A Conversation with Raymond Aron
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"A Conversation with Raymond Aron" most information being fed to him orally by his staff. This makes it difficult for him to analyze various developments, and causes him to make decisions on the basis of moods rather than cool...
...When there is a problem with the dollar or with the French economy, human rights is not enough...
...Young is of course against South Africa and Rhodesia...
...Beyond that, during the last twenty years there has been such a large change in French society, such urbanization, that the number of people who are profoundly interested in the political game is very large...
...A week later Mr...
...The rulers of East Germany think so...
...If you recognize now that a market economy is probably better for the freedom of the people and for productivity, why should you say that you are a socialist...
...How do you explain this...
...But when he decided to abstain, he should not have then asked Moscow to be moderate...
...2) the sort of socialist society they want to construct would inevitably go in the direction of the Soviet system...
...But, after all, there are always some people who are reexamining leftism...
...Visas are normally granted only to those who cannot work—retired people and invalids...
...The outcome not only frustrated French leftists, but leftists all over Europe...
...Many people I know told me: "Yes, certainly the program of the Left is bad, is inflationary, and in a certain way I would prefer a government victory...
...These travellers bring back gifts and first-hand information from the West...
...But it is necessary, if one abstains, at the same time to give the impression of will and decisiveness, not to ask the Soviets to be kind...
...In this category travel has increased from a million persons a year before 1972 to 1.3 million in 1976...
...It is very easy for economists to explain why a minimum wage increases unemployment and hurts the real interests of the workers...
...Aron: Yes, there is a large amount of truth to it...
...British decline is certainly an argument I use from time to time...
...It is the most highly industrialized, the most prosperous, and among the most stable...
...Can Communist societies survive exposure to the West...
...It is possible to explain these things quietly to students...
...He has had real success with his books, which are very good...
...The number of calls in both directions increased from a million in 1969 to 15 million in 1975...
...Victor Baras Under East German Eyes As long as East-West contacts are based on governmental sufferance rather than individual rights, East Germany can survive a great deal of exposure to the West...
...He is the author of numerous books, including The Century of Total War, The Opium of the Intellectuals, and, most recently, Plea for Decadent Europe, which will be published in America by Gateway Editions this fall...
...From your perspective, ours is not a half-free but probably a three-quarters non-free liberal economy...
...Road and rail Until his death last November, Victor Baras was a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...
...The East German authorities view all this contact with the West as a potential source of unrest, but they have ways of coping with it...
...The Opium of the Intellectuals, which I wrote in 1955, had even then a relatively great impact on the intellectual discussion...
...But it's easier to say than to do...
...Aron: It was interesting...
...It's excellent to have good feelings...
...The Israelis cannot but wonder which is the true Sadat: the one who a year ago said he was willing to sacrifice three million Egyptians to recover Arab lands occupied by Israel...
...Tyrrell: Has there been a shift in the ideological views of the French intellectuals in recent years...
...Unlike the other states of Eastern Europe, it is not sealed off prom the West by natural barriers of distance, language, or nationality...
...Their books are best-sellers, although I don't know how many people really read their books...
...Brandt gave the East Germans their long-desired objective—diplomatic recognition...
...It was the government which tried to exploit this fear in order to win the election...
...Everybody in France knows the importance of who's in power in Paris...
...It was, I believe, the first book of this type, after the war, which tried to explain the absurdity of Sovietism and the attachment of the French intellectuals to the dream of Soviet socialism...
...Aron: Yes, I prefer that to the opposite...
...The enterprises must have the financial means to invest, which implies a margin of profit...
...What follows is the text of their conversation, which took place at the offices of the magazine L'Express...
...The American Spectator May 1978 but the intervention of the state, price and wage fixing, nationalization, etc.—all that is very far from a free economy...
...That is ludicrous, and when a great power is a laughingstock, that is very bad...
...Tyrrell: As a French writer looking across the Atlantic, are you pleased by what you see in the Carter administration...
...First, the Communists have been saying that if they come to power they will respect the traditional freedoms of the French...
...Consistently there was a majority of people wishing for the victory of the government...
...Residents of West Berlin (who, under the city's Four Power status, are not citizens of West Germany) now visit the East more than three million times a year...
...Tyrrell: But surely Andrew Young is providing leadership for the moderate nations in Africa...
...Tyrrell: You mean you don't find President Carter's stirring human-rights statements a kind of leadership...
...But when the United States has no administration for a few years, or the administration has no will, or a president has been paralyzed by the Congress (which is more or less the present situation), everybody feels the impact of the void...
...12 The American Spectator May 1978...
...The relation between France and Paris is unique, and the interest that the French people 10 The American Spectator May 1978 take in politics is perfectly rational because of this relation...
...In addition the state maintains a virtual monopoly on the necessities and luxuries of life, from employment and housing to vacation opportunities and scarce consumer goods...
...So I do not know in what sense he is a socialist...
...Aron: You put to me the question of the so-called new philosophers...
...By 1976 there were more than 700 East-West lines, including 441 within Berlin...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The condition for the stability of the world is that the United States exist...
...they represented a grudging concession by the GDR in order to achieve detente...
...Tyrrell: Some economists have said that the intellectual defense of the capitalist system is too complicated to make in a political forum...
...Socialism in the GDR is run pretty much by the book...
...But Jean-Francois favors neither public ownership nor planned economies...
...Sadat went back on this agreement, claiming that the Egyptian army must have the right to deploy anywhere on Egyptian soil...
...before 1972 the figure was zero...
...What is happening in their local communities seems to be of greater interest for them...
...Tyrrell: Is there an interest among young people in France, among scholars and young intellectuals, in the ideas of the free market as expressed by Milton Friedman...
...That was silly...
...West Germans mail about 30 million parcels to the East every year, East Germans about ten million to the West...
...But the world being what it is, talk of human rights is not enough...
...For one thing, the East German government is not highly vulnerable to adverse public opinion...
...Maybe we cannot avoid such a development, but at least it would be good to give the impression of being conscious of the problem...
...My friend Jean-Francois Revel was more or less a socialist a few years ago...
...Under these circumstances, there can be no question of continuity, nor of certainty as to his intentions...
...Aron: Yes, I had a conversation with Revel and asked him: "Why do you call yourself a socialist when you're not...
...Aron: Because there is no administration...
...For the time being we still retain certain aspects of a liberal economy...
...Calls between East and West Berlin had to be relayed by way of Western Europe...
...Thus, while East Germans get many of their tastes from the West, they never forget that they get their bread and butter in the East...
...But the polls were wrong, or the people changed their minds at the last minute...
...And while the Berlin Wall has stopped the mass exodus of East Germans to the West, West Berlin remains a troublesome western outpost deep inside GDR territory...
...Indeed, this is one of the main weaknesses of a free society and a free economy...
...Immediately after the election R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., interviewed Raymond Aron, the renowned French philosopher and journalist who has spent more than a generation arguing against the European Left...
...The Sinai has belonged to Egypt only since 1906, when the British decided that it was required for the defense of the Suez Canal...
...traffic through East Germany to West Berlin doubled after the signing of the Four Power Agreement in 1971, with the rate currently at 15 million passengers a year...
...All this despite East Germany's exposed position...
...The GDR is part of a divided country...
...The fact remains that after the war the national product of Britain was between 25 and 50 percent above the French national product...
...A still larger number—some 70 percent—said they were very content with their own lives...
...Yet today, he expresses doubts...
...Normally, when one speaks of socialism one means public ownership of the means of production, or planning...
...or the one who said that if his visit to Jerusalem saved even a single Egyptian soldier from suffering a superficial flesh wound, he has accomplished his life's purpose...
...They know that their destiny is to a large extent determined by what happens in Paris...
...Even during the chilliest days of the Cold War, most East Germans were in touch with friends and relatives in the West...
...In Great Britain even the socialists are trying to re-create free enterprises able to invest—which is the key problem...
...The United States is still a very powerful country, but a powerful country without a leader and without will does not exist...
...In a sense it is a success...
...Tyrrell: Why is that...
...But in return he made the GDR agree to permit a vast increase in "human contacts" between the two states...
...I despair...
...Even so, the mobile part of the electorate in the United States is larger than in France, where voting is to a large extent the expression of a traditional allegiance to a certain way of life or view of the world...
...Nothing is assured in these matters...
...Personally, I am not liberal to the same extent as Friedman because I believe his system is impossible, even if it is the best system in theory...
...These contacts did not come gradually as a side effect of political détente...
...Tyrrell: Haven't people like Jean-Francois Revel had a change of position...
...The results of Brandt's policy were spectacular...
...If the wave of the future is the Soviet Union, or Cuba, if the sea-lanes for the shipment of oil to Europe are controlled by the Soviet government through satellites, that is a geopolitical fact of a certain importance...
...This article is published by permission of his estate...
...He believes that it is of no importance that certain African governments speak of themselves as pro-Soviet...
...The West German government's contribution to the cost of East-West contacts—visa fees, maintenance of road and telephone lines, postal charges, and so on—is a major source of foreign exchange for the GDR...
...Tyrrell: Some American intellectuals, some neo-conservatives, will say that the bad economic condition of England has removed social democracy or socialism as a feasible alternative...
...Begin's proposal that the Sinai be demilitarized...
...And that means "running 11 to the wagon"--I believe that is the expression you use...
...Aron: Yes and no...
...Aron: No...
...Ours is the least liberal economy of the western world or at least of Western Europe...
...In the United States there is a tendency for Jews to vote for the Democrats and for another category of people to vote for the Republicans...
...Jean-Francois Revel performed the same task from another point of view, in another style, with other words...
...But I would never, never vote for men like Giscard or Chirac...
...He is convinced that, in the long run, these governments will be independent from the Cubans or the Soviets...
...Is there any truth to this...
...His was very different from my own effort, but the message of his books is essentially the same as that of my own book...
...But in France we have an economy which is half state-planned, with the intervention of the state everywhere...
...that is another question...
...Yet the GDR is in many ways the most successful Communist country in the world...
...Tyrrell: Revel advocated socialism only a year ago...
...And East Germany's standard of living, unlike that of other relatively well-to-do Communist states such as Poland and Hungary, is not based on the widespread restoration of petty private enterprise...
...When there is a problem with oil, human rights is no answer...
...When Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party came to power in 1969, West Germany abandoned her traditional refusal to recognize the GDR...
...And now we have the film...
...Postal and telephone communications have also improved...
...It may be that within the next years there will be another change, that with the help of the North Sea oil there will be a new prosperity in Britain...
...The government had three main arguments: 1) the Socialist-Communist program is a program of inflation, and it is absurd...
...The success of the philosophers is not an intellectual event of great significance, but it is a political event of real significance...
...Tyrrell: What kind of policy would you have had Carter pursue in Ethiopia, for instance...
...The British then positioned two gunboats, one in the Mediterranean and one in the Gulf of Aqaba, and their surveyors drew a straightline between the two ships...
...There has been so much talk about the new philosophers...
...A Conversation with Raymond Aron France has just passed through one of the most important elections of the postwar period...
...You must show that it is not possible to increase the minimum wage without affecting all wages, and that an increase in the minimum wage will make it more difficult for enterprises to hire new workers...
...But I do not want to explain what western policy in Africa should be...
...If you do not want to intervene for one reason or another—because you believe that Somalia is in the wrong, or because you believe that the conflict is of no importance for the rest of the world—it is a feasible policy to abstain...
...Also, since 1972 about forty thousand East Germans of working age have been permitted each year to visit parents, children, or siblings in the West for "urgent family matters" (while leaving their own spouses and children in the GDR...
...First, I would say that the French people are very politicized...
...In the case of the United States, I believe the fact that the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties (leaving aside the relative qualities of the man in power) is so narrow compared to the gap between the opposition and the government in France explains why so many millions of Americans don't care very much about what happens in Washington...
...Has it had that kind of influence in France...
...Second, the Communists would be a minority in any Socialist-Communist government...
...But to explain that to people who have no idea how a free economy functions is difficult...
...When the Cubans are intervening in Ethiopia, human rights is no answer...
...In recent years East Germany has been more exposed than ever to travellers and ideas from the West...
...Thus an international border was created, and the Sinai was handed over to Egypt, then a British protectorate...
...this was nearly triple the 1970 figure...
...Letters between East and West are now generally delivered in less than five days, compared to weeks or months before 1970...
...All told, more westerners now pass through the GDR every year than East Germany has citizens...
...It is better that they reject the Soviet system, but they have not converted to the liberal, progressive society...
...And today the French national product is at least 30 percent above the British national product...
...Aron: Yes...
...This makes it difficult for him to analyze various developments, and causes him to make decisions on the basis of moods rather than cool analysis...
...In France, we go along without a real government for a few years without changing the destiny of the rest of the world...
...Aron: I'm afraid not enough...
...I am not cynical enough to say that to have a good policy you cannot have des bons sentiments, but I would say that it is not enough to be a statesman to wish the best for everybody...
...Tyrrell: Why is it that such a large percentage of Frenchmen vote, some 85 percent in this election, while such a small percentage of Americans vote...
...Aron: There are a lot of reasons for this...
...Travel from East to West is another story, since travel to the West is forbidden to most East Germans...
...France is a very centralized country...
...Aron: I don't know, possibly the best policy would have been to do what he did: namely, to have abstained...
...Aron: I believe the opposite is true...
...In 1976 about eight million westerners visited the GDR, a country of 17 million people...
...It is a plausible argument, but for the moderates, who feel themselves in a difficult position, it is of no great help...
...it is difficult to explain them in a political meeting to a mass public...
...and 3) the socialists are bringing to power the Communists, and even if they are able to expel the Communists after a certain number of months or years, in the interim the Communists would have conquered a part of French society...
...Third, the majority of French do not believe that the equivalent of the Prague coup is possible in Western Europe, in a country like France...
...The other day he even had a kind word for Milton Friedman...
...So you meet a very large number of people who are still devoted to the cause of the Left, who are voting for the Left, and who would tell you that Communist participation in the government poses no threat to our freedoms...
...Tyrrell: I take it you are pleased about the government's victory over the Left in the election...
...So the influence of Milton Friedman is yet to come in France...
...Aron: I've supported him on that issue many times...
...In fact, East Germany probably comes closer than any other country to what Marx had in mind—state ownership of the means of production, collectivized agriculture, central planning, and a modern technological economy...
...Unlike an American film, the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations began in reverse: with a happy-end," Shimon Peres, the leader of the Israeli Labor Party and a former long-time defense minister, said to us...
...and, after all, his monetarist theory is still under discussion in America...
...In 1970 there were only 34 telephone lines linking West Germany with the GDR, and it took hours or days to get a connection...
...just as consistently, according to the polls, there was a majority of people who intended to vote for the Left...
...There are 300,000 Soviet troops to keep the people from rebelling and 50,000 border guards to keep them from leaving...
...Maybe it is the same everywhere: that the motive for voting is largely the way people look at the world, and does not involve abstract consideration of the advantages of this program or that...
...But the economic decline of Great Britain was caused not only by the Labour Party but also by the Conservative Party...
...Aron: Only a few people really know of Friedman...
...No other Communist country is so flooded with western visitors and western culture as the German Democratic Republic...
...From the outside I see a Young line, a Brzezinski line which is very different, Vance's negotiations which are not very successful, and an unknown Carter...
...Tyrrell: Some very interesting polls came out before the election which showed that, though a majority of people were going to vote for the Left, an even larger majority did not want the Left to win...
...At Christmas in Ismailia, President Sadat agreed to Mr...
...The reason is West Germany's Ostpolitik, the German variant of detente...
...With the new philosophers a new generation is expressing its repudiation of leftism, but they are not drawing the consequences of this repudiation, because they are not on the side of a liberal society...
...Raymond Aron is Professor of the Sociology of Modern Civilization at the College de France in Paris, and is a regular columnist for L'Express...
...I do not know what policy is best in Africa, but I do feel that the moderate governments in Africa today suspect that if they are having difficulty nobody will help them...
...Radio and television from West Germany and West Berlin have always blanketed the GDR...
...Tyrrell: In light of freedom's condition in Eastern Europe I should have thought a large number of voters would have feared for their freedoms when confronted with the prospect of Communists in government...
...But it is true that at the higher level of the intelligentsia in Paris there is a trend away from the leftism of the previous generation...
...Many people vote for the opposition for ideological reasons quite apart from any calculation of the consequences of a victory either for the Left or the Right...
Vol. 11 • May 1978 • No. 7
