Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Seen from Europe, America—which had become superficially familiar in the course of the Cold War—was starting to look very alien. The earnest religiosity of a growing number of Americans—reflected in their latest, ‘born-again’ president—was incomprehensible to most Christian Europeans (if not to their more devout Muslim neighbours). The American fondness for personal side arms, not excluding fully equipped semi-automatic rifles, made life in the US appear dangerous and anarchic, while for the overwhelming majority of European observers, the frequent and unapologetic resort to the death penalty seemed to place America beyond the pale of modern civilization.7 To these were added Washington’s growing disdain for international treaties, its unique perspective on everything from global warming to international law, and above all its partisan stance in the Israel-Palestine crisis. In none of these instances did American policy completely reverse direction following the election of President George W. Bush in 2000; the Atlantic gap had begun to open up well before.

‘America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is time to grow up, you should return to Europe’.

The illusion that we live in a post-national or post-state world comes from paying altogether too much attention to ‘globalized’ economic processes . . . and assuming that similarly transnational developments must be at work in every other sphere of human life. Seen uniquely through the lens of production and exchange, Europe had indeed become a seamless flow chart of transnational waves. But viewed as a site of power or political legitimacy or cultural affinities Europe remained what it had long been: a familiar accumulation of discrete state-particles. Nationalism had largely come and gone12; but nations and states remained.