The Penguin History of the World

On a smaller, but important scale, regional groupings have emerged, requiring the observance of common disciplines. Some, like those of eastern Europe, have proved evanescent, but the European Union, even if many of the visions that attended its birth remain unrealized, inches forward. On 1 January 2002 a new common currency was introduced among twelve of its member states and 300 million people. Nor are formal organizations the whole story. There are some unorganized or only vestigially organized supranational realities that from time to time appear to eclipse the freedom of individual states. Islam has at times been feared or welcomed as such a force, and perhaps the racial consciousness of pan-Africanism, or of what is called négritude, inhibits some nations’ actions. The spread of this luxuriant undergrowth to international affairs must make obsolete the old notion that the world consists of independent and autonomous players operating without restraint except that of individual interest. Paradoxically, the first substantial inter-state structures emerged from a century in which more blood was shed by states in quarrels with one another than ever before.

International law, too, now aspires to greater practical control of states’ behaviour than previously despite all the notorious examples that remain of failure to comply with it. In part this is a matter of slow and still sporadic change in the climate of opinion. Uncivilized and barbarous regimes go on behaving in uncivilized and barbarous ways, but decency has won its victories, too. The shock of uncovering in 1945 the realities of the Nazi regime in wartime Europe meant that great evils cannot now be launched and carried through without concealment, denial or attempts at plausible justification. In 1998, representatives of 120 nations – although those of the United States were not among them – agreed to set up a permanent international court to try war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the following year, the highest of the British courts of justice ruled, unprecedentedly, that a former head of state was liable to extradition to another country to answer there charges of crimes alleged against him. In 2001, the former president of Serbia was surrendered by his countrymen to an international court and appeared there in the dock.

It is important not to exaggerate. Hundreds, if not thousands, of wicked men continue to practise around the world brutalities and cruelties for which there is little practical hope at present of holding them to account. International criminality is a concept that infringes state sovereignty and the United States is not likely under any conceivable presidency to admit the jurisdiction of an international court over its own citizens. But the United States itself also explicitly adopted revolutionary foreign policy goals for quasi-moral ends in the 1990s in seeking to overthrow the governments of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević and it is now concerned with the organization of efforts against terrorism which must imply some further interference with others’ sovereignty.

Nevertheless, at home, governments have for 200 or 300 years enjoyed more and more power to do what was asked of them. Lately, economic distress in the 1930s and great wars required a huge mobilization of resources and new extensions of governmental power. To such forces have also been added demands that governments indirectly promote the welfare of their subjects and undertake the provisions of services either unknown hitherto or left in the past to individuals or such ‘natural’ units as families and villages. The welfare state was a reality in Germany and Great Britain before 1914. In the last fifty years, the share of GDP taken by the state has shot up almost everywhere. There has also been the urge to modernize. Few countries outside Europe achieved this without direction from above and even in Europe some countries have owed most of their modernization to government. The twentieth century’s outstanding examples were Russia and China, two great agrarian societies that sought and achieved modernization through state power. Finally, technology, through better communications, more powerful weapons and more comprehensive information systems, has advantaged those who could spend most on it, namely governments.