Category Archives: Europe

by | 2 August 2023 · 3:15 am

Two Old Opium Smokers in Vietnam

From Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Andrew X. Pham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle pp. 162-164:

Grandpa Pham smelled of plum candy and Chinese medicine.

It was an odor that made me nauseous and hungry all at once.

His opium smoke.

I served as the footman of Grandpa’s opiate dreams. As his family went through the process of closing doors, shutting windows, keeping the confidence, I knelt at the door of Grandpa Pham’s study, a servant awaiting his wishes, witnessing the rite that came to be the center of his existence. In the seasons before Saigon fell, Grandpa was many years into his pipes, his grown children’s wages keeping him in the habit. I brought him the accoutrements of his ceremony and he arranged them on the straw mat: an oil lamp, matches, crisp unwrinkled newspaper, a bowl with a spoonful of steamed rice, a kettle of lotus tea, porcelain cups, a water-smoke pot, and old-fashioned Chinese brick pillows. He produced a cough-drop tin rattling with loose nuggets of black opium.

He smoked with an old friend, both of them Hanoi expatriates so wizened and emaciated it was difficult to tell them apart in the gloom of their conspiracy—hovering over their opium, their instrument of sedition from the world. Those Nationalist bastards, one cheroot figure said to the other, sold nine American bullets out of ten, no wonder we are still fighting this war. The other figure protested, though without much passion, It’s good for the economy, all the foreign money pouring in. Impotent to the world, they were still supreme patriarchs of their extended families. This, their War Room: two ancients sipping tea in cement air. Saigon is too hot, too corrupt, nothing but barbarians, said one. Yes, yes, Hanoi is the true soul of Vietnam, agreed the other. Shirtless in the heat, they sat on a handwoven straw mat, propping themselves with one arm locked at the elbow like a tent pole, a knee up near their chins. The room was bolted tight against ill winds. Their liver-spotted hide, the texture of week-old tofu-skin, did not sweat but drooped, flaccid on their chests and bellies, stretched taut over the ridges of their spines. The Americans are generous with their aid, but the French, they knew how to live well, one observed. True, the other nodded, true, they built the most beautiful mansions in Hanoi. The two jurors reached into a bowl, clawed a few grains of leftover rice, and wedged these between their gum and cheek like chewing tobacco. The newspaper was smoothed out, folded, and torn into two perfect squares. Starting with one corner, they rolled the papers into tapered pipes, overlapping the layers tightly. They took the moistened rice out of their mouths, pressed it into a paste, and glued the pipes. With tinker deftness, they fit the pipes to the water-smoke pot. Every practiced motion carried the serene precision of a ritual even as they talked. The Japanese were the true bastards, weren’t they? All that killing and the famines. Yes, yes, but that was war and so is this. No, for the Northerners, it is war. For the Americans, it is politics. For the Southerners, it is business. A precious opium nugget was placed on the pot they shared. Ah, but wasn’t Hanoi beautiful in winter? Yes, persimmon winters. They lay their bones down on the mat, on their sides facing each other, heads on brick pillows, the opium between them. Don’t you remember that one hot summer, so hot catfish died and floated in the creek? Yes, but wasn’t the monsoon wind blowing off Ha Long Bay magical? They worked themselves back through the years to the good memories, and when they were ready, they touched the flame to the opium and, with great sighs, began to feed from their paper pipes. They perfumed the air with opium sweetness, making it wet and soft, filling it with the watery gurgle of two old men drowning.

Once they slipped far into their refuge, a pair of goldfish dying on the floor, I moved the oil lamp out of the reach of their limbs and left them to their slumber. Their smoke swarmed the house, announcing that their spirits were temporarily on a journey, yet everyone tiptoed past the room as though fearful of waking a baby.

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Filed under China, economics, France, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, opium, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 30 July 2023 · 5:54 am

Danish Civil Warriors and Crusaders

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 103-105:

On Christmas Day 1144, the Christian Principality of Edessa was lost to Sultan Zenghi of Mosul. It was the first major defeat in the Latin Middle East, and when the news reached Western Europe, it was met with despair and determination. Something had to be done, and preparations were underway for a new crusade just as large as the first (in general, see Phillips 2007). An absolutely crucial force in this effort was Bernard of Clairvaux, abbot of the wide-reaching Cistercian order. Bernhard was a gifted speaker and traveled throughout northern Europe on a preaching mission, and it was also he who initially allowed Northern German princes to fight the pagan Slavic peoples instead of traveling to Edessa. He rationalized this on the theological grounds that the devil attacked Christianity on all fronts simultaneously, and that it was just as important to defend themselves in the north as it was in the south. This cumulatively led to the so-called Second Crusade in 1147, which was one crusade but executed on many fronts, as it was described by contemporaries. Crusades were led against Damascus, against several places in the Iberian Peninsula, and in the Baltic Sea.

In 1146, Cardinal Ubaldus hosted a church meeting in Odense to preach crusade and drum up support (Bysted et al. 2012; Jensen 2017). The reaction must have amazed him, because King Erik III Lamb of Denmark immediately abdicated and entered a monastery, thus becoming the first and so far the only Danish king to voluntarily surrender the throne. He also died shortly afterwards and presumably resigned due to illness. He was followed by Sweyn III, who was later nicknamed Sweyn Grathe. Grathe was chosen by the Sealanders, but the people of Jutland concurrently chose Canute, the son of Magnus (Nilsson) (who had killed Canute Lavard). The third individual to partake in the battle for the throne was Canute Lavard’s son, Valdemar, who was now about 15 years old. The struggle developed into an eleven year war between Sweyn III, Canute, and Valdemar, and is often portrayed as a civil war. It is probably more accurate to see the conflict as formerly independent countries who now seized the opportunity to choose their own king. Conversely, these kings sought to expand their own power and unite the kingdoms over which their predecessors had ruled. During this same time period, several kings fought for power in Norway and Sweden as well.

The bloody wars in Denmark give a rare insight to the rulers’ paths, both physically and mentally, to power within the empire. Sweyn III began his king’s reign by working with Valdemar to declare Canute Lavard a saint and place his bones as relics upon the high altar in Ringsted. It was not recognized by Archbishop Eskild because it was a private canonization without the pope’s acceptance, but it does show that Valdemar would henceforth use his father’s miracles as an argument to support his own position as king. After that, Keld of Viborg, who had previously sought the pope for permission to mission and become a martyr among the pagan Wends, mediated between Sweyn and Canute by having them participate in a joint crusade against the Wendish Dobin, near present-day Rostock. They participated because the pope promised that if they fell, their souls would be in heaven before their blood cooled on the earth (Knytlingesaga 1919–25, 108). At Dobin, they met with a Saxon cavalry, and succeeded in occupying the city, baptizing the inhabitants and forcing them to free their Christian slaves. Then, according to Saxo, the Danish army withdrew because Sweyn and Canute did not trust each other. According to his contemporary, German historian Helmold of Bosau, retreat was because “the Danes are mighty warriors at home, but completely useless in real battle” (Helmold 1868, 65).

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Filed under Baltics, Germany, Mediterranean, military, religion, Scandinavia, war

by | 28 July 2023 · 6:01 am

Scandinavian Warriors in 9th c.

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 62-64:

Ireland had previously been the target of Norwegian warriors, and in 851 Danes also started raiding the island. In 853 Ivar became king of Dublin and later participated in the conquest of York in 866. In 844 and 846 some of the armies that had fought in France pressed onwards to Galicia in northern Spain, and even to Arabic Lisbon: according to some later Spanish sources, these troops were dispatched by the Danish king Horik. In 854, 70 ships, led by Björn Ironside and Hastings, sailed from England via Spain to Morocco, into the Mediterranean, ultimately reaching Italy. Although it is difficult to measure the scale of these battles compared to earlier periods with fewer sources, it seems clear that the battles from the mid-800s onwards were vaster in scope, earning attention from their contemporaries who became the victims. There are three main reasons for this intensification of warfare.

First, it is clear that the Nordic longship had developed into a maneuverable and efficient war machine: Danish and Scandinavian fleets were famous and desired by other rulers for centuries to come. It probably wasn’t until around 1200 that other countries off the Atlantic coast built equally strong fleets; in the Mediterranean it probably happened in the early 1100s. Until then, the Scandinavians had a significant advantage at sea.

Secondly, the expansion in the 800s shows that Scandinavia was an extremely rich area. There is a very specific reason for that. With the rise of Islam in the 600s and the conquest of large parts of the Mediterranean world until the beginning of the 700s, Europe’s economic center of gravity shifted to the east. The link between East and West in the Mediterranean was left un-interrupted, but the Arab gold mines and new efficient exploitation of the Silk Road and its access to the East’s lucrative trade system provided an economic boost to the Byzantine Empire, particularly to the capital of Constantinople. The Scandinavians had access to this via the Gulf of Finland, Lake Ladoga in northwest Russia, and along the great Russian rivers to the Black Sea (Bjerg et al. 2013). Islam actually brought Scandinavia closer to being Europe’s economic center, becoming bridge and a transit area between the East and West. The vast quantities of gold coins found in Scandinavia clearly illustrate this. So far at least 200,000 Arabic gold coins have been excavated by archeologists, and with the spread of metal detectors more and more are discovered each year. Yet it is still only a small percentage of the many coins that were buried, and they represent only those treasures that were not dug up again by their owner or his heirs. Most of these immense riches were later invested towards war technology and political capital, in ships and men.

Third, most of these raiding expeditions were not random looting. Nor did they reflect a large-scale war between Denmark and other countries or between two cultures, one European and one Scandinavian, or between two religions, one Christian and one pagan. Rather, they were a natural element of an intricate political game between a variety of different rulers, with opponents and allied partners coming together across the political and religious spectrum.

The Danish wars in England were a continuation of old alliances across the North Sea. In northern England, Danish armies were apparently well received by the local population, whose elite probably had ancient Scandinavian roots. Several groups of warriors joined together to form the “great army” in 865, and in the coming years they conquered relatively easily East Anglia and Northumbria, which starting in around 870 came under Danish control. The Great Army threatened the kingdom of Mercia and Wessex in southern England, where it was stopped by King Alfred the Great. The warriors were soon followed by peasants who settled and cultivated the land. Danish had a lasting influence on the English language, and northern England became known as the Danelaw, the area under Danish law and control. We do know the names of several Danish commanders and kings located in England from the 800 and 900s. However, we don’t know if these kings also simultaneously ruled over anything back in Denmark. English sources say that they occasionally returned home to Denmark. This indicates that the relationship would have been close at the time, and the involvement in England clearly had a profound effect on the political hierarchy and power dynamics in Denmark.

The same certainly applies to the Frankish empire. One of the most important defensive strategies of the French king against the attack of the Scandinavian armies was to quickly ally himself with other Scandinavian rulers who were given land to which to defend [like Rollo in Normandy].

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Filed under economics, England, France, Ireland, Mediterranean, migration, military, piracy, Scandinavia, Spain, war

by | 26 July 2023 · 6:18 am

The Danish Empire!

Here’s a book I’ve long been waiting for, after coming across accounts of Danish colonies in Africa and India, Danish intercession with the Barbary pirates, and Denmark’s more familiar (and longer-lasting) Atlantic colonies, let alone the once dominant role of Danes in the Baltic region. This is a new and comprehensive book, so I’ll make an effort not to quote as many passages as I would do if it had been on the market for a longer time.

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 13-14, 16-17:

The Danish Empire: Rise and Fall. This sounds as a pretentious title for the small kingdom of Denmark, but it is inspired by English historian Edward Gibbon’s grande opus, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Released in 1776–88, it has since become a classic, not only serving as an unattainable standard for later historians due to its vivid narrative style, but also as a landmark work. It became an essential source for later generations in their understanding of the Middle Ages as a dark period and became a manifest for enlightened thought and rationality in the face of superstition and sensations.

We have chosen to title this book The Danish Empire: Rise and Fall—to stress the volatile and shifting nature of the political unit that throughout history has been called Denmark. Today, one rarely hears much about the topic of Denmark’s having been a great and politically important power. Denmark is mostly understood as a small country content with its current modest political situation. It is certainly true that Denmark is a country that has become smaller over time. However, modern descriptions of Danish history have cultivated the idea that Denmark has always been a miniscule country and has always been threatened by its powerful southern neighbor, as evident in the traditional general histories of Denmark (Christensen 1977–92; Olsen 1988–91). Images of Denmark as a large country, a substantial political power, something that may even be called an empire, lie beyond the tradition of modern Danish history. This is what we would like to attempt to challenge, and therefore we have emphasized the phraseology of rise and fall in the title.

…

Many Danish historians of the twentieth century tacitly assume that Denmark has always had the same size and political influence that it has today. If asked directly they would agree that it is an incorrect assumption. Yet history continues to be written accordingly: addressing how the territories that lie within the current borders of Denmark have changed over time. The border duchies of Schleswig and Holstein are mentioned due to the political problems they have always caused. Scania in southern Sweden is seldom referred to as a Danish territory as it was during the Middle Ages; other former Danish regions as Halland and Blekinge in Sweden are rarely addressed at all, not to mention the Baltic islands of Gotland, Øsel (Saaremaa), Rügen, and the country of Estonia. The Danish Empire actually stretched from the North Cape in northern Norway to Hamburg in Germany for over three hundred years, roughly equivalent to the distance between Hamburg and Sicily. This book hopes to recognize, include, and allocate these territories within their accurate place time and in history, such as England [Danelaw] in the Viking Period, Norway from the time of the Kalmar Union between 1397–1814, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the West Indies, and Colonies in Africa [Danish Gold Coast] and India. While Denmark’s history should be acknowledged in its collective entirety, it should also remain in its European context. Denmark was at times a relatively large power in Europe, and functioned as a direct threat, particularly to many of the smaller Germanic principalities of the south: it wasn’t until later in history that these power dynamics became inverted.

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Filed under economics, education, Germany, language, migration, military, nationalism, religion, Scandinavia, war

by | 18 July 2023 · 5:11 am

GDR’s Elite Decisionmaking

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 91-93:

The GDR’s uncivil society became immobilized by its own advance. By 1989, Honecker, who had begun his party career as a youth league agitator, was seventy-seven. Willi Stoph (1914–99), East German prime minister since 1964 (except for a brief interlude when he was head of state), was seventy-five. Erich Mielke (1907–2000), the head of the Stasi since 1957, was eighty-one. This ruling echelon, which had first settled in the villas of the northern Berlin suburb of Pankow, near Soviet military headquarters, moved farther out in 1960 to the more easily guarded, isolated Wandlitz woods (near Hermann Göring’s old hunting lodge). There they enjoyed Western food, fashion, jewelry, and electronics imported for them by the Stasi. Their uncivil-society compound became known as “Volvo-grad” for their chauffeur-driven imported vehicles (they could not bear to follow global elite practice and import West German Mercedeses). But despite herding together, the East German elites and their families mostly refrained from socializing—Mielke’s men were not supposed to keep a watchful eye on the private lives of party officialdom, but maybe they did? Decision making was a mystery even for high officials. “One of the most interesting findings is how little most policymakers, including many members of the SED’s highest circles, knew,” explained one scholar of East German ruling circles. “At Politburo meetings leaders discussed very little of substance. Two or three individuals walking in the woods on a weekend frequently made important decisions, and expertise rarely played a major role.”

What about the vaunted Stasi? The Stasi possessed an immense fortresslike complex in East Berlin and more than two thousand buildings, homes, bunkers, shelters, hospitals, and resorts throughout the GDR. Its staff, which numbered 5,000 in its early days, exploded to 45,000 by 1970 and 91,000 by 1989—meaning that Ulbricht and especially Honecker had built up a security ministry larger than Hitler’s Gestapo (7,000 in 1937). And that was for an East German population one quarter as large as that of Nazi Germany (66 million). In the Communist bloc, too, the Stasi stood out. Whereas the massive Brezhnev-era Soviet KGB counted one staff person for every 600 inhabitants and Poland’s equivalent SB had one for every 1,574 inhabitants, full-time Stasi personnel numbered one for every 180 East Germans. (Officially, the GDR bragged that it had one medical practitioner per 400 people.) The Stasi also developed an informant network estimated at seven times the per capita density of that of the Third Reich. Of course, for all the beatings they administered, the Stasi left behind not millions of corpses but millions of files. Its surveillance was overkill: some 6 million files, even though as late as 1989 the Stasi enumerated just 2,500 individuals as opposition activists, with only 60 deemed “hard core” (comparable to Czechoslovakia, though absurdly fewer than in Poland). That year alone the Stasi compiled 500 situation reports (each of 60 pages)—more than one per day. But the dictatorship proved incapable of using this vast reportage. As Karl Marx had written in 1842, often a “government hears only its own voice. It knows it hears only its own voice and yet it deceives itself that it hears the people’s voice.” The East German regime was out of touch, but partly for that very reason the paragons of uncivil society were in no mind to capitulate.

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by | 17 July 2023 · 5:44 am

GDR’s Crisis of Legitimacy

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 70-74:

Born in 1949 following mass rapes by the Soviet army and almost toppled in its fourth year of existence by mass popular revolt, the German Democratic Republic, a rump abutting another German state, lasted four decades. That was not quite as long as Wilhelmine Germany (1870-1918) but longer than the Weimar Republic (1918-33) or the Third Reich (1933–45). Over time, the GDR’s Leninist technocratic image—as a “Red Prussia”—developed a wide following both inside and outside the Soviet bloc. In 1980, the World Bank judged East Germany to be tenth highest in the world in per capita income, above Great Britain. But in the period after World War II, particularly from the 1970s, the formula of Communist-party monopoly and state planning failed to maintain competitive economies, including in the supposed great success, the GDR, as Jeffrey Kopstein has pointed out. East Germany’s infamous State Security Service (Stasi) managed to produce files on 6 million people, more than one third of the country’s total population (16.4 million). But the political police had no answer for a prosperous West Germany, which, in the 1950s, took off on a multidecade economic miracle to become, after the United States and Japan, the world’s third most powerful economy.

East Germany’s populace, no less than the regime, understood that comparisons with West Germany were the basis of the GDR’s legitimacy. Either socialism was superior to capitalism, or it had no reason for being. This logic—starkly evident in the case of the two Germanys—held for the entire bloc. And the bloc being a bloc, the fate of each national Communist regime depended on the fate of the others. When it announced its second Five-Year Plan (1956–60), the GDR committed itself to overtaking West Germany in per capita consumption of key food products and consumer goods by 1961. Rash? Announced or not, some form of a consumer competition was inescapable. In 1961, however, rather than outconsuming West Germans, East Germans were completely enclosed: on top of the already existing 857-mile inner German-German border, a new wire fence was hastily erected some 90 miles across Berlin. The next year, a second, inner fence went up, creating a no-man’s-land, “the death strip,” patrolled by self-firing machine guns triggered by movement. These barriers were soon concretized. Still, East Germans could continue to make direct comparisons with life in West Germany from their own living rooms—just by watching West German television. In Albania the populace could watch Italian TV and in Estonia Finnish TV—rare windows. But in the GDR, Western TV was accessible in the inhabitants’ native tongue (except in a poor-reception area around Dresden, dubbed “the valley of the clueless”). North Koreans have never had anything like that vis-à-vis South Korea. West German TV offered East Germans a “nightly emigration”—and a frustrating tease.

Samizdat (self-publication) in the GDR was virtually unknown, and antisocialist dissidents were relatively few, a circumstance often attributed to the supposed lack of a strong sense of nation and nationalism. (As we shall see in the next chapter, Communist Romania is said to have lacked dissent because of a too-powerful sense of nation.) In fact, even when they were critical, intellectuals in East Germany exhibited a high degree of loyalty. The East German novelist Christa Wolf (born Christa Ihlenfeld in 1929), who after a brief stint as an informer fell under extended Stasi surveillance, openly criticized the East German leadership, but like most East German intellectuals, she hoped not to undo but to revivify the antifascist, anticapitalist cause. There was no anomaly in an intelligentsia committed to the socialist cause. True, many East German intellectuals were apolitical. And repression was omnipresent. “We were always afraid of being denounced,” recalled one person critical of the regime. But for most, West German consumerism was not their idea of better socialism. Even the hideous Wall was accepted by some of them. “I took it to be an evil, but a necessary evil for the existence of the GDR,” said one socialist intellectual, adding that “whoever wants to tear down the Wall must also be clear that he is at the same time tearing down the basis of the existence of the GDR.” Those deemed antisocialist could apply to leave or be expelled, blunting opposition domestically. As for intellectuals who refused to leave, in many cases they also refused to campaign for freedom of movement (human rights)—if leaving was betrayal, why defend the right to betrayal?

This dynamic—leave or stay—turned out to be the crucial mobilizer in 1989, when the GDR was suddenly struck by mass demonstrations, to near-universal shock, in Leipzig. As throngs of East Germans—eligible for automatic citizenship upon arrival in West Germany—clamored for exit, others massed to voice the sentiment “We’re staying.” The period from the time this agitation erupted, in autumn 1989, to the time the regime disappeared was astonishingly brief. Before a momentous peaceful demonstration on October 9 in Leipzig, the country counted fewer than 100,000 total protesters at all events, but the total would rise to 4 million by November 9, when the Berlin Wall was breached. And yet, this was mass mobilization without mass organization. The best-known organized social movement outside the regime, New Forum, was announced only in late September 1989. Though loyalist, New Forum was immediately declared “hostile to the state” and illegal by the Stasi and found no counterpart inside the ruling party—such as the reform Communists in Hungary—to negotiate with and to bolster its fledgling organization. New Forum’s activists had no offices or telephones. Its name was sometimes evoked at marches, but it was overwhelmed by events. “Social movements in the GDR evolved largely spontaneously,” argues the scholar Steven Pfaff, adding that “detestable, poorly performing authoritarian states are commonplace; it is revolutions that are unusual.” When does popular acquiescence to dictatorship vanish? When does the uncivil society lose its nerve?

The Communist establishment could not emigrate: it had no exit.

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by | 15 July 2023 · 6:06 am

1989: Ruling Class Political Bankruptcy

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 12-14:

In the popular imagination, communism’s demise in Eastern Europe has given rise to two opposing grand narratives. The first tells of a breakthrough to freedom; the second, of a revolution stolen by the old establishment. Both are partly true. Freedom, meaning the messiness of democracy as well as the rewards and risks of the market in an age of globalization, came in varying degrees to the countries of Eastern Europe, albeit with great assistance from the 1990s process of European Union accession. At the same time, much of the old Communist establishment in the East bloc survived and prospered, even in Poland (though not East Germany). Still, outcomes do not mean causation. The 1989 revolutions did not happen because of a broad freedom drive or an establishment self-enrichment grab. The cave-in was unintended, precipitated by Gorbachev’s unilateral removal of the Soviet backstop, a move that had been intended to goad socialist-bloc countries to reform themselves. In other words, Gorbachev was looking to galvanize the reform-minded Gorbachevs of Eastern Europe. There was only one flaw in this approach: there were no East European Gorbachevs. True, inside the establishments there was some ferment even before 1985 (Romania excepted), but party types inspired by Gorbachev’s Prague-Spring-style socialist revival were not numerous around the bloc. Romania’s Communist party had no reform wing whatsoever. In Poland, which was run by a military man, the party reform wing was concentrated in a periodical (Krytyka). In East Germany, proponents of a socialist renewal were found mostly among dreamy intellectuals, not officialdom. Instead of galvanizing socialist reformers in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev’s stunning repeal of the Brezhnev doctrine caught out the bloc’s uncivil societies, exposing how they had long engaged in breathtaking mismanagement. Above all, they had clung to anticapitalism in the face of an ever-flourishing capitalist Western Europe—from which the uncivil societies had borrowed to avoid making hard choices, running up self-destructive debts in hard currency, as we shall see. Then they borrowed some more. What Gorbachev did was to lay bare how socialism in the bloc had been crushed by competition with capitalism and by loans that could be repaid only by ever-new loans, Ponzi-scheme style.

We offer, then, a third narrative of global political economy and a bankrupt political class in a system that was largely bereft of corrective mechanisms. It may seem a depressing tale, yet perhaps it is not as disheartening as that of ruinous elites in a market democracy. In the 1990s and 2000s, American elites colluded in the United States’ descent into a sinkhole of debt to foreign lenders, enabling besotted consumers to indulge in profligate consumption of imported goods. America’s unwitting policy emulation of irresponsible uncivil societies was facilitated by communism’s implosion in Eastern Europe, which opened the bloc economies to global integration, and by the rise of savings-rich Asia. It was in such an environment that the spectacular incomprehension, lucrative recklessness, and not infrequent fraud of elites—bankers, fund managers, enabling politicians—booby-trapped the entire world’s financial system. After the meltdown that commenced in fall 2008, we can only hope that the market and democracy prove their resiliency and good governance and accountability return. In the meantime, if Eastern Europe’s experience is any guide, those responsible will largely escape any reckoning.

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by | 14 July 2023 · 6:01 am

1989: Implosion More Than Explosion

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 8-11:

What more could there be to say on this twentieth anniversary of 1989? Plenty. Most analysts continue to focus disproportionately, even exclusively, on the “opposition,” which they fantasize as a “civil society.” This fixation recalls the long and fruitless search for “the bourgeoisie” who supposedly caused the French Revolution of 1789. But just as “the bourgeoisie” were mostly an outcome of 1789, so “civil society” was more a consequence than a primary cause of 1989. Thanks to the repudiation of the single-party monopoly and its corollary, the state-owned and state-run economy, the 1989 revolutions would make civil society possible. That said, highlighting the opposition is understandable for Poland since, as we shall see, Poland had an opposition, which imagined itself as civil society. Such a focus almost works for Hungary, too, because, like Poland, Hungary had a negotiated exit from communism, though Hungary’s proreform Communists in 1989 had to bolster the anti-Communist opposition in order to have a negotiating partner. Be that as it may, for all other Eastern European countries the focus on the opposition falls into the realm of fiction. And even for the Polish case, analysts too often leave out the side across the table from the opposition—namely, the Communist establishment. The often overlooked establishment, which we call “uncivil society,” is a primary focus of our book, because that is where collapse happened.

The incompetent, blinkered, and ultimately bankrupt Communist establishments—party bosses and propagandists, secret policemen and military brass—deserve their due, but we do not examine every Eastern European country in depth. East Germany, Romania, and Poland are the case studies (in that unusual order) that we single out for extended treatment because, in our view, they best reveal how and why each establishment’s implosion occurred. Seeking to use the opposition to help push through tough economic measures to save the system, uncivil society in Poland (as well as in Hungary) discovered that it had instead capitulated; in East Germany and Romania (and elsewhere) the establishment just collapsed. The causes behind both these outcomes had a lot to do with internal elite dynamics and with geopolitics, as we shall show. But in cases where the uncivil society was determined to hold on, it had to be, and was, given a shove by mass social mobilization. Paradoxically, therefore, in 1989 the enormous street demonstrations took place not in the country with the formidable organized opposition (Poland) but in the lands of the formidable Securitate and Stasi—the dreaded security police of Romania and East Germany, respectively. No less paradoxically, the mass protests broke out without equivalent mass social organizations. Hence, a second goal of our book, beyond a close look at uncivil society, entails an explanation of the social mobilization absent corresponding societal organization.

Eastern Europe ended up shaping the destiny of the Soviet Union, but the Soviets had long held the fate of Eastern Europe in their hands. The “Brezhnev Doctrine”—employing military force, as a last resort, to uphold socialism in the bloc—was in many ways the Andropov Doctrine. Yuri Andropov, the long-serving KGB chief (1967–82) and briefly the successor to Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary (1982–84), had long undergirded the Soviet resolve. Andropov played a hard-line man-on-the-spot role as Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the crackdown in 1956; he manipulated the more cautious Brezhnev over using force in Czechoslovakia in 1968; and he took a tough stance on Poland in 1980–81 during Solidarity’s existence. The KGB underling who served as station chief in Poland from April 1973 through October 1984 recalled that Andropov had refused to countenance Poland taking the “capitalist” path, a scenario viewed as zero sum geopolitically. Other evidence, though, indicates that behind closed doors in 1981 Andropov lamented that the overtaxed Soviet Union had reached the limits of its ability to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe and goaded the Polish regime to conduct its own crackdown (it did). Be that as it may, in 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev’s Kremlin not only formally repealed the Brezhnev Doctrine but also worked to prevent Eastern Europe’s uncivil societies from themselves using violence to prop up their regimes. Almost immediately thereupon, the Communist systems in Eastern Europe were overturned. The ashes of Andropov—who more than anyone had helped put Gorbachev into power—must have been turning over in his Kremlin Wall urn.

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by | 9 July 2023 · 5:06 am

Japan’s Defeat Hits Southeast Asia

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 278-281:

Even many years after the war, Mustapha Hussein remembered his reaction when he heard that Japan had surrendered: “I cried.” A political radical in the former British colony of Malaya, he had hoped that the peninsula’s separatist movement would seize the opportunity and declare independence during the brief period that offered itself while Japan was fatally weak and the Allies had not yet declared victory. Now that Japan had formally capitulated, the reimposition of British rule was just a matter of time. The chance was wasted. “I regretted the matter deeply as Malaya would once again be colonized and gripped by Western power.”

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, some activists did try to exploit the brief interregnum between Japan’s surrender and the arrival of the Western victors. In the East Indies on August 17, two days after the Japanese had accepted their defeat, the head of the separatist movement, Sukarno, declared independence, creating “an electrifying effect on the mass of Indonesians,” according to an observer. In Indochina two weeks later, on September 2, the day of the surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the US-backed guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh did the same for Vietnam. “Today we are determined to oppose the wicked schemes of the French imperialists, and we call upon the victorious Allies to recognize our freedom and independence,” he told a jubilant crowd in Hanoi.

Both attempts were squashed within weeks as the old imperialists returned, battered but determined to pick up where they had left off. It would seem that it was now back to colonial business as usual, and that the Western empires would be resurrected to their former grandeur. Nothing could be further from the truth. The European colonies, some dating back centuries, only returned for a brief interlude before evaporating forever. This also meant that the peace that was heralded by Hirohito’s speech in August 1945 was not peace at all, but more war by new means. This went for virtually all of Southeast Asia. For every society in the region except Thailand, the first two decades after the war that ended in 1945 brought new mass-scale violence, whether in the form of war, civil war, or revolution, or a combination of the three.

It came as completely unexpected to most Europeans. B. C. de Jonge, governor general of the Dutch East Indies in the 1930s, had confidently signaled that his country’s control of the Southeast Asian archipelago was essentially for eternity. “We have ruled here for 300 years with the whip and the club and we shall still be doing it in another 300 years,” he had said. In fact, counting from the time they returned to the East Indies in 1945 trying to reinstate their authority, the Dutch had only four years left as colonial masters. The Dutch had shown in 1941 that they could be beaten, fast and decisively, and the aura of superiority which had enabled them to control a country many times larger than their own was gone forever.

The genie of independence was out of the bottle, and it could not be put back in. Often it had horrifically violent results. Dirk Bogarde, the future actor, was on the island of Java with British forces and saw how Dutch internees, returning from the camps and trying to start their lives anew in their looted homes, often were murdered by frenzied mobs. In one instance, an elderly Dutch couple had been hacked to death in their small villa: “The woman… had put up a desperate fight, her hands shredded by the knives, her blood sprayed in elegant arcs across the tiled walls. The man lay face downwards in the sitting room, his balding head almost severed from his body.”

The inability of the Western colonial powers to deal efficiently with social problems that the colonized people, left to their own devices, had occasionally proven better at solving further contributed to the Western loss of prestige in the former colonies. An example was the famine in Indochina, which was alleviated after the French authorities had been ousted in the spring of 1945 and replaced with an indigenous regime propped up by the Japanese. Immediately after assuming power, the colony’s new rulers introduced new measures to reduce speculation on the pricing of scarce rice supplies while improving the transportation of grains to the hunger-stricken provinces. “Brutal measures that we ourselves would not have ventured to take bring a momentary abundance,” a French writer reluctantly acknowledged, adding that the people of Indochina “have come to think very seriously that they are ripe to be a great nation.”

This was only reinforced when the Japanese left and handed back Indochina to the Western powers. Despite the improvement made in the spring, the food situation quickly turned desperate again. “Hanoi with a population of 200,000 inhabitants is literally dying of hunger,” a foreign observer wrote. “The worst situation is that of feeding the infants.” This was only partly the result of Western mismanagement. More importantly, Indochina experienced devastating flooding, with river levels in Hanoi reaching a historical record, but the prestige of the colonial authorities suffered yet another blow.

As in the East Indies, a protracted guerrilla campaign followed in Indochina, fueled by the population’s thirst for independence, and French determination to hold onto its prized possession. If France let go of this “admirable balcony on the Pacific,” it would no longer be a great power, a leading French politician said. The result was long years of bloodshed which gradually evolved into a full-scale conventional war, and only ended with the withdrawal of the French colonial rulers and the division of Indochina into two in 1954.

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Filed under Britain, France, Japan, military, nationalism, Netherlands, Southeast Asia, war

by | 8 July 2023 · 5:50 am

Indochina, 1945: Famine & Coup

From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 200-202:

The famine lasted for five months in early 1945 but its causes could be traced back to the year before, and similar to the mass starvation that had struck British-ruled India earlier in the war, it was the result of both natural calamities and official policies. Drought and insect attacks caused the spring harvest in 1944 to drop steeply below expectations, and the following autumn devastating typhoons cut down the agricultural output dramatically. The worst effects of the hunger disaster could have been mitigated if rice had been sent to the north from southern regions, where the crops were more plentiful. However, American bombing had destroyed bridges, railroads, and other infrastructure, and anyway both the Japanese army and the French colonial authorities, who were still in charge despite the presence of large Japanese forces, prioritized the transportation of their own military forces over vital food supplies for the civilian population. Between one and two million people died as a result of the 1945 mass starvation in Indochina. This overall figure covered vast regional variations, and in the worst hit areas of northern Indochina, society teetered on the brink of collapse.

…

The food scarcity also affected those inhabitants of Indochina who were not directly pushed to the limit by starvation, but still saw a precipitous drop in the standard of living due to steep prices in rice. The result was that the French colonial authorities became even more unpopular than before. The fact that the French administration had helped prevent the kind of mass conscription of forced labor that had happened in other parts of Japanese-controlled Asia mattered less. To many Indochinese it made a much deeper impression to see sharply dressed Japanese officers walk the streets of the major cities, in humiliating contrast to the often flabby-looking French colonial troops.

Therefore, there was widespread anticipation of better times when on March 9, 1945, the Japanese Army in Indochina took over control from the French colonial authorities in a swift coup. French officers were taken into custody, and their soldiers ordered to lay down their arms. Those who resisted were met with trademark brutality. A few French garrisons opposed the Japanese move, and in some cases extended firefights took place. At the end of the battles, French prisoners were bayoneted or beheaded. Defeated foreign legionnaires were forced to watch as Japanese soldiers hauled down the French flag, tore it to shreds, and stamped it into the ground. Rapes of French women were commonplace. Duong Thieu Chi, the official who had witnessed instances of cannibalism, was shocked to see a senior French colonial official be thrown to the floor by a Japanese captain and then beaten bloody with the hilt of a sword.

The new Japanese rulers took steps to improve the food supply, for example by handing out grain from public granaries under much publicity, and also ensured a fairer distribution of rice where it was needed. However, they were less enthusiastic about nationalistic sentiments in the population, who suddenly believed that colonialism might be a thing of the past, resulting in mass gatherings and strikes. “The defense of Indochina against the enemy outside the country will be completely ineffective if domestic order is not perfectly maintained,” the Japanese military authorities warned in a statement. The people of Indochina gradually came to understand that their new masters were perhaps not all that different from the old ones.

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Filed under Britain, food, France, Japan, Laos, military, U.S., Vietnam, war