Duckworth £18 pp272

If Robert Conquest’s thought were not so challenging, it would be easy to dismiss him as a colossus from a past age. Born in 1917, he counted Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin among his friends, and won fame as a poet as well as a historian. He traversed the whole political spectrum, joining the Communist party in 1937 and, in the 1980s, writing speeches for Margaret Thatcher. As an intelligence officer during the war he was posted to Bulgaria, and it was watching the post-war Soviet takeover there that disillusioned him with communism. The Great Terror, which he published in 1968, gave a ground-breaking account of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, and was furiously denounced by western intellectuals. He followed it, in 1986, with The Harvest of Sorrow, telling the story of the collectivisation of agriculture under Stalin, during which millions of peasants died of starvation. The persistent denial of Stalin’s crimes by the leftist intelligentsia was, he insisted, “an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale”.

Time has proved him right. After the opening of the Soviet archives under Gorbachev, Conquest published The Great Terror: A Reassessment, which showed that he had, if anything, underestimated the atrocities. His new book adds chilling details from recent archival research, but its eye is on the future not the past. What can we learn from the Soviet catastrophe, he asks, that will help us survive? 9/11 has brought home to us that “the world that Americans and other Westerners full of goodwill want to mount and ride, feed and pat, is not a sweet-tempered little pony but a huge vile-tempered mule”. How should we respond? The ideas he comes up with have all been aired elsewhere in his writings, but that makes The Dragons of Expectation a useful compendium of his thought, and it is also a cracking read.

His starting point is a distrust of all utopias, theories and abstractions. He blames the 18th-century continental enlightenment and the French revolution for spreading these evils among Europe’s thinking classes. Unfortunately, he notes, intellectuals always feel superior to ordinary citizens, so they are a prey to “intoxicating generalisations” that common sense would instantly dismiss. Usually, too, like the founders of Soviet communism, they are seized with an unshakeable sense of their own righteousness, which is the most lethal of human infections, and the most prolific source of slaughter, terror and savagery. It follows, he deduces, that America and the UK have nothing to learn from 300 years of continental political thought. Rather their model should be the British enlightenment, a slow growth dating back to the middle ages, that has evolved a “disorderly pluralist” society, underpinned by custom and the rule of law, which allows the maximum individual liberty, and consequently the greatest release of creative energy into humanly profitable fields.

This, for Conquest, is civilisation, and measured against it the rest of the world can be divided into “civilised, semi- civilised, and uncivilised (or decivilised) countries”. The enemies of civilisation can be identified as minds closed to tolerance and pluralism, as exemplified in Iraq and North Korea. Fanaticism is always uncivilised. So, too, is over-keenness on politics. “All the major troubles we have had in the last half century have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania”. He prefers apathy, and sees nothing wrong with 30% or 40% of the population not voting. Boredom with politics and politicians has saved Britain from the worst excesses of doctrinaire thought, and from the illusion that all problems have a “solution” that the state can put into effect. One of our few utopian mistakes, for Conquest, was the introduction of the National Health Service. Based on the “absurd assumption” that free health care would mean a great improvement in health, and, therefore, less demand for the service, it has, he observes, saddled us with limitless expenditure that no party knows how to handle.

This judgment, flung off casually in the course of an argument, is typical of Conquest’s fasten-your-seatbelts thinking. He has little time for the United Nations. Although it has been offered to the world as the highest representation of humanity, many of its member states are, he judges, uncivilised, and hold out no hope of becoming civilised in the future. Its debates are dominated by the “unreal, high-flown, old continental vocabulary”, which demands that declarations must be made about “human rights”, although it is taken for granted that about half the membership have no intention of conforming. It follows that it cannot be effective in preventing hunger, poverty and genocide. Conquest proposes instead, as an immediate stopgap, a new western alliance of the states that supported America and the UK in 2003. They should, he believes, use military force if necessary to bring rogue states to heel, and prevent the kind of barbarism seen recently in the Sudan. Such intervention will, he realises, be denounced as “imperialism”, but that word, like “fascism”, “racism” and others, is for him simply one of the “mind-blockers” that befuddle thought in utopian backwaters such as the UN.

However, the most monstrous modern outgrowth of utopianism is not, he believes, the UN but the EU. Ruinously expensive, riddled with corruption, and bureaucratic on a Byzantine scale, it aims, as he sees it, to build a “regulationist superstate” in pursuit of the kind of high, transcendental dreams that have always seduced ideologues. Britain should, he counsels, withdraw from it and join, in due time, a much looser association of English-speaking nations which he calls the Anglosphere. This would have a consultative council, with the USA appointing 49% of the members, and the rest divided between Britain, Canada, Australia, the Caribbean, and others. The association would be headed by the President of the United States, and the Queen would be incorporated with “some such title as ‘Queen in the Association’”. Its Foreign Policy and Military committees would have competence over the entire world, and would raise its own forces in order, for example, to prevent coups by pro-totalitarian elements.

All this sounds just as utopian as anything Conquest derides, and it calls to mind, indeed, the fantasies of HG Wells, who was similarly convinced of the superior civilisation of the English-speaking races. However, Wells, like Conquest, has been proved right by history — on such matters as overpopulation and the destruction of the planet’s natural resources. Besides, Conquest is careful not to present his ideas as a blueprint, just the way things might develop, “an exercise in political and cultural science-fiction”. He has a historian’s long perspective, usefully reminding us that in a couple of centuries, let alone a couple of millennia, all our cherished credos and politically correct assumptions may appear as primitive delusions. This is a book that leftist intellectuals should read a little of every day, being sure to breathe deeply and loosen any constrictive clothing beforehand.

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