself:
Circumstances, my office, and also, I am sure, the experiences of my youth, gave me a chance – first as Mayor of Berlin, then as Foreign Minister and as Federal Chancellor – to reconcile the idea of Germany with the idea of peace in the minds of large parts of the world. After all that had happened, that was no small matter . . .116
There have been other Social Democratic leaders in post-war Germany apart from Willy Brandt who were impressive – above all, Helmut Schmidt, a politician with a commanding presence who had been Minister of Defence and Minister of Economics and Finance in Brandt’s government before serving for eight successful years as chancellor (1974–1982). Schmidt’s historical significance, however, hardly matched that of Brandt. His personal biography was very different. As a relatively apolitical young man, he served as an officer in the German army during the Second World War, and won the Iron Cross, fighting on the Russian front. His sharp intellect, brusque manner and more conventional views contrasted with the imagination, charm and political daring of Brandt. Schmidt was a controversial figure in the early 1980s when his readiness to accept American Pershing and cruise missiles on German soil met with widespread protests. In terms of ability, though, he remains another outstanding example of how well, by international standards, Germany has been served by its post-war leaders.
Helmut Kohl
Two things are remarkable about the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl. One is the length of time during which he held that office – sixteen years, from 1982 until 1998 – and the other is the skill and alacrity with which he seized an opportunity to pursue the unification of Germany at a time when other leaders advised caution. Kohl was underestimated as a politician during much of his time in office, and he fell under a cloud following his retirement when evidence emerged of party funding scandals in which he had been involved. He also had to overcome a very bad start in his relations with Gorbachev, being far slower than Margaret Thatcher to spot the potential for change brought about by the new Russian leader. As late as October 1986, a year and a half into the Soviet perestroika, Kohl told Newsweek that he did not consider Gorbachev to be a liberal but a ‘modern communist leader who understands public relations’, adding: ‘Goebbels, who was one of those responsible for the crimes in the Hitler era, was an expert in public relations, too.’117 The implied comparison with Goebbels offended Gorbachev and those around him, and it meant that Kohl was kept waiting – until the autumn of 1988 – for a meeting with the Soviet leader, even after he had come to realize his mistake. He then made up for lost time and went on to establish surprisingly warm relations with Gorbachev. Since the future of a divided Germany still depended heavily on what happened in Moscow, this was politically wise. But the connection was personal and emotional as well as prudential. What might have fundamentally divided the two men brought them together – their memories of being children, growing up on opposite sides of a war in which their countries were the major European antagonists. The devastation and suffering on the victorious side was no less than in that of the vanquished, and the war left indelible marks on both Gorbachev and Kohl.
At the beginning of 1989, unification still seemed a distant dream for Germans. Emboldened, however, by the radical changes in Moscow, the peoples of Eastern Europe pushed aside their Communist rulers in the course of that year. Until then it had been assumed that, as in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), Soviet military force would be used to ensure that no European country that was within the Communist camp would be allowed to slip out of it. This was taken to apply, above all, to the GDR, the East German state where 350,000 Soviet troops were stationed. Yet, when massive demonstrations took place in East German cities in October and November, and when the Berlin Wall was suddenly opened – as a result of a misunderstanding of a Politburo decision to ease travel restrictions – on the night of 9 November 1989, Soviet soldiers did not intervene. East German citizens who demonstrated in October had chanted, ‘We are the people.’ After the fall of the Wall, this became, ‘We are one people.’118
The popular desire for unification could not have been clearer, but many leading politicians, in Germany as well as in the rest of Europe, thought the issue so delicate that the process could only be a gradual one. Kohl took a different view. He believed, not without reason, that Gorbachev might be deposed by conservative Soviet Communists, alarmed by the domestic and international repercussions of his policies. In that event, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for reunification would have been missed. With strong American backing, Kohl hammered out a deal on reunification with Gorbachev, ignored the objections of Margaret Thatcher, and was ready to pay the price demanded by French President François Mitterrand for securing his agreement to German unification. It involved acceptance of closer European unity and, most specifically, undertaking to give up the Deutschmark in order to join a new, common currency to be created for EU members – the euro. Kohl himself was much more relaxed about the idea of both economic and monetary union than was the Bundesbank.
Before the common European currency could be created, Kohl worked for monetary union in Germany, offering a one-to-one exchange of the West German Deutschmark for East German marks, an attractive offer to those on the Eastern side of the divide, whose currency had been worth far less than that on the black market. In the process, Kohl ignored expert advice that the East German economy needed some years to be brought up to a comparable level with that of the West and that only then would a common currency make sense.119 Kohl’s focus was entirely on short-term attraction with a view to pushing through unification at the fastest possible speed. It was important within Germany, for if union had not gone ahead quickly, and on generous terms for citizens of the GDR, there would have been a real possibility of breakdown of order in East Germany. If that had led to bloodshed and internal repression, it would have posed very serious problems for Gorbachev and his allies in the Soviet leadership. The relationship Kohl had established with Gorbachev was of huge importance. In a meeting on 10 February 1990, the Soviet leader came to a provisional agreement with Kohl that unification would go ahead, although many details still had to be worked out. President George Bush the elder played a supportive role during the process, acting carefully so as not to undermine Gorbachev. He did not, however, share some of the apprehensions of a number of European leaders about the potential strength of a reunited Germany.120
Kohl’s seizing of the historic moment, and his skilful diplomacy in both inter-German and international relations, brought a speedy reward. The first was an election victory in East Germany when the Christian-Democrat-led ‘Alliance for Germany’ emerged as the most successful coalition of parties, getting almost half of all votes in March 1990. The last part of the process was completed in just eight weeks of the summer of that year – in the 2 + 4 negotiations, in which the representatives of the two Germanies sat down with those of the countries that had earlier constituted the four occupying powers: the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and France. The Treaty on German Unity was signed on 31 August 1990. No doubt, German unification would have taken place at some point, for the East German economy was collapsing, and almost 350,000 of its citizens had left the country in the course of 1989. Public opinion, which could now be freely expressed in the East, was clearly in favour of national unity. Yet, something that had seemed inconceivable just a few years earlier would not have proceeded so smoothly, speedily and peacefully had any one of Gorbachev, Bush and Kohl acted either more rashly or with significantly greater caution. It would be going much too far to say that there would have been no unification without Kohl, but, in his absence it could hardly have happened so quickly in 1990. As one student of inter-German relations appositely observed, it was Helmut Kohl who pushed reunification through ‘with verve, determination and an invincible – some would say finally disastrous – capacity to suppress economic and social misgivings in the cause of the final political goal’.121 For all the problems that were to come later, not least the vicissitudes of the euro, the part Kohl played in the unification of his country which had been divided for forty-five years gives him a strong claim to be regarded as a redefining leader.
REDEFINING LEADERS IN PERSPECTIVE
The focus in this chapter has been on redefining leadership in just three, albeit major, democracies. Not many generalizations can be based on such a small sample, although a close look at American presidents suggests the conclusion that it is very difficult to be a redefining leader (and almost impossible to be a transformational one) in twentieth- or twenty-first-century USA. Even those presidents who use to the full their political resources generally have less leverage within the domestic context than have the German chancellor and British prime minister. If we were to bring in additional redefining leaders from other democracies, whether presidential or parliamentary, the constraints on the occupant of the White House would doubtless still bulk large in comparison.122 Redefining the limits of the possible, changing the way people think about politics, and introducing radical policy change is a very tall order for any American president. A combination of the strictness of the separation of powers, the fact that Congress is by comparative standards an unusually strong legislature, the willingness of the Supreme Court to pass judgement on the constitutionality of presidential actions, not to speak of the existence of powerful and lavishly funded lobbies, mean that the American president’s scope for action is far more limited than the prestige of this apparently ultra-powerful office would suggest.
The widespread belief in a vast growth over time of presidential power within the political system of the United States is an oversimplification. It is, for one thing, contradicted by the finding that there has been a historic decrease in the rate of presidential vetoes of legislation as measured against congressional output.123 Richard Rose has observed that in Washington ‘there is a simple answer to the inquiring journalist’s question: Who’s in charge here? The correct constitutional answer is: No one.’124 The demanding nature of international politics, in which more is expected of the American president than of other heads of government, severely restricts the time available for implementation of a domestic agenda, quite apart from the constitutional and political constraints. In a nicely paradoxical phrase, Rose captures the practical limitations on presidential response to the endless problems that come his way when he characterizes it as ‘influencing organized anarchy’.125 A leading specialist on American government, Hugh Heclo, sees the presidential use of the ‘bully pulpit’ (first associated with Theodore Roosevelt) as a diminishing asset. The president’s capacity to rally public opinion has been reduced by ‘the proliferation of news sources, sites for contending political commentaries, and the ordinary citizen’s information overload’.126
Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the only two clear examples of redefining leaders to occupy the White House in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ceased to be president almost seventy years ago in the one case and more than four decades ago in the other. Presidential power, though, remains vastly greater in foreign than in domestic policy. This, indeed, is an area where the president’s power and influence have grown in the period that began with the Second World War, and where he (or, one day, she) can make an enormous difference.* In the international sphere, the president wields more power, both politically and militarily, than any other politician on earth. Yet, the limits of power are all too evident even here. While contenders for the American presidency may announce that the Middle East or some other part of the world is crying out for American leadership, the sober reality is that a majority of people in the area concerned are often disinclined to follow. Moreover, the use of American military power has in major instances been followed by profound unintended political consequences – from the Vietnam War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The hopes and expectations vested in the American president in the twenty-first century are so high and, in many respects, contradictory that they are impossible for any holder of that office to meet.127
Redefining leaders are rare within the entire constellation of political leaders, but examples of them could be multiplied if we move beyond the three countries from which the illustrations in this chapter have been drawn. One special category of redefining leaders consists of those who, as transitional leaders, pave the way for the transformation of the political or economic system of their countries, opening up space for that fundamental change without going on to play the leading role in the transformation themselves. The reforming leader can, in some cases, redefine the scope of legitimate political activity and stimulate either more radical leadership or movement from below, and sometimes a mixture of both, going beyond the intentions of the reformer. Not every transformational leader is, however, immediately preceded by a redefining one. Even his kindest obituarist could hardly have called Konstantin Chernenko a redefining leader. The main advantage for Mikhail Gorbachev in following this colourless apparatchik was in the immediate contrast he provided with Chernenko, under whom the only slight political movement was backwards.128
There are also quite different, and surprising, cases where leaders of a racially repressive or authoritarian regime have moved from being pillars of resistance to change to paving the way for the new, and not simply by unwittingly provoking collapse. F.W. de Klerk in South Africa and Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek, in Taiwan are examples of such transitional leadership. Adolfo Suárez in Spain could be seen as another, but for the fact that in Spain’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy, the part he played was so significant – overseeing the transition from a regime in which there were no pluralistic political institutions all the way to one in which democracy, with free elections, prevailed – that he should be considered as a transformational leader, and is treated as such in the next chapter.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
A striking example of a redefining leader was Fernando Henrique Cardoso who played a crucial part in the development and consolidation of democracy in Brazil, especially but not only after he became president in 1995. A social scientist-turned-politician, he redefined the limits of the possible in Brazil. When he became Minister of Finance in 1994, Brazil’s inflation rate was running at over 3000 per cent annually. When asked for his leadership philosophy in the face of this national disaster, Cardoso said: ‘I looked to exercise the art of politics which consists precisely in creating conditions in which one can realize an objective for which conditions do not yet exist.’129 In one year Cardoso had reduced the inflation rate to less than 10 per cent and hyperinflation has not in subsequent years returned to Brazil. The secret of his success was to delay the implementation of his anti-inflation plan until he had persuaded the trade unions by cogent argument that wage earners (as distinct from the wealthy taking advantage of high real interest rates) had most to gain if inflation were controlled. It is notable that Lula, Cardoso’s presidential successor who had been not only a trade union leader but also a long-term opponent of Cardoso, praised this achievement, observing that the lesson had been learned that low inflation was beneficial for a society where the great majority of people live on their wages.
When Lula succeeded Cardoso as president in 2003, this was Brazil’s first democratic succession in forty-three years. Lula himself was followed by a democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff, in 2011. Cardoso’s leadership altered perceptions of the limits of what politicians could achieve in a number of important ways. In addition to successfully combating hyperinflation, he showed great diplomatic skill in his dealings with the military and in subordinating them to civilian control. Through dialogue and persuasion, he won the armed forces over to acceptance of democracy, including the creation of a Ministry of Defence under civilian political leadership. Cardoso laid foundations whereby democratic electoral succession became the new normality in Brazilian politics. Taken in the round, his achievements were a notable example of stretching the limits of the attainable.
F.W. de Klerk
South Africa had a pluralist political system with real competition between the political parties of the white minority, but its racist basis meant that it was, in many respects, an international pariah state, subject also to a partially effective economic and sporting boycott. What tilted the balance was a new international context, brought about by the dramatic change within the Soviet Union and in Soviet foreign policy in the second half of the 1980s. The South African apartheid regime had long justified its existence by portraying itself as a bastion against the spread of Communism, citing the strong influence of the Communist Party of South Africa within the main black opposition movement, the African National Congress. The ANC, for its part, received economic as well as political backing from the Soviet Union, although it attracted much moral support also from democratic governments and liberal opinion in Western countries. When a liberalization of the Soviet Union itself took place, leading to much improved relations between it and the United States and the countries of Western Europe, the flimsy political pretext for apartheid appeared thinner than ever. Added to this was the change in Soviet foreign policy away from support for armed struggle and in favour of peaceful reconciliation of political differences in South Africa and elsewhere. Thus, the ANC, too, had reason to be responsive to serious overtures from the South African government in the hope of reaching agreement on peaceful transition to majority rule.130
By the time F.W. de Klerk succeeded P.W. Botha as South African president in 1989, the change in the international climate had become so great that it was clear to de Klerk that the moment had come for major domestic change. Embarking on a process of political reform, he took the risk of holding a referendum of white voters on whether this process should continue. More than two-thirds of them backed the policy. The key interlocutor – and the person who unquestionably was the transformational leader in the South African context – had to be Nelson Mandela, who had been demonized in the Afrikaner press for decades, and who was in his twenty-eighth year of imprisonment. Mandela himself has written that nothing in de Klerk’s past had ‘seemed to hint at a spirit of reform’, but he decided that the new president was ‘not an ideologue but a pragmatist’, and on the day he was sworn in wrote him a letter requesting a meeting.131 Negotiations between Mandela and de Klerk took place, Mandela was released from prison, the ban on the ANC (and also on the Communist Party of South Africa) was lifted, and a new constitution, according equal political rights to all citizens, was promulgated in 1993. Mandela, for his part, had agreed to renounce violent means for the achievement of majority rule, convinced by now that it was possible to reach that goal peacefully. Following free elections in 1994, in which the ANC-led coalition of parties gained more than 60 per cent of the votes, Mandela became South Africa’s first black president. Given the extent to which he personally had suffered at the hands of the oppressive apartheid regime, his magnanimity and inspirational leadership were decisive. Nevertheless, de Klerk earned the title of ‘enlightened conservative’ by seizing the moment when a negotiated settlement had become possible. It was a break with past policy, which paved the way for relatively peaceful systemic change in a country where many had assumed it would take much longer and end more bloodily.132
The Case of Taiwan
A still more surprising redefining leader than de Klerk was Chiang Ching-kuo, first the head of the secret police and later prime minister in Taiwan (or the Republic of China, as the Taipei government terms that country). He was the son of an unremittingly authoritarian leader, Chiang Kai-shek. The elder Chiang died in 1975 and three years later Chiang Ching-kuo moved from the premiership to the presidency which his father had held. Throughout the period between the demise of Chiang Kai-Shek and Chiang Ching-kuo’s own death in 1988, the younger Chiang’s was by far the most authoritative voice in Taiwan as the regime gradually liberalized and moved towards pluralist democracy. Again there was a hugely important international stimulus. From the time Chiang Kai-shek set up his Chinese government in exile in Taiwan, it had been recognized by only a minority of countries in the world and relied very heavily on political and military support from the United States. The biggest single incentive to Chiang Ching-kuo’s rethinking was the United States announcement in 1978 of normalization of its relations with mainland China.133
Rapprochement between the USA and the People’s Republic of China (mainland China where more than a billion people lived, compared with Taiwan’s population at the time of some twenty million) was bound to lead to a weakening of America’s ties with Taiwan. The process of improving American–Chinese relations was started by President Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 and taken up again with some zest in the late 1970s by President Carter, whose National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was especially keen to play the China card against the Soviet Union.134 Cultivation of mainland China continued under President Reagan. In early 1982 it was announced that the Reagan administration would not sell the advanced FX fighter jet aircraft to Taiwan, so as not to jeopardize Sino-American relations.135
Taiwan had been developing economically and educationally at an impressive rate already in Chaing Kai-shek’s time, but the younger Chiang realized that this was not enough. If his country was to achieve greater recognition in the outside world, earn renewed respect from the United States, and, ultimately perhaps become a model for mainland China itself (since the party he led, the Kuomintang, favoured eventual union with China, but as a non-Communist state), then movement towards democracy had to begin. Having come to believe that democracy would suit Taiwan’s interests better than dictatorship, Chiang Ching-kuo pushed through a series of liberalizing reforms in the mid-1980s, and ended dynastic rule by saying that members of the Chiang family ‘could not and would not’ compete for the presidency in subsequent elections. The reforms also ended martial law and legalized opposition political parties.136 It took almost a decade for all this to reach fruition, and fully democratic (although often turbulent) politics emerged only after Chiang’s death. It was he, however, who took the decisive steps to redefine the nature of the political system and pave the way for genuinely competitive elections in which the Kuomintang would not be guaranteed victory.
*
What these examples illustrate is that in the process of liberalizing and democratizing an undemocratic political system, innovative political leadership from within the old regime can be extraordinarily important. When there is a change of opinions, beliefs and even goals of leaders who already hold positions of institutional power, that can decisively facilitate democratization of an authoritarian regime. If a leader in a democracy changes his or her opinions while holding office, this often does the politician concerned more harm than good, earning fierce criticism for U-turns, intellectual flip-flopping and political inconsistency. An authoritarian leader, however, can use the levers of power he controls to introduce liberalizing or even democratizing measures, although these will pose risks for the existing holders of bureaucratic power. The cases with which this chapter has concluded underscore also the need always to understand leadership in its political context. What they have in common is that they refer to regimes which were becoming increasingly isolated, both politically and economically, although that in itself does not guarantee redefining change. North Korea has experienced economic failure and international contempt over decades, and yet the regime survives.
Within democracies (as in authoritarian regimes) redefining leadership is the exception rather than the rule. Sometimes it does come from leaders who are very dominant within their political parties – a Thatcher or an Adenauer – but it can just as readily come from a leadership in which the head of the government is far less assertive and there are a number of authoritative ministers playing decisively important roles, as in the case of the Asquith and Attlee governments in twentieth-century Britain. American presidents, despite the immense prestige of their office, find it difficult to dominate the political process, given the nature of the political system in which they operate.
When they do dominate, as Franklin Roosevelt and, much more briefly, Lyndon Johnson did, this depends less on their actual powers (although veto and power of appointment matter) than on influence and authority. Roosevelt’s success was in persuading a broader public of the need for legislation which was radically innovative in the American context and of using that public opinion to help persuade Congress of the necessity of these measures. It depended also, however, on one of the messy compromises of politics – tacit concessions to Southern Democrats that there would be no drastic federal interference with ethnic segregation in the South. Johnson’s persuasion, more directly focused on Congress, drew on his excellent memory and intimate knowledge of the type of argument that would carry weight with each Senator or Representative. In these cases, as in other instances of redefining leadership, the circumstances in which the leaders came to the highest office were decisively important. A crisis by definition poses problems but it also presents opportunities. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a response to the economic depression of the 1930s, and he exercised his greatest power when the United States was engaged in a global war. Johnson came to the White House when his country had just suffered the trauma of assassination of a young and popular president. He seized the moment to persuade Congress to pass legislation which redefined citizenship for many hitherto deprived Americans and constituted at least as significant a breakthrough as Roosevelt’s New Deal.
* It is almost an iron law that intellectuals who speak of ‘the masses’ are out of touch with real people. That would, though, be unfair to Laski who was generous with his time and sympathetic attention, whether addressing South Wales miners and staying in their homes, or with his students, to whom he was endlessly helpful. See Kingsley Martin, Harold Laski: A Biography (Jonathan Cape, London, new edition, 1969), pp. xiv, 95, 127 and 250–251. He was, though, a poor judge of opinion beyond the ranks of party activists and of the intellectual circles in which he moved.
* Throughout the period when Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership overlapped with Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet leadership, she benefited also from having excellent British ambassadors to the Soviet Union – Sir Bryan Cartledge (who had worked with Thatcher earlier in 10 Downing Street) from 1985 to 1988 and Sir Rodric Braithwaite from 1988 (to 1992). I took part in two seminars on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, held at Chequers, the weekend residence of British prime ministers. They were presided over by Mrs Thatcher and attended by Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe and other senior members of the government. The first of these, in September 1983, was especially significant. In the words of Sir Percy Cradock (In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, John Murray, London, 1997, p. 18) who very shortly after that seminar became the Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy Adviser, it ‘inaugurated a more open approach to Eastern Europe and led eventually to the first meeting with Gorbachev’. Especially at that stage of her premiership, Mrs Thatcher listened to what outside specialists had to say. At the 1983 Chequers seminar she interrupted her colleagues, especially Geoffrey Howe, frequently and the academics rarely. In their memoirs, both Thatcher and Howe devote several pages to this seminar with differing accounts of its genesis, and both attach importance to it. Howe notes that ‘in discussion with the experts on the Soviet Union’ the prime minister was ‘unusually restrained’. See Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (Macmillan, London, 1994), pp. 315–17; and Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, London, 1993), pp. 451–3. The second Chequers seminar on the Soviet Union was held in February 1987, as part of the preparation for Thatcher’s high-profile and successful visit to the Soviet Union the following month. In between, I was one of four academics invited to 10 Downing Street for an informal briefing meeting with Thatcher and Howe on the eve of Gorbachev’s first visit to Britain in December 1984, three months before he became Soviet leader.
* The SNP might have seen an even greater upsurge in its support if the promise of a devolved Scottish parliament had been broken by the UK government elected in 1997. For decades there has been a very clear Scottish majority in favour of more ‘Home Rule’ and a devolved parliament, whereas support for separate statehood for Scotland in opinion surveys has rarely risen above a third of the electorate.
* Political power is also less centralized in Germany than in England (England as distinct from the United Kingdom, for there is now substantial devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). The federal components of Germany’s political system – the regional Länder – each have their own Constitution, parliament, government and administration.
* None of that prevented the GDR intelligence service – in a decision requiring highest-level political approval – from planting an East German spy, Günter Guillaume, as a senior aide in Brandt’s entourage. When this espionage was discovered, Brandt resigned the chancellorship, once again setting an honourable example. See Mary Fulbrook, History of Germany 1918–2000: The Divided Nation (Blackwell, Oxford, 2002), pp. 168–71.
* It was in the company of two distinguished Hungarian historians on Visiting Fellowships, Ivan Berend and György Ránki, that I met Brandt in Oxford. Both were members of the Communist Party, as they had been from their youth, but serious reformers who worked for change from within the Hungarian system. Both were also of Jewish origin. Berend, as a teenager, spent the last year of the war in a German concentration camp. I remember the warmth of Brandt’s personality during the conversation, but recall just as vividly how moved, almost to tears, were the two Hungarian scholars in meeting him.
* I do not follow the fashion, begun by Joseph Nye, of using the terms ‘hard power’ and ‘soft power’. They may be a useful shorthand for newspaper columnists and politicians, but the vocabulary of authority, leadership, influence, persuasion, prestige, political power, economic power and military power remains perfectly serviceable. Although these terms are also open to more than one interpretation, they are somewhat more precise than the hard power–soft power dichotomy. Nye does not, of course, confine himself to such a division and his work contains many cogent arguments, but it retains a strong paternal attachment to his coinage of ‘soft power’.