Europe in Our Time: A History 1945-1992

by Walter Laqueur

"An encyclopedic amount of information is analyzed with considerable wisdom and a felicitous style."—Simon Serfaty, Johns Hopkins Univ. Laqueur presents a fascinating overview of post-war Europe, providing detailed analyses that cover every major political development, economic and social trends, and cultural movements since 1945. "An excellent work destined to become a standard text for the 90s."— Library Journal .

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics

640 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1985

About the author

Walter Ze'ev Laqueur was an American historian, journalist and political commentator. Laqueur was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Prussia (modern Wrocław, Poland), into a Jewish family. In 1938, he left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust.

Laqueur lived in Israel from 1938 to 1953. After one year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he joined a Kibbutz and worked as an agricultural laborer from 1939 to 1944. In 1944, he moved to Jerusalem, where he worked as a journalist until 1953, covering Palestine and other countries in the Middle East.

Since 1955 Laqueur has lived in London. He was founder and editor, with George Mosse, of the Journal of Contemporary History and of Survey from 1956 to 1964. He was also founding editor of The Washington Papers. He was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London from 1965 to 1994. From 1969 he was a member, and later Chairman (until 2000), of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. He was Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1972, and University Professor at Georgetown University from 1976 to 1988. He has also been a visiting professor of history and government at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Tel Aviv University and Johns Hopkins University.

Laqueur's main works deal with European history in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially Russian history and German history, as well as the history of the Middle East. The topics he has written about include the German Youth Movement, Zionism, Israeli history, the cultural history of the Weimar Republic and Russia, Communism, the Holocaust, fascism, and the diplomatic history of the Cold War. His books have been translated into many languages, and he was one of the founders of the study of political violence, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. His comments on international affairs have appeared in many American and European newspapers and periodicals.

(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Ernst · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1992, as he published this history of post World War II Europe, 72 year old Walter Laqueur probably did not expect to live 25 more years and be one of the first to recognize that Putin was off-course and dangerous, or to apply his lifelong study of fascism to new demagogues rising in the western world. He begins his story with a woman released from a concentration camp, knowing that freedom was an enormous thing, but finding oddly that at that time, "freedom did not mean that much to me." The idea that an exhausted Europe was entering a new age which could only be understood with experience is as close to a theme as the book has. It is the story of a continent which had led the world into two disastrous wars in the past half century which then resolved the struggle between capitalism and communism without a major violent conflict (the USA in Vietnam did not involve Europe and did not help resolve the struggle) and had, at the time of the writing of the book, a fair chance of a golden age of peace and prosperity.
At times the book slows down because of the author's determination to achieve encyclopedic coverage of the entire continent. If you want to know what happened in Albania in the 1980s, there's a paragraph to tell you. More often, the author's gift for covering vast fields in exciting valuable 10 or 20 page summaries makes the book a joy to read.
In the epilogue he has a warning much wiser than other books written at the time: "It is conceivable that decreasing conflict between states could lead to increasing tensions within societies, with all kinds of virulent nationalism playing a destructive role and the fabric of society weakened by any number of factors for which there may be no discernable 'objective' causes."
It was good to read this history by one of the wisest historians of our time.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laqueur's main thesis in the book is to answer the question of how Europe recovered from the destruction of the Second World War and why it went as it did. As he notes, it was widely believed in 1945 that it would take decades for the continent to recover, and even then it would never recover its position within the world.

To answer the question, Laqueur heavily involves economics; indeed it is the predominant aspect of the book. He details why certain political parties were able to come to power in the states of Western Europe (naturally focusing above all on the UK, France, Italy and West Germany). At the same time he examines the economics of the Communist Bloc, and why they were not able to keep up with the west.

The book was published in 1992 and though it mentions the August 1991 coup attempt in the USSR, it doesn't have much information past 1990. But that makes it a useful resource to gain an insight into the mood and historiography of the time towards post-war Europe. It also notes several trends that are still of concern today, notably the future of the EU (or EEC, as it was still known at the time), integration of the former communist states with the rest of Europe, immigration, and the effects of a recent recession.

As noted, it places a heavy focus on the four major states of Western Europe, while only briefly touching on the others (Scandinavia, Spain, Benelux, Austria and Switzerland), and while it does discuss Eastern Europe, details are, as noted, hard to come by and verify. As well it places almost an undue amount of focus on economics, with a lot of numbers and figures listed but not always placed in the right context. Other than that, it makes for an interesting read, especially with the benefit of two decades of hindsight in regards to the collapse of communism and the USSR.

[Claire S]

Picked this up back when I was entertaining dreams of getting my Master's in something interesting rather than functional.. Seems could probably benefit still from reading it .. one of these day.

[Emily H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was required reading for my minor, Modern European History.

[Christopher Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read, informative and compelling at once.