| 1 | 1 | | That history is apt to repeat itself is a powerful superstition. Without a horizon to fix |
| 2 | | upon, eyes and minds turn to the past for guidance. This seems to be the condition of our |
| 3 | | fin de siècle. The twentieth century draws towards its close with no great project in hand; |
| 4 | | history is not at an end but historicism, hopefully, is; with messianic communism a lost |
| 5 | | cause, no destination for mankind is in sight. |
| 2 | 6 | | The idea of progress was a casualty of the last fin de siècle. The crisis in belief that |
| 7 | | accompanied the turn of our own century meant that, as Eric Hobsbawm has written, 'The |
| 8 | | only ideology of serious calibre which remained firmly committed to the nineteenth- |
| 9 | | century belief in science, reason and progress was Marxism, which was unaffected by |
| 10 | | disillusion about the present because it looked forward to the future triumph of precisely |
| 11 | | those "masses" whose rise created so much uneasiness among middle-class thinkers.' |
| 3 | 12 | | The fin de siècle state of mind is characterised by a sense of decadence, lost values |
| 13 | | and threatened or shattered hopes, which by creating an ideological vacuum make fertile |
| 14 | | ground for irrationalism. That is plainly the condition of the former Communist world in |
| 15 | | its moral ruin - but also, though to a lesser extent, the state of mind gaining hold in the |
| 16 | | United States and Western Europe. |
| 4 | 17 | | In this atmosphere the past can easily masquerade as the future. The fear of a |
| 18 | | resurgence of virulent nationalism is an example. The disintegration of the Communist and |
| 19 | | old Russian empires is seen as an event comparable to the collapse of the Austro- |
| 20 | | Hungarian empire in 1918. Comparable it may be, but that does not mean it will have the |
| 21 | | same results. Nor is it instructive to equate the Europe reborn in 1989 with the Europe |
| 22 | | created by the Treaty of Versailles, thereby suggesting that the history of the inter-war |
| 23 | | years will in some way repeat itself. |
| 5 | 24 | | Some resurgence of suppressed ethnic nationalism undoubtedly there is, but what |
| 25 | | was the tide of history in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century today flows |
| 26 | | against the tide. Rather, the trend is towards large states accommodating regional and |
| 27 | | ethnic diversity. The released ethnic tensions in Eastern Europe, for the most part, do not |
| 28 | | take the form of territorial disputes as they did after Versailles. Hitler and Stalin between |
| 29 | | them did a ruthless tidying-up job. Almost everywhere, ethnic minorities are much smaller |
| 30 | | than they were. Yugoslavia is the exception, not the rule; a reminder of what Europe was |
| 31 | | and not a prototype for the future. |
| 6 | 32 | | The centripetal forces of economie interdependence are generally stronger than the |
| 33 | | centrifugal forces of ethnic self-deterrnination. The rediscovery of cultural identity |
| 34 | | competes with the spread of universal culture through media and information |
| 35 | | technologies. These played a powerful part in undermining authoritarian regimes and will |
| 36 | | continue to work towards open societies with market-based economies. The revolutions of |
| 37 | | 1989 were at the same time nationalist and anti-Communist; a purpose of independence |
| 38 | | was the freedom to seek admission to the Western system of interdependence. |
| 7 | 39 | | The same may apply, hopefully, to those components of the former Soviet Union |
| 40 | | that can reasonably aspire to eventual integration with Europe, notably Ukraine. Russia |
| 41 | | itself may be a rather different case: a far-flung multi-ethnic empire in itself, whose only |
| 42 | | history to repeat is one of autocracy inimical to individual enterprise. On that we had |
| 43 | | better reserve judgement. |
| 8 | 44 | | In the case of the United States it seems as unlikely as with Europe that the dismal |
| 45 | | history of the inter-war period will prove a guide to the future. Isolationism and |
| 46 | | protectionism were among the responses to the First World War and the great depression |
| 47 | | that ensued, and today those instincts are evident again. But the US is no longer a self- |
| 48 | | sufficient continental economy: it trades 30 per cent of its agriculture and 20 per cent of its |
| 49 | | manufactures overseas. Nor is it any longer the New World haven, disentangled from |
| 50 | | European conflicts; it is a much vaster multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society which |
| 51 | | continues to absorb massive migrations from all around the world. |
| 9 | 52 | | It may be an aspect of the fin de siècle condition to discover that in our ideological |
| 53 | | vacuum there is no refuge to be found in the past - and not much danger, therefore, of |
| 54 | | history repeating itself in the manners feared. Rather, we have to map new futures as we |
| 55 | | go, without the aid of transcendental visions. In the process, perhaps, we may free |
| 56 | | ourselves from the delusion that human progress is to be measured by centennials |
| 57 | |
preceded by onslaughts of fin de siècle despondency. |
| | | |
| | | Peter Jenkins in 'The Independent', February 18, 1992 |
