The Atlantic and its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War by
Norman Stone Norman Stone has produced a lively and idiosyncratic
account of the cold war that is none the worse for an occasional
tendency to ramble, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The Observer,
Sunday 16 May 2010
1957: tanks rumble across Moscow’s Red Square to mark the 40th
anniversary of the Communist rule in Russia. Photograph: ©
Bettmann/Corbis
Who won the cold war, and how, and why? The obvious answer to the
first question is that the west won, the United States and its western
European allies. But this wasn’t a victory for armed force like the
preceding defeat of Germany and Japan. Nato was arguably the most
successful military alliance there has ever been; and yet when the
Soviet Union imploded 20 years ago it still possessed a full nuclear
arsenal and, unlike the German army in the woefully misleading phrase
nationalists used after 1918, the red army really was "undefeated on
the battlefield", at least in the west.
The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War by
Norman Stone 712pp, Allen Lane, £30.00 Buy The Atlantic and Its
Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War at the Guardian bookshop
In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published The End of History. Although it
wasn’t a stupid book, the title was hubristic even at the time and, as
Norman Stone says in The Atlantic and Its Enemies, "even funnier
afterwards". Any idea that liberal democracy and market capitalism had
swept away competitors would seem painfully presumptuous as the new
century opened amid a wave of nationalist and sectarian violence.
Never mind who won, what went wrong?
And how did it begin? When the greatest and most terrible of wars
ended 65 years ago, only one of the victorious powers had fought from
start to end, and, not surprisingly, was exhausted. The cold war thus
began what Stone calls "the war of the British succession" between the
Americans and the Russians.
In Churchill’s phrase, an iron curtain descended across Europe as
Russia took over one country after another by force or fraud, and the
process was, as Stone says, very ugly indeed. He knows central Europe
better than most historians, and has no sympathy with the
"revisionist" claim that the west started the conflict, or that both
sides were equally to blame.
With bewildering rapidity, the communist absorption of eastern Europe
was followed by Mao’s triumph in China, the explosion of a Russian
atomic bomb, the creation of Nato, and the Korean war, a warning that
cold war could quickly turn hot. Stalin died in March 1953, but a year
before he had proposed a reunited but neutralised Germany. Those Stone
inelegantly calls "anti-cold war historians" have adduced this as
evidence that Stalin sincerely wanted peace, a view that Stone
(presumably pro-Cold War) derides. But there is a difference between
the internal character of a regime, however loathsome, and its
legitimate national interests, and Stalin might just have meant it.
Although no real war troubled Europe during the four decades or more
of the cold war, that certainly didn’t mean the world was at peace. In
one of the predictions in Nineteen Eighty-Four that he hasn’t been
given proper credit for, Orwell said the superpowers would avoid
direct confrontation while waging proxy wars in African and Asia, and
this was what happened. But neither the Americans nor the Russians
understood what they were doing in those distant climes, where what
had begun as a conflict between communism and liberal democracy became
far more complex when national and religious passions were ascendant.
We then return home to "the British disease", where Stone not so much
flies as flaunts his colours as one who thinks the Iron Lady rescued
us from the abyss. British economic and industrial decline was indeed
an historical fact, and there’s no denying the grave condition in
which the country found itself in 1979, although Stone as so often
paints with a broad brush: "The country was about one third as well
off as Germany, and in parts of the north there were areas that even
resembled communist Poland." Some of his other statements are not so
much sweeping as highly dubious (can it really be true that the Ford
motor factory at Dearborn had an annual workforce turnover of 900%?).
At any rate, after a lengthy discursion on Chile we return to Europe
and the history which didn’t end after all.
All of this is told in a lively or even rollicking fashion, and the
word "personal" in Stone’s subtitle is an understatement;
idiosyncratic or downright eccentric might be more like it. The author
is one of the great academic characters of our time. Born and bred in
Glasgow, he was educated at Cambridge and taught there after various
adventures in central Europe which he describes here, including a
stretch in a Slovak prison.
Some contemporary historians have achieved not only fame but literary
immortality. The paradox-mongering hackademic in Alan Bennett’s The
History Boys sounds very much like Niall Ferguson, and readers of
Robert Harris’s Archangel have suspected that the bibulous historian
"Fluke" Kelso (who inspires the best fictional description of a
hangover since Lucky Jim) has more than a hint of Norman Stone.
>From 1984 to 1997 Stone was a professor at Oxford in succession to
Richard Cobb (no Perrier addict himself), and there was something
heroic about his sojourn there. To have neglected his duties and shown
open disdain for his colleagues, while continuing to refresh himself,
would have made him unpopular enough among the bleating dons, but to
have been an "out Thatcherite" as well showed pluck beyond the call of
duty.
Anyone who thought Fluke, I mean Stone, would one day mellow was
mistaken. After Oxford he took himself off to Ankara, from where he
has tried to persuade us that, even if the Armenians didn’t quite have
it coming in 1915, there was no "genocide". However that may be, Stone
writes informatively about the country where he now resides.
He may not realise it, but no one who reads these pages can possibly
think that Turkey will join the European Union in any foreseeable
future, even were the Cyprus dispute to be resolved. Here again, Stone
takes an unfashionable line, if not defending, then not condemning the
Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974. Its consequences were
brutal, and the subsequent partition may well be permanent, but when
the Turkish-Cypriot leader Rauf Dentkas said that his people had
thereby avoided the fate of the Gaza Palestinians, he might have had a
point.
Having made his name 35 years ago with a scholarly and fascinating
study of the eastern front in the great war, Stone wrote a readable
general history of Europe from 1878 to 1919, to which this is a kind
of delayed coda. Most of what Stone has written is worth reading, and
The Atlantic and Its Enemies displays its author’s merits, as well as
his faults. I was reminded of what Isaiah Berlin said of his friend
Lewis Namier: according as whether one was or was not interested in
the subject on which he was discoursing, he could be the most
interesting man alive or the most boring. Some of these pages are
repetitious, or rambling, or simply unstoppable, and on occasion one
has the feeling of being trapped in the bar by the club raconteur.
Then again there are many very vivid passages, and Stone in his
anecdotage can be good fun, even if some of his turns of phrase –
"Khrushchev was not the only Communist leader to be showing off: Mao
had his own remarks to pass" … "Progress happened" … "a terrible
cocktail, superbly written up" – are so colloquial as to be obscure.
And Stone is welcome to tweak lefty noses, but when he says of the
Vietnam war that "Johnson was very anxious to spare civilians," one
must add that, in that case, he was not anxious to much effect.
When the fall of communism comes, Stone’s knowledge of eastern Europe
is once again invaluable, although he rubs in the fact that few in the
west foresaw that fall, even confessing his own error. There is a nice
line from the late Philip Windsor, the international relations scholar
at the LSE, who said that it was "the end of an empire" – not the
Soviet one, but political science. But then amid the triumphalist
crowing on the right 20 years ago nor did many foresee what Russia
would be like today, or the longer consequences of the
American-sponsored resistance to the Russian war in Afghanistan, or
where financial deregulation and the cheap-mortgage boom would lead
the west, or what the new revolt of Islam portended.
No, there is only one generalisation about history to be made with
absolute confidence: you never can tell.