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  • 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century:An Interview with Christian Caryl
  • Donald A. Yerxa

IN STRANGE REBELS: 1979 AND THE BIRTH OF THE 21st CENtury (Basic Books, 2013), Christian Caryl argues that 1979, not 1989, was the watershed year that gave birth to the 21st century. To make his case, Caryl, a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, highlights five seemingly unconnected events that took place in 1979: the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland, Margaret Thatcher's election as British prime minister, and the start of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in China. Senior editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Caryl in August.

Donald A. Yerxa:

What made 1979 so momentous?

Christian Caryl:

1979 was momentous because it changed the rules of the game. Some of the events that took place that year were big and dramatic, like the Iranian Revolution or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. China's economic reform program, by contrast, started off rather modestly, so it attracted relatively little attention from the outside world. But what these stories have in common is that they fundamentally transformed the way we think about politics and economics. Before 1979, the idea of an "Islamic revolution" sounded oxymoronic; few in the West had any inkling of the gathering power of political Islam until the revolution in Iran and the rise of the Afghan mujahedin. Similarly, Margaret Thatcher's election as British prime minister signaled a fundamental shift in thinking about economics: the word "privatization" was scarcely used before 1979. (Thatcher herself, intriguingly, didn't like the word; for a while she preferred "denationalization," which sounded, she thought, a bit less radical.) Before 1979, markets and religion were discounted as political and economic factors in many quarters. After 1979, it was no longer possible to imagine a world without them.

Yerxa:

You focus on the emergence of four seemingly unconnected leaders: Margaret Thatcher, Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping, and Pope John II. What do you mean when you say that that they were all counterrevolutionaries?

Caryl:

The stories I describe in my book all have a conservative vector, but their implications go well beyond mere defense of some imagined status quo ante. I define a counterrevolutionary as a conservative who has learned from the revolution. All four of these figures (as well as the Islamic revolutionaries who were fighting against the Soviets and their communist proxies in Afghanistan) were reacting, in their own distinct ways, to various versions of the progressive vision of modernization that loomed so large throughout the 20th century. Thatcher was reacting to the social democratic "postwar consensus" in Britain. John Paul II and the Afghan mujahedin were fighting back against Soviet-style communism. Deng Xiaoping, a lifelong apostle of Mao, rejected Mao by embracing pro-market reforms. And Ayatollah Khomeini was responding to the Marxist ideas that dominated the secular opposition in his native Iran as well as the Shah's "White Revolution," a grandiose modernization program expressly designed to steal the Leftists' thunder by co-opting many of their ideas.


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Iranian revolutionaries in Azadi Square, 1979. From the BBC documentary The Last Shah (1996).

However conservative their instincts were, all of my 1979 protagonists adopted important aspects of the revolutions they were trying to upend. Khomeini appropriated Marxist rhetoric into his new discourse of Islamic revolution; the Afghan holy warriors also learned a great deal about conspiratorial tradecraft and the power of modern ideological systems from their communist opponents. Deng maintained tight Communist Party control and Mao's exalted status even as he set about eviscerating Mao's legacy. Thatcher's crusading rhetoric and penchant for ideological litmus tests, regarded by many of her Tory colleagues as distinctly "unconservative," showed how much she had learned from her opponents on the Left. (And despite her reformist zeal she ultimately left large swathes of the postwar British welfare state intact.)

Yerxa:

Strange Rebels is rich in chronological narrative but relatively sparse in explicit analysis. Except for your introduction and epilogue, you let readers draw their own conclusions. Would you comment on the way you structured...

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