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It was a political vehicle in economic disguise, a device for overcoming Franco-German hostility.
The British experienced World War Two as a moment of national reconciliation and rallying together, rather than as a corrosive rent in the fabric of the state and nation, which was how it was remembered across the Channel.
they were hugely exacerbated in this case by the global scale of British imperial responsibilities.
Monnet, too, would later look back and wonder how different things might have been had Britain chosen to take the initiative at a moment when her authority was still unrivalled.
the USSR was the only one to suffer permanent economic damage.
Centralised direction and a relentless focus upon the production of tanks, guns and planes had turned the wartime USSR into a surprisingly effective war machine, careless of human life and welfare but otherwise well-adapted to fighting a total war.
Longstanding Leninist metaphors of class struggle and confrontation could now be linked with proud memories of a real war. The Soviet Party-State acquired a new foundation myth: the Great Patriotic War.
What happened after 1945 was that the Soviet Union took over, quite literally, where the Germans had left off, attaching eastern Europe to its own economy as a resource to be exploited at will.
Stalin needed to secure his satellite neighbours’ unswerving allegiance, and he knew only one way to do this.
Leninist redefinition of ‘socialism’ as a matter of ownership rather than social relations,
In return for Polish domestic calm Stalin was willing to tolerate a class of independent farmers, however inefficient and ideologically untidy, and a publicly active Catholic Church, in ways that would have been unimaginable further south or east.
Stalin was an anti-Semite and always had been.
The Communist state was in a permanent condition of undeclared war against its own citizens.
Soviet occupation succeeded Nazi occupation with minimal transitional disruption and drew Europe’s eastern half steadily deeper into the Soviet orbit
In brutally cutting the Soviet Union adrift from its ties to European history and culture the Bolsheviks did great and lasting violence to Russia.
But for the peoples to the east of that barrier, thrust back as it seemed into a grimy, forgotten corner of their own continent, at the mercy of a semi-alien Great Power no better off than they and parasitic upon their shrinking resources, history itself ground slowly to a halt.
Between the wars the far Right had been better supported than it suited most people to recall. From Brussels to Bucharest the polemical journalism and literature of the 1930s abounded in racism, anti-Semitism, ultra-nationalism, clericalism and political reaction.
The apocalyptic urgency of the Fascists; their call for violent, ‘definitive’ solutions, as though genuine change necessarily led through root-and-branch destruction; the distaste for the compromise and ‘hypocrisy’ of liberal democracy
Slavish intellectual adherence to a party line, long-established in the Soviet Union where there was in any case a pre-Soviet heritage of repression and orthodoxy, came harder to countries that had only recently emerged from the rather benign regimen of the Habsburgs.
enthusiasm for Communism in theory was characteristically present in inverse proportion to direct experience of it in practice.
German-speaking central Europe—the engine room of European culture for the first third of the twentieth century—had ceased to exist. Vienna, already a shadow of its former self after the overthrow of the Habsburgs in 1918, was divided like Berlin among the four allied powers. It could hardly feed or clothe its citizens, much less contribute to the intellectual life of the continent. Austrian philosophers, economists, mathematicians and scientists, like their contemporaries in Hungary and the rest of the former Dual Monarchy, had either escaped into exile (to France, Britain, the British
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Fortunately for the West, American popular culture had an appeal that American political ineptitude could do little to tarnish.
Well before the cataclysms of 1956, when the sympathies of most European intellectuals would swing sharply away from the Soviet bloc, the Atlantic orientation of most other Western Europeans had been decided.
Post-war Europe was still warmed by the fading embers of the nineteenth-century economic revolution that had almost run its course, leaving behind sedimentary evidence of cultural habits and social relations increasingly at odds with the new age of airplanes and atomic weapons.
If anything, the war had set things in reverse. The modernizing fervor of the 1920s and even the 1930s had drained away, leaving behind an older order of life.
in the way in which economics displaced politics as the goal and language of collective action;
The provision of administration and services replaced revolutionary hopes and economic despair as the chief concern of voters (who in many places now included women for the first time):
Austrian Social Democrats
In their view the German-speaking remnant of the old Dual Monarchy ought logically to have joined its fellow Germans in an Anschluss (union), and would have done so had the self-determination clauses of the Versailles agreements been applied consistently.
Unlike the Social Democrats, the Christian Socials had no pan-German urge to be absorbed into an urban and mostly Protestant Germany.
From 1934 until the Nazi invasion Austria was ruled by an authoritarian clericalist regime in which the Catholic party exercised a monopoly of power.
they were conspicuously silent on their singular contribution to the destruction of Austrian democracy just four years earlier.
erstwhile enthusiasm for the Anschluss.
Dr Karl Renner, the Socialist leader and first president of the independent Republic established by the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, had maintained his principled enthusiasm for a union of Austria and Germany as late as 1938.
Both parties thus had an interest in putting the ...
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Yet Austria not only succeeded in avoiding a re-run of its history, but managed in a short space of time to repackage itself as a model Alpine democracy: neutral, prosperous and stable.
the Cold War assigned Austria an identity by association—as Western, free, democratic—that it might have been hard put to generate from within.
Austria had to be
Proporz
almost every level jobs were filled, by agreement, with candidates proposed by one of the two dominant parties.
the bi-cephalous state sought to head off dissent by incorporating contending parties into its shared system of benefits and rewards.
government-by-coalition and administration-by-Proporz came to define Austrian public life.
As a result of the First World War Vienna lost its raison d’être as an imperial capital; in the course of Nazi occupation and the Second World War the city lost its Jews, a significant proportion of its most educated and cosmopolitan citizens.15 Once the Russians left in 1955, Vienna lacked even the louche appeal of divided Berlin. Indeed, the measure of Austria’s remarkable success in overcoming its troubled past was that to many visitors its most distinctive feature was its reassuringly humdrum quality.
Austria too was corrupt in its own way. Like Italy, it won its newfound security at the price of a measure of national forgetting.
Both countries were arbitrary geographical expressions whose post-war public life rested on a tacit agreement to fabricate for common consumption a flattering new identity
‘grand’ coalition government in 1966 with the Social Democrats, now led by Willy Brandt, in office for the first time since Weimar days.
But once it joined the Christian Democrats in office and adopted a moderate and reformist agenda, the SPD lost the allegiance of the far Left. A space would now open up outside parliament for a new and destabilizing generation of political radicals.
the war veterans and their spokesmen saw themselves above all as the unjustly abused victims of the war and the post-war settlement.
The preferred self-image of Adenauer’s Germany was that of a victim thrice over: first at Hitler’s hands
then at the hands of their enemies—
