How Churchill and Kohl were just as ruthless as dictators
‘But at least when Churchill lost the 1945 election, he walked away’
Personality And Power Ian Kershaw
Allen Lane €37.50
★★★★★
Any book by the acclaimed historian Ian Kershaw is eagerly anticipated, but this one is especially topical because of the recent death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev features prominently on the cover of the book as one of 12 political figures singled out by Kershaw as central to the history of modern Europe. Kershaw is interested in the effect of personality upon political power. He’s not evaluating greatness, which he considers a nebulous concept from a historical perspective, but in the impact these men (and one woman, former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher) had on their countries and the wider world.
Kershaw’s method is to take each of the 12 in turn, beginning with Lenin and ending with Helmut Kohl, and to sketch their characters against the background of the political circumstances in which they came to prominence. He then goes on to discuss how much their personalities influenced their exercise of power and to consider their legacies. The careers of dictators such as Lenin and Hitler were obviously very different from those of democratically elected politicians such as Churchill and Thatcher, but it’s striking how much of a role chance and the miscalculations of others played in all their lives. Lenin would
be no more than a footnote in the history books had not the German government made the fateful decision to allow his return to Russia in 1917, while Thatcher would probably not have won a second term without Argentina’s decision to invade the Falkland Islands.
It might seem distasteful to compare the characters of murderous tyrants with elected politicians, but as Kershaw reminds us, democrats need to possess a streak of ruthlessness just as much as dictators. Thatcher’s decision to sink the Belgrano and Churchill’s bombardment of the French fleet at Mers El Kebir in 1940 are cases in point. Churchill’s irascibility, egocentricity and recklessness were traits shared by the less salubrious characters in this book, and he was not alone. General de Gaulle, like Churchill, had pronounced autocratic tendencies, and it’s unsurprising that the two men infuriated and admired each other in equal measure. ‘What counts is power, and power again, and power once and for all,’ Churchill once confided to Tito, the Yugoslavian communist dictator. The acid test, though, was that when Churchill lost the 1945 election, he accepted the voters’ will and walked away. The disgraceful scenes in Washington when Trump and his supporters refused to accept Biden’s 2020 victory are
a reminder of the fragility of democracy in the face of populist rabble-rousing.
Kershaw is best known for his superb two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, and it’s no surprise that his essay on the German dictator is one of the best in the book. He notes the argument that democratic leaders exercise power ‘through’ states while dictators do it ‘over’ states, and no one exemplifies this more than Hitler. It is most clearly seen in the conduct of foreign policy and war, for which Hitler ‘avidly thirsted’. His backing for the decisive 1940 Ardennes offensive, which led to the fall of France but was strongly opposed by his top brass, made his position as war leader unassailable and meant that there were no constraints on his interference in military matters. ‘
The reputation for recklessness that dogged Churchill since his involvement in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign in the First World War seems small beer in comparison with Hitler’s foolhardiness, but the British prime minister, like all democratic leaders, faced limits on the ways he could impose his personality on policy. Hitler faced none. Two events define the 20th Century, World War II and the Holocaust, and ‘Hitler was the chief author of both’. He was, says Kershaw, ‘the prime mover of the most fundamental collapse of civilisation that modern history has witnessed’, and this is why he must be seen as the dominant political figure of the first half of the last century. Fortunately the leader who Kershaw thinks exerted the greatest influence on Europe in the second half of the century, Mikhail Gorbachev, is a much more benign character.
In some ways Gorbachev’s is the most interesting chapter in the book, because he was neither a democrat nor a dictator. He didn’t set out to dismantle the Soviet Union, but his actions had that unintended consequence. When push came to shove, however, he rejected the repressive tactics of his predecessors. The contrast with the present occupant of the Kremlin couldn’t be starker. Kershaw describes Gorbachev as a ‘towering’ historical figure. On Putin, I suspect, history will deliver a very different verdict.