The Penguin History of the World

Comfort could be drawn by enthusiasts from further progress in integration. In 1979 the first direct elections to the European parliament were already being held. Greece in 1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986, were soon to join the Community. In 1987 the foundations of a common European currency and monetary system were drawn up (although the United Kingdom did not agree) and it was settled that 1992 should be the year which would see the inauguration of a genuine single market, across whose national borders goods, people, capital and services were to move freely. Members even endorsed in principle the idea of European political union, although the British and French had notable misgivings. This by no means made at once for greater psychological cohesion and comfort as the implications of such a union emerged, but it was an indisputable sign of development of some sort.

In the years since the Treaty of Rome, western Europe had come a very long way, further, perhaps, than was always grasped by men and women born and grown to maturity under it. Underlying the institutional changes, too, were slowly growing similarities – in politics, social structure, consumption habits and beliefs about values and goals. Even the old disparities of economic structure had greatly diminished, as the decline in numbers and increase in prosperity of French and German farmers showed. On the other hand, new problems had presented themselves as poorer and perhaps politically less stable countries had joined the EC. That there had been huge convergences could not be contested. What was still unclear was what this might imply for the future.

In December 1975 Gerald Ford became the second American president to visit China. The adjustment of his country’s deep-seated distrust and hostility towards the People’s Republic had begun with the slow recognition of the lessons of Vietnam. On the Chinese side, change was a part of an even greater development: China’s resumption of an international and regional role appropriate to her historic stature and potential. Mao’s revolution had made China more integrated than ever before, and made significant improvements in health and education. But its economic development had been chaotic, and it had not lifted the Chinese people out of poverty. By the mid-1970s many Chinese leaders were looking for ways of breaking out of Mao’s endless political campaigns to focus on making the country strong and its people rich.

Mao died in September 1976. The threat of the ascendancy of a ‘gang of four’ of his coadjutors (one was his widow), who had promoted the policies of the Cultural Revolution, was quickly averted by their arrest (and, eventually, trial and condemnation in 1981). Under a new leadership dominated by party veterans, it soon became clear that the excesses of the Cultural Revolution were to be corrected. In 1977 there rejoined the government as a vice-premier the twice-previously disgraced Deng Xiaoping, firmly associated with the contrary trend (his son had been crippled by beatings from Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution). The most important change, though, was that China’s long-awaited economic recovery was at last attainable. Scope was now to be given to individual enterprise and the profit motive, and economic links with non-Communist countries were to be encouraged. The aim was to resume the process of technological and industrial modernization.

The major definition of the new course was undertaken in 1981 at the plenary session of the central committee of the party that met that year. It undertook, too, the delicate task of distinguishing the positive achievements of Mao, a ‘great proletarian revolutionary’, from what it now identified as his ‘gross mistakes’ and his responsibility for the setbacks of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. For all the comings and goings in the CCP leadership and the mysterious debates and sloganizing which continued to obscure political realities, and although Deng Xiaoping and his associates had to work through a collective leadership that included conservatives, the 1980s were to be shaped by a new current. Modernization had at last been given precedence over Marxist socialism, even if that could hardly be said aloud (when the secretary-general of the party pronounced in 1986 the incautious and amazing judgment that ‘Marx and Lenin cannot solve our problems’, he was soon dismissed).