 "Crucible Thirteen Months That Forged Our World")
Crucible Thirteen Months That Forged Our World
Jonathan Fenby
Simon & Schuster
Rs 699, 596 pages
As the world atomises under resurgent nationalism, trade wars threaten to reverse the steady integration of global economies, and climate change and terrorism present unique new challenges, history offers an instructive reminder of what is at stake. The twin disruptions of 2016 — Donald Trump’s election and the Brexit vote — provoked a deluge of books mourning the passing of liberal values and the post-Cold War consensus, all of them weighted with dire predictions. In contrast, Jonathan Fenby’s Crucible is a well-timed chronicle of a period when global politics was poised between great disaster and greater hope.
Mr Fenby’s history covers 13 months from June 1947 to June 1948, a period that, he says, “really did change the world, shaping much of it in a form that gives the period a lasting relevance for our day”. Looked at from the distance of 72 years, this is a striking period to choose. The hot war (World War II) had coagulated into the Cold War, and the world had entered the nuclear age. Most of Europe was in ruins even as, ironically, its colonial empires remained intact. China and Japan, the rising powers of the latter half of the 20th century, were torn by civil war and under occupation, respectively.
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At the end of the 13 months, new countries came into being with savage tragedies — India, Pakistan and Israel. Several colonies saw the start of movements that culminated in independence a few years later — Indonesia, Malaysia and Ghana; North Africa and Indo-China’s struggles for freedom began. South Africa discovered Apartheid. Most of East Europe was brought under Stalin’s cordon sanitaire. The era was bracketed by the opening discussions on the Marshall Plan — that seminal programme to revive western Europe, USA’s key overseas market, and pull it into the mutually beneficial alliance that Mr Trump is working hard to destroy — and the Berlin Airlift.
The book presents multiple and overlapping histories set on a very broad canvas. Mr Fenby’s global approach reminds us that the Cold War was not the sole defining development of the era. “Seeing this period through the prism of the Cold War is to distort events that determined the fates of hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa in ways that persist to this day. Reducing it to a trial of strength between countries led by Harry Truman and Josef Stalin is to ignore the extraordinary multiplicity of major developments across the globe and the way in which, at this stage at least, nationalism played a more important role in liberation struggles than allegiance to an ideological master in a far-away capital,” he writes.
Mr Fenby does not offer any new interpretation or analysis, but he is an engaging writer and a widely read one with a journalist’s eye for scene and colour. He imaginatively covers each month using the dramatic idiom with “Acts, “Scene” and “Cast” and closes each section with “Meanwhile,” a random listing of parallel political, social, sporting and cultural developments. His ability to tell a good story and evocative character sketches of the main actors spare the reader the tedium of a bald narrative history.
He reminds us how Harry Truman, thrust unprepared into the presidency at the sudden death of the charismatic Franklin Roosevelt, emerged as one of the post-war America’s better presidents. Truman made mistakes in his dealings with Stalin, of course, and had poor understanding of the nationalist aspirations of emerging Asia. But he was unafraid to delegate and his down-home style masked a shrewd grasp of the complex issues of the day. Selecting the statesman-like wartime chief of staff George Marshall as his Secretary of State proved a masterpiece of statecraft, and he suffered little insecurity in having the European Recovery Programme bear Marshall’s name.
We are entertained by snippets. Of how Nehru weighed into rioting crowds and appealed to them to stop the communal killings. Of how the taciturn Marshall told a State Department colleague that he had “no feelings, except a few which I reserve for Mrs Marshall”. Of Kim Song-ju, who established a lasting personality cult, renaming himself Kim Il-Sung meaning “Kim Becomes the Sun”, after the Soviets made him ruler of North Korea. Of the West-leaning Czech politician Jan Masaryk, murdered by secret police, who presciently told his American girlfriend, “One day they will kill me.”
Mr Fenby also reminds us of the serendipity that can change the course of history. Truman, for instance, had little patience with the demands for an Israeli state, even as the powerful Jewish lobby in America underwrote this project. “Jesus Christ on earth couldn’t make them happy, what do they expect me to do,” he once snapped to an aide. It was the intervention of a close personal Jewish friend that persuaded him to extend recognition for the new state, sealing the fate of millions of Palestinians and, indeed, West Asia ever since.
Mr Fenby’s previous histories have focused on Europe and China, so his assessments of those two regions are better than his treatment of other Asian and African developments. Indian readers may be frustrated by the limits of his description of the Kashmir controversy (he omits British chicanery and Nehru’s mistakes). But these are minor aberrations in a book that makes it possible to spot signs of history repeating itself as farce and/or tragedy.
