There Is Nothing for You Here, page 12
It was clearly not an abstract or theoretical question for me. I reviewed some of the salient points in my response but noted that when you were from the North East of England this was a lived experience, not a political issue. I related what working-class life was like in the North, from my family’s and community’s vantage point, and how the distinctions unfolded as you made a trip south (which I rarely did). London was another world entirely from Bishop Auckland and County Durham.
As I recounted in my Knox interview, in the twentieth century, the long arc of economic development had moved away from small industrial communities and cities to the service and high-tech hubs of large urban areas. By the 1980s, big cities and their immediate hinterlands had become the locus of opportunity—the chance to have a good, stable job and do something with your life beyond eking out an existence. The United States, as I would soon learn, became “bicoastal” during this same period, with the eastern Atlantic and West Coast regions pulling people and activity away from the center. Similarly, London and the South of England already dominated the United Kingdom in January 1989, when I was taking this interview. The North East of England was an economic wasteland, an opportunity desert. Prosperity was nothing but a mirage: the shimmer of the city of London or even another country somewhere far beyond the horizon.
I told the panel that Moscow was in fact the first big city I had lived in. When I got there on my student exchange program, Moscow was also very much down on its luck. Indeed, everything in the USSR was in a state of decay. In Bishop Auckland many of the shops were boarded up, the direct consequence of mass unemployment and rising poverty, which suppressed demand. In Moscow the shops were open, but there was often nothing in them. There was plenty of demand but no supply. I observed that the Soviet economy and consumer-goods production had run out of steam. The entire population seemed to be in a downward spiral. Although I didn’t know it yet, the Soviet Union was headed toward the same devastating levels of unemployment and poverty as the North East once the state collapsed in 1991. For now, in the USSR in 1989, people still had jobs, which was somewhat different from the situation at home.
In any case, the comparisons resonated with the selection committee. They had lots of follow-up questions about my time in the USSR and what I had seen during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit. So now I was on my way to America, thanks in part to my firsthand experience of the North-South divide and a chance encounter over a cup of coffee.
Part II
A Divided House
5
The Land of Opportunity
When I moved to the United States in 1989, I had not spent any length of time anywhere in England apart from Bishop Auckland and the North East. Having never experienced, except in tantalizingly fleeting visits, the proverbially “sunlit uplands” of England’s green and pleasant land, I was finely attuned to industrial decline. I was a product of it. It shaped my entire childhood and adolescence.
I wasn’t expecting to see similar patterns and divides when I got to Harvard and the land of opportunity, but parts of the United States were trending in the same direction as County Durham in the 1980s. The American version of England’s North East—the Northeast, New England—was also a deindustrializing region. Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the entirety of the next decade, I was struck by the jarring disparities and similar developments to those I had seen in old England and the USSR.
Harvard’s campus was a far cry from the other parts of town, including those right on its doorstep. Impecunious graduate students lived in subrentals in precariously leaning wooden triple-deckers in “Slummerville,” as some students snidely dubbed Somerville, the factory town just north of Cambridge. Their landlords were the former workers in Somerville’s once-famous brickworks, Ford Motor assembly, and meatpacking plants. They bought the triple-deckers for their growing families in the boom times. They were forced to rent out rooms or entire floors in the bust when everything closed.
Gentrification and economic revival were still some way off in this period. Harvard’s neighbor and sometime rival, MIT, was busy absorbing East Cambridge’s old industrial zone. The university was in the process of converting shuttered factory buildings into science laboratories and student housing. Harvard and MIT were major local employers, although of course for administrative and custodial staff positions. The faculty usually came from elsewhere, as did most of the students. There was a lot of town-and-gown tension and evident polarization of political views.
I had to come to Harvard to enroll in a two-year master’s program in Soviet studies at the university’s Russian Research Center. I ended up tracking the Soviet bloc’s free fall in real time over the course of my degree program. The USSR was on the ash heap of history only a few months after I received my degree in June 1991.
Over the course of my studies and based on my personal experiences, it soon dawned on me that the Cold War, the proverbial Iron Curtain, and the ideological veil of the bitter struggle between capitalism and communism had concealed the fact that the United Kingdom, the USSR, and the United States had much in common. Once you lifted the veil, you could see the touch points beneath—especially when you knew what you were looking for.
Stuck in the USSR
For me, born in 1965, and from my vantage point of experiencing life in the North East of England, then the Soviet Union, and then the United States, the big three military and industrial powers of World War II were facing similar postindustrial challenges, albeit on slightly different timescales. Historically, the USSR’s trajectory of industrial development was similar to those of the United Kingdom and the United States in the twentieth century, with periods of booms and busts before and after the Second World War. The USSR had been mostly on the sidelines during the oil shocks of the 1970s, as it developed its own oil and gas reserves for domestic consumption, but it could not escape the effects of the technological changes that pushed other economies toward modernization and away from heavy industry. The Soviet Union was the bastion of workers in coal mines and smokestack industries and massive factories. The 1980s were not good times for workers and their enterprises.
When I first got there, in 1987, the Soviet Union was still a centrally planned economy, as it had been since the 1920s. The parts of the economy were closely interlinked. Supply lines stretched across the entire country as well as into neighboring Eastern European countries of the Soviet bloc, such as Poland, Hungary, and East Germany (GDR). Moscow was the hub and the main market for goods. In the USSR, all roads and rail and air routes came into Moscow and out again. Every economic sector and geographic region rose and fell with the others. There was no autonomy, little room for individual innovation, and thus no system flexibility. You pulled on one string and suddenly other parts of the system started to unravel. Everyone knew there was a big, perhaps insurmountable problem by the time Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985. Over the next five years, the Soviet state was pulled apart by intra-elite disputes over how to fix the failing economy, with everyone tugging on different strings.
Ordinary people across the Soviet Union’s constituent republics had grown disillusioned with a Communist system that never delivered. It was very similar to the situation in the United Kingdom with Ireland, Scotland, and Wales in the same timeframe. By the 1980s, citizens of the USSR no longer fully associated themselves with the overarching Soviet identity the state had promoted. From the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to the Caucasus and republics like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, former Soviet “comrades” started to return to older ethnic identities. Even in the Russian republic, ethno-nationalist tensions increased behind the Soviet façade, similar to the rise of English nationalism in the UK. Eventually, in December 1991, the USSR came apart at the seams. The republican heads of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia met in a hut deep in the Belarussian woods to repudiate Gorbachev’s last-ditch efforts to shore up their fractured union. They declared the union dead.
In the case of the USSR, its postindustrial difficulties were immediately obvious, even to the outside observer. In the UK and the U.S., postindustrial decline was more uneven. It was gradual in some places, sudden and brutal in others. It was not even apparent on the surface for most people at the national level, unless you lived in a blighted former industrial neighborhood, town, or city—like a Somerville or Bishop Auckland—where the collapse of the local economy was a reality and the rest of the country seemed to move on without you. The United Kingdom and the United States were not centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union. Some might argue that the UK was centrally planned to some extent at the beginning of the 1980s. The “commanding heights” of the steel, coal, oil, gas, rail, and shipbuilding industries had been nationalized after World War II, until Margaret Thatcher reprivatized them and pushed them to be profitable or close. There was, however, a great deal of sectoral and regional variation. There was scope for innovation. There was also private capital and government spending to invest in new businesses. Private philanthropy and accumulated family assets (housing, savings) helped smooth things over for some of those who fell on hard times.
Parts of the economy and some regions in both the United States and the United Kingdom adapted relatively quickly to changes in technology. Massachusetts, for example, would turn itself around in the early 2000s, putting some of the travails I first saw in 1989 and in the 1990s behind it. Regions in the Northeast eventually matched the shifts in national and global trade patterns and met the demand for new manufacturing products and services. In the UK, the economy in London and the South of England boomed, driven by new financial and consumer services and an influx of highly qualified migrants and immigrants from around the globe. The mining and manufacturing industries and centers of North East England, and their counterparts in the American Midwest and Appalachia, were not so nimble. Nor were they so fortunate. They also lost everything at once.
In Russia, Moscow mirrored London and some of the individual U.S. cities. It too became a boom town. By the 2010s it was a glitzy megalopolis that eclipsed every other Russian city and region. All the population growth, dynamism, and wealth generation of the new service economy and technology sectors, and all the key connections with global markets, became concentrated in and around Moscow. It became totally different from the city I lived in at the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s. Instead of being the hub for the Soviet bloc, Moscow was now a global city. Everywhere else, even the former Russian imperial capital of St. Petersburg, was a backwater in comparison.
In the UK North East, as its population became economically and demographically depleted, the region’s political clout rapidly diminished. There was little effort to cushion the blows or smooth the transition. Successive governments and prime ministers after Margaret Thatcher did not care about the people’s plight. Politically, they didn’t have to. The North had no means to hold them to account for their losses.
Bishop Auckland’s predicament in the 1980s was soon emblematic of hundreds if not thousands of towns across regions of the United States. Left to their own devices, without targeted and sustained state intervention, they simply could not adapt and modernize. They ended up as permanent losers, not winners, in the new economy, and in a state of perpetual decay.
Initially in the United States, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and then the collapse of the USSR in 1991, there was no sense that America too was in postindustrial decline. The idea that the West had won the Cold War and capitalism had prevailed over communism deflected attention from the troubles of America’s old manufacturing centers and their displaced workers. The Rust Belt seemed an unfortunate anomaly amid an overall picture of steady growth in the U.S. economy and rising prosperity in East and West Coast cities. But at the end of the 1980s, the Rust Belt was far more like the Soviet Union and the North East of England than most Americans realized. The United States’ big industries had also developed under a fixed set of technological and economic conditions. They were huge enterprises, centers of mass production, purpose-built for a specific time and place in the first half of the twentieth century. They had been built close to major sources of raw materials, energy, and transportation routes, such as shipping routes across the Great Lakes or down major rivers to the ocean. They had enormous sunken and fixed costs. The enterprises had drawn in hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers, often with central state and local government intervention and direction. Places like Consett, Hartlepool, and Sunderland in my home region of County Durham had their counterparts in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Gary, Indiana; and Flint, Michigan; with their steel mills and giant factories. They were in essence the same kind of big company or mono-industry towns as Dnipropetrovsk (now in Ukraine), Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and Magnitogorsk in the USSR. Regardless of the particular circumstances of their individual creation, they were now outmoded and depleted, their big industries shrinking as they modernized and became automated.
Mass industries built the cities, not the other way around. When the industries closed, the place-based economies and societies crumpled in on themselves. The infrastructure of opportunity disappeared. Workers’ homes were built right next to the mine or the factory so people could walk or cycle or take a short bus ride to begin their shifts at all hours of the day or night. The towns’ civic fabric, every social amenity—the hospitals and health centers, the social clubs, the sports teams, the churches, even holidays and celebrations—was tied to workplaces and jobs. It was the same in the U.S., the UK, and the USSR. When the mine or the factory closed, there was no work, nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Thriving industry-built cities became shattered ghost towns. Everyone was stuck in place, trapped in a time that had passed.
In the 1980s, in the same timeframe as factories closed and demand for labor declined in the United Kingdom and the United States, the USSR faltered. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan precipitated the end of the Soviet Union as well as the Cold War through the pressures their interactions with Mikhail Gorbachev imposed on him, at a time when he was attempting the reform of the entire Communist system. But in fact, domestically, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev were all engaged in the same reform project—out with the old, in with the new. Each adopted a top-down approach notable for its absence of broader social consultation and its politically polarizing effects. Reforms were inflicted or imposed and rarely explained to the population that was most affected by them. But it was only Gorbachev who lost a country.
In the euphoria at the end of the Cold War, the confluence of timing, events, and intent went unnoticed on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The UK and the U.S. could surely not have anything at all in common with the Soviet Union, given the total failure of its system . . . could we?
“Blair’s Girls”
My time at Harvard, from 1989 to 1999, was a period of personal and professional transformation and transition, as well as consolidation of knowledge that led me toward these insights into the common patterns among the U.S., U.K., and Russia and the implications of these parallels. The 1990s was the decade in which the connections between my family experiences in the North East of England and developments and events in Russia became clear and I began to see similar reflections in the United States. In my first year at Harvard, I had a few of the same early encounters with class discrimination as I had had at St. Andrews. I could see how it would continue to constrain my opportunities back home. The Oxford philosophy, politics, and economics set that I might have ended up studying with, had things turned out differently at my interview, followed me to Harvard.
PPE, as I had already learned, was the prestigious generalist degree for aspiring politicians and most of the UK ruling class. Graduates of PPE at Oxford had a stranglehold on the UK government for decades, creating a purportedly meritocratic but certainly self-perpetuating dynasty. They dominated the Kennedy Scholarships—the one I missed by walking into the closet. Even Sarah Moor and a couple of others who had graduated from Cambridge felt out of place. The Oxford PPE clique at Harvard exuded confidence and the utter certainty that as part of the UK elite they would make a major impact as political party leaders, journalists, academics, or other public figures back in Britain.
The first social hour, when Harvard brought all the UK fellowship students together, was a rerun of my German school exchange experience a decade earlier. Each new fellow was encouraged to bring “a friend” to mix things up a bit. It was a bit early to have made friends, but Sarah and I were living together in a Harvard dorm, so we invited our immediate neighbors on either side, John Henriksen and Ken Keen (who would later become my husband). They were both from the American Midwest—from Iowa and Illinois, respectively. This was their first introduction to the UK and the vagaries of its class system. They thought it was ridiculous.
Sarah and I, with name tags affixed to our chests, stood around awkwardly clutching drinks, chatting to John and Ken, and waiting to introduce ourselves to the other students if they moved within reach or made eye contact. John and Ken quickly observed that as soon as some of the other Brits heard my answers to the determinative trifecta of questions and took note of my North East accent, they turned away and moved on. One Kennedy Scholar’s face puckered up so obviously as I spoke and she sipped her drink that they asked what was going on. John and Ken said it looked like she had taken a swig of pee. They referred to her as “Urine Face” for the rest of the year.
