Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Whether these discussions are a good or a bad thing is a matter for debate. Is all this public remembering a sign of political health? Or is it sometimes more prudent, as De Gaulle among others understood all too well, to forget? This question will be taken up in the Epilogue. Here I would simply note that these latest hiccups of disruptive recall need not be understood—as they sometimes are understood (notably in the United States), when juxtaposed to contemporary outbreaks of ethnic or racial prejudice—as baleful evidence of Europe’s Original Sin: its inability to learn from past crimes, its amnesiac nostalgia, its ever-imminent propensity to return to 1938.

Previous occupying armies—the Swedes in seventeenth-century Germany, the Prussians in France after 1815—lived off the land and assaulted and killed local civilians on an occasional and even random basis. But the peoples who fell under German rule after 1939 were either put to the service of the Reich or else were scheduled for destruction. For Europeans this was a new experience. Overseas, in their colonies, European states had habitually indentured or enslaved indigenous populations for their own benefit. They had not been above the use of torture, mutilation or mass murder to coerce their victims into obedience. But since the eighteenth century these practices were largely unknown among Europeans themselves, at least west of the Bug and Prut rivers. It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans. In order to fight and win the war, the British exploited

Stalin had continued his pre-war practice of transferring whole peoples across the Soviet empire. Well over a million people were deported east from Soviet-occupied Poland and the western Ukraine and Baltic lands between 1939–41. In the same years the Nazis too expelled 750,000 Polish peasants eastwards from western Poland, offering the vacated land to Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans from occupied eastern Europe who were invited to ‘come home’ to the newly-expanded Reich. This offer attracted some 120,000 Baltic Germans, a further 136,000 from Soviet-occupied Poland, 200,000 from Romania and others besides—all of whom would in their turn be expelled a few years later. Hitler’s policy of racial transfers and genocide in Germany’s conquered eastern lands must thus be understood in direct relation to the Nazis’ project of returning to the Reich (and settling in the newly-cleared property of their victims) all the far-flung settlements of Germans dating back to medieval times. The Germans removed Slavs, exterminated Jews and imported slave workers from west and east alike.

Most of Germany’s foreign workers had been brought there against their will—but not all. Some foreign workers caught in the slipstream of German defeat in May 1945 had come of their own free will—like those unemployed Dutchmen who accepted offers of work in Nazi Germany before 1939 and stayed on.4 Even at the derisory wages paid by wartime German employers, men and women from eastern Europe, the Balkans, France and the Benelux countries were often better off there than staying at home. And Soviet labourers (of whom there were upwards of two million in Germany by September 1944), even if they had been brought to Germany by force, were not necessarily sorry to be there—as one of them, Elena Skrjabena, recalled after the war: ‘None of them complain about how the Germans had sent them to work in German industry. For all of them that was the only possibility of getting out of the Soviet Union.’

At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place.6 After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

Where the First World War had a politicizing, radicalizing effect, its successor produced the opposite outcome: a deep longing for normality.

In France, Marshall Aid very much served the goals of the ‘planners’. As Pierre Uri, one of Monnet’s associates, later acknowledged: ‘we used the Americans to impose on the French government what we deemed necessary’, ignoring the American desire for liberalization but responding enthusiastically to US exhortations to invest and modernize. ERP dollars—$1.3 billion in 1948–49 and a further $1.6 billion in the next three years—financed almost fifty percent of French public investment under the Monnet Plan during the Marshall years, and the country could never have managed without it. It is thus more than a little ironic that it was in France that the Marshall Plan faced the greatest popular criticism. In mid-1950 only one French adult in three acknowledged having even heard of the Marshall Plan and of these 64 percent declared it to be ‘bad’ for their country! The Plan’s relatively poor image in France represented a partial public relations success for the French Communists, perhaps their greatest.4 In Austria the local Communists—backed by Soviet forces still occupying the eastern region of the country—never made any dent in the popularity of Americans and their aid; the latter put food in people’s mouths and this was what mattered most. In Greece the situation was clearer still. In the circumstances of a brutal civil war Marshall Aid, extended to Greece in April 1948, made the difference between survival and destitution. The $649 million of American aid to Greece under the...

How successful was the European Recovery Program? Western Europe indubitably recovered, and precisely over the period (1948–1951) of the Marshall Plan. By 1949 French industrial and agricultural production both exceeded 1938 levels for the first time. By the same criterion sustained recovery was achieved in 1948 by the Netherlands, in 1949 by Austria and Italy, in 1950 by Greece and West Germany. Of those countries occupied during the war, only Belgium, Denmark and Norway recovered sooner (in 1947). Between 1947 and 1951 the combined GNP of western Europe rose by 30 percent.

The real benefits were psychological. Indeed, one might almost say that the Marshall Plan helped Europeans feel better about themselves. It helped them break decisively with a legacy of chauvinism, depression and authoritarian solutions. It made co-ordinated economic policy-making seem normal rather than unusual. It made the beggar-your-neighbour trade and monetary practices of the thirties seem first imprudent, then unnecessary and finally absurd.

None of this would have been possible had the Marshall Plan been presented as a blueprint for the ‘Americanization’ of Europe. On the contrary, post-war Europeans were so aware of their humiliating dependence upon American aid and protection that any insensitive pressure from that quarter would certainly have been politically counter-productive. By allowing European governments to pursue policies that had emerged from domestic compromises and experiences, and by avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach to recovery programmes, Washington actually had to forego some of its hopes for western European integration, at least in the short term.

Of course the ‘official’ Cold War still lay in the future. But in certain respects it had begun long before May 1945. So long as Germany remained the enemy it was easy to forget the deeper disputes and antagonisms separating the Soviet Union from its wartime allies. But they were there. Four years of wary cooperation in a life or death struggle with a common foe had done little to obliterate nearly thirty years of mutual suspicion. For the fact is that in Europe the Cold War began not after the Second World War but following the end of the First.

Putting the matter thus has the effect of depicting the makers of US foreign policy, Kennan aside, as remarkably innocent. And so, perhaps, they were, and not only those like Senator Estes Kefauver or Walter Lippmann, who simply refused to believe what they were told about Soviet actions in eastern Europe and elsewhere. At least through mid-1946, many US leaders spoke and acted as though they truly believed in the continuation of their wartime partnership with Stalin. Even Lucretius Patrascanu, a senior figure in the Romanian Communist leadership (and later victim of a show trial in his own country), was moved to comment, at the time of the Paris Peace Treaty negotiations in the summer of 1946, that ‘[t]he Americans are crazy. They are giving even more to the Russians than [they] are asking and expecting.’ 4 But there was more to American policy than innocence. The United States in 1945 and for some time to come seriously expected to extricate itself from Europe as soon as possible, and was thus understandably keen to put in place a workable settlement that would not require American presence or supervision.

If it is possible to speak of a coherent US strategy spanning the years 1944–47 it would be this: reach a continental European settlement with Stalin; pressure Britain to abandon its overseas empire and embrace open trade and sterling convertibility; and withdraw from Europe with all due speed. Of these, only the second objective was achieved—the third falling victim to the impossibility of the first.

NATO was a bluff. As Denis Healey, a future British defense minister, observed in his memoirs, ‘for most of the Europeans, NATO was worthless unless it could prevent another war; they were not interested in fighting one’. The originality of the Treaty lay not so much in what it could achieve but in what it represented: like the Marshall Plan—and the Brussels Treaty from which it sprang—NATO illustrated the most significant change that had come over Europe (and the US) as a result of the war—a willingness to share information and cooperate in defense, security, trade, currency regulations and much else. An integrated Allied command in peacetime, after all, was an unheard of departure from practice.

It is estimated that until the late 1950s the Soviet Union exacted from the GDR, Romania and Hungary considerably more than it spent to control them. In Czechoslovakia it broke even. Bulgaria and especially Poland probably cost Moscow rather more in aid, between 1945 and 1960, than they furnished in trade and other deliveries. Such a pattern of mixed economic benefit in economic relations between metropole and colony is familiar to historians of colonialism and in this respect the relationship between the USSR and the lands to its west was conventionally ‘imperial’ (except that in the Soviet case the imperial center was actually poorer and more backward than its subjugated periphery). Where Stalin differed from other empire-builders, even the czars, was in his insistence upon reproducing in the territories under his control forms of government and society identical to those of the Soviet Union.

Following the establishment in January 1949 of Comecon (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance4), the rules for inter-state Communist trade were laid down. Each country was to trade bilaterally with the Soviet Union (another echo of Nazi-era requirements, with Moscow once again substituting for Berlin) and was assigned a non-negotiable role in the international Communist economy. Thus East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would supply finished industrial products to the USSR (at prices set by Moscow), while Poland and Romania were to specialize in producing and exporting food and primary industrial products. In return the Soviet Union would trade raw materials and fuel. Except for the curious inversion we have already noted—with the imperial power furnishing raw materials and the colonies exporting finished goods—this structure is reminiscent of European overseas colonization. And as in the case of non-European colonies, so in eastern Europe: the indigenous economies suffered deformation and under-development. Some countries were prevented from manufacturing finished goods, others were instructed to make certain products in abundance (shoes in Czechoslovakia, trucks in Hungary) and sell them to the USSR. No attention was paid to the economics of comparative advantage.

Stalin’s prejudices do not require an explanation: in Russia and Eastern Europe anti-Semitism was its own reward. Of greater interest are Stalin’s purposes in mounting the whole charade of purges, indictments, confessions and trials. Why, after all, did the Soviet dictator need trials at all? Moscow was in a position to eliminate anyone it wished, anywhere in the Soviet bloc, through ‘administrative procedures’. Trials might seem counter-productive; the obviously false testimonies and confessions, the unembarrassed targeting of selected individuals and social categories, were hardly calculated to convince foreign observers of the bona fides of Soviet judicial procedures. But the show trials in the Communist bloc were not about justice. They were, rather, a form of public pedagogy-by-example; a venerable Communist institution (the first such trials in the USSR dated to 1928) whose purpose was to illustrate and exemplify the structures of authority in the Soviet system. They told the public who was right, who wrong; they placed blame for policy failures; they assigned credit for loyalty and subservience; they even wrote a script, an approved vocabulary for use in discussion of public affairs. Following his arrest Rudolf Slánský was only ever referred to as ‘the spy Slánský’, this ritual naming serving as a form of political exorcism. 14

The scale of the punishment meted out to the citizens of the USSR and Eastern Europe in the decade following World War Two was monumental—and, outside the Soviet Union itself, utterly unprecedented. Trials were but the visible tip of an archipelago of repression: prison, exile, forced labor battalions. In 1952, at the height of the second Stalinist terror, 1.7 million prisoners were held in Soviet labor camps, a further 800,000 in labor colonies, and 2,753,000 in ‘special settlements’. The ‘normal’ Gulag sentence was 25 years, typically followed (in the case of survivors) by exile to Siberia or Soviet Central Asia. In Bulgaria, from an industrial workforce of just under half a million,

In Hungary, during the years 1948–53, about one million people (of a total population of less than ten million) are estimated to have suffered arrest, prosecution, imprisonment or deportation. One Hungarian family in three was directly affected. Relatives suffered commensurately. Fritzi Loebl, the wife of one of Slánský’s ‘co-conspirators’, was kept for a year in the prison at Ruzyn, outside Prague, and interrogated by Russians who called her a ‘stinking yid prostitute’. Upon her release she was exiled to a factory in north Bohemia. The wives of prisoners and deportees lost their employment, their apartments and their personal effects. At best, if they were lucky, they were then forgotten, like Josephine Langer, whose husband Oskar Langer, a witness at the Slánský trial, was later sentenced in a secret trial to 22 years in prison. She and her daughters lived for six years in a cellar.

Thus most of the Eastern European intellectuals’ enthusiasm for Communism—even in Czechoslovakia, where it was strongest—had evaporated by Stalin’s death, though it would linger on for some years in the form of projects for ‘revision’, or for ‘reform Communism’. The division within Communist states was no longer between Communism and its opponents. The important distinction was once again between those in authority—the Party-State, with its police, its bureaucracy and its house intelligentsia—and everyone else. In this sense the Cold War fault-line fell not so much between East and West as within Eastern and Western Europe alike. In Eastern Europe, as we have seen, the Communist Party and its apparatus were in a state of undeclared war with the rest of society, and closer acquaintance with Communism had drawn up new battle-lines: between those for whom Communism brought practical social advantage in one form or another, and those for whom it meant discrimination, disappointment and repression. In Western Europe the same fault-line found many intellectuals on both sides; but enthusiasm for Communism in theory was characteristically present in inverse proportion to direct experience of it in practice.

This familiarity of revolutionary violence in the French imaginaire, together with sepia-tinted memories of the old Franco-Russian alliance, pre-disposed intellectuals in France to greet Communist apologetics for Soviet brutality with a distinctly sympathetic ear. Dialectics helped, too. Commenting on the Slánský trial for Sartre’s Temps Modernes, Marcel Péju reminded his readers that there is nothing wrong with killing one’s political enemies. What was amiss in Prague was that ‘the ceremony with which they are killed [i.e. the show trial] seems a caricature of what it could be if this violence were justified in a Communist perspective. The charges, after all, are not prima facie implausible.’

This was not a problem for liberal realists like Raymond Aron. Like many other ‘Cold Warriors’ of the European political center, Aron had only limited sympathy for the United States—‘the U.S. economy seems to me’, he wrote, ‘a model neither for humanity nor for the West’. But Aron understood the central truth about European politics after the war: domestic and foreign conflicts were henceforth intertwined. ‘In our times’, he wrote in July 1947, ‘for individuals as for nations the choice that determines all else is a global one, in effect a geographical choice. One is in the universe of free countries or else in that of lands placed under harsh Soviet rule. From now on everyone in France will have to state his choice.’ Or, as he put it on another occasion, ‘It is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable.’

As a result of American domination of the European market, the European films of this period are not always the most reliable guide to European filmgoers’ experience or sensibilities. The British viewer especially was quite likely to form a sense of contemporary Englishness as much from Hollywood’s presentation of England as from his or her own direct experience. It is a matter of some note that among the films of the forties, Mrs Miniver (1942)—a very English tale of domestic fortitude and endurance, of middle-class reticence and perseverance, set symptomatically around the disaster at Dunkirk where all these qualities were taken to be most on display—was a pure product of Hollywood. Yet for the English generation that first saw it the film would long remain the truest representation of national memory and self-image.

Nevertheless, with the death of Stalin and the end of the Korean War, Western Europe stumbled half unawares into a remarkable era of political stability. For the first time in four decades the states of the continent’s western half were neither at war nor under the threat of imminent war, at least among themselves. Domestic political strife subsided. Communist parties everywhere except Italy began their slow retreat to the political margins. And the threat of a Fascist revival no longer carried conviction, except perhaps at Communist political rallies. Western Europeans owed their newfound well-being to the uncertainties of the Cold War. The internationalization of political confrontations, and the consequent engagement of the United States, helped draw the sting from domestic political conflicts. Political issues that in an earlier age would almost certainly have led to violence and war—the unresolved problem of Germany, territorial conflicts between Yugoslavia and Italy, the future of occupied Austria—were all contained, and would in due course be addressed, within the context of Great Power confrontations and negotiations over which Europeans had very little say.

These reassuring developments were unfolding against the backdrop of a major international arms race. This paradox—that a peaceful European settlement was taking shape even as the two Great Powers of the day were arming themselves to the hilt and preparing for the eventuality of a thermonuclear war—was not so bizarre as it might appear. The growing emphasis in US and Soviet strategic thinking on nuclear weapons, and the intercontinental missiles with which to deliver them, released European states from the need to compete in an arena where they could not hope to match the resources of the superpowers, even though central Europe remained the most likely terrain over which any future war might be fought. For this reason, the Cold War in Western Europe was experienced quite differently in these years from the way it was felt in the United States, or indeed in the USSR.

eastern Europe were effectively frozen. In domestic affairs, in addition to devoting considerable resources to helping the refugees, returning prisoners and their families integrate into West German society, the governments of the nineteen-fifties encouraged a distinctly uncritical approach to Germany’s recent past. In 1955 the Foreign Ministry formally protested against the showing at that year’s Cannes Film Festival of Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog. With the Federal Republic about to enter NATO as a full partner the film could harm West Germany’s relations with other states: in the words of the official protest it ‘would disturb the international harmony of the festival by its emphatic reminder of the painful past.’ The French government duly complied and the film was withdrawn.17 This was no momentary aberration. Until 1957 the West German Ministry of the Interior banned any screenings of Wolfgang Staudte’s (East German) film of Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan (‘Man of Straw’, 1951)—objecting to its suggestion that authoritarianism in Germany had deep historical roots. This might seem to confirm the view that post-war Germany was suffering from a massive dose of collective amnesia; but the reality was more complex. Germans did not so much forget as selectively remember. Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and had been properly punished.

To anyone raised (like the present author) in post-war Britain, ‘England’, ‘Britain’ and ‘British Empire’ were near-synonymous terms. Elementary school maps showed a world heavily daubed in imperial red; history textbooks paid close attention to the history of British conquests in India and Africa especially; cinema newsreels, radio news bulletins, newspapers, illustrated magazines, children’s stories, comics, sporting contests, biscuit tins, canned fruit labels, butcher shop windows: everything was a reminder of England’s pivotal presence at the historical and geographical heart of an international sea-borne empire. The names of colonial and dominion cities, rivers and political figures were as familiar as those of Great Britain itself.

For the Netherlands, the oldest colonial power in the region, the consequences were particularly traumatic. The Dutch East Indies, and the trading company that had developed them, were part of the national myth, a direct link to the Golden Age and a symbol of Dutch commercial and seafaring glory. It was also widely assumed, especially in the gloomy, impoverished post-war years, that the raw materials of the Indies—rubber especially—would be the Netherlands’ economic salvation. Yet within two years of the Japanese defeat, the Dutch were once again at war: the Dutch-held territories of South-East Asia (today’s Indonesia) were tying down 140,000 Dutch soldiers (professionals, conscripts and volunteers) and the revolution for Indonesian independence was generating admiration and imitation throughout the remaining Dutch imperium in the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America.

The experience of decolonization had an embittering effect on Dutch public life, already hard hit by the war and its sufferings. Many ex-colonials and their friends pressed what became known as ‘the Myth of Good Rule’, blaming the Left for the Dutch failure to reassert colonial authority following the interregnum of Japanese occupation. On the other hand conscripted soldiers (the overwhelming majority) were just glad to be home in one piece, after a colonial war of which no-one was proud, in which many felt that military success had been impeded by UN insistence on a negotiated transfer of power, and that was very quickly consigned to a national memory hole. In the longer run the enforced Dutch retreat from the colonies facilitated a growing national sentiment for ‘Europe’. World War Two had demonstrated that the Netherlands could not stand aside from international affairs, particularly those of its large neighbors, and the loss of Indonesia was a timely reminder of the country’s real standing as a small and vulnerable European state. Making a virtue of necessity, the Dutch retooled as ultra-enthusiastic proponents of European economic and later political integration. But the process did not just happen painlessly, nor was it an overnight switch in the collective sensibilities of the nation. Until the spring of 1951, the military calculations and expenditures of post-war Dutch governments were targeted not for European defense (despite Dutch participation in the Brussels P...

On the other hand French schoolchildren were insistently presented with the image of ‘France’ itself as a trans-oceanic continuum, a place in which the civic and cultural attributes of Frenchness were open to all; where elementary schools from Saigon to Dakar taught about ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ (‘our ancestors the Gauls’) and proclaimed—if only in principle—the virtues of a seamless cultural assimilation that would have been quite unthinkable to the administrators of British, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish or Portugese colonies.2 Only in France could the metropolitan authorities seriously treat their most valued colonial possessions not as foreign soil but as administrative extensions of France itself. Thus ‘Algeria’ was but a geographical expression; the area it denoted was administered as three departments of France (in which, however, only its European residents enjoyed full civil rights).

If the illusions of Empire died at Suez, the insular confidence of middle England had been under siege for some time. The disaster of 1956 merely accelerated its collapse. The symbolism of the English national cricket team’s first defeat by a team from the West Indies (in 1950 and on the ‘hallowed soil’ of the home of the game at the Lord’s cricket ground in London) was driven home three years later when England’s soccer team was thrashed in 1953 at its national stadium—by a team from lowly Hungary and by the unprecedented margin of six goals to three. In the two international games that Englishmen had spread across the world, England itself was no longer supreme.

Spaniards. Even in Britain, where the governments of the 1950s had actively encouraged immigration from the Caribbean to staff the country’s trains, buses and municipal services, the figures were not especially striking. In the 1951 census there were 15,000 people from the West Indies (mostly Barbados) resident in the UK: 4,000 of them in London. By 1959 West Indian immigration to the UK was running at around 16,000 people per year. Immigration from other parts of the Commonwealth was even smaller—in 1959 there were just 3,000 immigrant arrivals from India and Pakistan. The numbers would increase in later years—notably when the British government reluctantly agreed to admit the East African Asians expelled by the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin—but as late as 1976 there were still only 1.85 million ‘non-whites’ in the UK population, 3 percent of the total. And 40 percent of these had been born there. What made the difference, of course, was that these people were brown or black—and, being Commonwealth citizens, had a presumptive right of permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the imperial metropole. Already in 1958, race riots in west London alerted the government to the perceived risk of permitting ‘too many’ immigrants to enter a historically white society. And so, even though the economic case for unskilled immigrants remained strong and the overall totals insignificant, the UK brought in the first of many controls on non-European immigration.

The net effect of these laws was to end non-European immigration into Britain less than twenty years after it had begun. Henceforth, the growing share of non-whites in the UK population would be a function of high African, Caribbean and South Asian birth rates within the UK. On the other hand, these drastic restrictions on the right of blacks and Asians to enter the UK were accompanied, in due course, by a considerable improvement in their life chances once there. A Race Relations Act of 1965 banned discrimination in public places, introduced remedies for job discrimination, and set out penalties for incitement to race hatred. A successor Act eleven years later finally outlawed all discrimination based on race and established a Commission for Racial Equality. In certain respects, the new, non-European populations of the UK (and, later, France) were more fortunate than the second-class Europeans who found work north of the Alps. English landladies could no longer display signs announcing ‘No Blacks, Irish or Dogs’; but notices forbidding entry to ‘dogs and Italians’ were not unknown in Swiss parks for some years to come.

This was the brave new world that the British novelist J. B. Priestley described in 1955 as ‘admass’. For many other contemporary observers it was, very simply, ‘Americanization’: the adoption in Europe of all the practices and aspirations of modern America. A radical departure though it seemed to many, this was not in fact a new experience. Europeans had been ‘Americanizing’—and dreading the thought—for at least thirty years.22 The vogue for US-style production lines and ‘Taylorized’ work rates, like the fascination with American films and fashions, was an old story even before World War Two. European intellectuals between the wars had bemoaned the ‘soulless’ world of American modernity that lay ahead for everyone; and Nazis and Communists both made great play with their role as the preservers of culture and values in the face of unrestricted American capitalism and a ‘mongrelized’ rootless cosmopolitanism symbolized by New York and its spreading example. And yet, for all its presence in the European imagination—and the very physical reality of American soldiers based all over western Europe—the United States was still a great unknown for most Europeans. Americans spoke English—not a language with which most continental Europeans had any acquaintance in these years. The history and geography of the USA were not studied in European schools; its writers were unknown even to an educated minority; its political system was a mystery to all but a privileged few.

It did not follow from this that the fundamental nineteenth-century socialist tenets were discarded. The overwhelming majority of mid-twentieth-century European Social Democrats, even if they kept their distance from Marx and his avowed heirs, maintained as an article of faith that capitalism was inherently dysfunctional and that socialism was both morally and economically superior. Where they differed from Communists was in their unwillingness to commit to the inevitability of capitalism’s imminent demise or to the wisdom of hastening that demise by their own political actions. Their task, as they had come to understand it in the course of decades of Depression, division and dictatorship, was to use the resources of the state to eliminate the social pathologies attendant on capitalist forms of production and the unrestricted workings of a market economy: to build not economic utopias but good societies.

Anyone familiar with Nordic culture, from Ibsen and Munch through Ingmar Bergman, will recognise another side of Scandinavian life: its self-interrogating, incipiently melancholic quality—popularly understood in these years as a propensity to depression, alcoholism and high suicide rates. In the 1960s and at times since, it pleased conservative critics of Scandinavian politics to blame these shortcomings on the moral paralysis induced by too much economic security and centralised direction. And then there was the concurrent propensity of Scandinavians to take off their clothes in public (and on film) and—so it was widely rumoured—make love with perfect strangers: further evidence, to some observers, of the psychic damage wrought by an over-mighty state that provides everything and forbids nothing.4

But, as it emerged many years later, Scandinavian authorities at least had not abandoned an interest in the theory—and practice—of ‘racial hygiene’. Between 1934 and 1976 sterilization programmes were pursued in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, in each case under the auspices and with the knowledge of Social Democratic governments. In these years some 6,000 Danes, 40,000 Norwegians and 60,000 Swedes (90 percent of them women) were sterilized for ‘hygienic’ purposes: ‘to improve the population’. The intellectual driving force behind these programmes—the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden—had been set up in 1921, at the peak of the fashion for the subject. It was not dismantled until fifty-five years later. What, if anything, this sad story tells us about Social Democracy is unclear—distinctly unsocialist and undemocratic societies and governments have done more and worse. The legitimacy of the state in post-war Scandinavia, the authority and initiative accorded it by a mostly unquestioning citizenry, left government free to act in what it took to be the common interest with remarkably little oversight. It does not seem ever to have occurred to an ombudsman to investigate abuse of those who stood outside the rights-bearing community of tax-paying citizens. The line separating progressive taxation and paternity-leave from forcible interference in the reproductive capacities of ‘defective’ citizens seems not to have been altogether clear to some post...

Even the creation of a self-interested class of welfare bureaucrats and white-collar beneficiaries was not without its virtues: like the farmers, the much-maligned ‘lower middle class’ now had a vested interest in the institutions and values of the democratic state. This was good for Social Democrats and Christian Democrats alike, as such parties duly noted. But it was also bad for Fascists and Communists, which mattered rather more. These changes reflected the demographic transformations already noted, but also unprecedented levels of personal security and a new intensity of educational and social mobility. As west Europeans were now less likely to remain in the place, the occupation, the income bracket and the social class into which they had been born, so they were less disposed to identify automatically with the political movements and social affiliations of their parents’ world. The generation of the 1930s was content to find economic security and turn its back on political mobilization and its attendant risks; 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.

The rise in the influence of the state upon the employment and welfare of its citizens was accompanied by a steady reduction in its authority over their morals and opinions. At the time this was not seen as a paradox. Liberal and Social Democratic advocates for the European welfare state saw no reason in principle why government should not pay close attention to the economic or medical welfare of the population, guaranteeing citizens’ well-being from cradle to grave, while keeping its nose firmly out of their views and practices on strictly personal matters like religion and sex, or artistic taste and judgement. The Christian Democrats of Germany or Italy, for whom the state still had a legitimate interest in the manners and mores of its subjects, could not so readily make this distinction. But they too faced growing pressure to adapt.

If Jacqueline Kennedy imported European style to the White House, this was hardly surprising. European ‘design’ in the later Fifties and Sixties flourished as never before, the imprimatur of status and quality. A European label—attached to a commodity, an idea or a person—ensured distinction, and thus a price premium. This development was actually quite recent. To be sure, ‘articles de Paris’ had a longstanding place in the luxury goods trade, dating at least to the late eighteenth century; and Swiss watches had been well regarded for many decades. But the notion that cars made in Germany would ipso facto be better crafted than others, or that Italian-designed clothing, Belgian chocolates, French kitchenware or Danish furniture were unquestionably the best to be had: this would have seemed curious indeed just a generation before.

But for all its political applications, History is a discipline peculiarly impervious to high theoretical speculation: the more Theory intrudes, the farther History recedes.

But of greater relevance was structuralism’s immediate accessibility to intellectuals and non-specialists. As explicated by Lévi-Strauss’s admirers in cognate disciplines, structuralism was not even a representational theory: the social codes, or ‘signs’, that it described related not to any particular people or places or events but merely to other signs, in a closed system. It was thus not subject to empirical testing or disproof—there was no sense in which structuralism could ever be demonstrated to be wrong—and the iconoclastic ambition of its assertions, allied to this impermeability to contradiction, guaranteed it a wide audience. Anything and everything could be explained as a combination of ‘structures’: as Pierre Boulez noted when labeling one of his compositions Structures, ‘it is the key word of our time.’

Foucault himself foreswore the label ‘structuralist’, much as Albert Camus always insisted he had never been an ‘existentialist’ and didn’t really know what that was.8 But as Foucault at least would have been constrained to concede, it didn’t really matter what he thought. ‘Structuralism’ was now shorthand for any ostensibly subversive account of past or present, in which conventional linear explanations and categories were shaken up and their assumptions questioned. More importantly, ‘structuralists’ were people who minimized or even denied the role of individuals and individual initiative in human affairs.9 But for all its protean applications, the idea that everything is ‘structured’ left something vital unexplained. For Fernand Braudel, or Claude Lévi-Strauss, or even Michel Foucault, the goal was to uncover the deep workings of a cultural system. This might or might not be a subversive scholarly impulse—it certainly was not in Braudel’s case—but it does gloss over or minimize change and transition. Decisive political events in particular proved resistant to this approach: you could explain why things had to change at a given stage, but it wasn’t clear just how they did so, or why individual social actors opted to facilitate the process. As an interpretation of human experience, any theory dependent on an arrangement of structures from which human choice had been eliminated was thus hobbled by its own assumptions. Intellectually subversive, structuralism was politicall...

One distinctively German variant of Sixties cultural confusion saw sex and politics more closely entangled than elsewhere. Following Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and other twentieth-century German theorists of sexual and political repression, radical circles in Germany (and Austria, or at least Vienna) sung the praises of nudity, free love and anti-authoritarian childrearing. Hitler’s much advertised sexual neuroses were freely adduced to account for Nazism. And once again, a bizarre, chilling analogy was drawn in certain quarters between Hitler’s Jewish victims and the youth of the 1960s, martyrs to the sexually repressive regime of their parents. ‘Kommune 1’, a Maoist micro-sect that aggressively promoted sexual promiscuity-as-liberation, circulated a self-portrait in 1966: seven nude young men and women splayed against a wall—‘Naked Maoists Before a Naked Wall’ as the caption read when the photo ran in Der Spiegel in June 1967. The emphasis on nudity was explicitly designed to recall pictures of helpless, naked concentration camp bodies. Look, it said: first came Hitler’s victims, now the rebelliously unclothed bodies of Maoist revolutionaries. If Germans can look at the truth about our bodies, they will be able to face other truths as well.

The failings of Communist economies were hardly a secret. They were only just able to furnish their citizens with sufficient food (in the Soviet Union they often failed to manage even this). They were committed to the mass production of redundant primary industrial goods. The commodities—consumer goods above all—for which there was a growing demand were not produced, or else not in sufficient quantity, or of the necessary quality. And the system of distribution and sale of such goods as were available was so badly managed that genuine shortages were exacerbated by artificially induced scarcity: bottlenecks, skimming, corruption, and—in the case of food and other perishables—high levels of wastage.

But all this was easily contained. The Kremlin had made its point—that fraternal socialist states had only limited sovereignty and that any lapse in the Party’s monopoly of power might trigger military intervention. Unpopularity at home or abroad was a small price to pay for the stability that this would henceforth ensure. After 1968, the security of the Soviet zone was firmly underwritten by a renewed appreciation of Moscow’s willingness to resort to force if necessary. But never again—and this was the true lesson of 1968, first for the Czechs but in due course for everyone else—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.

In the short run, the practical achievements of the Sixties seemed rather thin. Eighteen-year-olds got the vote: first in Britain, then elsewhere. Universities tried, with mixed success, to upgrade their facilities and courses and render themselves more open to student demands. In the course of the next decade access to divorce, abortion and contraception was facilitated almost everywhere, and restrictions upon sexual behavior—whether as depicted or practiced—largely disappeared. In the Statuto dei Lavoratori of May 1970, Italian workers won the right to protection against unfair dismissal. Taken all in all, such changes constitute an underlying cultural transformation of European society; but they were hardly the ‘revolution’ envisaged in the slogans and actions of the generation of 1968.18 Indeed, that revolution had from the start been self-defeating. The same movements that purported to despise and abhor ‘consumer culture’ were from the outset an object of cultural consumption, reflecting a widespread disjunction between rhetoric and practice. Those in Paris or Berlin who aggressively declared their intention to ‘change the world’ were often the people most devoted to parochial and even bodily obsessions—anticipating the solipsistic ‘me’ politics of the decade to follow—and absorbed in the contemplation of their own impact. ‘The Sixties’ were a cult object even before the decade had passed. But if the Sixties seemed at last to pass un-mourned and with few enduring monu...

The deflation of the causes—and the demobilization of the coming decades—thus confers in retrospect an air of failure upon a decade of frenetic political activity. But in certain important respects the Sixties were actually a vital decade for the opposite reason: they were the moment when Europeans in both halves of the continent began their definitive turn away from ideological politics.

Two widespread assumptions lay behind such thinking, shared very broadly across the intellectual community of the time. The first was that power rested not—as most social thinkers since the Enlightenment had supposed—upon control of natural and human resources, but upon the monopoly of knowledge: knowledge about the natural world; knowledge about the public sphere; knowledge about oneself; and above all, knowledge about the way in which knowledge itself is produced and legitimized. The maintenance of power in this account rested upon the capacity of those in control of knowledge to maintain that control at the expense of others, by repressing subversive ‘knowledges’. At the time, this account of the human condition was widely and correctly associated with the writings of Michel Foucault. But for all his occasional obscurantism Foucault was a rationalist at heart. His early writings tracked quite closely the venerable Marxist claim that in order to liberate workers from the shackles of capitalism one had first to substitute a different account of history and economics for the self-serving narrative of bourgeois society. In short, one had to substitute revolutionary knowledge, so to speak, for that of the masters: or, in the language of Antonio Gramsci so fashionable a few years earlier, one had to combat the ‘hegemony’ of the ruling class. A second assumption, one that was to acquire an even stronger grip on intellectual fashions, went considerably further. This was the sed...

The underlying and usually unacknowledged source of these predominantly French intellectual influences was, as so often in past decades, German.