Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

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.’