Theodor Adorno, the German philosopher, cultural critic, and sociologist, once said that in psychoanalysis only the exaggerations are true. The same cannot be said for political analysis, as Jean-Francois Revel's book Why Democracies Perish demonstrates. Revel's argument and warning is that the inherent disadvantages of democracy make it "almost inevitable" that totalitarianism will prevail, at least in Europe. It is to ward off this near-inevitability that Revel wrote this book. Revel, a former editor of the Parisian weekly L'Express, has brought to the task of assessing the prospects of the democracies facing the Soviet Union a formidable intellectual arsenal honed in the political and ideological battles of Paris of the post-war period. Although the book contains much common sense about the relations between the Soviet Union and the West, it is too long on assertions assumed to be self-evident. It is too willing to generalize about "democracies" from the experience of Western Europe and the United States in the era making a shift of intellectual and emotional gears from détente to a new era of confrontation in the early 1980s. As a result, the book's pessimism is excessive.
Revel writes in the shadow of the apocalypse, not the apocalypse of nuclear holocaust, but of expanding totalitarianism and the supposed refusal of the Western democracies to grasp the depth of the danger. The central question of the era is, in his view, whether or not "the democracies consent to war to escape slavery, or accept slavery to escape war? Or, worst of all, must they fight a war that will end in their enslavement: What I hope is that they still have the time and the capacity to spare themselves both war and slavery" (p. 349). Yet, in 1983, the same year in which this intellectual call to arms was published, the political leaders of the supposedly decadent, pacifist, and neutralist-leaning peoples of Western Europe faced down the Soviet Union in the great battle of the Euromissiles and deployed cruise and Pershing 2 missiles. Revel appears to have mistaken the political opinions of many journalists, intellectuals, and politicians as representative of the view of the West European establishment and public and thus underestimated the determination of both West European, especially West German, elites and publics to stand up to the Soviet Union.
The West European setting
When one reflects on the number, variety, and severity of the different kinds of problems that the Western democracies faced in the period spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s, it is remarkable that things have worked out as well as they have. The OPEC oil shocks; huge cohorts of young people entering stagnant or declining labor markets in Western Europe; the most severe economic recession of the post-war era; unprecedented levels of unemployment among West European university graduates, particularly among graduates in the humanities and social sciences; the United States reeling from the defeat in Vietnam; and Western European allies, especially West German Social Democrats, hoping that an era of negotiations had replaced an era of confrontation--all of these short-term phenomena made the soberer appraisal of Soviet capabilities and intentions very unappealing. Soviet military power was growing in a period of maximum vulnerability of the societies of Western Europe.
Slowly and haltingly, the leaders of the democracies began to shift gears. Two of the major gear shifters were Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter. Schmidt's speech at the
...
Read Full Article
|
