The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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Books on the twentieth century tend to be either encyclopedias or tracts. I have a certain weakness for the tract approach: it makes for readability, because, as Pirandello said, facts are like sacks, which do not hold up unless you put something into them. If asked to recommend a book on this subject, I always suggest Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, written from — on the whole — the Right, or Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, written from a head-shaking Left. Each is very good on the vices of the other.

I am not a tractarian. This book began life as a history of the entire twentieth century, but I soon realized that the task was too great, not least because the two halves of the century were so different. Churchill and Hitler were old-fashioned figures, looking back to the nineteenth century, but 1945 was, as the Germans called it, Stunde Null, when things started anew. There had been a three-cornered international battle, between Fascism, Communism and what, for want of a more accurate word, we have to call liberalism, i.e. the free-market-democracy world of which the USA became the pre-eminent representative. Fascism lost, and quite soon the other two were fighting the Cold War, which ended fifty years later. ‘Capitalism’ was not in splendid shape, and it lost various tricks in the fifties. Of course, in 1989, it won, and even triumphed: as a Soviet marshal said, the Soviet Union had lost the third world war without firing a shot. However, the triumphalism of 1989 did not really last for very long, and, with financial and other troubles, the world was back, in a sense, to the doubts and compromises that had marked the 1970s.

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