Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950

8 Easterly Wind of Change

We know that our road is difficult. However, the choice has been made and we have paved the way for perestroika.

Mikhail Gorbachev, speech to the Soviet people at New Year 1989

We now have the Frank Sinatra doctrine. He has a song, ‘I Did It My Way’. So every country decides on its own which road to take.

Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, October 1989

Hardly anyone, whether in Eastern or in Western Europe, foresaw what was coming. Radical change in an apparently ossified Soviet bloc seemed unthinkable. That it could come from within the Soviet Union itself was unimaginable. Nor did Mikhail Gorbachev have any idea, when he became head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 11 March 1985, that within six years his actions would utterly transform world history. He wanted to reform the Soviet Union; he ended up destroying it. It was, of course, not his work alone. But without him it would not have happened. Between his accession to power in 1985 and spring 1989 the strong easterly wind of change under Gorbachev gradually gathered hurricane strength until it was on the verge of destroying all in its path and upturning the roots of the old order in Eastern Europe.

PERESTROIKA

The word, untranslated, went round the world. It meant ‘reconstruction’ and entered circulation with a speech delivered by Gorbachev in Leningrad in May 1985, when the new General Secretary of the Communist Party announced: ‘Obviously, we all of us must undergo reconstruction … Everyone must adopt new approaches and understand that no other path is available to us.’ What ‘reconstruction’ amounted to in precise terms, how its meaning and consequences would change over time, and the levels of opposition it would encounter were all unclear. What it initially meant to Gorbachev, and to those in the party who gave him their enthusiastic support, was the renewal and revitalization that they saw as essential to restoring the ideals of the Revolution of 1917.

Gorbachev was an insider. He had come to prominence within the regime. There was no need to imagine that whatever reforms he might seek to introduce would damage that regime – its structures of power within the Soviet Union or its domination of Eastern Europe. Gorbachev himself, a dyed-in-the-wool communist, had no intention of doing so. Although it faced growing problems in the economy and in relations with non-Russian nationalities, the USSR was stable when Gorbachev assumed office. It had low levels of foreign debt, did not face serious internal disorder, and could rely upon the loyalty of the armed forces and security services. There were no concerns about political destabilization either among those – a small minority – who wanted to introduce necessary reforms or among the ultra-conservatives, the dominant force in the Politburo, who wanted to stop them. The Soviet Union could have staggered on, in sclerotic fashion no doubt but without fear of imminent collapse, for the foreseeable future without the disintegrating dynamic of perestroika.

Born in March 1931 to a peasant family in Stavropol in the northern Caucasus, a region with a strong ethnic mix though mainly inhabited by Russians, Mikhail Gorbachev had experienced poverty and the persecution of family members under Stalinism before he began his rapid rise through the party to membership of the Politburo by 1980. His organizational skills, dynamism and decisiveness had gained recognition. He was seen as an emerging notable talent. He came to prominence during the short period of Andropov’s leadership. Andropov acknowledged the need for reforms (within narrow constraints) and looked to promote a number of younger party loyalists. He regarded Gorbachev as his leading protégé and gave him extensive responsibilities over much of the economy, especially agriculture. Gorbachev sometimes chaired the Politburo when the ailing Andropov was absent (though this task usually fell to Konstantin Chernenko). The death of Andropov and succession of the conservatives’ choice, the already ailing Chernenko, in February 1984 proved only a temporary setback.

Chernenko’s illness meant that Gorbachev for much of the time ran the Politburo and Party Secretariat. He was by now number two among the leadership of the Soviet Union. When Chernenko died in the evening of 10 March 1985, Gorbachev summoned the meeting of the Politburo, later that night, which already in effect predetermined that he would be elected next day, unopposed, as General Secretary. It was not because he had radical ideas for reform that he was elected. Gorbachev himself lacked precise plans. He simply felt that change was necessary. His mainly conservative Politburo colleagues were certainly uninterested in far-reaching reform that might threaten the system that guaranteed them rewards and privileges. Not all of them, by any means, were enamoured of Gorbachev. But no alternative candidate stood out. After the demise in quick succession of three near-decrepit leaders there was the feeling that younger, more dynamic leadership was vitally necessary. And Gorbachev’s energy and drive were impressive.

It is not at first sight obvious, even so, how Gorbachev could introduce increasingly radical change when he was the sole reformer in the Politburo, completely surrounded by conservatives. One reason is that Gorbachev was extremely persuasive and forceful. In contrast with his predecessors, he did not rely upon the authority of his office but on the power of argument. Politburo meetings were longer than they had been in the past. There was extensive debate. Sometimes Gorbachev would amend his initial position. But through compelling argument and the force of his personality he proved adept at gaining approval for his policies. And in the early stages, especially, he was anxious to keep the conservatives in the Politburo in line behind the steps he advanced.

He was greatly helped by the fact that the conservatives had no clear alternative strategy to offer in place of reform. Gorbachev had no difficulty in highlighting the poor state of the economy, which had worsened during the later 1970s and early 1980s. Economic growth had been declining. The budget showed a big deficit. There were shortages, a flourishing black market, low productivity, rampant extortion and corruption, and one of the lowest standards of living even among socialist countries. Military spending had, as usual, been sustained, but at the expense of the standard of living. He had seen at first hand the mounting problems of agriculture, was well aware of the deficiencies in industrial production and severe lack of investment, and recognized the growing burden of foreign debt. The conservatives might not want change. But they could not find ways of breaking the economic stranglehold simply by leaving things as they were. Gorbachev had the advantage, therefore, in pressing for change; there was no obvious alternative. The conservatives were from the outset on the defensive.

It was much the same with regard to foreign policy. Gorbachev could point to the growing gap with the United States in technological development. This was made all the more evident once the Soviet Union had to contend with President Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (‘Star Wars’), announced in 1983. The response in the Soviet Union had been the usual one: step up military expenditure. Gorbachev, too, at first thought that the Soviet Union had to increase its military spending substantially, which would enable it to catch up with the USA and overcome the deficiency in, especially, information technology. But he quickly grasped that another way of approaching the problem would be to work for a fundamental alteration in international relations with the United States. He envisaged extensive nuclear disarmament. This would persuade the Americans that their expensive Strategic Defence Initiative was wholly unnecessary. Faced with the obvious problem that a substantially greater budget for defence when the civilian economy was already under strain would severely limit the possibilities of improving the standard of living of Soviet citizens, Gorbachev was able to persuade the Politburo to try his alternative approach. The conservatives had nothing with which to counter his arguments except persevering with policies – tried, tested and failed – that would make matters worse. Moreover, they were worried about what Andropov, only a few years earlier and still at the time head of the KGB, had emphasized as Reagan’s reckless unpredictability, fearing that he was planning a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. They had come close to panic in 1983 when Soviet intelligence mistook a NATO military exercise as a sign of imminent nuclear attack – the most dangerous flashpoint since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, though hushed up at the time. Finally, they realized that the stationing of the SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe had been a failure, which – apart from the exorbitant cost – had merely provoked the West into retaliating by the deployment of the superior Pershing II missiles, against which the Soviet Union had no effective protection. So the conservative military establishment was open to change. Again, the weakness of the conservatives was Gorbachev’s strength.

Beyond his own eloquent persuasiveness and conservative weakness, Gorbachev was able to pursue his reformist agenda by strengthening his own position within the Politburo and in other leading organs of the party. Although he always had to cope with a majority in the Politburo who did not share his embrace of reform, he quickly introduced changes in personnel that strengthened his hand, especially in foreign affairs. He promoted a number of former fellow protégés of Andropov, who favoured reform, at the expense of the remaining conservatives. These included those who had manoeuvred behind the scenes on his behalf to ensure his seamless election as General Secretary: Nikolai Ryzhkov was given charge of the economy and made Chairman of the Council of Ministers; while Yegor Ligachev, who had handled the party’s Organizational Department under Andropov, was elevated to membership of the Politburo and given charge of ideological matters in the Secretariat. An important ally, supporting radical reform, was Alexander Yakovlev, now brought in to the party’s Secretariat. Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian party boss, who avidly shared Gorbachev’s view that change was necessary, was appointed Foreign Minister, while the conservative diehard Andrei Gromyko was removed by nominally promoting him to Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium, the head of state. Ryzhkov and Ligachev – also Boris Yeltsin, the party leader in Sverdlovsk (later returned to its Tsarist name of Yekaterinburg), now appointed as head of the Secretariat in Moscow – would be among those who later distanced themselves from Gorbachev and became his critics. In the early stages of reform, however, they were important allies against the traditionalists who wanted to drag their feet at any prospect of change. At lower levels, too, Gorbachev brought in party officials who would be sympathetic to reform. Beneath the surface of the sclerotic Brezhnev regime a new leaven of well-educated economic managers and technical experts had come to see that change was necessary. They, and middle-ranking party officials, had to tread carefully. But many of them were open to reformist ideas and, given a lead from above, ready to embrace them. By mid-1986 two-thirds of party secretaries in the provinces were new appointees.

Finally, Gorbachev was able to steer his reformist path in an ever more radical direction because, as his position strengthened, his own views on reform changed fundamentally. He began as a communist; he ended as a Western-style social democrat. He gradually came to the realization that reform was not enough. By 1988 he had reached the point where he recognized that the Soviet system had to be completely overhauled and transformed. In the process of his personal metamorphosis he carried the Soviet leadership with him – some more willingly than others, some trying in vain to apply the brakes, like trying to stop a runaway juggernaut. As reforms gathered pace it was increasingly difficult for Gorbachev’s opponents to obstruct, let alone reverse, them. It was far too late to resort to Stalin’s methods of nationwide terror. Drastic repression would have been much more difficult to implement than it had been in the 1930s. Soviet society had changed since those days. People for the most part liked Gorbachev’s reforms. Between 1985 and 1990 the General Secretary enjoyed immense personal popularity. In the intelligentsia, too, Gorbachev found much support for his radical proposals (though local party functionaries often dragged their feet).

Nor could the clock be turned back to the full-scale command economy of yesteryear. The serious economic problems of the Soviet Union could not be combated by such an approach. And the pressures to loosen, not tighten, the reins were meanwhile building up in the peripheral, non-Russian nationalities of the Soviet Union. So the reforms developed their own dynamic. One conservative, Vitaliy Vorotnikov, who later regretted being carried away by the power of Gorbachev’s arguments, lamented that ‘the train of pseudo-democracy had gathered such speed that to stop it was beyond our powers’. He was right: as long as Gorbachev was Soviet leader, the pressure for change could not be halted. It carried Gorbachev along with it. When faced with the question of halting or radicalizing his reforms, his answer was predictable and consistent. ‘I’m doomed to go forward, and only forward,’ he is reputed to have said. ‘And if I retreat, I myself will perish and the cause will perish too!’ But the radical change that ‘going forward’ involved proceeded inexorably in one direction: that of eroding, and ultimately undermining totally, the power structures of the Soviet state.

However serious the problems of the Soviet Union were when Gorbachev became party leader, they could have been sustained for some years to come. There were those at the time, and subsequently, who in fact argued that the Soviet Union could have successfully followed the example, adopted in China in 1979 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, of combining economic reform with the continuation of strong, authoritarian political control. Such a strategy of undertaking economic reform and only then attempting political transformation, they claimed, would have preserved the Soviet Union indefinitely. Gorbachev disagreed. He judged such views to be naive. He thought economic reform in the Soviet Union without accompanying significant political change would have been doomed to failure. (For his part, Deng apparently thought Gorbachev was ‘an idiot’.) As it was, the structural problems allowed Gorbachev to build up what became an unstoppable momentum for radical change. But without Gorbachev’s personal input, his own unquenchable and intensifying thirst for reforming the ossified power structures of the Soviet Union, that momentum would not even have started. This undiluted will for change was what, in the transformation of the Soviet Union, its satellite states and ultimately the whole of Europe, amounted to ‘the Gorbachev factor’.

Although economic reform seemed the initial focus of Gorbachev’s attention as General Secretary, for months few concrete measures followed the rhetoric. His starting point – aimed in good measure at placating the almost wholly conservative Politburo – was in fact to work for improvement within the strategic framework laid down under Brezhnev. His policy, he said in his first speech after his election as General Secretary, was one ‘of accelerating the social and economic development of the country and seeking improvement in all aspects of the life of our society’. It was a singularly vague statement of intent. Although convinced of the urgent need for reform, Gorbachev had no clear plan in mind. He was able to persuade even conservatives that economic management had to be decentralized. But the precise steps to that goal, implementing change, turning statements of intent into practical reality, were a different matter. He was treading in a political minefield. For all his impatience for change, it could not be brought about overnight. Months of avid persuasion, replacement of diehards by those open to reform, and bold moves to build a climate for change were necessary before the process of reform could take hold and gather pace. And all the while Gorbachev himself was learning, and changing. He gradually gathered confidence about the possibilities of radical reform. He was, too, carried along on the stream of the reforms that he had already instigated.

He soon realized that economic reform could only take place on any significant scale if it were to be preceded, not followed, by political restructuring. He was soon, therefore, pushing for political reform. And this, from starting as the platform for subsequent economic and social reform, gradually became an end in itself. ‘In the heat of political battles we lost sight of the economy,’ Gorbachev later admitted.

Visits to different parts of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1985 reinforced Gorbachev’s withering assessment of the state of the economy. But what really shook him, and convinced him more than ever that limited reform and administrative adjustments would far from suffice to remove the malaise, was the terrible nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, about a hundred kilometres north of Kiev, on 26 April 1986. The overheating of a reactor at the nuclear power station had led to a catastrophic explosion. The radioactive fallout, far worse than that at Hiroshima and Nagasaki after atomic bombs had devastated the Japanese cities in August 1945, was carried by high winds over wide areas of Eastern, Central and Northern Europe. Exposing millions to the effects of radiation, it was immediately recognized as an international, not just Soviet, disaster. It left a major imprint on the anti-nuclear and environmental movements in Western European countries.

For Ukrainians in the region at the epicentre of the explosion it was an unmitigated calamity. But neither the scale nor the nature of the disaster was immediately recognized, since the authorities at first left the local population in the dark about what exactly had happened. One eyewitness, the pregnant wife of a fireman who fought the blaze but did not survive, described the chaotic scene of the horror:

There were these tall flames. Lots of soot, terrible heat … They beat back the fire, but it was creeping further, climbing back up … They didn’t have their canvas suits on, they left just in the shirt they were wearing. Nobody warned them. They were just called out to an ordinary fire … He begged me: ‘Get out! Save the baby!’ … There were soldiers everywhere … Nobody said anything about radiation. It was just the soldiers who were wearing respirators … On the radio, they announced: ‘The town is being evacuated for three to five days. Bring warm clothes and tracksuits. You’ll be staying in the forests, living in tents’ …

At least twenty people were killed. The numbers of those who later died as a result of the explosion are estimated as running into the tens of thousands. Health problems arising from exposure to the high levels of radioactivity were felt for many years. The atmosphere was polluted, the ground contaminated. It was impossible to live in the area. Around 135,000 citizens were forcibly resettled.

For Gorbachev the disaster revealed not just an obsolete technology but also ‘the failure of the old system’. He later remarked that ‘Chernobyl shed light on many of the sicknesses of our system as a whole’. There had been incompetence, attempts to hold back vital information, hushing-up of bad news, irresponsibility, carelessness, widespread drunkenness and poor decision-making. It added up to a further ‘convincing argument in favour of radical reforms … We had to move perestroika forward.’

A second Russian word entered the international vocabulary soon afterwards: glasnost – ‘transparency’ or ‘openness’. It was an essential component of Gorbachev’s desire to spur public debate on his changes, in this way spreading their popularity and making them irreversible. It was not intended to introduce unlimited freedom of speech or free access to information, let alone Western-style liberal democracy. Nonetheless, in Soviet terms the move was extraordinary and the consequences were incalculable. A sign that Gorbachev was drawing a line under the repression of nonconformist opinion was his recall from exile in Gorky of the most famous dissident in the Soviet Union, the atomic physicist Andrei Sakharov, in December 1986.

Over the following year Gorbachev’s ideas on restructuring evolved further. The draft Law on State Enterprise that he presented in June 1987 envisaged the election of works managers, a level of decentralization of production and – in echoes of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s – the existence of a small private sector in services and industry. Within two years the initially small private sector had expanded substantially, though remaining small. In the state sector, still hugely bigger, it became possible to make workers redundant and to shut down loss-making concerns. In a further move away from the state-controlled command economy, land and even publicly owned factories could be privately leased for up to fifty years. Gorbachev had meanwhile, in November 1987, demanded the introduction of the rule of law and a new political culture as the basis of Soviet society. Astonishingly, too, and a complete break with Leninist class ideology, he wanted a foreign policy that rested on ‘common human values’ with other countries.

In line with the change of policy in international affairs that he had successfully persuaded his Politburo colleagues to accept that ending the nuclear arms race was directly in the interests of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had lost no time in meeting President Reagan with a view to seeking out an agreement. The previous year, before taking office, Gorbachev had already made a positive impression on Reagan’s prime ally, Margaret Thatcher, during a ‘charm offensive’ in Britain. Although he was well aware that she was a hardline anti-communist, he saw her as ‘the shortest way to send a message to Washington’. When he and his wife Raisa had lunch at Chequers, the British Prime Minister’s country residence, on 16 December 1984, Gorbachev had broken the ice by assuring Mrs Thatcher that he was ‘not under instructions from the Politburo to persuade you to join the Communist Party’. Mrs Thatcher visibly relaxed at the joke and later, picking up the words of one of her advisers, remarked: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’

Gorbachev and Reagan also established a good personal rapport when they met in Geneva in November 1985. At a second summit, in Reykjavik in Iceland, on 11–12 October 1986, Gorbachev took Reagan completely by surprise in proposing a 50 per cent reduction in strategic nuclear arsenals on both sides, then, when the Americans hesitated, suggesting the complete elimination of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. The proposal foundered when Reagan refused to contemplate restrictions on testing for the Strategic Defence Initiative. A third summit, in Washington between 7 and 10 December 1987, achieved greater success. Gorbachev and Reagan this time signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, committing the Soviet Union and the United States to the destruction of all ground-based missiles within a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometres. Gorbachev and Reagan met again between 29 May and 3 June 1988, this time in Moscow, where they discussed human rights and the removal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which had been announced in April – Gorbachev drawing a line under the disastrous episode of the Soviet Union’s ‘Vietnam’. Perhaps most importantly, the meeting reflected a changed climate – one of greatly improved relations between the superpowers, prompted in no small measure by the personal chemistry between Gorbachev and Reagan and by the bold initiatives in reducing the prospect of nuclear conflict that the General Secretary had taken.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 7 December 1988, Gorbachev announced that he was unilaterally reducing the Soviet armed forces by half a million men and would be withdrawing six armoured divisions from the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Hungary by 1991. He referred to a ‘common goal’ for humanity in establishing a peaceful world. Class struggle was not mentioned. He was turning his back on the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. He had come far in a short time.

Problems in the Soviet Union were meanwhile, however, mounting in worrying fashion. Glasnost had prompted people to speak out about their grievances, not least about the corruption of local officials, which government publicity had itself castigated. In the non-Russian republics this easily gained an ethnic dimension, manifesting itself in resentment against Russian functionaries, seen as outsiders given advancement instead of locals. There were ethnic disturbances in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, but more ominous signs of rising breakaway nationalist feeling, seeking autonomy from Moscow, in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Gorbachev had opened Pandora’s box. The lid could not be pushed down again.

By late 1988 it was plain, too, that the economy was failing. Gorbachev’s reforms had made the situation worse, not better. All the indicators showed that the economic performance was sharply deteriorating. The Soviet Union’s financial deficit was growing alarmingly. The sale of vodka was vital to tax revenues that propped up the tottering budget. Income from exports – especially of oil and gas – was dropping. For such a huge country, rich in natural resources, it was remarkable that a high proportion of hard currency, gained from exports to the West, had to be used to import food. Rationing of staple food products – including meat and sugar – was widespread by the end of 1988. Hospitals reported a shortage of medicines. Within a year many everyday commodities – milk, tea, coffee, soap, meat – had disappeared from the shops. Unsurprisingly, the anger of countless ordinary citizens was palpable. Strikes broke out in several parts of the country. And amid the growing economic crisis and huge popular discontent, elections were due.

The elections in March 1989 – the first free election in the history of the Soviet Union – to the Congress of People’s Deputies (a new body, of 2,250 members, replacing the former Supreme Soviet as the highest legislative body in the land) produced sensational results. These were not multi-party elections, as in Western democracies. Candidates had to be members of the Communist Party. The novelty was, however, that more than one candidate could contest each position. This was the compromise – some freedom of choice within a continuing one-party state – necessary to placate conservatives. It was, if an imperfect arrangement, an important move towards democracy. The sensation was that some 20 per cent of the candidates endorsed by the party were rejected by the electorate. In each of the biggest cities in the Soviet Union – Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev – the candidate backed by the party was defeated. In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin (who had resigned from the Politburo in 1987), opposed by the entire party apparatus, won almost 90 per cent of the votes.

It was the worst electoral defeat for the Communist Party since 1918. It opened the path to further political turbulence. In the Congress itself around 300 reformers – Yeltsin prominent among them – pressed for further democratization and more radical change. At the same time the Baltic republics were more stridently demanding autonomy from Moscow, while there were protests leading to bloodshed in Georgia in support of national independence. Rebelliousness and inter-ethnic conflict, bringing in their train rioting and violence in the Caucasus, reflected the fraying bonds of the non-Russian republics. And all this was against the backdrop of continued, and mounting, economic crisis. Gorbachev remained popular, as he would do until the summer of 1990. Yet his popularity and his power were at their peak. They would soon start to wane.

But for Gorbachev himself there could be no retreat. What had started as evolutionary reform was starting visibly to become revolutionary change. And the implosion was not only affecting the Soviet Union. Inexorably, it had momentous implications, too, for the satellite states of what had, until now, formed the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.

MOMENTUM FOR CHANGE

How significant was ‘the Gorbachev factor’ in the collapse of the Soviet bloc? The question has to be addressed in the light of the grave structural weaknesses that were blighting the socialist states. It raises once more a central issue of interpretation: how important is the role of individual agency in effecting major historical change? And to what extent is that role itself conditioned by structural determinants?

The structural problems of each of the Soviet satellites had deepened in the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s (see Chapter 7). The gap in levels of growth between the Soviet bloc and the Western economies was expanding, not shrinking. State indebtedness in Eastern Europe by the mid-1980s was reaching alarming levels. A large proportion of hard-currency earnings was used up in servicing debts to Western banks so that a way out of the vicious circle became well-nigh impossible. Gorbachev’s advisors told him that Eastern Europe was an economic burden to the Soviet Union, not a strategic necessity.

Romania showed that a route out of state indebtedness was not completely impossible. It was hardly, however, a route to commend itself. The International Monetary Fund had in 1982 imposed stringent conditions on Romania in return for rescheduling repayment of its huge (and still growing) national debt. In response, Nicolae Ceauşescu adopted a radical strategy: to pay back the debt completely, and within a very short time. The debt was in fact eliminated by 1989. This was only possible, however, by imposing horrendously draconian cuts in consumer spending. The cuts – including a ‘rational eating programme’ to reduce the intake of calories by up to 15 per cent – condemned citizens to lives of abject misery. Imports were drastically pared back, leading to chronic shortages of the most basic foodstuffs. Electricity consumption fell by 1985 to only 20 per cent of its 1979 level, while gas consumption in Bucharest in the winter of 1987 was fixed at two hours per day.

As Romanians starved and froze, Ceauşescu increasingly resembled a latter-day Nero, luxuriating (with his wife Elena) in a lifestyle of brazen extravagance and relishing a personality cult that plumbed depths of servility and absurdity rare even by the standards of authoritarian regimes. Signs of megalomania were unmistakable. Grandiose prestige projects swallowed fabulous sums of money. Around 40,000 inhabitants were turned out of their homes to make way for the ‘House of the Republic’ in Bucharest, stylistically reminiscent of the worst excesses of Stalinist architecture. In 1988 Ceauşescu announced a scheme entailing the destruction of 8,000 villages in order to build ‘agro-industrial complexes’. Villagers who would not destroy their own homes received no compensation. The Hungarian minority were to be ‘Romanianized’. Women suffered disproportionately as contraception and abortion were banned and the age of marriage reduced to fifteen. Tens of thousands of children were removed from poor families and placed in orphanages.

Ceauşescu’s regime was truly monstrous. But the sheer scale of cronyism and corruption of the ruling elite, and the fearful repression of the ‘Securitate’ – the dreaded state security organization (estimated to have 24,000 active officers), backed by a huge surveillance network of possibly hundreds of thousands of informers – did much to ensure only muted opposition, however little genuine popularity the regime enjoyed. As yet even those Romanians who in private were critical could scarcely contemplate any exit route from Ceauşescu’s rule. But Romania, whatever the specific character of its brand of communism, could not escape the climate of change that was starting to affect the entire communist zone.

The despotic tyranny in Romania stood out plainly, in fact, from the rest of the socialist bloc. Although part of the Warsaw Pact, Ceauşescu had increasingly gone his own way since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. That he had distanced himself from the Soviet Union in developing a form of Romanian national communism, and had consequently opened up a rift within the Warsaw Pact countries, had encouraged Western countries to court such a repulsive dictator. In 1978 Ceauşescu had even been invited to make a state visit to Britain and had dined with Queen Elizabeth II. Although Ceauşescu made overtures to Gorbachev, since Romania needed Soviet economic aid, a meeting of minds was impossible. Indeed, their meeting in May 1987 prompted strong criticism from the Soviet leader. Romanian and Soviet paths were set to diverge further. But the more Gorbachev clarified his radical approach to change within Warsaw Pact countries, the more Ceauşescu’s absolutist rule in Romania became endangered.

The other Warsaw Pact countries were sharply divided in their attitude towards Gorbachev’s reforms. The regimes in Bulgaria (traditionally unwavering in its loyalty to Moscow), the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia looked on the changes under way in the Soviet Union with disapproval, apprehension and foreboding. Resistance to the new climate under Gorbachev equated to the defence of the structures of power in their own countries on which their authority depended.

Todor Zhivkov, leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party as well as head of state since March 1954 and still clinging to power, was unlikely to be impressed by Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union. An attempt in 1982 to boost the flagging economy, and in particular to improve the supply of consumer goods, had failed. The country’s economic problems worsened when the Soviet Union, faced with falling revenue from oil exports, reduced its oil supplies to Bulgaria (and its other Eastern European satellites). Bulgaria’s economy, Gorbachev later noted, was kept alive by the ‘artificial respiration’ of foreign capital. Faced with ballooning foreign debt and an economy deemed to be ‘on the verge of a heart attack’, Zhivkov diverted attention by intensifying discrimination against the Turkish minority – about a tenth of the population. As ‘restructuring’ proceeded in the Soviet Union, relations with Moscow became more strained. Zhivkov paid lip service to reform in a half-hearted ‘Bulgarian perestroika’ introduced between 1986 and 1988. He was even taken to task – at least nominally – by Gorbachev in 1987 for adopting a line that might ultimately threaten the communist monopoly of power in Bulgaria, and for surrounding himself with advisors who favoured an orientation towards the West. But Zhivkov’s stance contained no small dose of hypocrisy. For he had no intention of weakening, let along surrendering, his hold on power. In 1987 the Politburo of the Bulgarian Communist Party expressly rejected perestroika as inapplicable to Bulgaria.

So did Erich Honecker for the German Democratic Republic, which he had led since 1971. With loans from West Germany and payment extracted for use of the transit route to West Berlin and crossing the Wall from West to East Berlin, the GDR was able to sustain reasonable standards of living – high for the eastern bloc, if far below those in Western Europe – even though, here too, beneath the official optimism the economy was in decline and state indebtedness sharply increasing. Political dissidence was more widespread than it had been a few years earlier. It found expression, despite the limits of public debate and the constant threat of punitive action by the coercive forces of the state, in the peace movement which, as in West Germany, had been prompted by the stationing of nuclear weapons on German soil in the escalating ‘Second Cold War’. By 1986 there were an estimated 200 peace groups in the GDR. Protestant clergy played a major part in articulating opposition on the nuclear issue, and also stirring strong feelings, especially among young people, about environmental damage. None of this posed an existential threat to the stability of the regime, which as it always had done, was prepared to resort to strong shows of force in repressing public demonstrations of disaffection. Honecker saw no need to change course. Unsurprisingly, the new broom sweeping clean in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev was not welcomed. Reform, mistakenly at first imagined to be little more than cosmetic, was regarded as wholly unnecessary in the GDR. Honecker stated explicitly in January 1987 that the path of perestroika did not suit East Germany. ‘If my neighbour decides to change his wallpaper, that doesn’t mean that I have to do the same,’ was the GDR’s stance, as voiced by Kurt Hager, the regime’s chief ideologist.

In Czechoslovakia, far more than was the case in the GDR or Bulgaria (not to mention Romania), the advent of Gorbachev opened up the gulf between the regime and wide sectors of the population (above all intellectuals) – a breach that had never been healed, even if not openly apparent, since the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968. Since then, using Timothy Garton Ash’s apt metaphor, Czechoslovakia had been like ‘a lake permanently covered by a thick layer of ice’. Beneath the glacial surface, there was movement. Most people had for long been bought off by relative plenty in the shops. By the mid-1980s, however, economic growth had stalled and national indebtedness increased. The economic prognosis made depressing reading. Political stability had been sustained by ritual conformity of the many, ruthless repression, and surveillance of the dissenting minority. But persecution had failed to silence the dissidents completely. The signatories of Charter 77 had, in fact, seen their goal not as active opposition but as maintaining a dissenting voice simply by refusing to remain silent. By the mid-1980s the signatories to Charter 77 had risen in number from the original 240 to 1,200. Hundreds of illicit publications had reached a wider, if still small, readership, inside the country and abroad.

Supporters of Charter 77, and many other citizens of Czechoslovakia, saw Gorbachev as a breath of fresh air and warmly welcomed the early signs of change in the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader was rapturously received by a crowd of some 50,000 people when he visited Prague in April 1987. For Gustáv Husák, the Czech leader since the ‘Prague Spring’, and for the rest of the Czech leadership, that was a deeply worrying sign – another reminder of 1968. They had make lukewarm noises of support for Gorbachev’s programme of reforms, though the General Secretary was in no doubt that they were unmoved in their opposition to any changes that might loosen their hold on power. Any hope that Husák’s resignation as party leader in December 1987 – he remained head of state – would open the door to substantive change was swiftly dashed. His replacement, Miloš Jakeš, was another hardliner.

The stance of Bulgaria, the GDR and Czechoslovakia towards Gorbachev’s reforms stood in sharp relief to the situation in Poland and Hungary. Both countries had already in the 1950s shown themselves to be the least compliant of the satellite states. Brutal Soviet intervention in Hungary in November 1956 and the threat of similar action in Poland had forced the two countries into line at that time. But both countries had continued to tread the tightrope of adherence to Moscow while pursuing limited deviation in their national development of communist rule. Hungary especially had partially veered away from the heavy constraints of the command economy with its variant of ‘goulash communism’; the growing unrest in Poland in the late 1970s had resulted in the birth of the independent trade union Solidarity (Solidarność) and signs of emerging liberalization before the promise had been snuffed out by the imposition of martial law in December 1981.

Both Poland and Hungary had already experienced, beneath the imposed conformity of the system, the emergence of forms of ‘civil society’. Intellectual discourse flourished just below the surface. Independent associations, discussion groups and publications had gained support in both countries. Thousands of them had sprouted like mushrooms from the soil in Hungary during the 1980s. The same was true, if anything even more so, in Poland. There, indeed, burgeoning democratic opposition extended far beyond the intellectual circles that were its bedrock in Hungary. Support among workers for Solidarity had been suppressed under the martial law decreed in December 1981; but it was far from destroyed. Opposition, in the form of strikes, demonstrations, the circulation of illegal publications and other forms of civil unrest, continued (partly funded by the CIA) despite thousands of arrests. And the Catholic Church provided an institution that had come to represent ideological opposition to the state, providing a powerful alternative to the regime in popular legitimacy and loyalty.

Courageous intellectuals in Poland continued to defy repression to make the view heard that ‘the party has deprived itself of its mandate to govern, and no one can do anything to change this’. From an internment camp in 1982, the writer and dissident Adam Michnik cited the novelist and poet Czesław Miłosz (who had broken with the Communist regime three decades earlier and taken refuge in the West). Miłosz had commented that the avalanche that would sweep away the repression ‘depends on the stones over which it rolls’. Michnik added, ‘And you want to be the stone that will reverse the course of events.’

In both countries the arrival of Gorbachev on the scene now gave legitimacy to the reformist opposition while substantially undermining the already weakened leadership of the regime. The trajectory of change in the two countries differed. In Hungary the drive to reform came largely from above, from within the Communist Party itself; in Poland, the regime’s leadership acted under pressure from below, from a mass movement demanding reform, as articulated by Solidarity. In both countries reformist forces had taken shape in response to growing structural problems. But the new wind blowing in Moscow was responsible for turning reformist tendencies into mounting and ultimately irresistible pressure for regime change.

In Hungary the long-standing formula of unwavering loyalty to Moscow and the Warsaw Pact in return for tolerance of a domestic loosening of economic constrictions and ideological relaxation became neither necessary nor applicable once Gorbachev had established power in the Soviet Union. As Hungary’s economic problems worsened from the mid-1980s onwards and national debt rose by 1987 to the highest level within the Soviet bloc, the popularity of the government waned. Inspired by what was happening in Moscow, reformers within the party saw their chance to push for more radical change than had previously been possible. János Kádár, still party leader three decades after assuming power following the uprising of 1956, had for long steered Hungary’s cautious path towards internal change. But in the altered climate he feared the dangers involved in Gorbachev’s push for rapid reform. His failing health served as a useful pretext to justify his forced resignation as General Secretary of the party in May 1988 when he was ‘elevated’ by those less hesitant about embracing change to the newly created – purely ceremonial – post of Party President. His replacement, both as party leader and already, since June 1987, head of government, Károly Grósz, a pragmatic conservative who favoured liberalizing economic reforms but also the retention of a communist monopoly of power, did not last long. He was himself ousted in November 1988 as head of government by Miklós Németh, backed by a reforming cabinet, which declared the need for a multi-party system.

Months beforehand oppositional groups had been openly demanding political pluralism and a free press. Between September 1987 and March 1988 they formed a number of organizations – the ‘Hungarian Democratic Forum’, the ‘Network of Free Initiatives’ and FIDESZ (the Alliance of Young Democrats). With different emphasis, each of these rejected the communist one-party state in favour of pluralist politics, market-orientated economics, and the pursuit of overtly national interests. The pace of change accelerated. In November the Alliance of Free Democrats was founded as a political party, arising from the Network of Free Initiatives. Once obsolete pre-war parties – the Independent Smallholder Party (in November 1988) and the Social Democratic Party (in January 1989) – were resurrected. An independent trade union organization (though attracting only minority worker support) was established in December 1988. The foundation of a Christian Democratic People’s Party followed in March 1989. By then the ruling Communist Party had accepted – an important symbolic move – that the uprising of 1956 had represented a true struggle for independence, ‘a popular uprising against an oligarchic rule that had debased the nation’. A vital step, legitimizing what was by now well under way, had already been taken several weeks earlier, in January 1989, when parliament had decreed that Hungary would become a multi-party state, and the Communist Party had formally accepted the end of its one-party rule. The revolution in Hungary was far from complete. But by the early months of 1989 it was unstoppable.

In Poland the rapidly deteriorating economic position – as an attempt to follow the Hungarian model of a limited market economy failed, debts to the West continued to mount, inflation remained high, and standards of living fell during the early 1980s – pushed General Jaruzelski’s regime by the middle of the decade to seek a form of rapprochement with Solidarity. The readiness to compromise was further prompted by a significant flashpoint: the kidnap and murder in October 1984 by members of the state security police of thirty-seven-year-old Jerzy Popiełuszko, a Catholic priest who had publicly voiced his support for the trade-union opposition, and been a prominent thorn in the side of the regime. The wave of anger that swept the country following the killing boosted the opposition and worried the regime. An estimated quarter of a million Poles, including the Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, attended Popiełuszko’s funeral on 3 November. A period of sullen, superficial calm followed. But the atmosphere remained tense. The tentacles of the police state were still as long as they had been at the height of Stalinism. However, the regime recognized that it had to make concessions to the public mood. A partial amnesty in November 1985 for members of Solidarity was followed in July 1986 by a complete amnesty for all the political prisoners arrested since 1981 (martial law had itself been formally lifted in July 1983). Among those released was the vociferous activist on behalf of Solidarity and internationally known intellectual Adam Michnik. The political situation was, however, only temporarily and partially stabilized.

Living conditions continued to deteriorate. Early in 1986 the government had been forced to increase weekly working hours and prices for foodstuffs. Soundings by the regime indicated that trust in the government had fallen to its lowest level since the 1950s. The state leadership played for time. It had hoped to preserve communist rule through the introduction of radical economic reforms to open up the economy more than ever before to private enterprise. A referendum at the end of November 1987, however, produced insufficient backing for the reforms, leaving only deep disaffection about the price rises that had already been introduced. The government was rapidly losing control of events.

By the spring and summer of 1988 the ensuing unrest resulted in another wave of strikes, at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk and in mining areas. These in turn prompted the government to enter into talks in August with what it termed ‘the constructive opposition’. Supporters of Solidarity were themselves divided: some sectors of the movement favoured negotiation with the regime, others a more radical stance. The internal division weakened Solidarity at this juncture – as the limited participation in the summer strikes had shown – and predisposed it towards a compromise with the government. For its part the government suffered public embarrassment when it invited Lech Wałęsa as a ‘private individual’ to a television debate with the leader of the official trade union, Alfred Miodowicz – a debate that Wałęsa won hands down. Following this media debacle, the government was again prepared to enter into talks with the Solidarity leader.

On 18 December 1988 Wałęsa established a Solidarity Citizens’ Committee to orchestrate pressure on the government to democratize. In January 1989, aware that stabilization of the country demanded a new basis of understanding with Solidarity (a move favoured by Gorbachev), Jaruzelski, threatening his own resignation, gained acceptance of the trade union’s re-legalization. This paved the way for the formal Round Table negotiations that began in February. Even at this stage the Minister of the Interior, Czesław Kiszczak, told the Polish people on television that ‘socialism would remain the system of government’. In reply, Wałęsa declared that ‘the time of political and social monopoly of one party over the people was coming to an end’. When the Round Table talks ended in April, it was with an agreed compromise to hold elections in June in which 35 per cent of the seats in the lower house of parliament (the Sejm) were to go to independent candidates. Wholly free elections would be held for the newly created, and less important, upper house, the Senate, while the position of President as head of state – a post destined, it was presumed, to be held by Jaruzelski (until now Chairman of the Polish Council of State) – was restored. Even now, the government felt satisfied with a deal that it thought would guarantee continued communist control. It soon proved to be a further miscalculation. By the spring of 1989 the attempt to resist the mounting pressure for democratic change was like trying to hold back the surging tide.

General Jaruzelski had been a strong supporter of Gorbachev’s reforms. Indeed Gorbachev acknowledged that Polish moves towards economic reform, even under martial law after 1981, had been well in advance of the position in the Soviet Union. Like Gorbachev, Jaruzelski had seen reform as necessary, but as taking place within the existing system in order to preserve communist rule, not to destroy it. Like Gorbachev, he had not foreseen the inexorable corrosion of the system that flowed as the consequence of substantive reform. Unlike Gorbachev, however, whose aims evolved with the radicalization of the reforms, Jaruzelski came only with great reluctance to accept the political changes that had been forced upon him and the regime.

In every country of the Soviet bloc the structural crisis was palpable by the time Gorbachev came to power in March 1985. What had at its root an inability within the system to overcome worsening economic conditions had grown to become a crisis of legitimacy of the respective regimes of the satellite countries. These had handled the problems in different ways, most (like Bulgaria) by introducing as little change as possible, others (notably Poland and Hungary) by a willingness to reform, while still attempting to hold the essence of communist rule in place. The pressure for change from within the system had meanwhile intensified greatly in Hungary and Poland especially, and had in intellectual circles (and in Poland within sectors of the suppressed Solidarity movement) given rise to radical demands for greater political as well as economic liberalization that threatened the communist monopoly of power.

It is easy, however, to pre-date, in the light of later events, the inevitability of collapse of the communist states. However grave the internal problems, the Soviet bloc looked far from being on the verge of collapse in March 1985, when Gorbachev assumed power in Moscow. Earlier Soviet leaders might well have reacted very differently to the difficulties in the satellite states. The iron fist had, after all, been the response in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Moscow had been allergic to a threat within any part of the imperium that had the potential to undermine the entire foundation of the system. The ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, formulated immediately after the suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’, if never officially enunciated, had defined the ideological basis for intervention. ‘A socialist state that is in a system of other states constituting a socialist commonwealth’, it averred, ‘cannot be free of the common interests of that commonwealth.’ Common socialist interest, in other words, justified military intervention to suppress anything that threatened it.

The leaders of the Soviet satellites were still in the early 1980s more than conscious of the continuing veiled threat of military intervention. They could not be sure that the Soviet leadership had turned away from such a strategy. Some, indeed, took comfort from this possibility. General Jaruzelski in fact later justified the declaration of military law in December 1981 precisely on the grounds that he was heading off such an eventuality (though minutes of the Soviet Politburo indicate that Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB at the time, had discounted the possibility, even should Solidarity win power in Poland, and had persuaded Brezhnev not to intervene). Absolutely crucial, therefore, was Gorbachev’s renunciation of the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’.

When the General Secretary informed the assembled leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries at their first brief meeting in the Kremlin after Konstantin Chernenko’s funeral in March 1985 that future relations would respect the sovereignty and independence of each country, their reluctance to accept his affidavits at face value was understandable. The fear of intervention only slowly diminished. Gorbachev repeated his message a month later at a meeting of the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries in Poland. His private remark, ‘Let’s not force anyone. Let each country decide what it should do,’ became more widely known. To Polish observers, however, nothing pointed to what was to come. The rituals of Gorbachev’s visit were no different from those of previous decades. In November 1986 in Moscow he made Eastern European leaders more formally aware that ‘the Brezhnev doctrine’ was obsolete. In Prague in April 1987 he declared the Soviet Union’s acceptance of the right of each socialist land to determine its own future in the light of national interest. The following year Gorbachev again plainly stipulated that the states in the Soviet bloc had ‘the right to choose’. The Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, Gennady Gerasimov, later wittily remarked that the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ had been replaced by the ‘Sinatra doctrine’ – letting the Eastern Europeans do it their way.

So there would be no future resort to Soviet armed might in Eastern Europe. Leaders of the satellite countries had to recognize that no rescue was forthcoming from the Soviet Union if they failed to satisfy the demands of their peoples. They were not over-anxious to pass the message on to their peoples, since their own power depended upon them continuing to believe that Soviet intervention remained a possibility. Indeed, Gorbachev himself did not publicly renounce ‘the Brezhnev doctrine’ when challenged by a Polish intellectual to do so in Warsaw in June 1988. Only gradually would the light dawn for ordinary people. When it did, in the course of 1989, the end of communist rule quickly followed.

Gorbachev’s entirely new approach to relations between the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe, no longer regarding it as an absolute priority to hold a country at any cost, was decisive in establishing the platform for peaceful evolution to national independence and the introduction of pluralist democracy. No one in March 1985, when Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, even experts far more aware than the general public of the structural crisis running through the Eastern European states, could imagine that these would collapse within five years. More than a year and a half after Gorbachev had become Soviet leader, in October 1986, one of the foremost experts on central Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, citing Václav Havel’s long-term ‘ideal of a democratic Europe as a friendly community of free and independent nations’, commented: ‘Hard to dissent from that; still harder to imagine its achievement.’ Even as late as January 1989 Garton Ash was still more than doubtful that the division of Europe would be overcome. But from then on the political – no longer just economic – crisis of the entire Soviet bloc was starting to run out of control at an accelerating speed.

The magnitude of Gorbachev’s personal contribution to the dramatic change, not just in the Soviet Union itself but throughout Eastern Europe, can scarcely be exaggerated. His was a classic case of Karl Marx’s dictum that men do indeed make their own history, but ‘under circumstances which they find before them’ (and, it might be added, with consequences that they did not foresee). Of course, Gorbachev was able to act as he did because of the gravity of the structural problems in Eastern Europe. And of course, as in the Soviet Union, there were in every country – if in some more than in others – reformers who were prepared to support his reforms, and to press for more radical change. But without Gorbachev’s singular readiness to embrace change, whatever the obstacles, history would have been different. How different is impossible to say. Probably at some stage the system would have imploded. But that might have taken years to happen, if at all, and under different conditions. That the collapse came so quickly, so decisively, and with so little violence and bloodshed, is to a great extent the personal achievement of Gorbachev.

BUSINESS AS USUAL: WEST EUROPEAN PREOCCUPATIONS

Few people in Western Europe were fully aware of the momentous changes that were shaking the foundations of the eastern half of the continent. Close interest in the internal development of the countries behind the Iron Curtain did not extend far beyond intellectual circles. The name ‘Gorbachev’, however, was soon familiar to anyone in the West who took the slightest notice of world affairs. The Soviet leader was indeed soon more popular throughout Western Europe than he was in his own country. That his changes promised greater freedom for the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union accounted for some of his popularity. But overwhelmingly Gorbachev was popular because of the promise he held out for an end to the Cold War – for an end to the threat of nuclear annihilation that had hung like a sword of Damocles over the entire world for four decades.

Gorbachev’s meetings with Western leaders – European leaders as well as Ronald Reagan – during his first years in power laid the ground for his growing popularity. His rapport with Margaret Thatcher, though they were ideologically polar opposites, continued to develop along the positive lines that had started when they had first met. The initial scepticism among Western European leaders about the genuine intentions of the new Kremlin chief was gradually assuaged. Through his engagement with their concerns and through force of personality, Gorbachev was able to persuade them that he was serious about nuclear disarmament and about trying to turn his notion of Europe as a ‘common home’, east and west, into reality. Early meetings with President Mitterrand and Mrs Thatcher did not go entirely smoothly. But alongside the airing of serious differences, a basis of mutual appreciation and understanding – a novelty in east–west relations in the Cold War – was created.

Gorbachev further built trust through talks on the complexities of disarmament with leading figures from NATO countries – Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland and Italy, as well as Great Britain – after the setback of the Reykjavik summit in October 1986. His first meeting, in October 1988 in Moscow, with Helmut Kohl, the West German Chancellor, also struck a highly positive note. Kohl impressed Gorbachev with his earnest desire for close cooperation in the interests of pan-European peace. Agreements on economic, scientific, cultural and environmental cooperation were signed. The good personal relations between the two leaders played a crucial role in establishing the platform for constructive long-term relations.

In a television age meetings between major political figures reached a wide audience. Gorbachev had, soon after coming to power, taken part in a live, critical interview by a group of Western journalists on French television, the first time that a Soviet leader had been willing to engage with the public in this way. Through news broadcasts his face soon became well known to countless millions throughout Western Europe. People warmed to his open personality – a complete contrast to the grim visage of earlier Soviet leaders. And they responded well to his emphasis on peace, nuclear disarmament and European unity.

Cheering crowds greeted him and his wife, Raisa, when they came to London in April 1989. The reception was if anything even more rapturous when Gorbachev visited Bonn in June that year. West Germans, in the firing line should it come to nuclear war, were unsurprisingly especially elated at the initiatives Gorbachev had taken towards disarmament. ‘I will never forget our encounter with the citizens of Bonn in the Town Hall Square,’ he later wrote. ‘We were literally overwhelmed by manifestations of goodwill and friendship, the cheering crowds expressing their support and solidarity.’

It had taken time to reach this point. For all the positive tone of their encounters, and the mutual trust that was gradually built up, there had been serious stumbling blocks in the way of harmonious relations, above all on the central question of nuclear disarmament. The three major Western European powers at the heart of the nuclear debate – Great Britain, France and West Germany, the first two themselves nuclear powers, the third in the front line of any nuclear confrontation in Europe – brought their own national interests directly into play in reacting to Gorbachev’s initiatives. Thatcher and Mitterrand both disliked Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme, out of scepticism over its long-term effectiveness, from fear that it would undermine the entire notion of nuclear deterrence, and, not least, because any ensuing nuclear disarmament would directly affect their own international status as members of a very restricted ‘nuclear club’.

Talk at the superpower summit in Reykjavik in October 1986 about removing all mid-range nuclear weapons from European soil did not go down at all well with Mrs Thatcher. The following month in Washington, President Reagan’s openness to the idea of nuclear disarmament worried Thatcher, who feared that it would bolster the lobby for unilateral disarmament in Britain. ‘We must not get into a situation where people were told that nuclear weapons were wicked, immoral and might soon be rendered unnecessary by the development of defensive systems,’ she argued. It was important to retain popular support in Europe for the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles, as well as to modernize Britain’s own nuclear arsenal. The Americans, she asserted, should warn Moscow that if the Soviet Union did not reduce nuclear arms, the ‘Star Wars’ programme would proceed. She won assurance that the NATO strategy of deterrence would remain in place.

Mitterrand’s position did not vary in essentials from that of Thatcher. Kohl’s welcome for ‘Star Wars’ was also muted, though from a different perspective. He was not convinced that the system would work. He doubted that it was either technologically or financially feasible. And above all he worried that a nuclear shield would in practice be deployed to protect the United States, while leaving Europe more vulnerable to nuclear attack. This worry was not fully assuaged even by the real progress Gorbachev and Reagan made on arms control, since the agreement they eventually reached in Washington in December 1987 on intermediate-range missiles, significant breakthrough that it was, did not cover tactical nuclear weapons with a range of under 500 kilometres – exactly the type of weapon that, it was feared, would be used in a superpower battlefield confrontation on German soil.

At the same time Kohl came to believe Gorbachev’s sincerity in aiming to end the nuclear arms race. This had not initially been Kohl’s position. The Bonn government had been sceptical about the true aims of the new Kremlin chief. In an interview in October 1986 Kohl had even insultingly (and absurdly) compared Gorbachev’s mastery of the media with that of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The Soviet press naturally responded furiously. In the West, too, where disarmament talks were at an early and sensitive stage, Kohl’s clumsiness went down badly. It was, however, in the interest neither of Bonn nor of Moscow to dwell on the faux pas. Kohl apologized to Gorbachev, putting the blame on the press. Influenced by his experienced and diplomatically agile Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who quickly recognized that it was directly in West Germany’s advantage to work actively to support Gorbachev’s initiatives, Kohl became convinced of the new opportunities for close cooperation. His decision in October 1987 to remove Pershing missiles from West German soil signalled German readiness to adjust as rapidly as possible to the new climate.

Hope of lasting improvement in relations between the West and the Soviet Union had grown markedly by that time. Hardly any Western European leader, however, even then could anticipate the speed of developments over the coming year, or believe that by the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall – symbol of the Cold War – would have come down. When President Reagan, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on 12 June 1987, demanded ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’, the sentiment was applauded but the demand itself seemed no more than a rhetorical flourish. The Wall appeared destined to last into the indefinite future and indeed, ran some arguments, it remained a welcome source of stability, permanently putting the ‘German Question’ on hold. A month later, when he met the impressive West German President, Richard von Weizsäcker, who tentatively raised the issue of German unity, Gorbachev remarked that ‘history would decide what would happen in a hundred years’.

Beyond the promising developments in international relations, the people of Western European countries were largely preoccupied with their own concerns, which were utterly detached from the dramatic shifts taking place east of the Iron Curtain. Europe was still a continent of two quite separate halves.

The social, economic and cultural transitions that had taken root in Western Europe during the 1970s intensified during the subsequent decade. The term that seemed to capture the spirit of the age was ‘postmodernism’. What it precisely meant no one could define. It was generally taken to imply a transition from a society dominated by industry to a computerized world shaped by information technology, and from ‘high’ Westernized culture to global mass culture. It also signified divergence, dissonance, a pluralism of interpretations, the absence of any claim to an authoritative voice, to cultural superiority or predominance. Perhaps the very vagueness of the concept helped its appeal. From philosophy to the visual arts, through literary criticism to historical understanding, it voiced a pervasive sense of scepticism, relativism, uncertainty and fragmentation. Notions of progress, of rationality, of truth, of any single comprehensible way of grasping where society had come from and where it was going, evaporated under the lens of postmodernist critique. The rejection of any ‘objective reality’ favoured a splintering of cultural interpretation into a myriad of individualist, subjective approaches or ‘discourses’, none of which could claim superiority over others. Although cultural unity had always been a chimera, the extent to which postmodernism penetrated intellectual understanding during the 1980s and afterwards did reflect in oblique ways the increasing breakdown of the collective and the dominance of the individualistic in society.

The decline in a sense of society as a collective concern and responsibility was enhanced as a greater focus on individual choice and individualist lifestyles caught hold. Advertising agencies, and the attractions of consumer choice brought nightly to the attention of much of the population through the spread of commercial television, played a big role in this trend. Consumer spending had not been seriously interrupted during the downturn of the 1970s. And as economies recovered from their earlier travails consumerism reached new heights. Shopping ‘malls’, an import from the United States, started to spring up in town centres or as enormous cathedrals of consumerism on the outskirts of city centres. People could shop there to their heart’s content, under cover, with free parking facilities and an array of cafés that allowed them a moment’s relaxation to ponder what they had bought and what they needed to buy before rejoining the hurly-burly. The spread in the use of credit cards encouraged people to spend now and pay later. ‘Shopping’ was no longer a matter of acquiring daily necessities. It became a leisure pursuit in itself – a pleasurable search for the latest bargains or fashions. Some trendy clothes carried a designer’s logo – a brilliant way of obliging the wearer to provide free further advertising. The choice of clothing became in itself one of the most distinctive indicators of the new individualism – a way for all to see of demonstrating individual taste and highlighting the wearer as a beacon of fashion-consciousness.

Leisure was also becoming more individualized. Personal computers – another major influence from across the Atlantic – made their entry into European society. Computers were still limited in what they offered. But what they did offer was by now expanding hugely. During the 1980s development of the microchip (an invention of the 1950s) made a quantum leap, enabling ever larger memory capacity on tiny integrated electronic circuits. By the end of the decade a single microchip could incorporate over a million interconnected transistors allowing a vast expansion of memory and the application of computer technology to more and more everyday commodities. Governments recognized that computer skills would be vital in the future and began introducing them into school classrooms. Young people, though, embraced computers first and foremost because of the electronic games that they could now play in their own living rooms – shooting down as many ‘space invaders’ as possible in what could become an obsessive and endless solo activity. The American company Atari, the Japanese enterprise Nintendo and Binatone, founded in Britain, led the boom in electronic games during the 1980s.

The younger generation was at the forefront, as it had been since the 1960s, of liberalizing social values. Feminist values were far more widely upheld by both sexes, although equal rights for women remained an elusive goal, not least in the workplace. Sexual freedom became far more socially acceptable than it had been only a few years earlier. The 1980s discovered, however, that there was a terrible, unexpected aspect to the expanded sexual freedoms. A new killer disease, discovered in the United States in 1981, was, it was established, spread by sexual contact. ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’, or AIDS as it swiftly became universally known, had no cure (though over time medical treatment was able to slow down the progress of the disease that, as the name implied, aggressively attacked and eventually destroyed the body’s immune system). Although AIDS resulted from heterosexual as well as homosexual sex – and also seemingly innocent blood transfusions in hospitals – it was during the 1980s heavily associated with homosexuality, leading to an upsurge in discrimination and intolerance towards gay men, who were left reeling by this devastating illness. By the mid-1990s reported AIDS-related deaths reached a high point in Europe of nearly 20,000 people a year. Some other parts of the world, notably the African continent, were far worse affected. Worldwide it has been estimated that HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which if untreated leads to AIDS, has claimed the lives of about 35 million people since the 1980s.

The decline of state ownership of industry and moves towards privatization, which accelerated sharply during the 1980s, in some ways accorded with the shift away from collective values. Privatization, spasmodic during the 1960s and 1970s, now became routine. Western European states profited from privatization – at least in the short term – by some $150 billion by the late 1990s.

Britain, the closest European country to the American ideals of deregulated capitalism that had been emphatically reinforced under Ronald Reagan, led the way. Margaret Thatcher was, in fact, more single-minded in her zeal for deregulation than the American President, and privatization was a central component of her determination to reduce the size of the state. By 1986 the British financial sector was largely deregulated. This bolstered the primacy of the City of London in the British economy, turning Britain more sharply than anywhere else in Europe into heavy dependence on its service and, especially, its financial sector. The rapid shrinkage of Britain’s manufacturing base was the opposite side of the coin.

The Labour movement of course strongly resisted policies of privatization. But the Labour Party suffered resounding electoral defeats in 1983 and 1987, while the trade unions were weakened and losing members. Beyond ardent Labour supporters, and including many within the working class, privatization was in fact popular. Millions of individuals, including thousands of employees of nationalized companies, became shareholders in privatized companies as state assets were sold off. Inevitably, of course, most shares were swallowed up by big investors, many of them in time non-British, who actually controlled the companies. Traditional patrician conservatives sometimes lamented the trend that was so welcomed especially by the young, upwardly mobile middle classes – the ‘Yuppies’ as they were contemptuously dubbed by the left. The former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, by now well into old age, famously criticized his successor, Mrs Thatcher, remarking that she was ‘selling off the family silver’. It was to no avail. Two-thirds of the once state-owned British industries were in private hands by 1992, including some of the most crucial parts of industry such as gas or telecommunications.

Alongside privatization went de-industrialization. This was a European-wide trend that had set in during the 1970s. But it went farthest and fastest in Britain. West Germany had done much in the 1970s to cushion the blow on communities of the demise of the old coal and steel industries, as well as protecting newer industries, upholding a large manufacturing sector, and sustaining high levels of technological and engineering skills. The following decade Britain, on the other hand, closed down at breathtaking pace much of its old manufacturing base. Coal, steel and shipbuilding were soon little more than a part of Britain’s industrial past. Little was done to mitigate the social damage done as tens of thousands of workers lost the main source of their livelihood. No alternative employment was available that could easily or adequately compensate for the final closing down of a factory that had once provided work for an entire community, while towns were now left demoralized, without an economic raison d’être, their local institutions and social cohesion undermined. Entire swathes of the country – the old industrial heartlands in South Wales, in the Clyde Valley of Scotland, and in the north of England – were alienated (and would remain so into the indefinite future) by government policy that they saw as favouring only commercial and banking interests, above all the City of London.

For all the widespread animosity towards Thatcherism in Britain’s industrial regions, many in the working class were themselves ready to profit from policies that redistributed ownership from the state to private individuals. Some 1.7 million tenants of council houses, built at state cost over decades for the less well-off, accepted the government’s offer to buy the property they lived in at heavily subsidized prices. It was touted as the route to a ‘property-owning democracy’. And the sales produced £24 billion for government coffers, contributing to the ability to lower taxation. But these were one-off gains. The council houses, once sold, could not be resold by the state. And if the state was not going to replenish the supply of council houses – as, it was obvious, the Thatcher government had no interest in doing – the long-term consequence was likely to be a housing shortage and a transfer of rental profits to private landlords.

The pattern of de-industrialization and privatization in Britain in the 1980s was extreme. Labour legislation meant that employees on the continent were often better protected than was the case in Britain, making changes in working practices more difficult to achieve. Modernization of industries and investment in training as well as capital was much more significant, especially in West Germany and France. Belief in the role of the state and its support for public services was also stronger than in Britain. Resistance to privatization was, therefore, substantial in instances where it was widely felt that key public services were threatened. Still, the economic forces that had provided the impetus for the British government to grasp the nettle of privatization with both hands affected every country to a varying extent. In France, where the socialist President Mitterrand had to ‘co-habit’ by 1986 with a conservative National Assembly (and a Gaullist Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac), the privatization of banks and branches of industry offered, as in Britain, the opportunity for ordinary people to become shareholders. That the demand for shares outstripped the supply indicated the popularity of the move. West Germany, too, was by the mid-1980s in the process of deregulating financial services, energy, and its commercial television and radio channels. By the end of the decade commercial parts of the postal services were also privatized. Among the largest European economies Italy was the country where privatization made only partial headway in the 1980s. Some big companies such as Alfa Romeo and state-owned banks, for instance the commercial bank Mediobanca, indeed shifted from the public to the private sector. But the bulk of heavy industry, most of the major banks and insurance firms, radio, television and the health service remained (before a second wave of privatization in the 1990s) within the public sector. But the Italian economy, which had earlier thrived, was by now lacking in innovation, inefficient and bloated in manpower, leaving it increasingly uncompetitive.

As the numbers employed in industry dropped – over a fifth of industrial jobs were lost on average in advanced economies between 1979 and 1994 – the character of the working class changed, and with that the nature of class politics. The old monolithic industries had gone, or were going. The close-knit class identities that these industries had spawned were dying. Ever more young people from working-class backgrounds had individual interests and pursuits not available to earlier generations. They had little or no experience of the collective interests that had come from sharing the same type of work, similar mentalities, similar lifestyles. They had grown up with privatization, had no expectation of (or desire to) follow their fathers and grandfathers to work down coal mines or into steel mills, had moved away from deadened communities to more prosperous areas (or sometimes abroad) often to find employment in white-collar occupations, or had benefited from rapidly expanding opportunities to study at university and moved up the social ladder.

The changing structure of employment, and gradual shifts in social culture, did offer some new prospects to women. Feminist values were far more widely upheld by both sexes, especially the younger generation, than had been the case only a decade earlier. But if equal rights for women remained an elusive goal, not least in the workplace, job opportunities, advancement or pay, women could nevertheless benefit from the rapidly changing conditions. Thousands, no longer bound to the home or work in a nearby office or town, were able to move to newly expanding cities to find employment in administration, hotels, health occupations, marketing or, for a growing minority with university education, in the professions and management. Women with children were entering the labour market far more often than had been the case even in the recent past. As the proportion of men in employment declined somewhat, the proportion of women rose – though most of the increase was in part-time work. Women’s fight for equality would continue. But the changes that were altering women’s lives and opportunities militated, as they did with men, towards greater self-assertion, individualism, and away from old, more collective lifestyles, identities and interests.

The backbone of Europe’s Social Democratic and Labour parties was weakened in the process. Socialist traditions were dissolving. And among young people, even those on the left, there was no great appetite for the high-taxation regime that had been the staple of social democracy’s welfare state. Low taxation to maximize the amount retained in wages and salaries for consumer spending on individualist tastes was increasingly preferred to financing public services through high taxation. But as Social Democratic parties were able to offer no viable or sustainable economic alternative to the widely adopted policies of rationalization, enhanced competition in the globalized market and privatization, they started to be seen in the eyes of many – often those who had been disadvantaged by globalization and de-industrialization – as little different in essence from Conservative or Christian Democratic parties.

The erosion of class-based parties was still only partial and limited. Indeed, in some countries it was still barely perceptible. It was only the beginning. But the trend towards movements of national or regional identity, though still not of major significance, was certainly discernible in some parts of Europe. Nationalist parties started to gain support in Scotland, Catalonia and Flanders. In each case growing economic prosperity – in Scotland mainly related to the still expanding oilfields in the North Sea – enhanced people’s feelings that they were disadvantaged by policies of their central governments, whether these were based in London, Madrid or Brussels. Disaffection in Austria at the duopoly of the Conservative and Social Democratic parties that had run Austria since the end of the war brought a trebling of support (to nearly 17 per cent of the vote by 1990) for the right-wing nationalist programme of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), under its flamboyant leader Jörg Haider, whose populism was tinged with approving comments about the Third Reich. In France the National Front, drawing on support from disillusioned conservative middle-class voters but also making inroads into the working class, regularly attracted around 10 per cent of French voters during elections in the 1980s, while the party’s populist and racist leader, Jean-Marie le Pen (a veteran of the Algerian War), took as much as 14.4 per cent of the vote in the 1988 presidential election that was won by Mitterrand and the Socialists.

Growing awareness of environmental damage from industry and from modern consumer demands formed another emerging element in the changing political constellation. These were global concerns, reflections of the impact on every part of the world from a globalized economy. The international organization Greenpeace, founded in Canada in 1971, drew worldwide attention to the destruction of the environment, sometimes through spectacular actions that won media attention, such as blocking Rhine shipping for three days in 1980. Recognition that great, perhaps irreparable, damage was being done to the environment started to seep more deeply into people’s consciousness. The seriousness of what was taking place was undeniable. Various reports showed the damage from carbons produced, for example, by refrigerators, hairsprays and other domestic aerosols to the ozone layer (which filters out ultraviolet radiation from the sun); the poisoning of fisheries through outpourings of industrial chemicals; the ‘acid rain’ from chemical emissions that was destroying vegetation and polluting water supplies; the dangers of lead in petrol; the loss of Amazonian rainforests to produce timber for the developed world; and the immense harm to wildlife caused by huge spillage from oil tankers that ran aground (such as the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in March 1989, leaking ten million tons of crude oil and killing immense numbers of birds). Western governments could not ignore the warnings indefinitely. The environment was becoming a political issue.

Green parties, reflecting the widening anxieties about environmental damage, started to proliferate. By the mid-1980s they had been established in most Western European countries. Beyond West Germany (where the Greens had formed a political party in 1980 and won sufficient votes to enter the federal parliament three years later) they had not as yet entered the political mainstream. Even so, they were making progress. In 1984 the first Green members of the European Parliament were elected. The shock of the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 gave environmental politics, particularly in northwestern Europe, a significant boost. The Swedish Greens, founded in 1981, were by 1988 the first new party for seventy years to enter the Swedish parliament. In Finland the Greens, founded in 1987, won ten seats in parliament four years later. Elsewhere, environmental movements remained peripheral in parliamentary politics, but were gradually able to influence traditional parties into growing interest in ecological matters.

Increased awareness of environmental issues was matched during the 1980s by enhanced sensitivity towards racism. Neo-fascist and racist parties and organizations were regarded as abhorrent by most of the population. Racial tolerance was coming to be seen generally as the plainest hallmark of a civilized society. Race hatred was, accordingly, viewed as the absolute negation of all standards of humanity. Racism of course did not disappear. But politically, culturally and socially it had become taboo, its outward expressions suppressed as unacceptable. As immigration into most Western European countries increased, societies had to try – and did so with varying success – to adjust to the challenges of multiculturalism. But sensitivity towards race was conditioned not just by current concerns.

The ghosts of the past were returning to haunt the present. Until the end of the 1970s the terrible events during the Second World War that had culminated in the Holocaust – the term was only just starting to be universally used to signify the German planned extermination of Europe’s Jews – had not penetrated far into general public consciousness. Historians had, of course, written about it. But their scholarly analyses had not reached a wide public. This was about to change – though not, primarily, as an outflow of the work of historians. The Holocaust was about to become a touchstone of historical consciousness in Western Europe.

The change partly arose from conscious attempts within the Jewish community in the United States to foster a sense of identity centred on the Holocaust. It was not simply a matter of preserving historical memory, important though this was. ‘Moral capital’, it was felt, could unify ‘collective memory’, and could help to bolster support for policies favourable to Israel. Symptoms of the changing climate were the foundation in 1977 of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, named after the celebrated Nazi-hunter (himself a Holocaust survivor) Simon Wiesenthal, and, even more important, the decision two years later to establish a Holocaust Memorial Museum in the heart of Washington D.C. Holocaust memorials and commemorative days began to proliferate. Teaching on the Holocaust in American schools and universities started to spread. In 1978 the major breakthrough into general consciousness of US citizens came with the showing on prime-time television of a four-part series simply entitled Holocaust, which was watched by nearly 100 million Americans. The fictional drama that followed the lives of a Jewish family, exposed to the full horrors of the Holocaust, and an SS man who rose to a leading position in the implementation of the extermination programme, captured the imagination in ways that scholarly literature could never do. Jewish organizations maximized the subsequent publicity opportunities presented by the success of the series to spread awareness of the Holocaust still further, both in Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

In West Germany a year later the showing of the series was a sensation. Holocaust was watched by around 20 million viewers (around half of the West German viewing population), who were transfixed by the personalized and highly emotional dramatic depiction of persecution and extermination. People empathized with the victims and recognized the monumentality of the crime as they had never done before. ‘A nation is shocked’ was the verdict of one scholarly analysis of the impact of the film. ‘Holocaust has shaken up post-Hitler Germany in a way that German intellectuals have been unable to do,’ commented the widely read weekly Der Spiegel. More than three decades after the end of the war an American film, criticized by some as reducing the destruction of the Jews to the level of a ‘soap opera’, had opened up the sense of national guilt. The following year the Federal Parliament (the Bundestag) abolished the statute of limitations on war crimes, permitting further legal prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust. The film was widely seen as playing a significant role in the decision.

From this point on, West German historical writing as well as public awareness focused on the Holocaust as never before.fn1 In 1985 the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War (publicized in the mass media far more extensively than on any previous anniversary) kept the Holocaust, and other German wartime atrocities, in the public eye. The visit by President Reagan, on the invitation of the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, to a war cemetery at Bitburg in May 1985 as part of the commemoration of the end of the war, backfired when it transpired that the cemetery held graves of SS men. Kohl was by this time trying to reconcile German responsibility for the Holocaust with the attempt – seen as important to preserve positive relations between the Federal Republic and its most important ally, the USA – to emphasize the positive transformation of his country since the end of the war and to acknowledge that it had broken the shackles of the past.

This played its part in the rancorous dispute about the Holocaust, involving practically all West Germany’s leading historians, that occupied the pages of the country’s leading newspapers for weeks during 1986. At the core of the dispute was the question of how the Nazi past – and above all responsibility for the Holocaust – fitted into present and future West German consciousness. Should guilt for Nazism’s crimes give way to a more positive sense of national identity, as was forcefully argued by Michael Stürmer, a prominent historian and speechwriter for Helmut Kohl? Or was Auschwitz essential to West German identity, as the eminent social philosopher Jürgen Habermas claimed? Was the Holocaust, in fact, no worse than the crimes of Stalinism? Such issues – and above all the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust – preoccupied West German intellectuals in 1986. Much of the general public naturally had little interest in the historians’ dispute. For many people it was time to move on from obsessing about the Nazi past and being consumed by guilt for events in which they themselves had played no part. Even so, the resonance of the dispute showed that the Holocaust had become a lodestar of West German consciousness.

Beyond West Germany a concatenation of separate events caught the public imagination throughout Western Europe and beyond, and drew international attention to the Holocaust. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, released in cinemas in 1985, a searing documentary based on the eyewitness testimony of victims, graphically illustrated the horror of the extermination camps. The trial of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief in Lyon (extradited in 1983 from his Bolivian exile to France), which exposed his role in the torture of the resistance hero Jean Moulin, and the deportation of over 200 Jews, kept the Holocaust in the public eye in France. And the ‘Waldheim Affair’ in 1986, in which the elected President of Austria and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, was forced to admit that he covered up the truth about his wartime service in Yugoslavia and Greece, where his unit had perpetrated serious atrocities, shone the international spotlight on Austria’s reluctance to acknowledge its part in the Nazi catastrophe. In one way or another the Holocaust was by now seldom out of the attention of the mass media – and, consequently, of substantial parts of the population. The Second World War started to be seen in a different light, with emphasis increasingly placed on racial policy, Nazi barbarity on the Eastern Front, and above all the genocide against the Jews.

Whatever the reshaping of the social and cultural landscape, economically and politically Western Europe remained stable in the later 1980s. The economic turmoil of the previous decade had been surmounted. Politically, there was much continuity. Helmut Kohl’s government was re-elected in West Germany in 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s in Britain the following year, and François Mitterrand – whose economic policy had retreated far from its earlier socialist programme – won a second term in office as French President in 1988. Following elections in 1987 in Italy, the Christian Democrats returned to head the government, replacing the socialist-led administration of Bettino Craxi, while the Communist vote had slumped. The late 1980s seemed a time of optimism in Italy, too, though behind the scenes corruption and escalating state indebtedness were worrying developments.

The European Community also looked with renewed optimism to the future. After some years of stagnation, ‘Eurosclerosis’ as it was dubbed, ‘The Single European Act’ of 1986 – the first time that the Treaty of Rome of 1957 had been substantially amended – breathed new life into the Community. The Act aimed to establish by 1992 a single market to allow for free movement of goods, services, capital and people within the borders of the European Community without national barriers or constraints. The driving force behind the innovation was the dynamic, newly appointed President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors. But Delors wanted to use the Act as a step towards attaining political union. In the summer of 1988 Delors told the European Parliament that he wanted to see ‘the beginnings of a European government’ within ten years. This put him on a direct collision course with Mrs Thatcher, and much of the British population. Thatcher had, in fact, played no small role in pressing for the Single Market. But she saw the European Union, as did much of the British political class and, led by them, most of the population, as little more than an economic entity, a free-trade zone. In contrast to Delors she fundamentally ruled out the aim of European political union. ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels,’ thundered the British Prime Minister in a speech in Bruges on 20 September. The speech marked the beginning of sustained ‘Euroscepticism’ – opposition to British membership of the European Community – in Britain, with Mrs Thatcher as its champion (even though she had plainly stated at Bruges that Britain’s ‘destiny is in Europe as part of the Community’). By 1990 ‘Europe’ was dividing her party, and her government. It contributed signally to Mrs Thatcher’s resignation as Prime Minister on 22 November 1990. And it was set to remain a festering sore at the heart of British politics. Beyond that, the clash between Delors and Thatcher reflected the crucial underlying tension in the European Union, one that had been present ever since the early ruminations on future European unity by Jean Monnet back in 1950: the tension between supranational objectives and national sovereignty. It was an issue that would continue to bedevil European politics.

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By the time of Mrs Thatcher’s downfall, Europe itself had been transformed. During the 1980s Western and Eastern Europe had continued to follow different trajectories. In 1989 this altered dramatically. From the spring of that year Western Europe looked with new interest, excitement and astonishment at what was happening east of the Iron Curtain as Gorbachev’s winds of change, by now a hurricane, uprooted the structures of communist domination that had been in place for over forty years.