This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part Two begins early in the twentieth century, as older ways of doing things and habits of thought give way. What follows is an era of cataclysmic struggles over what ideas and institutions will take their place. The course concludes in the present day, as communities everywhere are transitioning into a new era of world history. Again we work hard to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? Again we are drawn to pivotal choices made at key moments by individuals and communities.
The Weary Establishment
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来自 University of Virginia 的课程
现代世界，第二部分：1910 年后的全球史
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从本节课中
Decay and Renaissance (1968-1991)
与讲师见面
Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Hi, welcome back.
Make yourself comfortable. In this presentation, you'll see why the
1970s was a tough time to be an authority figure.
Let's look at the wary establishment by starting off with the status quo.
The status quo had these creaky managerial states we'd been talking about.
A sense among a lot of people that
socialists, capitalists, they are all these big
ministries, big bureaucratic entities, they're all
engaged in this competition, military competition
that just feeds the governments, feeds the corporations, they are all alike.
Meanwhile, the economic models of social democracy and socialism and
throughout the Third World were beginning to run into trouble.
One of the first phenomena worth noticing is
what economists call the Great Inflation of the 1970s.
One way to visualize that Great Inflation is this chart prepared by
economist Christina Romer and published in the bulletin of the Federal Reserve Bank
of St. Louis.
If you just look at the 1970s, you can see the levels of
inflation in five of the leading countries all moving into the double digit realm.
What's going on here?
A couple of things are going on.
First, the governments are just spending a lot of money, printing money, in order to
try to not only meet social services
and maintain military spending, like the United States
during the Vietnam War, but also because they're
trying to combat increasing unemployment with government spending.
They believe in a rigid relationship between inflation and unemployment.
They believe, because that was the
conventional economic orthodoxy of the time, that
if inflation goes up, unemployment is bound to come down, and vice versa.
Since they want to combat unemployment, they tolerate
increased inflation, they think it's okay to spend
more money even if that devalues the currency.
But it turns out that relationship isn't as rigid as they thought.
You can have both high inflation and high unemployment,
and all these governments discover that fact in the 1970s.
Another factor that's leading to the great inflation is a
spike in oil prices in the early 1970s and the late
1970s, I'll touch on in a moment.
But before we get to that, another key factor in
the economic breakdown is the end of the Bretton Woods financial system.
Just to remind you a bit of some
of that international financial history we covered, I
think I talked a little bit about World
Money 1.0 as being a gold exchange standard,
especially between about 1870 and 1914, and then rebuilt
a little after World War I until it finally collapsed.
And then in the aftermath of World War II, we get World Money 2.0.
That's the Bretton Woods System.
What's that?
That's really a gold dollar standard, in which you both have gold as
an anchor, but then you can print dollars that everyone can rely on.
But the United States finds that its overseas spending, importing goods
from other countries, spending money to
sustain its forces and commitments overseas,
they're having trouble maintaining the value of the dollar.
They would have to do things like hiking interest rates that they don't
want to do in order to maintain the value of the dollar against gold.
Finally, they just decide to break the gold
dollar standard and the Bretton Woods System in 1971.
Okay, so then you might ask, well, what takes its place?
Answer for a while: nothing really takes its place.
The currencies go into kind of a free
float against each other, with no hard anchor.
That too contributes to the great inflation and a lot
of uncertainties in international trade,
because currency values are fluctuating more
against each other. In 1973-74 comes the first oil shock.
There's a relatively small number of oil producing
countries as you can see from this map.
In 1973, seizing on a political crisis with another Arab-Israeli war
in the Middle East, the oil producing countries flex their muscles.
They jack up the price of oil in a cartel.
And that has reverberations,
especially in the big oil importing countries, but, by the way,
will also affect all the countries in the less developed world too.
At the end of the 1970s, again picking up off a scare caused by the Iranian
Revolution of 1978 and 1979, oil prices make another big jump.
That rise in the prices of a key commodity in the world economy also contributes
to the Great Inflation.
So it's worth taking a moment and just reflecting on what all
these sorts of problems would mean for models of modernization like ISI.
Remember, that was import-substitution
industrialization, practiced by countries like Brazil.
Or export-oriented industrialization, practiced by countries
like Japan or South Korea. Or for
the more socialist models.
Why would this be trouble for an ISI-type system?
Well, you have to buy imports.
You hope you can keep the amount of money
you need to buy imports down, but if you're importing
a good amount of oil and the price of
oil triples, you need more money to buy that oil.
Well, how are you going to get it?
Because if the price of necessary imports
goes up, and import substitution approach doesn't have strong export products,
you've sheltered your own domestic industries from foreign competition,
they're not producing their goods at a price or
quality that has had to be competitive in foreign markets,
so you can't rapidly ramp up your exports in order to buy the oil you now need.
What do you then do about that problem?
You still need to buy the oil.
You may even want to give your people more subsidies, so
they can pay those higher oil prices without much domestic unrest.
The answers are going to be, you're going to
start printing money to solve problems like these.
And the answer for a country like Brazil then was increasingly endemic
inflation leading to hyperinflation and a breakdown in the value
of Brazilian currency, and eventually, the breakdown of Brazilian economic growth.
Similar patterns were seen in other
countries that had followed models like this.
Okay.
So why would these economic troubles be a problem for an export-oriented economy?
Remember, these are economies that have
depressed their domestic standard of living
in order to keep their exports cheap,
in order to enrich the people, the companies, that
are making these exports and their allies in the government.
But what if problems in importing countries like the United
States, like Western Europe, means their demand for import falls.
Then you're, not only are you depressing the living standards of your
own people, you're taking in less money as an offsetting compensation for that.
Your political problems might get
even worse.
You can imagine greater tensions between historic allies like the United States and
Japan, the United States and South Korea,
and that's definitely there during the 1970s.
So, lots of economic troubles, including
international economic tensions, what does it mean?
Fraying ties among allies, the routinization of rivalries among enemies.
Meanwhile in the early
1970s, the United States suffers the appearance of
a catastrophic failure, a defeat, in the Vietnam War.
The United States had gotten its troops out of Vietnam.
It had helped sign a treaty at the
beginning of 1973, but the treaty breaks down.
Meanwhile, the fed up US Congress won't
support more military assistance to South Vietnam.
North Vietnam overruns South Vietnam.
The Vietnam War is over.
It looks and feels like a huge American defeat.
It feels like American power is in retreat, maybe in decline.
The country is divided at home.
Meanwhile, it looks to the outside world like the Soviet
Union is just getting stronger and stronger in the 1970s.
Although quietly, behind the scenes, socialism
is having some serious economic problems
of its own.
But, you might ask, isn't it a good thing that the
tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States have relaxed?
Didn't people feel like with this relaxation of
tensions, with detente, things were getting much better?
After all, the sides seemed to be practicing a kind of peaceful coexistence.
Here's Nixon and Brezhnev having regular summit meetings, talking freely
about each other's concerns.
But what the world also has is a sense of routine, managed conflict.
For a sense of the peculiar balance in the detente of 1972 between the
Soviet Union and the United States, take a look at this Time Magazine cover.
This's 1972, so you have President Richard
Nixon on the right, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev
on the left, and they're shaking hands.
They're getting along, you see Nixon has just received
a whole suitcase bulging with money and even an
olive branch representing peace because the Americans have just
sold a whole lot of wheat to the hungry Russians.
Commercial relationships and friendship. Now both men, as
you see, have something hidden behind their back.
Just an armful of missiles and guns and arrows, all the implements of war.
Right there too.
But they're trying to manage their conflict, routinize their conflict.
That fellow you see in the far right,
that's the Democratic senator Henry Jackson, called Scoop Jackson.
He doesn't think the United States and the Soviet Union should be getting along
so well.
He thinks the United States should be
confronting the Soviet Union a little bit more.
But, they're going ahead with trying to manage all of this.
Two great powers trying to routinize their rivalry.
And you see things aren't all dismal in the world:
Time Magazine is calling attention to a brand new invention, you
see there in the bottom right hand corner, these newfangled string bikinis.
There are some obstacles to detente, to a happy relaxation of tensions.
Well, like what?
They�ll have some real problems in domestic support for this.
Well, why would that be a problem?
Because the government is saying in effect,
well, you just need to be realistic.
We're the two great powers.
We need to just adjudicate these conflicts
and disputes among us, that's the realistic path.
But on the
one hand, it seems like you're betraying
the ideals that your country is standing for.
And on the other side, it might look like, yes,
and you're making conflict and competition a matter of accepted routine.
And also the process and style in both United States and Soviet Union of managing
these super power conflicts and having quiet discussions
of how to sort things out, seemed incredibly
secretive, deceptive to the outside world.
So there's a lot of domestic criticisms of that.
And it does tend to reinforce the argument that, you
know what, the two big superpowers are kind of alike,
and the rest of the world is trapped in their rivalry and their little games.
To give you some sense of the idealistic argument, notice
the way Time Magazine is calling attention to the plight of
these interesting Soviet intellectuals.
Writers who are trying to expose the way Soviet totalitarian rule has worked.
Here in this cover story of 1968 on Russia's
dissident intellectuals, you see the ice is slowly thawing.
That's allowing the release of
this numbered Soviet prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
who you see now portrayed almost as the
lonely prophet, the Jeremiah of the Soviet regime in 1974, writing a gigantic book on
the Gulag Archipelago, exposing the Soviet slave labor
system, in which Solzhenitsyn had been a prisoner.
But domestic concerns, domestic unease with this
managed conflict regime, isn't the only problem.
Another problem is that it's hard for them to really reduce the threat.
For instance, the two sides have different kinds of military forces.
In Europe, Soviet army is much larger.
But then that's supposed to be offset by NATO
advantages in technology, in nuclear weapons.
But NATO's defense strategy means that if
the Soviets successfully attack and are overrunning Western
Europe, NATO has to be willing to be the first countries to use nuclear weapons.
So that seems like a kind of unstable way of preserving the nuclear balance.
Is the United States really willing to risk a global nuclear war,
to sacrifice Chicago to save Hamburg?
There's also a nuclear asymmetry since the arsenals of the two sides are different.
The Soviets have a huge force of heavy land based missiles, highly accurate.
The Americans rely much more on their bombers, on their submarines.
So the Americans fear the Soviets have
the temptation to strike first with their highly
accurate missiles.
The Soviets fear that the Americans will use their buildup
at air and at sea to present them with
a nuclear danger because after all, doesn't NATO threaten to
start a nuclear war if there is a war in Europe?
So my main point here is that the
military balance might seem stable on the surface, but
to people who are looking at it in the
governments of the two sides, it didn't really seem
all that stable.
They still saw significant threats in the dynamic of military competition.
A third obstacle to getting a real relaxation
of tension that could bring the Cold War to
an end was the ongoing struggles in the
Third World between the proxies of the two sides.
Both sides complaining that the other was seeking unilateral advantage
in the conflicts of the Middle East, between Arabs and Israelis.
In Indochina, even after North Vietnam won its war and became the unified country
of Vietnam, renaming Saigon into Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
finds itself in a conflict with Chinese-dominated Cambodia.
Vietnam even invades Cambodia, putting an end to
the genocide being conducted by that communist regime.
The Chinese, angrily, invade Vietnam from the north and
fight a brief inconclusive struggle there in early 1979,
so more fighting in Indochina. And Africa is
becoming much more of a theater for Cold War proxy wars during the 1970s.
In Southern Africa, there, for example, is a civil war in the new country of Angola.
In that civil war, the United States secretly
backs one side, the Soviets secretly back another.
The Soviets escalate the play.
Tens of thousands of regular Cuban troops are airlifted into Angola,
in order to make sure their preferred side wins the civil war.
In the Horn of Africa, which we see depicted
up here, there's also a new Cold War contest.
The ancient empire of Ethiopia had been supported by the West
in the 1970s, early 1980s. The Soviets
were supporting a military dictatorship here in Somalia,
as the two sides were tussling over who would control this region.
Oh, but wait. Socialists overthrow the emperor.
There's a coup in which there's now a pro-socialist government in Ethiopia.
The Soviets and their Cuban and East German allies switch sides.
Thousands of Soviet and East European military advisers flow into Ethiopia,
now helping them fight Somalia, and the Somalis
are now getting help from the United States.
In Central America, a civil war inside
Nicaragua also becomes a cold war proxy conflict:
one side getting help from the Cubans, another side getting help from
the Americans, and that civil struggle then extends to El Salvador as well
and rebellions against the brutal right wing dictatorship in
Guatemala long backed by the United States.
And finally, the 1970s conclude with the Soviet
invasion and occupation of the country of Afghanistan.
You might ask yourself for a moment, why in the
world would the Soviets want to invade and occupy Afghanistan?
Soviet allies had been in charge in Afghanistan,
but, for Afghan reasons, that had degenerated into a
civil war.
The Soviets feared, irrationally it seems, because there was
no real factual basis for it, that the Americans
would take advantage of that civil war and get
involved in helping the other side in the Afghan war.
To preempt that kind of American intervention,
which hadn't even occurred, the Soviets decide
that to defend themselves, they need to
invade and occupy Afghanistan, beginning with a landing
by Soviet paratroopers and the killing of the Afghan head of state.
But to the Americans and to a lot of the world, the notion that the Soviets
are doing this defensively, out of fear of
an imaginary American intervention, doesn't seem to make sense.
They have their interpretation, which is this is
a part of an onward march of Soviet
conquests that might even be headed towards taking
advantage of the turmoil in Iran and even
moving towards the Persian Gulf.
So to take stock of this, the domestic
economic models are sputtering, international tensions are getting a
lot worse, and at home in these countries, East
and West, conditions deteriorate even more in the 1970s.
Let's take a look at how postwar boom is turning into bust.
Next time.
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