Tony Judt, ed. Jennifer Homans, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995–2010 (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 400 pp., $29.95.

TONY JUDT came to be known to a large audience by his unsparing criticisms of the “war on terror” and his protest against the Israeli denial of equal rights and statehood to Palestinians. Both of those engagements took courage, the second more than the first. Judt was partly secured from the slander to which someone with his views would otherwise have been subjected, because he had a connection (by family at one remove) to the catastrophe of the European Jews. But in any setting, he would have been the first to scorn the professions of group solidarity required by identity politics. He hated the cant of secular tribalism as much as he hated political and religious fanaticism.

Judt grew up in England and spent the first years of his academic career in Cambridge and Oxford, but his perspective on modern history, and indeed his sense of himself, was that of a good European. He knew the distinctions of texture between Vienna, Prague and Milan with the finesse a New Yorker may bring to the finer points of SoHo, Murray Hill and Sutton Place. He owed this topographical mastery to the luck of a privileged childhood but also, as he would acknowledge in a memoir, to the system of trains that connected Europe in the postwar society of his teens and twenties. The trains and the termini that housed them—“these remarkable cathedrals of modern life”—could seem an emblem of the possible civic future of the European Union and the United States. America was for Judt an extension of Europe. He lived in this country happily without giving much study to the wildness of our history. Only the last decade of his writings, including some essays reprinted in this collection, registers a fresh stocktaking. One of the losses of his death is that we are now deprived of his further thoughts on America itself.

All of the essays in When the Facts Change belong to an extended later phase of Judt’s writings on contemporary history. While working on his major book, Postwar, he commented widely on politics and international affairs in articles for the New York Review of Books and other journals. The people he admired, his method of composition, the curious sense in which he committed Europe to memory—these aspects of his temperament are brought out with tact and a fine eye for detail in the introduction by his wife Jennifer Homans. Her sketch brings the reader close to a scholar who was elusive by temperament. For all his capability and forthrightness, Judt was a private, not a public, face.

These essays are written in a variety of tones. When Judt casts his eye over Europe and looks at its prospects for improvement, the manner is apt to be lofty and somewhat disdainful. He wrote in 1996:

The essence of the Franco-German condominium around which postwar Western Europe was built lay in a mutually convenient arrangement: the Germans would have the economic means and the French would retain the political initiative. In the early postwar years, of course, the Germans had not yet acquired their present wealth and French predominance was real. But from the mid-fifties this was no longer true; thereafter France’s hegemony in West European affairs rested upon a nuclear weapon that the country could not use, an army that it could not deploy within the continent itself, and an international political standing derived largely from the self-interested magnanimity of the three victorious powers at the end of the war.

The judicious posture and ironic address are insensibly blended here, as they sometimes were in the writings of George Lichtheim—a British scholar and commentator on similar subjects a generation ago whom Judt has generously acknowledged as an influence and exemplar. The manner is adapted to historical narrative as well as polemics, and Judt combined the two genres as skillfully as any writer of our time. Yet he is capable of asking with urgency, as he did in his 1996 essay “Europe: The Grand Illusion”: “If ‘Europe’ stands for the winners, who shall speak for the losers—the ‘south,’ the poor, the linguistically, educationally, or culturally disadvantaged, underprivileged, or despised Europeans who don’t live in golden triangles along vanished frontiers?” This is a different voice, but a voice familiar to readers of Judt’s causerie Ill Fares the Land: an impassioned appeal from capitalism to the ethics of socialism and the ends of democracy.

That book, a primer written for young people and a small masterpiece of its kind, was an important statement to come from a scholar largely known for his anti-Communist rigor. Some of Judt’s pieces from the late 1990s reflect his continuing preoccupation with his “choice of comrades” (Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Raymond Aron, Leszek Kolakowski, François Furet). There was no contradiction between his hostility to Communism and his belief in social democracy. Still, there was a puzzle. Judt was a latecomer to the polemics of the Cold War. Stalinist thugs had left no personal scar on his life. Though he took the opportunity to speak the truth against Communism as late as articles reprinted here from 1995 and 1998, it was by then a well-worn truth and not lacking in Western supporters. His passion was not exactly a “sacred rage.”

Rather, it drew upon the memory of other people’s rage and his own conviction that the generation of 1968 to which he belonged had (as he put it in The Memory Chalet) “missed the boat.” The real action had been in Eastern Europe: “Marxists? Then why weren’t we in Warsaw debating the last shards of Communist revisionism with the great Leszek Kolakowski and his students? Rebels? In what cause? At what price?” Indeed, Judt once grew so warm in defense of Kolakowski that (in an essay reprinted in his earlier collection Reappraisals) he deplored E. P. Thompson’s skeptical “Open Letter” to the Polish philosopher as an insult to the life of reason and conscience itself, and went on to say of Kolakowski’s response: “No one who reads it will ever take E. P. Thompson seriously again.”

So the measured utterance that marks Judt’s essays is not always an adequate index to the emotion underneath. “What Is to Be Done?,” the title of one article here, may be a shopworn phrase—it recurs elsewhere in the book—but Judt’s merely practical directives issue from a sense of duty that is secondary to his larger purpose. He was above all an analyst and a critic. In his well-tempered surveys of the state of contemporary Europe or the new thinking in economics, he is doing good work, but only his mind is in it. The heart of the book lies in his recognition that the main hopes for improvement in the civic life of humanity rest with Europe. This is a large source of his anger at the brutality of the neoconservatives who willfully tore up the compact between Europe and America. They seemed to present Europe with an arbitrary choice: march with the empire now, or quit our company forever.

 

JUDT WROTE against the war on terror from the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 until the end of his life in 2010. And in these pieces, an iron enters the prose that is new and unmistakable. The posture is no longer reverence for the heroes of European modernity accompanied by proper contempt for their enemies. It is horror at the insolence and ambition of a party bent on spoiling that inheritance. Two essays, in particular, published early in the new century analyze and denounce the Israeli refusal to accord full political rights to the Palestinians. No explicit connection is offered, yet these will seem to many readers part of the same argument as Judt’s warnings about the war on terror. Perhaps by 2010 they belonged to the same story in the mind of Judt himself. Homans tells us that he withheld from publication a long essay on Israel (printed here) in the belief that the subject finally had become intractable. One reason for this deterioration may have been the way the presence of Israel in American politics was cemented by the war on terror.

The first of Judt’s notable shorter essays on Israel-Palestine, published in May 2002, urged Israel to pursue negotiations in order to assure a “final settlement” and the emergence of an independent Palestinian state. The second, published seventeen months later, saw Israel as having passed the point of no return for the two-state solution and spelled out “the alternative”: a single state, comprising Jews and Palestinians as equal citizens. The latter argument is informed by a pessimistic vision of the new “facts on the ground”: the sheer size of the Jewish-Israeli settler colony in the West Bank, the oppressive effects of the occupation wall on the daily lives of Palestinians and the unabated influence of the Israel lobby in the larger decisions of American policy. “We are now,” says Judt in October 2003 (and by “we” he means the United States) “making belligerent noises toward Syria because Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been moved there—a claim for which there is no corroborating evidence from any other source.” It took nerve to write this essay—anger, too—and its sharpness may owe something to an authority Judt possessed from having lived and worked in Israel in his early years. But one is always startled by a writer who can face unpleasant facts and speak them in clear words; the judgment issued in “Israel: The Alternative” is all the more striking because it is so plain. Israel, writes Judt,

remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethno-religious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews—is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.

The timing of the essay also took courage: October 2003, the irresistible height of the American celebration of victory in Iraq—victory by the sole superpower over any obstruction in its path. But how did Judt reason his way to this analysis? Had the facts of Israeli politics changed so suddenly? The title of this collection comes from a saying of John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?” A characteristic remark by a superior wit, and doubtless it stung; but the comment can be made to bear a morally lazy meaning that neither Keynes nor Judt intended. The facts, of course, do matter to an honest observer and, as Max Weber pointed out, the mark of a dishonest scholar is the suppression of inconvenient facts. But the mind also acts on principles that are prior to, and not reflexively changeable by, facts. Thus a defender of Soviet Communism in 1937, when shown convincing evidence that the Moscow trials were rigged with a tissue of lies, forgeries and coerced confessions, ought to have changed his mind about the nature of the Soviet system; but if the newly enlightened witness had found no previous clue that something was wrong with the system, he would have lacked an insight to spur his comprehension of the facts. A prodigy at the pure digestion of facts would have been inclined to believe the evidence of the trials—an exercise of credulity that many Western admirers of Stalin had no trouble performing.

 

FAR FROM tracing the profile of facts, Judt wrote and acted from certain principles of judgment; with a historian’s modesty, he brought them to light in an unmethodical way. His mostly encouraging prognosis for Europe in Postwar was founded on his belief that the biggest obstacle to enlightened progress after 1945 was Soviet Communism. This sense of things lasted well into the Clinton years, as his 1997 essay “Why the Cold War Worked”—a review of John Lewis Gaddis’s triumphalist history We Now Know—reveals in considerable detail. And yet, returning nine years later to a book by the same author on the same subject and expressing the same viewpoint, Judt (in a 2006 essay included in Reappraisals) sounded a very different note: “In Africa, as in Latin America, the cold war was a clash of empires rather than ideologies. Both sides supported and promoted unsavory puppets and surrogates.” He went on to speak of the destructive “proxy confrontations” between the United States and the Soviet Union “from Central America to Indonesia,” a “continuous accompaniment to the cold war” which encompassed “the mass killings of hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Guatemala.” Both empires were now held to account; a historian was blamable for not weighing the violence on both sides. Further, according to Judt, Gaddis had refused “to make the link between the cold war and what has happened since.” Notice that this was not a case of the facts changing. On the history of the Cold War, roughly the same facts were available to Gaddis and Judt in 1997 and 2006. What had changed was the salience of one set of facts in the mind of Tony Judt. And this was caused by the light cast by a later history on the structure, the motivation and the characteristic coloring of earlier events.

In interpreting American power from 1945 to 2003, one popular narrative starts the account with the Berlin airlift and carries it through the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the successful stalemate in Berlin and the reduction of Soviet influence in Africa, and winds it up with the fall of Soviet Communism, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the creation of an independent Kosovo. This chain of events can be plausibly explained as all of a piece, the coherent expression of a wise policy executed by a succession of U.S. administrations. But a quite different emphasis is also possible. Start the account instead with the American continuation of the Vietnam War after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and accord a large importance to a large event—the ferocious decade-long war in Vietnam, commanded by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, which killed between a million and three million Vietnamese; follow with the American bankrolling of the mujahideen in Afghanistan “to give the Russians their Vietnam,” the interventions by Ronald Reagan in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the eastward push of NATO by Clinton and the younger Bush, and finally the war on terror with its ambiguous record in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The second version may seem to an impartial observer as persuasive as the first. The bias of a given history toward one version or the other depends on which way the historian casts his eye.

As this collection makes clear, the alignment of the facts began to change for Judt around 2002. But the effects are not registered all at once. A review of Joseph Nye’s Paradox of American Power, written in August 2002, takes the reliance on “soft power” to be the prevailing wisdom of American policy after 1945, a preference that fits with “common sense, and would have seemed that way to every postwar American administration from Harry Truman to George Bush Sr.” How true is this? Dwight Eisenhower ended the war in Korea and avoided the Suez debacle of 1956, but he also sent the first American military advisers to South Vietnam. John F. Kennedy allowed the Bay of Pigs invasion to go forward until its disastrous opening hours signaled defeat, and took the world to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962 in the worst of all hard-power confrontations. Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic and permitted the heedless slaughter of civilians in free-fire zones in Vietnam—an engagement in which the avowed purpose of defending Southeast Asia from the spread of Communism hid the privately acknowledged purpose of avoiding loss of face. If one adds just a few of the many instances of violent CIA operations known to presidents and not countermanded by them, the list grows much longer: Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 are only the beginning. The largely forgotten U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989—whose motives were explained in a sketchy and haphazard way by George H. W. Bush—aimed to prove the efficiency of American arms in a post–Cold War environment. It prepared the way for the 1991 Gulf War, a war the younger Bush imagined he was honorably completing in 2003.

From this point of view, it does not look as if soft power was the “common sense” basis of U.S. policy until the neoconservatives discarded it. And one may say so with a full awareness of the exorbitance of the neoconservative ambition: the visionary militarism of officials and opinion makers such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas J. Feith, Max Boot and Reuel Marc Gerecht certainly marks an extreme, but it was an extreme not unfamiliar to John Foster Dulles. Violent imposition of the American will in international affairs has been a constant temptation since Korea, and a temptation seldom resisted when the cost for the United States seemed local and finite. After the fear of Soviet reprisals disappeared in 1990, the military solution became increasingly the rule, whether it called its cause the destined spread of democracy or the defense of NATO or the “responsibility to protect” borne by a coalition of the willing.

 

MILITARISM, AS a fact of American politics and foreign policy, comes up for the first time in When the Facts Change in an essay published in 2005. It enters Judt’s argument by way of his respectful quotation of “a very senior and rather conservative Spanish diplomat”:

We grew up under Franco with a dream of America. That dream encouraged us to imagine and later to build a different, better Spain. All dreams must fade—but not all dreams must become nightmares. We Spanish know a little about political nightmares. What is happening to America? How do you explain Guantánamo?

By 2008, Judt is evidently shaken, and he says in his own voice that the adventurism of U.S. policy comes from ignorance of the suffering caused by war. As he now recognizes, this is a deficiency that may go further back than 2001, and he speaks of American force projection as a warning rather than an example:

The United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the United States surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the United States and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

Yet, in 1998, Judt approved of the Dayton Accords as a transparently generous undertaking; he spoke then of his incredulity at a Balkan intellectual who imputed to the United States a selfish motive: “The idea that the United States, or any other Western power, should have the remotest intention of ‘getting a foothold’ in the Balkans had never crossed my mind.” Why had it not crossed his mind? Getting a foothold is what great powers do for as long as they expand; they fear the loss of greatness if they stop expanding. A foothold was indeed obtained by the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia over eleven weeks in 1999, and it resulted in the erection of Camp Bondsteel—today the largest U.S. base in the Balkans, and an asset that has been used to hide detainees in the war on terror.

Nor has the search for a foothold ever slackened. The Obama administration went to war in Libya, escalated the drone war, started a new military campaign in Iraq and Syria, and is currently weighing direct military assistance to Ukraine. Despite the transition from Bush to Obama, there is scant evidence that the underlying aims of American foreign policy have changed in the passage from an “extreme” Republican to a “moderate” Democratic presidency. As the original Wolfowitz Doctrine, enunciated in the 1992 “Defense Planning Guidance,” put it in the aftermath of the Gulf War:

First, the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

Between a common sense that favors diplomacy and the expansionist vision outlined above by Wolfowitz, it is the latter that has emerged as the dominant force in American policy.

 

TONY JUDT’S driving affections come out in this book in his eulogies for Amos Elon, Furet and Kolakowski, all of whom he admired for reasons inseparably intellectual and moral. The essays collected here, in sum, testify to Judt’s attachment to a whole way of life, a climate of feeling he once took for granted but which he saw receding. It may be characterized as the way of life made possible by the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and brought into practical politics by the extension of the franchise in the nineteenth century. The ethic of freedom, solidarity and gradual improvement, on which Hume and Mill and Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant agreed, still seems to embody for Judt the best of the human inheritance. Yet he was not fond of looking back. The most laudable exertions of the twentieth century, as he saw it, partook of the same idealism; the results are visible all around and they have earned our gratitude. Judt has in mind the understanding of human and social dignity on which the welfare state is based, and the invention of the modern city as a place of civil relations among friends and strangers. Unfashionably for a Western academic, Judt in his last years came to regard the United Nations as the strongest hope for preserving a residue of that idealism. He believed that for all its tangle of bureaucracy and its wars of prestige between the small, medium and big shoulders in the world of nations, the UN offered the only possible agency for international understanding and relief of the disasters brought by global warming.

When it came to picking a personal touchstone to suggest the value of modern life to him, Judt chose a thing so incidental that most people would hesitate to assign it a spiritual value. Two lovely and unexpected essays in When the Facts Change are given to a celebration of the railway system of Europe. It seems to him one of the glories of modern life; on this subject, Judt is uninhibited. He praises the 1946 postwar movie Brief Encounter, a romantic melodrama set in a drab provincial station, and to account for its glamour he points to “the transcendent authority of the timetable, the configuration of the station and its location in town and community, the physical experience and plot significance of steam and cinders,” all the phenomena of the modern setting which for the characters “represent risk, opportunity, uncertainty, novelty, and change.” Life is lived for the sake of such things, he supposed, and like all genuine historians, he spoke for the things he feared were vanishing.

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Belknap Press, 2014).

Image: Rebecca M. Miller