116 | Dan Snow
We talk with the host of Dan Snow's History Hit, the no. 1 history podcast, about some of our favourite subjects. Does history help us understand the present state of politics, and which history? Are we closer to the 1890s, the 1930s, or the 1980s? How should we commemorate the aftermath of WWI? Plus we talk about whether Chinese politicians are really able to take the long view. With Helen Thompson.
DAVID: Hello, my name is David Runciman, and this is Talking Politics. Today we have a podcast mash up. We're joined by the broadcaster and writer Dan Snow, who also hosts the number one history podcast – Dan Snow’s History Hit – and we're going to discuss something we love talking about on Talking Politics: can history explain the current state of politics, and if so – which history?
DAVID: Helen Thompson is with us as well today. Helen and I talk about this quite a lot, on and off this podcast, so we have, I think, views about which bit of history we should be drawing on – and we'll try and cover quite a lot of history if we can. Dan – you said in your podcast you have every type of historian and most of them, I think it's fair to say, just love history – so they're not coming on to explain Trump, they're coming on because they want to talk about medieval kings or whatever.
But there is a strand – and it's not just on your podcast obviously – there is a strand in contemporary history which is the kind of “warnings from history” genre, particularly people who study the first half of the 20th century and they want to say there are obvious parallels, whether it's with Trump or with European populism, maybe what's happening in Hungary or Poland. They hear these kind of dark echoes, and I guess the claim is that if we missed them there's a risk that history at some level will repeat. Do you buy it?
DAN:
Yes I'm afraid I do.
DAVID:
You’re a “warnings from history” guy.
DAN:
I’m all about warnings from history: I spent the 90s listening… two things. One is that history would finish, and there was nothing you could learn from it, because of computers, and because of Francis Fukuyama, and history was finished and that was great, liberal democracy had won, and even Russia was democracy and China was sort of joining the WTO and it was all fine. We all remember that.
And then there was a second strand though that which usually right-wing military historians spending all their time going… “I mean the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” and all that sort of stuff and you know we've got to be absolutely on this, because remember the Holocaust, and now that the dog is barking, and now that you got Orbán in Hungary and you've got Poland and you've got Russia, you've got Erdoğan, you've got Trump: suddenly I don’t hear those guys and I was like “what about the eternal vigilance, guys? what’s going on there?”
And historians now seem to have broken two ways: either people saying: “Yep, alarm bells ringing, this is it, it’s no longer a drill, I know it sounds a bit dramatic but this is it. This is what we've all been waiting for. This is why we’ve been teaching kids in school almost nothing but Nazis and stuff,”
DAVID:
Which is true, we have -
DAN:
But this is why we've done it, because we wanted them to know what it feels like when democracy can decay into dictatorships. And all those people in 90s that talked about “eternal vigilance” are all gone guiet, and they’re saying “oh, don't worry, it's not the same.” Looking back I suspect it's because they were right-leaning and they assumed that the threat to liberal democracy was going to come from communism, and from this enormous exponential challenge of the Soviet Union, and now that it seems to be coming from right and left, but it seems to be right wing populism, is that those guys don't seem that worried any more and I find that very odd.
So in my experience of the podcast, and talking on and off to historians, there are people who are just floating on, talking about the Tudors, and there are other people who as I say are mobilising and I can see Sarah Churchill's wonderful book, Behold America – Tim Snyder, Cass Sunstein about impeachment, I'm afraid I share their views – and I share their views because as I say when I was growing up I was being told the whole time that it's a republic if you can keep it - the Ben Franklin line - and now we need to keep it. If we allow the erosion of objective fact, of our political discourse, of the dodgy money that's flowing in out of politics on both sides, then we’ve got a really serious problem.
DAVID:
I'm skeptical. Helen can come in in a second. We love talking about history and we love doing the historical comparisons – the thing that makes me nervous about that particular “echoes of the first half of the 20th century” is the crying wolf bit. There is a danger that we're looking for it to kind of break in a way that suddenly “Yeah we're doing it again” and it won't. And though we hear the echoes, the differences are much more profound.
I think one way to look at this is: we look back to say the 1930s and we think about “oh yes we recognise ourselves in them” but what would they think of us? If you took someone from the 1930s and showed them our world, and I think they would recognise some of the politics, they would hear the anti-Semitism, the racism, the conspiracy theories and all of that, and they would recognise the political institutions – they would go “yeah, it's like, the same – you've got the House of Lords, you know, the parties are the Tories, the Conservatives, you've got the same electoral system, the House of Commons looks the same, but everything else has changed – these societies are just completely different.” They would be blown away by how rich we are, how elderly we are, how healthy we are, you know we’re doing that kind of rhetoric-to-rhetoric comparison or institution-to-institution. And we miss that these are just completely different worlds, so though the echoes are there, I think waiting for it to kind of break all the way through – it won’t, and there is a risk in that which is that while we're waiting for Trump to turn into a Hitler he doesn't because it’s Trump’s world.
DAN:
But what's the harm in raising the alarm, talking about those echoes? I think you're absolutely right, there are enormous differences, history isn't repeating itself – but I don’t see the downside of saying “this is it guys. Democracy is under threat in the US: you've got massive voter suppression, you have got “othering”, as you've mentioned, the assault on the free press is very, very important, and is straight out of Muss- I mean, I don’t want to be derivative but the rise of Mussolini is so remarkable in the 20s. The fact that Trump apes his body language, his mannerisms, his rhetoric, is so remarkable, and of course attacking the press, which Madison of course believed was almost a fourth branch of government – this idea of a free press. And if you look at the damage done to the Trump White House it has come not from the coequal branch of governments which is Congress, it's come from the New York Times and The Washington Post and it's completely remarkable.
HELEN:
I think the danger though of making the danger, if you like, the 1930s, is that we make democracy into a form of government that is usually not prone to these dangers – that somehow it needs the exceptional threat that somebody like Hitler and Mussolini posed to democracy for it to have the problems that we now see. And I just I don't think that it does. I think that democracy is actually rather more prone to crisis or at least prone to severe corruption than we came accustomed to thinking, particularly going back to your decade of the 1990s, it seems to me in the 90s is a decade of allusions when all kinds of strange ideas take hold.
DAVID:
Which just happens to be when you were a student -
DAN
That’s the problem!
HELEN:
So we've gone back to something that's actually much more like normal politics over a long historical period of time, and then the only frame that people have got for explaining what's going on is “oh, it’s the 1930s” - where actually one of the things it seems to me most strikingly different between this politics and the 1930s, including when you look at Trump, is the absence of private armies of paramilitary violence. And that is just not there in anything that we're seeing at the moment. I'm not saying it couldn't be there, but we aren't seeing anything that at the moment is the equivalent of Hitler or Mussolini mobilising paramilitary men to take power.
DAVID:
And to take that analogy – to take someone from the 1930s and show them our world and these would look like paper tigers, in some sense, to them because it would be all talk.
DAN:
I of course, luckily agree with you – I think the huge thing that’s different is we have one thing that Hitler did that is useful –
DAVID:
- if that’s the word –
DAN:
- he absolutely delegitimized formal empire, formal annexation of other people's territory, and I think if you look at Mussolini and Russia – physical expansion of a state is something that today, no one is even… I mean that's what's so extraordinary about the takeover of the Crimea by Putin, and even that, there was a historical precedent – had Putin marched and conquered Eastern Ukraine, that would have been absolutely paradigm-shiftingly disturbing, and I think that's an important element that's missing, thank goodness, is that none of these people – Orban – is not talking about annexations – greater Hungary, for example.
But at the same time – this is possibly a metaphor too far – but I do find that online, the Cybernats, Trump fans on Twitter, Brexit fans on Twitter, and of course the non-paramilitary beating of people on the street – my willingness to speak out has been curtailed by online abuse. I probably shouldn’t admit this, because I always pretend it doesn’t, so I hope no-one’s listening. And, for example, I am really not claiming to be very important, but I get asked on Question Time a lot, and in the old days you go on, and you have the lovely position of self delusion, and think you are rather brilliant, articulate, and you ask your mum after and she says “yeah, you were great.” Now of course you are immediately told by 5000 people what a complete idiot you are. And actually, I think, I don’t need that. My mental health probably doesn't need that any more. Now – is that a very very small example of of suppression of opposition – of people articulating views which are in opposition to those of, you know Trump or Brexit.
DAVID:
It really is a form of violence as well, we shouldn’t think that – sticks and stones violence, there’s name calling violence, and they’re completely different. You can coerce people in this way. I take your point, and I think it is chilling, and it has a chilling effect. And yet it's so hard to kind of believe it will play out in the same way, so that yes we're in a space where things are happening that clearly parallel things that have happened in the darkest points in 20th century history – including the moment when democracy looked like it was about to collapse. But when I look forward, I don’t see that history kind of gives us a sense of what's coming next. This feels new to me.
HELEN:
Also going on the question of – like – the abusive language in which politics is conducted, if you go back to 1790s America, including the attacks on the press and the Alien and Sedition Acts – this is completely there. This is the beginning of what we would think of as modern Republican politics – and it’s absolutely vicious.
DAVID: The John Adams Thomas Jefferson election is still the dirtiest election in American history, notwithstanding Trump vs. Clinton.
DAN:
Absolutely.
HELEN:
And so we need to think “Okay, where does this come from in Democratic politics – and if we get too hung up on the 1930s we think it comes in Democratic politics when whatever we want to identify the danger of the 1930s – let's call it populism, racist populism for shorthand – we say okay. The problem arises with free speech and democratic politics when we see that. But actually the problem of free speech arises in Democratic politics an awful lot of the time.
DAN:
Also look at the Kennedy brothers alone in the Midwest, in smoke filled rooms. As you point out, American democracy is appalling as British democracy – I used the term very reluctantly because as we know, First Past the Post produces the most extraordinary results – so I totally take your point but I do think if Trump was not so hobbled by his personal indiscipline, and if he hadn't immediately passed the one significant bit of legislation as part of a giant tax cut for billionaires, he would be well on the way to fundamentally eroding American democracy. I think if he was like Orban in Hungary he’d have immediately done the infrastructure – if you’d got Medicare for all – he could have gone in and just smashed through Medicare for all, that would have been brilliant!
At the same time, starting a trade war and doing all the liberal things that you could've done – and actually he’s holed himself below the waterline, and for those who oppose him, thank goodness.
DAVID:
I want to offer a couple of other decades to get away from the 1930s comparison – one more recent and one more distant – the more distant one is the 1890s which struck me for a while as being the closest to now, because that was the populist decade and populism is not fascism, I don't think, not least because of the paramilitary aspect, but also because Populists don't come to destroy democracy, they come to rescue it, to save it.
But the 1890s were also the great age of conspiracy theories, the great age of anti-expert politics, it was it was the time where if you were a banker, you were by definition lying, for a Democrat. That elites had captured Washington, elites had captured the City of London, they’d captured British politics, the Dreyfus affair. That to me is much closer in a way to our world and yet we don’t see that connection because all the big events of the 20th century stand between us and them. But actually I think if we’re rerunning a period of politics, it's the end of the 19th century, it's not the middle of the 20th –
DAN:
And also the big trust-busting, the monopolies –
DAVID:
And it was the Gilded Age, it was the age of inequality, it was a technological revolution, it was the electrification transportation revolution. It was an era of peace. Broadly speaking there weren't great power wars. That feels to me more like our world, but we don’t – somehow it's almost too distant, we cannot make the leap because you've got to get across the Second World War, the Great Depression, to there.
DAN:
The Second World War is an unbridgeable ha-ha for the British historical memory – I mean, we cannot see further than Churchill, we cannot get back to before 1940, it's very difficult I think.
HELEN:
I think as well is that the 1890s works particularly well in the case of the United States, for the reasons that you said, in terms of the economic crisis, the whole issue around gold, the populist reaction to that, the anti-Semitism that was part of the populist movement, the huge concentrations of power around the railroads and oil and Rockefeller and so on. So you can see any number of parallels, but I think if we now start trying to talk about 1890s British politics or 1890s German policies …
DAVID:
I think it is French politics which is the other point of comparison. We're not saying Paul Manafort is Dreyfus or whatever, not least because he's pleaded guilty!
HELEN:
The thing about the French politics and the Dreyfus trial is this seems to – from what I understand anyway – is that the context for that turn in French politics is really the humiliation of 1870 in the Franco-Prussian war. So this is geopolitical humiliation that is probably actually more akin in some respect than to Germany's after 1919.
DAN:
It makes me wonder… I think that's a really good, really important parallel, but it also makes me wonder about people like Salisbury in 1890s Britain as a hegemonic power that to an intelligent observer, Britain looked like it was in its imperial heyday, but had actually been overtaken economically by the USA and Germany, and policy makers were deeply pessimistic and nervous about Britain's ability to prolong its remarkable period of power.
And you get Salisbury in the late 1890s, very very pessimistic, saying things like we actually messed up we should have intervened in the U.S. Civil War and smashed American power, we still could, very nervous – very a sense of inevitability about Germany's domination of the European continent. And so I think that kind of pessimism you see in American policymakers they’re – you know – they've all been reading their Thucydides, or misreading it. And so I think the kind of hysteria around American hard power is reminiscent, I think, of the jingoism you see in Britain and it's an insecurity actually. I always think people are not very good at judging when you're actually at your imperial peak in Britain, actually, it was decades before, generations before, and yet the 1890s were finally the British population had been mobilized behind this imperial project just as the imperial project was starting to collapse. I wonder if that's true.
HELEN:
I think the other thing about the 1890s in Britain is it's obviously a parallel between the way in which the Irish question stopped, for me, absolutely everything in British domestic politics in the way which Brexit permeates everything in British – only you might say there’s an Irish dimension to that… you might also say there's a parallel between a time of economic crisis the extension of the franchise in the third reform, or you wouldn't have expected the Conservatives to be the dominant party in the 1890s, but they were.
And again I think post 2008 lots of people wouldn’t have expected the Conservatives to be the dominant party, but they just about have been.
DAVID:
The other decade is the 1980s because we tend to think of that as the decade of democratic triumph – it's the decade that preceded the 1990s, which as Helen said, is the outlier decade, but the one that frames so much of our world. But Dan as you were talking earlier about those kind of cold warriors who were ringing the alarm bells, and they seem to have sort of gone away, but of course they're waiting for Putin to invade the Baltic states – they're waiting for their moment of truth for, like you say, the landgrab politics to come back. But you know the 1980s weren't just a period of democratic triumph. They're an incredibly fraught decade for Western democracies and fears about Russia haven't gone away and the parallels must be there.
DAN:
Well apart from anything else, the seed bed for the Republican news dissemination ecosystem – it was the birth of the lesson from the 70s, lessons from Watergate, from Vietnam – the American right was that we need they needed to launch a sustained decade long project to to try and seize the commanding heights of U.S. judiciary media.
I think they were practicing that, and building that, and it was extraordinarily successful – so you got a situation where the mismatch between American views on things like abortion and even health care – and yet the iron like grip that people holding opposite views have on the judiciary and state houses and governorships across that country is completely remarkable – and that's a product of what was started in the 80s. Completely remarkable project in many ways.
And it's also a time when the Soviets were – I just interviewed the excellent Waldren on my podcast, and he talks about this sustained attempt by the Soviets to intervene in U.S. elections, and it is – I mean, I know we’re nervous in this room about historical parallels, but let me tell you – I have never ever come across historical period where you just simply change, you swap out the proper nouns, and you insert Putin, Trump and various other things, and you have got a very very similar…
And it actually it was the same people doing it – the KGB – they have got an institutional memory of intervening in American politics, and they were doing it by attempting to muddy the waters, attempting to delegitimize facts, to legitimize politicians of all stripes, create events for, you know, anti war marches, Texas independence rallies, that people would then get involved in. They all are ultimately sponsored by the KGB. And then placing forged articles creating conspiracy theories – and Reagan was furious about this. The CIA – there’s reams of material about how they confronted this, and the idea was you need an educated populace who are robust, sufficiently trained in things like history, to reject the use, to read beyond the headline. The CIA case officer in front of Congress at one stage said you need to read all of the newspapers, not just your own particular newspaper. You need to read opinion pages – if you're reading a story that seems outlandish, double check it before sharing it with your friends…
I mean it's just unbelievable. And we have we have seen that – and of course the Internet has just been a giant enabler for Putin and his former KGB cronies to do that on a gigantic scale.
DAVID:
That's one of the ways in which the 1990s becomes this kind of barrier of illusion, because there's continuity straight the way through from that, and the 90s look like this kind of almost deceptive moment where it seemed like that had stopped.
HELEN
I think it's partly due to the strange thing about the 80s is it really – I hate that cliche of a decade of two halves – and it doesn’t really divide in the middle either.
DAVID:
And also we should say decades aren’t these neat historical packages: they’re irresistible.
HELEN:
The Cold War is not quite as intense as it was – there was no Cuban missile crisis obviously in the 90s but it is pretty intense, and certainly a lot more intense than it had been in the 1970s. And I just don't think we should underestimate the way that Gorbachev – when Gorbachev come to power and then Reagan decides he can do business with Gorbachev, things change incredibly quickly. I mean that is just a massive amount of geopolitical change that occurs from, let's say, from 1986 ish to 1989 with the collapse of Soviet rule, and then it does so with scarcely any violence – I mean other than in Romania, in domestic terms. And that is an astonishing thing. I think part of our problem is we don't quite understand how astonishing those last years of the 80s are for Soviet rule to fall apart peacefully in the way in which it does.
DAVID:
You live through these things and it's just – like – I can't remember thinking about it – when the wall came down we all woke up to it, but to live through the second half of the 80s was to be in a complete daze.
HELEN:
If you go back to the beginning of the 20th century, you know, you've got these empires in Europe: the Russian empire the Austrian and Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman empire – if you think of it, in some sense, the Soviets recreating the Russian Empire is the end of that. So we enter at least in Europe a completely different geopolitical world. And I just don't think we understood it – and I think that's partly why the 90s turned out to be such a strange decade that we struggle to explain even retrospectively – we got a head full of allusions because we didn't understand the massive change that happened in Europe in the end of the 80s.
DAN:
And also there’s a really important narrative in which we probably took credit for it. And I’m not sure that Reagan and Thatcher were responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union and in fact this wonderful quote from the CIA, the head of the Russia desk – the Soviet desk at the CIA – and he says we played no part in the collapse of the Soviet Union: it collapsed under its own giant internal crises, and oil and things like that. So just calling it the triumph of democracy, the triumph for liberalism, was an implication that there was a sort of victory – and the behavior of Yeltsin in the 90s sort of seemed to corroborate that, didn't it. He seemed to say you won. We’re going to absorb western practices – in terms of you know, economic financial systems, and actually that that wasn't happening as we thought it was and it turned out that quote unquote victory of the West may not have existed – and if the Soviet Union collapsed of its own accord, then it's not surprising that what's gone on within that space has developed in a way that is particular to that space, rather than the victorious liberal West.
DAVID:
I want to come back at the end to what Helen said about – we need this very broad kind of collapse of the Russian Empire perspective on contemporary politics, which is often hard to get to, but Dan – I just want to ask you a question about something that your podcast has done a lot, and that we've been going through for the last four years for better or for worse, which is commemorating the first world war – we've been through this hundred year set of commemorations for the last four years, we’re coming up to the climax – the launch of the war, the various major battles, the Somme and so on, commemorating in all sorts of different ways – commemorating the loss, but also trying to understand what it means or what it meant. We've talked to lots of historians over this period about the first war – the 100 year anniversary is slightly arbitrary, but important too. What’s the first world war being commemorated this way meant to you?
DAN:
100 years ago this week… the forgotten front of the first war, which is increasingly important the more I think about it, which is the extraordinary and unexpected breakout from Northern Greece of Serbian, French and British forces and what's called Salonica, which knocks out Bulgaria which was a central power within the space of weeks, and cuts the railway between Berlin and Istanbul, effectively knocking Turkey out of the war and effectively precipitating this giant collapse of a centuries-old important heterodox power in the Middle East – in fact we don’t know where that ended because that story is continuing literally, and they're still fighting for the patrimony today in Palestine.
And so the Eastern European dimension of the First World War which is just not remembered at all is something happening as as we speak, a hundred years ago. I suppose the anniversaries – it is funny, as always with history, it divides into two groups. There are the people who – antiquarian, is that the right word – who are just fascinated by the loss, and by the cemeteries, and by the scale of what was going on a hundred years ago, and its a useful moment in which to pause and ponder it and in some cases for family members, it’s very important to salute, to remember their grandparents, their great grandparents, and that ties in with a sort of family history and a story about themselves.
I’m kind of slightly less interested in that and more interested about the kind of geostrategic outcomes. I think its impossible not to see the modern world still as a product of the utter catastrophe that was 1914. And if you look – revolution in Russia, criminal regimes taking over there which cast the longest of shadows – the collapse of Ottoman power and the Middle East, and total failure to build something legitimate in its place. The German question of Eastern Europe, the nationalities question of Eastern Europe, which again arguably is still confused today, but certainly was a hugely important factor in the outbreak of the Second World War – an even more giant catastrophe. The collapse of British Imperial financial power, the delegitimization of European rule over the rest of the world…
So I think those things are important to talk about and think about on this centenary, but I also agree with you. I'll still be thinking about the next year…
DAVID:
Maybe this is overstating it, but I've always thought that the pivotal year of the 20th century, the year that made our world, was not 1914 or 1970, 1980 – it was 1919. Actually the war changed everything. It didn't settle anything. What mattered was what happened afterwards, the politics, the non-war politics, the Weimar Constitution, the Versaille Peace Treaty – these other things in the end shaped the legacy of the war. Americans saying we don’t want to do that again. Confronting the Bolshevik regime for the first time in a non-war setting where you can actually think about – and not knowing what to do about it. I don’t know how we're going to commemorate 1919. It's a different thing, but in some ways that's the year that matters.
HELEN:
I partly agree, but I think there's a counterfactual there that's really hard – I don’t know what the answer is. Do we get to – like – the Bolshevik revolution without the first world war?
DAVID:
No, we don’t –
HELEN:
And it could be that you push it further back into the future, but I wouldn't pretend to know enough about it to make a judgment
DAVID:
And also saying that the events that shape the world we now live in happened between 14 and 18, but the beginning of the shaping of their significance only really can happen when the fighting stopped.
HELEN:
So then the question is – like – what do you do about remembering the Versaille peace treaty. Because then that becomes the crucial question: do you see it as something that was just the absolute failure, because it's a straight path that gets you from 1919?
DAVID:
This is almost a family question for you because your Margaret McMillan…
DAN:
…is my aunt
DAVID:
– And she was really important actually in getting people to rethink that – 1919’s going to be an important anniversary for her.
DAN:
It’s a big one in the family… I think, well I would ask you guys, this is a question about agency. We want someone to be in charge and I think even on the left, the myth of Rupert Murdoch's a powerful one, because it's sort of comforting to know that someone is in charge. Right – someone's got this mad anarchic chaotic system. If Rupert Murdoch wants something to happen, maybe it will happen and even if we don't like the outcome it just at least someone's got a lever that they can pull. And actually what if the truth is that we don’t – humans are powerless.
I think what comes out of Margaret's book about Versaille is these people are gathered. Lloyd George has got a bunch of friends, Clemenceau’s shot recovering from a bullet wound… Wilson is sick and the British and French armies are are almost at the point of disintegration – being demobilised. The Soviets were about to launch this thrust into Poland, and I’m not sure whether… Do you see Versaille, do you see Yalta, do you see any of these great conferences of the 20 century as actually the individuals being able to reshape the world successfully, or are they actually just kind of responding to these just catastrophic events?
HELEN:
I think it's really hard and I think the Versaille one’s actually particularly difficult to think about here because you think you could make an argument – say, the crucial year actually is 1917 not because of the Bolshevik revolution because of the U.S. entry into the World War. So then the world is changed by the U.S. becoming a power that's acting in Europe. This is the moment when the rise of the United States as the dominant military political economic power in the world becomes clear. So then what do you do about interpreting – you know – is it that Wilson has just got a way too ambitious idea about what he wants to do. He makes tactical mistakes because he doesn't ensure any domestic support in the Senate, in particular – he doesn't bring any Republicans with him to Versaille – or is it actually that America is not in a position having just come into this war a year before it's ended, to impose any kind of systematic peace on Europe that it has the capacity - the domestic capacity to uphold… and then it becomes less about Wilson and more about this strange arrival of America. And I don’t know what the answer to that is, but I think that understanding what the answer to that is is probably part of the answer to your question.
DAVID:
I’m going to give a slightly evasive answer which is in my world, the history of political thought, the really important anniversary of 1919 is a lecture that Max Weber gave in January 1919 called “Politics as a vocation” which I think has some claims to be the really most important piece of political writing that comes out of that period and it's about dealing with the unintended consequences of your actions and that is what political responsibility is for Weber.
And to sort of frame it, Weber would say it's a false choice – like – either you create the world that you intend, or the world gets away from you. It's like what you do in the world that gets away from you, and that's what 1919 is about – what happens in American politics, what happens in European politics as they lose control of this event that they were part of, but got way bigger than any of the politicians. And that becomes the 20th century story. So apart from anything else, I hope we’ll do a podcast on the Weber text. In a way it is important and the ideas matter as well.
DAN:
I think there's also a really important point about making peace in democracies. And if you look at the 18th century which is my wheelhouse, the peace treaties following the war of Austrian succession, the seven years war and the American Revolution – they are incredible. I mean these oligarchs meet around the table and are able to swap famously kind of swap colonies all around the world, and sort of divide – well – on several occasions the Brits give away vast amounts of their wartime gains in order to achieve what they hope will be a lasting peace.
And they understand to do that you have to leave – as Julius Caesar said – you have to leave the enemy a golden bridge – you can’t make Louis the Fifteenth agree to a kind of Carthaginian peace because he'll fight on, and you’re all bankrupt, it’s a nightmare.
And I think what's interesting about Versailles is actually we all now go “Oh, the Hapsburg Empire was a very civilized entity,” right – a kind of multi confessional multi linguistic multi-ethnic kind of blob that sat there in a sort of harmless, well almost harmless way, because they were sort of incompetent, and just dealt with an area of the world which is geographically and demographically and has proved to be quite difficult and of course exactly the same is true of the Ottoman Empire.
But you've just convinced, you know, millions of mothers in the UK and wives have seen their menfolk go off to war, they've worked in factories – you can't then say “we've won”. And actually the answer here the statesmanlike answer is to just is actually to bolster our defeated enemy – which is kind of what those negotiators were doing in the 18th century of France – actually we need to take our foot off the trachea of the French monarchy here, we've been too successful. I think there's a really interesting point.
HELEN:
I think that's really interesting, and I think there's another parallel. It's not quite about Democratic politics because you could say, if you go back to the Congress of Vienna, the equivalent of dismantling the Austro-Hungarian Empire is dismantling the Holy Roman Empire, and then allowing what's going to become the Confederation of Germany, that Prussia’s going to dominate, and it's going to lead to an 1870 and a unified German state, and then we’re into the politics that we're now talking about at the end of the nineteenth century, first half of the 20th century. So you could argue that they make something like the same mistakes in geo political terms, but there's no Democratic politics, because as you say it's not a Carthaginian peace in 1815, whereas it is in 1919. But when the Germans get to make the peace in 1870 with the French, then it is.
DAN:
Right, exactly – and that's the point – everyone says Versailles was very tough, and it's like the Treaty of Bressler Tosk, I mean come on, that was brutal! Just it was the most punitive imposition of peace – it was insane! The Congress of Vienna’s an interesting one – when Napoleon comes back, it has to get slightly more punitive, but the extraordinary thing about Vienna was that – partly because of Talleyrand’s brilliance – but France was really accepted into this community of nations as a great power, and in fact at – Bourbon France, Wellesley and Wellington and various other policy makers met and realised you needed to strengthen Bourbon France, and actually with Versailles, social democratic Germany, which was by that stage the counter party, said “Right we need to do what we can to legitimize this new entity which is no longer kind of Yunker Prussian Williamite Germany” but of course the population was like I thought the whole point is we're going to crush German industry and deal with these people
DAVID:
And we are coming up to the hundredth anniversary of – which I’m sure won't be celebrated much – of the election that came after the war, the general election, the coupon election where people had flu, everyone was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, the politicians and the voters, it was the worst time ever to hold an election, and no one knew what to stand on. So it turned out from nowhere they stumbled across a slogan which was “make Germany pay”. That's Democratic politics.
I want to ask a last question: two ways of doing it – take it either way you want… and we sort of drifted this way so from the 20th century, opening up history does that and it's great – like back in the 18th century, and then going back possibly to the Ottoman Empire and so on.
So there is also a sense about contemporary democratic politics – if you look at the Bob Woodward book about Trump – we talked about this a bit last week. It's a bit more like an monarchical court in some ways than it is a conventional democratic – small d democratic – administration. Steve Bannon likes to do this. He likes to make these big historical comparisons before Trump fired him, he said I’m Cromwell, Trump’s Henry the Eighth – or he says Trump is Tiberius Gracchus, you know, the great populist of the Roman Republic…
There is a sense that we're living through a point in politics where maybe the conventional Democratic or modern points of comparison don't quite catch it. The other side of this is we've got politicians – whether it's Chinese politicians or Hungarian politicians – who basically say to Western Europe that your view of the world is too narrow because you’re kind of post… well, it could be post the French Revolution, or it could be post the industrial revolution, but you're kind of just that – second half of that millennium. We're millennial. Now we see the big sweep: Orban says it, Xi says it. I am going to ask you another do you buy it question – do you buy it that actually that kind of really big sweep is something we should, in Western Europe, spend more time thinking about?
DAN:
Yeah. I mean of course we should. I just don't believe Orban and Xi. There’s a great theory that the Chinese Communist Party, they're building giant ring roads around Beijing, not for this generation of commuters, but for the next gen – and I think what they're doing is trying to pour money into the economy, to get traffic moving, firing dollars into their economy. They're just building enormous white elephants, and saying it's because of grand strategy – Orban the same. I mean, I just don’t buy that. But at the same time, it is really important to remember that there are certain geographical – your Jared Diamond thesis about for example the size of the importance of China within the global economy over thousands of years, rather than just their disastrous last few hundred years. So in the early 15th century, as we all know now, China dominated the Indian Ocean in the maritime sense. It was the biggest economy in the world, and in the same way we should remember that Britain's relationship with Europe is more than either splendid isolation in late 19th century, so-called – or our decade of shame in the 70s which seems to be the lens through which most people kind of choose which side to be on.
And in fact our relationship with Europe goes right back into the Celtic tribes’ decision about what to do about Julius Caesar’s presence in Gaul – so of course we to remember the big sweep, but I also think when nationalists start telling you that they've unlocked this sort of magical – whether it's Bannon or Orban – that they've identified the sort of glorious role that Hungarian Magyars played in protecting Europe from either the Mongols or Islam or – I mean it's just absolute nonsense.
There is one other thing I'd like to raise with you guys which is I was watching the other day the robot on Mars, you know, and I thought – we've put a bloody robot on Mars and we're giving it instructions. This is completely remarkable. In every single area of our lives, we have… I met a young woman whose heart had been taken out, and she wore a backpack and she had an artificial heart in her backpack – and yet in political terms when you read Woodward's book and you listen to what Bannon has said on and off the record, we might as well be living with a sort of insane hereditary monarch. So a question for you guys is – how when we have advanced in all these other fields, is our politics, to a large extent, still mired in the language in the corruption of the Athenian Panics. What is the next stage of politics?
DAVID: Well that’s a big question to end on…
HELEN: I don’t think it’s because you can get past the problem of corruption in politics. I would say that is the answer – is that it's not possible to progress in politics in the same way, because corruption and I mean that in the very general sense, not just material corruption, but political arrangements decayed through time – and in part that they decay through time through material corruption, and in part because of concentrations of power…
So we’re never going to get to, in some sense, a better politics – we can always have a better politics than where we are at any particular moment, but the idea we're going to make the kind of advances that we've made with medical technology, I just – I just can’t…
DAN:
It’s very depressing.
HELEN:
- maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I would say that what you can see is not repetitions, it's the wrong word – sort of parallels in political dynamics and if you can’t actually make a great deal of political progress, you can kind of see some of the same dynamics play themselves out at different times, and I've just been quite struck really since we've been doing this podcast and thinking about, you know, historical questions and how to understand politics and the events of the last two or three years, that I've spent more time thinking or reading about the 16th century, and medieval European history. So I find it quite illuminating for understanding contemporary politics – it doesn't mean that we’re back in the 16th century, or that the things that Orban says about – you know, like the Battle of Mohacs for Hungary are – a way of thinking about are true in some sense… but I still think that there are things that are unfolding, sort of contingencies that are now in our politics that are recognisable if you started from before the modern period. In one way I'd say that our political understanding is impoverished. If we only use modern history and I mean by that history kind of like from the French Revolution onwards, I do think we've got a tendency to that, as well as a tendency to make it all about the 20th century.
DAVID:
I’m going to give you a different kind of answer. It's a really difficult question – to go back to what I said earlier: take someone from the past and show them our world and they would say – you’ve got people – you’ve got machines on Mars, you put people on the moon, someone's walking around with a heart strapped to her back – and you have the House of Lords, your parties haven't changed, your politicians look the same, they sound the same. You've got the Electoral College in the United States, you know, it's just sort of – when's it going to catch up?
I think it will change. Talk about something that we put on our separate podcast – we talked about recently with Adam Tooze – the sort of 10 year cycle since the crash – a lot has changed in those 10 years, and 10 years ahead, I think we could be in for some dramatic changes. I also think we're at the beginning of the technological revolution in politics– we’re by no means at the end of it. But I think there is also a risk for the reasons Helen says – because politics doesn't change that fast, and because some things do seem to be relatively baked into how it works, there is also a risk that we're in a world that politics is going to be left behind because people will find other ways of changing how they live, whether it's through technology, whether it's through new kinds of communication, whatever – we might be on the cusp of a point where our politics actually gets frozen in place. We carry on with elections, we elect stranger and stranger people, they get angrier and angrier, we get angry and angrier with them. And while we're doing that, China or Google or who knows, shapes our world. That's the thing that worries me.
DAN:
Feels like that's already happening. But I would – I've got my little pet idea – is that Trump, as well as these other ridiculous strongmen elsewhere, but Trump has a clear warning to me that we need to jettison the idea of leadership. And it's that wonderful quote from the civil rights movement which is: strong people don't need a strong leader. And I think we've still – in our corporate world and elsewhere – we've got an attachment to the often male sort of messianic leader, and Trump is a wakeup call, and we need to get rid of this idea. And I don’t know what would replace it and everyone will laugh at me, but we are too sophisticated as a society to sort of elect these monarchical figures, these Renaissance princes, who have all the failings of all of us. I mean I would be a shockingly bad leader, and I think we are reaching a point when maybe we just don’t need that person.
DAVID:
Later on this autumn we're going to be talking to the historian Tom Holland about ancient Rome, and whether thinking about Julius Caesar can help us understand politics today. We will tweet a link to the episode we did a while back with Jill Lepore – that was about Trump and American history, and her new book about American history is just about to come out. If you want to hear a bit more of Helen and me talking to Dan Snow – we did a separate conversation for History Hit which is about technology and history.
Next week we're going to be talking about dark money, corruption, and really really rich people. Do join us for that. My name is David Runciman and we've been Talking Politics.