The New Faces of Battle - After Communism, three political strains - social democracy, national soverignty, and pro-regulation parties represent three main views in world politcs

National Review, July 9, 2001 by John O'Sullivan

One of the lighter and more instructive moments in the Gothenburg summit came over the dinner at which George W. Bush reportedly charmed his European counterparts into submission. It concerned, however, not Bush but a much more controversial figure in European circles-namely, the new center-right Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

"I am a happy man," Berlusconi said innocently, "because I have finally liberated Italy from Communism. They had barely 30 percent of the votes, but they really used to run the government."

Berlusconi's perfectly truthful gibe was aimed at his fellow diner, Romano Prodi, a former prime minister in the leftist Olive Tree coalition that included "reformed" Communists. Prodi was unceremoniously ejected from office some years ago to make room for a post-Communist prime minister and is now respectably installed as president of the European Commission. But as UPI's Roland Flamini tells it, Berlusconi also drew blood from the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, whose own coalition includes (not very reformed) French Communists. Jospin complained haughtily of the Italian's "vulgar intervention." And the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, asked to describe what impression Berlusconi had made on the summit, responded with a similar sniff: "I could do so, but I don't want to." In the end, Berlusconi himself began to retreat from his impolitic remark.

As Basil Fawlty might say: "Don't mention the genocide."

But Berlusconi's breach of political etiquette went beyond drawing attention to the fact that some of the prime ministers present were allied to parties that justified mass murder until very recently. He was also indirectly bringing up the touchy subject of their own recent past. Only a few years ago, Jospin himself defended the Soviet Union in the French Assembly against the charge in The Black Book of Communism that it had been guilty of crimes against humanity. And evidence emerged a few months ago that, contrary to his earlier denials, he was a member of a Trotskyist party in the 1970s. Fischer, also a radical leftist in the 1960s and '70s, has been similarly embarrassed by photographs that show him apparently in the act of kicking a downed policeman in a riot-and still more so by allegations from his former radical colleagues that he was an active sympathizer with the terrorist Left in those years.

It is hardly too speculative to suggest that if the Gothenburg summit had taken place in 1971, say, Jospin and Fischer would have been among those rioting against it. Indeed, they might well have been shot by the Swedish police. Not that they would have earned much sympathy for that. The European leaders in Gothenburg took the robust view that although it is wrong to execute convicted murderers in barbaric Texas, shooting unnamed demonstrators in the back is an understandable precaution in civilized Sweden. They were, after all, demonstrating not against Nixon or Pinochet but in the main against social democrats who have the future of humanity at heart.

And it can hardly be denied that there is a certain raw logic of power in this contention. As Marxists used to argue when explaining away the awkward fact that there was no right to strike under Communism: A right to strike would be a logical absurdity in a workers' state since "the workers would be striking against themselves."

Similarly, Jospin and Fischer might now explain to their dimmer successors in the streets: "Look, the long march through the institutions has succeeded. We leftists don't need to demonstrate in the streets since we are now sitting in ministerial offices and around international conference tables. We dictate everything from the content of history lessons in schools to the level of environmental regulation required for free trade. And if some unreconstructed rightist reminds us that once we condoned genocide or looked the other way when a bomb was planted, we put him firmly in his place until he apologizes nicely. Comrades, fold up your banners. You already live in a world regulated by planners and bureaucrats. You are demonstrating against yourselves."

Today's politics is not a battle between Left and Right, or between nationalists and internationalists, or even between libertarians and egalitarians, although debates are sometimes expressed in those terms. Domestically and internationally, it is a three-way struggle between three large interests:

1. A new international governing class of lawyers and bureaucrats who seek to impose a more or less uniform social and economic regulation on all countries. (Represented in Gothenburg by Jospin, Fischer, the Swedish premier Goran Persson, and other social-democratic leaders.)

2. Those who resist the spread of such all-encompassing regulation because they believe in market competition, national sovereignty, independent social agency, moral self-regulation, or all four. (Bush, Berlusconi, the Hungarian premier Viktor Orban, and other Central and Eastern European leaders with experience of "really existing socialism.")