The Story of Everything
Tony Judt
From New York Review of Books
One World Divisible: a Global History since 1945 by David Reynolds.
Twentieth Century : The History of the World, 1901 to 2000 by J.M. Roberts.
Does the world have a history? The question may seem rhetorical - after all, we study the
history of the universe (cosmology) and the history of the earth (geology), so why not the
common history of those who live there? Throughout the recorded past, people have
interacted within and across communities : exchanging, trading, fighting, conquering,
migrating, mingling, and intermixing. The history of any one community or country is
inexplicable without reference to the existence and behavior of other communities and
countries. So rather than subdividing it into the contingent and ephemeral nations, states,
and continents that form the subject matter of conventional history, why not make a
virtue of necessity and treat the history of the world as a whole?
It is a seductive notion, sometimes accompanied by an implicit utopian postulate: we are all
"citizens of the world," or should be, so why not cast our story as a shared experience? a
lot of schools and colleges in the US now offer courses in "World History." In many places
these substitute for histories of states or regions (Europe) whose previous salience in the
curriculum is shunned as the legacy of discredited cultural and political bias. We live in a
"global" (or "globalizing") environment, the argument runs, so the time has come to teach
our present condition.
There are two problems here. The first is obvious: when you try to explain everything, you
run the risk of conveying nothing very much at all. As John Roberts puts it in his history of
the world in the twentieth century, "general explanations are generally unhelpful." In the
old days we studied English history, for example, as though it unfolded in splendid
autonomy. The lives and opinions of the rest of humankind served only as a backdrop to
the national story. Today we risk being so preoccupied in shading in the broader human
experience that we lack the time or inclination to delineate any national story at all. The
gain in breadth is offset by an undifferentiated blandness.
The second difficulty lies in a problem of perspective. History is a story, a story needs a
narrator, and a narrator needs to be standing somewhere.
The view from nowhere
doesn't work. The fulcrum of the narrative need not be a place; it can just as well be a
philosophy of history or a political ideology. That is why the great liberal histories of the
past worked so well, telling a confident tale of human progress centered on the civilization
of Europe. It is also why the best Marxist historians have written such successful general
histories. And it is the reason most history textbooks are so unspeakably boring,
hamstrung by their authors' efforts to tell everyone's story from all possible angles and
to offend no constituency or point of view. The history of the world can be rendered
interesting and convincing from various perspectives (which is not to say that they are all
equally true), but no one history can embrace them all.
Perspective, however, is not just a matter of where you stand - it also depends on what you
are looking at. The history of the world since 1945, for example, makes little sense
without sustained attention to the actions and goals of the United States. For the same
reasons, a resolute refusal to acknowledge the centrality of Europe in international affairs
during the preceding centuries would be simply perverse. Efforts to invert these
priorities and see how the global past looks from, say, Senegal or Sri Lanka serve a useful
purpose in reminding the reader that for every influential imperial who there is usually a
colonized subject whom without which the story is incomplete. And if your purpose is to
tell the story of subject peoples then this inverted perspective is crucial. But it is a
paradox of world history that its very ambitions usually require a focus upon the great
powers - because they were great and they had the power. In undertaking world history
to escape from national narratives, we are in the end forced to privilege some national
stories and achievements over others in order to make sense of the overall picture.
Both books reviewed here engage these difficulties head on, albeit in rather different
ways. It is perhaps not irrelevant that they are both by British historians. The British
have long excelled at large-scale narrative history, for reasons that remain a trifle
obscure - perhaps it is because, as the Frenchman Jean Monnet mischievously asserted in
another context, the British can't understand an idea but are excellent at appreciating
hard facts. The British (or at least the English) also have the advantage that comes with
being a somewhat reduced, middle-sized nation: neither a former colony nor (today) a
colonial power, shorn of global ambition but not quite European, and at peace with their
past - at least when compared to their continental neighbors. This slightly decentered,
offshore condition gives to the best history writing from Britain a dispassionate tone
lacking in much American writing about the recent past, which cannot altogether escape
from the ghosts of cold war conflicts at home and abroad.
There is also a refreshingly opinionated quality to many British general histories, a
willingness to recognize that history writing is an art, not a science, and is most convincing
when it is the undisguised expression of one man's views. John Roberts, especially, is a
master of the deflating observation, the skeptical dissent from right-thinking
historiographical practice. Of the peasants of pre-Revolutionary Russia he writes, "The
overwhelming majority of the tsar's subjects were ignorant and superstitious peasants,
for the most part illiterate." Of the youth culture of the Sixties he observes that "though
attention-catching, (it) was largely froth, the least profound manifestation of a great
change." His approach is nicely illustrated in the introductory remarks on the difference
between our own world and that of a century ago: "People accepted in 1901 more readily
than we always do that a shared humanity should not be trusted very far as a guide to
behaviour, and said so more frequently than we are brave enough to do."
One World Divisible and Twentieth Century have much in common. They are long books
(both about nine hundred pages), unusually well written and remarkably inclusive, when we
consider the ground they cover. Although I prefer Roberts's book I can only admire David
Reynolds's achievement. a historian at Cambridge, he seems to know a lot about almost
everything. "s the notes suggest, he has read across an astonishing range of material: the
source for one paragraph on international seaborne trade in the 1960s is an entire book on
the use of containers in transport. Reynolds can cite with equal ease from a monograph on
the Moroccan political elite, an epidemiological history of England (for data on the social
costs of cigarette smoking), Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, and
Ronald Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously (for a discussion of the political uses of "rights
talk" in the 1990s). The book is suffused with statistical data and examples from across
the globe.
All this material is put to a sustained purpose, the presentation of a thesis about the
history of the world since 1945 as a "dialectical process of greater integration and greater
fragmentation." On the one hand the world has been drawn together - by improved and
cheaper communications, by the growth of speculative and highly mobile private capital
movements, by the steady falling of technical and political barriers to the movement of
good and people. On the other hand these same processes have fueled an equal and
opposite reaction - the emergence of new regionalism in defense against the "gales of
globalization," the invention and reinvention of states and nations since 1945, the rise of
national heritage industries as a "reaffirmation of national culture in the face of
globalization." Moreover, the world is not converging on a single, "American" norm; even the
developed capitalist societies exhibit a protean range of social forms with varying
proportions of public and private ownership and very different attitudes toward both the
market and the state.
Within this overall frame, Reynolds incorporates a multitude of lesser themes. He often
reminds the reader that, for much of the world, the post-1945 era was neither "nuclear"
nor was it shaped by the concerns of the cold war: "It was equally the age of water and
wiring." The prosperity and technical progress of the postwar West were by no means
confined to Europe and the US; rural depopulation, increased output, and growing
consumption have become a universal pattern. But the form change took in other
continents was so different that it is not very helpful to speak of worldwide "technological
revolutions" or even "global society." Some people are entering the Internet age; for
others the goal remains basic electrification; for others, relief of hunger.
Reynolds is impressive in his command of the history of the non-Western world,
particularly the Indian subcontinent and Latin America - a noteworthy achievement for a
historian hitherto best known for his writings on Anglo-American diplomatic relations. By
deemphasizing the universal impact of the cold war and paying close attention to trends
working against globalization at the national and regional level, he has written a truly
general history.. "t the same time he has allowed himself plenty of space for "set pieces":
his descriptions of the Great Leap Forward in China and the Cuban missile crisis, among
many others, are masterpieces of compact narration - as is his brief history of the
computer, another matter in which he has read unusually widely.
He is also very interesting on armies, a subject about which non-specialist historians are
usually woefully underinformed. From Indonesia to Ghana, from Argentina to Greece, from
Pakistan to Poland, the military has played a central role in twentieth-century - and as the
Turkish case suggests, by no means always a reactionary one. The place of the military in
politics is not well caught by the old division of the world into Western or Communist
political models - indeed, the army was often the vehicle by which countries avoided or
postponed both liberal democracy and revolutionary authoritarianism. Bonapartism and its
variants have been among Europe's most successful export commodities.
Both David Reynolds and John Roberts have quite a lot to say about Africa, the most
troubled continent, none of it very reassuring. Reynolds rightly observes that much of
Africa was not really part of the international community for most of his period. This was
not without its advantages. To be sure, international aid to Africa has been negligible. But
until very recently much of the continent was not really exposed to the world economy and
its upheavals. In 1965 the state of Illinois had a Gross Domestic Product greater than the
of the whole African continent, and as late as 1983 the combined debt for all of black
Africa was less than that of Brazil. Just why Africa should be so economically marginal and
politically unstable remains obscure. Colonial mistreatment explains much.
When the
Belgians walked away from the Congo in 1960 they left behind just thirty Congolese
university graduates to fill four thousand senior administrative positions. The British did
better, but they too can hardly be said to have prepared their former subject populations
for a sustainable independent existence, whether by providing adequate schooling or by
encouraging future leaders to take over responsibilities. It is salutary to be reminded
that as recently as 1951 the British foreign secretary, the Labour politician Herbert
Morrison, regarded independence for African colonies as comparable to "giving a child of
ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shotgun" - a sentiment echoed by the Portuguese
dictator Salazar, stating his determination to hang on to Portuguese colonies in Africa and
the Atlantic:
We will not surrender, we will not share ... the smallest part of our
sovereignty .... There are ... backward races whom we feel we have a duty to
lead to civilization.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the newly independent states of most of Africa have fulfilled the
worst expectations of their former masters. Between kleptocratic shell-states and
murderous warlords, they remain an insoluble dilemma for local reformers and
international agencies alike, as recent events in Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda
tragically demonstrate.
Finally, while he twice reminds us that his angle of vision is that of a middle-aged white
male English academic (once would have sufficed), Reynolds is commendably ecumenical. He
never forgets that during the "long peace" between the West and the Soviet bloc half a
million died in Indonesia in 1965 and many more in China, Cambodia, and Bangladesh - not to
mention the 700,000 war dead in Angola and Mozambique, to whom should be added two
million departing refugees and six million internally displaced and dispossessed; or the
many hundreds of thousands killed and the 17 million made refugees at the coming of
Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947. It was not a particularly good half-century for
much of what used to be called the "third world," though things started to improve a little
after the mid-Eighties.
All this and much more makes One World Divisible a mine of useful information on
everything from economics to embryos. If anything, the book seems too well informed.
Each page is stuffed with facts, figures, people, dates, and events and in the end, despite
Reynolds's best efforts, the result is a bit indigestible, resembling an encyclopedia in
narrative form. The effort to capture large processes in a phrase sometimes misfires -thus we are told that "organizations such as Solidarity in Poland or Charter 77 in
Czechoslovakia were the price to be paid for detente and Western loans," something that
is only true in an indirect and trivial sense. The heroic effort to summarize and connect
great mounds of data occasionally leads to overambitious conclusions -- was rock music
really "part of a larger challenge to traditional concepts of classical art and Euro-centric
culture that was spawned by the consumer society"? Tell that to Bill Haley.
Perhaps most frustrating of all is the difficulty one has in distinguishing the forest from
the trees. In a global history on this scale it seems important to keep the reader firmly
apprised of what truly matters, something Reynolds recognizes in his introduction but
sometimes neglects thereafter. Thus the events of 1989, from South Africa to the Baltic,
are fully and carefully described in this book. But they are not connected, and indeed the
structure of the work keeps them well apart, so that someone who didn't already have a
sense of just how dramatic that year was might not acquire it from reading this book.
This, together with a rather limp ending, undermines Reynolds's efforts. In the end you
learn a bit less from this book than you had hoped.
That is not a criticism one could make of Twentieth Century. The book is not J.M.
Roberts's first attempt at the subject, of course, and readers of his previous books may
recognize much of the material. But the result is an elegant and reassuringly magisterial
book, just a trifle old-fashioned: the Rolls Royce of modern world histories. Roberts
doesn't have a thesis, though he does have themes, and he never uses five examples where
one will serve. By starting in 1901 rather than 1945 he can take advantage of a greater
span of time over which to illustrate the scale of change wrought in our era. Indeed, the
case against anachronism is clearly stated : "Any history of the twentieth century must
begin in a world deeply unlike our own."
Fully one quarter of Roberts's book is devoted to mapping out the world as it was and
appeared before 1914, an investment in thick historical description that pays off
handsomely. We never forget thereafter what sort of a world it was we have lost, and
even when we are deep into the events of our own age the long view is ever present. "s
Roberts notes, "It is something of an irony that, as the twentieth century drew to its end,
[the] powers should have been so interested in a matter already familiar to those same
statesmen of 1901 -- the always intractable legacy of the Ottoman Succession." This is not
in itself an original observation -- we have been reminded ad nauseam that our century
began and ended in Sarajevo. But Roberts has in mind not just Yugoslavia but the Black
Sea region, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East, an altogether more suggestive
perspective on recent international crises.
Although the author is himself unobtrusive, his book is very clearly positioned. It is quite
optimistic : Roberts is not afraid to remind us that there has been in our time (i.e., since
1950) "an unprecedented and revolutionary growth in the world's wealth" and that this is a
good thing; though he also concedes that much of that growth, in Europe at least, did little
more than get the European economies back to where they were in 1913, before the no less
unprecedented disasters of the ensuing three decades.
And despite -- or perhaps
because of -- his well-informed sensitivity to the history of other places, Roberts writes
from an unambiguously European point of view.
His grounds for doing so are not in the least autobiographical, and they are quite
convincing:
Willingly and unwittingly, Europeans had forced the rest of humanity out of
self-absorption and towards participation for the first time in a world
history. The history of the twentieth century has therefore to be
approached with (What is sometimes deplored) a "Euro-centric" stance. In
many ways the world actually was centered on Europe when the twentieth
century began. Much of that century's story is of how and why that ceased
to be true before it ended.
In recent years Europe has been an importer of labor and rather introverted in its
concerns, but that wasn't always so. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Europe exported ideas and people alike : in 1931 alone one and a half million men, women,
and children emigrated from Europe, most of them Italian, Spanish, and British. Before
that many millions of Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Greeks, Poles, Jews, and others
fanned out across the world. In their wake traveled concepts and categories of all kinds,
some of which would come back to haunt the European powers in later decades.
As the rest of the world was thereby Europeanized, often against its will, so Europe lost
its confidence. And the story of European expansion and the struggles against it thus gave
way to an apparently random sequence of events. The cold war provided an interim
organizing principle -- the history of the world seemingly reduced to a struggle between
competing and incompatible political systems. But that, too, is now behind us. This is one
reason why the recent history of the world is often hard to grasp; if you don't happen to
believe in revolutionary theorems or conspiracy theories, then the significance of
contemporary history can prove elusive.
"Modernization," "Americanization," or
"globalization" are at best descriptions (and as David Reynolds suggests, not very good
ones); they don't explain anything.
John Roberts's solution to the challenge of telling the history of the world during and
after the displacement of Europe is in some ways the opposite of that adopted by
Reynolds. He avoids ambitious generalizations and offers a restrained, reasonable man's
view of the main strands of international history, compensating in wit and common sense
for what he lacks in detail and narrative density. The result is a book which is all the more
convincing for its restraint -- you may not learn as much as you do from reading A Global
History, but at the end you perhaps understand it better.
The tone of Roberts's work is well captured in his tart observations on the nature of
nations and nationalism, about which it is always possible to say too much. Like Reynolds he
writes against the grain of contemporary "post-national" history writing, which as
practiced in the US consists in a projection of domestic "multiculturalism" onto the rest of
humanity and a consequent denial of the reality of other people's national histories. But
Roberts's account of what nations actually are and why they come into being is sensibly
minimalist:
As self-recognition was the essence of the matter, such argument was
(Though often lengthy) almost always finally irrelevant: the fact was usually
established by circumstance ....
Broadly speaking, nations were
rediscovered and celebrated by intellectuals, poets, linguistic scholars and
historians, and even occasionally invented by them, before being brought to
birth and exploited by bandits, agitators and politicians.
But then they exist, and you have to take them seriously.
Roberts's generally optimistic view of the twentieth century will not be to everyone's
taste. Thus he is very clear on what was at stake in World War II, but in the end is more
disposed to celebrate the fact that the war was fought and won then to dwell on what took
place during it. There is also a hint of past tales of progress and improvement in his
concluding thoughts: "There are no grounds for believing that solutions to new problems
will not in due course appear. "t present the evidence remains overwhelming that human
manipulative power has so far brought more good than harm to most human beings." This
sanguine perspective doesn't stop him from noting the yawning gulf separating the rich and
the poor today: life expectancy at birth in Ethiopia is not much more than half that of
someone born in the US or northwest Europe, and AIDS has reduced life expectancy in
Botswana from sixty-one years to just forty-seven years in the course of the past decade.
But on the whole eco-pessimism and fin de siecle doubts get short shrift in Roberts's
book.
On the cold war, Roberts differs significantly from Reynolds. They share a sense that the
global rivalry of the two great powers should not be allowed to distort or foreshorten our
grasp of the larger picture (over time and space alike); but for Roberts the "long peace"
cannot be so readily dismissed as illusory. Many of those who have died violently since
1945 (Reynolds puts the figure at 18 million) have been victims of their own governments,
in East Asia above all. When the great powers go to war, as in 1914 and 1939, the scale of
suffering and destruction is much greater still. There have been no general wars for half
a century, and whatever progress has been achieved in that time -- in economic prosperity,
in international cooperation, and in collective well-being -- is largely owing to this sustained
era of peace.
If Roberts is able to make this point so convincingly, it is precisely because of his emphasis
upon states and powers. His book is not in the least a "diplomatic" history of the world,
but it does pay attention to the concerns and influence of men in government and the
resources they control. His grounds for taking high politics seriously are as valid for us
today as they were in 1901 : "What diplomats do is not always important but the complex
interests they are meant to defend and represent always are." For what are probably
related reasons he is gently skeptical of the capacities and achievements of international
agencies and transnational networks advocating such causes as ecology and human rights in
what is still a world of states. Of the latter he writes, "In forty years of activity such
causes have only been successful when they have been able to influence and shape state
policy itself."
This sustained interest in the role and capacities of states is common to both books
reviewed here, and for advocates of "global history" it should give pause. We live in a
world of states. This is generally a good thing, from the point of view of their citizens;
and not just citizens -- even subjects gain something from living in a regulated public
sphere where violence is a monopoly of the ruler. The collapse of the state -- in war,
under occupation, in civil war -- is a terrible thing, because with it go the fragile civilities,
rules, and conventions that govern and restrain collective human behavior. To be
"stateless" is to be helpless, vulnerable. But the state is not disappearing; and where
people fear that it might do so, they quickly resort to forming sub-state communities -defined by territory, language, or history -- in order to limit their exposure to the
unknown. The illusion that we live in a post-national or post-state world comes from paying
altogether too much attention to economic processes (or, more precisely, capital flows) and
inferring analogously transnational processes at work in every other sphere of human life.
On the other hand, there truly is today an international community in a way that is perhaps
unprecedented. International law is taking shape, even if our capacity to enforce it
remains negligible (thanks in large measure to countervailing laws and habits that protect
the sovereignty of states). a few people in most countries of the world live in a truly
transnational environment, by virtue of their education, their skills, and their access to
information. There is very little that even the most retrograde states can do about this,
just as the most advanced states can no longer control their economic policies in ways that
seemed natural and necessary just twenty years ago. The result is that the condition of
the social world has come to resemble that of its physical counterpart: look at it through
the lens of "globalism" and all you see is transnational waves; think in terms of power and
its application and you will observe little but state-particles.
The difficulty of seeing both at once is a reminder that contemporary "world history" has
a frustratingly uncertain quality to it. This is not just because we don't know where it is
going, but because the "it" in question is inherently unstable. Of what is "world history" in
our time a story? Prosperity? Freedom? Revolution? Oppression? Evil? The rise of nationstates? The fall of nation-states? Globalization? Its discontents? All of the above,
presumably, and much else besides. But it just isn't possible to tell the story of
everything. David Reynolds and John Roberts are master historians, and they come as
close as one could reasonably hope to encompassing recent human experience in a single
narrative: Reynolds tells you more of what happened, Roberts gives a better sense of what
changed.
But as they would be the first to concede, they miss much, whether by design or neglect;
in Roberts's words, a history of the contemporary world is "ultimately unattainable."
World history, like world government, is a self-undermining project, shackled by the
burden of expectations that it raises. Historians are neither cosmologists nor geologists,
and a single, satisfying account of the world continues to elude us and probably always will.
We shall have to settle for less.