And Now, the '30s Look in Politics

Having influenced fashion and the movies, something like the '30s look has returned to the political life of the Western world. Not since the querulous prewar years, certainly, have there been so many wobbly governments, imperiled leaders and shattered traditions in Western Europe and North America. Last week alone, a series of coincidental developments posed the astonishing prospect of almost overnight change in the mind and manners of several key governments, with deep implications for East-West detente and other matters of high policy.

In the U.S., the beginning of formal presidential impeachment hearings before a committee of Congress brought a time of fateful decisions regarding Richard Nixon's presidency. At the same time, a number of U.S. allies found themselves dealing with abrupt changes:

> In West Germany, a spent and moody Willy Brandt stepped down after five years as Chancellor, deepening the shadows over the future of both detente and the European Community.

> In France, the race for the presidency settled down to a bitter struggle between Socialist Francois Mitterrand, the candidate of the left, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the candidate of the right and center. No matter who wins, the election could mark the end of Gaullism. The voters' decision could also upset the internal stability that had given France much of the strength it had used so effectively within the European Community for a generation.

> In Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau's minority government fell from power after a vote of no confidence on its budget policies. Canadian voters may return another minority government--possibly Trudeau's Liberals again, possibly the opposition Tories--in an election scheduled for July 8.

Even before last week's surprises (see following stories), the West seemed to have become a kind of political basket case. In Britain, Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson's minority government clings tenuously to power 2 1/2 months after a bitter, standoff election that top pled Edward Heath's Tories but seemed to show mainly that the voters have little confidence in either majority party. In Italy, no one seems to care very much whether Premier Mariano Rumor's two-month-old center-left regime, which is the 36th government the country has had since the war, makes it through the spring. Belgium and The Netherlands have feeble minority governments that could go under at any time.

In Portugal, the public euphoria that followed the overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship is gradually giving way to an atmosphere of uncertainty and some political tension. Denmark's minority government could fall this week when the legislature votes on a controversial proposal to slash welfare benefits. Even tiny Iceland, once an island of stability 500 miles from Britain out in the North Atlantic, has caught the spreading governmental malaise. After the country's ruling three-party coalition split up last week over how to deal with a rate of inflation that could reach 42% this year, Premier Olafur Johannesson dissolved Parliament and called for new elections on June 30.

In the past 15 months, there has been a change of leaders in all but one of the nine nations of the European Common Market; the lone survivor is Pierre Werner of Luxembourg. It is a matter of debate as to how Moscow reads the auguries. Surely the West's weakness at the top cannot be welcome to Soviet Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, who has staked his hopes for detente largely on his personal dealings with Nixon, the departed Brandt and the late French President Georges Pompidou.

The disease of political instability is not limited to Europe. In Israel, Premier-elect Yitzhak Rabin is struggling to form a coalition government capable of taking his divided and war-disillusioned nation into a new era. In Australia, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was forced to call new elections this week. In Japan, meanwhile, Premier Kakuei Tanaka seems to be slipping steadily in public opinion and within his Liberal Democratic Party.

Harvard Professor of Government Stanley Hoffmann finds similarities in the shaky political situation to the Depression 1930s in that it is "a time when you have weak majorities and no strong leaders." One crucial difference is that while leaders are under fire almost everywhere, relatively few people are calling--at least so far--for fundamental changes in the democratic system. Today, says Professor Heinrich Winkler of Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg, "the parliamentary system as such has not failed."

But few Western electorates would be that kind to their leaders. Though the local dissatisfactions range from fears about inflation to the aftershock of a sobering war in Israel, there is a general fading of optimism in the industrial nations. If there is a common denominator in the West's political problems it is that voters--and leaders --are beginning to be aware that a long period of nearly uninterrupted economic growth has virtually come to an end. Says Columbia University Historian Fritz Stern: "For 25 years a steadily expanding economy protected Europe from major upheavals. Young radicals might thunder against the consumer society, against the endless boredom that comes with bourgeois life, but the workers of Europe found embourgeoisement an exhilarating experience."

Untold Truths. While it continued, economic growth solved domestic social problems almost automatically; this allowed the postwar titans to play their roles--Adenauer to bring a shattered Germany back into the West, De Gaulle to play savior to a nation torn first by war and then by withdrawal from Algeria. Yet over the past year or two, real growth in the industrial nations has faded. It has been replaced by mere inflation--now vastly stimulated by the rising cost of oil and other natural resources. As growth disappears, social issues reemerge. Britain, where a coal miners' strike over government wage guidelines led to a bitter election last February, may have the dubious distinction of being the first to experience the kind of political showdown over economic policy that may well spread to other European countries.

British Historian Arnold Toynbee, now 85, recently warned that even though growth has come to a halt, "few politicians have yet dared to tell the truth to their constituents." But, he adds, "the truth is declaring itself in ways that cannot be ignored"--in the form of shrinking dollars, pounds and francs, and rising unemployment. Oxford Defense Analyst Alastair Buchan agrees that there is--and should be--a certain "crisis of confidence in government." But he also believes there is "a larger doubt about the governability of society in general. I think that the 1950s to the 1970s will some day look like an aberrant era of extraordinary growth. It is going to seem very much like the Belle Epoque of 1895 to 1914. I don't think that means we are heading for a major war, but we are in for some very nasty social adjustments."

Some argue that the spread of weak or ineffectual minority or coalition governments reflects the inadequacy of politicians. Says Harvard's Hoffmann: "There is a sense the electorate has in many countries that leaders just do not have answers to questions like inflation and the energy situation, nor are the older ideological parties adapted to these current problems." The future of democracy, Hoffmann suggests, will hinge on "whether governments are able to deal with inflation and the formidable questions of energy price rises."

In such a situation, many observers see the disappearance of classic charismatic leaders and the rise of economics-wise technocrats-- Helmut Schmidt in West Germany, possibly Valery Giscard d'Estaing in France--as a positive sign. For all the turnover at the top levels of government, notes Princeton Historian Carl E. Schorske, there is no sign of political upheaval in the West. Right now, he says, "what you have is a crisis of administrators rather than a crisis of statesmen."

Even so, there is reason to doubt whether even the most gifted politician-administrators are adequate to the complex tasks that confront them. Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell worries about a basic structural inadequacy in Western governments: "We confront an increasing number of problems and we do not have the mechanisms to solve them. Everything gets thrown now into the political cockpit so that the political system gets overburdened. When things that were outside the political arena get thrown into it--health, education, business--you get overloading. More conflicts are generated, and that creates problems for political leaders."

The profusion of such tough but mundane challenges inevitably generates a certain nostalgia for simpler times and more glamorous leadership. That impulse is scarcely realistic. What leader, after all, can be terribly glamorous at a time when inflation is bubbling up into double figures? Says Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., one of the intellectual outriders of John Kennedy's Administration: "Being a leader in any country --whether advanced or undeveloped, a dictatorship or a democracy--is no great fun these days. All industrial societies face intractable problems that the leadership is not capable of coping with."

Cataclysmic Worries. In their private moments, at least some of the world's leaders might be tempted to agree. Only last March an article in the West German magazine Der Spiegel quoted an aide to Willy Brandt as saying that the Chancellor "sees everything breaking apart." Brandt was said to have decided unhappily that changes of governments had become meaningless spectacles, that real power was more and more in the hands of big corporations and other interest groups. The result could be increasing extremism on both the left and the right. If this went on unchecked, Brandt was said to worry, parliamentary democracy in Western Europe could disappear in 20 or 30 years.

Brandt has since disowned the article--purportedly based on excerpts from his secret diaries--although not very convincingly. Whether or not the quoted excerpts were authentic, that kind of cataclysmic approach did seem to reflect the doubts and disappointment of a visionary leader who had remained in power beyond his time. Not that vision is outmoded. But perhaps the real question today is how a new generation of pragmatic, technocratic leaders can make democratic government work better in an era in which the pivotal concerns of politics are complex mat ters of economics and international cooperation.

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