Geoffrey Hawthorn

Even at the end of his new book, it’s not clear where Edward Luttwak is coming from, as they say in his country. He leaves no doubt, however, about where he dreads coming to. Instead of being smoothed through ‘the spotless elegance of Narita or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Singapore’, the hapless international traveller who comes into New York’s Kennedy Airport will walk into one of the tatty terminals that near-bankrupt airlines no longer maintain, mildly surprised at the naked plywood and unfinished gypsum board. He will stand in line for an hour or two at passport control, perhaps more if several planes have arrived, as everyone knows they will, together. Already unhappy at his luggage having been thrown off the belt by angry handlers, he’ll have to present it to an unhelpful customs official. And if he’s not transferring to an internal flight, in which case he’ll have to suffer clerks tapping in his connection with one finger, more angry ground staff, and another broken walkway, he’ll emerge to be bounced over potholes, past decayed public housing and corners piled high with garbage, until his smoking bus or audibly unsafe taxi, ‘usually driven by an unkempt, loutish driver who resembles his counterparts in Kinshasa or Islamabad rather than London or Tokyo, where licensing requirements are strict and dress codes enforced’, drops him in front of the beggars outside his Manhattan hotel. Safe at last in the lobby, he will pause before choosing one of the tours that now offers a drive past the drug dealers on the streets of the South Bronx.

The project of ‘developing’ the South, the countries of Latin America and the poorer former colonies of Asia and Africa, dates, as a deliberate project, from the Forties and early Fifties. It showed its origins. Economically, development meant industry. Adam Smith and Marx, it was assumed, were right. Output could most effectively be raised by moving as quickly as possible to capital-intensive mass production. David Hume’s alternative, to think in terms of a ‘product cycle’, of simple agriculture at one end and advanced manufacture at the other, and to position oneself at the point at which one could make the most of one’s endowments and of trade with other countries, was all but forgotten. Politically, development meant a directive state. The countries of the North had themselves recovered from depression and mobilised for war by bringing their economies under direct political control. There seemed no good reason, after that war, to suppose that for its development the South should not do the same. Politicians in the South concurred. They wanted to catch up, and were happy to have strong powers to do so.

In The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which touched the anxieties of conservatives as well as liberals at the end of Reagan’s expensive two terms in the White House, Paul Kennedy suggested that like other great powers before it, the United States was dissipating the resources that had made it great. It was in ‘imperial overstretch’. And its political system, like that of Britain earlier in the century, would make the decline more difficult to stop. But Rise and Fall, a critic said to Kennedy at the Brookings Institution in Washington in 1988, was too conventional a book. It mistakenly supposed that the problems we faced were the problems of states, and that the solution to them, if solutions there were, were political.

For the past thirty years, New Left Review has been the most consistently interesting political journal in the country. And Perry Anderson, who used to edit it and still helps direct it, has been its consistently most interesting contributor. Like those who wrote for the two papers it replaced, the Communist New Reasoner and, later, Universities and Left Review, the contributors to New Left Review were provoked by the condition of what Tom Nairn called Ukania. But they distanced themselves from the old Ukanian Left. The country’s economy, they said, was in chronic decline, its politics were a comprehensive disaster, its society was stalled in defensive resentment, and there was no redemption to be had from what Anderson then saw as ‘the ferruginous philistinism and parochialism’ of its ‘long national tradition’. Sentimentally, he now recalls, they offended patriots (E.P. Thompson especially). ‘Intellectually, they disturbed canonical Marxist opinion, as transmitted from Capital. Politically, they nettled the Labourism of reformists and the ouvriérisme of revolutionaries.’

Ben Macintyre had a question that few of us have had to face. How do you start a conversation with a lost tribe of Aryans? Having sweated and bumped his way into northern Paraguay, just beyond the confluence of the Aguaraya-umi and Aguaraya-guazu, Macintyre had at last arrived at a small valley, on the far ridge of which were some shacks. ‘That,’ said the man who’d brought him on horseback from the river boat, ‘is Nueva Germania.’ Macintyre had come to look for descendants of the Saxons whom Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband had brought there in the 1880s. He put ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ into his Walkman – ‘to get myself in the mood’ – turned up the volume, took some food, and waited for an authentic German to show up. Soon one did, dismounted from his stallion, and introduced himself as Dr Schubert. It was time for the question. ‘What,’ Macintyre asked him, ‘are you doing here?’’