Ronald Reagan had many detractors, who
directed sneers at the movie actor turned president,
the ‘great communicator’ who failed to
grasp the essential details of issues, the hands-off
president. When he did stumble into trouble,
as in the Iran–Contra affair, he did not appear to
realise precisely what or who had gone wrong. Yet
he retained his personal popularity throughout
his two administrations, as troubles just seemed
to slide off him, earning him the nickname the
‘Teflon President’. Was Reagan just lucky to
be in the White House during a decade most
of which brought increasing prosperity to the
Western world, in contrast to the difficult 1970s?
Was he merely fortunate that the Soviet Union
had gained a new leader in the mid-1980s who
saw the futility of the Cold War and was determined
to end it? Or was there more to it? Perhaps
the judgement should be that Reagan spotted
opportunities and responded positively to them.
He was a likeable, kindly president and he had the
skill to project his warmth. The American people
were in tune with his optimism; they wanted to
put Vietnam behind them. They responded to his
upbeat projections of a bright future and rejected
Carter’s gloomy ‘crisis of confidence’ diagnosis of
what was wrong with America.
Reagan was carried forward across the nation,
not just in California, by a revival of the conservative
tradition that had already made itself felt in
the 1970s. It was a scepticism about the ‘nanny
state’, about government’s ability to find solutions
to all the country’s ills, including the
growing and predominantly black underclass, the
drug-use, the gun culture and the increasing
number of one-parent families. The American
people would have to accept their responsibilities.
Welfare meant taxation. In California in 1978,
the state had to obey the results of a referendum
called Proposition 13, which cut property taxes
and so left the state budget with insufficient funds
for all its welfare and social programmes. Reagan
recognised that the California tax revolt was not
just a local but a national issue. The diagnosis was
that taxation fell too heavily on the creators of
wealth. There was too much regulation stifling
America’s natural enterprise. In his inaugural
address he coined the slogan, ‘Government is not
the solution to our problem – government is the
problem.’ The US needed government, but it
should work with the people, not sit on their
backs. The US, he declared with some exaggeration,
was the ‘last and greatest bastion of
freedom’.
But how was America to be restored to greatness
and prosperity? An answer was seemingly
found. Reagan had been converted before the
elections to the theory of supply-side economics,
or more precisely to the scientific truth of the
‘Laffer curve’, the discovery of Professor Arthur
Laffer. If Carter was a born-again Christian,
Reagan was a born-again economist. On the face
of it, supply-side economics was a miracle: it held
that if you lowered taxes you actually collected
more revenue. The theory was that lower taxes
gave firms more profit, and consumers more
money in their pockets; this in turn would lead
to more investment and greater employment;
people would have more incentive to work
harder, and with increased economic activity
more tax revenue would be collected and unemployment
and welfare benefits saved. Reagan
grasped that this was an attractive policy to put
to the American people. It left out of account,
however, the effects of inflation, from which
higher taxation inevitably followed as more
people’s earnings were pushed into higher tax
brackets. Without constant rate reductions of tax,
taxation would actually become heavier.
The objectives of Reagan’s economic policies,
as put forward by the administration, were to
lower taxes, to reduce government spending, to
balance the budget and to restrict money supply
so as to lower inflation. Professor Milton
Friedman of Chicago University was the moneysupply
guru; he and Frederick Hayek attacked the
notions of the welfare state and socialism which,
they taught, would lead to a totalitarian state. The
correct policy was to deregulate, to remove
restrictions on business and to allow free-market
competition. The combination of all these ideas
became known as Reaganomics. The economic
cures for inflation and stagnation had already been
tested in Pinochet’s Chile with some success. Now
they were going to be tried in the US.
It sounded too good to be true; indeed, before
George Bush became vice-president, while he was
still competing with Reagan for the Republican
nomination, he coined the memorable phrase
‘voodoo economics’ to describe Reaganomics.
And it was too good to be true; all the objectives
could not be harmonised. The US did not balance
its budget as promised and turned a small national
debt into a large one. In other words, the excess
of government expenditure over revenue income
in the Reagan years injected a significant stimulus
to the economy in good old Keynesian fashion
at the cost of a ballooning deficit.
Deregulation, too, had its limits. Environmental
concerns cannot be completely ignored.
And there were instances where only one-half of a
business’s activities were deregulated. This stored
up for the 1990s the Savings and Loans Association
disaster. While depositors were federally
insured (up to $100,000 in any one Savings and
Loans account), the financial managers could now
operate without the severe restrictions on their
activities of previous years. To attract customers
they vied with each other to offer higher savings
interest rates and so had to engage in more risky
investments themselves to be able to pay them.
With the collapse of real-estate markets at the
close of the 1980s, the insolvency of many of them
and of some banks involved the federal authorities
in a huge financial bail-out to compensate the
investors. This is one important example of how
deregulation has not always led to the expected
good results.
There was little sign that Reaganomics was
really working during the first two years of the
administration. Reagan wanted a 10 per cent
reduction in corporate and personal taxes in each
of the first three years but this meant cutting the
federal budget too. Compensating completely for
the tax cuts would have been an exceedingly
painful process, though Reagan undertook not to
cut any essential welfare benefits to the needy and
elderly. There was much waste, ‘pork barrel’
expenditure, that could have been cut, but members
of Congress fiercely defended their electors’
favourite subsidies. Getting his budget proposals,
substantially unaltered, through both Houses of
Congress in 1981 despite the Democrat majority
in the House of Representatives was a major triumph
for Reagan personally.
In the end, Congress modified the biggest tax
cut in US history only slightly; in the first year
the cut would be 5 per cent instead of the 10 per
cent originally proposed, so as not to increase the
budget deficit to inordinate heights, but accepted
10 per cent in each of the following two years.
But the budget director, David Stockman, had
presented an incomplete financial prospectus. It
would have got any company director into severe
trouble. In his very critical inside story of his years
in the administration, published after his resignation
in 1985, Stockman depicts an almost unbelievable
blindness to the realities of financial
arithmetic. The budget could not be balanced
given the large tax cuts and an increase of defence
expenditure of 10 per cent per year. Caspar
Weinberger, previously renowned for his costcutting
ways, was in charge of defence. A miscalculation
had the consequence that instead of a
hefty 7 per cent per year real growth of expenditure
on defence, it actually came out at 10 per
cent per year from 1980 to 1986, that is rising
from $142 billion in 1980 to a planned $368
billion by 1986. As it turned out, defence spending
was trimmed so that by 1986 it had ‘only’
doubled to $273.4 billion.
How then were the budget figures to add up
to produce a balanced budget by 1984? The computer
provided a simple answer. The supply-side
economic stimulus would increase output by
some 5 per cent a year. Instead the economy went
into recession in 1981 and 1982, thus creating a
burgeoning deficit. The recession brought inflation
under control, but unemployment increased
to 10 per cent – more than 11 million Americans
were out of work across the country. In some
regions unemployment was far worse than in
others, and black people and other ethnic minorities
were especially hard hit. The ability of trade
unions to defend their members was weakened by
Reagan’s policies. The most dramatic showdown
came in 1981 when the air-traffic controllers’
union called a strike. Reagan took the tough decision
to dismiss all the strikers after they had
refused to return to work. Military air-traffic controllers
filled the gap until new personnel had
been trained. It was an example that Mrs
Thatcher was to bear in mind during her confrontation
with the miners in 1984. With defence
spending protected by Reagan on the ground that
it was essential for facing down the Russians, and
with his insistence on persevering with tax cuts,
reductions in the growth of welfare spending took
the brunt of the economies, but they were quite
insufficient to halt the growth of the budget
deficit. Some tax increases, implemented despite
the fashionable economic theories, proved too
small to bring the deficit under control, and the
tax cuts turned out to have benefited the rich
far more than the middle-income families and
the poor. Wealth had failed to trickle down to the
bottom 20 per cent, as the theories had predicted
it would.
Reagan persisted with his unpopular policies.
The economic turnaround began in 1983. There
followed six years of economic growth, despite
temporary blips (as in 1987), and the creation of
17 million jobs, though many of these were in
low-paying service industries. But was this due to
the virtuous effects of supply-side economics?
Federal spending increased instead of declining
on all the major items, including social security
and various welfare payments. As the national
debt increased, so interest on it doubled, adding
$68 billion in just five years. Easy credit and the
deficits put more money in people’s pockets and
they spent more. The supply-side economists’
prediction that investment would increase proved
wrong.
By the end of the 1980s the US also had the
largest trade deficit of any major industrialised
country. Even the proportion of gross national
product collected in taxes did not significantly
decrease from the post-war average. So was
Reaganomics all smoke and mirrors? Was the US
prosperity of the years 1983 to 1990 simply based
on borrowed time, on credits that have to be paid
for in the future? There is no simple answer. The
US is immensely rich in resources. By West
European standards, outlays on welfare were woefully
inadequate before 1981 and even increased
federal spending has not brought it proportionally
to the same level as in Germany, Britain or
France. That the US deficit was not allowed to
soar out of control for a time owed much to a
reform enacted by the Senate and proposed by
two Republican senators, Phil Gramm and
Warren Rudman. This required the implementation
of phased reductions of the deficit and automatic
spending cuts (to fall equally on military
and non-military provision) when deficit targets
were exceeded. Pension and poverty programmes
were excluded from the cuts. Reagan reluctantly
signed the measure in December 1985. It held
back the growth of the deficits until the slowdown
in the economy later in the decade.
The Reagan revolution was not as revolutionary
as it seemed. But the American people, who had
overwhelmingly re-elected him in November
1984, gave the ‘old Gipper’ the benefit of the
doubt. He remained throughout his latter years of
office one of the most popular presidents in
American history. The economy continued to
respond and unemployment did not rise above 7
per cent; people felt good – at least, most of them
did. The darker side was there too: ethnic discrimination
and poverty, crime and drugs, the decay of
big cities, increasing indebtedness and an adverse
trade balance. Despite the Laffer curve, there is no
miracle cure. Reagan, in fact, was a big spender on
programmes other than defence. The only way to
bring the budget into balance was by raising taxes.
Reagan would not hear of it, nor would George
‘read my lips’ Bush during the presidential election
of 1988. It was one important reason for Bush’s
election victory that November over the Democratic
candidate, who had been too frank. Yet the
spending spree of the mid-1980s came to haunt his
successor in the White House when the economy
once more turned down.
If there was less of a revolution in US domestic
policies than was thought at the time, a real revolution
did occur during the Reagan years in
America’s role and standing in global politics. As
recently as 1988 distinguished academics were
vying with each other to analyse the reasons
for America’s terminal decline. ‘Overstretch’ of
America’s ‘imperial’ global responsibilities was the
favourite diagnosis. How the picture has changed
since then! No doubt academics will catch up.
Reagan certainly began his years in the White
House as an outspoken enemy of communism the
world over. Russia was an ‘evil empire’, and the
‘focus of evil in the modern world’. The spread
of communism, especially in what Reagan perceived
as America’s backyard, Central America
and the Caribbean, he saw as a direct threat to
the security of the US, because communist victories
in Nicaragua and El Salvador could spread to
Mexico and so to the very borders of the US. The
domino theory was revived. Behind the global
dangers, the administration did not doubt, was
the hand of the Kremlin. The condemnation of
the Soviet Union reached its peak when a Soviet
fighter in September 1983 shot down a Korean
civilian airliner that had strayed over militarily
sensitive Soviet territory. Many lives were lost,
including those of Americans.
But there was always a positive side to the
administration’s and Reagan’s policy calculations.
The Soviets were rational. If the US did not flinch
from confrontation, from spending whatever was
necessary to ensure potential military dominance,
the basis would eventually be reached for an
accommodation, and for disarmament, especially
of the nuclear arsenals. When Reagan launched
his Strategic Defence Initiative, or Star Wars as it
was popularly known, in March 1983 he knew
that the Soviets could not afford to keep pace.
SDI would, it was hoped, enable the US ultimately
to defend itself against nuclear attack far
more effectively than the Soviet Union could.
The thinking was that there was not the remotest
possibility that the US would be the aggressor in
a superpower war, so the world would be safe
from nuclear war. Once the Soviet Union could
also be persuaded to accept that the US was not
likely in the future to become an aggressor, the
huge nuclear arsenals would become redundant.
Serious disarmament could be given a chance,
with nuclear and other weapons serving as a
limited deterrent insurance. The great change
occurred in the Reagan era of the 1980s.
The transformation in US–Soviet relations
would not have happened but for events outside
Reagan’s control, the changing leadership in the
Kremlin and the Soviet Union’s worsening economic
plight. When Gorbachev became the
Soviet leader in March 1985, the scene was set
for a pas de deux that began with each leader
keeping a careful distance from the other and
ended in an embrace, with Reagan strolling
cheerfully around Red Square in the spring of
1988. Perhaps only a president with Reagan’s
impeccable anti-communist credentials could
have persuaded Congress to accept that the Soviet
Union could be trusted to abide by the agreements
reached and that it had ceased to be an ‘evil
empire’.
During his first administration, Reagan’s crusading
rhetoric castigating communism and the
Soviet empire never really matched the administration’s
actual policies. Although not ratified by the
Senate, the SALT II treaty provisions were
observed; this in the end proved to be to America’s
advantage. The scope for using American military
forces was limited by a law passed by Congress
after the Vietnam War to restrict the president’s
freedom of action: this was the War Powers Act of
1973. The president as commander-in-chief was
still able to use armed force when he thought it
necessary, but he had to inform Congress within
forty-eight hours of their deployment abroad and
would have to withdraw them after sixty days
unless Congress specifically directed otherwise.
There were other realistic restraints. The Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 had led
to the retaliatory American grain embargo. But the
US farmers came first; their plight induced the
Reagan administration to lift Carter’s embargo on
the sale of wheat in April 1981 and to follow this
up with further huge sales in 1983. That in turn
made it difficult for the US to dissuade West
European firms from supplying the apparatus to
the Soviet Union for oil and gas pipelines.
Meanwhile public opinion in the US and Western
Europe was becoming ever more hostile to further
nuclear escalation. Reagan declared that he was
committed to arms control, but negotiations with
the Soviet Union made no progress during his first
administration. Meanwhile, the Russians became
increasingly bogged down in Afghanistan. For the
US it was a Vietnam in reverse. With Pakistan as an
ally, it was able to arm the desperate mujahideen
in Afghanistan, who inflicted casualties on the
Soviet troops, which proved unacceptable in an
unwinnable war.
US involvement in the Lebanon and a Middle
East peace process likewise made little headway.
The US was not willing to use all its power to
coerce Israel and the Arab nations, and in any case
it was extraordinarily difficult to make much
progress on the Palestinian question. That part of
Carter’s Camp David agreements remained a
dead letter. Reagan sent 2,000 marines to the
Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping
force after Israel’s invasion in 1982; in October
1983, 241 marines were killed in their barracks
by a fanatical Muslim. There was an outcry in the
US, and after a decent interval the marines were
withdrawn in 1984. The Middle Eastern problems
were now too great, and US policy too indecisive,
for the US navy in the Mediterranean and
a few hundred marines to provide a solution.
The liveliest area of foreign policy was in
Central America and the Caribbean. In October
1983 marines were sent into the island of
Grenada to remove an illegitimate left-wing
regime. Since Grenada was a member of the
British Commonwealth, Margaret Thatcher was
much annoyed. More serious was US intervention
in Central America. Here Reagan and Secretary
of State Alexander Haig (and later his successor,
George Schultz) were fighting communism most
actively. The Sandinista victory in Nicaragua had
brought a communist-style government to power,
and the US had cut off aid; in El Salvador there
was a left-wing insurrection. The Reagan administration
sent increasing quantities of military and
economic aid to the El Salvadorian government,
despite its appalling human-rights record. A war
by proxy was being waged in Nicaragua, with the
Soviet Union supplying the Sandinistas, and the
CIA from 1981 funding the opposition forces,
which became known as the Contras, operating
from bases in El Salvador and Honduras. With
memories of Vietnam still vivid, however, Reagan
faced strong public opposition, which was reflected
in Congress. Most Americans cared less
about the excesses of the Sandinistas and the leftwing
rebels in El Salvador than about the possibility
that young US soldiers would be dragged
into the conflict, many of them to come home in
body bags.
Reagan’s convincing victory in the 1984 election
strengthened his hand considerably. In the
course of his second term he was to meet the new
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev five times. At
their very first meeting in Geneva in November
1985, the ice was broken. Reagan was a great
believer in the power of personal relations to
overcome set ideological positions. He came to
share Margaret Thatcher’s view that Gorbachev
was a new kind of Soviet leader with whom it
would be possible to negotiate on a more trusting
basis. The various on-and-off arms-reduction
negotiations had achieved very little so far. On
the table since 1981 was Reagan’s ‘zero option’:
if the Soviets withdrew their SS20 and other
intermediate-range missiles in Eastern Europe,
the US would not counter them by sending over
Pershing and Cruise missiles to Britain and other
NATO allies. The proposal did not affect missiles
outside Europe, that is in the US or Siberia. So
far the Soviets had rejected this, and the US had
rejected Soviet proposals for deep cuts in both
sides’ nuclear arsenals. When Gorbachev and
Reagan met at Reykjavik in October 1986, the
Soviet leader hoped that he could get Reagan to
give up Star Wars by tempting him with a spectacular
agreement to reduce nuclear arms. Despite
his obvious disappointment at the failure of all his
efforts, Reagan stood firm. The setback proved
temporary. The Soviet need for Western technological
assistance and for defence savings was
urgent. In December 1987 the signing of the
INF (intermediate-range nuclear forces) Treaty in
Washington set the seal on the new US–Soviet
relationship, not only in settling direct issues
between them but also in the context of regional
conflicts all over the world. The treaty banned the
production and testing of intermediate-range missiles,
and all existing missiles in this class were to
be destroyed.
Reagan’s policies in Central America were the
most controversial in the administration’s conduct
of foreign relations. His appeal for support for
the Nicaraguan Contras – ‘freedom fighters’, as
he called them – was rejected by Congress, which
confined help strictly to non-military aid. Meanwhile
the peace initiative undertaken by the
Central American presidents was looked upon with
suspicion in the White House. The American economic
embargo of Nicaragua, the CIA’s mining of
its ports (1984) and the administration’s efforts to
keep the Contras in the field did enormous damage
to Nicaragua’s economy, which had been
placed on a war footing. Sandinista mismanagement
did the rest. When the Soviet Union and its
satellites eventually cut off aid to the Sandinistas,
the hardline Marxist–Leninists conceded genuinely
free elections, which to their surprise they lost. For
the time being at least, Reagan’s victory over communism
in Latin America was complete.
The handling of the Middle East was the least
successful aspect of the administration’s conduct
of external relations. It led to the one major scandal
of the Reagan era, the so called Iran–Contra
affair. In the Gulf War between Iran and Iraq,
there was no doubt which side the US favoured,
though it imposed an arms embargo on both
countries. Ayatollah Khomeini’s hate campaign
against the US as enemy number one and the
fanaticism of Iran’s Muslim fundamentalists
threatened the conservative Gulf oil states,
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates.
Consequently they supported Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq, even though he had started the Gulf War
with his invasion of Iran. When Iran countered by
attacking oil shipments from Kuwait, the US and
an international naval force moved in to protect
them. Kuwaiti tankers were reflagged in May
1987 so that they came under direct US protection.
US warships shelled Iranian oil installations
in reprisal for attacks on the oil tankers.
Yet by a twist of fate the scandal that broke
concerned illegal arms shipments from the US by
way of Israel to Iran. The cause was humanitarian.
In the Lebanon imbroglio eight American
hostages were taken by Lebanese groups such
as the Hezbollah, the ‘Party of God’, believed to
be responsive to Khomeini’s commands. Their
release was secretly arranged in 1985 in return
for secret shipments of desperately needed arms
and spare parts to the Iranians. These were paid
for handsomely as well. The immediate organiser
of the deal was an intelligence operative in
Washington, Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North. It
appears to have been his ‘neat’ idea that the
profits from the deal should be illegally channelled
to the Contras. One hostage had been
released and more releases were in prospect when
the deal leaked. The subsequent judicial and
congressional investigations found that the participants
in the scheme, and Colonel North’s boss
Rear Admiral John M. Poindexter, the national
security adviser, had broken the law. President
Reagan accepted responsibility for dealing with
Iran, but not for the diversion of funds to the
Contras. It does seem unlikely that he fully
grasped what was going on. But the Iran–Contra
affair tarnished the administration’s record. With
the Iran–Iraq war ending in the summer of 1988,
the immediate urgency for active Gulf diplomacy
appeared to have ended. But peace in the Gulf
was soon to prove illusory.
When Reagan delivered his farewell address to
the American people on 11 January 1989 he
could claim with justice that ‘America is respected
again in the world, and looked to for leadership’.
It was also true that countries ‘across the globe
are turning to free markets and free speech – and
turning away from the ideologies of the past.
Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly
productive.’ The astonishing changes in
Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990 were suddenly
to fulfil Reagan’s prophecy.
Americans still felt good when it came to choosing
between the two presidential candidates in
November 1988. The problems of deregulation,
the deficit budgeting, easy credit and junk bonds
largely lay in the future. The economy was still
going strong, the balance of payments improving
and unemployment dropping to around 5 per
cent. But the Republican candidate Vice-President
George Bush was not very inspiring and early in
the summer looked like losing to the Democratic
candidate Michael Dukakis, the governor of
Massachusetts, who had greatly improved the
economy of his state. More charismatic than either
was the Democratic leader, the Reverend Jesse
Jackson. But the time was not ripe for an African
American Democratic vice-presidential runningmate.
Bush further handicapped himself by choosing
Senator Dan Quayle, a personable conservative
politician who was considered too young and too
inexperienced. The election turned largely on
domestic issues. Dukakis warned of the need for
higher taxes. Bush riposted with ‘Read my lips, no
new taxes’; it became virtually his campaign slogan.
The Dukakis campaign, by way of contrast, was
inept and lost him his big early lead. ‘Contented
America’, to use Professor Galbraith’s phrase, was
in the majority and turned to the safety of Bush
and to the comforting conclusion that spending
more money on welfare and urban deprivation
provided no solution to America’s social problems.
It was enough for Bush to promise help where it
was really needed and to express the wish to create
a ‘kinder, gentler nation’. On 8 November 1988,
he won convincingly.
In Congress in 1989 Bush faced Democratic
majorities in both Houses. The Democrats were
not inclined to vote for measures to reduce the
large deficit if it meant cutting welfare, social
security, medical care for the old or any of the pet
‘pork-barrel’ projects that gained Democrats and
Republicans alike support from their constituencies.
The president’s policies at home began cautiously
in 1989; with an eye on the deficit, he
rejected public-spending increases. But the deregulation
of the Savings and Loans institutions
during the Reagan years had led to imprudent
lending and the imminent bankruptcies that
ensued required a large federal bail-out. The
deficit grew instead of shrinking, and the economy
began to show signs of downturn after the
credit expansion and stock-market wheeling and
dealing of the 1980s.
A severe recession began in 1990 and continued
through 1992. Despite his campaign
promises, President Bush was forced to raise indirect
taxes and reduce exemptions from tax for the
better-off. He was widely blamed for not giving
sufficient attention to the state of the economy
and the rapidly growing unemployment. Yet for
a time his popularity reached extraordinary
heights. The explanation for this lies in ‘patriotic’
America. Bush’s forceful handling of Panama
gained him enthusiastic support. The strongman
of Panama was the virulently anti-American
General Manuel Noriega, who was wanted in the
US for drug dealing. In May 1990 Noriega had
forcibly prevented the democratic opposition
leader from gaining the presidency: the elections
had been accompanied by violence, intimidation
and corruption. The US pressed for the
removal of Noriega, but without success. Finally
on 20 December 1989, a large US military force
descended on Panama City, causing some loss of
life and destruction. Noriega was cornered, captured
and brought to the US for trial, and the
opposition candidate of the previous May was
installed as president. But such forceful intervention
raised renewed fears in Latin America of
‘gunboat diplomacy’.
A much bigger issue was the Gulf crisis after
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
President Bush’s consistent and decisive response
in leading the United Nations and forming a
coalition of European and Arab nations to defend
Saudi Arabia won him general support. The
despatch of ground troops, however, caused considerable
anxiety inside and outside Congress. By
the end of the year, from the Democratic side of
Congress especially, there was opposition to the
use of force and an insistence that negotiations
and sanctions should be continued and allowed
time to work. When the Gulf War was quickly
and brilliantly won with few American casualties
in 1991, Bush’s reputation was at its height.
But Bush’s decision to stop the fighting once
Kuwait had been liberated without toppling
Saddam Hussein was a profound misjudgement as
Hussein defied the UN and was anything but
cowed. Nor did the immense efforts at mediation
by Secretary of State James Baker, which brought
together Israel and its Arab neighbours to try
to negotiate a peace settlement at conferences
in Madrid and Washington in the autumn of
1991 and early in 1992, appear to lead to much
progress.
The Bush administration could certainly take
credit for responding positively to the changes in
the Soviet Union and for recognising that to
welcome the reunification of the two Germanys
was a more realistic and productive policy than
the more hesitant reactions in Western Europe.
Nor should Bush or Baker be criticised for not
recognising the independence of the Baltic states
sooner, which would only have added to
Gorbachev’s difficulties. Gorbachev’s credentials
as an international statesman and peacemaker
were impeccable, while those of Boris Yeltsin
(then only a possible successor) were still untried.
Bush remained cautious throughout, preferring
what looked like the safer bet. Nor was he ready
to commit American resources or to sacrifice the
lives of US servicemen for ideological reasons or
to engage in war a day longer than was required
to meet American objectives. He could claim that
his had been a safe pair of hands.
But the election in November 1992, with the
Cold War over, no longer turned on foreign
issues or defence. Attention focused on domestic
problems, the state of the economy, the frustrations
of the economically disadvantaged and of
the middle class, many of whom were threatened
by unemployment.
The nation had become increasingly polarised,
not simply between black and white Americans
but between the haves and the have-nots, as the
destructive Los Angeles riots demonstrated in
May 1992. The US might in this respect prove to
be something of a model for the future of other
highly industrialised nations. The development of
an ‘underclass’ of the poor, with the black ethnic
group its largest but not its only component,
could produce further violence, crime and drugtaking
and increased dependence on welfare. A
vicious circle was set up: inner-city ghettos with
deteriorating education and employment opportunities
became the derelict homes of the poor.
Well-paid employment requires education and
skills, and the market economy provided less
rather than more jobs for the unskilled. To put
them to work, to provide training and education,
to revitalise the inner cities, to provide more manual
jobs – all this would require more public
spending, which in turn would mean higher taxation
and sacrifices by the better-off. When the
poor and those on low wages constituted a majority
they represented political power, as in F. D.
Roosevelt’s day. In the last quarter of the twentieth
century their numbers had shrunk, however,
and many were alienated from the democratic
process, which they saw as unhelpful to them.
They no longer constituted so significant a group
among those who vote. Less government interference
and lower tax burdens appealed to those who
vote, among them a large elderly population who
claimed medical and social benefits fully, without
regard to their income and wealth.
As long as the violence of the poorest section of
society was contained there was little real incentive
to ‘declare war’ on poverty, especially as it was
comfortingly argued that past efforts to do so in
the 1960s had not been effective. Now that the
Cold War was over, would the American people
resolve the crisis in many inner urban centres,
which at times of eruption could resemble a war?
That was one of the large questions of the 1990s.
The November 1992 election was a ‘three horse
race’. A millionaire, Ross Perot, stood as an independent.
It is a measure of America’s disenchantment
with politics and a tribute to Perot’s gutsy
television performances that he won 19 per cent of
the popular vote. A rather lacklustre Bush, who
could not persuade the American people that the
recession was over, lost the presidential election
but only by a small margin of popular votes. The
reforming governor from Arkansas, Bill Clinton,
and his vice-presidential running-mate Albert
Gore, a senator from Tennessee, turned the White
House Democrat. The two men, both still in their
forties, belong to a new post-war generation.
Clinton projected the aura that reminded America
and the world of the dynamic Kennedy years
with one significant contrast. Unlike Jacqueline,
the new First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was
a formidable partner actively involved in politics.
The question for the 1990s was how far
a change in direction, and the abandonment of
‘Reaganomics’ would meet the challenge of guiding
the world’s largest economy forwards successfully
and curing the ills of poverty and deprivation
that continued to exist in an avowedly affluent
society.
The Clinton years at home were fortunate
years. The Cold War dividend appeared to be that
the US no longer faced any serious threats.
Clinton could choose to act abroad or not. No
longer need the president send soldiers abroad to
risk limb and life. The US could look after its own
interests at home. The American people would
give their support to a relaxed, comfortable president
who concentrated on making their lives better
and when it came to the end of the first term
they would re-elect him. The lesson learned from
Bush was that what mattered was the economy.
Clinton’s conduct of foreign affairs changed
markedly during his first administration from
1993 to 1997. In his election campaign he
accused Bush of looking abroad and neglecting
domestic issues. Clinton inherited the ill-fated
intervention in Somalia and the problem of Haiti,
where the military had driven out the elected
president; desperate refugees were fleeing to the
US, many perishing in their overcrowded boats.
The inhuman war in Bosnia had been raging for
a year, the Bosnian Muslims unable to defend
themselves. Clinton called for aid to Bosnia,
NATO air strikes and the lifting of the arms
embargo, but at this time, early on in his administration,
his stance lacked conviction. He could
do no more than Bush for the Bosnian Muslims,
the victims of aggression, since the administration
was not prepared to send ground troops, and air
strikes were vetoed by Britain and France. In
October 1993 more forceful intervention by the
marines to end the clan wars in Somalia ended
with the naked corpse of an American helicopter
pilot being dragged through the streets of
Mogadishu. Evidence of American impotence was
displayed on television screens around the world.
Clinton also dithered in his attempts to deal with
Haiti’s military junta; he was not prepared to risk
American lives to restore democracy. The 600
lightly armed US and Canadian peacekeepers
were ordered not to land on the island in the face
of an angry Haitian crowd assembled by the military.
The following year Clinton took the plunge
and the force sent to Haiti in October 1994
restored the elected president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, despite his suspected Marxist leanings. It
was one thing to take military action in the
Western hemisphere – America had been doing
so for a century or more – but quite another to
intervene anywhere else. With the end of the Cold
War, Clinton’s attention turned from Europe to
Asia, to trade with Japan and China, and human
rights. The US was no longer prepared to serve
as a universal policeman and in this Clinton
reflected the majority view in America. But the
wider world regarded the president as unequal to
the task of leadership.
At home during the first year of Clinton’s
administration Congress frustrated many aspects
of his domestic agenda, in spite of the Democrats’
majority in both the Senate and the House of
Representatives. His only partial success was the
passage of a budget that demonstrated a measure
of financial prudence, raising the taxes of the rich
and providing some help to the poorest section
of society; the underprivileged would be encouraged
to move back into work, cutting welfare
spending. The flagship reform, universal health
provision, which had won him many votes in
the 1992 election, was in the hands of his
redoubtable wife, Hillary, but she lacked experience
in handling Congress. Her ambitious plans
to help 37 million Americans who had no health
care were vetoed by special-interest groups and
conservative Democrats and Republicans in
the House; they raised the old scare of socialised
medicine, claiming that the ‘new tax’ would
increase unemployment. Meanwhile, Hillary
Clinton’s own standing was being undermined
by allegations of wrong-doing. The Whitewater
scandal even cast doubts on the credibility of
the president himself. In the summer of 1994
the health bill was withdrawn. Hillary Clinton,
both admired and derided for running a ‘copresidency’,
had to abandon her key role in the
administration, changing her image and supporting
good family causes.
Clinton displayed remarkable resilience in the
face of political setbacks and personal attacks and
doggedly pursued his agenda of building a solid
foundation for America’s future prosperity and
influence, primarily through economic diplomacy.
He overcame the opposition of both Democrats
and Republicans who feared that free trade would
lead to unemployment, securing the passage of
the North American Free Trade Association
(NAFTA), which linked the US with Canada and
Mexico, in November 1993, and of the Uruguay
Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) in December 1994. He planned
to extend free trade agreements to include Chile
and the Argentine, and the whole of Latin
America (except Cuba) by 2005. Another free
trade goal was to link the US with Asia. First,
however, he needed to correct the trade imbalance
with Japan. Clinton’s threats had little
impact on the Japanese who, in many ways, continued
to maintain barriers against foreign
imports. His efforts to link human rights in China
to trade with the US and to the granting of ‘most
favoured nation’ status were even less successful.
In the last resort American exporters were keener
on markets than on dissidents in China and
Clinton’s economic agenda in the end took precedence.
‘Constructive engagement’ was now
deemed the best way to influence China. Fences
were mended with the European Union and in
December 1995 free trade between Europe and
the US was set out as a future aim. Thus Clinton
was seeking to position the US, already the most
powerful economy in the world, as the fulcrum of
global trade in the twenty-first century. But in the
autumn of 1997 Congress baulked at allowing
Clinton wider powers – fast track – to negotiate
further trade deals.
The failures of policies in China and Japan
during the early Clinton years were obvious; the
successes, whose benefits lay in the future, did not
make as much impression on the public as the
continuing scandals enveloping the White House.
Clinton alienated many of his own supporters; the
liberal Democrats condemned the policy of granting
China most favoured nation trading status
despite its human-rights abuses; they were also
opposed to his plans for limiting welfare and to
the introduction of a tough crime bill. Clinton’s
agenda was changing and moving to the right; his
approval rate was falling. Recognising that there
was a political vacuum and a lack of a clear
mission, congressman Newton Gingrich, the
Republican whip in the House of Representatives,
seized the initiative and set out a new Republican
manifesto for the November 1994 congressional
elections, a ten-point conservative ‘Contract with
America’ which sought to end ‘undeserving’
welfare for unmarried teenage mothers; to
provide tax breaks for the better-off; to oppose
US participation to UN peacekeeping all around
the world; and to promote fiscal responsibility.
Many voters, disillusioned with politicians in
general and the Clinton presidency in particular,
chose to stay away from the mid-term elections.
The Republicans won a sweeping victory, capturing
both the House and the Senate; Newton
Gingrich became the new speaker of the House.
Despite a largely Republican Congress, from
the low of autumn 1994 Clinton managed to win
back the support that would lead to his reelection
in November 1996, showing a new political
astuteness and employing successful measures
at home and abroad. In the Bosnian wars the US
seized the initiative and put an end to the fighting:
the UN embargo on arms was ignored and
the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims were persuaded
to form an alliance to defeat the Serbs.
Diplomatically the US played a predominant
role in fashioning the Dayton Agreement in
November 1995. A week later, on his visit to
Northern Ireland, Clinton was greeted as a peacemaker.
In March 1996 he took a firm line on
China’s threat to the Taiwanese presidential elections;
China engaged in military manoeuvres,
firing missiles close to Taiwan, but the crisis was
averted. In foreign affairs Clinton could no longer
be regarded as a novice.
At home Clinton succeeded in portraying the
Republican Congress as extremist in its domestic
policies while he himself took the centre ground.
The ‘New Democrat’ agenda was tough on crime
and tough on welfare for the ‘undeserving poor’;
the government would provide education and
training to enable welfare recipients to return to
work, punishing the recalcitrant by withdrawing
support. The programme sounded attractive to
the majority of Americans, who were enjoying a
buoyant economy with unemployment under 5
per cent. The declining auto industry was restructured
and modernised; ‘Silicon Valley’ symbolised
America’s leadership in the field of information
technology; up and down the country in businesses
large and small management and workers
demonstrated their capacity to change and compete.
Prosperity now depended on the export of
goods and services, which made up a third of the
Gross Domestic Product. A political consensus
had been reached for the government to downsize
and to balance the budget by 2002. On these fundamental
issues the New Democrats and the
Republicans were largely in agreement, although
Clinton vetoed the more stringent cuts to such
entitlements as the Medicare programme for the
aged. However, in December 1995 Congress and
the administration were deadlocked over the budget.
The spectacle of unpaid federal employees
rebounded on speaker Gingrich and the Republicans,
who were forced to compromise. Clinton’s
appeal became a broad one for moderates across
party lines. However, on racial issues he followed
more conservative and traditional policies of integration
through education and training. As black
and Hispanic Americans climbed the ladder in
economic-social terms so, it was argued, would
the bitter divides of race diminish.
By November 1996 Clinton was well placed.
His most dangerous potential opponent in the
presidential elections, General Colin Powell,
chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during the
Gulf War, had declined to be considered for the
Republican nomination. The Republican contestant
Senator Robert Dole fought a campaign
marked by its decency; Ross Perot dropped out
as a third party candidate. Clinton was now
helped by an economic boom: living standards for
the majority of Americans were rising for the first
time in years. Violent crime was falling, but so too
was job security for the professional managerial
class and blue collar workers as industry and services
restructured, often with scant regard for
employees. Flexibility was now the key. Those at
the top made huge profits; far more lost out.
Great problems remained to be solved: the decaying
inner cities, drugs, health care, and the situation
of the underclass in deprived areas –
predominantly black and Hispanic people.
It was clear, however, that the American
democratic process was crying out for reform.
Anyone seeking election in the US requires a
huge campaign chest. The public money allocated
to a presidential candidate is overshadowed by
donations made by people who usually expect
something in return. Clinton’s fund-raising activities
laid him open to criticism. A night in
Lincoln’s bedroom in the White House is innocent
of consequences; more questionable are large
donations, especially those made by foreign fundraisers.
In their quest for funds candidates are
sometimes tempted to cross the uncertain line
between legitimate dealings and corruption.
Throughout his years as president Clinton has
had to answer accusations of misconduct of one
kind or another; his wife’s involvement with the
failed Whitewater venture has been another source
of attack. Allegations of false testimony led to
impeachment proceedings in Congress and personal
humiliation. Clinton was shown to have
been hair-splitting with his interpretation of the
facts.
The drama was played out on countless TV
screens and in the press and diverted attention
from more serious issues. The American people
avidly read the latest revelations of the longdrawn-
out Monika Lewinsky affair: a pretty
young intern, a middle-aged charismatic president,
a stoical family, then the clues, a black dress,
a semen stain, talk of cigars – denials and admissions,
the indefatigable prosecutor’s hunt for
precise sexual detail at a cost of over 40 million
dollars; did the president lie about his personal
life? If anyone but the president had been
involved, the story would not have rated a
mention in the media, it is commonplace. It certainly
does not rate with Watergate. The House
of Representatives sent the case for impeachment
to the Senate. In the Senate ten Republicans
joined the Democrats in February 1999 to acquit
the president of perjury, in any case the
Republicans could not have secured the necessary
two-thirds majority to convict. The real loser was
not Clinton but Al Gore the next Democratic
presidential candidate who shunned the support
of Clinton in the campaign.
Soon it was politics as usual again. Clinton was
riding high astride the longest economic expansion
in US history, unemployment rate down to
4 per cent, personal incomes had soared and
fuelled increasing consumption, the housing
index up by a third, despite the warnings of the
chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan
of ‘irrational exuberence’, the stock-market rise
made everyone feel rich, able to afford more,
never mind the mounting debt; the federal
treasury was a beneficiary as lower taxes kept the
coffers full. ‘Goldilocks’ was the name given to
this wonderful ‘new economy’; fortunes were
made overnight as gullible investors chased the
offerings of new high-tech startups and dot.coms
to stratospheric heights ignoring their lack of
earnings. Old traditional telecoms too were
caught up in the bubble, and ‘creative accounting’
made sure that wonder companies became
ever more wonderful and enriched their promoters
including venerable and trusted Wall Street
brokers. The Reagan tax cuts, however, rather
than Clinton’s policies had fuelled a boom that
could not be sustained. It was coming to an end
as Clinton left office. At least he had done
nothing during his two terms to get in its way
and the American people were grateful. His personal
popularity remained high matching the
country’s optimistic mood. But the election of
2000 was bitterly contested.
Abroad Clinton had tried in vain to steer clear
of using US power aggressively. But after diplomacy
had failed he did intervene in Kosovo in
March 1999 to put an end to Milosˇevic´’s murderous
campaign against the ethnic Albanian
people; he did so in a way that would endanger
the least American lives, from the air. He resisted
the call by Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair to
oust the Serbians by an offensive on the ground
using such of the NATO allies prepared to participate.
This prolonged the conflict and caused
even greater suffering. It was left to the Serbs in
the following year to oust Milosˇevic´. The same
reluctance to act marked his policy towards Iraq
even after the UN weapons inspectors were
thrown out. Saddam Hussein defied the UN who
countered with economic sanctions. Britain and
the US limited their intervention by defining protective
no-fly zones in the south and north of Iraq
and from time to time punishing the military by
missile attacks on their bases. No US military personnel
would be put at serious risk.
On reducing the nuclear missile threat,
Clinton made little headway. The technology for
an effective missile defence system, successor to
Star Wars, simply proved inadequate and hugely
costly if attempted. US intervention in Haiti in
1994 turned sour. The military were turned out
but Bertrand Aristide installed as the elected president
did not halt violence or the country falling
into deeper poverty. In Cuba, Castro continued
to symbolise the patriot standing up against the
bullying US. Clinton did not lift the trade
embargo applied practically by the US alone,
though contacts increased and tensions lessened.
US policies have done nothing to increase its
influence. Clinton deserves credit for his attempts,
down to his final days in the White House, to
move forward the Palestinians and Israelis in a
peace process. Had he succeeded that alone
would have ensured his place in history. It was
not due to lack of effort on his part that he failed
when at one time a peace deal seemed within
grasp at the Camp David negotiation between
Arafat and Barak in September 2000. Clinton left
the White House, a well-liked president at home
and respected for his contributions to peacemaking
abroad. His years in the White House are
remembered for continuous prosperity and no
fatal adventures abroad, in the end a respectable
record of achievement.
Vice-President Gore should have been able to
capitalise on the successful Clinton White House
years. The scandals and sleaze of the Clinton years
were not the uppermost election issue Gore had
to fear. Gore had none of Clinton’s easy charm
and fought an uninspiring election campaign.
George W. Bush, son of former president George
Bush, also started with a handicap, a notorious
inability to speak English without making errors.
As a popular two-time governor of Texas, he had
earned a reputation for toughness on crime. His
ideology was ‘compassionate conservatism’.
During his election campaign he avoided the
mistake his father had made of making promises
it turned out he could not keep. His promise to
cut taxes was popular, his undertaking to put ‘a
touch of iron’ in foreign relations not sufficiently
specific to be alarming; on the hotly contested
question of abortion, he was non-commital.
Gore’s proposed tax cuts were targeted more to
the less well-off and more cautious than those
proposed by Bush. Gore’s health plan reforms
relied less on private insurance and added a benefit
for prescriptions; Bush relied more on private provision,
Gore on state and federal assistance. The
differences were not huge, the electorate equally
divided between the two candidates.
After the votes had been cast on 15 November
2000, the outcome was in doubt and depended
on a few hundred cast in Florida. In Palm Beach
County the arrangement of candidates on the
ballot paper had confused some voters; in the
wealthiest country in the world, punch card technology
of voting machines functioned imperfectly;
manual recounts, the famous ‘chard’ pieces
of paper hanging from holes had to be examined
to see whether the hole had been effectively
pierced to enable the machine to count the vote.
State law and local officials decided the outcome.
Gore did not concede; the legal wrangles were
finally adjudicated by the Supreme Court five
weeks after election day. Although Gore had won
more votes nationally, he had lost the votes cast
by the Electoral College based on who had come
first in each of the Union’s states. Would George
W. Bush be able to claim sufficient legitimacy
to be able to act as president? The US constitutional
process and Gore’s graceful concession
triumphed. All doubts were dispelled that whatever
reservations people had about the functioning
of the electoral laws, which differed from state
to state, the imperfect machines and other flaws,
the nation had to rally behind President George
W. Bush on his inauguration in January 2001.
During the Reagan–Bush era the US’s northern
neighbour Canada faced serious constitutional
problems. The Liberal Party, in power since 1963
except for a period of nine months, was swept out
of office in the general election of 1984 by the
Progressive Conservative Party led by Brian
Mulroney. It was the end of the Trudeau era;
Pierre Trudeau himself gave up the leadership of
the Liberal Party. Canada thus followed the sea
change of Western politics, adopting policies
to roll back the frontiers of the state, cut government
spending and encourage business enterprise.
Mulroney also promised to solve Canada’s
longstanding constitutional problems, especially
the question of French-speaking Quebec. His
approach was conciliatory, though he was soon
perceived as too irresolute.
Canada benefited from the upswing that lifted
Western economies after 1982, and its gross
national product grew strongly until 1990. A
major plank of Mulroney’s strategy was a drive for
free trade. After fierce debate about the threat to
its independence, Canada in 1988 concluded a
treaty with the US that came into force in January
1989 and provided for the dismantling of all trade
barriers over a ten-year period. Already 70 per
cent of Canada’s trade was with the Americans.
The satisfactory state of the economy enabled
Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative Party in the
federal election of 1988 to retain power with an
overall majority. But the constitutional issue
raised by the passionate desire of French-speaking
Quebec to preserve its identity was becoming the
burning question in Canadian politics. For the
first time Canadians were talking of the unthinkable,
namely that the Canadian federation could
break up.
A new constitution designed to regulate
relations between the provincial and federal governments,
devised by Trudeau in 1982, had
foundered on the objections put forward by
Quebec. Nonetheless, Mulroney and the prime
ministers of the ten provinces reached an agreement
in June 1987 known as the Meech
Lake Accord, which accepted French-speaking
Quebec’s demand to be recognised as a ‘distinct
society’. The agreement next required ratification
by the parliaments of the provinces. In
December 1988 Quebec’s prime minister Robert
Bourassa insisted that in Quebec only external
signs in French would henceforth be permissible.
That infringed the rights of the 12 per cent of
the province’s population who were Englishspeaking.
The language issue was symbolic of
deeper intentions and aroused a storm in the
English community. Two English-speaking provinces
now put off decisions to approve the
Meech Lake Accord. If it was to come into force,
it required the unanimous approval of all the
provinces by June 1990. In the end only eight,
including Quebec, had approved and Manitoba’s
and Newfoundland’s refusal to ratify meant that
the Accord lapsed.
Negotiations for a solution had to be begun
anew. The pro-independence parties in Quebec
gained in strength. The chances of a successful
outcome had deteriorated since the abortive
Meech Lake Accord. The English-speaking
provinces questioned why Quebec, which had
already benefited disproportionately from federal
economic aid, should be granted special status.
Mulroney was further weakened by his personal
unpopularity, and that of his government, while
Bourassa had to maintain his position in Quebec
against the rising tide of sentiment favouring
independence. Nevertheless, a new agreement
was eventually hammered out and announced in
September 1991 by the federal government and
the provincial prime ministers embodying farreaching
constitutional changes. These included
the crucial recognition of Quebec as a ‘distinct
society’ and the granting of self-government to
Canada’s indigenous peoples, the Amerindians
and the Inuit. The referendum throughout
Canada in October 1992 saw the rejection of the
constitutional proposals. This in part reflected the
unpopularity of Mulroney; moreover, the majority
of English-speaking Canadians felt that the
concessions to French-speaking Canadians went
too far. Three years later, in October 1995, a referendum
in Quebec failed to gain a majority for
independence by the narrowest of margins.
A political sea change occurred in 1993. The
October election results nearly wiped out the
Progressive Conservative Party, reducing their
representation in Ottawa from 155 to 2; the
Liberal Party won 177 of the 301 seats, the separatist
Bloc Québécois, led by Lucien Bouchard,
54 seats, and the right-wing Reform Party of
Western Canada 52 seats. These elections were
the first to be held on the basis of ‘first past the
post’ in each constituency instead of proportional
representation and so no longer reflected the percentage
vote cast country-wide. That is why the
Bloc Québécois, whose support was concentrated
in French Canada, gained 54 seats with 14 per
cent of the vote nationally, while the Conservatives,
with 16 per cent spread widely, captured
only 2 seats. After the elections Prime Minister
Jean Chrétien, after nine years in opposition,
formed a Liberal government. His administration
set out to cure Canada’s economic ills: at the cost
of unemployment the government cut its spending
and the deficit. The economy revived, though
unemployment remained at 9 per cent in 1997.
The problem of Quebec appeared to have eased
after the issue of separation was addressed in
1995, when a dramatic referendum for independence
failed by only 50,000 votes.
Canada’s federal future continued to defy any
agreed solution and looms large in national
politics. Earlier attempts to agree on constitutional
change at Meech Lake in 1987, or
Charlottetown in 1992, ultimately failed to win
the approval of the English-speaking voters. In
the west, Preston Manning led the Reform Party
opposed to special treatment of Quebec and
recognition of its ‘distinct society’, but he too
wanted to win greater autonomy from the federal
government in Ottawa. The general election
called by Chrétien in June 1997 left the Liberals
as the largest party but also reflected the growing
divisions of Canada.
During the last years of the twentieth century
and early years of the twenty-first the political
issue that had divided Canada for decades – the
demand of francophone Quebec for independence
– began to ease. The federal elections in
June 1997 though reducing the strength of the
Liberal Party, returned Jean Chrétien to the premiership.
He was now prepared to take a stronger
line on the issue of Quebec, and was fortified by
a decision of the Supreme Court in the following
year that a unilateral declaration of independence
would not be legal. While the charismatic leader,
Lucien Bouchard, prime minister of Quebec
province, continued to claim that the aim of his
party, the Parti Québécois, was independence,
after having already lost referenda in 1980 and
1995 he was in no mood to attempt a third.
His more flexible attitude and good government
contributed to his continuing in power after
elections in Quebec in 1998, but the opposition
had also found a charismatic leader in Jean
Charest. In Canada there was general satisfaction
with Chrétien’s government, the strong
economy in 2000 helping to secure his third victory
in seven years in the November general election.
Canadians were more concerned with the
economy, unemployment and health care than
with constitutional issues. This was true also of
Quebec where in elections in April 2003 the Parti
Québécois was ousted from office after nine years.
Although 80 per cent of the 7.4 million population
of Quebec is French-speaking they deserted
their old-style political leadership and voted for
a third party, so helping Charest and his Canadian
liberals to a stunning victory. The uncertainty over
the stability of Canada has lifted, and government
could address the economic issues during a period
of difficult world conditions.
World History
