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and his successors at least suppressed national strife in their empire. And if
the Soviet Union should disintegrate can we be sure that the emergence
of a dozen sovereign Turkmenistans and Tadjikistans, much of the time
battling each other, will be a major step to global peace and progress?
The failure of communism in Eastern Europe (or in Cuba, China,
Vietnam, and elsewhere) will not have an immediate decisive impact on
radical criticism of democratic societies. This is obviously because political
views are shaped above all by events at home rather than abroad.
Whether America will remain the greatest exporter of goods and services
or whether its net savings rate will continue to slip, or whether high–
tech exports continue to decline, may be of less importance than the
doomsayers claim. But one needs hardly to enumerate all the major social
ills from inner city ghettoes, the crime rate, the widening gap between
rich and poor, to the sad state of American education and the scandalous
backwardness as far as health and other social services are concerned, to
realize that there is no room for complacency. To state that American
capitalism has performed better than Soviet communism is a backhanded
compliment. The complacency will probably give way in the coming
years to an equally unjustified pessimism: if there has been an American
decline, it is not irreversible.
It
is quite unlikely that the collapse of communism will strengthen
conservative parties in Europe. True, socialist parties in Sweden and the
Netherlands have lost influence over the last few years, but France and
Spain are ruled by social democrats, and their chances for electoral vic–
tory in Germany and Britain have improved in recent months.
If
their
prospects are now better than a year or two ago, it is precisely because
they have dropped much of their extremist and utopian ballast. The dif–
ferences between the social and economic policies of the social democrats
and the conservatives (which in the European context more often than
not are really centrist parties) are less and less important: both are in favor
of the market; both want to keep the welfare state.
In
essential respects,
Europe has moved into a direction of which the early Fabians and Ed–
uard Bernstein would approve.
In
a recent issue of
Partisan Review
(#3, 1990), William Phillips
quoted an American professor
to
the effect that recent events in Eastern
Europe will "not reverse the impressive growth of leftist faculty in
universities." I do not find the statement surprising at all, and Mr.
Bowles is probably right, at least in the short run. Ever since Talleyrand
wrote to Mallet du Pan about the Bourbons,
ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien
oublie,
there are countless examples for the astonishing capacity of survival
ofBourbonic ideologies. The fact that pan-Germanism had been defeated
in the First World War did not affect the political views of large sections
of the German middle class after 1918; Trotskyism continued to
