Strange Rebels: Gerald McGhie comments on a book that posits 1979 as a key year in shaping our modern world.

• Author: McGhie, Gerald
• Position: Book review

STRANGE REBELS: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century

Author: Christian Caryl

Published by: Basic Books, New York, 2013, 408pp

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For Christian Caryl, a senior fellow of the Legatum Institute and contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine, 1979 represents a key turning point in the history of the modern era. He sees four major events. In Britain Margaret Thatcher came to power determined to dismantle the nationalised industries, curb the trade unions and promote the idea of entrepreneurship and self reliance. In China, Deng Xiaoping embarked on a massive poverty reduction programme, ending Mao Zedong's experiment with collective farming, opening special economic zones for both foreign and domestic entrepreneurship, and allowing information to come into China from the outside world.

In 1979 the Shah (who was considered unshakeable) hastily left Iran, one of the Middle East's most secular countries, to be replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned from years of exile to implement his vision of Iran as an Islamic state.

In the West some also decided that it was time for religion to reassert itself against the forces of secularisation. In October 1978 the College of Cardinals had elected a new pope (John Paul II). Karol Wojtyla, a priest from behind the Iron Curtain, had spent his entire career confronting the political and spiritual challenges of communism and was deeply read in the key Soviet texts. His June 1979 trip to his Polish homeland represented a challenge to the reigning power structure, especially the ideas underlying Soviet orthodoxy. He received a tumultuous welcome with an estimated 11 million Poles attending his sermons. It was the church, not the state, that organised his well-attended meetings and, as Caryl sees it, the experience of the pope's visit would be put to use in the Solidarity rallies that led to martial law in 1981 and ultimately to collapse of Soviet authority in Poland in 1989. The pope's message focused on a policy of strict non-violence. Caryl suggests that the non-violence theme making the fall of communism a decade later owed much to the lasting influence of John Paul II'S teaching. The message was, of course, a religious one but it also represented a challenge to Marxist doctrines.

The reassertion of religion had a broader effect. Khomeini's revolution became a rallying cry for the wider Islamic world. For the first time since the Ottoman Empire era an overtly Islamic movement...