Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The politics of social democracy were not always seductive to impatient young people, as later events were to show. But they were intuitively appealing to men and women who had lived through the terrible decades since 1914, and in certain parts of Western Europe social democracy by the mid-Sixties was no longer so much a politics as a way of life.

This appropriation of the Austrian state and its resources to stabilize the market in political preferences had less to do with social ideals than with the memory of past traumas.

The net effect of the re-distributive policies of the first three post-war decades was to shift income and assets from the top 10 percent to the next 40 percent; the bottom 50 percent gained very little, for all the general improvement in security and welfare.

their children, the much larger generation of the 1960s, had only ever known peace, political stability and the welfare state. They took these things for granted.

Back in 1900, most marriages in Italy had lasted around twenty years, before being dissolved by the death of a spouse. By the end of the third quarter of the century marriages lasted in excess of thirty-five years, and demand for the right to divorce was steadily growing.

The Sixties generation saw the world as new and young. Most young people in history have entered a world full of older people, where it is their seniors who occupy positions of influence and example.

As Adenauer had understood, their identification with America and ‘the West’ derived in no small measure from a wish to avoid association with all the baggage of ‘Germanness’.

A disproportionate number of the students and professors arrested, expelled and imprisoned in Poland in the years 1967–69 were of Jewish origin, and this was not a coincidence.

All that was lacking was the opportunity, and the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors duly afforded this in June 1967.

Soviet support for the Arab cause legitimized vocal criticism of Israel, Zionism—and Jews.

We do not want a Fifth Column in our country.’ The reference to Jews as Poland’s Fifth Column was carried on radio and television and heard by millions of Poles. Its message was unambiguous.

But the consequences of his decision were dramatic. The Polish authorities unleashed a flood of prejudice against Jews: throughout Poland, but especially in the Party and in academic institutions.

the height of the anti-Semitic frenzy, newspapers were defining Jews by criteria derived directly from the Nuremberg Laws—unsurprising, perhaps, in view of the presence of recycled Polish fascists among the Stalinist wing of the ruling Party.

Of Poland’s remaining 30,000 Jews some 20,000 departed in the course of 1968–69, leaving only a few thousand behind, mostly the elderly and the young—

The desire to speak—to talk about the past

The unfriendly reception was a source of some surprise to the Soviet leadership, who had been led to expect that their tanks would encounter widespread support.

East European army units engaged in the invasion of Czechoslovakia had been led to believe that they were defending the country against West German or American invaders, and some of them had later to be quietly withdrawn, their reliability—notably that of Hungarian units occupying Slovakia—seriously in question.

never again would it be possible to maintain that Communism rested on popular consent, or the legitimacy of a reformed Party, or even the lessons of History.

Never again would radicals or reformers look to the ruling Party to carry their aspirations or adopt their projects.

But the soul of Communism had died twenty years before: in Prague, in August 1968.

The Sixties ended badly everywhere.

The consumer boom of the late fifties and sixties had greatly increased European dependence on cheap oil:

Real wages had begun to outstrip productivity growth; profits were declining; new investment fell away.

The excess capacity born of enthusiastic post-war investment strategies could only be absorbed by inflation or unemployment. Thanks to the Middle East crisis, Europeans got both.

The depression of the 1970s seemed worse than it was because of the contrast wi...

The greatest beneficiaries of the modern welfare state, after all, were the middle classes. When the post-war system started to unravel in the 1970s it was those same middle classes who felt not so much threatened as cheated: by inflation, by tax-financed subsidies to failing industries and by the reduction or elimination of public services to meet budgetary and monetary constraints.

having forgotten its aim it redoubled its efforts,

the Irish Republican Army aimed at making Northern Ireland ungovernable, expelling the British, and uniting the six northern provinces with the rest of Ireland.

ETA, the IRA and their imitators were terrorist organizations; but they were not irrational.

In most of Western Europe, the airy radical theorems of the 1960s dissipated harmlessly enough. But in two countries in particular they metamorphosed into a psychosis of self-justifying aggression.

distinctly nationalist tinge to German extreme-Left terrorism

It was altogether appropriate that Horst Mahler, one of the few surviving founders of Left terrorism in West Germany, should end up three decades later on the far Right of the political spectrum.

In a more threatening world, securing one’s self-interest took precedence over advancing common causes. There is no doubt that this change in mood was also a response to the heady indulgence of the previous decade.

But in fact this narcissistic obscurantism was very much of its time, its detachment from daily reality bearing unconscious witness to the exhaustion of an intellectual tradition.

Satirists and political comedians replaced writers and artists as the intellectual heroes of the hour:

was so stunningly banal in conception and execution as to defy parody.

clothing and music (and buildings) the temptation to recycle old styles—mixing and matching with little self-confidence—substituted for innovation.

‘When two states wish to establish better relations they often reach for the highest common platitude’.

The block vote of the white, male, employed working class—the universal bedrock of Communist and Socialist party support—was contracting and splitting.

But legal or otherwise, abortions were part of the life experience of millions of women

Salazar was obsessed with the avoidance of debt, and conscientiously balanced every annual budget. Fanatically mercantilist, he built up unusually high gold reserves which he took care not to spend on either investment or imports. As a result, his country was locked into poverty,

In order to crush the growing Angolan nationalist movement, Lisbon inaugurated in 1967 a ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy based upon resettlement of the population into large, controllable villages: by 1974 more than one million peasants had been moved. The plan failed to break the insurgency, although it had baneful and enduring effects on Angola’s society and rural economy.

By the beginning of the 1970s its African wars were consuming half the annual defense budget of Europe’s poorest country.

Indonesia had seized control of Portuguese East Timor.

enforced passive acceptance, a decades-long de-politicization of the culture.

they also recognized the disproportionate demographic significance of Catalonia in particular,

The democratic transition of Mediterranean Europe was quite the most remarkable and unexpected development of the age.

Edward Heath, the only British political leader since World War Two unambiguously and enthusiastically in favor of joining his nation’s fate to that of its continental neighbors.

the price-inflationary impact of membership,

Indeed, with the accession of three poor, agrarian countries, the Common Agricultural Fund took on heavy new burdens—and France ceased to be its main beneficiary.