Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

It was in these years, then, that the European Community acquired its unflattering image as a sort of institutionalized cattle market, in which countries trade political alliances for material reward.

The ultimate emergence of a single European currency was thus the outcome of pragmatic responses to economic problems, not a calculated strategic move on the road to a pre-determined European goal.

Every politically significant revolution is anticipated by a transformation of the intellectual landscape.

that economic growth and job creation (and thus government income) would continue at the high levels of the fifties and sixties; and that birth-rates would remain well above replacement level,

rhetorical strategy was quite seductive to younger voters with no first-hand experience of the baneful consequences of such views the last time they had gained intellectual ascendancy,

what Thatcherism stood for more than anything else was the ‘smack of firm government’.

the nation’s ostensible longing for strong, confident rulers.

all these suggest a clear appreciation that her primary political asset was the very obstinacy, the obdurate refusal to compromise, that so outraged her critics.

The British were once again being ruled.

The Thatcherite revolution strengthened the state, cultivated the market—and set about dismantling the bonds that had once bound them together.

Many of those who lost jobs in inefficient (and previously state-subsidized) industries like steel, coal-mining, textiles and shipbuilding would never find work again, becoming lifelong dependents of the state in all but name. If their former employers went on in some cases (steel, notably) to become profitable private companies it was less through the miracle of private ownership than because Margaret Thatcher’s governments had relieved them of high fixed labour costs, ‘socializing’ the expense of superfluous workers in the form of state-subsidized unemployment.

Riding on Thatcher’s coat-tails, Tony Blair shared many of her prejudices, albeit in a less abrasive key.

To anyone who had fallen asleep in England in 1978 and awoken twenty years later, their country would have seemed unfamiliar indeed: quite unlike its old self—and markedly different from the rest of Europe.

activist in some of the most extreme anti-democratic movements of the age. He spent most of World War Two as a junior servant of the collaborationist government in Vichy, switching his allegiance just in time to be able to claim postwar credentials as a resister.

Wages were raised, the retirement age lowered, working hours reduced.

France would build a better society through European unification rather than against it.

In markets as in gardens, the French were suspicious of unplanned growth.

Critics had warned that the result would not be more competition but simply a transfer of concentrated economic power from the public to the private sphere and this is what happened.

They monopolized whole sectors and were no more responsive to their small ‘stakeholders’ than they had been to taxpayers or consumers when administered under public management.

was the Master Narrative of the twentieth century; and when its core assumptions began to erode and crumble, they took with them not just a handful of public-sector companies but a whole political culture and much else besides.

This was not a problem for Thatcherite radicals, who treated public policy as an extension of private interests

Post-1945 rights talk thus concentrated on individuals. This too was a lesson of war.

Even though men and women were persecuted in the name of their common identity (Jews, gypsies, Poles, etc) they suffered as individuals; and it was as individuals with individual rights that the new United Nations sought to protect them.

Under Socialism it was the state that polluted. But it was society that suffered, and pollution was thus a subject about which everyone cared.

The fear inspired by Stalin’s repression hung like a pall across the moral landscape three decades after his death, even if no-one actually spoke of it,

It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less.

Economic reforms of even the most localized and micro-efficient kind would have immediate political ramifications.

The Communist system might corrode indefinitely at the periphery; but the initiative for its final collapse could only come from the centre.

‘The most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself’.

The Soviet Union could ill afford the armaments race upon which it had begun to embark as early as 1974.

In the long run the economic bill for this generations-long military build-up must come due.

But for Gorbachev, whose priorities were domestic, securing a more stable international environment was a victory in itself. It bought him time and support for his reforms at home.

‘ideology’ was not an appropriate basis for foreign policy.

In an authoritarian system power is indivisible—relinquish it in part and you must eventually lose it all.

We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism,

At some crucial moment all dying authoritarian regimes vacillate between repression and compromise.

Distaste for violence was all that many of the revolutionaries of 1989 had in common.

But the lament for their lost European identity had acquired special significance for Eastern Europeans in recent years with the emergence in the West of something new: an institutional entity—a ‘European Community’, a ‘European Union’—built around self-consciously ‘European’ values with which East Europeans could all too readily identify: individual rights, civic obligations, the freedom of expression and movement. Talk of ‘Europe’ became less abstract and therefore, among other things, more interesting to young people. No longer just a lament for the lost culture of old Prague or Budapest, it now represented a concrete and attainable set of political goals. The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe’.

benefits. It was, after all, one of the attractions of ‘Europe’, as imagined from the East, that it held out the prospect of affluence and security, liberty and protection.

Eastern Europe’s crowds and intellectuals and trade union leaders ‘won the third world war’ it is, quite simply, because Mikhail Gorbachev let them.

In 1849 Russian intervention had sealed the fate of the Hungarian and other revolutions of that year; in 1989 Russian abstention helped assure their success.

Gorbachev did more than just let the colonies go. By indicating that he would not intervene he decisively undermined the only real source of political legitimacy available to the rulers of the satellite states: the promise (or threat) of military intervention from Moscow. Without that threat the local regimes were politically naked.

It was Mr Gorbachev’s revolution.

It was, in effect, a delayed epilogue to the post-imperial state-making that had followed the fall of the other three:

The Germans could have their unity, but at a price.

This was not the recovery of history, however, but rather its erasure—it was as though the GDR had never been.

In effect, Helmut Kohl exported the cost of his country’s unification and Germany’s European partners were made to share the burden.

But the Russian people had never been assigned ‘nationhood’ in the way that Kazakhs or Ukrainians or Armenians were officially ‘nations’ in Soviet parlance.

To be Russian was to be Soviet.

In the declining years of the peoples’ republics, patriotism re-emerged as a serviceable substitute for socialism.