# True love will find you in the end
# You'll find out just who was your friend
# Don't be sad, I know you will
# But don't give up until
# True love finds you in the end
# This is a promise with a catch
# Only if you're looking will it find you
# Cos true love is searching too
# But how can it recognise you
# Unless you step out into the light, the light
# Don't be sad, I know you will
# But don't give up until
# True love finds you in the end. #
In 1979, a Frenchman called Bernard Kouchner,
who had founded Medecins Sans Frontieres,
chartered an old cargo ship, and he went to rescue
thousands of starving refugees trapped on a tiny island.
Refugees that no-one else seemed to care about.
They were fleeing from the new communist government
that had taken over Vietnam.
To many liberals in the West,
the communists had been heroes in their fight against America,
which meant that the refugees did not deserve to be helped.
To Kouchner, this was outrageous.
The point is people are dying in the China Sea.
I mean, the boat people are now facing piracy.
I mean, they are attacked by pirates
ten times in their trip, if they are still alive,
and nobody are taking care of them.
And that's our purpose.
It's not possible to shut up now.
Kouchner's action had a powerful effect in the West,
because it started to undermine the self-belief of a whole generation,
who saw themselves as radical and pure...
..that possibly being good was not as easy as it seemed.
It began when the singer Joan Baez came out in support of Kouchner.
In the 1960s,
she had been deeply involved in the Civil Rights protests...
The mothers gave me five children to fully register...
You can't go in, nobody but students and parents.
..and also one of the leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
She was a symbol of the idealism at its heart.
I'd like to try, if I may. You can't get in.
But now she said that the refusal to help the refugees
showed how radicals had become not only uncaring, but corrupt.
They would allow thousands of people to die,
simply because they had the wrong ideology.
Baez went on French television
and she gave an interview that caused a sensation.
INTERVIEWER, IN FRENCH:
No, I never defended the government of Vietnam.
I spoke for the people inside of Vietnam.
I was against the violence
that this country perpetrated inside of Vietnam,
but...I was equally against an American boy
being shot out of a plane as I was the women and children
of Vietnam being bombed,
so it was never possible for my position to be clear,
particularly somewhere like France, where peace movement means left.
I'm not left.
Baez was immediately attacked by other anti-war activists,
led by Jane Fonda.
They accused Baez of being an unwitting agent
of American imperialism.
..and leftism in a way that I'm not. I think that's as simple as...
Despite the row, Kouchner carried on,
rescuing thousands of refugees lost at sea in tiny sinking boats.
Kouchner believed that what he was doing
might also be the start of a completely new kind of radicalism,
one that really would make the world a better place.
The reaction in the West, he said,
had shown that the old political ideologies of left and right
had now lost all credibility.
Kouchner had an alternative idea
that was going to go very deep in the imagination of the West.
It said that we are all one world,
linked together simply as individuals,
not divided by political ideas or by nations.
And we, the good people in the West, had a duty to intervene
to help the victims of all evil political ideas,
wherever they were across the world.
We don't care on leftist and rightist countries,
there is no leftist and rightist suffering,
and there is no possibility to split the world in good people
and bad people, good dead and bad dead.
Because we think that this is a new kind of policy.
For us, human being is one.
To let the people speak to each other before dying.
# With the nice girl in the park
# You were strolling full of joy
# And you told me that you'd never kissed a girl before
# Hold your hand out, you naughty boy
# Last night in the pale moonlight
# I saw ya, I saw ya
# With the nice girl in the park... #
Julia Grant had grown up in the north of England, near Blackpool.
But, in the 1970s, she had moved south
and became part of the growing gay scene, and a drag artist.
She knew inside herself that she was a woman -
that was her true self.
Which made her an outsider everywhere,
including in the gay world.
When I was living on the apparently gay scene and being a drag artist...
..nobody thought any...
..any bad if I sort of went out, did my show,
and, when I came off stage, sort of toned down my make-up
and put on a dress, because I was accepted as a drag artist,
whereas if I try to go to a gay pub dressed as a woman...
..most gay people resent the fact that a man wants to change his sex.
Transvestites and transsexuals are a minority
within the actual gay world.
To have a gender reassignment operation,
Julia was going to have to go through a series of interviews
with a state psychiatrist.
He would decide who she really was.
Julia was part of a new idea rising up in the 1980s -
it said that to change the world and to make it a better place,
you should fight to become
who you as an individual truly were.
That was real freedom.
But, to do it,
Julia was going to have to take on the medical establishment.
Do you have a letter from your doctor for me?
Right. Well, what is the problem?
Well, I feel, um, that I've been having a fight with myself
for a long time, and I've come to terms with the fact
that I believe I am a woman...
..trapped within sort of a man's body.
Well, what do you mean by being a woman?
Well, my whole.... All my thoughts and everything are feminine,
there's nothing masculine.
I tend to reject my masculine body.
You know it to be masculine?
I identify it as masculine
because society identify me as masculine.
Well, it's not a matter of society. It's a matter of anatomy.
You say you feel like a woman?
Yes, I believe everything I do is feminine.
I believe I'm a woman inside.
Well, Michelle, how does it feel to be a woman?
It just feels like being me. Can't describe it as anything else.
You see? She's right.
Nobody knows how anybody else feels inside.
Well, I feel I don't...
I believe I don't actually feel the way a normal man should feel.
It may be that you identify with certain stereotypes
of the female gender role -
that is the traditions, the behaviour, the ideas,
but that doesn't make you a woman.
You know, styles do change, even if you think they don't.
Shoulders are wider, and they're higher.
See, they all had to have pads put in.
And, insofar as we could,
we've just lengthened them a little bit because they're longer.
And the thing we've learned is never really press your hem.
You know, sometimes you see people ironing a dress,
and they press along the hem until it looks like a knife edge.
And then, if you want to let it down, you can't.
Just leave the hem gently rolled, and then you'll...
Never press along the edge, then you can let them down.
The China News Agency supplied
all the news for everyone in China,
but it also ran a privileged news service
for the Communist Party elite.
And the higher you were in the party,
the more truth you were allowed to know.
There were three levels of secret newspapers published every day,
and at the top there was what was called Big Reference.
Very few copies were printed,
because they were only for the top leadership,
and it was printed in extra large type
to make it easier for the old men who ran the country to read it.
And at the very top was now Deng Xiaoping.
He was in complete control in China.
He had defeated all his rivals,
and to show his strength, in 1979, he put his main enemy on trial,
Jiang Qing.
HE SPEAKS IN MANDARIN
She was accused, along with the other members of the Gang of Four,
of killing and persecuting thousands of people
in the Cultural Revolution,
but she refused to recognise the court.
She continually attacked the judges.
SHE SHOUTS
The judges, she said, were hypocrites.
They had all followed Mao's ideas.
They were just turning on her to save themselves.
Instead, she presented herself as the one thing
that she knew Deng Xiaoping feared most -
a defiant individual.
As she was hustled out of the court, she shouted,
"I am without heaven, and a law unto myself.
"It is right to rebel."
But Deng showed her no mercy.
Deng Xiaoping decided to experiment with democracy.
He allowed people to put up posters and sell magazines
in Tiananmen Square.
It was known as Democracy Wall...
..and it quickly became a symbol of a new openness in China.
But then it started to run out of control.
People published details of widespread corruption, greed,
incompetence, and nepotism at the very top of the Communist Party...
..and then that force that Jiang Qing had prophesied, individualism,
re-emerged.
Wei Jingsheng worked as an electrician at Beijing Zoo.
Wei he was a charismatic figure,
and he quickly became a leading force at Democracy Wall.
He called for the overthrow of Deng Xiaoping.
He put up posters that said,
"We want no more gods or emperors or saviours of any kind.
"We want to be our own masters.
"Everything that is happening now is just a new-fangled lie.
"Deng is just a new fascist dictator."
The wall was closed down, all the posters hosed off,
and Wei was arrested.
Wei Jingsheng's trial was broadcast live on television.
He was accused of counter-revolutionary crimes
and passing secrets to foreign agents.
Why was it necessary to close down Democracy Wall?
Well, you see, on the democratic wall...
..everyone, without putting his name...
..can blame or charge any person...
..without any ground. They can do it without any legal obligation.
Do you think in England, do you have this kind of freedom?
I don't think so.
Blame any person without putting on his own name in the wall paper.
Do you think that is a kind of freedom?
I don't think so.
Do you think that there's freedom of speech?
The way it looks in the West
is that, the moment the lid came off for a second in China,
and people made contact with western journalists...
I think I have to go for another...
Some work to do.
Bernard Kouchner's humanitarian vision of a world without borders
was now spreading.
Idealists from the West, inspired by his ideas,
were travelling to conflicts all around the world.
In Afghanistan, they came to help the Mujahideen,
who they saw as noble idealists
struggling against the Russian invasion.
IN FRENCH:
And, in 1984, it suddenly became a truly global movement.
It started when the BBC shocked the world
with a report about the effect of a famine in Ethiopia.
The response was Live Aid, organised by Bob Geldof.
It was driven by a vast outpouring of sympathy
for those who were starving in Ethiopia...
..but also by an anger and a frustration
with all politicians in the West who had done nothing to help.
I find it incredible that the mass of people
probably feel that something should be done,
yet their own governments just don't do anything. They do very little.
The very fact that it has to be done by people giving their own money
is ridiculous. I mean, we've given enough money into government.
Why can't they spend some of our money giving it back?
I mean, at the moment, you've got a problem with the butter mountain,
you don't know how to dispose of it.
To sell it to the Russians is the cheapest way.
I'm sorry, but butter doesn't do very much good in Africa,
as you know. Butter oil actually does.
It's one of the major sources...
Oh, butter OIL, if you can... If you can get it...
Well, it is a by-product of butter.
Yes, but, look, a lot is going. A lot of surplus food is going.
But, Prime Minister, there are millions dying,
and that's the terrible thing. Yes indeed...
# And the lesson today is how to die... #
What Live Aid seemed to show
was that it might be possible to change the world...
..but, to do it, you had to bypass all politics
because politicians, both left and right,
had become corrupted by power and petty nationalism.
Instead, you connected directly with others suffering
around the planet, and rescued them.
Bob Geldof travelled to Ethiopia
to visit the camps where the aid was being delivered.
But he began to realise
that something very strange was happening.
The Ethiopian regime was rounding up thousands of the starving people
who had come to the camps.
They were being taken to airstrips,
where they were loaded at gunpoint onto giant transport planes.
They were then flown to what were called resettlement camps.
Geldof was shocked by what he was seeing.
To him, it seemed to evoke an evil ghost from Europe's past.
The first pictures we saw of resettlement were these ancient
and beautiful people, starving and in rags,
under armed guard, going into these vast Russian planes.
They probably had never seen a plane.
They have nothing left, only their dignity.
And to the West, the immediate psychological reaction
is Jews being led at gunpoint into cattle trucks by the Nazis.
What Geldof had stumbled upon
was something that those who ran Ethiopia had been trying to hide -
that the food brought in by Live Aid
was being used as a weapon in a civil war.
Ethiopia's ruler was a brutal tyrant called Colonel Mengistu.
Mengistu had decided that the only way to win the war
was through a massive piece of social engineering.
He was going to literally move millions of people
out of the rebel areas in the north
and relocate them in the empty south,
where they could no longer fight,
and the food aid was being used as bait
to lure hundreds of thousands of people into the refugee camps,
where his troops then swooped in and rounded them up.
Live Aid was an extraordinary achievement.
It is estimated that it may have cut the death toll in the famine
by half.
But the group Medecins Sans Frontieres made the dramatic claim
that the aid might have also led to the same amount of deaths
as it had saved.
The mass relocations were so brutal, they said,
that over 100,000 people had died.
It showed the weakness at the heart
of the growing humanitarian movement -
that when they came face to face with a brutal ruler
like Colonel Mengistu, who was using their aid not to save people,
but to save himself and kill thousands more in the process,
they had no way of stopping him.
They couldn't challenge power.
I only wish I'd been born a woman, then I'd have the same privileges
as all the sort of women's libbers who were sort of showing off
about burning their bras and all the rest of it.
They can still marry. I can't.
So I've got to try that little bit harder by wearing make-up
and trying to look good all the time,
feminists liking it or not.
I think that if a woman's got pride in herself
and wants to look attractive and wants to wear make-up,
then, I don't know,
more people will turn and look at a fully-made-up woman.
Well, it ain't right, men dressing up as women.
They're just a bunch of queers, ain't they? BLEEP hell.
How do you know that? What? How do you know?
We've got one in our school, ain't we? Mr BLEEP.
Yeah. He's a queer. In the papers and everything.
He goes round touching all the kids' legs.
They're a disgrace, touching men's bollocks and everything.
Well, she wasn't doing that, was she?
I dunno. It's not even a she, is it?
It's a he trying be a she.
Julia Grant was now living as a woman,
while she carried on being interviewed by the NHS psychiatrist,
but she was becoming increasingly frustrated and angry
with the process, and she decided to challenge the power
the psychiatrist had over her.
She travelled to the south coast to see a surgeon at a private clinic.
She went with her partner, Amir.
He was a refugee who had fled persecution in Iraq.
The surgeon agreed to give Julia breast implants...
..and, after the operation, Julia went to confront the psychiatrist.
I am supposed to be directing your case
because it's primarily a psychiatric matter,
and I must confess, I take exception to you doing that.
Well, I thought it was something permanent.
I needed something to establish that I was doing what I was doing.
It's a medical matter. It isn't a personal choice.
I like to be informed.
See, once again, you're overstepping the mark,
and I don't like it one bit.
I don't wish to appear to be petulant,
but, really, you're not arranging this affair
in a manner that fits our protocol.
We like to do it in our way, where we know what's going on,
and I don't like people to step out of line.
I find it, to say the very least, irritating.
Well, I'm having difficulties with the guy I'm living with...
So do many of my patients with their associates.
Why should you be different?
I don't think you have conducted yourself particularly tactfully
in all this, and there I think the interview will end.
Thank you very much.
You'd better come and see me in another few months.
Why can't I have the operation?
Why can't I pay for it?
They don't like that.
They like you to be very placid and just sit there
and just do as you're told.
And if you don't do as you're told,
then you're going against the system,
and then the system won't help.
After all, it's my mind. I know what I want.
Nobody else can get inside me.
Julia went back north to see her family,
to tell them that she was going to defy the medical establishment.
She would find a way to pay for the operation herself.
She travelled through the old industrial cities,
where many of the factories were now closing
in the wave of de-industrialisation that was sweeping through Britain.
Factories and terraced houses. That's all it is.
It's like Coronation Street, innit?
That whole view. It's amazing.
Back-to-back.
# Take me out tonight
# Where there's music and there's people who are young and alive
# Driving in your car
# I never, never wanna go home
# Because I haven't got one any more
# Take me out tonight
# Cos I wanna see people and I wanna see lights
# Driving in your car
# Oh, please don't drop me home
# Because it's not my home, it's their home,
# And I'm welcome no more... #
In the mid 1980s, a young girl called Chai Ling
had come from the provinces to study psychology at Beijing University.
She became fascinated by an American psychologist called Abraham Maslow.
He taught that the human beings of the future
would be driven by what he called self-actualisation.
They would be guided
only by what they felt inside,
not by what they were told to do.
These are the people who would resist suggestions.
They would choose what they wanted to do.
You might urge them to do something, and somebody else might,
but it was their decision, doing what they themselves decided to do.
They look within, making real the inner self,
which is independent of the century, independent of the culture, even.
Then, one night, Chai Ling was drugged
and, she believed, raped by another student,
but the authorities did nothing,
and she decided to join the growing student protests
against what they saw as a corrupt regime
that was now in charge of China.
Deng Xiaoping had got rid of both revolutionary ideas and democracy...
..and, in that void, corruption had taken over the whole society.
Party officials everywhere were looting billions of dollars.
All that mattered now in China was money and connections.
TRANSLATION: The first thing in life is money,
and the second thing is connections.
It is very important to have connections.
When you know people,
then, wherever you go, things become so much easier.
In April 1989, the one leader that the students trusted, Hu Yaobang,
died of a heart attack at a party meeting.
Students started to come to Tiananmen Square to mourn him.
Chai Ling was among them.
And, as more and more people came to the square,
she became one of the most vocal of the protesters.
CROWD CHANTS BACK HER WORDS
CHEERING
Soon, over a million protesters filled the square...
..but the government refused the students' demands
for more democracy, and the movement started to split.
HEATED DISCUSSION
The radical faction began a hunger strike
to try and force the government to respond.
Chai Ling had now risen to become one of the leaders
of the radical movement.
She later wrote that the experience made her an independent woman.
She herself was liberated, and became a self-actualiser.
But many of the other student leaders were frightened
that she was going to create disaster.
The government was still refusing to negotiate,
and the protest leaders held a tense meeting.
Many of them argued that they should retreat now, on such a high,
which would force the party to accept real reform.
If they didn't, there would be stalemate,
and then killing.
In the vote, Chai Ling raised her hand, which made it unanimous.
But that evening, she changed her mind,
and she helped persuade the students to stay in the square.
The next day, she called an American journalist called Phil Cunningham,
and gave an extraordinary interview.
Chai Ling had suddenly realised
that combining the new force of individualism with collective action
was never going to work.
She felt the contradiction deep within herself.
She had realised that, in the age of the individual,
it was no longer going to be possible
for people to give up their lives for a greater cause.
TRANSLATION: To be honest, from the day I called for a hunger strike,
I knew we would not get any results.
Certain people, certain causes are bound to fail.
I have been very clear about this all along...
..but I've made an effort to present a staunch image
to show that we were striving for victory.
But, deep down, I knew it was all futile.
All along, I've kept it to myself, because, being Chinese,
I felt I shouldn't bad-mouth the Chinese.
But I can't help thinking sometimes, and I might as well say it.
You, the Chinese, you are not worth my struggle.
You are not worth my sacrifice.
The students keep asking, "What shall we do next?
"What can we accomplish?"
I feel so sad, because how can I tell them
that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed?
For the moment when the government has no choice
but to brazenly butcher the people?
Only when the square is awash with blood
will the people of China open their eyes.
Only then will they really be united.
Are you going to stay in the square yourself?
No, I won't.
I'm not going to let myself be destroyed by this government.
I want to live.
Five days later,
Deng Xiaoping sent the troops and tanks in to clear the square.
HE SINGS
Boris Yeltsin was the president of the new Russia.
He had promised to turn the country into a mass democracy.
Yeltsin appointed a group of young technocrats,
and they set out to do this through what they called shock therapy,
advised by western bankers and economists.
They believed that they had to move fast
because the communists might try and take power again.
But behind it was a grander utopian idea
that it might start the spread of democracy all around the world.
But at this very moment,
in the West, the opposite started to happen.
The whole idea of mass democracy began to be questioned
and undermined from inside the political establishment itself.
It began almost unnoticed,
hidden behind the wave of enthusiasm after the fall of communism.
But a political scientist called Peter Mair
has argued that what happened in the 1990s
was that the old idea of democracy started to disappear in the West...
..and it was replaced by something else
which we haven't fully comprehended yet, or even seen.
because it is outside the old categories of politics.
Western politicians, Mair said, literally changed their roles.
They gave up being representatives of the people,
and instead they became the agents of a new bureaucracy
which was rising up and promising that it could manage
the dangerous and unpredictable force of individualism
better than the politicians could.
Just as the activists in China had found with Chai Ling,
individualism and its drive to self-actualisation
can corrode and eat away at the collective power of mass democracy.
Peter Mair said the same was now happening in the West.
The first politician to confront this was Bill Clinton.
He came to power promising to represent
what he called the forgotten middle class.
But very quickly, within weeks of entering the White House,
Clinton agreed to give up on many of his promised reforms,
and to give power over to the financial world.
He did this not through any cynical motive,
but because he knew that the old power base
of mass politics had gone.
No-one joined political parties any more.
Organised labour was a vanishing force.
Clinton might be in office,
but he no longer had the collective power of the people behind him.
The power that, in the past,
had allowed politicians to challenge the elites in society.
And, in the face of that, Clinton decided to give power instead
to the new force that promised that it could create a wealthier
and happier society -
the bankers and the economists and the management experts
who were now spreading and multiplying
through the corridors of Washington.
We know big government does not have all the answers.
We know there's not a programme for every problem.
The era of big government is over.
If the new bureaucracy delivered on their promises,
it was going to be a wonderful world.
But if something went wrong,
then the politicians would have no power with which to confront them.
The shift in politics had begun.
SHOUTING
In Russia, the democracy experiment had gone out of control.
The president, Boris Yeltsin, had lost all power.
It had been seized by a small group called the oligarchs,
who were using it to loot Russia.
There was massive inflation.
Millions of people were reduced
to selling what they owned on the street.
The life expectancy of a Russian man fell from 65 in 1987
to 58 in 1993.
There was fury in the Russian parliament.
Its leader accused Yeltsin of economic genocide,
and demanded that he stop the experiment.
Nyet.
Yeltsin responded by dissolving parliament.
He cut the phone lines and sealed the building off.
SHE RESPONDS
But a group of protesters broke through.
And fighting began around the parliament,
and then spread to the television station.
SHOUTING AND GUNFIRE
SHOUTING
GUNFIRE
Yeltsin portrayed it as a stark battle of good against evil.
He was backed by President Clinton.
Clinton said it was the only way
for Russia to become part of the new global economy
and defeat its dangerous past.
But in among the fighting
was a man who believed that he knew what was really happening.
Eduard Limonov had been expelled from the Soviet Union
20 years before.
He had lived in New York in the 1970s,
the moment when the banks who now ran the global system
were beginning their rise to power.
Limonov was convinced that what was happening now
had nothing to do with democracy.
It was what he called the geopolitics of money -
a force that had already enslaved the American people
and now wanted to bend the Russian people to its word.
And when Yeltsin ordered the tanks to attack the Russian parliament,
backed by the American president
and by the bankers and the economic experts,
Limonov decided he was going to fight this system.
Because he knew its one weakness.
It told no stories about the past...
..and it had no vision of the future.
Its only aim was to keep the system stable.
Limonov had visited the Serbian nationalists
who were besieging the city of Sarajevo.
He was the guest of their leader, Radovan Karadzic.
Karadzic told him about the powerful nationalism
that was now reawakening after the fall of communism.
Serbs used to possess the entire ground.
We own this country. This is our country.
Turks have been here occupiers,
and the Muslims are successors of those occupiers.
So traditional imposed geopolitics.
Geopolitics. Yes, exactly.
Limonov became notorious when he was then filmed firing a machinegun -
in what seemed a random manner - into the city below.
You are very courageous people,
despite anything what is against you,
it's a great power of almost...
Almost the entire world.
Yeah, 15 countries against you and you resist.
And I repeat again - we Russians, we should take example from you.
UPBEAT MUSIC
Limonov realised that something was re-emerging from the past in Bosnia
that might have the power to confront
the new system of global money.
It was nationalism, and the national myths that came with it.
They were powerful stories that linked people together
and gave them a collective power.
Something that individualism could never do.
DANCE REMIX OF: What's Up by 4 Non Blondes
All you girls that believe men are bastards,
you should be near the front. I'll need you later on.
Ah, they're coming.
# Oh, my God, do I try
# I try all the time... #
Oh, I remember the '60s. I used to dress like that.
In the end, Julia had realised
that her psychiatrist was never going to let her have surgery.
"She was," he said, "not ladylike enough and too pushy."
She had gone to a private surgeon
and finally become what she had always known was the true person.
But, only weeks after the surgery, she had collapsed from bleeding.
She was taken into hospital unconscious,
where she was treated for a suspected miscarriage
by doctors who had no idea of her medical history.
The surgery was damaged, she could no longer have sex...
..and Amir left her...
..and she was alone.
If the truth be known, some of my friends have never, ever asked
how I feel, how I am, why I'm always alone.
People... Well, there are one or two people
that I actually discuss the problems with.
The first time, maybe five or six years ago,
and the person that I told...
..only used it against me and he went off with somebody else.
And when I asked why, you know, it's thrown in my face.
"Well, you're not a real woman anyway.
"What am I supposed to do?"
And when you get knocked like that,
and you have to face up to that kind of thing,
I suppose it makes you just a little bit weary.
Most people listening to that would say,
"Oh, what a shame, how sad," but...
..I suppose if love slapped me in the face,
I wouldn't even recognise it now.
Julia had challenged the old power in Britain.
She had stood up against her psychiatrist and won.
Her victory was a symbol of the decline of that old paternalism.
But now she had discovered how difficult individualism could be.
That, when things go wrong, you are weak and alone.
SHE MOUTHS SILENTLY
But as individuals were beginning to feel
the limitations of their power,
the new class that had grown up to manage them
was growing stronger and more confident...
..and they began to see democracy
not just as something to be bypassed,
but as a potentially dangerous force.
By the mid-1990s,
technocrats in the political think-tanks in the West
were becoming frightened that elections all across the world
were producing what they called the wrong kind of result.
In Algeria, a party called the Islamic Salvation Front
took the majority of votes in the first round of an election.
It was a stunning victory.
But people feared that its real aim was to turn the country
into an Islamist state and get rid of democracy.
Western politicians found themselves supporting a military coup
that stopped the elections.
THEY CHANT
But, in Europe, the extreme right paraded openly.
They protested against the immigrants
coming from Africa and the Middle East.
THEY CHANT
TRANSLATION: The foreigners take away houses in Germany,
bring drugs and all kinds of filth.
They steal German workplaces and they filthy up the environment.
For me now, the most important inspiration is Adolf Hitler.
And faced by the horror in the Balkans,
President Clinton's representative, called Richard Holbrooke,
brought the question out into the open.
"Suppose elections are free and fair," he said,
"and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists.
"That is the dilemma."
An American political scientist called Fareed Zakaria,
put it more bluntly.
"The people, we are told," he said, "are the most important.
"We are driven by the phrase, 'the American people are not stupid,'
"but what if they are?"
But the political scientists were not alone in distrusting people,
for, at the same time, a group of behavioural psychologists
who were becoming increasingly influential
were insisting that individuals
also made the wrong decisions in the marketplace.
They were not behaving in the logical, self-interested ways
that economics said they should.
The most famous of them was called Daniel Kahneman.
He would win a Nobel Prize for his work.
For 30 years, Kahneman had been studying human behaviour
and he had discovered, he said,
that human beings actually had two systems inside their brains.
One of them they were aware of, which they thought was in control.
The other was an instinctive part
that really drove most of their actions.
A part that they were completely unaware of.
This new psychology was a powerful attack
on the whole idea of the confident self.
Because the picture the psychologists painted
of human society was of millions of individuals
living most of the time thinking that they were rational
and in control...
..whilst something else inside them
was really guiding many of their actions...
..without them knowing it.
But, Kahneman said,
there was an underlying pattern to this irrational behaviour.
It meant that if somehow you could gather enough data
on human beings' behaviour, you could see the patterns
and so predict what they would do, and manage them.
But, to do that,
you would have to bypass and ignore their conscious self,
because it was the behaviour - not the thoughts - that counted.
LOUD DANCE MUSIC
THEY TALK HEATEDLY
HE RESPONDS ANGRILY
RADIO: # Put your lovin' arms around me
# Inside your arms, I'm burning
# Put your lovin' arms around me... #
In Russia, President Yeltsin had lost all control.
He was drunk most of the time.
MURMURING
He had become the puppet of the oligarchs,
who had taken over all the media and blocked any opposition.
But there was one opponent.
It was Eduard Limonov.
..the Queen, the fascist regime!
HE SPEAKS ON TANNOY
THEY CHEER
He had started his own tiny party.
He called it the National Bolsheviks.
It was, he said, a fusion of fascism and communism,
and the party flag was designed to show this.
THEY CHANT
But it wasn't simple nostalgia.
Limonov wanted to shock people out of accepting
the completely corrupt society around them.
He wanted to go back to the original roots of fascism and nationalism.
To the idea that if you can find a story
powerful enough to inspire people,
you can then use that collective power
both to sweep away the corrupt rulers and change reality.
It was something that had been wiped and forgotten
because of the horrors it had led to in the past.
And the individualism that had been promoted so strongly in the West
after the Second World War had been a force shield against that.
A shield of one world composed of just individuals.
Limonov was the reappearance of the frightening old dream.
MUSIC: Vechnaya Vesna by Grazhdanskaya Oborona
The third person to join the party was the musician Yegor Letov.
He had led the opposition to communism in the 1980s.
Now he sang songs about how Russia was trapped in a frozen world,
buried under a mass of meaningless broken fragments from the past.
Ghosts from the past were returning at the margins in England, too.
In August 1999, a farmer in Norfolk called Tony Martin
shot two burglars who were travellers.
He killed one of them, called Fred Barras.
Tony Martin was a recluse.
He lived in a remote, half-ruined building called Bleak House.
Tony Martin considered himself a victim.
He'd been plagued by burglars for years.
He lived in squalid conditions, paranoid about being burgled.
The stairs of the house were booby trapped.
He slept fully dressed with his boots on and a gun by his bed.
Martin was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
His conviction touched off a wave of protest.
On the surface, it was about Martin's right to defend himself...
..but it also expressed a much wider feeling
that was simmering under the surface.
That the very institutions that were supposed to protect the people -
the law, the police and the politicians -
were now being turned against them.
A growing sense that you couldn't trust those in power any longer -
what began to be called the elites.
The Labour government was shocked by the anger that burst out.
Tony Blair wrote in a private memo, simply, "We have lost touch."
But what Blair and the other modern politicians had forgotten
was that that suspicion of the elites did not come out of nowhere.
It had its roots back in Britain's past,
at the moment when the empire was collapsing.
And Tony Martin himself was a direct link back to that anger.
In the 1950s, Martin's uncle had been a leading member
of a group called the League of Empire Loyalists.
The League were powerful because some of their members
were at the heart of the Conservative Party.
They were convinced that there was a global conspiracy
to destroy the British Empire.
It was being run by bankers in America,
working together with communists in Russia.
But they also believed that many of those in charge in Britain
were also involved in this conspiracy,
including most politicians.
Well, my reasons for joining the Empire Loyalists are many,
but they largely stem from the fact that I believe in the thesis
of nationalism and national independence
as opposed to internationalism,
which I consider would in time devolve into a world government
which would, of necessity, by sheer weight of numbers,
become a communist-controlled world government,
with the control of the world in the hands of very few people.
This would be a tyranny, and I consider the only way
to combat this possibility of a tyranny
is to encourage a nation toward a nationality.
And that anger was about to return.
By now, politicians in the West
had given large amounts of their power away.
What had begun with Bill Clinton in the early 1990s had spread.
When Tony Blair came to power,
he had immediately given control over much of the economy
to the Bank of England.
But, in 1998, the global financial system
showed how unstable it could be.
An economic crisis that began in Russia, and then spread to Asia,
had consequences throughout the world.
In response to the crisis,
the Bank of England had insisted that interest rates be raised.
But this made many British goods too expensive to export.
And in the north of England, factories began to close.
Tony Blair insisted, though, that it was a price the country had to pay
for being part of what he called the world economy.
He can say a world economy till he's blue in the face,
but it's not just us, is it? It's other people.
"He can say"? Mr Blair can say the world economy...?
He can say, "World economy, world economy," but...
So what do you say? People in the Northeast are suffering,
but why has he given all that power to the Bank of England? Why?
Why, you know? Why is that?
Is he passing the buck? What's he doing?
So he can't be blamed for things like this that go wrong. He can say,
"Well, it's the Bank of England's interest rates, none of us did it."
I don't know.
They're just opening their mouths
and letting the wind waffle their tongues about,
as far as I'm concerned. Get up here and get things sorted.
You vote a Labour government in,
you vote for them all your life and
this is the crap you get off of them.
You think it's all wrong, what's happened, what could they have done?
Give us more support, stepped in, put a shoulder behind us,
show a bit more muscle. Just...
..let them know that they canna do this.
And at the end of the century,
a new anger began to grow out of in the margins of England,
that in the future would get mixed up with the furies of the past.
But the politicians increasingly found
that there was little they could do to respond to this anger.
Because, over the past ten years,
all kinds of new organisations had grown up
that were deliberately designed to limit the politicians' power,
because national politics was dangerous
to the stability of the global system.
The idea had originally come from technocrats
inside the European Union.
One of the leaders was a political scientist
called Giandomenico Majone.
"Politicians," Majone said,
"were always driven by short-term, self-interested motives."
Which meant that they, too, were irrational.
The solution, he said, was to bypass the politicians completely.
HE SPEAKS FRENCH
Pardon?
..later in the afternoon...
And in the 1990s, behind the scenes
of the political debate in the European Union,
Majone and a group of technocrats created a range of new institutions
that were deliberately designed to avoid political interference,
and instead run large areas of society in a rational way.
Majone gave them a boring bureaucratic name.
He called them non-majoritarian institutions.
But, in reality, they were a completely radical invention
that challenged the very idea of democracy.
"These new organisations," Majone said,
"are, by design, not directly accountable to voters
"or to their elected representatives."
Out of it was going to come the massive range
of new bureaucracies that today run large parts of the modern world.
Not just central banks,
but all kinds of regulatory agencies,
special courts and expert bodies.
All of which govern not through political policies,
but through rational scientific assessment and measured outcomes.
And the European Union became the centre of this experiment.
In front of house,
the elected politicians debated subjects like human rights,
but continually failed to come to any conclusion.
Are we concerned with rights or with political objectives?
And much of what we're going to discuss today is...
But quietly, behind the scenes, what were being created
were, in Majone's words, "specialised institutions
"staffed with neutral experts, carrying out policies
"with a level of efficiency and effectiveness
"politicians cannot and never will achieve."
The original idea behind mass democracy
had been that the politicians would be the bridgehead
for the people into power.
They would challenge the powerful groups
at the top of society on behalf of the people.
But then the people, driven by the new individualism,
had retreated into their own private worlds.
So the politicians switched sides and became instead
the representatives of the new powerful technocratic class.
It still looked like they were powerful
and had control over events.
But now the people had gone,
beneath them was a void.
But, in 1999, Tony Blair realised that there might still be a way
to change the world dramatically and recapture some of that power.
The conflict between the Serbs and the Muslims in the Balkans
had erupted again.
Serbian nationalists were attacking the Albanian population in Kosovo.
Blair worked hard to persuade a reluctant President Clinton
to join in a bombing campaign to force the Serbs
to stop the ethnic cleansing.
And it succeeded.
Tony Blair came to Kosovo and was welcomed as a hero.
CHANTING AND APPLAUSE
At the refugee camp, Blair presented what they had done
as an expression of that epic vision
that Bernard Kouchner had put forward 20 years before.
We are all one world linked together simply as individuals,
not divided by political ideas or by nations.
And we, the good politicians in the West,
have a duty to intervene,
to help the victims of all evil dictators,
wherever they are in the world.
This is not a battle for territory.
This is a battle for humanity.
It is a just cause.
It is a rightful cause to make sure that these people, innocent people,
who have been driven from their homes at the point of a gun,
are allowed by the world community, acting together,
back to their homeland, back to Kosovo.
So these people can become symbols of hope, humanity and peace.
Thank you.
And the new ruler of the independent Kosovo,
appointed by the United Nations, was Bernard Kouchner.
We are taking a significant step towards stability
and democratic self-government in Kosovo.
In the 1990s,
the triumph over communism had ushered in a new era.
Liberal politicians in the West
had willingly given up much of their power
in the interests of the greater good of global stability.
The power had gone first to the global financial system.
And now it was being given to the American military as well.
It looked like a new world.
But, underneath, the old forces of money and military power
were reassembling and resuming their dominance...
..just as they had in the pre-democratic days
of the old empires.
And that was going to lead to other strange forces
rising up and coming back to haunt the West.
# And I just can't help believing
# Though believing sees me cursed
# For belief ignores the heathens
# Day by day sigh even worse
# But for all we are receiving
# There's an evens key to turn
# You was the generation that bought more shoes
# And you get what you deserve
# I can't help believing
# Though believing sees me cursed
# For belief ignores the heathens
# Day by day sigh even worse
# But for all we are receiving
# There's an evens key to turn
# You was the generation that bought more shoes
# And you get what you deserve... #
DALEK VOICE: Alert! Alert! We have located the Doctor!
# Yeah, yeah! Ooh, baby
# Winter sweeps the streets of evening
# This frequency's my universe
# To reel a deep or meaning feeling
# In seas where schools of fools be first
# But for all we are receiving
# There's an evens key to turn
# You was the generation that snorts fortunes
# And you get what you deserve
# Yeah, yeah! Yeah, yeah!
# Yeah, yeah! #