It’s easy to forget how undemocratic Europe was 50 years ago

The subtitle of Simon Reid-Henry’s substantial work indicates its thesis: ‘The remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971–2017.’ The Cold War had started in 1945, and the author takes us through the upheavals of the 1960s before the advertised start of his narrative. He describes a western world that, by 1971, had undergone the student-led convulsions of 1968, and that, as well as facing challenges from the Soviet Union, China and their satellites, would have new ones to grasp: notably those presented by the 1973 oil crisis and the resulting delinquency of western treasuries as they sought not to disappoint societies — and electorates — used to rising real wages and the indulgences of consumerism.

Although this book is not always well-written it is extensively researched and wide in scope. Reid-Henry looks principally at Europe and America, but also at the democracies of what was once called the ‘White Commonwealth’ — Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He reminds us how, at the start of his period, democracies were rare: Europe was not merely severed by an Iron Curtain, but Greece was run by the Colonels, Spain by Franco and Portugal by Salazar. Outside the English-speaking world and north-western Europe there was little democracy; and his book is an account of democracy’s triumph, as Gorbachev lets the Soviet bloc go. The author does not explore the limited attempts to follow the doctrine in Latin America or India, something perhaps dictated by the need to keep this massive book within reasonable restraints; his definition of ‘the West’ is very much a Cold War one.

There is a problem with writing history without a long perspective, and this perhaps is the inevitable flaw of an exercise such as this. By far the most satisfactory and illuminating part of the book are those chapters dealing with the West before 1989, and notably the rise of radical conservatism under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; and it discusses the exception of François Mitterrand, and his failure to use a socialist approach to kick-start France’s economy after the difficulties of the 1970s ended les trente glorieuses.