“As with wine, there are vintages in history. But 1979 is a Château-Margaux in this area,” the editorialist of the New York Times Thomas L. Friedman. If pivotal years are fashionable in publishing (we can no longer count the works devoted to 1789, 1914, 1917, 1968 or 1989), we must recognize that the twilight of the seventies has everything of a turning point. In a fascinating book combining great history and cultural analyses, 1979, The great shift of the world*journalist and essayist Brice Couturier looks back on this year which continues to haunt us in many ways.
1979 was the second oil shock, the definitive end of the Trente Glorieuses, a term popularized by Jean Fourastié in a bestseller published that year. It is also the launch of the European monetary system, the first step towards the single currency. For the United Kingdom, it was above all the arrival at 10 Downing Street of Margaret Thatcher, who shook up the declining economy of the former empire and became the leading figure of the “neoliberal” wave.
1979 was also the end of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and the boat people Vietnamese fleeing communism, which provoked a humanitarian mobilization in Western countries (to the point of bringing together Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron on the steps of the Elysée). “The defense of human rights – a defensive ideology – was going to take the place of the revolutionary myth,” notes Brice Couturier. 1979 kicks off Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. One of the poorest countries in the world, China is slowly converting to a market economy and opening up, a prelude to globalization.
Islamism and narcissism
1979 saw the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, which pushed the United States to finance Sunni jihadists (including a certain Osama Bin Laden…), but also forced them to toughen their tone against the rival Communist. The idealist Jimmy Carter will soon give way to the cowboy Ronald Reagan. 1979 was of course the Iranian revolution which surprised and blinded the West. Even Valery Giscard d’Estaing, although little suspected of leftism, believes that the religious dimension is anecdotal, and that it is above all a social and political revolt. However, this “revenge of God”, as Gilles Kepel would later diagnose it, clearly marks the end of Arab nationalism in favor of Islamism. The magazine Time make no mistake in designating Ayatollah Khomeini as “man of the year”.
But Brice Couturier himself quickly passes over the most underestimated event of this year: the storming of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by an Islamist fundamentalist group opposed to the Saudi royal family. The attack will block any attempt at modernization in the cradle of Islam for a long time. “This event was not understood in the West, but the consequences were major, underlines Thomas L. Friedman. Saudi Arabia reacted by taking a Wahhabi and fundamentalist turn. Not only did it embark on this ultra-religious path and puritanical on its territory, but it exported it to the mosques and madrasas of Muslim countries. In doing so, it changed the face of Islam, from Morocco to Indonesia. In 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself declared that before 1979, his country led “a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women drove cars, there were cinemas in Saudi Arabia”.
Former member of Radio Nova and GlobeBrice Couturier does not forget revolutions more frivolous. The tube Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles heralds the advent of music videos. Off the Wall by Michael Jackson launches the biggest pop phenomenon of the end of the century. London Calling des Clash is undoubtedly the best (double) rock album of all time. In terms of ideas, the essay The Culture of Narcissism by sociologist Christopher Lasch proves premonitory: the collective emancipation promoted by the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s gives way to the individual king, with his aspirations for bodily and psychological well-being. And it was in 1979 that Sony launched the Walkman which, according to the critic Guardian Jonathan Glancey, will represent “the apotheosis of individualism of the 1980s”.
*1979. The great shift of the worldby Brice Couturier. Perrin, 395 p., €23.50.
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