Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

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.

‘Totalitarianism at the outset is enthusiasm and conviction; only later does it become organizations, authority, careerism.’

‘the manipulation of fervor is the germ of bondage.’

At the peak of the McCarthy years the directors of America Houses spent much of their time removing books from their shelves. Among dozens of authors whose works were deemed inappropriate were not only the obvious suspects—John Dos Passos, Arthur Miller, Dashiell Hammett and Upton Sinclair—but also Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Alberto Moravia, Tom Paine and Henry Thoreau.

The welfare state was avowedly social, but it was far from socialist. In that sense welfare capitalism, as it unfolded in Western Europe, was truly post-ideological.

Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect.

Factories and offices were run from the top down with no input from below. Managers could discipline, humiliate or fire their staff at will. Employees were often accorded little respect, their opinions unheeded.

The Sixties ended badly everywhere.

The politicization of these cultural discontents was typically the work of activists familiar with the tactics of more traditional parties in which they or their families had once been active.

Britain’s remarkably successful Campaign For Real Ale (CAMRA) is a representative instance: founded in 1971 to reverse the trend to gaseous, homogenized ‘lager’ beer (and the similarly homogenized, ‘modernized’ pubs where it was sold), this middle-class pressure group rested its case upon a neo-Marxist account of the take-over of artisanal beer manufacture by mass-producing monopolists who manipulated beer-drinkers for corporate profit—alienating consumers from their own taste buds by meretricious substitution.

This amuses me as accusations of Marxism is bandied about by a set of politicians and their captive media.

Since 1973, however, free-market theorists had re-emerged, vociferous and confident, to blame endemic economic recession and attendant woes upon ‘big government’ and the dead hand of taxation and planning that it placed upon national energies and initiative. In many places this 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, half a century before. But only in Britain were the political disciples of Hayek and Friedman able to seize control of public policy and wreak a radical transformation in the country’s political culture.

Thatcher, like all the best revolutionaries, was fortunate in her enemies.

Despite this apparent dismantling of the public sector, the share of Britain’s GDP absorbed by public expenditure remained virtually the same in 1988 (41.7 percent) as it had ten years earlier (42.5 percent), notwithstanding Thatcher’s promises to ‘get the state off people’s backs’. This was because the Conservative government had to pay unprecedented sums in unemployment benefit. The ‘scandalously’ high figure of 1.6 million jobless that had so damaged Callaghan’s government in 1977 had reached 3.25 million by 1985 and remained one of the highest in Europe for the rest of Mrs. Thatcher’s time in office.

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.

As an economy, then, Thatcherized Britain was a more efficient place. But as a society it suffered meltdown, with catastrophic long-term consequences.

If—as Mrs. Thatcher asserted—there is ‘no such thing as Society’, then in due course people must lose respect for socially-defined goods. And so they did, as late-Thatcherite Britain began to take on some of the more unappealing characteristics of the American model that the Iron Lady so admired.

Private affluence was accompanied, as so often, by public squalor.5

In the East as in the West, the Seventies and Eighties were a time of cynicism.

And just as his fellow citizens were thus made publicly aware for the first time of the scale of official incompetence and indifference to life and health, so Gorbachev was forced to acknowledge the extent of his country’s problems. The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they were Soviet values, as the Soviet leader began to appreciate.

The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe’.

The old political extremes—far Left, far Right—were now frequently united: typically in their opposition to foreigners and their shared fear of European integration. Anti-capitalism—recast somewhat implausibly as anti-globalization, as though strictly domestic capitalism were somehow a different and less offensive breed—was attractive to nativist reactionaries and internationalist radicals alike.

In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up ‘Armenian Radio’ with a question: ‘Is it possible’, he asks, ‘to foretell the future?’ Answer: ‘Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing’.

It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess their calculations. Stalin may well have been mad, but he was not stupid.