open Democracy News Analysis - Iron Curtain: a century restaged, Patrick Wright - Comments

Chris Ward on "Iron Curtain: a century restaged"

Chris Ward — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 21:18:31 +0000

I agree with the basis of Patrick Wright's argument. While Churchill referred to an Iron Curtain, it was against the back-drop of the Red Army across Europe and the former war-time ally seen as an aggressor. However, the earlier Iron Curtain was a Soviet idea, reflecting the competing views of Trotsky, who wanted to launch worldwide revolution immediately and Stalin who opposed the idea arguing for the consolidation of socialism in one country. However. from behind Stalin's curtain, the Comintern and the predecessors of the KGB were engaged in espionage and subversion, which inconveniently, was interrupted by Adolf Hitler.

patrickwright on "Iron Curtain: a century restaged"

patrickwright — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:39:21 +0100

You're right, certainly, that the 'theatricalization of politics' is a long-standing phenomenom, easily traced back into antiquity. The version that emerges with the iron curtain has a distinctly twentieth century aspect. Basically, when an 'iron curtain' is brought down between peoples, it surrenders them to propaganda, paranoia, and the purposes of their opposed regimes - this is how the early twentieth century objectors saw it. Once this has happened, and even more so when the division enforcing ignorance of conditions on the other side is accompanied by a polarisation between ideologies, every interaction becomes susceptible to theatrical presentation. People who went through the curtain have a hard time establishing what they were looking at. If they were not actually faced with 'Potemkin villages' - i.e. scenes that had been rigged to give them appropriate impressions - they were confronted with exactly that accusation by hostile commentators in their homeland. This is how things were for the first westerners who travelled to Soviet Russia, and the confusions persisted through the twenties and thirties (not least in the exhibitionary show trials) Even in the fifties it was possible for a Polish diplomat/spy named Pawel Monat to land at Idlewild Airport in New York and be utterly shocked by the sight of traffic jams - having been convinced that the images he had previously seen of such scenes were just rigged up by US propagandists hoping to convince citizens in the eastern bloc that American workers had cars.

ianniscarras on "Iron Curtain: a century restaged"

ianniscarras — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:52:08 +0100

Thank you for the reply. Surely the "theatricalization" of politics comes in different shapes and forms and existed long before curtains brought the show to a close? If however contemporary Europe is a curtain free world, does that mean that we should look forward to yet more leaders with the rhetorical capacities of a Romano Prodi? The use of a turn of phrase to shed light on certain aspects of our twentieth century is striking and I will order your book over the net. I.C., Athens, Greece.

patrickwright on "Iron Curtain: a century restaged"

patrickwright — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:21:35 +0100

Various other 'curtains' emerged in the shadow of the 'Iron' one that became established after Churchill's Fulton oration of 1946. The 'Bamboo Curtain' was brought down around the People's Republic of China after the Liberation of 1949. The Mexican artist Jose Luis Cuevas later detected a 'Cactus Curtain' between the USA and Mexico, blaming it on the isolationist tactics of Diego Rivera and other muralists. I think, however, that it is for different reasons that the 'prehistory' of Churchill's Iron Curtain is worth reconsidering now. Over the post-war decades, we got used to thinking of the Iron Curtain as an armed and closed frontier - something altogether more like a wall or a fence. Indeed, it found it's primary European symbol in the Berlin Wall. This identification, supported as it certainly was by the experience of that time, encouraged the idea that the Iron Curtain disappeared with the fall of the Wall in 1989. Yet if we understand the iron curtain in its longer history - as a metaphor that was first applied to international relations by British anti-war campaigners in 1914 - we will see that it was not entirely, or even primarily, a way of talking about frontiers, open or closed. To begin with, the iron curtain was the war between Britain and Germany, and it was by members of the same circle that the metaphor was then taken east and applied to the Allied blockade of Bolshevik Russia in 1920. For these people - all connected to the Union of Democratic Control and other suffragist and anti-war campaigns - the iron curtain was a 'psychological deadlock' planted in the polarized minds of belligerent peoples. It was a vertical division that marked the resurgence of the nation state and the cancellation of ideas of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and social progress. A cancellation of exchange between peoples cast into mutual suspicion, it also testified to a disconcerting triumph of the new, and satanic, arts of State censorship, propaganda and public relations. By reconnecting this history to the story of the post-war Iron Curtain, we will put an end to the Cold War legend that the Iron Curtain first descended into the world in 1946. More importantly, however, we will surely also wonder what exactly came to an end in 1989. My contention is that much of the iron curtain, together with its theatricalization of politics, has lived on in Allied conduct of the 'war against terror' in Iraq: Blair's dodgy dossier, George W. Bush's 'mission accomplished' moment on a carefully manipulated US aircraft carrier etc.

ianniscarras on "Iron Curtain: a century restaged"

ianniscarras — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:41:30 +0100

And curtains of any other kind? Have they made any contribution to the theatre of international relations? I. C.

Iron Curtain: a century restaged, Patrick Wright

Patrick Wright — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:32:01 +0100

When I started researching the Iron Curtain, I shared the widespread assumption that this symbolic device first descended into the world on 5 March 1946, when Winston Churchill went to the small town of Fulton in Missouri and, standing in a college gymnasium with President Truman at his side, gave the famous speech in which he warned of the new division of Europe: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent . . ."

I assumed that the story of the Iron Curtain reached forward from that inaugural moment, through four decades of cold war to the events of 1989, when the Berlin wall was breached, the wire that had long divided Austria and Czechoslovakia was twisted into a great heart-shaped sculpture, and "people power" seemed to triumph at last. This was indeed the reality of the Iron Curtain as experienced by many millions, but it wasn't long before I realised that it was also a formulaic conception, and one that remained tightly framed by cold-war attitudes.

Patrick Wright is a cultural critic, historian, and broadcaster, and professor of cultural studies at Nottingham Trent University. Among his books are On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (Verso, 1985), The Village that Died for England (Jonathan Cape, 1995; new edition, 2003), The River: the Thames in Our Time (BBC Worldwide, 1999), (as co-author) Stanley Spencer (Tate, 2001), and Tank: the progress of a monstrous war machine (Penguin, 2003). His latest book is Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2007). His website is here.

This article is an extract from the introduction to Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War

Also by Patrick Wright in openDemocracy:

"The stone bomb" (8 April 2003)My doubts intensified when I visited Fulton in April 2003. There can, of course, be no question that Winston Churchill came here to deliver his epoch-making speech. Yet it remains a strangely theatrical experience to drive into this small town in the American mid-west and to find at its heart a Churchill memorial consisting of a relocated London church by Sir Christopher Wren, bordered by a little "English" garden on one side and an artistically adjusted stretch of the Berlin wall on the other.

It was also curious to stay across the road at the Loganberry Inn, a late Victorian timber house with bedrooms named after previous guests, remembered as if they had only just departed: Margaret and Denis Thatcher, President Lech Walesa.... Churchill's speech was a vast event for Fulton, but the enthusiasm with which his brief visit is now commemorated as the opening act of the cold war left me scratching my head at the breakfast table.

My suspicions were confirmed soon enough. Shortly after returning to England from Missouri, I happened to go to Grantchester, the little village just west of Cambridge, in order to visit a distant cousin. David Roden Buxton was very elderly by then, and we sat by the fireside as he reminisced over some albums of photographs. He had travelled alone in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s, studying and photographing medieval churches, including many marvellous examples of both stone and wood that had been destroyed later in the Stalinist period. Asked how he had come to assemble this evocative record, he explained that he had first gone to Russia with his sister and parents in the summer of 1927. The family had visited Moscow and other cities, and also walked considerable distances through the countryside.

During the course of this conversation, he produced a copy of a book written by his father, a now forgotten Labour politician, humanitarian and colonial reformer named Charles Roden Buxton. In a Russian Village contained a description of the days its author had spent, seven years earlier in 1920, exploring conditions in several villages near Samara on the Volga. It was a work of vivid testimony, rendered all the more poignant by the fact that the settlements Charles Roden Buxton observed in their early encounter with Bolshevism had been overwhelmed by famine in the months between his visit and the completion of his book.

Yet, this was not all. Pasted inside this battered family copy was a newspaper article clipped from an edition of the New Leader, the paper of the Independent Labour Party. Headed "Behind Russia's Curtain" and published in October 1927, this yellowed fragment contained Charles Roden Buxton's reflections on his more recent second visit to Soviet Russia. The title alone caught my attention and I was further surprised by the first paragraph, in which Buxton quoted an earlier condemnation of the "iron curtain" written by a certain Vernon Lee.

At that time, I was vaguely aware that a woman named Violet Paget had lived behind this pen-name and that, in the 19th century, she had written aesthetic studies and also stories concerned with history and the supernatural. Yet here was Vernon Lee as a political writer, lamenting the isolation, ignorance and hatred into which the "iron curtain" had plunged its violently separated peoples, and doing so some three decades before Churchill went to Fulton.

To begin with, I resisted this discovery as a meaningless coincidence of language: a verbal snare that should have had a large sign stating "Digression" posted beside it. I tried to shake off the idea, returning to the later story of McCarthyism, rereading the spy novels of the time, and flying to Lübeck in northern Germany to walk along the little beach at Priwall where, from 1952, the fence dividing East from West Germany had joined the Baltic Sea. Yet that reference to Vernon Lee persisted in my mind and I eventually decided to track it down.

It took me the best part of a year to locate the original article by Vernon Lee. By then, I had found several other instances of the phrase "iron curtain" being used in this earlier period. I had also come to the conclusion that these usages could not be dismissed either as trivial accidents or relics of an intriguing but ultimately irrelevant prehistory. It was surely they, and not the Missouri ground supporting Fulton's transported Wren church, that indicated the true foundations of Churchill's famous expression.

Blow-up scene from The Miller and His Men, the young Winston Churchill’s favourite play for the Victorian toy theatre

While the book that resulted from these researches - Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2007) - is indeed concerned to trace the emergence of a political metaphor, it is also an anticipatory exploration of the division that came to be known as the Iron Curtain after 1946. That barrier was, after all, a powerful political and cultural reality, and certainly not just an armed frontier between east and west Europe. Many of its characteristics, including the pronounced sense of theatricality it would bring to international politics, were inherited from the period before the second world war.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm has introduced us to the idea of "the short 20th century". My investigation is shaped by a connected hypothesis, which might be identified as the long cold war. It journeys through the back of Winston Churchill's mind, and into an early 20th-century world where the "iron curtain" was first described by a largely forgotten collection of Internationalists for whom it testified to the resurgence of the European nation-state, with its habits of imperial rivalry, secret diplomacy, press-stirred chauvinism and war. My purpose in excavating this earlier history - a story of lost horizons as well as of new vertical divisions - is not to reclaim the Iron Curtain for Europe, but to assist in the ongoing task of dismantling cold-war perspectives, "triumphalist" or otherwise, and of creating a differently informed understanding of the problems besetting international relations in the 21st century.

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