History has a way of playing tricks. As events unfold around us, we interpret what we see through the prism of precedent, and then are amazed when it turns out that our actions never play out the same way twice. We speak confidently about “the lessons of the past” as if the messy cosmos of human affairs could be reduced to the order of a classroom.
Rarely has the past proven a more deceptive guide to the future than at the end of the eighth decade of the twentieth century. If you take a certain pleasure in seeing the experts confounded and the pundits dismayed, then 1979 is sure to hold your interest.
In January of that year, the shah of Iran got on a plane and left his country, never to return. He had been on the throne for thirty-seven years. He was toppled by a wave of rebellion that brought millions of protesters onto the streets of Iranian cities. The crowds they formed were some of the biggest humankind has ever witnessed, before or since. Yet just a few years earlier, well-informed observers had been hailing Iran as a miracle of modernization and praising the shah for the brilliance of his economic reforms. His hold over Iranian society was deemed unshakable; after all, he presided over one of the world’s biggest armies, not to mention a brutally effective secret police. But now his subjects were taking to the streets, declaring their eagerness to die for the cause of an elderly Shiite legal scholar living in Parisian exile.
Most outsiders couldn’t fathom what was happening in Iran. Decades earlier the German philosopher Hannah Arendt had assured her readers that revolutions—France in 1789, Russia in 1917—were, by definition, the products of secular modernizers. So what was one to make of the Iranian masses chanting religious slogans? Surely, the very phrase Islamic Revolution was a contradiction in terms. Many Westerners and Iranians alike responded by denying the phenomenon altogether, concluding that it was all a smoke screen for a “real” revolution engineered by the forces of the Left, who had to be using religion to camouflage their real intentions. Others compared Khomeini to Gandhi, another leader who had employed the rhetoric of faith in an anti-imperialist struggle. Events soon demonstrated just how misplaced this analogy was.
Jimmy Carter, who was US president at the time, had a simpler analysis. Khomeini, according to him, was simply “crazy.”1 This was a view that, in its sheer desperation, speaks volumes about the difficulties facing outsiders who were struggling to comprehend the events in Iran. Khomeini was not insane (though he might have been willing to assert that he was sometimes “drunk with the presence of God,” since he was a man steeped in Sufi poetic traditions). He was, in fact, a shrewd and methodical man who, in his approach to politics, repeatedly displayed a sharp sense of pragmatism.
Khomeini was no improviser. He had spent years shaping his vision of a future Iran, one in which Shia clerics would run the government and exercise supervision over virtually every aspect of society. But the road to that goal turned out to be a complicated one. Although the Quran offers a comprehensive ethical and political blueprint for society, it offers little practical detail on the ins and outs of administering a modern nation-state. For all its philosophical and poetic richness, the Holy Book of Islam has little to say about the specifics of monetary policy, exchange rates, or agricultural subsidies. So the course of the Iranian revolution ricocheted through abstruse scriptural debates, outbursts of violence, and the constraints of the possible—a history that bequeathed to the new Islamic Republic a range of eccentric political arrangements that make it a strikingly unpredictable place to this day. It should come as little wonder that Khomeini found the path to be so tortuous. In this respect, the “Islamic Revolution” was untraveled territory not only to outsiders, but also to its founders.
The upheaval in Iran had an explosive effect on the rest of the Islamic world. This was most apparent in Afghanistan, its neighbor to the east. Here, too, the decision makers in both Washington and Moscow initially overlooked the impact of religion. When the doddering Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo colleagues decided to send their troops across the border on Christmas Day 1979 to quash a revolt against the country’s recently installed communist regime, Western observers instinctively recalled earlier episodes of the Cold War. Moscow’s grab for Kabul, they said, was simply a repetition of earlier interventions in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, when Russian tanks had crushed local anti-Communist rebellions. The powers that be in Washington immediately assumed that the Russians were seizing an opportunity to make an aggressive thrust toward the strategically vital Persian Gulf. The old men in the Kremlin actually had more modest motives: they were desperate to shore up the crumbling twenty-month-old Communist regime, which had succeeded in the course of its brief life in alienating just about everyone in the country. The KGB even suspected the Afghan Communist leader, Moscow’s own client, of hatching covert plans to court the West.
But both Washington and Moscow failed to predict the forces that the invasion would unleash. Here, too, the insurgent power of revivalist Islam took observers by surprise. Some commentators, recalling Afghanistan’s history of resistance to foreign invaders, speculated that fanatical Muslims would prove a match for the Russians. But what loomed in their minds was the image of the romantic tribal fighters who had given the British Empire such difficulties in the nineteenth century. What no one foresaw was how the odd fusion of Islam and late-twentieth-century revolutionary politics—a formula whose mostly Sunni version in Afghanistan had much in common with the fervor stirred up by Khomeini’s Shiite followers—would combust into a strange new kind of global religious conflict. It is true that the Afghan revolt against Communist rule initially took the form of a traditional tribal uprising. But events soon demonstrated the power of the odd new phenomenon known as “Islamism.” Within the space of just a few years, this religious insurgency would supplant Marxism and secular nationalism as the dominant opposition ideology of the Middle East.
This revivalist spirit was not restricted to the world of Islam. There were Westerners, too, who believed that it was time for religion to reassert itself against the onslaught of secularization. In October 1978, the College of Cardinals that had come together in Rome to elect a pope had jolted the world by settling upon a Pole, Karol Wojtyła, the archbishop of Kraków. The new pontiff, who chose the name “John Paul II,” was a virtual unknown even to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square who had assembled to hear the outcome of the election. News commentators and Vatican officials mispronounced his name. Their confusion was understandable. He was the first non-Italian to become bishop of Rome since the Dutchman Adrian VI was chosen for the job 457 years earlier.
But it was the politics of the Cold War that really made Wojtyła’s selection momentous. As a priest who came from behind the Iron Curtain, he had spent his entire career confronting the political and spiritual challenge of Communism. Just seven months after his election, in June 1979, the new pope proceeded to demonstrate his transformative potential by embarking on a pastoral visit to his Polish homeland that shook Communist rule in East Central Europe to its very foundations. Here, too, it would take time for all the ramifications of this event to reveal themselves—perhaps because no one suspected that it would catalyze a campaign of nonviolent moral and cultural resistance to a twentieth-century totalitarian regime. For all his determination to undermine Marxism-Leninism, the pope himself could not foresee how his efforts would hasten the collapse of the Soviet empire within his own lifetime. “On being elected pope, John Paul II did not believe that the day was close at hand when communism would lose,” as George Weigel, his most sympathetic biographer, notes.2
Margaret Thatcher’s election as British prime minister in May 1979 marked another radical caesura. It wasn’t just that she was the first woman to hold the nation’s highest elected office; her significance went far beyond the mundane fact of her gender. If the pope and the Islamists stood for the rising assertiveness of religion, the ascendancy of Thatcher signaled a new shift with equally profound global implications: she was a missionary of markets, zealously determined to dismantle socialism and restore the values of entrepreneurship and self-reliance among her compatriots.3 At the beginning of her term in office, her views on economic policy were so unconventional that they made her part of the minority within her own cabinet. Indeed, it was Thatcher’s battles with her fellow Conservatives, as much as with her opponents on the Left, that shaped the free-market agenda that would soon alter her country and the world.
She was, at the time, just possibly the last person in British politics that anyone would have tapped to become the most influential premier of the twentieth century since Winston Churchill. But it is hard to blame those who did not guess what was to come. In 1979 Thatcher herself did not yet dare to use the word privatization, a recent coinage that just a few years later would figure prominently in the global market revolution that she helped to unleash.
Markets also played a prominent role in a less conspicuous shift that was under way at the same time in the world’s most populous country. At the end of 1978, the septuagenarian Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping heaved himself into the top job, and in the months that followed he and his comrades introduced a series of economic reforms that ultimately changed the country beyond all recognition. Emulating other East Asian success stories like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, party leaders laid the groundwork for “Special Economic Zones” that would invite in foreign capital and technology. They allowed private entrepreneurs to found small companies and opened up the country to an influx of information from the outside world. And in the all-important countryside, where the overwhelming majority of Chinese still lived, Deng and his colleagues began to allow the dissolution of the collective farms set up by Mao Zedong and permitted the peasantry to return to their old system of family farming.
No one really grasped the full magnitude of what Deng had in mind. No Communist regime, after all, had ever succeeded in reforming itself. The incomprehension had much to do with the fact that Deng, who carefully deployed Maoist slogans in support of his restructuring program, remained a sincere believer in the primacy of Communist Party rule. In the spring of 1979, he even moved to quash a nascent prodemocracy movement that he had initially used to outmaneuver his political rivals. All this obscured the details of a grand political and economic experiment that has left a profound mark on both China and the world.
Today, without thinking much about it, we tend to measure China’s success against the leading industrialized countries of the West. As the reforms began to get off the ground in 1979, however, the comparisons that most observers drew were with Yugoslavia, Hungary, or even East Germany (the latter still considered a paragon of socialist productivity). During an official visit to Tokyo in 1978, Deng bewildered his Japanese hosts with an offhand remark about a territorial dispute the two sides had agreed to shelve: “And beyond ten or twenty years, who knows what kind of system China will have?” The Japanese thought that he must be joking. Today we know that he wasn’t.4
These five stories—rich in event and grand personalities—would be worth telling in themselves. But do they really have that much to do with each other? Surely, Britain’s first female prime minister has nothing in common with Iranian Shiism’s leading militant cleric. And what could possibly unite the bishop of Rome, the budding Islamists of Afghanistan, and the leader of the Chinese Communist Party? The fact that they lived through the same historical inflection point, one might argue, does not mean that their stories are linked. Coincidence is not correlation.
In fact, though, they have much more in common than at first meets the eye. The forces unleashed in 1979 marked the beginning of the end of the great socialist utopias that had dominated so much of the twentieth century. These five stories—the Iranian Revolution, the start of the Afghan jihad, Thatcher’s election victory, the pope’s first Polish pilgrimage, and the launch of China’s economic reforms—deflected the course of history in a radically new direction. It was in 1979 that the twin forces of markets and religion, discounted for so long, came back with a vengeance.
Not all of the historical figures whose fates converged that year necessarily thought of themselves as conservatives, and none of them tried to turn back the clock to some hallowed status quo ante. This is precisely because they were all reacting, in their own ways, to a long period of revolutionary fervor that expressed itself in movements ranging from social democracy to Maoism—and it is striking that they were all variously denounced by their enemies on the Left as “reactionaries,” “obscurantists,” “feudalists,” “counterrevolutionaries,” or “capitalist roaders” who aimed above all to defy the march of progress.
There was a grain of truth to these accusations. The protagonists of 1979 were, in their own ways, participants in a great backlash against revolutionary overreach. Deng Xiaoping rejected the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in favor of pragmatic economic development—a move that, despite Deng’s disclaimers, entailed a gradual restoration of capitalist institutions. Khomeini’s vision of an Islamic state was fueled by his violent repudiation of the shah’s state-led modernization program (known as the “White Revolution”) as well as the Marxist ideas that dominated Iran’s powerful leftist opposition movements. (The shah, indeed, denounced the Shiite clerics as the “black reaction” in contrast to the “red reaction” of the Marxists.) Afghanistan’s Islamic insurgents took up arms against the Moscow-sponsored government in Kabul. John Paul II used Christian faith as the basis for a moral crusade against the godless materialism of the Soviet system. And Margaret Thatcher aimed to roll back the social democratic consensus that had taken hold in Great Britain after World War II.
At the same time, it was easy to underestimate just how much these leaders had actually absorbed from their opponents on the utopian Left. A conservative can be defined as someone who wants to defend or restore the old order; a counterrevolutionary, by contrast, is a conservative who has learned from the revolution. John Paul II, who had spent most of his adult life under the Communist system, knew the Marxist classics intimately and devoted considerable intellectual and pastoral effort to countering their arguments—knowledge that helped him to shape his program of moral and cultural resistance. (It also left him with an intense interest in the politics of the working class that informed his patronage of the Solidarity movement—as well as feeding a deep skepticism about Western-style capitalism.) Khomeini and his clerical allies appropriated Marxist rhetoric and ideas wherever they could, forging a new brand of religious militancy that railed against colonialism and inequality; socialist notions of nationalization and state management later played a large role in the Islamist government’s postrevolutionary economic policy. (One historian describes the resulting synthesis as “revolutionary traditionalism.”)5 Afghanistan’s jihadists borrowed from the Communist playbook by building revolutionary political parties and comprehensive ideological systems to go with them. Margaret Thatcher, who studied at Oxford when Marxism was the reigning political fashion, fused her conservative instincts with a most unconservative penchant for crusading rhetoric, ideological aggression, and programmatic litmus tests. It was precisely for this reason that many of the Conservative Party comrades-in-arms who accompanied her into government in 1979 questioned just how “conservative” she really was. As for Deng Xiaoping, he insisted on maintaining the institutional supremacy of the Communist Party even as he charted a course away from central planning and toward state capitalism. Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad describes Deng’s reform program as “a counterrevolution in economics and political orientation the likes of which the world had never seen.”6
It was entirely in keeping with this spirit that Thatcher proudly reported to a Conservative Party rally in April 1979 that her political opponents had dubbed her a reactionary. “Well,” she declared, “there’s a lot to react against!”7 It was, indeed, precisely this peculiar spirit of defiance that gave the year its transformative power. The decisions of these leaders decisively defined the world in which we live—one in which communist and socialist thought has faded, markets dominate economic thinking, and politicized religion looms large. Like it or not, we of the twenty-first century still live in the shadow of 1979.