Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (135 page)

In a more fundamental sense, the political terrorism of the Seventies was a product of moral relativism. In particular, the unspeakable cruelties it practised were made possible only by the Marxist habit of thinking in terms of classes instead of individuals. Young radical ideologues who kept their victims, usually diplomats or businessmen chosen solely by occupation, chained in tiny, underground concrete dungeons, blindfolded, their ears sealed with wax, for weeks or months, then dispatched them without pity or hesitation, did not see those they tortured and murdered as human beings but as pieces of political furniture. In the process they dehumanized themselves as well as those they destroyed and became lost souls, like the debased creatures Dostoevsky described in his great anti-terrorist novel,
The Devils.

As a threat to the stability of all societies under the rule of law, international terrorism should have been the primary concern of the United Nations. But by the 1970s, the
UN
was a corrupt and demoralized body, and its ill-considered interventions were more inclined to promote violence than to prevent it. Truman’s fatal mistake in allowing executive power to slip towards the General Assembly in 1950, compounded by Eisenhower’s error in 1956, when he allowed Hammarskjóld to hound Britain and France as aggressors, now yielded a bitter and abundant harvest. The
UN
was founded by fifty-one states, the great majority of them democracies. By 1975 there were 144 members, with plans for 165, all but twenty-five of them totalitarian or one-party states, mainly of the Left. The Soviet, Arab—Muslim and African states together constituted a working majority. There was thus no question of taking action against terrorism. On the contrary. As we have already noted, Idi Amin, a terrorist himself and a patron and beneficiary of terrorism, was given a standing ovation in 1975 when he advocated genocide. Yasser Arafat, head of the
PLO
, the world’s largest terrorist organization, was actually given a seat in the Assembly. The
UN
Secretariat had long since ceased to apply the principles of the Charter. The Secretary-General functioned as a mere post-office. Communist members of the Secretariat lived in their national compounds and handed in their hard-currency salary cheques to their embassy finance officers. Their senior member, the Under-Secretary-General for the Security Council, Arkady Shevchenko, had a
KGB
‘minder’ all to himself.
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Broadly speaking, during the 1970s the
UN
majority concentrated on three issues: organizing the destruction of South Africa and Israel, and condemning ‘imperialism’ as personified by America. In 1974, the credentials of South Africa, a founder-member, were rejected, as a substitute for expulsion. At the
UN
meeting of non-aligned states held at Havana, a Soviet satellite capital, in March 1975, a plan was outlined to expel Israel, but dropped when the US threatened to leave the Assembly and discontinue its financial contribution. Instead, the
UN
Third Committee passed an anti-Semitic resolution, condemning Israel as ‘racist’, by 70 votes to 29 with 27 abstentions. The resolution was produced by Cuba, Libya and Somalia, all then Soviet satellites. As the American delegate Leonard Garment pointed out, the resolution was ‘ominous’ because it used ‘racism’ not as the word ‘for a very real and concrete set of injustices but merely as an epithet to be flung at whoever happens to be one’s adversary’. It turned ‘an idea with a vivid and obnoxious meaning’ into ‘nothing more than an ideological tool’.
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Some of the speeches in favour of the motion were openly anti-Semitic and would have evoked roars of applause at Nuremberg. Of the seventy states which voted for it, only eight had the most remote claims to be considered democracies and more than two-thirds of them practised varieties of official racism. In Moscow Andrei Sakharov, who had not yet been arrested, remarked that the resolution ‘can only contribute to anti-Semitic tendencies in many countries by giving them the appearance of international legality’. Even more serious was the fear that the vote might subsequently be used as justification, in morality and international law, for a concerted attempt by Arab states to exterminate the Israeli people, who had founded the state precisely as a refuge from racism and race-murder. The American Ambassador to the
UN
angrily announced, when the General Assembly ratified the vote 67–55: ‘The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by and it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.’
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It was true that the vote was merely on paper. But the real danger of the
UN
was that paper majorities tended to grow into real policies: the corrupt arithmetic of the Assembly, where in the Seventies votes could be bought by arms or even by personal bribes to delegates, tended to become imperceptibly the conventional wisdom of international society.

This was particularly true of the attacks on America, now increasingly isolated and, as the economic crisis of the 1970s deepened, blamed as the source of the world’s ills. It was a striking consequence of
UN
arithmetic that the Arab oil states, whose price-increases added $70 billion a year to their incomes in the year 1974–5, all of it at the
expense of the industrial nations and underdeveloped countries, were never once criticized in any resolution by the Assembly or a
UN
committee. Nor was any attempt made by the
UN
majority to get them to disgorge these excess profits in the form of mandatory aid. The synthetic anger of the
UN
was concentrated wholly on America, one of the chief victims, and by extension to the West as a whole. It is illuminating to trace the genesis of this assault. The original Marxist thesis was that capitalism would collapse. That had not happened. The first fall-back position (Khrushchev’s) was that the ‘socialist bloc’ would overtake the West in living standards. That had not happened either. The second fall-back position, used from the early 1970s onwards, which was sold to the Third World and became the
UN
orthodoxy, was that high Western living standards, far from being the consequence of a more efficient economic system, were the immoral wages of the deliberate and systematic impoverishment of the rest of the world. Thus in 1974 the
UN
adopted a ‘Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States’ which condemned the workings of Western economies. The 1974
UN
World Population Conference was a prolonged attack on US selfishness. The 1974
UN
World Food Conference denounced America and other states, the only ones actually to produce food surpluses. The Indian Food Minister thought it ‘obvious’ they were ‘responsible for the present plight’ of the poor nations, and had a ‘duty’ to help them. Such help was not ‘charity’ but ‘deferred compensation for what has been done to them in the past by the developed nations’. Next February the ‘non-aligned’ countries castigated ‘the obstinacy of the imperialist powers in preserving the structures of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation which nurture their luxurious and superfluous consumer societies while they keep a large part of humanity in misery and hunger.’

The attack was particularly unreasonable since during the previous fourteen years alone (1960–73), official development aid from the advanced nations direct to the poorer countries, or through agencies, amounted to $91.8 billion, the largest voluntary transfer of resources in history.
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Whether the money was effectively used, of course, was another matter. Much of it served merely to keep in power inefficient and tyrannical regimes practising various forms of ‘socialism’, such as Julius Nyerere’s in Tanzania, and so to perpetuate backwardness. The argument that the West was somehow to blame for world poverty was itself a Western invention. Like decolonization, it was a product of guilt, that prime dissolvent of order and justice. It reflected the same tendency to categorize people morally not as individuals but as members of classes which was the fundamental fallacy of Marxism. The nation-structure was analogous to the class-structure. We have already noted the effect of the
‘Third World’ concept on the Bandung generation. Like many clever but misleading ideas, it came from France. In 1952 the demographer Alfred Sauvy had written a famous article, ‘Three Worlds, One Planet’, in which he quoted Sièyes’s famous remarks in 1789: ‘What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.’ The Cold War, he argued, was essentially a struggle between the capitalist world and the Communist world for the Third World. That ‘Third World’, ignored, exploited, despised, like the Third Estate, it too wants to be something.
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Gradually the term ‘Third World’ became one of the great cant phrases of the post-war period.
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It was never defined, for the good and simple reason that, the moment anyone attempted to do so, the concept was seen to be meaningless and collapsed. But it was immensely influential. It satisfied the human longing for simple moral distinctions. There were ‘good’ nations (the poor ones) and ‘bad’ nations (the rich ones). Nations were rich precisely because they were bad, and poor because they were innocent. It became the dynamic of the
UN
General Assembly. It led to the creation of the
UN
Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD
) in 1962, which popularized the fallacy. It inspired the guilt-ridden Pearson Report of 1969, which surveyed the whole aid programme 1950–67 and blamed its failures on the people who had supplied the money.

In due course the term ‘Third World’ began to seem a little threadbare from overuse. The Paris intellectual fashion-factory promptly supplied a new one: ‘North—South’. It was coined in 1974, when the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, called a conference of ‘oil-importing, oil-exporting and non-oil developing nations’. The idea was to link guilt to ‘the North’ and innocence to ‘the South’. This involved a good deal of violence to simple geography, as well as to economic facts. The so-called ‘South’ was represented by Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Cameroon, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, Zaïre and Zambia. The ‘North’ consisted of Canada, the
EEC
powers, Japan, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. Eleven of the ‘South’ states were actually north of the equator, and one of them, Saudi Arabia, had the world’s highest
per capita
income. Australia, the only continent entirely south of the equator, had to be classified as ‘North’, presumably because it was predominantly white and capitalist. The Soviet bloc was omitted altogether, though entirely in the North. In short the concept was meaningless, except for purposes of political abuse. But for this it served very well. It led to an elaborate gathering in Paris in May—June 1977.
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In due course it inspired a document called the Brandt Report (1980), which
like the Pearson Report blamed the West, now termed ‘the North’, and proposed an international system of taxation, under which the North should subsidize the South, on the analogy of national welfare states.
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Inevitably America was presented as the primary villain in the North—South melodrama. It was also the target of another term of Seventies abuse: the ‘multinational’. This too came from France. In 1967 the French publicist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber produced a sensational book,
Le Défi Americain
, drawing attention to expansion of American firms abroad. By the 1980s, he predicted, the ‘third industrial power in the world’ would not be Europe but ‘American investments in Europe’. The ‘multinational’ was ‘the American challenge’ to the world. The notion was eagerly taken up by European intellectuals of the Left, and translated into ‘Third World’ terms, with the multinational, overriding the sovereignty of states, as the spearhead of ‘American imperialism’. At the
UN
General Assembly of April-May 1974, the multinational was held up to global obloquy, almost on a level with South Africa and Israel. Like most intellectual fashions, it was misconceived and already out of date. Multinationals were simply businesses operating in many countries. They dated from the 1900s, when Gillette, Kodak and other firms set up in Europe, and they included banks and oil companies and others whose business was essentially international. They were by far the most cost-efficient means for the export of capital, technology and skills from richer to poorer countries. Equally important, in the post-war period they learnt much faster than governments how to merge into the local landscape and adjust to national prejudices. Studies of American multinationals in Chile and Peru, for instance, showed that their political influence, considerable up to 1939, had long been declining rapidly by the time the term became fashionable.
¹¹⁶
Within America, the power of international companies was more than balanced by labour and ethnic lobbies. The ‘multinational explosion’ was really a phenomenon of the 1950s and early 1960s, and was near its climax when Servan-Schreiber wrote. In 1959 America had 111 or 71 per cent of the world’s largest firms. By 1976, the number had dropped to sixty-eight and the percentage to forty-four. The peak year for US multinationals was 1968, as it was the apogee of the American paramountcy as a whole, when 540 US overseas subsidiaries were established or acquired. By 1974–5, however, the 187 largest American multinationals were breeding only 200 a year.
¹¹⁷
It is true that, over the decade 1967–77, US investment in Europe rose from $16 billion to $55 billion.
¹¹⁸
But Servan-Schreiber’s apocalyptic vision seemed absurd by the mid-1970s, when West German and Japanese firms were expanding
overseas much faster than their American competitors. In 1970 the ten biggest banks were all American. By 1980 only two were, the rest being French (four), German (two), Japanese and British (one each). The Japanese held six places out of the top twenty, and another was held by Brazil.
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All the evidence shows that during the 1970s international economic power was becoming far more widely diffused. Yet the multinational scare was immensely damaging to America, just at the time when its relative influence was declining fast. Far from wielding excessive power, American companies were increasingly discriminated against, ‘I can tell you’, complained an official of Chase Manhattan, ‘that as a US bank in Mexico we get treated like dirt by the Mexican authorities.’
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This was despite the fact that Mexico, together with Brazil, owed $69 billion of floating interest-rate debt, much of it to Chase.
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The artificially created hostility to US multinationals even penetrated back into America itself, where an attempt was made to pass the Foreign Trade and Investment Act (1971), calling for control over export of US capital and technology and heavier taxation of multinational profits. The ensuing struggle was highly damaging to American economic interests.
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