The Penguin History of the World

Once, and not long ago, even the greatest of European monarchies could not carry out a census or create a unified internal market. Now, the state has a virtual monopoly of the main instruments of physical control. Even a hundred years ago, the police and armed forces of government unshaken by war or uncorrupted by sedition gave them a security; technology has only increased their near-certainty. New repressive techniques and weapons, though, are now only a small part of the story. State intervention in the economy through its power as consumer, investor or planner, and the improvement of mass communications in a form that leaves access to them highly centralized, all matter immensely. Hitler and Roosevelt made great use of radio (though for very different ends); and attempts to regulate economic life are as old as government itself.

None the less, governments in most countries have had to grapple more obviously in recent times with a new integration of the world economy and, consequently, less freedom in running their own economic affairs. This goes beyond the operation of supranational institutions like the World Bank or International Monetary Fund; it is a function of a long-visible tendency, often now called ‘globalization’, in its latest manifestations. Sometimes institutionalized by international agreement or by the simple economic growth of large companies, but driven by rising expectations everywhere, it is a phenomenon that often dashes the hopes of politicians seeking to direct the societies over which they are expected to preside. Economic and political independence can be hugely infringed by unregulated global financial flows, and even by the operations of great companies, some of which can call on resources far larger than those of many small states. Paradoxically, complaints about the curbing of state independence to which globalization can give rise are sometimes voiced most loudly by those who would urge even more vigorous interference with sovereignty in cases of, for example, the abuse of human rights.

The play of such forces is discernible in the pages that follow. Perhaps they are bringing about some reduction in state power while leaving forms largely intact as power accumulates elsewhere. This is at least more probable than that radical forces will succeed in destroying the state. Such forces exist, and at times they draw strength from and appear to prosper in new causes – ecology, feminism and a generalized anti-nuclear and ‘peace’ movement have all patronized them. But in fifty years of activity they have only been successful when they have been able to influence and shape state policy, bringing changes in the law and the setting up of new institutions. The idea that major amelioration can be achieved by altogether bypassing so dominant an institution still seems as unrealistic as it was in the days of the anarchistic and utopian movements of the nineteenth century.

2 The Cold War World

By 1950, a period had begun during which the central characteristics of the world political order seemed increasingly to be frozen and irremovable, whatever might be going on elsewhere. Then, after a quarter of a century or so, came a quickening of the pace of change, reaching its climax in the 1980s. By 1990, landmarks taken for granted for thirty years and more had disappeared (sometimes almost overnight) while others were already called into question. But this happened after a long time during most of which a prolonged and bitter Soviet–American antagonism overshadowed almost every other part of international life, casting a blight over most of the world, and constituting a source of crime, corruption and suffering for thirty years. The Cold War was far from the only force shaping history, and perhaps not the most fundamental in those years, but it was central to them.

Its first serious struggles took place in Europe, where the initial phase of post-war history was brief and may be thought to have ended with the Communist takeover of government in Czechoslovakia. At that moment, the continent’s economic recovery had hardly begun. But there were some grounds for hope about other, older problems. The familiar German threat had gone away; there was now no menace from her once-great power. Instead, her former opponents now had to grapple with the vacuum of power in the centre of Europe. Further east, boundary changes, ethnic cleansing and wartime atrocity had left Poland and Czechoslovakia without the problems of ethnic heterogeneity they had lived with before 1939. Yet in a new way Europe was divided as never before and that fact was embedded in the worldwide Soviet–American hostility whose exact origins have been and can still be much debated.